In the era before 3D printers, inventing eagle gauntlets would have been difficult, but now it was easy. Better yet, it gave him an excuse to purchase a fancier 3D printer that was capable of making stronger, lighter parts. Rufus was gradually getting clued in to the fact that dudes like T.R. actually liked it when you spent money, provided you did it within reasonable bounds. It proved that you were doing something.
In other words, he dropped, or at least set to one side, the pretense that he was actually patrolling the airspace of the Flying S Ranch with a personal fleet of drones and threw himself full-time into helping Thordis, Carmelita, Tsolmon, and Piet train their eagles. In military parlance, they were the Blue Team, preparing to defend the ranch against possible invaders, and he was the Red Team—a simulated opponent that the Blue Team could train against. And since all of them called him by his nickname of Red, it all seemed to fit. It gave him a story he could tell himself, as he sat down there in the cool recesses of the marble mine repairing drones torn apart by enraged birds of prey, as to why this all made sense. A story he could also relate to T.R., if T.R. ever asked. But he never did.
Cyberabad
“We think you are ready to walk,” said Dr. Banerjee after they’d extracted him from the tank, removed the sphere from his head, disconnected the cables behind his ears, and given him a chance to shower and put some clothes on.
When he’d first regained consciousness, “clothes” had meant hospital gowns, but these days it seemed to be T-shirts, sweatpants, and a simple piece of cloth to cover his head. He never wore the same T-shirt twice. They just showed up. Most were blazoned with the names and logos of kabaddi teams, but there was also some hockey swag. He had only the vaguest sense of what kabaddi and hockey were, but their practitioners seemed quite generous with clothing.
As for the piece of cloth on his head: in the early going he’d been a little unclear on whether this was a medical thing—for they’d been doing a lot of things to his skull—or a form of attire. Some of the people who came to visit him—including most of the ones who claimed to be his friends and family—wore such coverings on their heads. Typically, they were a lot more elaborate than the thing he had. Large portions of his head had been shaved for medical reasons, but they’d left his hair long on top and in front. He could twist it into a sort of bun above his forehead and wrap that up in the cloth. Also, there was a metal band that he wore on his wrist.
Right now he was seated in a wheelchair in the living room of his suite, looking across a coffee table at Dr. Banerjee, a small woman in her forties. She was flanked by a couple of the usual crowd of—well, it was hard to tell who and what they were. Younger people who seemed smart and efficient and pleased.
“I’ve been walking for weeks,” he said.
“I mean, without the rack,” she clarified. She referred to a cube-shaped frame on wheels that until now had always surrounded him when he walked; it prevented him from injuring himself when he lost his balance. “Today’s results were more than encouraging. Your proprioception has been improving steadily during the last few weeks, but recently it has just gone shooting off the charts. We have finally got those darned gyros dialed in. The neural interfaces are ‘taking.’ Combining those two advances, we can now say that your sense of balance is better than what we have measured in controlled experiments on Olympic gymnasts!”
“Well, screw it then,” he said. In one motion he unbuckled the lap belt holding him into his chair and stood up. The backs of his legs impacted the chair and sent it rolling backward until it clattered against a wall. Dr. Banerjee was horrified. She needn’t have been. He knew exactly where he was in space.
“No, too soon, Laks!” she exclaimed.
Laks. Yet another of his names.
“Please sit down! We wish to perform the trial under controlled circumstances!” Dr. Banerjee herself had jumped to her feet as if to physically restrain him—funny thought, since she weighed less than half of what Laks did. His lack of balance had not prevented him from working out on weight machines to gain back the muscle mass he’d lost during the months of lying unconscious.
Her colleagues, though, looked very pleased. They high-fived each other. One of them took a picture.
“Can you do this?” Laks asked. He lifted one foot off the floor so that he was balanced on one leg. Then he closed his eyes. “Count,” he said.
One of them began: “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three . . .”
When the count reached thirty, he opened his eyes. Rock solid. No flailing of arms or hopping around.
“I cannot,” Dr. Banerjee admitted. “Few can.”
During the half minute he’d been standing on one leg with eyes closed, that “Laks” thing had been sinking in. It jogged a memory—a recent one. He walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window of his suite. This was on something like the thirtieth floor of the building, so it had a fantastic view out over a sunlit cityscape consisting mostly of new office buildings ranging in height from five to fifty stories. Some were emblazoned with logos and funny words that he took to be the names of companies. The place was called Cyberabad. It was part of a much larger and older city called Hyderabad. These were all details he had picked up in fragments strewn among conversations he barely remembered, scattered across the last several weeks; but it was all coming into focus. It was beginning to “take,” to borrow Dr. Banerjee’s expression.
Dr. Banerjee inhaled sharply as Laks approached the window. She must be afraid that he was going to trip over his feet and smash through it. But he wouldn’t. His sense of where he was could not have been more perfect. He even knew that he was gazing along an azimuth of about 325 degrees with respect to magnetic north.
Below, and across the street, was a building perhaps ten stories high. Its flat roof was fifty-seven meters below him. He wasn’t sure how he knew that. The roof had a pea-gravel surface, sort of gray brown on the average. But someone had gone up there with white paint and rolled out the words “GET WELL SOON LAKS!” in letters several meters high. Strewn all around that was brownish vegetable matter flecked here and there with muted colors: flowers that had adorned the big white words but that had wilted and withered. Thousands of individual bouquets. Literally tons of old dead flowers.
His view of Cyberabad was cut off as the curtain was yanked across the window by one of Dr. Banerjee’s flankers. “Sorry,” he said. “The days of drones hovering outside your window are thankfully gone. But still, if anyone recognized you, social media would go ballistic. And we don’t want expectations getting out of hand.”
Laks stood there for a few moments absorbing that. This phrase “social media” was, on one level, new to his ears. Or the sensor pods screwed into the temporal bone ridges behind his ears that did what ears did, only better. And yet he could feel it lighting up big networks of connections in his head.
During the months he had lain flat on his back in the dark, trying not to be sick from vertigo, sometimes the sun would come out from behind clouds. Even through the blackout curtains next to his hospital bed, he could sense that it had done so. Not so much because of light leaking round the edges as because of the vague omnidirectional warmth radiating through the dark fabric. This was a little like that. On the dark side of the neurological curtain was Laks, trying to work out what “social media” denoted. On the other side was a large portion of his brain. And yet the curtain had a few moth-holes in it. Through those, he glimpsed clear images: a freckle-faced woman with a camera. The snowy top of a mountain. A Chinese man with a stick.