If his recovery from the Queen Elizabeth IV crash twelve years ago had been traumatic for Howard Falcon, so it had been for Hope Dhoni, at the time a twenty-one-year-old trainee nurse at the old USAF hospital in Arizona to which Falcon had been rushed. She had been by far the most junior member of the team.
When he was brought in, crushed and burned, laid out on the bed’s pale green blankets, Falcon had not even looked human. Hope had spent time in inner-city emergency departments and military trauma wards, and she thought she was toughened up. She wasn’t. Not for this.
But it was Doctor Bignall, second-in-command, who had helped her through. “First of all, he’s alive. Remember that. Barely, though: his heart’s about to give up—you can see that from the monitor trace. Second of all, don’t think about what he’s lost but what he still has. His head injuries seem manageable . . .”
She could barely see the head under what remained of Falcon’s right arm.
“And that arm he threw up to protect his head might even have preserved his face. Some of it.”
She watched the team work, humans and machines, as tubes snaked into Falcon’s body. “So what’s the first priority?”
“To keep him alive. Look at him, he’s suffered well over fifty percent blood loss, his chest is wide open. We’re replacing his blood, all of it, with a cold saline solution. That will cut brain activity, stop cellular activity—”
“Suspended animation.”
“If you like. And that will give us a chance to get on with the structural stuff. A chance . . . Oh, wow, he’s in cardiac arrest. Crash team . . . !”
The structural stuff. When Falcon was stabilised, achieved essentially by shoving him into a room full of machinery that would emulate the functions of his broken body, it turned out that there was little left of him that was saveable but brain and spine—and some of his face, preserved by that flung-over arm. The good news was that was quite a lot to build on. Monitors already showed ongoing brain activity. Hope would soon learn how to tell if Falcon was asleep or awake, and she wondered which state was worse for him.
What followed, for Hope, was a rushed course in neuroinformatics. As the hours turned to days, the team worked as quickly as they could. They needed to establish a connection between what was left of Falcon and the equipment that would sustain him for the rest of his life. And that meant reading information from, and writing information to, what was left of his broken nervous system.
Sensors on prosthetic extensions to Falcon’s surviving stump of an arm were able to use his own nervous system to communicate with the brain—but for the rest of his body, his spinal column was so badly damaged that wasn’t an option. New communication pathways had to be built. So microelectrodes were lodged within Falcon’s brain—in the motor cortex area responsible for physical movement and in the somatosensory cortex, which governed the sense of touch. More sensors were placed in the lumbosacral region of his spine with a control hub to link the brain to the lower limbs. Once it was possible to transfer digital information into and out of his ruptured nervous system, a suite of prosthetic body parts was brought in and tried, one by one, each of them riddled with microsensors that communicated continually with the devices anchored to the brain and spine.
Even hastily improvised, it was an impressive feat.
Hope was able to help with the medical side. As the recovery proceeded she flashed lights into eyes of metal and gel, and pinched sensor-loaded plastic flesh, testing for sensation. She learned later that Falcon slowly became aware of this, over the days and weeks of silence inside his own head: sparks of light, dull feelings of pressure. But the first external stimulus he’d been truly aware of was a sound, a metronomic thumping that he’d believed was his own heart, but was in fact the combined rhythm of a room full of machinery.
The team had been highly motivated. They weren’t just saving a life; they were doing so using the latest techniques and technologies. Indeed, the doctors said, this case was driving the development of new techniques altogether.
Sometimes they were over-keen. One younger doctor had bragged in the canteen, “You know, this must be the most interesting trauma case since they gave up fighting wars . . .” Doctor Bignall punched the man in the mouth. If he hadn’t, Hope Dhoni would have.
And now, a dozen years later, here stood Falcon, restored.
A golden tower.
People said that in this iteration of his support gear Falcon looked a little like the old Oscar statuette. When he stood upright, there was an abstract sense of a human body rather than its literal shape: a golden, wedge-shaped torso, shapely shoulders and neck, a featureless head—featureless save for the aperture through which a partial face peered, leathery human skin exposed to the air. Artificial eyes, of course. His lower body was a single unit, shaped to suggest legs; it looked solid but was segmented to allow Falcon to bend, even to “sit” with reasonable verisimilitude. And under the “feet” was a kind of trolley riding on balloon tyres. At rest, Falcon kept his arms folded over his chest, to reassure onlookers; when deployed his arms moved with a mechanical whir of hydraulics, the motions stiff and inhuman, the hands like grabbing claws.
This was not the first model within which Falcon had been embedded. He liked to complain that he had made more human-looking snowmen as a boy . . .
Dhoni remembered when Falcon had first started to feel pain again.
Falcon couldn’t tell them he was in pain, at the time. All he could do was flicker an eyelid. He had no mouth. His tear ducts no longer functioned. But the machines told of the pain. And Hope knew.
It took two years before he could turn the page of a book unaided, with a whirr of servomotors from the single exoskeletal arm hooked up to his body. Every night of those two years, Hope Dhoni had washed Falcon’s face and wiped his brow.