35
Raul’s harness dangled from his buttocks as he swung himself up along the wall of alien machinery to which the far ends of the cables were attached. The knotted muscles in his arms seemed ready to burst through the thin layer of skin that covered them. In his concentration, he hardly noticed the minor amount of effort the climb required.
Dr. Stephenson had been encouraging him to explore his connections to the ship’s machinery, only the good doctor had no idea how successful that exploration had become. With every attempt, Raul’s access to the ship’s neural network got better, despite the severe damage the ship’s systems had suffered. Like him, she had been horribly injured, but she was a survivor.
Crude as they were, the connections Dr. Stephenson had made between the machines and his own amputation-exposed nerve bundles had been effective. It had taken a while to make sense of the wild sensory data that bled into him through his optical nerve and through the cables he now thought of as his tail. At first, he had thought the strange sensations were only pain-induced hallucinations. How wrong he had been.
His nanite-infested bloodstream had worked miracles, accepting the attachments as if he were a hybrid plant with some new genetic sprigs grafted to his trunk. New skin had grown up around them in a way that just seemed right. Even better, the physical connections to his nervous system were getting better. Yes, the nanites had been one busy little colony, always analyzing his health, always seeking ways to fix imperfections. And while they could not regenerate lost limbs, they were very good at keeping him alive and incorporating usable new parts.
What Raul had initially thought were hallucinations were his first feeble attempts to deal with the data coming from the ship’s damaged neural network, a magnificently capable system that his consciousness roamed at will. It was incredible. Now, when he thought about something, he not only thought about it with the neurons in his own brain, he thought about it with all the functioning neural pathways in the ship.
Unfortunately, only a very small portion of the original neural net was currently functional. The molecular data storage banks were the most heavily damaged, although he worked steadily to repair them. He had the feeling that if he could just reach a critical mass here, he would attain access to knowledge that would enable him to understand how to bring more of the power systems back online. And with more power, he could bring the main computers back to life.
In the meantime, he had made a glorious breakthrough. He had managed to tap the Internet remotely. Raul still didn’t quite understand how he had achieved it. He had been wishing that he could access data from the outside world and somehow the ship had brought a connection online. It wasn’t a physical connection like a cable line or an uplink to a satellite. Somehow, the ship just managed to make it happen.
But that connection was spotty and limited, the result of damage to a set of components that were the object of Raul’s current repair efforts. Clinging with one hand to a set of conduits, Raul unfastened the casings, his artificial right eye seeing the activity in those circuits in a way that no human eye could. As he observed the data flow, his brain, augmented by the shipboard neural net, understood exactly what was wrong. He might never again leave this craft, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t touch the outside world.
A broad smile crawled across Raul’s face. Perhaps his suffering had not been in vain. Maybe God wasn’t done with him after all.