The Medusa Chronicles, "Encounter In the Deep," 1.4-5

Two months later, and it's time to resume the portion of "The Medusa Chronicles" that @toxinvictory put on the fast lane. Where we left off, transhuman astronaut Howard Falcon was aboard a sea ship full of asshole humans and not-asshole-so-far chimpanzees. The ship has submerged into the deep, so let's see what he ends up encountering there besides assholes.

1.4
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This chapter gives us a surprise POV shift, inviting us into the mind of Dr. Hope Dhoni. I don't think that it will be a pleasant stay in here, but I'm eager to be proven wrong.

We start with her reminiscing about her role in Falcon's resurrection decades ago. At the time, she was a 23 year old trainee nurse. She wasn't totally green - she'd been working in the trauma ward for a couple of years already, and been desensitized to the sight of injury and disfigurement - but she still wasn't ready for the state this patient was brought in. He apparently was still alive when they dug him out of the wreck, somehow, but he'd gone into cardiac arrest during the ambulance ride. He was down to fifty percent of his body's initial supply of blood, most internal organs cooked, heart and lungs moving only with machine assistance, etc. The only reason that (most of) his face survived is because he managed to hold up his hands in front of it before the explosion, resulting in his hands being splattered all over it and providing a bit of thermal insulation. Were it not for that, he probably would have taken too much brain damage to be recoverable at all.

The lead doctor in this case wasn't much of a people person, but fortunately the secondary doctor - Dr. Bignall - was, and he provided Dhoni and the other junior staff members with the leadership they needed to not be totally out of their depth. Rather than thinking about Falcon's body in terms of what had to be fixed, he got them to think in terms of what parts could be recovered. This kept them from wasting time on longshots, and meant they basically started out by writing off everything besides the brain and spine and working their way up from there. In the end, they managed to preserve his brain, most of the head around it, the collar, and one arm (sans hand). Most of the spinal cord itself ended up being too damaged to do much with, and had to be bypassed with new synth-nerves hooked up to artificial brain implants. I suspect that this is why they ended up giving him wheels instead of legs; the lower spine was just too fucked up to work with at all, and their implants weren't quite good enough to coordinate human legs.

For many days, they tracked Falcon's brain activity to see when he was asleep and when he was awake. Dhoni was never sure she wanted to knew which of the two was worse, for him.

Later on, it says, she learned that he had never been fully conscious for those first few days; even when he wasn't technically asleep, he was under the effects of so many painkillers and chemical depressants that he wasn't really awake either. The first thing he remembers being fully aware of was a sound and vibration that he thought was his heartbeat, but was actually the movement of his life support system's motor components. The next thing after that was faint lights, moving around, that he tried to follow with his eyes; this was Nurse Dhoni herself, testing his prosthetic eyes with a penlight.

Shifting back fully into Dhoni's perspective again, the text starts getting weird in the same way I pointed out last time. Talking about how the team wasn't just motivated to save a life, but how they were extra excited to be working on the most advanced biomechanical system ever. The text catches itself here and tries to portray the doctors as having been wrong to feel this way, including a completely unconvincing assertion that Dhoni was tempted to punch one especially callous technician in the face for acting exactly the same way she did in the earlier chapters.

Yeah, this really reads like the authors trying to cover their own asses and failing miserably. It's more cute than aggravating, in this case.

Then we get to the detailed description of the end results, and oh my god Howard's new body is even more horrific than I'd been imagining.

So, basically, upside-down golden GLaDOS with a burned-up ruin of a face grimacing out from inside the head.

If I were him, I'd rather just spend the rest of my life hooked up to the Jupiter blimp.

In a callback to the prologue, Falcon had remarked to Dhoni that he'd made more convincing snowmen as a child.

I don't know if the fact that the text goes over all the tech and engineering details in such breathless, pornographic detail makes this gut punch ending less disturbing, or more.

Well, there's more of a gut punch after that, actually. Dhoni remembers the first time he'd been able to feel pain again. He could only move one eyelid (or what remained of it) at the time, so their only indication that he was feeling pain was the brain scans. Dhoni just remembers washing his face and wiping his brow, trying to reduce the pain as much as she could in the parts of him she could access, every day for nearly two years.

This chapter would have benefitted a lot from relocating all the tech porn. Either put it at the beginning and follow it up with the emotional horror, or start the next chapter with it and show the eventual flawed end result that still betrays the ugliness behind the superficial attempts at prettying it up.

Anyway, I think the intent was to show that Hope Dhoni actually does care about Falcon and reducing his suffering, even if the authors aren't good at portraying the social aspects of that. Next chapter.

1.5
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Back to the present, and back to Falcon's POV. He folds his articulated stalk-body-thing to simulate sitting and hunches besides the table Webster and Dhoni are sharing in the lounge. Dhoni gently scolds Falcon for not coming in for regular checkups and upgrades like he's supposed to. Okay, see? That's a lot more plausible than the dialogue in 1.3 made it sound. I can't believe that the worldgov space agency wouldn't give him a thorough medical and engineering gauntlet when he returned to Earth, but I can believe that he might have been putting off his routine checkups since then. Falcon kinda rolls his cybernetic eyes at that, but she points out that it's not just a matter of keeping his systems at 100% and his organic bits healthy for whatever they're still worth. Thanks to the march of technology since he left for Jupiter, there are also upgrades he's been missing out on, including ones that could really improve his quality of life.

For instance, there's now a virtual reality network, self-contained away from the main internet. You just need to be near one of the big VR modems and to have a coin-sized implant installed in the back of your skull, and you can log on and enjoy a sunny seaside vacation in San Junipero. Webster chimes in to inform Falcon that he already has one himself. Dhoni doesn't say whether or not she does, but the implication is that a growing percentage of the world's population is getting them.

Howard...reacts in disgust. VR is for children's games and military training, but he repeats himself. Lol, Falcon being a real boomer about the latest cultural fads. Can't grudge him the bad attitude though, considering not only his condition but also his social environment. Webster counters that it's not just games and exercises anymore; half of his work at the bureau is done via virtual council now. And, when Falcon says that that still doesn't impress him, Webster says...this:

So, he thinks Falcon needs to retreat into virtual space so that nobody has to look at him rolling around in his biomechanoid horror show of a physical body.

There are many good answers Webster could have given. That was not one of them. "You are offensive to modern aesthetics" is, in addition to a shit argument in general, extremely shortsighted. Who knows how long the current aesthetic-technophobia is going to hold true for? It sounds like this is just a cultural trend born in reaction to the recent environmental disaster. People want everything to look all hippy and solarpunk, with aqua-drones designed to look like dolphins unless you're paying attention, sure. But are they still going to want that in 10 years? 20? What about the younger generation, being raised into this restored world without any firsthand memory of or aversion to the openly high-tech era that preceded it?

Webster and Dhoni explain that if Howard had had his accident nowadays instead of a couple decades ago, he'd have gotten a much better reconstruction. Modern biotechnology would allow the regrowth of most of his organs, including even the spinal cord and brain stem. He'd have a mostly-organic, mostly-human looking body, and he'd be able to live a mostly-normal life. Unfortunately, with all the cybernetic implants and modifications made to his brain, there's no way to disengage him from his new housing without killing him anymore. This is why there will never be another cyborg like Falcon; his design was a cutting edge experiment that became very quickly obsolete.

...I still have trouble believing that there were no other conversions of dying patients in those few intravening years. Very few, sure, but none at all?

Dhoni then points out that in virtual space, Falcon can actually feel and experience things as if he were an organic human again. He can have normal social interactions without people looking at him any differently than a normal person. He can play sports. He can eat food and have sex, or at least reasonably close sensory facsimiles of those things. Etc. Okay, see, THIS is the way to sell this to someone. Dhoni is actually showing better (well, less bad at least) people skills than Webster now, crazy.

Falcon says that VR is dumb and stupid, and that he'd rather they just gave him an off switch than a VR uplink. Even though his neural cybernetics would make attaching one to him the easiest thing in the world, much moreso than for a baseline human. Why does he feel this way? Because there is only one reality, that's why. Um...okay, Falcon. No one was denying that. Maybe he's just gotten so sick of humans that he doesn't relish the thought of being reunited with them in VR.

Falcon leaves the table. Webster seems to be actually mad at him for turning this down. Why is he so invested in this? No idea.

After he's gone, Dhoni and Webster talk about how this was sort of predictable, really. Webster tells her about how Falcon was disappointed when he was told they didn't have a blimp tough enough to take him into the maelstrom of Jupiter's red spot, and still claims to want to go back and do that as soon as they have a vehicle for him to use. He always wanted to throw himself against the walls of reality and test them. Even though, in this case, he's sort of denying his own personal reality.

Webster also says that at this point he's tired of giving a shit. WTF. It's really like he took this VR rejection personally. What, did he invent the VR jack himself or something? End chapter.

Opinion unchanged, so far. This is a story about human relationships and community written by people who have never gone outside. Either give me back the simps, or send Falcon back to Jupiter so he can find more space jellyfish; I suspect that these authors are much better at that type of story than this type.