Implant Read online

  Implant

  By Jeffrey Anderson

  and

  Michael Wallace

  © Michael Wallace & Jeffrey Anderson, 2011. All rights reserved

  Original Cover Art by Elizabeth Mitchell at http://portfolio.lismitchell.net

  “The Defense Sciences Office is interested in new proposals in BRAIN MACHINE INTERFACES. This new program represents a major thrust area that will comprise a multidisciplinary, multipronged approach with far reaching impact.”

  • Defense Science Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 9/17/2007.

  Chapter One:

  “Is it going to hurt?”

  “A little.”

  “‘Cause I can handle pain.” Ian Westhelle looked away as the anesthesiologist buried the 18-gauge needle just below the cord of his bicep. “I just don’t like needles. I prefer an honest fight.”

  He watched the anesthesiologist slide the catheter into the vein and retract the needle in a single motion. A drop of blood welled at the mouth of the catheter. Satisfied the needle was out, Ian turned his gaze back to Dr. Julia Nolan.

  “Any last questions?” Julia sounded like a dentist asking a kid if he wanted a sticker.

  Damn straight he had questions. How does it work? What happens if it screws up? Will they actually read my mind? What is she wearing under those scrubs? Am I going to die?

  “No questions.”

  It didn’t matter. The decision was made. He’d won the lottery, signed the consent. Too late to back out, so why not get on with it?

  When he’d met her two days ago, he’d thought it was a prank. Probably some chick Kendall met at a bar and conned into a practical joke. Would have been the first decent gag he’d seen since joining the CIA. But two days of questions, protocols, security paperwork, briefings, and MRI scans had been plenty convincing.

  Sometimes he thought he was crazy to go through with it, but his ego wouldn’t let him back down. The underlying message went without stating. He was the best “the company” could find. They had an assignment that might get him killed. This might keep him alive.

  Through all of it Julia had been more than patient. Attentive, reassuring, honest. She was upfront about risks. She admitted the procedure was new—she’d invented it. Half a dozen implants had already been performed—probably on baboons, knowing how these things went—but she claimed to have worked out the bugs.

  Ian lay down on the narrow metal table. A C-shaped frame arced around the headboard. Julia had told him this was to take CT pictures during surgery to check placement of the leads.

  He adjusted his head on the towel at the end of the table. “How do I know this whole operation isn’t a sham so she could see my tattoo?” he asked the anesthesiologist. He glanced down at the single Chinese character imprinted in black on his left chest and gave the man a half smile. The anesthesiologist raised an eyebrow at Julia.

  “It’s lovely,” Julia said. “Does it mean anything or is it just an excuse to tear off your shirt and show girls your pecs?”

  “It’s shorthand for ‘please be gentle, ‘cause I’m a big baby about needles and scalpels.’”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  He took a deep breath. “I know, I know. But can you tell this guy to give me the drugs already?”

  Julia nodded at the anesthesiologist, who depressed the plunger to a syringe filled with opaque white fluid.

  “Count backwards from 10,” Julia said.

  Ian got to 9.

  Julia grabbed the paper gown at her waist and pulled until the tie snapped. She pulled her arms out, wadded up the gown with her gloves inside, and tossed it in the red-lined metal hamper. She reached back to unfasten the lead vest and skirt and hung each one on a peg on the wall.

  Her blue scrubs were damp down the center of her chest and under her arms. She drew her arm across her face, which smeared mascara across her sleeve. “Let plastics know we’re finishing up here,” she said to the charge nurse. Julia then pulled two blue gloves out of the dispenser on the wall.

  Ian was just her patient, and she had no information about his intended mission, but she felt a connection with him and by extension with his mission. He seemed like a decent guy, full of bravado, but in a self-effacing way. Hopefully, the implant could help him.

  “Peroxide.” She turned back to the scrub nurse, who was counting forceps. A paper boat of 4x4 gauze pads soaked in clear fluid appeared on the mayo stand. She picked off a few and scrubbed at the betadine on Ian’s chest, neck, and face. She grabbed a blue towel from the instrument tray to wipe off the rest of the orange dye, taking more care around incisions on Ian’s right breast, the base of his skull, above both ears, and on each temple.

  She’d put in six devices, each one like a flat piece of cellophane, a few inches in diameter, studded with miniature metallic spikes. For each one, a braid of tiny wires snaked out one end. The implant itself came rolled up, and she inserted it into a small burr hole in the skull. With a flexible endoscope, she painstakingly unfolded it around the surface of the brain and embedded the thousands of tiny spikes into the brain tissue. The wires tunneled through the soft tissues of the neck until they connected to a small bio-computer implanted under the pectoral muscle.

  Julia turned to the anesthesiologist. “How much fentanyl did you use?”

  “100 mcg at induction.”

  “Better give him another 50 now before plastics shows up.”

  She’d closed plenty of wounds in her life, but this one was different. Ian didn’t just need a surgeon, he needed an artist. The plastic surgeons would rough up the edges of the wound on his chest, make it look like a battle scar rather than a precision surgical cut.

  The door opened.

  A metal cart wheeled through the door to the operating room, pushed by a twenty-something Asian man in jeans and a black t-shirt that read, ‘No, I will not fix your computer.’

  “Keep him sedated please,” the man said.

  “Who are you?” Julia asked. “And where’s the plastic surgeon?”

  “I’m with applications. We need to do a firmware upgrade before bringing the implant online.”

  “What are you talking about? The software is stable. We’ve tested it. What firmware upgrade?”

  The Asian man stopped the cart. “They didn’t tell you?” He rolled his eyes. “Love this place. Fifty million bucks for the damn implant and the whole program is run like the DMV.” He shrugged. “Look, I don’t know who’s not talking to who, but I told Markov I needed to come in before your dude wakes up and download the latest patch.”

  “You must be Hubert Chang. Lead programmer?”

  “Right. You want me to wait while you check it out?” An edge of sarcasm.

  Julia waved an arm and turned around. “No, go ahead. You’re sure it’s been vetted? What’s new?”

  “Nothing, just adding a couple of new log files to the firmware. Waste of time if you ask me. All anyone cares about is more data, as if anyone ever reads the stuff we’ve already got. And I can’t even fart around here without writing up a use case. Can’t wait to get back to NSA. You people are really something.” He opened the laptop on the cart and aimed a wireless probe at Ian’s chest. When the computer logo appeared, he typed a password with one hand. A few keystrokes later a progress bar moved across a window on the computer.

  “And that’s it?” she asked. “Just log files?”

  “Oh, a few bug fixes, too, of course. Always have to tweak stuff, make it work better.”

  #

  Julia pushed through the door to the O.R. and strode down the hall. Chang may have been right that they were just documenting every step of the process, but that didn’t change the fact that nobody told her a thing. The wh
ole operation was too secretive. That’s how mistakes happened. Nothing like this happened in private practice.

  And bug fixes? What did that mean?

  She began rehearsing the familiar lines. She didn’t have enough control. The timeline was too fast. She should have years for testing, and enough staff to do the job right. Damn their security. Is it so hard to find a few more people with top secret clearance? They were driving her out, and she could do just fine in private practice. Let them try and find another academic neurosurgeon willing to work under these conditions. She gave orders; she didn’t take them. She pushed open the door to the control suite.

  Terrance Nolan, her husband, sat behind a computer monitor at his desk. His office enjoyed an expansive view over a wooded slope down toward the Potomac, but he usually kept the blinds drawn and today was no exception.

  “Hey, sweetheart. How’d surgery go?” He stood up and opened his arms to give her a hug, then lowered them again when she stood in the doorway.

  “What’s in the firmware upgrade?”

  “Good to see you too.”

  Her husband had worked for the National Clandestine Service, the operations division of CIA, for fifteen years. Julia didn’t like to admit it, but he had been the one who’d landed her this job. He’d stuck with her over the fourteen years they’d been married, through medical school, internship, residency, her academic job at George Washington. But it could have been worse. She was the only one in her class who made it through residency with her marriage intact.

  She’d made a lot of promises. Good salary, decent benefits, residents to take call. Selling him on the academic lifestyle had been a good part of their conversation for the seven years of residency. Sure, it sucked now, but once she finished…

  Only three years later as an assistant professor, things weren’t much better. She still took a lot of night call. It was hard enough to be junior faculty, but to be a woman meant that she was constantly fighting to be treated like a colleague. Every time Dr. Friedline gave a lecture, she was the one who took the extra call. Her discussions with her husband had turned to, “When I make tenure…”

  But that wasn’t looking likely. Some of the faculty had never wanted her hired in the first place. Publications were scarce. Her research took time, and the department refused to cough up money for a grad student or ease off on her clinical responsibilities. The residents were no help. They already worked like dogs, and most just bided time until they could take a private practice job in spine surgery and start making real money.

  Brain machine interfaces were the coolest thing going in neurosurgery, but you had to know everything. You needed an animal lab, needed programmers, neuroradiologists, circuit designers and nanotechnologists. It wasn’t the sort of thing a solo investigator could pull off.

  Her luck started to change the day Terrance told her that the defense department had put out a solicitation for extramural proposals involving brain machine interfaces. Two months later, she submitted a grant proposal. Three days after that, two men in dark suits showed up at the hospital with an offer to work full time for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as chief investigator of a top secret implant program for the CIA.

  Turns out that “chief investigator” wasn’t exactly the person in charge. It was a lesson she learned fresh each and every day.

  “The firmware upgrade?” Julia asked again. “Some programmer marched in after surgery and said he needed to upgrade the firmware? Change log files, fix bugs. Did you know about this? It was working fine.”

  Terrance looked blank for a moment, then nodded. “Oh, right. Sorry, someone must have forgotten to brief you. It’s no big deal, a couple of extra commands, more implant control of the software.”

  “That’s not what Chang said. He claimed it was log files and a couple of bug fixes.”

  “Yeah, that too. Whatever, it’s all been completely tested. But never mind about that. You deserve congratulations. I take it everything went well? That’s a perfect record on all eight now, including the one yesterday.” He moved to put his arm around her.

  She didn’t resist, and leaned toward him. “The hard part isn’t over yet. I was worried about this one. Couldn’t unfold one of the arrays around the middle cerebral artery, almost had to abort. And now we still have two weeks of training, with two subjects at once.”

  “Rose and Westhelle are good, they’ll be fine.” He put his finger over her lips before she could reply and drew her tighter. “You’re amazing. I’m so proud you pulled it off. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  He moved to kiss her as she turned her face onto his shoulder, and the kiss landed awkwardly on her cheek.

  Fine wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted brilliant, flawless.

  Chapter Two:

  “Today’s going to be a little different.” Julia’s voice projected into Ian’s headphones.

  “Thank God.” Ian couldn’t see anything, his goggles dark.

  He’d spent 11 hours yesterday in the damn goggles, watching flashing checkerboards, drifting line segments, rotating patches of color, over and over again. How did Kendall describe it last night? Fingernails on a chalkboard for the eyes?

  At least the chair was comfortable. He reclined and felt the weight of the audiovisual cables that stretched from his head back to the rack of amplifiers and electronic components. There was a strap around his chest and a probe attached to his finger. He occasionally heard muffled footsteps or snippets of conversation from the half dozen technologists scattered around the room.

  “I was sort of hoping this was going to be music day.”

  Hope he likes banjo, came Chang’s muffled voice from somewhere in the background. He would be sitting next to Julia, doing something incomprehensible with the computer.

  “No, Ian. Sadly, they cut the music day from the schedule. Donut day is gone, too, and sleep-in till noon day didn’t make the cut, either.” Julia’s voice was much crisper through his headphones.

  “All right. Let’s go. I can handle it.”

  “What are you afraid of, Ian?” Julia’s voice was soft, comforting.

  “How do you mean?”

  “What are you afraid of? Snakes, falling from heights, public speaking, crawlspaces?”

  “You’re serious.”

  “We’re trying to make the implant more useful, more than a glorified video recorder. If we can find exactly where in your brain things like fear or drowsiness or pain are processed, we can suppress them through your implant.”

  Ian blinked as his goggles flashed to life and began cycling through colored photographs every few seconds. They fed him the magnified view of the hairs on a spider’s face, a bat with open jaws, a crowded elevator.

  “No, none of that. Not really.”

  Images kept coming. A view from the top of a skyscraper. Waves on an ocean. Dismembered bodies boiling with maggots. A soldier with a raised machine gun.

  No skin response. No change in heart rate, said a voice from the corner of the room. Another technician.

  Images from horror films. Intestines. An electrical probe. A guillotine with a harvest of heads lying at its base. The rack, the wheel, and other medieval torture devices. The parade of the gruesome and terrible continued for several minutes.

  Ian grew sleepy. As the days stretched on, he and Kendall had taken to breaking the monotony at nights with a few drinks. It was catching up to him. “You’re going to have to do better than that,” he said.

  A moment later the goggles went dark.

  “Can you help us out a little, Ian? Any nightmares you remember? Bad experiences on assignment?” Julia probed. “You picture it, we’ll stimulate your brain, make it vivid.”

  Ian closed his eyes. He thought about Ranger School. His Ranger Instructor screaming profanity in his ear. Crawling through a Florida swamp, covered in clouds of mosquitoes. A water moccasin gliding past Ian’s half-submerged face. He opened his eyes to complete darkness. He was in Cartagena. His platoon was deplo
yed in a coca field creeping toward a large plantation house. Floodlights. The sound of dogs snarling.

  This is better. His galvanic skin response is positive. Julia’s voice, now distant, muffled like the others.

  I’ll bump it up, Chang’s voice added.

  “What are you seeing?” Julia asked, her voice clear in his ears, now.

  Then Ian was in Pyongyang. Tied up. Smoldering cigarette butt coming toward his eye. Fetid smell of the interrogator’s breath. Had to move now.

  “What is it, Ian?” Julia asked again.

  “Hard to focus,” Ian said. “Different stuff. Missions in Columbia, North Korea.”

  Hold on, that’s worse, Chang’s voice said. Bad signal to noise. I’m getting nothing.

  Do we have to record a fear response? Can’t we just try suppressing the amygdala? Julia’s voice this time, distant again.

  No good. Too nonspecific. I need the whole network, including areas in the cortex.

  “Something from childhood?” Julia encouraged. “Early images can be the most powerful.” He remembered the waiting room. His mother turning him over the nurse, who led him back. “We’re going to put you to sleep now.”

  Big spike there, Chang’s voice said.

  Implant 6, looks like the medial temporal lobe.

  “Ian, sweetheart. Can you hear me?” It was the nurse, a kind woman who would later give him ice cream that he wouldn’t be able to eat through his sore throat. “Looks like he’s out. Wow. Those tonsils are really swollen. Any time you’re ready, doctor.”

  I’m seeing a cluster in the posterior cingulum, said another technologist, now receded into the background. Also right dorsolateral prefrontal.

  Ian, the child, tried to talk. “Don’t touch me. I’m awake!” The words did not reach his lips. For some reason he couldn’t move, though he was fully awake.

  Chang’s voice. Looks like we’ve found it. Take all those clusters and start stimulating there. Let’s ramp up the fear response. Run positive current. 200 microamps.