Wounds - Book 2 by Ilsa J. Bick Read Free Book Online

their haunches, but their heads followed him to and fro, like perfectly behaved spectators to a slow-motion tennis match but in a kind of ripple, like a wave, as if the next picked up where the one before left off.
    “You can get closer,” said Kahayn. Her voice sounded unnaturally loud in the hush. “They don’t initiate.”
    “That’s an odd way of putting it.” Cautiously, Bashir sidled up to one cage. The primate inside squatted, watchful. Waiting. But Bashir noticed it right away: a shift in the air. A sense of…he frowned. Expectancy?
    And that’s when he saw an odd bulge tenting the crown of the primate’s scalp. The bulge was a rough circle with a diameter of six, maybe eight centimeters. But there was nothing external, no protruding wires or electrodes. A quick glance at the other cages revealed exactly the same bulge in roughly the same place.
    He turned back to Kahayn. “It’s an implant, right?” When she nodded, he continued, “For what?”
    “This.” She stirred air again. “What’s it remind you of?”
    Bashir closed his eyes. Thought. Almost smiled. Quark’s. “A bar,” he said, opening his eyes. “Too many people in a small space and they’re all talking at once, so there’s only this general buzz but you can’t make out the words.”
    “Do you feel as cold now?”
    He blinked. “No, it’s gone.”
    “That’s because they’re not as worried about you.” A pause. “What would you say if I told you there was a conversation going on?”
    “You mean the animals? But how—” He stopped. Pulled air in a quick gasp. “My God.”
    “Yah,” she said, softly. “That’s right.”

    “Neural regeneration,” said Saad. “The Kornaks are good at developing prosthetic limbs and eyes and ears and a whole host of other appliances. Someday, they’ll build a man from scratch; count on it. They’ll have to, eventually.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “Can’t have kids,” said Mara. Her expression was bland, and her tone matter-of-fact, as if she were talking about something no more important than the weather. “Kornaks, us. Oh, we get a couple. But usually something’s wrong with them. Most of them die.”
    “The Kornaks have focused their energies on replacing themselves piece by piece,” said Saad. “But that only works up to a certain point.”
    Lense nodded. “The brain’s the limiting factor. It doesn’t regenerate. You can rebuild a lot of the body, but if you’re senile, who cares? It’s like a fail-safe device. We’re pretty much wired for obsolescence.”
    The cave was silent. Then Saad said, “Well, not all of us.”

    The autopsy suite smelled just as primitive as it looked: a strong tang of some disinfectant mingling with the gassy odor of rot. The microscope was also primitive. Binocular eyepiece, adjustable objectives, a slide with a specimen in paraffin mounted on a staging table. But Bashir saw well enough and he didn’t like it one little bit.
    “Massive rejection. Looks like a battlefield after a war.” He exhaled. “Dear God. The tissue’s absolutely ravaged. How long did you say the process took?”
    “In the primates, within two weeks,” said Kahayn. She stood by his right shoulder. “The problem is that with all the damage done to our environment and the weird bugs that developed over time, our immune system is quite reactive to just about everything. To get around that, all our prosthetics are biomimetic and possess a DNA chip that allows for recognition and then integration into the host body. Still, the trick is to make prosthetics as antigenically neutral as possible.”
    Bashir arched his eyebrows. “Hard to do, with DNA as a template. You produce RNA, which produces proteins, and you’ll get rejection. The only way to get around that would be some sort of, I don’t know, universal DNA donor. On the other hand, the brain’s privileged, relatively antigenically isolated, so it might work. But there’s no such thing as a universal DNA