Interface

16

It was a creepy and surreal morning when they implanted the biochips in the mind of Mohinder Singh. Dr. Radhakrishnan got up early, as he always did on the morning of an operation. He went downstairs, eschewing room service, and watched the sun come up over Delhi from the cafe of the Imperial Hotel. The air pollution was especially bad this morning. Some kind of dire temperature inversion had clamped itself down over the city like a bell jar, trap­ping and concentrating the cocktail of dust, automobile exhaust, coal smoke, woodsmoke, manure smoke, and the ammoniated gasses that rose up from the stewn excreta of millions of people and animals. This being winter, the air was relatively humid, or as humid as it was ever likely to get. The humidity condensed around the countless nuclei provided by all of that air pollution, so that when the sun rose, it had to force its way up through a thick cloacal fog, and turned a furious red color, the color of Elvis's face in his last moments on earth. When it finally burst free of the horizon, the sun simply disappeared and became a mere bright tendency in the burnt-orange sediment of the eastern sky.

Dr. Gangadhar V.R.J.V.V. Radhakrishnan sipped tea and ran over the whole project one more time, wondering if they had overlooked anything.

Mr. Salvador had been spending even more time than usual on the telephone recently. This was totally irrelevant to today's operation, but Dr. Radhakrishnan remained curious about the American side of this project. Old Bucky had to spend a certain amount of time every day at the Barracks. The phone would ring, he would answer it, and he would talk. For hours. And Dr. Radhakrishnan would stroll back and forth through the Barracks, tending to his own work, and occasionally cock an ear in old Bucky's direction, hoping to overhear something.

Most of what he overheard, he already knew; Mr. Salvador was just relaying information about the project to others. But on one occasion, wandering around near Mr. Salvador's desk, Dr. Radhakrishnan heard him involved in a very intense, and very loud, conversation about something called Super Tuesday.

Dr. Radhakrishnan was sure he had seen this phrase somewhere before, but he did not have the foggiest idea what it meant. Some kind of American thing. He kept meaning to ask Zeldo if he knew, but kept forgetting.

After a while, Zeldo came down, murmured a sleepy hello to him, occupied another table nearby, and began to read the Times of India.

Dr. Radhakrishnan had far too much on his mind to concern himself with politics, and rarely looked at the Times. But when Zeldo moved on to one of the interior pages, opening the paper and holding it up in the air, Dr. Radhakrishnan could clearly see a headline, down low on the first page:

U.S. CANDIDATES VIE IN "SUPER TUESDAY" ELECTIONS

"What is Super Tuesday?" he said.

Zeldo spoke to him through the paper. "It's today," he said. "A bunch of the states have their primaries on the same day."

"Primaries?"

"Yeah. You know. To select the presidential candidates."

Dr. Radhakrishnan didn't want to hear anything more about it. He knew it would cloud his mind. He sat there drinking his tea. Then it was time to go to work.

It all went smoothly there in the magnificent central operating theater of the Radhakrishnan Institute. He had never seen the place, except in his dreams, or in the computer simulations, until he walked in to begin the operation. The room was circular, huge, high-ceilinged, a cathedral of technology. The floors were white and mirror-smooth. The walls were white painted concrete. All the light was recessed halogen fixtures, painfully bright, and unnaturally pure in coloration compared to the tainted, smoky-yellow illumination provided by old-fashioned bulbs. It felt just the way it should: as though every technological system on earth converged on this one spot, on the operating table that stood in the middle of the room.

"Jeez," Zeldo said, walking into the place, "all we need is a skylight and some lightning rods."

They did it much better this time around. Everything was calm and quiet. Everyone knew their moves. All the equipment was brand new and worked perfectly.

They lowered the biochip down a shaft into the middle of Mohinder Singh's brain and nestled it into the space that had been cut away. This time it was a perfect fit. The incision had been made under the control of a computer, there were no gaps, the new cells would knit together with the old ones much more quickly.

The closing process took a couple of hours but Dr. Radhakrishnan stayed there through the whole thing, watching his assistants put Mr. Singh's head back together. Zeldo stood off to the side at a Calyx console, monitoring the signals from the chip.

By the time they were sewing Mr. Singh's scalp flap back down over the reassembled skull, lines of data had begun to scroll up the monitor screen. The biochip had already made contact. Zeldo was astonished by this, but Dr. Radhakrishnan wasn't. They had done it right this time.

"What is it?" Mr. Salvador said. He had just come in from the hotel. Clearly, he had been catching up on sleep, sex, drinking, or some other fundamental bodily function, and had been interrupted in the middle by Dr. Radhakrishnan's telephone call. Clearly he was not happy about it.

"Check this out," Dr. Radhakrishnan said, leading him into the room where Mohinder Singh had, for the last few days, been recovering from the operation.

"Is this going to be more wubba wubba?" Mr. Salvador said.

Mohinder Singh was sitting up in bed, as usual, and smoking, as usual. His scar was nearly obscured by the deepening shadow of his hair. He looked up as Dr. Radhakrishnan and Mr. Salvador came into the room, squinting at them impassively through cigarette smoke.

Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke to him briefly in Hindi, gesturing in the direction of an ashtray that rested on a table next to the bed on Mr. Singh's paralyzed left side.

Mr. Singh looked down at the hand and it began to twitch. Then it jumped into the air like a small animal spooked by a sudden noise, and came to a stop out in front of Mr. Singh's face. The hand began to move toward his mouth, a few inches at a time, in a zigzagging course, like a sailboat trying to tack upwind into a moorage. As it got closer the fingers began to vibrate nervously. They wanted to close over the cigarette but they didn't want to get burned.

Then, suddenly, he had gripped the cigarette. He yanked it out of his mouth and extended his arm out over the ashtray in one explosive movement, scattering ashes the whole way. His hand vibrated for a moment above the general vicinity of the ashtray, dumping a few more ashes from the end of the cigarette, some of which actually landed in the ashtray.

Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke another couple of words and Mr. Singh's hand dropped straight down into the ashtray, crushing the cigarette and mostly putting it out. Then he jerked his hand back into his lap, leaving the cigarette in the tray, spinning out a long tenuous line of smoke.

"Astonishing," Mr. Salvador said. He looked quite awake and considerably less grumpy.

Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke another few words. Then he said, to Mr. Salvador, "I have asked him his name."

Mr. Singh's mouth came open and then closed again, the lips coming together: "Mmmmmo-

"Mo," Dr. Radhakrishnan echoed.

"Derrrrrr."

"-der. Mohinder."

"Ssssin."

"Mohinder Singh. Very good." Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke in Hindi again, then translated: "What kind of lorry were you driving at the time of your accident?"

"Ta... ta."

"That's right. A Tata 1210."

"Still no signs of tumor or rejection?"

"None."

"Right," Mr. Salvador said, "that's it, then." He spun on his heel and burst out of the room.

Dr. Radhakrishnan waited for a few moments, then followed him.

The offices were upstairs. He entered the stairwell and heard Mr. Salvador above him, taking the steps two or three at a time.

By the time he had followed Mr. Salvador, quietly, up to the office level, old Bucky had already got through to someone on the telephone:

"What? All right, I'll speak loudly. Can you hear me? Good. Listen carefully; we are go for launch. Yes. Yes. Unequivocally. Yes, you have a good day too."