"Yes, but—"
"You understand the interface programming?"
Mervin was sure that Mr. Holz knew he had written much of the interface programming himself. He nodded nonetheless.
"You're one of the ones who kept telling me that a computer was just a less complex version of the human brain. And if we can download human
thought into one of these blasted machines, why can't we download the duplicated information into someone else's brain?"
"Theoretically..."
"Don't give me theoretically!" Holz exploded.
"I've had it up to here with all of your theoretical garbage! Can you do it or not?"
Mervin was frightened. Barely twenty-two years of age, he was a brilliant computer hacker who had graduated from college three years early and moved swiftly into the work force. But he was hopelessly inept in most social situations. Mervin could remember being yelled at precisely twice in his life. Once by his father for breaking into his savings account and increasing the balance by eleven million dollars and once by a stranger when he had stepped in front of the man's car, his nose buried deep in the pages of Star Trek fan magazine. Both times he had responded to the shouting the same way. His bladder had burst like a mud-and-twig levee in a monsoon.
"I can, um... That is, urn..." Mervin looked at his computer screen. He nodded dumbly. A shiver pulsed through his body, and a flush rose to his cheeks.
"Is that a yes?" Holz snapped. Mervin nodded again. Holz was mollified. "Perfect. Great. That's the answer I expected after all the money we've dumped into this ridiculous program." He paused, sniffing the air. "What's that smell?"
Holz found a volunteer in Zach Pendrake, one of the white shirts from marketing who had been coordinating with the PR boys to put a positive spin on the bank fallout from the day before. Pendrake was a loudmouth, opinionated on any subject from poli-tics to software to anything in between. He was the type who thought shouting down an opponent in a debate was the only way to win. Knowledge and experience be hanged.
Pendrake had taunted Mervin in the cafeteria for the past eight months to the point where the timid young man had taken to eating in the diagnostics lab.
Holz had moved Mervin into the large fourth-floor laboratory where the PET team and others connected with the early stages of the interface study had worked. The room was spacious and filled with equipment that had outlived its usefulness but had been stored here on the off chance that it might be needed once more. Nearly everything was covered with sheets of thick, translucent plastic.
Holz, accompanied by his young male assistant, led Zach Pendrake into the sterile room.
Mervin's stomach knotted when he saw whom
Holz had tapped as a volunteer. Pendrake, on the other hand, seemed absolutely delighted.
"Mervin! Buddy! How ya doing, pal?" He slapped the nervous programmer on the shoulder.
Mervin winced. He bruised easily.
"Zach," he said with a timid nod.
"Mr. Holz didn't tell me you'd be testing me."
Pendrake glanced at Holz. "Mervin and me are old buddies." He turned back to Mervin. "Why haven't I seen you at lunch, Merv? Got a little chippie stashed away somewhere?"
Mervin looked horrified at the idea. He glanced nervously to Lothar Holz and his silent assistant, stammering. "Mr. Holz, I... That is, I..." His eyes were watering.
Holz held up a hand. "Pendrake, calm down."
The marketing man smiled but grew silent.
He allowed Mervin to steer him to a wheeled table to one side of the lab, beneath the large bar-covered window. It was like a regular doctor's examining table. Right down to the sheet of disposable paper over the plastic-coated foam pad.
Mervin smeared a set of electrodes with a noxious-smelling gel and affixed them to Pendrake's temples.
These led to the back of a small computer console that was hooked into the mainframe in the corner.
Mervin had already transferred the information Holz was most interested in—the data on physical feats—
into this larger computer.
He had Pendrake unbutton his shirt and proceeded to attach a second set of electrodes to his chest.
These ran to a portable EKG monitor that had been shipped in from a subsidiary pharmaceutical company in New York. Mervin snapped on the machine, and instantly a steady green vertical line appeared across a small monitor in the face of the device. At regular intervals, a reassuring open-ended triangle spiked up from the solid line, accompanied by a familiar electronic beep.
Holz watched, anxiously wetting his lips, as Mervin slipped onto the rolling stool before his computer and began typing swiftly at the keyboard. He talked as he worked.
"I culled the stuff you told me to, Mr. Holz," he said. He avoided Pendrake's bemused look. "You wouldn't want anyone developing the psychoses your prisoner had. It's all about killing and stuff."
He shuddered as he thought about the man with the deep-set eyes who was, at the moment, in the interface van somewhere on the Cross Bronx Expressway.
"Anyway, what I concentrated on was the physical aspects of his nature. I tried to keep it pretty basic."
He was no longer glancing at Pendrake but was becoming more engrossed in the data stream on the monitor before him.
The marketing man looked bored. He had volunteered for this latest experiment for the same reason he had volunteered for some of the earlier ones. To suck up to the boss. Plain and simple. And, as he had been with the earlier PET experiments, Pendrake was bored out of his skull in less than a minute. He exhaled deeply as the first bits of data began to download into his cerebellum.
All at once, he sucked in a sudden, unexpected lungful of air.
The EKG pinged once. It almost sounded questioning. As if the device were uncertain of the data it was collecting.
Mervin glanced up curiously. Lothar Holz
watched, his face growing more expectant with each electronic spike of the EKG.
Pendrake felt the air pull down to the bottom of his lungs. It flowed into his heart and forced itself, fresher and fuller than ever before, into his blood-stream. The cleansing air coursed through his body, opening floodgates that someone who had dedicated his life to bar charts and smoke-filled rooms never knew were closed.
He felt suddenly invigorated. And light-headed.
For some reason, he found himself rotating his wrists absently. Holz was standing close, practically salivating.
"Is it working?" he asked Mervin. His eyes never strayed from Pendrake.
Mervin nodded. "He's absorbing it. Slowly, but it's working."
Pendrake knew what the little nerd meant. As he felt the power within him grow, he gripped the cold metal lip of the examining table in both hands. Still in a seated position, he twisted his hands. A simple action. He felt the strength of the metal beneath the pads of his greasy fingers. The strength of the metal was as nothing compared with what now flowed within him.
There was a loud wrenching noise, and when the others in the room looked they saw that Zach Pendrake had ripped a pair of foot-long sections of lead-enforced metal piping from the edge of the table.
He held the twin silver pipes in the air, a baffled expression on his face. It was as if he was wondering how they had gotten there.
Mervin looked on in wonder, Holz in slavering awe. Only Holz's assistant showed no sign of interest in the proceedings.
Pendrake no longer seemed to be aware of the others. In a crystalline moment of pure realization, he understood. Understood everything. The point of existence. The perfection that could be derived from the simple act of breathing. He knew that the limitations on the human body were placed there by men afraid to achieve. Terrified of true success.
The epiphany was short-lived.
Pendrake suddenly sat bolt upright on the examining table, as if jolted by a massive surge of electricity. The calm, soothing spikes of the EKG monitor stabbed sharply and held at a constant, dangerous peak.