Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome by John Scalzi Read Free Book Online Page A

as storerooms for the locked in. It was an immense humanitarian crisis, on a global scale.
    I don’t know. Maybe we were wrong to enlist prisoners as trial subjects. It’s something I don’t have a good answer for, and yes, sometimes it still keeps me up at night. But on the other hand we had workable, functional neural networks, from the moment I sat up in bed to the moment we switched on the first Haden patient, in eighteen months. That is a miracle. It really is.
    Kathryn Martinez:
    About a third of the prisoners recruited for the trials died or suffered moderate to significant brain damage. Or I should say, the government
only in the last five years
released the data which says a third of the prisoner participants died or suffered brain damage. We have reason to believe those numbers are, shall we say, conservative.
    Chris Clarke:
    Well,
I
didn’t die, anyway. Though I had to wait until that Supreme Court ruling came down to get to participate in the trials. I was one of the second wave of test subjects. Since I heard that a lot of the first wave died or got brain damage, I don’t suppose I should complain.
    So, the way it worked is that I spent a lot of time with my head in a bunch of machines that made detailed scans of my brain. MRIs, X-rays to see blood vessels that had dye in them, that sort of thing. That took months, which didn’t make sense to me. I’m not Stephen Hawking. There’s not that much brain to see.
    Finally they decided they knew as much about my brain as they were going to find out without actually looking at it, so they took off the top part of my skull so they could observe it directly. When they did that they took a clear, sterile piece of plastic and put it where the top of my skull used to be, so they could see inside whenever they wanted. Then they took the part of my skull they sawed off and tucked it into my stomach area, so it would stay alive for when they wanted to attach it back on to my head. I could feel the thing when it was down there. It wasn’t a very good feeling.
    Then they decided they’d seen enough and put the top of my skull back on, after they placed the neural network in my head. They told me that the network had tendrils that would bury themselves in my brain but that I shouldn’t be able to feel them, so I shouldn’t worry about them. That wasn’t exactly a lie. I couldn’t feel the tendrils as they dug into my brain, but every once in a while it was like one of them would hit something, and I would get a huge rush of feeling or sensation. One time my field of vision went entirely green for like an hour, and another time I suddenly started smelling oranges. Another time I had about a minute where it felt like someone put a branding iron straight up my backside. It didn’t last very long but when you’re feeling something like that, time stretches out.
    After about a week of this I guess everything was where it was going to be, and they told me they were going to turn on the network, and that if everything worked then I would be seeing through a camera they set up on a desk, and that I would be able to talk through a speaker. Then I felt something like an electric shock and I could see myself on the bed, bald, with this ugly scar across the top of my head that made me look like Frankenstein’s ugly cousin. And I thought,
Jesus, I look like shit
, and suddenly I heard the words I was thinking, coming through the speaker. The network was reading my thoughts. I realized I was going to have to be careful with what I thought until I could actually control myself. And then
that
came over the speaker.
    Then I started to talk to anyone who was in the room because it had been so long since I could talk to anyone about anything. I was just asking people’s names and what they were wearing and about their kids and their pets—it didn’t matter because I could talk again and it was the best thing in the world. After a few minutes of this I got a weird itch on my face