Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [133]
It was Tia—Tia!—sitting there in a body, a human body, like the realization of his dream!
"This?" he replied cleverly.
"I hope you don't mind if I don't get up," she continued, a little ruefully. "I'm not very good at walking yet. They just delivered this today, and I haven't had much practice in it yet."
"It?" he said, sitting heavily down on his bunk and staring at her. "How—what—"
"Do you like it?" she asked, pathetically eager for his approval. He wasn't sure what he was supposed to approve of—the body?
"How could I not like it—you—" His head was spinning as badly as it had a few hours ago. "Tia, what on earth is this?"
She blinked, and giggled. "I keep forgetting. You know all that bonus money we've been getting? I kept investing it, then reinvesting the profits in Moto-Prosthetics. But when we got back here, I was thinking about something Doctor Kenny told me, that they had the capability to make a body like this, but that there was no way to put a naked brain in it, and there was so much data-transfer needed to run it that the link could only be done at very short distances."
"Oh." He couldn't help but stare at her; this was his dream, his daydream—his—
Never mind.
"Anyway," she continued, blithely unaware that she had stunned him into complete silence, "it seemed to me that the body would be perfect for a brainship, I mean, we've got all the links already, and it wouldn't be any harder to control a body from inside than a servo. But he was already an investor, and he told me it wasn't likely they'd ever build a body like that, since there was no market for it, because it would cost as much as a brainship contract buy-out."
"But how—"
She laughed aloud. "That was why I took all my share of the bonuses and bought more stock! I bought a controlling interest, then I told them to build me a body! I don't need a buy-out—I don't really want a buy-out—not since the Institute decided to give us the EsKay homeworld assignment."
He shook his head. "That simple? It hardly seems possible . . . didn't they argue?"
"They were too happy that I was letting them keep their old jobs," she told him cynically. "After all, as controlling stockholder, I had the right to fire them all and set up my own Board of Directors. But I have to tell you the funniest thing!"
"What's that?" he asked.
Her hands caressed Theodore's soft fur. "Word of what I was doing leaked out, and now there is a market! Did you have any idea how many shellpersons there are who've earned a buy-out, but didn't have any place to go with it, because they were happy with their current jobs?"
He shook his head, dumbly.
"Not too many ships," she told him, "but a lot of shellpersons running installations. Lots of them. And there were a lot of inquiries from brainships, too—some of them saying that they'd be willing to skip a buy-out to have a body! Moto-Prosthetics even got a letter of protest from some of the Advocates!"
"Why?" he asked, bewildered. "Why on earth would they care?"
"They said that we were the tools of the BB program, that we had purposely put this 'mechanical monster' together to tempt brainships out of their buy-out money." She tilted her head to one side, charmingly, and frowned. "I must admit that angle had never occurred to me. I hope that really isn't a problem. Maybe I should have Lars and Lee Stirling look into it for me."
"Tia," he managed, around the daze surrounding his thoughts, "what is this 'mechanical monster' of yours?"
"It's a cybernetic body, with a wide-band comlink in the extreme shortwave area up here." She tapped her forehead. "What's different about it is that it's using shellperson tech to give me full sensory input from the skin as well as output to the rest. My range isn't much outside the ship, but my techs at Moto are working on that. After all, when we take the Prime Team out to the EsKay homeworld, I'm going to want to join the dig, if they'll let me. What with alloys and silicates and carbon-fibers and all, it's not much heavier than you are, even though it outmasses a softperson female of