The guard made the security check into a formal, cautious ritual Manny found more annoying than reassuring. Pulling up to the front door, the kid killed the motor and turned to Manny. "Where are we?"
Manny didn't answer. A minute dragged by in silence; the front door remained closed.
"We gave everyone the day off," Galen said with a vacant giggle.
"Did not," said Joslin petulantly. "The staff's in residence."
The door opened then, and a tall red-haired man dressed in antiseptic white stepped out. Manny felt himself relax at the sight of Travis and climbed out to shake hands with him. Travis led him toward the door, started to speak, and then frowned at something over Manny's shoulder. Manny turned to look; Galen and Joslin were still in the cruiser, fiddling with the mysteries of the seat belts. Manny went back to help them.
"You're to wait here," he reminded the kid behind the wheel. Not really necessary; the map on the in-dash screen of the navigational computer had been replaced with the words WAIT HERE TILL FURTHER NOTICE.
"Gotcho, muchacho," the kid said with an idiotic grin. Manny didn't bother giving him a dirty look. But he canceled the kid's refreshment, and later the kid was going to have one of the worst trips of his life on the stuff Manny would give him, without having the slightest idea why.
– -
On the screen two bubbles were moving in a slow dance around a length of complicated braid. Every so often one of the bubbles would hesitate and move to the end of the braid, attaching itself briefly before moving away again, leaving behind a new segment. Manny studied the action for a few minutes and then looked up at Travis. "What's this going to be?"
"The female. The receiver," Travis added.
Manny couldn't help glancing at Joslin, who was wandering around the small room with Galen in tow, pausing occasionally to whisper in his ear. "That's the part that stays in the skull."
"Right." Absently Travis scratched the back of his head.
"When it's finished, it will be a hollow tube only a few molecules wide." "But alive."
"Living tissue, yes." Travis's gaze remained on the screen. "For the first time implants will consist one hundred percent of living tissue. Therapeutic implants all have some percentage of hardware, so they all qualify as foreign objects, not completely at home in the body, though most recipients accommodate them with no trouble."
Manny made a polite noise.
"This one you see here is for the visual center." Travis tapped the back of his own skull where he had just been scratching. "Injected through the scalp and bone, it makes itself completely at home. So to speak."
"Only a few molecules wide." Manny frowned. "The people who'll be getting the early benefit of this stuff-ah, most of them would be hard put to flip a marble into the Grand Canyon on the first try. How are they going to plug into a socket only a few molecules wide in the backs of their own heads?"
Travis almost smiled. "Each target area will be marked with a small bump the size of a pimple. All they'll have to do is lay the connection against the bump. The connector finds its own way in by tropism. Makes no difference which socket-the software will make the adjustment for the correct input and output, and all the connectors retract automatically at the disconnect command, so there's no danger of damaging the mechanism. It will take a little practice, but your people should be able to receive their implants in the morning and be plugging and unplugging by lunchtime. In theory, that is."
"Clever."
"It's all Dr. Joslin's development."
They looked over at her together. She was standing at a bank of cabinets, gesturing flightily with one pasty hand while she continued to whisper to Galen, who had one arm around her insubstantial waist.
"Amazing." Manny jerked his chin at the cabinets. "What's in there?"
"Very little as yet. Freeze-storage for the completed polymers. They have to be kept frozen so they'll remain in stasis until we're ready to insert them." Travis led him through a door into another room, tiled, white, and bare except for a table with a box about twice the size of a human head at one end.
"Operating room," Travis told him. "Once we start up, well keep sterile conditions, of course." He put one hand on the box. "This is a standard combination scanner and insertion device. The scanner pinpoints each area of the brain for insertion. It hardly needed any adapting at all for the new procedure."
"Is it painful?" Manny asked.
"The procedure?" A flicker of amusement crossed Travis's ruddy, oblong face. "Not really. Dr. Joslin's primate subjects indicated some temporary tenderness at the insertion sites, a little itching that we've determined is psychosomatic. Depending on the individual, there may be some slight reactions and discomfort while the sockets become acclimated, but that depends on the individual. Brain tissue itself is incapable of feeling any pain."
"Primates are a long way from knowing for sure about humans," Manny said. "Even running a projection-simulation-"
Travis held up a hand. "Dr. Joslin?" he called loudly. "Could you come in here and help me show Mr. Rivera something, please?"
Joslin appeared in the doorway, still towing Galen. She looked around the room and gave a strange little laugh, as if she'd been caught out at something.
"Dr. Joslin, would you please lie down on the table and put your head in the scanner?" Travis asked.
Joslin disengaged from Galen and hopped up on the table. Travis slid up a panel on the end of the box, and she lay down, moving up until her head disappeared inside the scanner. Travis picked up a small control and danced his fingers over it.
In the wall behind Manny, a mural-sized holo screen lit up with a 3-D display of a human brain in glowing green. Within the brain a network of black lines appeared, all of them coming from separate areas to meet in what looked like an impossible tangle.
"Dr. Joslin supervised the placement of her own sockets," Travis said mildly, facing Manny's frown with an even, noncommittal expression. Manny looked from Travis back to the display. The Upstairs Team wouldn't care much for the idea of Joslin making free with a procedure that was solely the company's property now, even if she had developed it. It made a convenient legal point that could be pressed should she decide to be troublesome later.
"The black lines you see on the screen are the pathways the sockets have generated in her brain. The configuration will vary from person to person, just as brain and mind organization vary."
Manny looked at Travis again. Travis liked this better than standard therapeutic implants for brain dysfunctions, he realized. Travis liked it a lot.
"Eight sockets will serve the purpose," Travis went on, "though we may eventually find that some subjects need more, or even fewer. This procedure, incidentally, makes implants used to treat the dysfunctional obsolete. A totally organic implant can alter brain tissue, replacing dysfunctional cells with healthy ones."
"You included that in the reports to the AMA and the Food, Drug, and Software Administration, didn't you?" Manny said.
Travis nodded. "You're aware that's not necessarily a strong selling point with them."
Manny gave a short laugh. "I know all about them. They'll have representatives in Topanga tomorrow night for a presentation, which will include much stronger selling points."
Travis's face didn't change expression. "The pathways from each socket all end up, without exception, at the limbic system, the seat of our basic emotions-rage, fear, pleasure. When the sockets are engaged, stimuli will induce these things directly, for the duration of the experience. The consumer plugs into the feature presentation-music video, movie release, commercial, standard TV fare-and undergoes a three-dimensional experience." Travis's sudden, brief smile was bizarrely sunny. "Your advertising people will understand how to make good use of this."