Elizabeth Bear: Hammered

The bartender shook his head. “Suit. I have the good stuff for my work. I’m not quite ready to get hardwired, though — I’m old enough to think you’d have to be pretty desperate to get a neural tap put in. Although the nano stuff is a lot better than what we were doing even five, ten years ago.”

Feynman stared hard at his glass. It changed in his hand, turned into a tall, fizzing cola. “Now that is why I come here,” he said happily, sipping the drink.

The bartender smiled. “But we’ve got some test subjects who actually are manipulating the VR environment with — literally — nothing more than thought.”

Feynman frowned doubtfully. “What’s the practical application of that?”

“Oh, hell, Dick — if you don’t mind my calling you that — what isn’t the functionality of it? Stroke victims — Oh, damn, we are old. Here we stand in a virtual playground, talking shop.”

“Well, to be honest,” Feynman answered with a laugh, setting his drink down to twist his hands around the dented rail, “it’s more interesting than most of what goes on in here.”

“You think?” The bartender picked up the liquor bottle and poured. A glass appeared on the bar as if conjured there, catching the stream of fluid a second before it struck and splashed. “I’d say that depends on which corner of this little world you happen to hang out in.”

Feynman leaned forward, shoulders hunching like a perched hawk’s. “You don’t find the unreality a little distressing?”

“What’s so unreal about it?” The bartender shrugged, tilting his head back, regarding the virtual ceiling for a second or two. He looked back down at last and met Feynman’s gaze. “It’s not any more unreal than the intellectual space in which a chess game takes place. Consensus reality.”

Feynman chuckled and picked up his drink, spinning the glass in his hand, spilling nothing. His other hand wiggled quotes in the air. “How do we know anything exists outside our heads?”

“Isn’t that a little fluffy for a physicist, Dick?”

“Not at all. You can’t observe a thing without changing it, after all. The universe is a glorious puzzle that seems to keep altering even as we unravel it. There’s one wag who’s working on that as a basis for faster-than-light communication. Ansibles, more or less.”

“All right, I’ll bite. What’s an ansible?”

“Faster-than-light communication, based on quantum mechanics. No, really. It’s from a science fiction book.”

“Ah.” The bartender finished his drink. “What would you need faster-than-light communication for?”

“Talking to things that are very far away,” the physicist answered, eyes twinkling. “But you were telling me about your work.” He looked into the age-spotted mirror over the bar, seeming unaccountably amused by the reflection.

“Funny. I never thought of the coincidence before — but there’s something like an observer effect in my own field of study.” The bartender looked up at Feynman with a grin.

“Everything’s interrelated.”

“I tend to agree. I’m looking into the psychosomatic basis of rejection. Why some people just cannot adapt to a transplant or a prosthesis, and others do just fine.”

“Huh.” The physicist hooked a tall chair over with a booted foot and settled himself, leaning forward over the bar. One foot still kicked restlessly. “Interesting.”

“I think so,” the bartender said, warming to his topic. Bartenders love to talk as much as they love to be talked to. “Well — let’s see. I can tell you this much without violating confidentiality. I have one patient coming in for follow-up on some work done almost thirty years ago. Late forties, serious trauma: one of the first cyberprosthetic patients. But she’s made a better adjustment than any of my patients with more modern prostheses. Funny thing — half the hands we sew on, we wind up cutting back off again. People just freak out about it. Bored yet?”

“Fascinated. I remember reading some of Sacks’s popular work on similar topics. Something about a guy who couldn’t recognize his own leg as a part of his body.”

“You read old books, Dick.”

“I’m an old guy. Is that what you’re talking about?”

The bartender nodded vigorously, excitement staining his voice. “Similar stuff, yes — now throw in the trauma of a dismemberment on top of it. Messy.”

“I imagine. So, about your patient…”

“Her hardware — the fucking thing is literally spliced into her spinal cord in two places, and there’s brain work, too. The old, dangerous method. The scarring is something to behold.”

“Didn’t that cripple most of the patients?”

“Not most. Maybe 30 percent. Guy who pioneered it back in the thirties — his name eludes me at the moment — was mostly working with kids who got cut up in South Africa, if I recall. He may have made a few extra cripples, but this particular lady is only walking because of what he did for her. Most — maybe all — of the others are dead now. The long-term survival odds on the nano work are much better.”

“I imagine.” Feynman rubbed the lower half of his face.

The bartender nodded hard — the nod of a young man, not the elderly one he appeared. “Anyway, she’s been seeing me for about ten years, and I’ve discovered the weirdest thing. She’s made adaptation like you wouldn’t believe. And she’s been generous enough to help me in some of the VR work I’ve done. She’s ideally suited for it. And! — I think I know why she’s been doing so well for so long.”

Feynman had an odd way of tilting his head to one side when he was thinking hard. “Why’s that?”

The bartender paused for a moment, as if he had an idea that his interviewer already suspected the answer to the question. “Somehow, she’s managed to get her brain to do the opposite of what Sacks’s patient did. It thinks the hand is her hand, a part of her body. Integrated. And the neatest part, the one that I can use to really good effect if I can figure out how she does it—”

Feynman leaned forward as if pouncing. “I see. Your stroke patients and a VR interface. If you get them to accept the interface as part of their reality… That could be dramatic.”

“Yeah,” the bartender said. “Dramatic.”

His guest got up to leave, still nodding, and the bartender held up a hand. “Hey. Come back anytime you want to talk shop.”

The stranger turned halfway back and smiled. “Thanks,” he answered. “But I probably won’t.” And then he turned and walked out of the saloon, leaving his host befuddled behind the bar.

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

Tuesday 5 September, 2062

Evening

Colonel Valens pinched the bridge of his commanding nose, leaning back in his chair. An emotion he identified as frustration sat on his chest. He ignored it. “The damned problem, Alberta, is I know exactly who I want for a test subject. I know she’s still alive, she’s out there somewhere, and I have only half a damned clue where to find her.”

A petite woman with her gray hair twisted up in a chignon, Alberta Holmes leaned back comfortably in a leather-upholstered armchair in the corner of Valens’s office. She laced her fingers together and rested them on her knee. “One of the subjects from your cybernetics program, I assume?”

Valens nodded. “A master corporal when I worked with her. Genevieve Casey. Good soldier, nice kid. A little impulsive.” Unconsciously, he rubbed his left shoulder with his right hand, as if massaging stiffness. “Pretty much got the left side of her body blown off when the A.P.C. she was driving found the wrong end of an antitank missile. Amazing she survived at all. We patched her up, though. Better than new.”