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IN HARDCOVER
AUGMENT NATION
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RECOVERY AND REHABILITATION September 3, 2040
Memorial Hospital Trauma Center, Surgical Critical Care Unit—Fifth Floor:
Damon Leiter looked down over his broken body and understood that the course of his life had become defined by two things:
The computer implants in his head had undergone a hard reset.
And he was going to have to rely on his organic brain to figure out who’d tried to kill him.
The implants were still functioning—he could feel them—unless it was an illusion, like phantom limbs after an amputation. Data from the past forty-eight hours should have flowed back into his conscious awareness a few minutes after such a reset. That’s what he’d been told—but it had never happened before, should never have happened. He checked for the presence of long-stored data, like a tongue probing a tooth. Yes, older data was still there. He took a mental sniff: there was lots of wifi and white-fi in the area—the stale, rusty smell of older, slower frequencies probably installed five years ago, but also the ozone-sharp scent of the newest vintage. That made sense. He was in a hospital room, and there was probably a well-connected nursing station nearby.
Like a human brain, his implants had a buffer to hold new data for a time before it was sorted by importance for long-term storage. Maybe the buffer had been damaged; although a strong power flux from a hard impact could have wiped it. A basic diagnostic scan didn’t show any lasting malfunction, just a blank where the past forty-eight hours should be. No digital memory of those two days at all. That was a problem.
He turned his eyes to the far wall with its flat, pastel-green paint. Shouldn’t there be a mirror there? A window to the left? Vid screen hanging in the high corner to the right? No. That was another hospital room, fifteen years ago. Strange that the old memory was so vivid. He relaxed and let his eyes lose focus. He didn’t want old memories—he needed the fresh stuff of the past two days, and plenty of it. Real memory was a capricious thing, like the still surface of a pond—touch it wrong and the ripples would distort the image it reflected beyond recognition. It was doubtful that he’d actually find the details he needed there or be able to fully trust the ones that did arise, but it might give him a place to start.
At first nothing came. Then he felt the room lurch into a spin and his muscles jerked and snapped like a string of firecrackers tossed on the ground. He groaned and arched with a bright swell of agony, and dimly heard an alarm go off from some equipment behind him. Nurses would soon come running.
No good. Pushed to revisit the moment of near-death, his brain relived only the trauma without revealing peripheral details. Or, fear and confusion had simply never allowed those elements to register in his mind in the first place.
He was badly broken, but he’d survived. To stay alive, he’d need to know who had tried to kill him, and how urgently they would try again.
There was no way to determine that with the information from his biological neurons alone, but it was clear that he wouldn’t be leaving the hospital bed any time soon. He might as well use the time to search his digital archives.
How far back should he look? Through nine years of data? To those early days he’d rather forget, when he was the boy David and not yet the man who’d become Damon? Could he even be sure the identity of his would-be murderer was there to be found, in the sensate library of his life?
It had to be. He had to trust that there’d be a clue somewhere in the shades of his past.
He closed his eyes and pictured an accordion string of images: a photo album stretching far off to an obscure horizon. And then he sent his mind hurtling along it.
* * *
