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

brain. The MEMs interpreted normal brain as damaged. And then when I was doing imaging studies, the primates—maybe the MEMs, I don’t know—they decided to link. I couldn’t stop them, and they didn’t stop with just one machine. These scanners hooked into more sophisticated systems, and then other systems linked to those computers in a cascade. They were like a virus. But instead of crippling the network, they and the network—our computers—became dependent upon one another. They joined forces.”
    Networking; brains meshing with a computer, behaving like a computer the way a Bynar’s must; an amazing discovery …“What happened when you tried to disconnect them? Shut down the computers?”
    “They just… died. Like they needed the machines. Or had become them.” She looked bleak. “They just died.”
    “Then what about the animals I just saw? Are they linked to a computer network somewhere?”
    “No.” She shook her head. “You’re in the isolation wing. Our power is self-contained. Our computers are in a separate area. Our communications don’t even tie in with the main complex. The animals you saw were never exposed to anything more complicated than a free-standing system that’s not on any network.”
    “But you just said that these MEMs, their natural proclivity is to try to link with another system. So if you—well, I don’t know— starve them for contact, what do they link with?” Then he remembered that crowded air in the animal room. “To each other?”
    She nodded. “But, again, limited by distance the way one would see with microwave transmission, or line of sight technology. I keep trying to separate them. Interrupt the MEMs, introduce a lesion, all sorts of things. But I keep failing. I separate them too long or too far, they die.”
    “Well, then, that would be the end of it, wouldn’t it? I mean, you really can’t take this any further.” But that was a lie. Because Bashir knew that he’d have been tempted to take the next logical step. “What did you do?”
    “Isn’t it obvious, Julian? If a brain’s information could be uploaded or downloaded with another machine…”
    “Why not manipulate data, yes? Download information into the primates and vice versa?”
    “Pretty much,” she said, quietly. “It was all so… exciting, you have to understand that.”
    “Oh, but I do,” he said. “The brain’s immense, and there’s so much of it we don’t use. So I understand the temptation, completely. Honestly.”
    “No arguments about ethics?”
    “Just because I understand temptation doesn’t mean there are no ethics involved, Doctor,” he said, gently. “I said I understood. Here you’d stumbled on a mechanism to put knowledge in or take it out, yes?”
    “That’s right,” she said, her voice thin, intense. “Data is data. That’s all we are, really: chemicals and molecules and atoms, and all of it some rearrangement according to a code. All there, just waiting for a compatible system, a way to read it, to edit and to add. It was like being given a key to a locked door. Turn the key and, instantly, you know the thoughts and memories and desires of someone else. Just waiting for me to open that door.”
    “But some doors are locked for reasons,” said Bashir. Thinking: I’d have been tempted. A window into the mind of an animal, or even another species…
    And then it hit him.
    She said memories. She said thoughts and memories of someone else. Not something, not an animal. Someone.
    All those isolated empty rooms, each with a bed and a chair and a table and a vidscreen. Just like his. And that angry red eye of a magnetic lock at the end of a silent, dark corridor.
    Oh, dear God. Everything came crashing in, and when he looked at her—at that stricken, remorseful face—it was like he saw her for the first time. Not just her blue skin or the chocolate cast to her lips, or even her artificial left eye that had no capillaries and a left hand that made a tiny