The Medusa Chronicles Read Online Free PDF

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.

5
    Webster called them back to the table for the drinks.
    This time Falcon sat down, or at least folded down his undercarriage.
    Dhoni said in a rush, “I know there’s every chance I won’t see you again any time soon, Commander—”
    â€œHoward.”
    â€œHoward. I do recall you got out of that clinic as fast as you could—how did Doctor Bignall put it? ‘Like a delinquent kid who’s finally old enough to steal a car.’”
    Webster barked laughter. “That’s you, Howard.”
    â€œBut I would urge you to come in for regular checks, refurbs and upgrades to your prosthetics—and medical attention to your human core. But while we’re here,” she said