Chapter 6
When Franklin’s attention refocused into the room, Anand was not longer talking about the Cowboys fighting at Wild West Alive and instead he had returned to his ruminations about the pseudo relationship he had working with the Neurosurgeon.
“There was never a single ‘Eureka’ moment,” Anand was saying, “It was a series of small successes followed by minor setbacks. The team was multi-national. Each specialist would focus on solving problems in their area of specialty. No one of us could have done it alone.”
Franklin realized Anand had been talking for some time and he had not been paying attention. In the notebook, his notes were his own remembrances of the fearful encounter on his dark doorstep and his surprise at finding a new Warmbot delivered to his home. Dolly of course assumed he had bought it in time for the dinner party, but he knew he had not. He could not afford such an extravagance. This was followed by pages about his experience at the courthouse and his discovery of the media file that showed the murder of Christopher Mark.
Anand continued speaking; he seemed unaware that Franklin had not been paying attention to his monologue.
Anand said, “My relationship with Sadhna was professional. I admired her skill as a surgeon and her brilliance as a research scientist. I also admired her. Eventually the project progressed past the theoretical and we were ready for experimentation. We were ready for a human trial. It was agreed that we would meet at the Neuro-Science unit at the medical research center in Lost Angeles where Sadhna maintained a laboratory and an office.
“I remember before I left for Los Angeles, I met with Chris Mark and Al McKnight. They were keenly interested in our progress and wanted to discuss the next steps. Chris Mark had a naturally curious mind and when he got focused on a topic he could easily be distracted by a tangent that he found interesting. Sometimes fifteen minutes of conversation would elapse before I could steer him back to the topic at hand, sometimes we never settled anything and the conversation just rambled aimlessly.
Al McKnight, on the other hand was a man of few words. He would doggedly follow a topic till he was satisfied with the response. When McKnight spoke, those around him listened. McKnight commanded your attention. Conversationally, Mark and McKnight were a picture of contrast.
“We are close,” I explained standing in the executive conference room that was nearby both of their offices.
Mark and McKnight occupied the top floor of the same building that had housed the offices of Remote Surgical Instruments. The newly imagined company “RSI Gaming” retained the acronym but none of the original product line. The firm had grown exponentially with the success of Wild West Alive.
The view from the conference room included the growing metropolis and rolling hills of Pleasanton and Dublin. In the distance Mount Diablo could be seen rising above the houses and freeways.
It is strange to think that Al McKnight and I are both now here, in the Minimum Security prison only a few short miles from where we once looked out from that conference room. Anand, paused to consider the juxtaposition of then and now, but did not comment further.
Anand continued saying,
“I told them that I was meeting the research team at the neurological research center next week and we were preparing to commence with human trials.”
Mark was inquisitive, “You think you can solve the bandwidth issues?” He asked,
I was not confident, but answered yes anyway. Mark quizzed me on the latest developments.
“Our plan,” I explained, “Is to read and replicate the synaptic impulses at the brain stem. Our thinking is we will introduce an extremely sensitive sensor array which will detect the transmission of neurotransmitters across dendrites. We will attempt to isolate the Dorsal Root ganglia which includes all sensory perceptions. We are not interested in autonomic functions like heartbeat. Once captured, we can duplicate the transmission of the sensory signals into the remote subject. It will be like installing another extension on your vid-phone. We will basically be initiating an organic conference call. One host, one set of sensory organs, multiple receptors reading the signals simultaneously. We are calling the process “Synaptic Derivation.”
Al McKnight was restless and becoming disinterested in the dissection of the minutia of the process. He asked, “Will you be ready for launch of the new game? Will you be ready to deploy the new system for Rome Alive?”
I had no idea if this technology would work at all, let alone if we could have a production ready model in time for the launch of Rome Alive. But I looked at McKnight and answered as confidently as I could.
“I think yes,” I said, “We are very close.”
McKnight stared at me. I think he suspected an ulterior motive. “Is Dr. Singh meeting you at the research center?” He asked.
“Quite right,” I answered coolly. “She is leading the neurological work. She will perform the surgery and implant the device into our test subjects.”
“Mmmm,” McKnight made a humming noise and was silent.
Chris Mark on the other hand, had stopped paying any attention to this conversation. He was preoccupied by the schematic of the prototype neural implant that I had handed him.
“So obviously it worked,” Franklin interrupted to move the narrative along and to steer Anand away from any additional details about the inner working of the neural implant device.
“Quite right, quite right,” Anand said. “It worked, as you say.”
“Today we take it for granted, but back then it was quite new. Sadhna and I were the first ever to “Synap in” as they call it now. We were the first to remotely connect to a device that was integrated with the Host’s brain stem. We were innocents at play. Each of us connecting to a remote host via a rudimentary prototype Synap Suit. I remember the feeling of controlling the host’s body. It was so much different from the rudimentary pressure point device we developed for Wild West Alive. I could really feel what the Host was feeling. As soon as I was Synapped-In I felt invigorated. My senses were attuned to his body. His strength was my strength. I could hear his strong pulse in my ears. I felt vital. But more than that, I was free of my own body. I was outside myself.
“I think for Sadhna it must have been the same. We had escaped the confines of self. We were no longer, Son or Daughter, Husband or Wife. We were outside of our cultural constraints. We felt brand new.”
“The experiments began with simple coordination exercises and then progressed from there. Soon we felt confident to go for a walk. From the Neuro-lab we made our way through the hospital and found ourselves on the outskirts of the college campus nearby Sahdna’s research laboratory. Life buzzed all around us. College students were walking, talking laughing. Skimmers zipped by on the street. It was quite different than wearing the hat. No one could tell we were controlling the hosts remotely. We seemed just like everyone else. We were just two college students on a walk across campus. We made our way east and eventually wandered into a Botanical Garden.
“I remember I could feel the cooling of the air on the face of my host as afternoon became dusk. I was acutely aware of smells and sounds. Once inside the garden, amid the exotic plants and shrubs we explored our environment. We played. We innocently romped about. We explored the pathways and waterways. Each new plant was a delight, touching the soft or oily leaves of strange ferns or grass or cactus.”
Anand’s descriptions of his romantic encounter in the garden stirred old memories in Franklin. Franklin remembered his own romantic encounter in a college campus garden. He remembered the day he met Dolly. Franklin closed his eyes in an attempt to physically repress the memories and thereby stay here in this moment, but the memories were too strong.