by Larry Leonard  (C) 2001

   “There was a case like this in England in the first part of the twenty-first century,” said Ms. Doult.  “A young man slowly succumbed to a degenerative disease until the only moving part he had left was his left eyelid.  He communicated by blinking it.  Morse code, I imagine.  Anyway,  he told his doctors that they should pull the plug on his respirator when his eyelid stopped working.  The courts backed him up, and two weeks after the eyelid froze they threw the switch and he suffocated to death.”
   She obviously enjoyed the imagery of a man suffocating to death.  She was the paper’s editor and, Brian thought, a great argument for the return of the glass ceiling.  This was going to be a ghoulish assignment.  They’d never give it to a reporter with tenure.
   “I’m working on a piece about the collapse of Islamic terrorism during that same era,” he said with little hope.  “It led to the rise of capitalism and western-style government in all the Islamic theocracies, straightened out their justice systems, fed their people and freed women from millennia of oppression.”
   “Sturgis does that sort of thing for us, Brian,” she said through those narrow, straight lips.  “He has a Masters in history.”
   Brian shifted uncomfortably in the hard-backed chair.  It was supposed to be an antique from an era when people were shorter, but he suspected that she had had it built to her own specifications and finished in a way that made it look old.  Its legs were half a foot shorter than a standard chair, so he had to look at her through his knees, like a child.
   “But,” he said, “I have located an unimpeachable source that reveals the true death of Osama bin Ladin!  When the American Special Forces entered his cave, he shaved his beard and mustache off, then dressed up like an Arab woman, right up to the veil.  They treated him with respect and gave him transport in an army truck to an Afghan village.  The local fundamentalist Moslems, having observed a woman in the company of men without her husband, executed him for adultery.”
   She peered at him over the rims of her half-glasses.
   “What’s the source?” she asked.  There was a slight hiss to her voice when she said it.  A picture of a poised King Cobra came to Brian’s mind.  He swallowed.
   “A transcript from a Rush Limbaugh program?” he answered.
   She actually growled.  A growling snake.  It was hideous.  Frightening.
   “Get out of here.” she said in her quiet, deadly snake voice.
   He got.

   “Whatcha workin’ on?” Sturgis said amiably.  Brian hated amiable people.
   “A project for the Sunday science page,” he replied in a tone that contained no taint of emotion.  He said it as if he was replying to a question about shoelaces.  It didn’t save him.
   “That sounds neat,” said Sturgis in his irritating down home accent.  “What’s it about?”
   Brian looked up from the research material on his desk.  Sturgis was wearing his usual classic newspaper uniform.  Baggy, wrinkled pants, green shirt with vertical orange stripes, suspenders, green and orange tie.  Perched on his nose were the usual goggle-like, small round glasses.  With his hair parted in the middle, he looked like a cross between Oscar Wilde and Triceratops upchuck, only lumpier.
   “It’s about the Asimov man,” he admitted with some difficulty.
   Sturgis laughed amiably.  “Oh, you ended up with that one, did you?”  He slapped his thigh like a corn farmer at a county fair.  “I used to get those when I was a yonker.  Hoo hee.  The Eyeball, huh?  Well, good luck, son.”
   He walked away, chuckling. 
   “Don’t pay any attention to him,” said a soft voice at the next desk.  Miss Fetching. Amply endowed, but minus a brain, she belonged in broadcasting, not a newspaper.  They hadn’t had an affair, yet.
   “Yeah,” he said, and went back to his research.

   The Asimov Man had once been a human.  He had been born in the normal way a hundred and fifty years earlier.  As his life progressed, he developed a series of terrible diseases at just the right time for medical science to come up with the “cure.”  The quotes around that word are the key to understanding the situation, because being at the leading edge of medical science means that the solution applied is the earliest application developed.  Although lucky in the respect that he was still alive, the Asimov man was a collection of initial breakthroughs.  The first application of this drug, or that therapy.  The first to get this mechanical implant type.  He was, in a word, an experimental human. 

   The Oregon State Health Sciences University was an imposing edifice.  Architecturally begun when Greek and Roman influences obtained, it had fluted stone columns at the entry.  Half a century later when it was expanded, cost was a factor, so the wings were similar to mid-twentieth-century Soviet design – great slabs of concrete with bureaucratic beehive windows set back in dark recesses.  The latest expansion was based on the new architecture, which utilized weight-saving, space-age materials, and with its spirals, arches and towers made the facility look like somebody had set the Disneyland castle on top of a Parthenon whose wings had been built by a stonemason named Svetlana.
   Having once visited the home of Thomas Jefferson, The Hermitage, which also was developed in an evolutionary style frenzy, he called the hospital The Regurgitive.
   “May I help you, sir?” said the female voice of the lobby computer.
   “I’m from the newspaper,” he responded.  “I’m interviewing the eye—the Asimov Man.”
   “That will be level seven in Prosthetics.  Please check in at the nurse’s station.”
   Prosthetics had once meant hooks and wooden legs.  These days it meant genetic biological replacements and solid state micro-engineering.  When he stepped off the elevator, the nurse at the desk looked up at him.  She was three-quarters flesh-colored titanium.  Only her head was real.
   “You’re the reporter?” she asked.  He nodded, swallowing.  His eyes shifted from side to side, scanning the premises for any other monsters that might be lurking about. 

   “Good day, Brian,” said the eyeball.
   The titanium nurse had ushered him into a darkened room.  At the center was a cylindrical tank perhaps six feet tall and a yard in diameter.  It was filled with a pale blue liquid.  Silvery bubbles originated from a tube at the bottom, and floated in a steady stream upwards to the surface of the liquid, some ten inches from the top of the cylinder.
   “Hello, uh, sir,” said Brian.  It was generally assumed that the Asimov Man was male, but there was no way to tell.  The creature – he couldn’t help but think of it as that – consisted of crystalline structures linked with ribbons like the ones that connect the components of a computer.  There were devices like pumps encased in clear plastic, their components doing some job or other in a rhythmic fashion.  Colored  tubes entwined like spiderweb strands, going here and there, delivering oxygen or fluids from one cluster of artificial organs to the next. 
   The first thing that struck him, though, was that it wasn’t just an eyeball.  It was half a human brain and an eyeball.
   “Uh, how’s it going?” he said, stupidly.
   The laughter that emanated from wall speakers stunned him. 
 “Thank you,” the speakers said, after the laughter descended to chuckles and ended with a giggle.  “I needed that.”
   “How do you do that?” said Brian.  “Speak, I mean?”
   “Aha!  The reporter in you coming out!  It’s as if there were two evolutionary branches of Man.  One gave us the lizard brain and the other, reporters.”
   “That’s unfair,” Brian said.
   “Comparing reporters to lizards?” asked the voice.
   “Yes,” said Brian.  “It’s unfair to lizards.”
   The speakers crackled with more laughter, and Brian joined in.  He saw a chair in the gloom, now that his eyes had adjusted.  It had a little table next to it.
   “With your permission?” he said, pointing at the chair.
   “Please,” said the voice.
   Brian sat down, brought out his notepad and the fine felt tip pen he preferred to use during interviews.  He glanced up.  The eye had swiveled a bit to look down at him.  “God, but it must be awful,” he heard himself saying.  His face flushed with shame.  That had been an unforgiveably insensitive thing to say.
   “Sometimes,” said the voice, agreeably. .  “It was a lot worse before they solved the body image problem.  You know, people who lose an arm having terrible pain in the phantom arm.  I was about half gone before they found the second, lizard visual system, that caused it, speaking of lizards.”
   Once more, the reporter took over in Brian.  “I did some research on this.  I saw a California doctor with a mirror box.  The guy with one hand stuck it in the box, and the mirror provided his other hand.  The one that was missing.  He flexed and unflexed the good hand, and watched the mirror image flex and unflex.  The pain went away in the phantom hand.  Is that it?”
   “I wish I could nod,” said the voice.  “Yeah, that’s it.  The brain forms a body image and when part of it disappears a vital neural area thinks it is still there even though everywhere else in your thinkpot knows it’s gone.  Amazing stuff.”
   “You talk in really long sentences, sometimes,” observed Brian.
   “I don’t have to stop to take a breath,” said the voice.  “I could sing an opera without a break.”
   “Is there an opera about a one-eyed half brain in a plastic tube?” said Brian.
   “There must be at least one opera about a politician,” said the voice.
   The titanium nurse, hearing laughter again, peered at her monitor.  All seemed well.  She picked up her screwdriver and began to replace her thumb with a newer model that didn’t click when you bent it.  She was going to spend the weekend with a carpet cleaner and didn’t want any minor sounds distracting them from the main event.

   Brian gave Sturgis a hug when he returned to the newspaper office.  He asked Miss Fetching for a dinner date, then without waiting for her answer, walked into Ms. Doult’s office without knocking.  Her eyes appeared from beneath snake eyelids and targeted him.  He suddenly wished she would open her mouth when she spoke so that he could see if she had a forked tongue.
   “I had a great time,” he said, sitting down in the wooden chair and putting his feet up on her desk.  “Thanks for that assignment.”
   “I didn’t send you there to have a great time,” said the snake.
   “I know,” Brian replied cheerfully, “but it’s too late. I really like the guy.  When they finally come up with a body for him, we're going to start our own newspaper and run you out of business.  What’s for lunch, a live rabbit?  I want to watch your jaws disconnect when you swallow it.” 

 (C) 2002 Larry Leonard