Counterpoint

This story is careware: if you read it or download it, you are morally bound by my terms and conditions.

Jomas Cartwright and Daniel Patel had a lot in common. Dr. Massier was about to give them a lot more - just how much more, nobody really knew yet.

Most obviously in common, they were both lying unconscious in the same operating theatre. They were both male, famous musicians, badly crippled and very rich. Everybody knew that.

Jane Massier knew more - she had taken great pains to find out. Both had similar physique and similar mercurial characters, including an inability to cope with the recent violent ending of their careers. They were willing to try anything to escape from the prisons of their maimed bodies - even Dr. Jane Massier.

As she watched them being prepared for the operation behind her glass partition, Jane reflected on the crucial differences between them which were as important to her as their similarities. Jomas was a virtuoso performer, famous for his intuitive and emotional interpretations of the classics. The murderous attack by his lover's husband, in which he had lost the left half of his brain, had been broadcast live across the world. His right hand hung limp and useless from that moment on, and gone also were the ability to read music, and the power of speech and of song. But the musical fire which drove his soul lived on in the right half of his brain, unable to express itself any more. He had lived for his music and could not bear to live without it.

Daniel on the other hand was famous for his revival of the lost art of classical composition. Hailed as the greatest composer since Sibelius, he had extended the classical rules of harmony for the first time in two centuries. His knack for a catchy tune and flamboyant dancing had assured him of popular immortality. He had lost the right half of his head and most of his limbs in a horiffic plane crash only days after Jomas's beating. With half his brain the accident had taken away his feel for music - his intellectual genius was undimmed but he had no judgement left for his work: his greatest achievements sounded no different to him now than the random beepings of a computer. Frustration and boredom had already driven him to one suicide attempt.

Jane slipped on her virtual reality hood, logged-on to the Surgeon and brought up her hand for the first incision. Over Jomas's still form, a Knife swooped down to his shaven head. Strange Jane thought how a laser gun with the intelligence of a small frog could still bear the name of an old second-millennium piece of sharpened metal. That ancient technique could not even sterilise as it cut, let alone decide which bits to cut and which to pass through unfocussed. Ugh! She put the thought out of her head and bent to her work.

Within minutes, Daniel's surviving half brain lay nestled in Jomas' skull alongside the resident good half, Daniel's discarded body already on its way to the organ bank. Jane clicked on the Suture icon and sat back for a rest. It would be a few minutes before the fine mist of micromanipulators starting to spray over the open wound could carry out their task of closing it up as if it had never been.

She wondered idly why calling an icon's name should be called "clicking on" it, and where the word "Suture" came from. Before the days of virtual surgery, she supposed, when surgeons and patients were actually in the same room. Imagine the germs! And no safety expert system to correct your aim if your (metal!) knife slipped. What she really needed was a Surgeon which could do you a cup of coffee... Jomas had been drinking coffee when she put her idea to him - or more accurately he had been spilling it down his shirt in desperate refusal to drink through a straw. She had approached the subject very cautiously, knowing that although she offered the chance to play and perhaps even sing again, the route she offered was - well - mindblowing. With growing astonishment and delight, she had watched as he broke his stylus writing YES with his shaky left hand, and laboriously followed it up with PLAES! and a lopsided grin.

Surprisingly to her, it was the grossly crippled intellectual who had been harder to convince. She had to explain the whole procedure blow by blow, with Daniel asking questions the whole way. At the end he was still suspicious. "Isn't it a little too convenient that our tissues match so closely?" he asked.

"I mean, it's enough of a coincidence even for us to have the same blood type isn't it?"

He was out of date! Jane sighed and patiently explained about GMV's - genetic manipulator viruses which were tailor-made to invade the cells of a particular individual and modify every gene in their body to a chosen form. "So by the time of the surgery you will both be modified to be genetically identical twins," she finished. Finally taking it all in, Daniel just sat and stared at her with his blank, lost eyes for minutes on end. Unable, she suddenly realised, to make a value judgement. "What have you got to lose?" she asked. "You've already tried to leave your body once." He shrugged, and signed the consent form.

Now, the micromanipulators had done their work and it was time for the interesting bit. Jane's special creations, and her reason for the whole exercise. A magnetic resonance imager closed in around the restored features of the sleeping man, and Jane leaned forward in her headset, into a new virtual world, the MRI scanner's world inside the sleeping head.

Highly novel and still experimental, Jane's inventions were a new class of Formicands. The name comes from the ant-like ability of such molecules to self-organise into groups which achieve a higher function than an individual molecule is capable of. Seen as a whole, a nest of ants behaves as a single organism more intelligent and flexible than an ant on its own. This ability of ants is described by an ancient branch of mathematics called chaos theory, and its appliction to molecular engineering is almost as ancient.

Jane's breakthrough was in discovering a practical link between formicand chemistry and surgical micromanipulators, allowing her to design simple manipulators which would organise into intelligent colonies capable of complex and delicate surgical operations... such as joining two halves of a brain together...

In the event, it all went like clockwork. Jane's hours spent in the simulator allowed her to feel comfortably at home in the bizarre 3-D world of the MRI scanner. Her surgical formicands behaved impeccably, mapping and joining cut nerve fibres under the watchful eye of a mind map networked in from the neuro research lab. Jane had very little to do really, other than run a few checks that the right body functions were generally being connected to the right bits of brain, and feel vaguely let down that it was all so like the simulator.

At last it was all over. Jane leaned bach with a tired sigh and doffed her headset. The sterile isolation of the operating theatre had not been needed for some time, it was now jammed with nurses and media men ....

Jane was upset, and felt that her VIP visitor sensed it. Not that the operation had gone badly, no. More that it had been too successful. Two weeks of deep, drugged sleep and a programme of neural conditioning had brought the traumatised brain back to normal functioning. On regaining consciousness, a few days of intense therapy had established the basics of physical co-ordination to such a point that musical talent began to reappear. This was a vital milestone, as it gave the patient the motivation to cover the next, more difficult stretch. For with full consciousness and time to think, two sets of memories had come flooding back. That had of course been anticipated and the psychologists were ready. And they did a grand job too, so they said. No, everything went right and her career was all set for its own kind of stardom. Then the lawyers had arrived.

Jane opened a door and ushered her VIP visitor into the room where her charge sat waiting. The current head of the World Council of Religions, the Dalai Lama, had been deemed a suitable arbiter of the dispute since none of the lawyers had any axe to grind against him. The fact that Buddhism is at heart more a philosophy than a religion, and has spent millennia learning to get along with other religions, probably helped in this. But crucially to the legal arguments, the Buddhist concept of mind bears many similarities to quantum mechanics' view of reality, and is capable of handling paradoxes in a pragmatic way. Jane suspected that this simply meant there was nothing in Buddhist philosophy which the lawyers could define legalistically and hence disagree with, and wondered if she were being cynical or wise. At any rate, the Dalai Lama was the only suggested arbiter to survive a hundred and thirty-seven committee meetings of backbiting. He had agreed quicky to the invitation, seeing it as a golden opportunity to demostrate Buddhist values to the world. The legal, ethical and philosophical minefields appeared not to trouble him at all. Brave, wise or foolhardy? The world's press were divided.

As they entered, a psychologist was offering the patient a tray with a cup, teapot and coffee pot on it. The right hand reached for the tea, the left for coffee. The face was a study as differing emotions flickered across each side. After a brief struggle, the left hand won and poured coffee. Jomas was always a coffee man. But the right hand refused to lift the cup, and when the left hand tried the mouth refused to open. Daniel had hated coffee.

Then the right hand got the cup, tipped it in the wastebin and refilled it with tea. But when it lifted the cup to its lips, the left hand knocked it aside. All to be expected, and the psychologist nodded happily as he scribbled on his notescreen.

Jane barely had time to notice that an insurance agent had joined the lawyers and cameramen before the patient looked up from his empty cup and caught sight of the Dalai Lama. His eyes held a bottomless, haunted depth of blackness she had not seen before and it stilled her in shock. The room suddenly went very quiet as he spoke:

Careware Terms and Conditions

© 1999 Guy Inchbald. You can copy this story, print it, and give hard or soft copies to your friends. You may not obtain payment for the story or for its distribution, or use the story in association with any commercial activity, without the author's express permission. You may not remove these terms and conditions from any hard or soft copy.

If you like my story, a small payment (up to you) is requested - 50% will go to my favourite charities.

Guy Inchbald
Park View, Queenhill, Upton-on-Severn, Worcs WR8 0RE, England
guy@steelpillow.com

Top of page Index Home Page E-mail me