Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [5]
He left the girl’s brain, streamed back to the safety of medical peripherals, and watched through monitors, for several minutes, the girl’s face. Serene, unmoved. The dead ain’t easily impressed. Except, she wasn’t dead.
Arms folded over her chest, her hands clenched into fists and pressed together. Legs extended and turned inward. Classical decorticate rigidity—a “mummy baby.” Silent baby. The girl’s eyelids didn’t so much as twitch. Deep coma state, the Glasgow Scale of 5. Even her reflexes were depressed. It was as if her central nervous system had refused to heed the outside world, trying to construct some other inner space, perhaps not even three-dimensional.
Just now, Nathi noticed that someone must have made her hair into curls—not long, not short, but just the right length to lie neatly by her shoulders. The burning red contrasted sharply with the clinical white of the sheets—a captured, still flame pinned down by the watchful eyes of medical equipment turning around her bed in a cylinder of vigilance.
“At least she feels no pain,” her previous doctor had told Nathi months ago. “There is no ‘she’ to speak of. Nobody’s home.”
Yet. That doctor hadn’t plugged himself into her thalamus, to fill the missing spot. Nathi knew better.
Even in a sensory deprivation tank, the brain kept generating sensory and motor context of its own—dreaming awake. The brain was like a virtual reality machine, a generator of possible worlds. Having evolved as a prediction engine, the brain churned them nonstop—in dreams or daydreams, in hallucinations or when planning for the future. Worlds of possibility.
The girl still had brainwave activity within the gamma range. Inside her brain, behind those unmoving eyelids, self-generated input for the senses—fragments of memories, sparks of emotions, failing attempts at new worldbuilding—percolated still, with nothing to connect the dots. What worlds of possibility still echoed across her mind? All Nathi did was weave the patterns once again into a single tapestry, returning her into the world she still remembered. Her eyeballs moved and eyelids fluttered—for just one hundred seconds.
Could it be that some part of the girl’s “self” had survived within her digital layer? Nathi’s nanobots were not alone in her brain. The girl was parahuman, a half-analog half-digital being that simultaneously existed in both worlds, the physical one and the cyberspace. Linked directly, parahumans interfaced with e-World at the subconscious level, just like posthumans did. But, just like humans, they had bodies. They were mortal.
Nathi was a fairly good hacker. But he’d failed to even talk to the girl’s digital half, never mind breaking in. He’d never heard of a parahuman self surviving only in the digital layer, but he knew that something had been going on there. Something that had generated the background for that dream.
That something must be running even now.
What was that? A sharp splash of activity in her anterior cingulate cortex, the seat of pain. If Nathi had a body still, he would have shuddered. The human doctor had been wrong. She could feel pain—if something brought all pieces of her consciousness together. What nightmares ran through the girl’s comatose mind? By linking in, he’d only given them an outlet to recombine, the deaf at last finding the blind.
All of a sudden, it became too difficult to watch that serene face. Could that last dream be a real memory? How could it if the girl still lived? He knew what Dragonclaws in expert hands could do to nanodiamond armor, never mind to unprotected flesh. But dreams did not appear out of nowhere. rem sleep wasn’t that different from waking state, except that input for a dream was redirected, the external stimuli replaced by an internal source.
He had himself fed the initial input. He’d lucked out when the girl recalled the blueberries.