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They’d removed a section of the man’s skull, made careful incisions in the brain, and just finished implanting an oddly shaped device that resembled a folded piece of origami art.
Vaughn leaned toward a thin microphone that stuck up from the control panel. When he spoke, his voice sounded hollow and monotone. “Please step back from the subject.”
Two of the three medical personnel responded immediately. The lead surgeon finished one additional task and then stepped away. With the doctors out of the way, the camera offered a clear view of the cauliflower-like folds of the man’s gray matter. Looking closer, one could see not only the protruding section of the implanted device but also a thin mesh of microscopic wires, which had been spread across the man’s brain in an earlier surgery. The gray matter had begun to grow over it, incorporating it into the neural network.
The Overseer could only assume this was the next step in Vaughn’s mad idea. The merging of human and machine intelligence. He silently thanked whatever deity might have existed that such treatments hadn’t been available when he’d fallen into Vaughn’s clutches.
“Initiate testing,” Vaughn said.
The lead surgeon powered up the new implant. The patient twitched and began to flip his left hand and foot involuntarily.
Vaughn leaned into the microphone again. “Subject fifty-one, can you hear me?”
“I hear your voice,” the man said nervously.
“I want you to recall a pleasant memory. Your first time at the beach.”
The man didn’t reply.
Vaughn waited.
“Are you remembering?”
“Yes,” the man said. “It was warm. The water was clear.”
Vaughn turned his attention to another screen, one filled with the EKG and the other medical readouts. From there he looked to a second screen; this one displayed a vast number of tiny blue dots on a field of black. These illuminated pixels swirled by the thousands in a three-dimensional shape. The Overseer knew that shape from his own tests. It represented TAU’s interface with a human subject. It remained steady and undisturbed even as Vaughn asked another question.
“Recall a time when you were hungry.”
The subject had been denied food for several days. An act designed to instill a negative memory.
“Yesterday,” the subject said. “My stomach felt pain. Empty.”
The Overseer knew the drill. He watched the screen containing the swarm of pink dots. They remained steady. Inert. Another failure.
“The provocation is too weak,” Vaughn demanded. “It needs to be raised. Apply direct stimulus to the pain center of his brain.”
The doctors had been prepared for this eventuality. They had already mapped the man’s brain. They knew where pleasure centers and pain centers lay. At the touch of a switch they could flood the man’s brain with input, making him feel as if he were in ecstasy or agony.
“We should first stimulate pleasure,” one of the surgeons said.
“No,” Vaughn snapped. “Pain is more intense. Initiate the procedure.”
The lead surgeon began to speak to the patient, presumably to warn him that he would feel pain, but also to remind him that it was imaginary.
“Stop,” Vaughn insisted. “Explanation will limit the results. Initiate without description.”
The surgeon pulled back, stepped to one of the machines surrounding the patient, and moved a dial. Almost immediately the manon the table began to writhe. He grunted and shook. But the pink dots remained as they were.
“Increase intensity,” Vaughn demanded.
The surgeon did as he was told, and the man’s protests became exponentially louder. He shouted, he grunted, he screamed. “Please, no more!”
The Overseer folded his arms. He knew there would be no stopping. Vaughn asked for more and the pain level went up once again. On the nearby screen, the cluster of dots began to move. At first the motion seemed random.
“Increase intensity at ten second intervals,” Vaughn commanded. “Do not stop until I instruct you.”
The pain went up. The tiny dots moved faster now, churning in circles and changing direction with each increase in the stimulus. The pattern reminded the Overseer of starlings twisting and turning in the sky by the thousands, separate and individual, but acting as if they were of one mind.