Wired Bone: Chapter Two (Patreon)

Chapter Two

The light, filtered through the fluids inside the glass tubes that ran throughout the room, dyed the room in a deep red glow. They ran across the walls and just under the ceiling, barely leaving room for the lamp lights.

Though at first glance the positioning of them appeared random, Zero’s experienced eyes tracked the way they all connected to the Thought Alternator, a block of mental at the end of the room.

Hundreds of wires expanded from it. Some went through the glass tubes, caressing the braincells. Some connected to the plush chair in front of the device, the ends hanging through holes on the headrest. And others lay strewn across the ground in the typically disorganized fashion of Doctor Phan.

Said academic, a short and bald Vietnamese man of a slightly plump nature and a magnificent handlebar moustache, was currently connecting some of the chair’s wires to the back of Zero’s shaved head, plugging them straight through the skull and into the brain matter with an unpleasant feeling.

“How are you feeling, Zero?” Doc Phan asked, inserting the plugs as fast as he could while still being careful, as he’d done since Zero had mentioned that it felt worse when he went slow.

“Fine,” Zero reassured him, smiling slightly. His eyes, however, stayed focused on the Thought Alternator.

The blocky machine had a single screen on it, though Doc Phan hadn’t sprung for a color one since he hadn’t thought it necessary, which showed a series of numbers and letters that surely made sense to the good doctor, but meant nothing to Zero. Under the screen were a series of switches, keys, bits and bobs, none of them labeled.

The things about people with Hypercognitive Neurological Disorder — colloquially known as “cogs” — is that they are at the core, mostly self-centered people who suffer the Curse of Knowledge[1]more than most.

To Doctor Phan, who designed and put together the Thought Alternator with his own hands, and who remembered with beyond photographic detail every single picosecond of doing so, the machine was easy to understand because he was physically incapable of forgetting what anything did.

And if anyone else ever needed to use the Thought Alternator, not that the possibility ever occurred to him, they would most likely be fellow cogs, and thus capable of figuring it out by poking at the machine for five minutes and going “well, Iwould have done this, but if I were like Phan, I would do that” until everything made sense.

The final plug entered Zero’s skull with the disgusting feeling of sliding metal into your cerebellum, and he let himself start to drift.

“How long of a trip are you feeling like making, Zero?” asked the doctor.

“I had a big breakfast,” Zero said, “So I’d say no more than two hours, lest you are forced to clean me, doctor.”

“I did it when you were fresh out of the vat, I can do it again,” Phan said, waving off his creation’s concerns.

“I am fourteen months old, doctor. I can clean my own behind.”

“Of course, of course,” the doctor chuckled, reaching to start manipulating the Alternator. “My, so young and already a at the rebellious phase.”

Zero was tempted to say something in the nature of “it’s not a phase, dad”, but the line would not be possible to uncross once breached. The doctor’s job was too important to compromise, and it was only his willful ignorance of Zero’s filial feelings towards him that allowed him to operate on the artificial human.

It did sting to have Phan allude to the relationship and be unable to reciprocate, but one of them had to keep things professional.

“Excuse my impudence then, doctor,” Zero said, keeping up a smile. “So? Drift time?”

“Hm… let’s call it a half hour at the least, hour and a half at the most. Plenty of space for error then.”

“Sounds good to me,” Zero nodded, trying to get as comfortable as he could with wires in his brain, even though he knew he would not care for comfort for long. “See you on the other side, doctor.”

Doctor Walter Phan, senior researcher at Third York’s Academy of Hypercognitive Research and Learning, looked at his test subject and smiled a bit, one hand on the last switch he’d press, as he said, “See you on the other side, Zero.”

Then he threw the switch.

And then Zero, the artificial person grown inside a vat, died.

One hour, thirty-eight minutes and twelve seconds later, Zero came back to life.

Doctor Phan started unhitching the wires from his skull as he blinked slowly, looking around the room. The movement of his eyeballs inside their sockets felt like they slid against sandpaper, as he’d died with his eyes open and the doctor had been too focused on the Thought Alternator to close his eyelids again.

It took a moment for the signals from his brain to travel down his nervous system, like they had to shake off the cobwebs. Once they were back to functioning, however, Zero’s fingers moved with newfound dexterity and control that had previously eluded him.

With a thought, he brought up a selection of different composer’s best works in his mind, and almost without a conscious decision to do so, his fingers moved as if to play the first of them on an imaginary piano.

Zero smiled widely and turned to look at the good doctor, pulling a plug a little harder than he would have liked but thankfully not damaging his grey matter as he said, “It worked! I can play piano now!”

Doctor Phan, mouth open to chastise his creation, stopped, then smiled wide enough to match Zero, walking around to grab onto Zero’s shoulders, holding him with emotion. “Really?! It really worked?”

“Fetch me an instrument if you don’t believe,” Zero challenged, his smile gaining some cockiness. “I told you we’d get it down by September! You owe me a week in the enrichment room.”

“Ha! That I do!”

Phan rushed to unplug the rest of the wires from his subject’s skull and wrapped Zero in a tight hug, almost pulling him off the chair as he swung him around in excitement.

Zero let himself get lost in the warmth of his creator’s embrace, holding him tight and smiling against his white lab coat.

Then the doctor let go of him and Zero immediately dropped to the floor.

“Zero?”

“… it appears that my knowledge on how to walk has been locked,” Zero noted, face mushed against the floor. “I recall the theory, so I suspect it might come back to me within the day.”

“Oh, that’s… disappointing, but today was still a day of great progress. Don’t lose sight of that, Zero.”

“I won’t.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Would you like me to fetch you a wheelchair, Zero?”

“Yes, please.”

[1] A fallacy wherein someone assumes that most people share the same background of information than they do, and proceed to act based on this without explaining things. The source of many frustrating talks over dinner.