Termination Shock

Cyberabad

“We think you are ready to walk,” said Dr. Banerjee after they’d extracted him from the tank, removed the sphere from his head, disconnected the cables behind his ears, and given him a chance to shower and put some clothes on.

When he’d first regained consciousness, “clothes” had meant hospital gowns, but these days it seemed to be T-shirts, sweatpants, and a simple piece of cloth to cover his head. He never wore the same T-shirt twice. They just showed up. Most were blazoned with the names and logos of kabaddi teams, but there was also some hockey swag. He had only the vaguest sense of what kabaddi and hockey were, but their practitioners seemed quite generous with clothing.

As for the piece of cloth on his head: in the early going he’d been a little unclear on whether this was a medical thing—for they’d been doing a lot of things to his skull—or a form of attire. Some of the people who came to visit him—including most of the ones who claimed to be his friends and family—wore such coverings on their heads. Typically, they were a lot more elaborate than the thing he had. Large portions of his head had been shaved for medical reasons, but they’d left his hair long on top and in front. He could twist it into a sort of bun above his forehead and wrap that up in the cloth. Also, there was a metal band that he wore on his wrist.

Right now he was seated in a wheelchair in the living room of his suite, looking across a coffee table at Dr. Banerjee, a small woman in her forties. She was flanked by a couple of the usual crowd of—well, it was hard to tell who and what they were. Younger people who seemed smart and efficient and pleased.

“I’ve been walking for weeks,” he said.

“I mean, without the rack,” she clarified. She referred to a cube-shaped frame on wheels that until now had always surrounded him when he walked; it prevented him from injuring himself when he lost his balance. “Today’s results were more than encouraging. Your proprioception has been improving steadily during the last few weeks, but recently it has just gone shooting off the charts. We have finally got those darned gyros dialed in. The neural interfaces are ‘taking.’ Combining those two advances, we can now say that your sense of balance is better than what we have measured in controlled experiments on Olympic gymnasts!”

“Well, screw it then,” he said. In one motion he unbuckled the lap belt holding him into his chair and stood up. The backs of his legs impacted the chair and sent it rolling backward until it clattered against a wall. Dr. Banerjee was horrified. She needn’t have been. He knew exactly where he was in space.

“No, too soon, Laks!” she exclaimed.

Laks. Yet another of his names.

“Please sit down! We wish to perform the trial under controlled circumstances!” Dr. Banerjee herself had jumped to her feet as if to physically restrain him—funny thought, since she weighed less than half of what Laks did. His lack of balance had not prevented him from working out on weight machines to gain back the muscle mass he’d lost during the months of lying unconscious.

Her colleagues, though, looked very pleased. They high-fived each other. One of them took a picture.

“Can you do this?” Laks asked. He lifted one foot off the floor so that he was balanced on one leg. Then he closed his eyes. “Count,” he said.

One of them began: “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three . . .”

When the count reached thirty, he opened his eyes. Rock solid. No flailing of arms or hopping around.

“I cannot,” Dr. Banerjee admitted. “Few can.”

During the half minute he’d been standing on one leg with eyes closed, that “Laks” thing had been sinking in. It jogged a memory—a recent one. He walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window of his suite. This was on something like the thirtieth floor of the building, so it had a fantastic view out over a sunlit cityscape consisting mostly of new office buildings ranging in height from five to fifty stories. Some were emblazoned with logos and funny words that he took to be the names of companies. The place was called Cyberabad. It was part of a much larger and older city called Hyderabad. These were all details he had picked up in fragments strewn among conversations he barely remembered, scattered across the last several weeks; but it was all coming into focus. It was beginning to “take,” to borrow Dr. Banerjee’s expression.

Dr. Banerjee inhaled sharply as Laks approached the window. She must be afraid that he was going to trip over his feet and smash through it. But he wouldn’t. His sense of where he was could not have been more perfect. He even knew that he was gazing along an azimuth of about 325 degrees with respect to magnetic north.

Below, and across the street, was a building perhaps ten stories high. Its flat roof was fifty-seven meters below him. He wasn’t sure how he knew that. The roof had a pea-gravel surface, sort of gray brown on the average. But someone had gone up there with white paint and rolled out the words “GET WELL SOON LAKS!” in letters several meters high. Strewn all around that was brownish vegetable matter flecked here and there with muted colors: flowers that had adorned the big white words but that had wilted and withered. Thousands of individual bouquets. Literally tons of old dead flowers.

His view of Cyberabad was cut off as the curtain was yanked across the window by one of Dr. Banerjee’s flankers. “Sorry,” he said. “The days of drones hovering outside your window are thankfully gone. But still, if anyone recognized you, social media would go ballistic. And we don’t want expectations getting out of hand.”

Laks stood there for a few moments absorbing that. This phrase “social media” was, on one level, new to his ears. Or the sensor pods screwed into the temporal bone ridges behind his ears that did what ears did, only better. And yet he could feel it lighting up big networks of connections in his head.

During the months he had lain flat on his back in the dark, trying not to be sick from vertigo, sometimes the sun would come out from behind clouds. Even through the blackout curtains next to his hospital bed, he could sense that it had done so. Not so much because of light leaking round the edges as because of the vague omnidirectional warmth radiating through the dark fabric. This was a little like that. On the dark side of the neurological curtain was Laks, trying to work out what “social media” denoted. On the other side was a large portion of his brain. And yet the curtain had a few moth-holes in it. Through those, he glimpsed clear images: a freckle-faced woman with a camera. The snowy top of a mountain. A Chinese man with a stick.

“Run it by me one more time,” he said to the curtain-snapper. He knew he’d seen the guy before. He didn’t wear scrubs or a lab coat. More a T-shirt and jeans kind of chap. Ponytail. Name tag “Kadar.” Rhymed with “radar.” Right now Kadar had an uncertain look on his face, which for him was unusual. He wasn’t sure he understood Laks’s question.

So Laks clarified: “Something happened to my brain.”

The guy exhaled. As if to say How many times are we going to have to go over this? He broke eye contact. His gaze wandered over to a counter in one corner of the room where a microwave and a coffee maker had been provided for the use of Laks and the many people who came to his suite to have these weird conversations with him. Beneath the counter was a small fridge, and atop it were a fruit plate and a basket of snacks. A thought occurred to Kadar and he strode over to it.

Meanwhile Dr. Banerjee was saying, “You suffered an exposure to a pattern of energy that coupled in a deleterious manner to certain delicate structures inside of your noggin.”

“Consider a spherical brain,” said Kadar. He had plucked a single green grape from a bunch of them on the fruit plate. He now extracted a steak knife from the silverware drawer and used it to cut most, but not all, of the way through the grape. Laks drifted over to watch. Kadar opened the grape like a book. The uncut skin in the back held the two halves of it together like a hinge. “To most people, a piece of fruit not quite cut in half. To a radio engineer, a butterfly antenna.”

“Antenna!?”

Kadar nodded solemnly and placed the grape in the microwave. He slammed the appliance’s door shut and poised a finger over the “Beverage” button. “The last thing you saw before you lost consciousness on the top of that ridge was a Chinese weapons system that projects electromagnetic energy in a certain band. A little bit like this microwave oven.” He hit the button while indicating with his other hand that Laks should observe. Laks bent over and peered through the perforated-metal screen behind the door glass to see the grape dimly visible trundling around on the glass turntable and presumably getting warmer. But suddenly there was a flash like a little lightning bolt and a sizzling noise. Kadar shut off the microwave, opened the door, and pulled out the two halves of the grape, which were no longer attached. “Hardly even warm,” he said. He rotated the halves so that Laks could see the former place of attachment, now marked with tiny black smudges where the skin had explosively vaporized. “But in that one place, for a moment, it was as hot as the surface of the sun.”

“How do you know that?”

“The color of the flash.” Kadar held out the grape halves. Laks let them tumble into the palm of his hand. They were scarcely above body heat. “And that is the problem. The radiation from the Chinese weapon coupled weakly to most of your body but strongly to certain bits. Which got damaged. We’re trying to get those bits to grow back—or provide substitutes where that isn’t going to be possible.”

Laks looked over at Dr. Banerjee, who seemed mortified. Presumably she felt that Kadar was being a bit blunt. But Laks didn’t mind. “I’ll keep the grape next to my bed as a reminder,” he said. “So I don’t have to keep asking you.”

Kadar seemed slightly abashed. “I don’t mean to suggest in any way that we are unwilling to answer any and all of your questions.”

“In that case, I have one more.”

“Shoot.”

“Why go to all this trouble just for me?” Laks looked around. “I mean . . . this is a pretty nice hospital room, right?”

“Very nice,” said Dr. Banerjee, with a depth of feeling suggesting that she had, in her day, seen some pretty fucked-up hospitals.

“It’s because you are a hero of India,” Kadar said, “but India is not quite finished with you yet.”