(no subject)
W came back to her lab to find what would strike anyone else as a horrifyingly gruesome sight--a dismembered body, headless and missing an arm and a leg, all arranged rather neatly on a plastic sheet on which transparent reddish fluid had pooled in places. She did start violently upon turning on the light and first seeing it, leaning against the doorframe and catching her breath once she recognised the body. It was the clockwork boy Del had brought in not too long ago.
She knew Del had been captured, so it came as no surprise that her erstwhile bodyguard would have been also, but the condition W found him in was a little unexpected. It must have been one hell of a fight.
Upon closer inspection she found a note. I know you worked on him before. Can you fetch Ali and see if the two of you can repair him? -Z She wasn't entirely sure how much repairing she'd be able to do, as his head was intact. She picked it up, examining it, oddly thankful that someone had thought to close its eyes. Aside from the fact that the neck had been almost completely destroyed, there wasn't much damage that would fall within her realm of expertise. The artificial spine had been separated, but the metal vertebrae were all still present. She eyed the cord that hung from the inside of the fourth cervical vertebra--she had no idea, at the moment, what it was, though it looked as though a finely meshed tube had been filled with some sort of gelatinous substance. She remembered it criscrossed and pooled in the braincase amongst the gears and wires in his head.
Time to examine it later. Call Alistair first. This she did and while she waited for him to arrive, she prepared a slide with a tiny squeezing of that gelatin. Eyeing it under a microscope, she was surprised to see that it was a sort of neural culture--neural cells had been grown in a gel base and allowed to propagate, creating an artificial brain and central nervous system. W stared.
"What in the world is that?" Alistair's voice startled her from her impressed staring.
"That's Edward," W said, turning to look at Ali, who was still wearing one of those riotous Hawaiian shirts he'd displayed such a fondness for on the island. At least this time, though, it was accompanied by a pair of rather ordinary jeans instead of the only slightly less deafening bermudas he usually coupled the shirts with. "He's a homegrown cyborg, basically."
"Fun never ends around here," Alistair observed drily, rubbing his head.
"You okay?" He looked kind of wan, she thought.
"This splitting headache just started up out of no-where," he grumbled.
W fetched him some painkillers and a cup of water, though he looked like what he really needed was a hug, as he looked almost wibbly. She patted him. "Think you'll be up to doing this?"
He eyed the remains dubiously. "I think so."
W nodded and the two of them went to work removing the odd leather bodysuit, which involved much unfastening of buckles. Once that was finished, they laid out the pieces on the table in more or less the order in which they'd be assembled.
"What, was he hacked to pieces with a baseball bat?" W wondered aloud, looking at the extent of the damage. The skin was torn instead of lacerated and the inner workings looked as though they'd been separated more through blunt trauma than anything else.
Alistair ran his fingers along the ragged end of the arm. "Large-caliber firearm," he said. "Very large. More or less point-blank range, I'd say."
"Surgery via Desert Eagle. Remind me to keep at least three universes between myself and Project Augustus at all times," she observed.
"Heckler and Koch, actually. But duly noted," he replied with a barely repressed shudder.
Thus they set to work repairing the automaton in question. They had everything from jeweller's tools to microwelders to basic electronics brought in. W busied herself growing more of the neural culture as well as more of the skinlike stuff that covered the metal and wires and tubes that comprised the body, and when she wasn't doing that, she was cross-referencing what she could access of Del's notes as well as taking copious amounts of her own. A lot of the components wouldn't have created a functioning automaton on their own, but the organic components seemed to fill in the design gaps--neural clusters here, cell colonies there, a fluid coursing through an insanely complex network of servos that functioned as some kind of pared-down blood, lubricants in other tubes, and this skin structure that was almost completely self-sustaining. A true bio-mechanoid.
All the while, Alistair muttered to himself, sometimes with an odd accent. It was strange to listen to, almost as though he were two people. In a way, he was, as he read some of the pieces so deeply that the mind of their long-deceased inventor became prevalent, subsuming Alistair's own. W itched to question him during these times, but knew better than to distract him. If there was anything she really wanted to know, she could ask later. Still, she was dying to know how an eccentric old inventor in an isolated mansion could have built an artificial life form of such staggering complexity that it would not only pass a Turing but make the tester beleive that he was the AI.
Eventually, all there was for it, now, was to reattach the head, which they did slowly, carefully, replacing the spongy mesh that stood in for the intervertabral discs, reconnecting the tiny wires and gears and rebuilding the miniscule servos, replacing the tubes that stood in for the jugular and carotid vessels. W carefully inserted a needle through the fine mesh that created the structure of the spinal cord, injecting more of the neural culture. She grafted more of the skin around the repaired neck with tiny sutures and, when all was finished, they stood back, looking at their work.
Edward did not look as though he'd been violently dismembered apart from the skin repair, the tiny sutures visible under the stark, white light. He lay motionless, eyes closed.
There was no pulse, however, and no brain activity. No respiration. No signs of life at all. The two stood and puzzled over this for a while, wondering if defibrillators could be used to restart an artificial heart. W pried open one of his eyes and flickered a light into it, but it remained unresponsive.
Alistair picked up Edward's wrist and closed his eyes, apparently reading it rather deeply. W stood by and waited, watching Ali's eyes flutter, rolling back into his head as he dug through memories and sensations and images.
"Hm," he said, eventually. Before W could stop him, he pulled a crash cart over to the table, activated it, primed the paddles, and placed them on Edward's head. The resultant shock created an explosive squiggle on the EEG...
... which evened out to normal brain-wave activity. The rest of the body followed suit like a machine whose power had been restored. Respiration resumed and the heart restarted its facsimile of a normal sinus rhythm. Within moments, it appeared as though Edward were completely functional again.
The brain waves eased into a sleep pattern and W sighed, psnapping her gloves off and pushing a hand through her hair. Alistair yawned cavernously.
"Fourteen hours," she said. "Fourteen hours and a ream of notes." She eyed the microcassette tapes strewn about and pitied the SHop transcriptionist who was going to have to type all of that out.
"Fascinating, though. The old man was terribly unconventional in almost everything he did and yet..."
"I know. I put his creation back together and I'm still wondering how he did half of this stuff."
"So am I, and I read it all. But I can barely remember his mind. I ... don't think it wanted to be figured out so easily, if that makes sense."
"Not really," W confessed, dropping various tools into an autoclave. "But then again, I'm not an object reader."
Alistair chuckled. "Fair enough. I need to get some sleep, now, though. I'm beat."
"Goodnight, Alistair, and thanks," she said, smiling.
"Goodnight, Clair," he answered, pausing at the door and smiling before he left.
It wasn't until she'd finished cleaning up and was in her office that she realised he'd never called her "Clair," before.