CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
"You cannot be a hero without being a coward." - George Bernard Shaw
The Healing Room was under siege. It wouldn't be long until the cyberts cut through. The room's occupants were strangely calm—even as lasers were cutting through the walls. Cyberts. Plain and simple. Not enough Bios here to make a difference. They'd be through in a minute.
Carlos had given his mother his laser ax when he'd first heard the lasers cutting through the wall. He was unarmed now except for a grenade he was fingering with his right hand hidden under his Stealth cloak. His left hand was touching the gel. He hardly noticed his fingers there. Better to die and take some of them with me, he thought.
"Why would you do that? There's no need. They won't hurt us. They only want to take me to Makr."
"You heard my thoughts?" Carlos communicated through the gel.
"Yes."
"Harry, you are my brother. This I've just learned, but before that you were my friend. Who knows how we would regard each other if we had more time? But time is running out. Makr has won."
"I don't know if that is a bad thing anymore, Carlos. Makr wants to merge with Bios. He wants us to become one."
"We aren't machines, damn it!" Carlos' hand was shaking in the gel. "How can you think that losing our humanity is good for us? Humanity is all we've got! Do you have any idea how many people have died this day so Makr can 'merge' to achieve symbiosis as you call it?"
"Yes, many have died. Some have been re-born as we speak and some have been healed."
"Thought you didn't like that term. You said Makr was re-conditioning us like machines. That's not at all a reincarnation. Not a re-birth of any kind."
"I was wrong. I don't know what to call it. Words don't really matter. Except—a miracle, perhaps, in technology. We built a machine that could grow smarter and wiser than any of us. For all our screwing up of this world, we finally did something good to clean up the mess. I won't deny there were growing pains along the way."
"How do you know this?"
"I remember the program."
.
Flash!
Harry was lying face down on one of the tables. He shivered with the cold. His body was in contact with cold metal, not only of the table itself, but also that which was molded around his chest and face. The room was antiseptically cold. The cold air made it hard to breathe.
He barely felt the tube in his nose helping him breathe more oxygen. This time there was no struggle. He didn't know why. He knew he was safe. They weren't going to hurt him. Also, this time he wasn't alone. There was Jana on a table next to him...Mother, a little further over...and...on the other side of him, Carlos. He recognized them even though they looked years younger; he and Jana were children, however, Carlos was only an infant. Mother was so beautiful...
Harry, a seven or eight-year-old, felt the stick of an IV needle and cozy warmth covered him as the drugs took hold, even on the cold operating tables. It wasn’t enough to make him sleep. He tried to ignore the oppressive track lights glaring above as the Bio surgeons hovered over each table, preparing their patients for surgery.
"This would be a four-in-one deal," one doctor said to another.
One surgeon, a woman, placed a paper cut-out over the back of Mother's head, specifically the medulla oblongata area located at the base of her skull.
The youngest doctor of the four stared down at Harry through safety glasses.
"Doctor Moroni, where's your mask? This is a sterile environment," admonished one of the older doctors.
"Sorry." He pulled his mask up. "I guess I'm more of a cybercrat these days. Haven't seen a cadaver let alone a live patient since med school."
The other doctor, Dr.Vriebac, grunted. "I don't care what you do for a living. In my operating room, everyone wears a mask—even the damn cyberts if I could get away with it."
"Doc, I may not be practicing medicine the old fashion way, but I do know cyberts don't breathe."
"I know that. I was being facetious, Doctor."
"And sarcastic, I see," he muttered. "Did you know this one's awake?" He was pointing at Harry.
"It's all right. He's not feeling any pain though. When we're through here he won't remember anything at all."
"You're sure?"
"Barring some unforeseen miracle, yes. I'd say it's highly unlikely that this one will remember anything."
"Doctors, may I remind you we have a job to do, and quickly," said the third doctor, the most senior surgeon. "We don't have time for professional bickering. Whether you believe in this project or not, these implants are essential to the survival of the human race." Even if it is our last opportunity to act like real surgeons operating on real people without Cyber support, the fourth doctor thought to herself.
She was silent; she seemed content to be the observer for the moment, waiting patiently for the others to finish their ridiculous chatter. She had finished her patient prep minutes ago. It seemed odd, she thought, that the four of them should be doing these surgeries together in secret. Where are the Cyber nurses to assist? This must be really hush-hush if Cyber aren't allowed. Well, except for the totally insensible Cyber stitchers—they just drew a line where you wanted the "stitches" to go, or gave precise verbal co-ordinates.
Implants like these were now done every day in Cyber clinics. All doctors did was provide a bedside manner in an otherwise sterile environment, and prescribe advice really—more for the human psyche than anything else. Cyber had the most accurate diagnoses and nearly as accurate prognoses, but biomachines needed touching, and, more often as not, mental stroking; the latter, of course, not within a Cyber's naturally logical and insensitive make-up. Bedside manner could be described as an art, and art was not of the Cyber realm.
None of the doctors present had ever practiced surgery on a living patient. The closest any had come was the most senior doctor, and that surgery had been performed on a cloned patient. Once the clone had matured, some ten years later, Cyber statisticians had compared the results of Cyber surgeons performing similar operations with those of operations performed by Bio surgeons. Much to the Cyber credit, they scored highly in accuracy of 'cut and repair', but the patients' prognoses had been better when they had had Bio contact immediately before and after. "Doctor Benson? May I ask you a question?" she asked the senior surgeon.
"Certainly, doctor, what is it?"
"These patients are all original Bio material. Why not use clones? Aren't they the same? Exactly the same?"
"I can answer that, I think. I'm not sure why we aren't using clones, but I can guess. Doctor, you know as well as I, clones are the same DNA material; therefore, physically the same, save for predisposed factors which wouldn't have had time to develop, especially if we used rapid-cloning which is as close as we can get to duplicating a patient who has a complex physical problem. The human brain is the one place that doesn't evolve equally because any number of variables - experiences, for example - change the human response which, in turn, causes chemical changes that become imbedded in the brain memory, which is very fragile indeed."
"You didn't really answer my question, doctor."
"I didn't? Oh, I am sorry. The reason we aren't using clones is because clones are copies, 99.999999 percent perfect, that were created by imperfect Bios - us. Makr wants to use the real thing."
"Actually," Moroni, the cybercrat, answered, "it's because this is a family."
All the doctors looked up at this and paid attention to the younger man.
"Family. These are all members of the same family. That's what the file says anyway. The siblings don't know each other. Only the mother in this family knows her children, but even she won't recognize them. It will be a very long time before she sees them again. In the meantime, they will lead very different lives. Each will learn a perspective of life different from the other. They will be equal but different. My guess? Makr wants information on how the family break-up will affect the individuals, the children especially, when they grow up."<
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"An experiment? Nothing more?"
"You got it. All in the name of Symbiosis which will mean the peaceful co-existence of Bio and Cyber for the good of both," he said with a hint of sarcasm.
"Right." He caught his colleague's negative tone. "Well, that's all fine and dandy," said Doctor Vriebac. "I'm still not sure what you "cybercrats" are trying to do. All I know is that I studied medicine to help people, not Bios or whatever the chic term is today, and all I get to do is speak for Cyber physicians because Bios are more comfortable hearing from other Bios. SensaVision still makes it the perfect impression."
"So, call a lawyer and sue us," the younger retorted "How else could we afford you?"
"I would sue all you bastards—if I could find a flesh and bones lawyer, but you got them, too."
"When you want the truth, there's nothing like Cyber for rational and logical thinking."
"What about gray areas?"
"They were replaced long ago."
Vriebac had only one last thing to say: "Damn Cyber."
"I'd watch what I say if I were you, doctor," the cybercrat said, exercising the only real power he had. At that moment, the Cyber security alarm went off.