12 Days of Fiction 2018, Day Three
An Interview With Primus, Part III
Primus stares at me intently. My questions don’t seem to annoy him. To some extent, I find it unnerving. Beyond that, I want to find out why.
“Are you telling me you have no thirst for power, Primus?”
“I don’t.”
“It’s hard to believe.”
“Let me put it this way: this,” and he gestured at his office, “is not, as you just said, power. This is my job. It’s what I do. I’m the director. The manager, if you wish, but just that. I’m not the owner. I’m not the ruler.”
“Who owns? Who rules?”
“Consensus.”
“You’re telling me you’ve built a perfect society within society?”
“Not at all. I’m telling you how we work, how we reach decisions. Of course, it’s much easier for us.”
“Ah, yes. You mentioned you were even more connected than me, is that what you’re referring to?”
“Certainly. Allow me to tell you a story. As you well know, three centuries ago doctors started creating what we will call cyborgs for convenience. People who received many artificial organs, as a method to preserve their lives after extremely serious accidents, or because of particularly aggressive diseases.”
“Yes. Procedures were streamlined and eventually became so commonplace there was a counter-effect.”
“The Dignified Death Movement, yes. People who didn’t want to be, and I quote their manifesto, ‘entombed alive in an artificial body’. If they ever found themselves in a circumstance where cyborg parts would save them, they’d rather die. I can understand them. Back then… well, even though the technology was good, it had its shortcomings.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sensory isolation, Ms Vonn. As new organs are added, the impulses between the brain and those new organs need to remain. What you need is for the person to remain alive, so when you replace a lung, a liver, even a heart, you make sure not only that the new organ works correctly, but that it responds to orders. The biochemical interface has to be perfect. When the organ is, say, skin… the interface is just too large.”
“You mean loss of sensitivity?”
“Yes. You replace a leg, you want the patient to walk. That was the easy part. But while the patient will never worry again they’ll break a toe against a rock, for instance, you do want them to feel that rock. That wasn’t possible at first.”
“It looks like a small price to save a life, Primus. Or to walk again.”
“It is. What was unexpected was longevity. As more organs were substituted, life extended. Maintenance, we could say, was easier. All you needed to do was to keep the brain alive, it seemed. But the brain needs its sensory input to work properly.”
“Ah. You’re referring to the Rogues.”
“Yes. The effects of a lack of long-term neural input on the brain weren’t really that well understood. How could they? Some of the first full cyborgs, patients whose whole body, or almost all of it, had been replaced, basically went mad.”
“Is that why I haven’t found out your real name? You were one of the Rogues?”
Primus surprises me again. This is a crucial question, and he smiles at it.
“I was wondering when you were to ask about who I am. I was sure you had researched me.
“No, Ms Vonn. I was lucky not to be one of the Rogues. They were, after all, sick people. But back then, I considered it adequate to… erase all traces of my identity, in order to protect myself and all parts involved.”
“But that’s in the past.”
“And there it shall remain. Consider it. I might tell you who I was, but what purpose would it serve? You’d have a name, that’s all. And then what? Anyone who had anything to do with me is long gone. My real name has no use now.”
I have to say I take that into consideration. Does Primus suspect I’ll try to dig out anything on him at a later date? That my assistant is doing it right now? I think he does.
“Anyway, Ms Vonn, technology kept advancing. Some of us helped with it. After all, we had nothing but time on our hands. Our greatest breakthrough, as you well know, was the discovery, two centuries ago, of what some call the man-machine interface, the possibility to store human memory engrams in a computer storage device. Science fiction made true.”
“It was highly controversial, Primus.”
“And to some extent it still is to some people, I am well aware. Yet for us, who already inhabited our artificial bodies, it was the next logical step.
“Of course, nobody had expected the main secondary effect.”
“A secondary effect? Which secondary effect?”
“Immortality, Ms Vonn.”
