Wired Bone: Chapter Five (Patreon)

Chapter Five

Three minutes and forty seconds later, Doctor Phan and Zero went their separate ways. The good doctor had to report his progress to his superiors, meaning Zero had the rest of the day to go about his business.

The Academy was large.

Large enough that the building and its surrounding campus occupied 12% of Third York borough of Odysseus. Granted, this district was mostly natural, consisting of little but farmland, the Academy’s campus and vast expanses of parkland, mostly kept there so there would be somewhere for cogs to get fresh air and touch some grass.

It was noted as a necessity after the fifth death laser incident within the semester of the Academy’s creation, so any attempts to turn the land into something more useful were quickly shut down.

An enormous waste, Zero thought as he paused his wheelchair next to an open window.

Hopefully, Doctor Phan’s work would soon render the limitations of biological brains null, and they’d be able to expand the academy to cover the entire borough, granting more space for everyone to work in the luxury they deserved.

That would be a day. He only hoped to live to see it.

He pushed the wheels forward and moved through the hallways.

It bore repeating that the Academy was large. The building itself was ten levels tall, if you counted the two that were underground. Divided among those levels was a vast array of surgery rooms, lecture halls, libraries on different topics, assembly shops, and more.

Every field of science not labeled as dark was explored within its hallowed halls: mathematics, physics, biology, geology, chemistry, seismology, psychology, sociology, social psychology, virology, engineering, zoology in general, herpetology specifically, agronomy, astronomy, medicine, mycology, forensic criminology, anthropology, and more fields were stretched to their limits and then broken to explore what lay beyond those limits.

This involved a lot less lasers than most first-year students seemed to believe[1].

Zero rolled the wheels down a ramp, interchanging a nod with a student in a wheelchair who was going the opposite way. The ramp was wide enough that the two didn’t bump when passing at the same time, so Zero was able to get down the level with no awkward crashing and apologies and trying to go one way so he could go the other.

He went from ramp to ramp to avoid the crowded elevators, which had the more important task of carrying students and faculty around.

The stairs and ramps were the terrain of custodians and non-teacher staff.

Not that the Academy had need for plumbers, nurses or electricians, since most of the students or teachers would be more than happy to grab the nearest tool-like object and solve a problem while everyone else in the area stopped what they were doing to stand around and shout suggestions. But this high-minded altruism did not apply to cleaning after themselves.

So, the Academy kept a large staff of janitors for student spaces and maids and/or butlers for teacher spaces. Then the cooks, then the servers who carried food to people too busy to hit the student or faculty cafeteria, then the security officers and caretakers who made sure that students and teachers got some fresh air, and finally the test subjects.

They became more and more visible the further down he got, until he reached the basements, where the subject’s chambers were. The rooms were sparse and not too spacious, with three sets of bunk beds per room and only as many decorations as each subject’s doctor allowed him.

Zero was proud to note that Phan had gifted him many decorations that littered the area around his bed. It made his room easy to find even when he was dazed from a failed experiment, and a little complicated to walk as there wasn’t that much free room for it.

Speaking of which, he entered it and immediately had to stop to avoid running over a small plastic doll with fake plastic hair. It was part of a crowd, all laid out in a pattern around his bed, most of them facing towards him.

It made his bunk mate — who slept above him — a little uncomfortable to wake up every morning to a plastic horde of varying makes staring at her.

Especially since, the last time she dropped to the floor without thinking and threw them out of arrangement, Zero had attacked her with a stepladder while the others laughed.

(In his defense, he’d been a little loopy from the last attempt at a skill download.)

The subject in question found himself at a loss for a moment, trying to figure out a way to enter the room without knocking any of them over, and he looked inside with bare hopes of how to help.

Inside were all his roommates and friends, beyond the good doctor. They were all writing their way through some worksheets with varying levels of enthusiasm.

There was Higgs and Manny, pale-skinned twins with eyes that were black from the pupil to the sclera. They both had the bunks on the left of the room, from the entrance.

Higgs had his hair in a military cut and was making conversation with the others as he ignored his worksheet, while Manny had his long hair in a braid tossed over his shoulder and was slowly writing his answers, seeming not to pay attention to Higgs.

Then there was Tetra, a four-armed dark-skinned subject, the oldest of them all at one and a half years of age. She slept in the bunk above Zero’s, at the right of the room.

She had her hair in a pixie cut, and she’d given herself a tongue piercing after she snuck out of the Academy once, for some ungodly reason. She was making conversation with Higgs, mostly by throwing barbs at him. Her top hands were toying with a twelve-sided puzzle cube of her own creation, while her bottom hands were rapidly working through the worksheet.

The fifth member of Zero’s room was a brain in a jar which they affectionately called Brian. He rested in the top bunk on the opposite side from the door.

It was in a transparent tube thing, made of a much sturdier version of glass developed by the Academy for precisely this kind of nonsense, and which had a few holes and tubes at the bottom through which Brian breathed and plugged itself into different bodies.

At the moment, it was in a body with spindly chitinous legs, the two front ones with pincers at the end. Attached to the sides of its case by tendrils of meat and skin were a pair of lovely brown eyes which made a shocking amount of noise when it blinked. At the bottom of the body was a swell of a belly which hung pendulously and waved around when Brian walked.

Then there was Whiskers, who was resting on her side in the lower bunk at the end of the room.

Whiskers was a tiger with a beak mouth surrounded by long and prehensile purple tentacles, modified to be somewhat intelligent on a level that no one had managed to discern as she had not been entirely tamed or domesticated.

Every day they were not mauled by Whiskers was a minor miracle.

Zero was pretty sure the Academy had given her a bed because they were worried they would get mauled by the freaking thing if they did not.

Brian was the first one to spot Zero caught at the door, and it snapped one of its claws until Higgs and Tetra looked over, then it pointed towards him.

Tetra saw the situation, immediately spotted the problem, then rolled her eyes and went back to her worksheet.

Higgs, on the other hand, also figured it out and smiled, “Hey! You must be the sixth roommate!”

“I am,” said Zero.

“What’s your name?”

“Zero.”

“Why aren’t you walking? You seem to know how to.”

“He probably fried his brain again,” Tetra remarked. “Keep an eye on the stepladder.”

“It was one time,” Zero grumbled. “And I didn’t fry my brain. I just… lost the muscle memory on how to walk, but I still know the theory.”

“I have the opposite problem,” Higgs chuckled. “I don’t know how I know how to talk, but I think that if I think about it flargle-balger-dorgle.”

There were even odds that Higgs was either making a joke or actually lost the capacity of speech.

Either way, he would probably be of no help here. Zero turned to look at Brian pleadingly.

Those googly eyes blinked at him, then pointedly turned back to his worksheet. Traitor.

Zero briefly contemplated asking Whiskers for help, then promptly decided he would rather take his chances relearning to walk.

He put his hands on the armrests and slowly started pushing off of it. He knew that he was supposed to strike a balance on his feet, but at the moment that felt rather like standing on a tightrope. His feet shot out forward to catch his weight as it went forward, then stumbled back as it went back.

It wasn’t fast enough. He almost landed on the wheelchair, but he missed by just enough to push the chair back and land ass-first on the floor.

He could hear Tetra snickering, and he flipped the bird in her general direction. Slowly, he pushed himself upright again, onto his knees and then onto his feet.

He put them spaced out so that they would catch his weight better, purposefully bending his knees to manage his center of mass. His arms shot out like he was doing a complicated balancing act rather than standing up.

Higgs clapped encouragingly, still incapable of speech until he forgot that line of thought. Zero gave him a thumbs-up back, then refocused on his task.

His decorations had been put together so that he could have a small path to and from his bed, but stepping on those small pockets of clear floor seemed like a daunting challenge now.

Zero was up to the challenge.

He shuffled his way to the beginning of the path, then he experimentally raised one foot to balance on the other one. He almost immediately started to drop, so he dropped the foot and retook his previous stance.

Slowly, he brought the back foot closer, shrinking his stance. It was getting harder not to fall, but now he had more of a handle on it. He slowly moved his weight to one leg and raised the other just a bit, centimeters from the floor and then back down.

He increased the amount he raised it bit by bit, his meticulous mind calculating the distance it would need to go. Seeing that it was a little longer than he anticipated, he widened his stance just a bit, then went back to lifting and dropping his foot.

Once he was sure, he raised the foot and swung it around to land on the next clear spot before he could start to drop. His balance was compromised and he swung back and forth for a bit, but he managed to regain control.

“Almost there!” said Higgs.

Brian clicked its crablike claws in support.

Zero smiled at his friends, then measured the distance to the bed. It was less than his height, so…

He raised the back foot and dropped his weight forward, in what he would later claim was a controlled drop, until he landed face-first on the bed.

His body made an arc over the plastic dolls, not dropping a single one, and he raised his arms in success with his face still mushed against the thin covers. Brian and Higgs clapped and cheered in celebration.

Whiskers woke up and snarled. They both immediately stopped as everyone in the room froze, staring at the modified tiger.

Whiskers looked around, then went back to sleep.

A general breath of relief was tossed out by those present.

“I wanted to ask,” said Higgs. “Why is there a squid-tiger here?”

“It’s one of life’s great mysteries,” Tetra deadpanned.

“I think her doctor wanted to make some kind of new living weapon for the Rangers,” was Zero’s muffled explanation as he tried to climb onto the bed without knocking anything over. “He promptly lost control of her, but no one wanted to risk taking her out after the first dozen attempts failed, so…”

“I got the impression that there’s a lot of impressive stuff in wherever we are,” Higgs said. “Shouldn’t there be something here that can take out a squid-tiger?”

“You’d think so, yeah,” said Tetra.

They all looked at Whiskers. One of her tentacles twitched in her sleep.

“Is she, like, sentient?”

“Sentient means she can feel, so yeah,” Tetra, pedantic as ever, noted. “Whether she’s sapient is another question. An unanswered one.”

“Huh.”

Zero finally managed to raise his sorry carcass onto the bed, which he did with a breath of relief. His head lolled to the side and he contemplated the posters taped to his wall, showing different figures of fictional and historical importance. He only recognized a few, having never been educated in either field.

“So, no muscle memory for walking?” Tetra asked, speaking over the sound of her puzzle box as it spun in her dexterous hands.

“Yup, but that’s just an unfortunate side effect,” Zero said, with no small amount of satisfaction. “It worked.”

The clacking of wood pieces snapping together stopped for as long as Tetra’s did, barely a second, then restarted. “What did?”

Zero smiled. He had her interest. That alone made the brief death worth it.

“Doctor Phan’s project,” Zero said, smiling widely as Brian started skittering closer in interest. “You are now looking at a world-class pianist.”

“I’m that too, but you don’t see me bragging,” Higgs scoffed.

“A pianist is someone that plays a piano,” Zero explained. Higgs stared blankly. “An instrument that makes music.”

“Oh!” said Higgs. “Well, I can probably do that too. I’m very skilled.”

“I’m aware,” said Zero, smiling indulgently.

You had to be patient when the younger subjects started producing hormones. Poor Higgs and Manny were only five months old, and they’d stopped getting the hormone blockers six weeks ago.

They were lucky that Manny was how he was, otherwise they’d have to deal with double the boasting and staring.

The sound of Tetra’s puzzle box had stopped. In its place, Zero heard the sound of the metal chest attached to the end of her bedframe opening.

Bits and pieces of metal dinged against each other as they were pulled out. Zero looked up with curiosity, then turned to look at Higgs.

Higgs immediately understood and looked up to deduce the situation. He blinked, then shrugged with an apologetic expression and looked around the room instead.

He blinked at the worksheet on his lap, then bumped Manny with his shoulder, saying, “Hey, Manny? What’s this.”

“That is a worksheet,” replied Manny, in his usual monotone. “We were given them for routine testing.”

“Oh,” said Higgs, looking down at his sheet. From what Zero could see, it had exactly half of a question answered, with a single circle not even fully filled out by Higgs’ number two pencil. “How many times did I get distracted and not fill this?”

“Thirty-seven,” replied Manny.

Higgs’ usual smile dimmed, in a miniscule but incremental way, until he was just staring at the paper with a blank expression.

“Hand it over,” said Zero, bringing his attention over to him. “I’ll help you fill it out so you don’t get distracted.”

Higgs didn’t smile. There was still too much sorrow in his eyes for that. But his expression lightened slightly.

The next few minutes were spent going from answer to answer, forcing Higgs to stay on track. They had to answer these questionnaires every week, and most of the time Higgs didn’t need help. But when he did, Zero was the only one who would or could.

Tetra was uninclined to care about others. Brian did not have a body which could speak comforting words or even speak at all, Whiskers was — and this could not be stressed enough — a big mutant tiger. And then there was Manny.

Higgs and Manny were two parts of an experiment to create a biological supercomputer. Thinking machines were the domain of Dark Technology, but a thinking living being was permitted under the laws of the Councils, so this and projects such as the Thought Alternator were considered to be acceptable loopholes.

The first dozen attempts at the project had failed. It was enough of a challenge to create a mind on par with a Hypercognitive’s, leave alone one that could surpass it.

That was until the twins’ doctor had come up with the solution of dividing the workload between two beings.

Manny was capable of remembering everything, while Higgs was capable of a higher level of thought than any cog could achieve.

Some clarification: this was not hyperbole.

This was not exaggeration.

For example, when most people said that someone “remembers everything”, they mean they have a pretty good grasp of most of what people tell them. Maybe that they have a knack for dates and birthdays and such.

When someone said that Manny “remembered anything”, they meant that Manny could repeat literally everything you told him word-for-word and in the exact same inflection and speed you said it.

It meant that if you gave Manny a sketchpad and a pencil, he could recreate anything he’d every seen down to the most minute detail his eyeballs were capable of capturing.

It meant that there was no trick, no distraction, no anything that you could do to make Manny forget anything. His mind wasn’t a steel trap, it was a black hole.

But he could not process it. Manny was physically incapable of having original thoughts, of managing the boundless information he gained and stored every day.

Higgs was the opposite. Higgs could figure things out just by thinking about them.

Most Hypercognitives could, it was what allowed them to make such vast technological progress.

But Higgs was different. He had figured out the exact dimensions of the Earth by staring at his feet for five minutes. He’d deduced a teacher’s entire romantic history from how he’d smiled at a message a servant had handed him. They’d given him countless pieces of coded messaging to inspect, and he’d figured each one within the minute.

Which was especially impressive because Higgs forgot almost everything that happened beyond an hour.

There were exceptions, such as basic mathematics, language and Manny’s existence. Things that were quite literally wired into his brain.

Higgs had a hard time staying on task because uninteresting things would be forgotten within ten minutes. Manny could not help his twin because he could notthink to do so. It was impossible to know if he even wanted to.

The experiment was considered half of a failure. While the twins’ doctor, Arthur McGill, had proven capable at creating high-spec brains, an existence like theirs was judged to be simply too awful to give to any proper human being.

The Ethics Committee had given Dr. McGill hell over it, but eventually they had voted against putting them out of their misery.

So now they stayed at room 2-11, along with the other failed or half-failed experiments that the Academy hadn’t given up hope on.

Well, them and Zero.

Whiskers had been an attempt to create intelligent animal companions to aid Rangers in protecting the borders of the city-state. Brian had been an attempt to prove that a mind could adapt to multiple bodies. Tetra had been another attempt at creating an artificial Hypercognitive.

Whiskers proved too difficult to control. Brian had to be made specifically to fit different bodies. Tetra simply did not have the skills to match the students, researchers and teachers at the Academy.

Zero, though fond of them, resented having to room with failures simply because there hadn’t been room in other parts of the dormitories. Other experiments had whispered behind his back just because he associated with them, he knew it.

But today had been proof.

Empirical evidence that Doctor Phan’s beloved pet project had succeeded, and it had only taken a single test subject!

Proof that Zero was the first step towards great things!

So, his legs didn’t work? So, he briefly died with every turn of the Alternator?

SO WHAT?!

He wasn’t a failure! This was proof, and he would rub it in the face of anyone that looked!

“Zero?” said Higgs, making him look up. The short-haired twin was giving him an awkward look. “Are you alright?”

Zero blinked as he realized he’d gotten lost in his thoughts, then cleared his throat. “Um, yeah, sorry. Uh…”

He realized the worksheet was done. He smiled awkwardly and tossed it over to Higgs.

“We’re finished,” he said. “Manny, can you take Higgs’ sheet and deliver it when you’re both done.”

Manny silently took his twin’s papers and nodded.

He did not move, however.

Higgs looked at his twin, smiled a bit, then said, “C’mon, Manny-Man. You can show me the way.”

Manny stood up and lead the way out the door, with Higgs following closely behind.

Zero watched them go and felt a small stab of guilt at having through of them as failures.

He sighed and dismissed it as a futile thought. They werefailures, and in any case, the only one who could have noticed was Higgs, who would forget it after an hour.

Theirs was a sad reality, but Zero was hardly responsible for it.

“Zero,” came Tetra’s voice from above him.

“Mm?”

“Come on up.”

He blinked, then he unfolded his legs and grabbed on to the upper part of the bedframe. It took some effort, since he still needed to practice his walking again, but eventually he dragged himself up to her bed.

Tetra was holding a piano. Or rather, a collection of 12 keys connected by thin yellow wires to a small speaker, all placed on top of a plank of wood. They weren’t held very firmly by the bits of paper tape that held them to the wood, but the arrangement and his new instincts told Zero what it was supposed to be.

“You made me a piano?” he asked.

“You seemed unbearably happy about it,” Tetra muttered. “I thought you’d like a chance to show off.”

Zero smiled a bit, then he took the improvised instrument and played a few experimental notes.

Amazingly, for an electronic instrument, it was completely untuned.

He could work with it.

“Any requests?”

“… something happy.”

Zero’s fingers danced.

[1] The resulting disappointment of that had been the heart of the United Student’s Union argument for the laser festival at the end of the school year.