Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [261]
This to the computer; a signal to the hyperchips clamped Micaya's artificial arm and leg together.
"Lay a finger on Mic—" Forister threatened, struggling vainly against the effects of the paravenin.
"I won't need to," Polyon said with a brilliant smile. "I can do it all from here."
A series of brisk verbal commands and typed-in codes caused the portion of the ship's computer that Polyon controlled to transmit new, overriding instructions to the hyperchips controlling Micaya's internal organ replacements. The changes had the full duration of a transition loop to take effect. When they returned to normspace, Micaya's face was colorless and beads of sweat dotted her forehead.
"It's amazing how painful a few simple organic changes can be," Polyon commented gaily. "Little things like fiddling with the circulation, for instance. How's that hand, Mic, baby? Bothering you a bit?"
"Come a little closer," Micaya invited him, "and find out." But now Polyon had drawn attention to her one remaining hand; they could all see how it had changed color. The fingernails were almost black, the skin was purplish and swollen.
"Keep it like that for a week," Polyon said, "and she'll have a glorious case of gangrene. Of course, we don't have a week. I could trap even more blood in the hand and burst the veins, but that might kill her too fast. So I'll just leave it like that while you think it over, Forister, and maybe we'll start working on the foot as well. Fortunately, the heart's one of her cyborg replacements, so we don't have to worry about it failing under the increased demands; it'll go on working . . . as long as I want it to. Want to hear how well it works now?"
A word of command amplified the sound of Micaya's artificial heart beating vehemently, the pulse rate going up to support the demands Polyon was making on the rest of her system. The desperate, ragged double beat echoed through the cabin, droned and drummed and shrilled through a complete transition loop, and no one spoke or moved.
* * *
For a heartbeat, no more, Nancia found silence and darkness a welcome relief from the stabbing pain of the input from her rogue sensors. Is this what Singularity is like for softpersons? But no, it was worse than that. In the confused moments before she shut down all conscious functions and disabled her own sensor connections, she had been aware of something much worse than the colorshifts and spatial distortions of Singularity; the malevolence of another mind, intimately entwined with her own, striking at her with deliberate malice.
He means to drive me mad. If I enable my sensors again, he'll do it. And if I stay floating in this darkness, that will do it too. The bleak desperation of the thought came from somewhere far back in her memories. When, how, had she ever felt so utterly abandoned before? Nancia reached out, unthinking, to search her memory banks—then stopped before the connection was complete. If sensors could be turned into weapons to use against her, could not memory, too, be infiltrated? Access the computer's memory banks, and she might find herself "knowing" whatever this other mind wanted her to believe.
Is it another mind? Or a part of myself? Perhaps I'm mad already, and this is the first symptom. The flashing, disorienting lights and garbled sounds, the sickening whirling sensations, even the conviction that she was under attack by another mind—weren't all these symptoms of one of those Old Earth illnesses that had ravaged so many people before modern electrostim and drug therapy restored the balance of their tortured brains? Nancia longed to scan just one of the encyclopedia articles in her memory banks; but that resource was denied her for the moment. Paranoid schizophrenia, that was it; a splitting off of the mind from reality.
Let's see, now—she reasoned. If I'm mad, then it's safe to look up the symptoms and decide that I'm mad, except that presumably I won't accept the evidence. And if I'm not mad, I daren't check memory to prove it. So we'd