Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [59]
When the silence proved too oppressive, Charlotte began to talk again, although Wilde was still engrossed in his breakfast. “The detail is still piling up by the bucketload,” she said, “but we’ve had no major breakthrough. We still haven’t pinned down the current name and location of the woman who visited the victims or the man who used to be Rappaccini, although Hal thinks that we’re getting close on both counts. Most of the new information concerns the second murder, and possible links between Urashima and King. You knew Urashima at least as well as you knew King, I suppose?” “We met on more than one occasion,” Wilde admitted, laying down his fork for a moment or two, “but it was a long time ago. We were not close friends. He was an artist, and I had the greatest respect for his work. I would have been glad to count him as a friend, had that ridiculous business of house arrest not made it virtually impossible for him to sustain and develop his social relationships.” “He was released from the terms of his house arrest and communications supervision thirteen years ago,” Charlotte observed, watching for any reaction, “but he seems to have been institutionalized by the experience. Although he began to receive visitors, he never went out, and he continued to use a sim to field all his calls. The general opinion was, I believe, that he was lucky to get away with house arrest. If he hadn’t been so famous, he’d have been packed off to the freezer.” “If he hadn’t deserved his fame,” Wilde countered, “he wouldn’t have been able to do the work he did. His imprisonment was an absurd sentence for a nonsensical crime. He and his coworkers placed no one in danger but themselves.” “He was playing about with brainfeed equipment,” Charlotte observed patiently.
“Not just memory boxes or neural stimulators—full-scale mental cyborgization.
And he didn’t just endanger himself and a few close friends—he was pooling information with other illegal experimenters. Some of their experimental results made the worst effects of a screwed-up rejuve look like a slight case of aphasia.” “Of course he was pooling information,” Wilde said, pausing yet again between mouthfuls. “What on earth is the point of hazardous exploration unless one makes every effort to pass on the legacy of one’s discoveries? He was trying to minimize the risks by ensuring that others had no need to repeat failures.” “Have you ever experimented with that kind of equipment, Dr. Wilde?” Charlotte asked. She had to be vague in asking the question because she wasn’t entirely sure what multitude of sins the phrase “that kind of equipment” had to cover.
Like everyone else, she bandied about phrases like “psychedelic synthesizer” and “memory box,” but she had little or no idea of the supposed modes of functioning of such legendary devices. Ever since the first development of artificial synapses capable of linking up human nervous systems to silicon-based electronic systems, numerous schemes had been devised for hooking up the brain to computers or adding smart nanotech to its cytoarchitecture, but almost all the experiments had gone disastrously wrong. The brain was the most complex and sensitive of all organs, and serious disruption of brain function was the one kind of disorder that twenty-fifth-century medical science was impotent to