Matthew kept staring at her as he sat at his terminal next to her bed. She looked so peaceful lying there. Her brown hair was too long for the bandages around her head, and was spread out over the pillow. She could have been sleeping, but the tubes in her mouth and nose gave away the true state of her condition. The machines kept her breathing, and Matthew listened to the slow, rhythmic, breaths that they forced into Jayne’s lungs. He watched as her chest rose and fell under the sheet that now covered her, and reached out to take her hand where it lay by her side.
As he held her hand in his, he remembered how she had first looked that morning, lying naked and uncovered on the bed. She had seemed so limp and colourless, inhuman even. He had felt uncomfortable and somehow embarrassed looking at her. Now she was dressed in a surgical gown and the machines had returned the colour and warmth to her skin. To him, she was alive again, a person once more.
Jayne Middleton.
But according to current medical beliefs, this was all a waste of time. Her heart had been stimulated and was beating once more, the machines forced the air in and out of her lungs, and a drip fed nutrients into her. But the most important organ in her body, her brain, was inactive. The trauma it had sustained in the accident had damaged it too much, and the subsequent lack of oxygen during her transfer would have damaged it even further. Although Jayne was physically strong enough for her heart to be restarted, and for her body to recover from the stress it had undergone, her brain was a much more fragile entity.
Medical experience showed that the brain never recovered from such damage, and that depriving brain cells of oxygen had an even more damaging and irreversible affect. So, although Jayne’s body was alive, her brain was dead. And that was that.
Until now.
Matthew was sure that the information the brain had once stored when alive was not lost at death, at least not for a while. He believed that, like the heart, the brain could also be restarted, or that, at the very least, the information it stored could be accessed. To Matthew, the brain was just a big, complicated computer, and death was the off switch. His theory was that the memories and personality stored in the brain were still there, and like the information stored on a hard disc that had crashed, it could be retrieved. But, up to now, no one knew how. Matthew thought he knew.
The surgery to install the implant in Jayne’s head had been completed that afternoon, and, as Ben had promised, the surgery had been carried out as if Jayne were a live patient. Two nurses had already been hired to look after Jayne, and Matthew had met them both. They were called Sandra and Julia. Both were bright and friendly, and they had looked after Jayne all day together. Sandra had now gone home, but Julia would stay on all night, giving way to Sandra who would return in the morning.
It was six o’clock, and most people had already gone home, but for Matthew, his work was just beginning. The implant in Jayne’s head was connected by a cable through the wall to the two Cray computers MedTec had installed in Matthew’s lab. In fact, they took up most of the space in his lab, and were by far the most costly items to be purchased. They were very powerful, but apart from the many simulations, they had hardly twitched. That would all change tonight.
Matthew had spent the last part of the afternoon wheeling his mini-computer into the room next door and connecting it up to the Crays via the cables through the wall. Even though there was a closed circuit TV camera that relayed pictures of Jayne directly to his lab, Matthew wanted to be in the room with her during the field trial.
Now everything was ready. Matthew let go of Jayne’s hand and turned to his keyboard and monitor. He typed away for a few seconds and then hit the return key with a flourish. Apparently nothing happened, but next door one of the Crays began to heat up as its usage went up from almost zero to eighty percent in a few seconds.