Breaking the Code

"Through here, doctor."

I followed Dr. Siemens, the gentleman in the scrubs. He'd been talking excitedly all day. They were bringing her into the light today, he said. Her nervous system was finally stabilized, and her muscles should come under her full control without any danger. The only issue, he had said, was what her mind would be like. The rewiring was a delicate job, he said. She'd lived in total darkness, total silence, total social isolation, for so long. What would she think, seeing light, hearing noise, being confronted by people? How would she react?

I had shrugged when I was given the briefing on their latest project. It's not that I think it's a great idea - there are some ethical issues, yes, I acknowledge that. But they were paying, and a man's got to eat. I've reluctantly hung out a shingle for clinical work, but it isn't my favorite thing. I prefer to do research. Yet even if I were doing clinical private practice full-time, there's no way I could pay my debts.

This job was an honorable way out. I would be an employee of the Company, nominally a consultant but really part of their organization. They would pay off my debts over the next five years. I would receive a stipend from them that would pay for my basic needs and just a tiny bit more besides. I would be able to supervise the clinical treatment and training regime of the world's very first superhuman construct. But the reward for that, well, it was largely the chance to supervise the clinical treatment and training regime... do I need to repeat myself? Speaking simply: I was going to bust my ass for the Company, working on the case study of my dreams, and in exchange, the Company would forgive my debts and make sure I didn't starve.

With my head full of all of this, I stepped through the security door. It slammed shut behind me.

This was clearly a working space. Pieces of medical monitoring equipment were everywhere, as were files and disks. A pipette-puller sat between a rack of tiny surgical tools and a stereotactic frame. A spaghetti tangle of wires ran from a cluster of computers around a corner. An open cabinet showed tangles of wires, multi-testers, and miscellaneous electronics. I spared the hardware a glance, watching the people instead - three technicians were in the room. One was flipping through files, the second was working a molecular simulation on a computer, and the third had his head and shoulders buried in a refrigerator-sized case, from which he swore every few seconds.

The one with the files found what he wanted and pulled out a few papers, tucking them into a worn and beaten notebook, which he handed to Siemens. The physician read a few paragraphs and smiled, then closed the notebook and beckoned me onward.

We left that room, and went on down the hall. We passed a small conference room, an emergency first-aid station, and what looked like a physician's exam room on our way. But the door we were heading for was somewhat nondescript. It was just plain heavy.

"Hold on, there's a baffle," said Siemens. He raised a pen-sized wand to a plate on the wall; there was a click, and he pushed it open. "Step through here, and I'll close the door before we can go into her room. Give your eyes a minute to adjust."

I stepped through, as he said. It was dark - not pitch black, but all I could see was a pattern of angles and contours, a world in grey and black. And also different was the sound - though I'd taken it for granted, the click of my shoes on the floor, my breathing, maybe even my heartbeat had been echoed back to me by the smooth walls. Here, it was quiet. The walls absorbed all sound.

Almost all sound. There was a slight squeak, as though someone had changed position in a chair.

Siemens nudged me. "How are your eyes?"

"I can see enough," I said. "I'm as adjusted as I'm going to get, anyway."

"Well, let's go on in, then. Remember not to stare." He knocked twice on the inner door, then unlocked it with his wand and held it open for me again.

The room on the other side was still poorly lit, but like the space between the inner and outer doors, it was enough to perceive shapes by. There was a bed here, a door - leading off to a bathroom, no doubt. A stand of some sort might have held a vital-signs monitor, plugged in and charging but turned off. A low desk with a couple of books on it, and a chair, and in the chair was a woman.

There was something strange about her. I noticed that immediately. One was her eyes; they glinted oddly in the darkness. The way she moved, even to shift position as she watched me enter, was subtly wrong - too jerky, too stiff. And as I got a better feeling for the way the dim lights cast their shadows, I realized her face was somewhat the wrong shape: the length and angle of her nose and jaws was different. Whatever they had done to her sensory organs, her eyes and nose, they hadn't had room to put her back together the right way. She had a cat-face, almost a muzzle.

She pushed herself out of her seat and stood, a little unstable. She was wearing a dress of a light material - flimsy paper, from the sound - and it showed off her figure. She was very lean. I was feeling a sympathetic hunger just by looking at her.

I remembered her name. It was Josephine.

"Josephine," I said, "My name's Ted Warren, Dr. Warren if you prefer. I know your name, but little else about you. Can you tell me about yourself?"

I think she smiled. "Better than you," she said.

--

After two weeks of exposure to this interesting young woman, I'd developed some idea of what was going on. First, as she had said the first time we met, she was superior to me, at least physically, and to some degree mentally as well. Her ability to concentrate was certainly far better than most, and in terms of simple cognitive tasks, she performed at an ordinary rate of error, but much faster. It looked to me like the performance of someone on a powerful stimulant, but without the corresponding reduction in performance at more complex tasks.

And physically, well... though she was smaller than I was, smaller than most people, and though I am physically reasonably fit, she was - as I said - physically superior. She could lift more, throw harder and more accurately, move faster, react faster, and her sense of balance was amazing as well.

Those were the positive parts.

The negative parts were some deep-seated insecurities and a chronic kind of anxiety and paranoia. She described sometimes "struggling to know what's real," as though she perceived some parts of her subjective experience to be unreliable. I suspect, although I don't truly know, this was related to her long experiences with sedatives or social and sensory isolation. But it could certainly have been worse. Some people crack completely under the strain and become psychotic. She was definitely not psychotic. Mercurial? Painfully shy, at times? Oh yes. But she was better-oriented than any psychotic client I've ever seen or heard of. The only thing that really puzzled me, until I figured it out, was her constant hunger and food-related anxiety. Her metabolic throughput is a lot higher than most people's, even at rest. So she's running hot (literally: her core body temperature is nearly a full degree higher than mine, say), and to maintain that she has to eat more foods, or at least richer foods, to get through the day.

We developed a friendly if slightly distant relationship, one that allowed me to do my work both as an observer for the Company and as a therapist. The relationship changed at some point, though. It's hard for me to pinpoint when or how.

Over time, I had come to appreciate the look of her face. Where at first I'd thought she was pathetically deformed, I'd come to think of her as pretty. Where I'd thought she was dreadfully skinny, I came to consider her merely slender. (In truth, she had gained a more healthy proportion of body fat, but had to eat constantly to maintain it.) And she was very pleased with the abilities of her body, now that the systems upgrades were complete. So was I, listening to her.

But she was lonely, and I was too... a touch on the arm, a hand on a shoulder, and so on gradually escalated. Not too much time had passed before she felt comfortable enough to embrace me, and I didn't push her away. And our meetings grew from a mere mental-health checkup and discussion to talking about the ways our life histories constrained our current choices. She had it much worse, though. Her official file said she'd been adopted by one of the Company researchers at an early age, but I knew from pumping people for information that she'd been treated more as a specimen than a child. Compared to all that history, a few debts on my part were just a minor stumbling block.

It also promoted some attachment issues, I think. And that helped propel our relationship forward a little faster than expected.

Really, it was only when I spent the night in her apartment that my anxieties about it grew. We hadn't slept together, except in the most literal sense, but it was still a gross breach of propriety. And I was able to explain it away by hastily arranging Josie's Scrabble board and saying we were up all night - I coached her in the story. I think we got away with it that time.

I was breaking the rules in every way, getting attached. I had enough emotional involvement that my clinical judgment was compromised. I didn't really care, though.