139: SURGERY

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We discuss various possibilities of what, if anything at all, is strange about the colony, but it only goes in circles. The only thing we can all (except Tal) agree on pretty quickly is that we probably didn’t stumble onto a planet with abandoned alien tech. Other than that, we just don’t have enough information to draw any real conclusions.

“The very day they drop the quarantine, I’m going to insist on seeing the underground facilities,” Captain Klees declares. “We can’t advise the resource drops if we don’t know what they have and what their manufacturing is like.”

The next morning, Max comes around again. “The second cargo drop has landed and been retrieved,” they report. “We have growth medium, meaning that Dr Kim can get to work on growing that new foot for you, Captain.”

“You’re getting a new foot?” Tinera asks.

Captain Klees nods. “The artificial ones are never quite right, and covering them with skin doesn’t help. Kim says they can grow and implant one with no problems here, so…”

“Not to be morbid,” Tal says, “but there were a whole bunch of dead colonists we could’ve grabbed one from on the ship.”

“‘Not to be morbid’ doesn’t make that less morbid,” I point out.

“Didn’t you literally bring down two eyeballs for this exact reason?”

“Yes! And it was morbid!”

“Dr Kim can grow a new foot for Captain Klees using his own tissue and at the correct size and proportions, as if he never lost it,” Max says. “She also reminded me to remind you, Tinera, that the offer stands for – ”

“Nope!” Tinera puts her bad hand behind her back. “My body’s fine as it is, thanks.”

“Well, she’s there when you change your mind. Aspen, she wants to consult with you in person about your eyes.”

“What, like, right now?”

“At your earliest convenience.”

“Uh. Okay, sure. Let me suit up.”

One suit-up, sterilisation, and quick walk later, I once again find myself in the isolated patient area of the medical dome, looking at Doctor Kin through the glass. She doesn’t ask me to remove anything except my helmet this time, which makes her penetrating gaze a little easier to deal with.

“There are a few ways we can go about replacing your eye,” she says with absolutely no preamble. “As you know, replacing it with another biological eye is a little beyond our capabilities, given the level of damage. They’d be able to do it on Earth, and perhaps one of your sleeping doctors can do it, but it would involve the replacement of the entire optic nerve and channel right through the brain, which is something I’m certainly not going to attempt. We’ve previously discussed using a synnerve attachment to a mechanical eye and allowing artificial parts and machine learning to replace some visual elements. Normally this would be a complicated operation with several points of failure and a long recovery time, but you have some distinct biological advantages that means we might be able to get you in and out within an hour or two.”

“I… do?”

“Indeed. I’ve been looking over your medical files, and I’m very fascinated by the effects of the DIVR-32 geneset.”

“So far as I know, it doesn’t do anything with normal synnerves. Just the weird altered ones that the Courageous uses, and even then, only if – ”

“Only if you kill the nerve first and then let it the outer layer break down over time, yes. Which is perfect for our purposes. An ordinary synnerve attachment risks damaging your nerves further and making it even more difficult or unlikely to get a flesh eye working in the long run. Furthermore, any use of synnerves set to grow or adapt contains a slight inherent risk for most people. But not you. You have a body set to break down a specific type of synnerve if it grows incorrectly and dies off. You carry a sample of that synnerve still living, though inactive, in your body. And you have a port in your skull designed for the express purpose of allowing attached synnerves to talk to machinery.”

I reach up and touch the back of my head, remembering too late that I’m wearing bulky space suit gloves. “You want to use my cerebral port?”

“Yes! If we take a sample of the synnerves in the port, run your head through an electrostatic shield – we have such a device in the dome, we use it for some types of sterilisation – when re-inject it, we can run a simple cable under your skin to your eye socket and fit in a mechanical eye. Absolutely no brain surgery required. I’ll have to drill a very small hole in the side of the eye socket for the cable to run, but other than that, I can do the whole operation without going into the skull at all. Even if it fails to work properly – and there’s absolutely no reason it should fail to work properly – it’s about as much physical damage as an ill-advised piercing. Do you want to give it a shot?”

“I’m a little tired of being everyone’s science experiment.”

“I’m sure you are. But I’m not a scientist, I’m a doctor. And this is the only way I think you’re going to have two working eyes within the next several years. It’s not particularly invasive, so if one of your doctors can attach a flesh eye later, that’s not a problem – we just take the cable out.”

I hold both of my hands up, in front of my face but to the sides, well within my range of vision – or at least, what should be my range of vision. I can only see one of them.

I am pretty tired of not seeing people. And lacking depth perception, which is something I still don’t notice I’m missing until I fail to grab something properly. Lina and the Friend told me that that’s largely a matter of experience, that if I’m one-eyed for long enough I’ll learn how to compensate for it, but why should I fucking have to?

“Let’s do it,” I say.

“Great! If you could step over to that table to your right?”

“Wait, we’re doing this right now?”

“Why wait? I have the tools and equipment ready.”

“Uh. Sure. Okay.”

“We’re going to have to take some of your hair off to access the cerebral port. Is that a problem?”

“No, that’s fine.”

“Good. Usually I’d be there to assist you, but obviously, we can’t do that today. So. Do you know how to use an electric hair trimmer?”

I stare at her. “Do I know how to use an electric hair trimmer?”

“Answer the question, please.”

“Yes! Why wouldn’t I?”

“You’re from a century and a half in the past! I don’t know what technology you know!”

“You think the interstellar spaceship was invented before the hair trimmer?”

“You don’t need hair trimmers to run a spaceship, so there’s no reason why not.”

I stare some more. It’s like talking to Tal.

Doctor Kim clears her throat. “Anyway. There’s a trimmer on that table there. Please clear the cerebral port and surrounding area. We need at least a centimetre shaved all the way round; more would be easier.”

I take my gloves off and shave the whole head. Why not.

“Excellent. Now if you’ll remove your false eye and stick your head in that machine over there…”

Great, another mysterious machine to immobilise my head in the dark. I stick my head in and, as expected, supports immediately inflate to immobilise it. I feel something wet and cold rub over my cerebral port, sterilising the area, and then the sharp pain of a needle. I’m not bad with needles, but with absolutely no warning I’m glad for the restraints preventing me from jerking my head.

“Try to hold still,” Doctor Kim says. I feel a disconcerting sort of vibration through my skull as the needle forces its way into a tiny channel in the cerebral port. After far, far too long, it retracts.

“We’ve got a synnerve sample,” Dr Kim says. “I’ll be running the field now.”

Every muscle in my face twitches painfully, but it’s over in a moment.

“Okay,” Kim says. “Re-implanting the synnerve tissue. Just a reminder that your eye won’t start working until this has grown in, and it might take some time to learn to interpret the input correctly.”

“They sedated me for this the first time around, you know.”

“Then I’m sure you appreciate how much more efficient we are. You won’t need to recover from any sedatives.”

This process takes longer, as the needle has to poke in multiple tiny channels and inject synnerve samples. Then, more disconcerting pain from tools I can’t see as they ‘clear a sufficient port section of unnecessary biological tissue’, which is about the grossest way that Dr Kim could’ve explained the process.

The cable that’s attached for my eye isn’t nearly as large as the one the cerebral stimulator used on the ship, nor does it need the entire port. The attachment site is less than half a centimetre in diameter and the cable that a long needle proceeds to snake under my skin and around the side of my skull no thicker than a piece of thread. The worst part of the operation is when the surgery bots have to drill a very tiny hole in the side of my skull, just ahead of my temple and above the very edge of my brow ridge, to feed the cable into the eye socket. I’m dosed with a painkiller for that part, but the experience still feels somehow revolting.

“There we go!” Dr Kim says cheerily as a metal tool inside my eye socket does something (glues the cable in place or something maybe, I don’t know) and retracts. The machine lets me go and I pull away from it as quickly as possible. “The eye is in a little box on the desk there, you can insert it. See where the cable port is? Just line it up right when you pop it in and the cable will connect automatically. Oh, and when you’re taking the eye out, make sure you give the cable time to disconnect before pulling the eye away from your face. Unless you want to rip the cable out. Which would be unpleasant.”

‘Unpleasant’, she says.

“Thanks.” I retrieve the eye. It looks about like how I expect, and not all that different to my glass eye, unless I look into the pupil and iris part closely enough to see the lenses. I locate the little cable port, helpfully surrounded by a bright red circle, turn the eye so it’ll line up approximately with the port in my socket, and pop it in.

It connects.

I see… nothing that I didn’t see before. Because the synnerves haven’t grown in yet. Obviously.

There are two very small wounds on my head, both glued shut – one at the cerebral port, and another where the drill had to enter near my eye. I can’t feel the thin cable under my skin, and the replaced patch of skin feels almost like the rest of my face now, aside from the lack of wrinkles. Another month and I’ll be one eyebrow away from looking like I was never burned at all.

Will I be able to see like I was never burned at all? I guess we’ll find out.

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