Under the Knife(29)

Long before he’d met Jenny, Finney had also conceived of the device’s other uses and quietly moved the development of these offshore: to locales under the authority of wealthy and powerful clients who’d made up in discretion what they’d lacked in scruples. He’d been aware of the medical experiments they’d conducted for him. It was unpleasant, to be sure, but necessary; he’d looked the other way because business was business, after all, and the international market for this would be huge.

After Jenny’s death, he’d had to rush the device’s final development, to ready it for the field ahead of the original timetable.

Now, here they were.

Ironically, Jenny had worked with deaf children in college and had delighted in the cochlear implant concept.

“You’re making the world a better place, Morgan,” she’d said when he’d told her about its (legitimate) application over breakfast one morning, and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m so proud of you.”

He’d given serious thought then and there to ending the offshore program, had even taken a few preliminary steps to divest himself of it.

But then she’d gotten sick a few days later.

Jenny.

Much as he believed in what he was now doing, he had to concede that she would not have approved.

But she wasn’t here.

Finney swiped his tablet screen with two fingers. A red circle appeared in the middle of it. He tapped it. A large “5” replaced the red circle and proceeded into a countdown. At “0” the screen burst into a pixelated riot of multicolored sine waves.

The die was cast.

He couldn’t see it, or hear it, or touch it; but Finney knew that at that moment a pulse of electromagnetic energy was reaching out from his tablet, seeking its brother embedded in the substance of Dr. Wu’s brain—an electronic umbilical cord that would link her thoughts with the tablet, and, by way of the tablet, with him.

A single word flashed on the screen: NOMINAL.

The connection was established.





RITA


Rita perceived a slight tickling sensation inside her skull, as if someone had removed part of the bone and passed the tip of a feather along the surface of her brain.

She pulled her fists away from her eyes. The impulse to cry had disappeared, erased by the tickling feeling, which felt so odd. She touched her left ear and shook her head, as if to clear it away.

But the sensation was gone.

“What was that?” she said.

“Dr. Wu,” Finney said. “You need to operate on Mrs. Sanchez this morning. You can’t cancel the operation. You’re a surgeon.”

And a strange but compelling thought rang through Rita’s head, as if a part of her mind had grabbed a bullhorn and was shouting:

I’ve got to operate on Mrs. Sanchez this morning! Because I’m a surgeon!

Without thinking, she stood up—

(Because I’ve got to operate on Mrs. Sanchez this morning)

—intending to hurry to pre-op to tell Mrs. Sanchez it was time for the operation.

She went ten paces before she stopped.

But.

No.

She shook her head fiercely from side to side.

Where the hell had that stupid idea come from? Operate this morning on Mrs. Sanchez? That didn’t make sense. Any sense at all. She’d already decided to cancel. Operating wouldn’t be safe.

“But … that doesn’t make sense,” she said aloud. “There’s no reason for me to do that.”

It was so hard to push those words out of her mouth, an effort as intense as any of the biggest running races of her life. Which was so strange. She felt like she was trying to move concrete blocks with her tongue. Why was that?

“There’s no reason for me to operate this morning,” she said.





FINNEY


Finney raised his eyebrows and studied the colored displays on his tablet.

Interesting.

And annoying.

She was blocking him.

Her resistance was impressive. He hadn’t expected her to shrug off the embedding so quickly, or with so little effort. Her intellectual discipline—or willpower, whatever you wanted to call it—was formidable. And, he conceded, admirable. In its own way.

The signal strength, the amount of power he was transmitting to her brain, was set to fifty percent, the level that had worked for most of the experimental subjects. He swiped the tablet with his index finger and increased the power level.

He increased it a lot. Not to its maximum, but close.

Admirable or not, he was in control here.

Not she.





RITA


She winced as the tickling sensation reappeared in her brain.

Except now it wasn’t tickling.

It was much more intense—like a buzzing, or a humming, that rattled her head like the wheels of an approaching train shaking its tracks, then vanishing with the same abruptness that had accompanied its arrival.

She felt—

(what the hell had that buzzing been?)

—really, really strange.

She raised her left hand to her left ear, and …

… and in that moment somehow stepped outside herself.

Literally outside myself was her very first, very vivid impression.

But that can’t be, she thought. I can’t literally step outside myself.