The Medusa Chronicles Read online

  “Tonight we’ll see a selection of scenes, key incidents. Just sit back and relax; the 3D should be easy on the eye. Those of you with neural jacks are welcome to try out the immersive options, though they are all restricted to passive mode.” Another smile. “Don’t try pressing any buttons in Grandpa’s Apollo Command Module. And maybe you’ll have some insight into how it felt, on Sunday 9th April 1967, when Seth Springer was given the bad news that he wasn’t going to the Moon . . .”

  An area of the wall behind Matt Springer’s lectern became a glowing rectangle, filling with the deep, limitless blue of a cloudless sky. The angle panned down, taking in an expanse of blocky white buildings laid out campus-like amid neat areas of lawn and roadway. For a moment or two it could have passed as a contemporary scene, the buildings’ utilitarian architecture revealing little. But as the point of view zoomed in, so vehicles and figures quickly gave the game away. Squared-off cars, men in suits and hats and ties, despite the obvious heat. And few women to be seen at all. This was a scene from a hundred and thirty years in the past—from the first faltering days of the space age.

  The point of view narrowed to one building, then one window of that building. And then, with one dizzying swoop, through the glass, into an air-conditioned office. Contemporary fittings, polished wood and leather. Lots of photographs and flags, cabinets and framed documents, a desk with a calendar and a briefcase, but nothing that Falcon recognised as a computer or visual display device . . .

  “The Apollo Moon programme is cancelled. But the good news is,” the man behind that desk was saying, “you two good old boys are gonna get the chance to save the world.”

  “In five minutes there won’t be a dry eye in the house,” Webster said.

  “Save mine, of course.”

  “Come on, let’s duck out of here. There’s only so much Springer either of us can take. Also there’s someone who wants to talk to you.”

  “Let me guess. Nurse Hope.”

  “Wise guy. And I need a bathroom break. You coming, or not?”

  * * * *

  A short walk under a roof of ribbed bulkhead led to another of the Shore’s advertised features, the Observation Lounge, a cafeteria-bar. Falcon estimated a quarter-acre of carpet was scattered with tables and floor cushions and even a kids’ play pen, over which loomed an immense blister, a window of toughened Plexiglas. At this time of night, an hour before midnight, nothing was visible beyond the window save pitch-dark ocean.

  Hope Dhoni sat alone at a table before the window. She had some kind of equipment on the table, an open case. As Webster and Falcon approached she looked around and smiled warily.

  The little robot Conseil—presuming it was the same one—rolled over towards them. “May I serve you?”

  “No,” Falcon said curtly.

  “He’ll have iced tea with me,” Hope said firmly. “Thank you, Conseil. You always liked iced tea, Howard.”

  Webster grinned and sat down. “And a bourbon for me. On my tab—”

  “You are all guests of the President on this voyage, Administrator Webster.” Conseil had a mellifluous, almost Bostonian accent, Falcon thought. It was certainly a lot more humanlike than the buzzing monotone of Adam, that treasured toy from his childhood. The robot trundled away to a softly lit bar area at the back of the room.

  And Falcon rolled away on his own balloon tyres towards that big window. It curved over his head. Cautiously he touched it with one fingertip. He thought of cottage windows, frosted by snow on a winter’s morning—sensations that had been relayed to his brain through skin and nerves, rather than a network of prosthetics and implanted neural receivers.

  A light swam by in the dark, a perfectly smooth, horizontal motion. One of those sea sprites, he assumed. Again, he felt uneasy about how close the automated critters came to the boat. That pilot light was all that was visible beyond the window.

  Hope Dhoni came over and stood at his side. “One of the ship’s most famous features,” she murmured. “The window itself, I mean. An engineering marvel. Rather like you, Commander Falcon.”

  “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry. The way I reacted when we met. Those days under the surgeons were difficult for me. Even remembering them—”

  She slipped her hand into his. He could sense the pressure of her ­fingers, measure the moisture and warmth of her palm—he even had a vivid, unwelcome impression of the bone structure. He could not feel her hand in his, though, not by any meaningful definition of the word.

  Suddenly uncomfortable, he pulled away. Too many memories. Too much pain.

  For both of them.

  “Come,” Hope said gently. “Sit with us.”

  4

  If his recovery from the Queen Elizabeth IV crash twelve years ago had been traumatic for Howard Falcon, so it had been for Hope Dhoni, at the time a twenty-one-year-old trainee nurse at the old USAF hospital in Arizona to which Falcon had been rushed. She had been by far the most junior member of the team.

  When he was brought in, crushed and burned, laid out on the bed’s pale green blankets, Falcon had not even looked human. Hope had spent time in inner-city emergency departments and military trauma wards, and she thought she was toughened up. She wasn’t. Not for this.

  But it was Doctor Bignall, second-in-command, who had helped her through. “First of all, he’s alive. Remember that. Barely, though: his heart’s about to give up—you can see that from the monitor trace. Second of all, don’t think about what he’s lost but what he still has. His head injuries seem manageable . . .”

  She could barely see the head under what remained of Falcon’s right arm.

  “And that arm he threw up to protect his head might even have preserved his face. Some of it.”

  She watched the team work, humans and machines, as tubes snaked into Falcon’s body. “So what’s the first priority?”

  “To keep him alive. Look at him, he’s suffered well over fifty percent blood loss, his chest is wide open. We’re replacing his blood, all of it, with a cold saline solution. That will cut brain activity, stop cellular activity—”

  “Suspended animation.”

  “If you like. And that will give us a chance to get on with the structural stuff. A chance . . . Oh, wow, he’s in cardiac arrest. Crash team . . . !”

  The structural stuff. When Falcon was stabilised, achieved essentially by shoving him into a room full of machinery that would emulate the functions of his broken body, it turned out that there was little left of him that was saveable but brain and spine—and some of his face, preserved by that flung-over arm. The good news was that was quite a lot to build on. Monitors already showed ongoing brain activity. Hope would soon learn how to tell if Falcon was asleep or awake, and she wondered which state was worse for him.

  What followed, for Hope, was a rushed course in neuroinformatics. As the hours turned to days, the team worked as quickly as they could. They needed to establish a connection between what was left of Falcon and the equipment that would sustain him for the rest of his life. And that meant reading information from, and writing information to, what was left of his broken nervous system.

  Sensors on prosthetic extensions to Falcon’s surviving stump of an arm were able to use his own nervous system to communicate with the brain—but for the rest of his body, his spinal column was so badly damaged that wasn’t an option. New communication pathways had to be built. So microelectrodes were lodged within Falcon’s brain—in the motor cortex area responsible for physical movement and in the somatosensory cortex, which governed the sense of touch. More sensors were placed in the lumbos­acral region of his spine with a control hub to link the brain to the lower limbs. Once it was possible to transfer digital information into and out of his ruptured nervous system, a suite of prosthetic body parts was brought in and tried, one by one, each of them riddled with microsensors that communicated continually with the devices anc
hored to the brain and spine.

  Even hastily improvised, it was an impressive feat.

  Hope was able to help with the medical side. As the recovery proceeded she flashed lights into eyes of metal and gel, and pinched sensor-­loaded plastic flesh, testing for sensation. She learned later that Falcon slowly became aware of this, over the days and weeks of silence inside his own head: sparks of light, dull feelings of pressure. But the first external stimulus he’d been truly aware of was a sound, a metronomic thumping that he’d believed was his own heart, but was in fact the combined rhythm of a room full of machinery.

  The team had been highly motivated. They weren’t just saving a life; they were doing so using the latest techniques and technologies. Indeed, the doctors said, this case was driving the development of new techniques altogether.

  Sometimes they were over-keen. One younger doctor had bragged in the canteen, “You know, this must be the most interesting trauma case since they gave up fighting wars . . .” Doctor Bignall punched the man in the mouth. If he hadn’t, Hope Dhoni would have.

  And now, a dozen years later, here stood Falcon, restored.

  A golden tower.

  People said that in this iteration of his support gear Falcon looked a little like the old Oscar statuette. When he stood upright, there was an abstract sense of a human body rather than its literal shape: a golden, wedge-shaped torso, shapely shoulders and neck, a featureless head—­featureless save for the aperture through which a partial face peered, leathery human skin exposed to the air. Artificial eyes, of course. His lower body was a single unit, shaped to suggest legs; it looked solid but was segmented to allow Falcon to bend, even to “sit” with reasonable verisimili­tude. And under the “feet” was a kind of trolley riding on balloon tyres. At rest, Falcon kept his arms folded over his chest, to reassure onlookers; when deployed his arms moved with a mechanical whir of hydraulics, the motions stiff and inhuman, the hands like grabbing claws.

  This was not the first model within which Falcon had been embedded. He liked to complain that he had made more human-looking snowmen as a boy . . .

  * * * *

  Dhoni remembered when Falcon had first started to feel pain again.

  Falcon couldn’t tell them he was in pain, at the time. All he could do was flicker an eyelid. He had no mouth. His tear ducts no longer functioned. But the machines told of the pain. And Hope knew.

  It took two years before he could turn the page of a book unaided, with a whirr of servomotors from the single exoskeletal arm hooked up to his body. Every night of those two years, Hope Dhoni had washed Falcon’s face and wiped his brow.

  5

  Webster called them back to the table for the drinks.

  This time Falcon sat down, or at least folded down his undercarriage.

  Dhoni said in a rush, “I know there’s every chance I won’t see you again any time soon, Commander—”

  “Howard.”

  “Howard. I do recall you got out of that clinic as fast as you could—how did Doctor Bignall put it? ‘Like a delinquent kid who’s finally old enough to steal a car.’”

  Webster barked laughter. “That’s you, Howard.”

  “But I would urge you to come in for regular checks, refurbs and upgrades to your prosthetics—and medical attention to your human core. But while we’re here,” she said doggedly, “while I have the chance, I want to show you a new option.” She patted the box. “This is a virtual reality extensor kit. While we’re here it’s interfaced to the ship’s Bosun and to the global net.” She took out two metal discs, each the size of a new cent. She handed one each to Webster and Falcon.

  “Neural jacks,” Falcon said.

  “You got it,” Webster said. His own hand hovered at the back of his neck.

  “You, Geoff? You’ve got one of these sockets? Virtual reality is for kids’ games or training simulators.”

  “Like hell it is. I’d have no idea what my kids and grandkids spend their time doing without this hole in my neck. Besides, half the world’s business is done virtually now. Even my Bureau’s. And, unlike you, I always treat myself to upgrades.”

  “You never told me.”

  “You never asked. And you never told me you have an interface. Sur­geons installed it while they were hacking your brain stem, did they?”

  “It was a necessary component of my treatment. The destruction of my spinal cord—”

  “That was twelve years ago—”

  “It needs upgrading,” Dhoni said quickly. “But this smart new kit is downward-compatible.”

  Falcon stared at the bright coin. “Virtual reality? What’s the point?”

  Webster leaned forward. “Look, Howard. I think I see what the doctor’s getting at. We live in a good age. The world’s at peace. No borders, no wars, and we’re driving towards our goals of eliminating hunger, want, disease—”

  “So what? And why the VR jack?”

  “Because, in this nascent utopia, there’s no place for you,” Webster said brutally. “That’s what you think, don’t you?”

  “Well, it’s true. I’m unique.”

  “That can’t be changed. The medics saved your life, Howard, but in a radically experimental way. You were a one-off. And as the Earth recovers from the depredation of the past, people are becoming more—conservative. Machinery is fine, but it has to be unobtrusive.

  “If your accident happened now, you wouldn’t be treated the same way. You’d be kept on ice until biological replacements could be prepared for your broken body parts. I’m talking stem-cell treatments, even whole lower brain and spinal cord transplants. They’d have made you human again. Machines are machines, to be kept separate from humanity.”

  “And so I’m the only true cyborg. The only living symbiosis of man and machine.”

  “Hope tells me there’s nothing that can be done to change that for you now, physically.”

  Dhoni seemed about to reach for Falcon’s hand, but she pulled back. “But there are other options.”

  “This, you mean? To escape into artificiality?”

  Webster shook his head. “There are whole virtual communities, Howard. And once you’re in there you can be fully human again. You can do things—well, hell, all things you can’t do now. Run, laugh, cry—make love—”

  “It’s the real world for me, Doctor Dhoni. That, or give me an off switch.”

  Hope flinched.

  Webster said, “Damn you, Falcon.”

  Falcon rolled back from the table, straightened up, and left.

  * * * *

  When he’d gone, Dhoni said, “I suppose I should apologise. I didn’t mean to spoil the evening.”

  Webster’s look was rueful. “Oh, we were making a fine job of that by ourselves. But I guess a virtual substitute for life was never going to be enough for a man like Howard Falcon . . . ‘Some other time.’”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That’s what he said, as he was about to leave Jupiter. He looked over at the Great Red Spot—the mission planners ensured he had stayed well away from that—and he said, “Some other time.” The control team up at Jupiter V heard it clearly. It’s the kind of line you stick on a T-shirt . . .

  “But in a way he has a point. About Jupiter anyhow. His mission in the Kon-Tiki was heroic, but he only scratched the surface. The planet’s full of structure—we think. Literally anything might be found down there. Jupiter is an ocean of mystery. And since he got back from Jupiter he’s already been seeking funding for follow-up missions. One reason he’s showing his face here, I think.”

  Dhoni nodded. “But all this is a denial of his personal reality. How can we help him?”

  “Damned if I know. Damned if I care, right now.”

  6

  When he returned to Springer’s presentation, Falcon observed that nobody in the audience had even noticed
that the pioneer of the clouds of Jupiter had gone briefly AWOL. Again he seethed with unreasonable resentment.

  It didn’t help that Matt Springer had a good story to tell. As if to rub that home, as Springer concluded his narrative a final image of Grandpa Seth—valiant at the controls of his doomed Apollo craft—remained frozen. Falcon was impressed at Springer’s skill as he milked the moment, before an audience that just happened to include the World President.

  Finally he spoke again. “Well, you know the rest. My ancestor was honoured with a ceremony at Arlington. Robert Kennedy beat Richard Nixon to the presidency, and in January 1969 made the Icarus incident a keynote of his inaugural speech . . .”

  A crude recording of RFK at the presidential podium was shown. Falcon knew the speech word for word: “A decade earlier and we would not have had the spacefaring capabilities that have saved us . . . Now it is incumbent upon us not to let this capacity wither . . . On the contrary, we must move out beyond the fragile Earth and into space, further and wider . . .”

  “And,” Springer commented with a grin, “Kennedy was wise enough to stress how well America and the Soviet Union had worked together on the Icarus project.”

  “This episode has proven we are better united than divided, and more than that, we can be united around common goals . . .”

  Springer said, “Right there, in that passage, you had the foundation of the unity movements that led to the World Government. So Frank Borman led the first Apollo Moon landing in December 1971. The 1970s were the decade of Apollo, as RFK’s administration reflected the public gratitude to NASA by pouring in money: multiple missions, flights to the lunar poles and the far side, the beginnings of a permanent base in Clavius Crater. And then the first steps beyond the Moon.”