Augment Nation

AUGMENT

NATION

SCOTT OVERTON

No Walls Publishing

SUDBURY, ONTARIO, CANADA

Copyright © 2022 by S.G. Overton

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

Scott Overton/No Walls Publishing

Sudbury, Ontario, Canada

www.scottoverton.ca

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Book Layout © 2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

Augment Nation/ Scott Overton -- 1st ed.

ISBN 978-1-7774308-9-4

To my children.

I’ve tried to teach you to live your dreams. Thanks for taking that message to heart, and for respecting mine.

Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain.

― Corneliu E. Giurgea

The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

―john milton

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.

BOOK ONE

August 12, 2031

Patient Name:  David Allen Leiter

Age:   14      Sex: M

Next of Kin: Astrid Leiter (mother)

Medical History:   No relevant history

Preoperative Diagnosis:   Broad-spectrum agnosia secondary to severe cerebral trauma incurred in a vehicular collision.

Investigations:   Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scan of head. Right-parietal craniotomy, left-parietal craniotomy, and occipital craniotomy for purpose of implanting electrodes for a brain-computer interface (BCI), and for implantation of a combination BCI and digital storage device known as the Taggart BCID. Intra-operative assessment of functioning of the BCID.

Anaesthesia: Monitored anaesthesia care with local anaesthesia(Marcaine and lidocaine). IV sedative.

Complications: None

Detailed Procedure Description: The scalp was shaved and scrubbed; sterile sheets placed. The patient was prepped with Betadine and a Leksell frame was mounted. Incisions were made and burr holes drilled along the parietal bossings, the sagittal suture, and the lambdoid suture. The skull was opened, and three large contiguous sections removed. The dura was cauterized. For each electrode array implantation, microelectrode recording was done, target cells identified, then a deep brain electrode (DBE) connected to the BCID was planted on target in the cortex and tested. Multiple high-density micro-electrode arrays were implanted (see attached appendix A for type, number, and detailed placement). The BCID unit was attached to the underside of the parietal bone flaps using titanium screws. External ventricular drainage (EVD) and a brain pressure monitor system were positioned.  Saline irrigation was used, and the dura sutured closed with Vicryl mesh. Parietal and occipital bone flaps were replaced and secured with plates and screws. The skin was closed with common poliglecaprone sutures.

Cerebral pressure was monitored to note any increased pressure from either surgical manipulation or the BCID, but the device is very thin (see appendix B for device specifications).

Leksell frame was removed and patient was transferred to the post-operative area in stable condition. His vital
signs were monitored and within normal parameters. The patient reported no pain or discomfort.

V. A. Klug, MD

per Emery R. Taggart, MD

Image:   A thick vertical line with a shorter horizontal line across it about three-quarters of the way to the top. Something in David’s mind supplies the word cross. He doesn’t hear the word, or truly see it, but he becomes aware of it somehow. Then a shape is in front of the cross: a human shape, a man shape. David’s eyes look at the top of the figure and his brain says the word face. As David tries to make sense of the image, there comes a sound. The man on the cross is speaking to him. He says:

Hello David. I’m Doctor Taggart, the surgeon who installed your implant. How are you feeling?

David’s eyes began to focus. An impression of lifeless green paint and sterility. A hospital room, then—he could see the corner where the far wall met the ceiling. Halfway down the wall was a big rectangular …something like a window that reflected stuff. [A mirror.] The cross was a reflection in the mirror.

That was it. He was lying in a hospital bed with a mirror on the opposite wall. The cross must be above the bed, and he could see its reflection. There were strange shapes on either side of it, with blinking lights and screens. But the man wasn’t in the reflection. He was standing in front of it, at the end of the bed, obscuring most of the cross.

David’s voice didn’t work right away—his throat felt tight and dry. Sore, too. He tried to clear it, but someone placed a container with a drinking straw in his hand and he took a few sips. Just water. He tried to speak again and managed to say, I’m OK.

"Great. That’s good to hear. Don’t worry that you don’t remember me. You had agnosia—do you remember what that is? Including prosopagnosia. So, we’ve met—lots of times—but you haven't been able to recognize my face from one time to the next. You remember my voice, though, right?"

David nodded. He groggily tried to concentrate on the man’s features and more words appeared in his awareness: [Emery Rueld Taggart, MD]. He was pretty sure he’d never known Dr. Taggart’s other names before. He liked the face, though. What he could see of it above a blue cloth mask. It was a strong face with bushy eyebrows and blue eyes alive with interest. Dr. Taggart, he said.

That’s right, David. Your surgery’s over and it went really well. You should heal without any problems, just like I promised, although it'll take a while for your hair to grow back. Smile wrinkles above his mask showed Dr. Taggart was trying to be chummy, but he wasn’t very good at it. And if everything’s working the way it’s supposed to, your implant should already be helping you identify the things you see. Faces too. Is that happening?

David nodded and sipped more water. Yes, he said. There are words. They just…they just….

Just come to you? That’s right. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Signals from the implant are actually sent right to the vision centers of your brain and in a form your brain can recognize, but they’re not images exactly. We’re pretty sure you’ll be able to learn how to store whole images in your implant’s memory, but that could take some time and it’s not critical right now. The most important thing is that your implant identifies what you’re seeing and tells you what it is. OK? David grunted agreement. Great. So, are you ready to look at some pictures? The doctor took silence as consent and held up a square of paper in his gloved hands.

[Paper. Picture.]

It’s paper, David said. A picture on paper.

Yes, but what’s it a picture of?

No new words came to David’s mind.

OK, I knew this might happen. Not a problem. Taggart gave a half nod to someone else in the room. David tried to turn his head to see who it was but found he couldn’t, and that it hurt to try. He moved his eyes instead and ignored the ache from that. He could just barely see two other man-shapes a few feet away. He looked at their faces, but his mind said [unknown—unknown].

"The implant is analysing the object too literally. David. Now, here are some pictures of things. I need you to look at the pictures and try to imagine the real things they represent—make a kind of new image in your mind of the real objects. Can you do that? He waited for David’s shrug and then held up the page again. OK, what’s this a picture of?"

There were straight lines and some of the spaces between the lines were shaded. It looked like something he knew. There was a word for it.

Box. It’s a box.

Very good. How about this one?

"A … pyramid?" Was that right? It looked like two triangles pushed together. Pyramids were in Egypt. With sand, and mummies, and burning sun.

That’s right. Good, good. OK, let’s try something a little more complicated.

Green and brown. Thick line below, wide convoluted shape on top.

A tree.

"Good. This one?

Rectangular. Red. Round shapes underneath.

A car.

Excell….

2025 Honda Accord.

Taggart laughed. Even better. We weren’t sure how much orientation would be required for the implant to provide more detail. Apparently not much. He held up another picture.

It’s a dog. A Labrador retriever. Dr. Taggart, my brain already told me your name when I looked at your face. Do we have to look at kindergarten pictures?

Fair enough. We can let it go for now. You’re probably still tired. He gave a little shrug to the other men, but the show of sympathy didn’t disguise his impatience.

How come I know your name, but not these other people?

"Well, we put my face into your implant’s database as a reference, along with thousands of other well-known and historical people, and tens of thousands of objects. But your implant is supposed to learn new faces and objects you encounter by storing new images and their identifying data as you learn it. This is Dr. Robert Burke, and Mark Phelps, a graduate student. I guess you can’t actually see much of our faces with our masks on, but they’re for your protection."

My implant takes pictures? Through my eyes?

No. It records the signals that pass from your retina along the optic nerve and encodes those signals for storage so they can be faithfully reproduced. That way, when that data is recalled from the implant, your brain processes it the same way it would process fresh data from your eyes. That requires much less storage space, and your brain accepts the information more readily. But maybe that’s enough questions for now. You should rest again, David.

Just then someone else came into the room. A woman. Long, straight black hair around a small face with large eyes and long eyelashes (but his head didn’t supply a name). About the same age as David’s grade-eight teacher, Miss Simon. This woman was on the skinny side, but she had an attractive sway to her walk; and David’s teenaged eyes locked onto her large breasts. She was pretty. Very pretty.

Suddenly the men were laughing.

Look at that reaction! Mark Phelps was watching something going on behind David’s head. Look at the EEG. And the blood flow from the thalamus across the cortex. I’d say you’re a hit with this young fella, Doc. He turned to the woman, who blushed, started to say something, then just looked down at the clipboard in her hands.

David was mortified. How did they know what he was thinking? How could he make it stop? He screwed his eyes tightly shut and gave an involuntary shudder.

I think perhaps we should all leave David alone to get some more rest. Taggart sounded annoyed. Especially you, Doctor.

David listened to them walk from the room and felt wetness on his cheek.

  #   

Image: Same reflective surface [mirror] but with a different shape in front of it. Round, but with a short, thick trunk below, spreading into a broader box-like shape. The top part [face] has features: two beside each other [eyes], two others below [nose and mouth], two others, one on each side [ears]. Familiar features [identified in database: David Allen Leiter, features reversed].

David was glad that he was now allowed out of bed for short periods, even if he couldn’t leave the ICU room yet. He stood looking into the mirror, that he now knew to be the mirrored side of an observation window and wondered if anyone was looking back.

There was reason to believe that the reflection he saw was his own face, but he couldn’t really sense that. There was no ultimate recognition, only the data readout from his implant, and the fact that the eyes in the reflection winked when he commanded his own to do so. That could be a trick, but he knew it was pretty unlikely.

His reflected face was very different from the faces of Dr. Taggart and the other men. It took him a moment to realize the difference had to do with the top of the head. Something missing. [Hair]. Yes. The head in the mirror was bald. Of course. They would have shaved his head to perform the surgery. He tipped his head forward a little and looked at the ragged tracery of dark pink lines over the top of it [stitches]. Was there a pattern to them? Were they shaped like continents? A simple map of the mind beneath? He had a vague recollection of continents, though he wouldn’t have been able to identify any without assistance.

What about the brain under that mapwork of lines? How had it changed? It had been probed and prodded, punctured and poked. It also had artificial electrical leads imitating neuronic pathways, and a wafer-thin computer laid overtop, but not separate—not anymore. The implant was wired right in with dozens of connections, some to receive input, some to give output. Did that make his brain an alien thing?

Was he even still human?

He tried to picture the head with hair—could his implant supply that by superimposing a stored image of himself with the current one coming from his eyes? The implant was supposed to act automatically, but it was a kind of computer. Maybe there was a way to give it commands. For this, he would need to picture a mirror image, like the one he was looking at, maybe from brushing his teeth at bedtime or something like that. He tried thinking the command, then saying it out loud, but neither produced any effect. Then he simply concentrated on his name and tried to evoke a sense of the past. A shadow flitted over the reflection—features flickered slightly—but the changes wouldn’t stay. That would take practice, apparently. Well, he had nothing else to do.

He pulled his head back and rocked it, raising his arms in the beginning of a yawning stretch, and then a combination of images tweaked at his brain. He was seeing the reflection of his head and arms, he knew, but there were straight lines extending beyond them, upward and to the left and right.

The cross. He was standing in front of its reflection. Something about the montage made him shiver.

#

There came a time when David was finally allowed to return home. Yet his home's familiarity was tainted somehow, as if overlaid with a new reality. Every token of the past was, at the same time, a reminder of how much his life had changed.

Whenever he tried to remember his accident or the months after it, David could only retrieve bits and pieces. Fragments. Isolated moments. That was wet memory. Neuron memory. Only strong impressions were moved into storage, along with some of the facts he was told after the event.

His mother had been driving. David had missed the bus and was going to be late for school. Mother was cursing under her breath at a traffic light, and when she saw the signal for the cross-street turn red, she started forward without waiting for her green. A furniture truck from the other direction ran the red light. David only had time to register a looming shadow and a howl of brakes before the world crashed in on him.

Their Toyota rolled. He remembered his head banging against something hard, more than once. Other noises didn’t catch up until the crumpled car came to a stop. Then he was assaulted by sound: screams, sirens, saws. Odors that he vaguely associated with animals. He could never remember any pain, only a detached sense that this was what it was like to die.

He'd spent months in the hospital, and only a few weeks at home before they got the call from Dr. Taggart’s clinic. Those had been frightening months; he remembered that much. Every so often someone would walk into his view with his mother’s soft voice, or his aunt Jenny’s cackle, or the bored drone of Dr. Strong, the doctor assigned to him in the hospital. But it wasn’t them, so he didn’t respond, waiting for the real people to show up. The impostor-doctor told him his brain was just tricking him—it had been hurt in the accident and it couldn’t connect faces he saw with the memories of the people he’d known. Or objects either. A nurse would tell him she’d put a glass of water on the bedside table, but David could never find it on his own. He couldn’t remember what a table looked like.

He learned to recognize his mother’s smell and touch, and that would make it OK for a while. But each time a stranger would come into his room and smell like his mother, he was surprised and suspicious.

It was just as hopeless for him when he was able to go home. He couldn’t accomplish anything. Everything he wanted to do required some thing that he could never find on his own. One day, they got a call from Dr. Taggart’s office, and were told about radical experimental surgery that might cure the agnosia. The doctors warned his mother time and again that the surgery was risky, but her response was always to ask another question, as if she couldn’t recognize words of caution, like David couldn’t recognize faces.

Yet, after all, that surgery had worked.

It had left him altered; something new had been added to his original body, to his very brain. That made him a new person, didn’t it? David Leiter reborn?

At fourteen, like most people, he couldn’t remember his early childhood struggles with language such as pre-school efforts to read: painstakingly learning each letter one-at-a-time, then words, then sentences. Heck, babies had to learn a name for each new object they discovered—every single thing in their world. Did they get frustrated? Now, feeling like a baby in a teenaged body, David certainly did. His implant supplied the names, but there was always a slight lag—perhaps only microseconds, but surely more than his real brain had needed. It was the interface: one brain (computer) needing to pass information to another brain (flesh). He could only trust Taggart’s promise that the process would get faster, until he wouldn’t notice it.

During the long weeks of rehabilitation in the hospital, Taggart also promised that David would discover lots of other benefits from the implant over time; but for the first few months back home, the terrible drawbacks of the surgery outweighed everything else.

He’d always loved sports and was gifted at hockey—had even dreamed of an NHL career. No longer. Contact sports involved too much risk to his implant and his now-more-vulnerable brain.

His coach suggested he try cycling. David found he liked the speed, the freedom of the open road, and the wind in his face. Competing in the sport would be too risky, and he constantly had to remind himself to slow down; but thanks to a special, oversized helmet, he was able to convince his mother to let him ride for fun.

Then the world threw another block into the road.

His mother had always been a shopper, compulsively acquisitive. She blamed it on a deprived youth. Never able to have the things she wanted then, she was determined to make up for it as an adult. Maybe that was part of the reason his father had left them when David was just five. A bargain, to her, was like a rabbit to an eagle; but when she found a great deal, she always bought too much. Their small home was a warehouse of the unnecessary, everything largely bought on credit, since his mother's desires were far greater than the income from the housekeeping and retail jobs that were the only kind she could get.

If David’s brain-implant surgery hadn’t been part of a fully funded research study, he would never have been able to receive treatment for his condition. Even the hospital stay afterward would have been far beyond his mother’s means. He was grateful that his affliction and its cure were not the cause of her financial troubles.

Even so, she wasn’t the only architect of her downfall.

When hackers looted the database of the Treasure Trove rewards program, they stole Astrid Leiter’s identity. Long before the company saw fit to alert their members, her meager savings had been cleaned out and her credit rating trashed. Though she went to court to clear her name and her credit record, the case dragged on for years, and the last of David’s time at home was spent dirt-poor. There was no money for a decent bicycle. No money for dreams.

David overheard his mother’s lawyer say that he half-suspected the ad company behind the rewards program of engineering the identity thefts themselves with a fake computer attack for cover.

David never forgot that.

Lack of money was only one of the reasons that the teenage years of David Allen Leiter were a time spent longing to escape. So, four years later, when his enhanced abilities helped him earn a lucrative scholarship to university, and the move gave him an opportunity for a new identity, he wasted no time shedding his old name and the painful shell it had come to describe. Daemon was a term from programming class; in a broad definition it described an agent that was part of a greater undertaking but worked in the background. Under the radar. David liked that. There was something attractively subversive about it. But to use Demon or even Daemon as a name would only have invited a new ostracism, so he became Damon. Close enough.

His mother still called him David, not understanding that his David years were years of loneliness and exclusion, of ridicule and sometimes even torment. Who wouldn’t want to leave that behind?

#

Image:   A wide-open space populated by figures moving chaotically through it. At first glance they seem to be evenly, if randomly, distributed. Then, as time passes, it becomes clear that almost all the figures are linked somehow, part of a nearly cohesive whole. But they are seen from the outside, from the perspective of one who is not part of that whole. Isolated. Isolated and alone.

When he first got his implant, David fantasized that it made him like a superhero, with special powers beyond those of ordinary people. Dr. Taggart had been right: it did much more than just help him identify objects and faces. Nearly every week he learned a new trick, especially once Taggart’s team began to provide firmware updates that he could download on his computer and transfer to his implant via Bluetooth. The implant's combination of flesh and graphene circuitry produced some brilliant results. He would need that advantage.

The day he entered high school was a month after the term had started. His mother cooked scrambled eggs, sausages, and hash-brown patties for breakfast—his favourites. That confirmed his fears: he was screwed.

In high school, special was not something you wanted to be. To his new classmates, he was a target: a shrimp who started classes a month late and was nearly bald, with only a layer of fuzz covering a quiltwork of pink scars over his head. Dismayed at their reaction, David tried wearing a wig—only once. It was cuffed from his head and trampled into the schoolyard dirt within minutes of his arrival. He didn’t even pick it up.

Before three more days passed, he was beaten up for the first time. A big kid named Thorne and his circle of sycophants chose David for special attention and would corner him whenever the chance presented itself. He quickly learned to avoid wandering off on his own in the schoolyard, but that didn’t help much, and the beatings continued