quantum prosthetics

7/30/2019 Quantum Prosthetics

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Quantum Prosthetics

By Jason Fink

CHAPTER 1

Surprisingly enough, the Singularity didn't start with the

internet. It started with an amputee.

And his name was Dack.

Once upon a time, Dack was born. He slid into the world

with a minimum of fuss, for which his mother was exceedingly

grateful. He was a he and not a she, not an it, not at all

confused by anything but the cold bright air that pounced on him

suddenly. He cried a bit, sucked a bit, pooped a bit. Before

long, he was off to a university.

The middle bits were unimportant, really. So was the

university where he’d decided to go, and eventually went. The

university would have most likely been fairly unimportant as

well, except that’s where he lost his hand.

Not that he actually lost it. He knew perfectly well where

it had gotten off to, not that he’d had any say in the matter.

His hand had meandered off one evening while the rest of his

body had been doing the overly-hormonal boy thing, that is to

say showing off for some girls in the hopes of getting laid.

The problem with hormones and boys and girls and sleepless

nights spent trying to prove that they were deep and meaningful

by calling it themselves Dawn Patrol and spinning some tale

about how meaningful the sea is and adding alcohol to the mix;

the problem, one might say, is that in this mix there lies a

great abundance of stupidity.

And lo, did Dack drink of the never ending flagon of

temporary idiocy, and he found it good. For a moment at least.



He was very pleased with himself for having found a way to scale

a razor-wire topped fence so that he could get to the other side

and let the aforementioned girls (and, truth be told, boys who

had happened to also want to be a part of the late night overly

hormonal Dawn Patrol stupid fest) let the minor horde of people

he called friends into the fenced-off outdoor pool for a bit of

skinny dipping.

He was counting on debauchery and he was counting on being

thought of as impressive and he was counting on one of the girls

(and there was one particular girl, though, truth again be told,

he knew that she was a woman) to have decided that she would

drink from the Flagon of Idiocy and choose him.

What he wasn’t counting on was, upon reaching the top of

the aforementioned razor-wire was the likelihood that he might

slip. And, of course, he did slip.

This was not how he lost his hand.

This was, however, how the girl (woman, his mind prodded)

decided to drink from the Flagon of Stupidity and perhaps help

Dack, who had fallen and twisted his ankle but still managed to

let the minor horde of people who he knew of as friends into the

pool area. He had done so without much complaint but with an

overly exaggerated limp, and this woman had decided to stay by

poor brave, foolhardy Dack’s side and help nurse his bruised

ankle and not-as-bruised ego.

This was where Dack and Jova met and where the first spark

of love embered up and would most likely have blossomed into the

heat of sex fire if the guard dogs that no one had really

noticed had not chosen to show up right about then. Not that

the dogs had actually done the choosing, it was the owner and

manager of the apartment complex who, tired of college kids

breaking into and using the pool of his swanky apartment complex

that was filled with tenants who liked to swagger and use words



like filthy to mean something was fantastic, and using the pool

without asking. The manager had decided to take what he thought

would be the next logical step and buy a six-pack of Doberman

Pinschers in order to chase off the previously written about

college students. The manager had assumed that the man he had

purchased the canines from, a man whose van was not entirely

dilapidated and who had not smelled as unwashed as he looked,

the manager had assumed that this man would have given the

animals a proper vetting and proper training and kept them up on

their shots and vet visits. The manager suspected that this may

not be the case when, after paying the man what seemed like an

all-too-reasonable fee, when the man shouted something about the

dogs being his problem now and then slammed the door of the not-

overly dilapidated van and drove off leaving the smell of rubber

lingering in the air.

The manager realized that the dogs were indeed his problem

now and he decided to use them to make the dogs the kid’s

problem. He did so in a flourishy manner that was the violent

equivalent of waving a cane and yelling “Get off my lawn!” Only

this time the lawn was a pool and the cane was a half dozen

Doberman Pinschers with anger control issues, issues that, to

the manager’s credit, were being addressed in weekly therapy

sessions. Since dog therapy is a thing now. Though it wasn’t

once, and life was probably better for it.

The beasts charged slaveringly into the hoard of college

kids, and they were all jumpy and bitey and growly and barky and

slobbery and other words that end with a y. There was a panic

and an elevated potential for danger that ensued, with college

students who had all drunk form the Goblet of… actually it was

probably due more to the tequila and adrenalin at that point

with college kids who ran around and yelled and screamed and

generally made a nuisance of themselves.



One of these dogs, the slobbery viscous dogs, had decided

to charge at Jova. Perhaps it was because she appeared

especially tasty, perhaps it was because she wasn’t moving at

all, no one really could tell except the dog and the dog really

can’t tell. It can speak, but that’s more of a bark and less of

a Hi-how-are-you-let-me-tell-you-how-my-day-is type of thing.

Whatever the reason, the dog ran at Jova, mouth agape with shiny

sharpish teeth (they were actually more sharp than sharp-ish,

but Jova was hoping that they were more on the ish side. They

weren’t).

So Dack decided to follow the whole chivalrous route and

shove his arm in the dog’s mouth

No, not that arm. Not yet.

Dack decided to shove his arm in the dog’s mouth and the

dog, rather than clamping down hard, then whipping its head

around and latching on until the proper Dutch word was spoken

after which it would release, the dog gnawed ever so lightly

then released Dack’s forearm. It then pulled off an amazing

downward dog as if it had been born into the pose, and wagged

its stump of a tail.

Dack then realized that the dogs just wanted to play and he

said as much to his friends and what was once a chaos of panic

was now a chaos of college kids finding themselves surrounded

with giant puppies who wanted to jump and run and play tug-of-

war and who partook in the skinny dipping as well. As much as a

dog can dip with the skinny, there was no shaving involved so

the fur stayed on.

And Jova kissed Dack and it was good. Dack was exceedingly

happy as his plan worked out much better than he had hoped for

as he sat on the chaise lounge with Jova while they were what

some would call snogging, other call kissing, others making out

and still others macking, and they were both glad that they’d



been a little bit stupid. Jova leaned her head into Dack’s

shoulder while Dack leaned over and slightly back, bracing his

body by putting his left hand onto the glass side table.

Yes, this is where and when it happened. While Jova’s face

was deciding to be silly and bury itself in Dack’s right armpit,

a clean armpit, Dack had made sure, and while her head was

buried he could smell the jasmine scent of her shampoo.

That was all he really remembered, except for the searing

pain of course.

He was later told that his hand was now a part of the

permanent tilework of the pool. He was also told that a stray

rivet had worked its way out of a jumbo jet, one of the new ones

that every major airline wanted, and this rivet that had worked

its way out at twenty-thousand feet had decided to drop onto

Dack’s hand. There was some slight exploding-like action, but,

miraculously enough, only the hand and the glass table were

destroyed, though there was some significant damage to the

poolside cement.

And to be fair, it wasn’t just the left hand that was gone,

it was also three-fourths of Dack’s left forearm.

CHAPTER 2

There were settlements and apologies and denials and people

taking the law entirely too seriously. Dack didn't sweat it

since he was an easy-going dude. This was how he was always

introduced by his friends and compatriots "This is Dack- he's an

easy-going dude." He was happy with the end result of the

courty and legalish things. He wound up not really having to

worry about cash money for the rest of his life. That and he



got free first class trips anywhere in the world for the rest of

his livelong days.

Jova happened to receive this benefit as well, since the

airline folk didn't want her to claim emotional distress and had

preemptively offered it to her as well. She would probably never

had done anything in the lawsuit arena since she was such an

easy-going chica. This was how her friends introduced her "This

is Jova - she's an easy-going chica." She took the proffered

lifetime tickets while smiling and saying thank you.

The two sets of tickets proved most beneficial to their

relationship. Now that there was a relationship. Because there

was. It went a little more slowly after that night, since

neither one of them wanted to rush things nor did they want to

anger the airplane rivet gods again.

Jova showed up to help Dack through recovery bringing him

pudding, and he never told her he wasn't fond of pudding because

he was fond of her, and he would read to her, and she never told

him she did not like being read to because she was fond of him,

and they smiled and flirted and eventually decided to risk

angering the rivet gods. So they did the whole snog-kiss-make-

out-mack thing which eventually turned into sex.

No one lost any appendages.

They were not unhappy about this.

So their relationship bloomed and blossomed like a deep

fried onion flower. Each month they chose a new location to

explore. They would fly out on Friday and return on Sunday, no

matter how far the location was, and these locations were chosen

via spinning-globe-and-dart method which nearly caused another

lost appendage or two. Though it did not. At times they wound

up in such places as exciting as Tacoma, sometimes it was in

more boring and mundane locales as Vanuatu or Oman or Argentina.

They were always back in time for class on Monday.



They could do this because of the aforementioned tickets.

And since it was aforementioned, it won’t be mentioned again.

Except to say that it is easy to keep up a fun and exciting

relationship with someone when both are easy-going and can, as a

unit, tango in Tangiers, skydive in São Paolo, and ride the

rapids in Rapid City. Though upon arrival in Rapid City and

finding that there are no rapids to ride can lead to a fracture

in a relationship built as it was on world travel and excitement

and exploding hands, and this fracture can lead to a disastrous

falling out.

Disastrous to the relationship, not necessarily to the

world like a super volcano might be, or even a medium sized

asteroid. Although in this case, it could be argued that the

dissolution of Jova and Dack’s relationship may well have been

directly responsible the end of all humankind, if not all

organic life on the planet. Not that it was, but it could have

been argued that it might have been, and in some realities it

probably was, but in this reality the events did not play out

that way.

But it could have. But it didn’t.

Because of a butterfly.

Not a Butterfly Effect, though it was a butterfly, and it

did have an effect, just not the normal effect that a butterfly

has vis-à-vis tornadoes in Texas. This did not happen yet.

What was happening now was Jova being distant and Dack

being clingy which led to Jova being eye-rolly and Dack making

playlists which led to Jova saying to Dack many things.

Things about it not being Dack, it was her, that she wanted

to stay friends, that she couldn’t handle the intensity of her

feelings towards Dack, that she didn’t want to hold him back in

the world, that she and Dack were at different points in their

lives, that she needed her space, that Dack deserved better than



Jova, that she just wanted to focus on school, that they were

moving too fast and that they needed a break.

Dack, not being completely dumb despite the Flagon of

Idiocy, understood where she was going with that line of talk.

Part of him just wanted Jova to come out and say they were

breaking up, boom, get it over with, clean break. Another part

of him was all hey, let’s not be too hasty boy, if she doesn’t

say the words, it means we still be jive talkin’ together. Dack

was not sure what part of his brain spoke like that (though he

assumed it was the hippocampus), and he ignored it. That is to

say he ignored it after the sixth unreturned message he left for

Jova on one of the many contact platforms he had access to.

This led to brooding and self-pity and disappearing for

twenty-four hours in the woods, a twenty-four hours that

thoroughly pissed off his roommate as well as his boss. In

wanting to find himself in the woods he had made a point not to

bother anyone as he was alone in the world and nobody really

cared anyway, plus he wouldn't really be missed (not at all, not

really), and he didn't need his phone because who would he call?

A bear?

So off he traipsed with a sleeping bag, a backpack and a

few cans of beans, finding one of the less well known campus

footpaths into the mountains. He took a water bottle for liquid

needs and a whiskey bottle for memory-killing needs, and off he

walked, never to be heard from again.

Never for a day, at least. He came back when his prototype

arm started itching. It did this from time to time; it didn't

fit quite right yet, and if he didn't clean the stump often

enough it got itchy and smelly and funky. Not the good kind of

funky, either, though he wouldn't have minded that so much.

His personal rhythm was a 1-3-7 in a 1-2-3 world. He walked



through the door of his flat, prosthetic off, scratching his

pruritic scar and was promptly punched in the face.

He did not appreciate this.

Being punched in the face by Lambin, his roommate, was the

direct cause of Dack losing his arm. Not the other arm, the

same left arm he’d lost before, only this time it wasn’t all

flesh–and-blood being strewn about, it as plastic and metals and

rotators and pulleys and microchips.

This was not, it seemed, Dack’s week. Lambin was more than

a smidge upset at Dack, or as Lambin put it, he was so fucking

pissed off at the shit-eating Dack that perhaps he deserved to

lose the arm. Again. Then he proceeded to sheepishly apologize

and help clean up the mess.

Dack’s boss was a bit more understanding. He was a one of

the computer engineering professors and had been young and full

of the stupid hormone once upon a time and he probably still

was, though he’d been married for twenty-seven years and wasn’t

sure where he’d placed those hormones. Probably in the garage,

next to his old comics. Doctor C was a good ear for Dack to

bend, though he did mention to the student that if he missed

work again without checking in, there’d really be no job for him

to come back to.

Dack told Doc C that he understood, and Doctor Chuck (his

name was, indeed, Chuck, Chuck Chaz Charlie, to be precise; Dack

was told by Doc C that his father was the second cousin of some

famous author type and thus his father had done his name in a

tribute of sorts) (Dack couldn’t quite remember, but thought the

guy’s name was Hollar and he wrote about some famous catch –

Dack didn’t really know much about sports history, however), and

Doctor C let Dack come back to work.

Of course, that’s when Dack dumped his arm in Doc C’s lap.

This time, it was the right arm, not the left, and it wound up



in the good doctor’s lap not due to an attempt at coercion,

grade inflation, or a mutual attraction, but because Dack

tripped while trying to unpack his other arm, the plastic and

metal one, the one he actually wanted to dump in Doc C’s lap.

Doctor Chuck Chaz Charles wasn’t just a computer

engineering professor. He also dabbled in prosthetics. And by

dabbled, this meant that fully half of his time on campus was

devoted to the newly created Department of Applied Prosthetics.

Fully funded by a grant from a generous and anonymous student

and a large airline. The Doctor was a paradox, at least that’s

what he liked to call it in his own little joking way. He loved

these sorts of bad-pun-dad jokes. He was a paradox because he

held two doctorates – one in Physiology & Ergonomics, the other

in Conflict Resolution. His two master’s degrees were slightly

more useful in his chosen field, as he was a Master of Computer

Engineering and a Master of Nanotechnology.

To be sure, his Conflict Resolution came in handy when

trying to navigate the complexities of academia. Though not

quite as well as he would have liked while trying to navigate

the complexities of fatherhood and marriage, especially when his

wife spoke of his endless student loans. He did not have just

the four degrees, he was always picking up certificates,

associate and bachelor degrees, and he had the student loans to

prove it. At least twice he had received degrees in the mail

from colleges he had forgotten that he’d attended.

When his Associate’s Degree in Animal Husbandry had

arrived, he’d realized that he had not just been going to a very

intense petting zoo multiple times per week. His daughter, who

had been five at the time, had loved it.

Te doc told Dack that he supposed he’d turned in the

homework and Dack believed him as Doc C was always writing

papers then forgetting that he’d done so. Dack had been in the



room once when the doctor had received the latest edition of the

New Journal of Applied Culinary Physiology (the most respected

journal in its field). Doc C had spent an hour pouring over an

article that he exclaimed to be revolutionary. He shot off a

letter to the author asking to meet as well as offering some

bits of insight.

Two days later, Doc C’s mail contained a letter that had

been forwarded to him from the editors of the Journal. The

doctor explained rather sheepishly that he had written the

letter to himself without realizing it.

The memory was one that made Dack grin and nearly forget

about Jova’s smile and about his nearly broken nose and black

eyes and about his broken arm, and there will be no revisitation

as to which arm it was that was broken. One was broken and the

other had made a somewhat inappropriate, though accidental,

proposition to the crotch of a professor. Who was also his

boss. Even though, truth be told, Dack was paying Doc C’s

salary. Anonymously. Dack just liked to work. He always had,

and even lied about his age when he was thirteen so he could

land a summer job.

He spent that entire summer wondering how the owner of the

liquor store managed to be so bad at gauging ages.

But that was then and then wasn’t now and now was when Dack

needed a new arm. He missed his old arm, though not so much

the broken plastic and metal one as the flesh and bone and nerve

and blood one that had exploded. Sort of exploded. There were

days when his phantom limb drove him crazy, but then he would do

his mirror exercises and would feel better for a bit, and there

were times when he would get a little down, but his brain was

one of those that PTSD avoided. He was sad, sure, but he felt

ok most of the time and never did the whole flashback thing.

Dack realized that he was lucky fairly early on when, in rehab,



many many other limb-losers could be seen in downward spirals,

depressions and dependencies. Dack did what he could to help

and thanked the Lord of the Genetic Dance that his brain didn’t

work that way. Be that as it may, he still liked having a second

arm, even if it was mechanical.

Creating a new prototype was fairly easy, especially with

the department’s new Thre3Deezy 420 three-dimensional printer.

They also had a meat printer, though it was broken as one of the

interns had loaded the wrong media into it when she’d had a late

night pot-induced craving for a burger. The Thre3Deezy was

working fine, however, and within a few hours Dack had a new

arm. This one was slightly modified for Halloween, with the

pinky being turned into a working scale model of a chainsaw.

Not that it would actually cut anything, but it would tickle

enough to annoy.

When Dack tried to print up a tentacle arm, Doc C said no.

When He’d tried to print up a hatchet arm, Doc C said no. When

he tried to print up a shotgun arm, Doc C said yes and Dack

started working on it, only to be told by Doc C that he was just

kidding. Finally Dack gave up and got a normal hand with the

chainsaw pinky attachment. The novelty wore off, Dack switched

back to an Ol’ Reliable 2.0, and hit the books.

Dack’s brain had decided to ignore the Stupid Hormone, and

he threw himself into his studies. He managed to fit four years

into five, graduating with a degree in biophysics. He was

interested in studying the inner workings of the body through

the eyes of a hard scientist. Biology was nearly the same thing

as witchcraft, and chemists were glorified cooks. Physicists,

however, they were the ones who took stock and measure of the

universe and they were the ones who said this is good, this is

how it works and we just made a big ass bomb that is crazy, dog,

and can take out a city.



Plus, he just liked the sound of the word biophysics. It

sounded like some sort of made up crap, like the kind you find

in poorly written science fiction. But it was a real thing.

When he saw it offered in his course catalogue, he’d wikied it

to make sure. He’d also looked for the urban definition, but

that was something he decided to never share with the public.

Dack, with his biophysics degree in hand, set out to change

the world.

Unfortunately, he lost track of that notion. He had an

idea.

CHAPTER 3

After a year, skipping around the globe was wearing. It

had been a good idea, but he was tired. Dack had his highs and

lows like anyone, and like anyone he thought that no one could

possibly understand the things he was going through. Not at

all. The one night affair with the concert cellist in Tunisia,

the phantom pain-induced depression in the Angkor Wat, the

jellyfish incident in Brazil; it was all searing his brain like

tuna on a grill.

This was not a dish he particularly cared for, especially

after the printed tuna steak incident in the lab. It was an apt

description of his brain’s mood so he went with it. He'd

started writing things down as he went, deciding on the paper

blog route rather than the digital one he was used to. Dack

supposed it wasn't a blog, he supposed that it was a journal or

diary or some other thing that he couldn't think of. He didn't

really like those words so paper blog it became. He even taught

himself how to use the old-style cursive, though he doubted

anyone but him could read it.



Dack noticed that he got some very strange looks when he

wrote in public places. This was not typical, with his

somewhere-between-well-tanned-Dinka-and-albino-Dane skin, his

dark brown hair that had a different texture for each day of the

week, and his complete averageality that he exuded physically.

This is not how people saw him when he wrote. Cafe patrons

would glance at him sideways from their smart tablet phones,

pedestrians would look askance at him through their iGlasses or

Google-E-eyes or MSSpex (and once even a Lens-Ux user but she

was shy and cradled her penguin and walked away), and children

on playgrounds would use their video knuckles to film him and

upload it to various social media sharing sites with captions

like "Treekillur Rites wif a Pen" or hashtags that fell into the

#ludditeFTW or #WTFkindoftabletisthat categories.

Dack felt it strange, whenever he bothered to think about

it (or feel about it, as the case may be), felt it strange that

he was being stared at because he wrote shit down on paper and

not because of his neon-green and purple arm. At one point he

even started to write about how strange it was but he was

distracted by a local tea house bombing. The local

blastologists had all agreed that the day held a 60% chance of

pipe bombs with possible serin cloud precipitation due to the

high pressure Khy Mien terror cell system in the morning

followed by a low lying Whitey White Klan embankment. Then they

laughed and turned to the weather woman who let the audience

know that the day would be warm and mild, and if they didn't get

out to enjoy it they were the real terrorists.

Dack surfed to another webcast shortly after, but everyone

seemed to be in agreement. He was glad that he wasn't caught in

the blast. He downed some Serin-B-Gone (chocolate of course)

before he left, then went out to see what the world had in store

that day. As it turns out, the day was a rather mundane one,



and would have been downright boring if the tea shop hadn't been

blown sideways.

Challenges eluded him. He wanted to check his brain into a

local gym and beef it up. This was not a thing. He wished it

was. Dack supposed that the closest thing to a brain gym was

school. He went all pouty and tantrumy but eventually

capitulated with himself and wound up in a graduate program for

quantum mechanics.

He had another idea.

And when he finished his bratwurst with onions caramelized

in brown sugar, he realized that, while tasty, ideas for sausage

shaped foods would not do him much good in school.

CHAPTER 4

Dack was fine with the clicky-clack of his unflesh arm (not

that it actually made any noise, except when it broke and that

was less often than one might imagine). There had been many

breakthroughs in prosthechnology; there was even a sort of

rudimentary feedback system so that the limb could transmit

feeling to the brain. There had been so many advances in the

field of prosthetics over the decades, to the point where a

replacement limb could almost be patched into a nerve bundle and

have it work exactly like the old one.

Almost.

There was always a delay, a pause in the brain-computer

interface that resulted in an ever-so-slight hiccup in motion.

Usually it was on the scale of tenths of seconds if you had the

funds for a top of the line Becky (BCI was too clinical for most

folks; Becky was the kleenex of brain chips). If you went with

a fully wireless model, the delay was greater, and if you were



cash strapped… Dack thought of those being almost as good as

hooks.

These things bothered Dack. He wanted to be able to be

able to feel an egg shell, the grains of sand on a beach, a

puppy’s fur, a woman’s fur… but he couldn’t, not really, not

with the plastic hand. Not that prosthetics were plastic

anymore (though some parts were). Most were calcified titanium

(not that everyone could afford the titanium, many went with

steel or some other weaker metal, and while the calcification

process still helped build a stronger bone-prosthetic melding it

wasn’t nearly as clean) support structures with a series of

tubes and wires (plus some fancy flexible micro-electronics)

overlaid with a silicone-cloned skin sheath.

And this was just the standard model. With the number of

amputees in the world closing in on a full percent due to war,

discontent, freedom fighting, terrorism and body modding, there

were many, many people who wanted something beyond the four-

fingers-and-a-thumb hand or the five-toed foot. Dack’s tentacle

idea from college was one of the milder things he’d seen as

people were going from utilitarian (he’d seen a jackhammer leg

attachment for a construction worker) to the not-quite-so-

utilitarian (the guy with a hand that was all scissors told Dack

it wsn’t as useful as he’d expected).

There were faux-nerves and nano-relays, servos and motors,

but it just wasn’t quite enough, not for Dack, not really. He

knew that he just had to wait a year or five and they’d be able

to grow him an entirely new arm. Dack didn’t want to wait, he

knew that there was some way of creating a seamless junction

between man and machine.

His arm took over his life, though not in the serial-

killer-hand-takes-over-sleeping-recipient-at night-and-murders-

people way, but in the Dack-liked-to-tinker sort of way. He’d



decided to make it his thesis, his raison d’être, his coupling

of school and usefulness. This last tended to be a most rare

thing, as many schools’ usefulness wre directly linked with

alcohol tolerance.

During one of his many talks with and examinations by his

previous boss, Doc C, he’d realized that he’d had quite a few

nerve conduction studies done. Dack had been poked and prodded

and assessed and examined more times than he could count (though

Doc C said it was forty-seven). Motor NCS, sensory NCS, h-reflex

studies, small pain fiber studies, f-wave studies, a-wave

studies, sound wave studies, they were all there.

But what wasn’t there, what Dack’s quantum mechanical

oriented brain had noticed was that, while there were studies of

waves and studies of impulses, there were no studies of what he

thought of as particles of quanta. What if, perhaps, nerves

operated not just on a wave or impulse pattern, but on a

particle plane as well? It had been postulated for decades that

the brain was just a quantum computer, a biological one, a mass

of intertangled neurons with Dutch cats being held hostage in

poisoned boxes.

And what was a brain?

A big fucking mass of nerves, amiright? Dack told Doc C.

Doc C just nodded sagely, as he felt wiser than normal after his

trip to India, and he said nothing. He said nothing because his

nodding was less profound than it was sleepy; the professor was

jetlagged, having just gotten in from Bangalore a few hours

earlier. Dack took it as the first kind of nodding, the wise

kind, and moved ahead with his plans for his thesis while Doc C

moved ahead with his plans to sleep.

One-armed Dack, not really knowing any better, set about

trying to create the world’s first quantum computer, and make it

for the express purpose of making a better bio-mechanical



interface. He had no real thought to change the world, no

assumption that he would succeed, nothing other than some duct

tape, bailing wire, bubble gum and the entire old web series

MacGyver on his holosphere (these were a thing). When he

thought about it, Dack realized that it wasn’t a web series,

those had disappeared a long time before, it was that thing that

was before the web series. Radio. That was it. The picture

radio.

Quantum computers had been attempted many times before

(very many), and the people who made them were smart people with

smart ideas and smart cars and smart tablets. They got close,

many, many times, close enough so that they could claim that

they had done it, when in fact they had only just missed the

target by that much. It was like the difference between a light

bright mauve and a somber, muted magenta – it was really, really

close. But it was the kind of close that if a husband was sent

to pick up a light bright mauve corsage for his teenage daughter

and he came back with a somber, muted magenta, well, it would be

noticed.

And it was.

There was a component missing from each of these attempts,

and it was a biological component. No one knew that this was

what was missing, at least not until they did know. When they

knew, they knew. But they didn’t. Not yet.

There had been attempts made by scaffolding DNA and

training it to work on a computational level, with results that

ranged from promising to zombie-virus outbreak terrifying. This

didn’t actually happen, but again, it could have and probably

did in a similar but separate reality.

The project Dack worked on was one of quantum entanglement.

He wanted the quanta of the biological nerves to become

intertwined with the quanta of the prosthetic circuitry. He



wanted the quanta to become organized in a chaotic sort of way,

to trick them into working for both the body and the prosthetic

at once. He wanted to get them tangled on such a tiny, basic

level that they couldn’t distinguish the squishy part from the

solid state. He knew that there were problems, problems between

the chemical-ness on the biological side and the mechanicy

electrical-ness on the side of the fake arm. He was at a loss

for a bit, and then it came to him, as if in a dream, though it

was not a dream.

Cheese.

It was all in the cheese.

This was not to say that the secrets of Bell’s little paper

was cheese based (although it might be hilarious in the abstract

if this were the case)(at least to physicists)(who were also

fromagers). Gouda did not simply move faster than the speed of

light.

To be precise, Dack wrote in his paper blog, it wasn’t the

cheese so much as it was the fucking pizza. Which puts into

mind an image of Italian food copulating which… is not where he

wanted to be going with that sentence. Dack had earlier been

out with friends to the local pizza joint, called the Pizza

Joint, and he’d just taken a big bite of a hot slice of cheese.

The intense burning the roof of his mouth wasn’t as strong a

feeling as the epiphanical flood his brain was experiencing as

he watched the string of cheese droop from his mouth and connect

back to the slice.

It wasn’t just cheese. It was cheese with red sauce stuck

to it, ribboning around the gooey white filament ever so

faintly. Ribboning around the hot gooey white filament, if

precision was necessary. Which it was.



It was the heat. It was all in the heat. The idea was too

intense for him to let go of, too intense for him to sit there.

He couldn’t stand it

He got out of the kitchen.

Dack wasn’t sure how, exactly, he had gotten into the Pizza

Joint’s kitchen, but he had, so he got out, heading straight

back to his lab. He needed to find a material, some sort of

fusible alloy or physiological compound that mimicked human

tissue – specifically nerve tissue. He needed to find something

that had the same melting point (or would it be boiling point?

Dack asked himself), the same resistances, the same molecular

weight, the same everything as nerves. Without being actual

nerves.

Months zoomed by in what Dack felt was a montage of lab

work – flash! He’s mixing things in beakers! Flash! He’s

spilling liquid! Flash! He’s staring at a large holo display

with scribbled noted, his hair mussed! Flash! He’s asleep with

his head on a lab table, drool collecting on his tablet! Dack

experienced all the inbetween bits, but it felt faster than it

was. His brain wanted to just get around the worky morsels.

And so it did.

Once Dack put it all together in his head he was ready to

try it outside of his head. Virtual simulations showed the

process working, the tanglement entangling, but he would not be

sure until he did if for real. For fake was all well and good,

but it was not super helpful. Dack had two choices. But not

really. The first was to try it on an animal first but this

never happens in the really big breakthroughs, at least not in

the ones in any media that Dack had ever seen. And since Dack

was feeling giddiful from being up for more than a day doing

postulations and theorizing and building prototypes and

soldering things that needed soldering and going pee a lot due



to the massive intake of coffee, he figured that a human trial

was fine.

And, of course, since this a fairly large reason why

carbon-based life nearly went extinct on the planet and the

reason why Dack has been the focus rather than John or Joe or

Daisy or Frieda, of course that human was Dack. Since robots

were things and precision robotic surgeries were a thing and

since Dack had access to one of the precision robotic surgical

units and since he also had access to local anesthetics, it was

a fairly easy decision for Dack to make. All he really needed to

do was to program the Prosun (the kleenex of precision robotic

surgical units) to cut into his arm instead of cloned monkey's

and attach his own nerves to the prosthetic instead of the

nerves of the monkey.

It was supposed to go smoothly, and most likely would have

except there was an explosion that had been timed to free the

cloned monkeys from their cages. Not really. This was just a

thought that Dack had just before the Prosun made its first

incision. And after that, it all went smoothly, with minimal

blood loss, no pain, and a hand-forged artificial arm that was

now fused to his ulnar, interosseous and radial nerves.

He’d included a wireless component so that the arm’s

onboard cpu could sync up with his Becky – what all the cool

amputees called flirting. Once he turned the arm on, Becky and

the arm would flirt until they hooked up, and the HUD on Dack’s

glasses would flare into life with a diagnostic and initial boot

program.

At least, this was the idea. As ideas go, it wasn’t a bad

one. The problem with ephemeral ideas, however, is that they are

just that: ephemeral. Real life do not ideas make.

Dack went through the boot sequence, a purposefully

complicated one that involved the sequential pulling of fingers



(Dack thought that this would be his coup de grace if he ever

had kids, as they would actually have to pull his fingers) then

longpressing the space on the middle finger where the nailbed

would typically be found.

That’s when the lights went out. In that exact instant.

Not just the lights in the lab, but the lights in the building

and in the university and in the city. Only the soft blue glow

of Dack’s artificial middle finger illuminated the laboratory.

Dack was sure that this was not his fault. He had created

an independent power cell system that recharged through

movement, light, and wind using bacterial insulated electrical

tubing (it never needed repairing, since it was a living

organism), a tubing that lived in a symbiotic relationship with

the user – the user being Dack this time. The hair on his arms

were painstakingly pulled nanobot glass, used for cooling, power

generation (the hair served as a mini-wind farm micro

environment; Dack could envision himself windmilling his arm to

recharge when there was no other power source), and as feeling

receptors.

There was nothing at all in his new arm that could have

affected the lights in the room. Could it? As he wandered

through the building, discovering the extent of the blackout,

his first thought was about being a little silhouetto of a man.

It took him a moment to realize that this was not his thought,

and he shut down the music he’d been listening too. He always

loved the classics, though he never had a head for who sang

what. Bachthoven. Aretha Gillespie. The Queens. The Village

Voice. He just knew he liked what he liked, though the line

he’d just heard about it being real life or just fantasy

(damnit, who sang that? the back of his brain asked; The Beetle

Stones? Catherine Perry?)seemed appropriate at the moment. He

thought that perhaps something had gone drastically wrong with



the boot, and perhaps he was just lying on the floor of his lab,

dead, and this was all just the last vestiges of his brain

electricity making up an elabora…

He stopped thinking that when he stubbed his toe, then hit

his head on someone else’s head.

The shits and fucks and hopping around on one foot while

trying to hold his forehead were mirrored by the other figure,

also shrouded by darkness. It was a short waltz of mutual pain,

followed by sheepish apologizing and the growing realization

that the two injured parties knew each other.

And this was how Jova came back into Dack’s life.

CHAPTER 5

What had happened then, then being at the end of their

college relationship and not now at the time of the mutual

forehead-striking, was that Jova became distant and Dack was

clingy which had led to Jova being eye-rolly and Dack making

playlists which led to Jova saying to Dack many things.

Things about it not being Dack, it was her, that she wanted

to stay friends, that she couldn’t handle the intensity of her

feelings towards Dack, that she didn’t want to hold him back in

the world, that she and Dack were at different points in their

lives, that she needed her space, that Dack deserved better than

Jova, that she just wanted to focus on school, that they were

moving too fast and that they needed a break.

At least, that had been Dack’s perception, which was fine

and good, but not the complete picture. Jova had said some of

these things, not because she did not care about Dack, but

because she saw that his clinginess wasn’t born from her

distance but from his own fear, the fear that he was losing



interest and not really wanting to be in the relationship and

felt responsible and guilty for not wanting to be in the

relationship and he, Dack, had chosen to be clingy for two

reasons, neither of which he was aware of.

The first reason was that somewhere deep in the grand sulci

of his brain organ, somewhere he knew that be becoming overly

adherent to Jova, she would naturally push him away and he could

thusly say that it was not his fault but hers. The second

reason was similar though almost completely opposite. The

ridges and crests of his bulbous neurological mass were

whispering things, things that he listened to while he slept,

things that sounded fairly close to the old adage of faking it

until one makes it.

Jova, not being an idiot, neither wanted to be in a faked

relationship nor did she want to cause him pain, at least not

any more pain than she had by playing the girly coy card at the

pool party and letting him stroke her hair and lean over and

lose his arm rather than playing the I-really-want-to-sex-you-up

card that she’d felt in the days before the accident. She let

herself be courted by the man she was falling in love with, and

this led to her man losing his arm.

Not that she felt guilty about this, not at all, as she

wasn’t the guilt-feeling type of person. She was, however,

pragmatically practical, and she loved logic, nearly as much as

she loved Dack. Jova knew. She knew what she needed to do.

She knew that she needed to be the one to end the relationship,

a relationship that Dack wanted to end but did not know he

wanted to end. She knew that he would be sad for a while, be

mad for a while, be drunk for a while but move on and grow. She

said all of the things that Dack had thought she said, but Dack

was right. She could never bring herself to say that they were

over, done, finito, kaput, hit the road Dack. She could not say



it because she did not want it, but she want to be pitied even

less. Jova didn’t kill her relationship, the one-armed man did.

Jova then moved on as well. She, too, cried and was

angered and drank and mourned for the loss of the man she loved,

loved more than anyone before, loved enough to ignore the many

attempts he made to contact her, attempts that drifted off

sooner than later, drifting off in a way that told her she had

been right. This was not unusual. She was often right, and by

often this meant very nearly always, and it was her penchant for

rightness and logic that led her into a judgeship, but that was

later and not then, in college, or now, in the middle of a

headache.

One of the few times she had been wrong was a time that was

seared into her memory or onto her soul, if that was the sort of

thing she believed in, though she did not believe in it, at

least not often. It was seared like a fresh cut mahi-mahi on a

hot grill in Hawai’i while on a perfect vacation, the good kind

of seared (at least good for meat eaters or pescatarians, though

not so good for the mahi-mahi or vegetarians), the good kind of

seared, not the bad kind, like placing one’s hand on a hot

griddle.

Jova, a woman taller than most, darker than some, was a

lover of knowledge and devoured information for the sake of the

devouring. Jova was not someone who knew a little about many

things, she was not a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none. She

was a woman who knew a lot about most things, and a master of

any trade she decided that she wanted to master. Her energy was

frenetic, though in a calm, placid way, as she often looked and

acted totally at peace with where she was in the moment, never

looked harried or rushed, never spoke quickly. She was a woman

of strong opinions and little sleep.



It was the butterfly that did her in. Not did-her-in

killed her, but did-her-in by making her fall in love, or at

least come to the realization that she was truly lost in Dack’s

soul. Not that she believed in a soul most of the time, but she

did that day. That day Cupid was a butterfly.

Dack and Jova had gone to the little grove in Santa Cruz to

see the cascading waterfall of monarch butterflies that lived

and loved in the eucalyptus, a sight that, once seen, would have

a person swearing that butterflies did, indeed grow on trees,

that the butterflies were leaves that could fly. They dripped

from their stalactite formations on the long hanging eucalyptus

branches. They flitted here and there, more taking to the air

as the day warmed as the sun rose, as the quiet took hold.

There were many visitors of the bipedal variety, though none

spoke, such was the power of the Lepidoptera meeting ground, and

as no one spoke, a few were blessed by the mini fluttering monks

when they chose to land on a hat here, a shoulder there, a back

in another place. There were smiles and pointing and giggling

and videoing and picture taking that happened in these slices of

instants.

One of these instances was comprised of a young girl,

perhaps five, maybe six, a girl who was watching the orange and

black pilots fly around with a mixture of trepidation awe and

fear. The girl was trepidatious and fearful, that is. The

insects were merely ambivalent. The girl’s parents were taking

pictures here and there and speaking to their child out of the

corners of their mouths, cooing and oohing and ahhing and isn’t

that awesoming to each other and to the wide eyed girl and her

older brother who kept whispering that he was more bored than he

had ever been, but then would get distracted by another insect

swimming through the air in his field of vision.



Then a butterfly landed on the bare arm of the little girl,

the girl who was most probably five. An ear-piercing, earth

shattering, butterfly scattering scream issued forth from the

tiny female human, sending a stampede of butterflies towards the

cliffs and to certain doom and the butterfly-boys (as opposed to

cowboys, because, well, - butterflies) couldn’t steer them back

from the edge in time.

This did not happen. At least, not in this particular

dimension. It did not happen because Dack, a man who was

attuned to his child side and more sensitive than most, saw the

impending disaster and moved to stop it before the tsunami of

sound could issue forth from the child’s lungs. Dack and Jova,

standing near the little girl, saw the miniscule flying creature

float towards the unsuspecting kid. Dack crouched next to the

child, smile in place and soothing whisper-voice on hand, struck

up a conversation with the little girl about butterflies, about

these butterflies, about how friendly they were and about how

they were good luck, especially if one was to land upon you.

The parents glanced at Dack, and their creep-o-meters did

not go off, so they let the conversation continue, since they

were right there and Dack wasn’t too close and his smile was

infecting their daughter, a daughter who did not like surprise

touches, especially not soft surprise touches, and when these

surprised touches happened to her she would scream her banshee

scream. Her parents saw that she was being soothed and that she

did not notice when the butterfly landed on her arm until Dack

pointed out that she was due for good luck since there was a

butterfly on her and she giggled and squealed quietly (Dack had

explained that good luck butterflies like the quiet), and Dack

pointed out that she was going to have especially good good luck

because she didn’t have just any butterfly on her arm, she had a

special one. It was orange, like the monarchs of the grove, and



it had some black, like the monarchs of the grove, but it was

not a monarch, Dack told her.

No, this was no Monarch, Dack had made sure to tell her,

but Dack knew what it was, since he’d seen one before. This was

a butterfly that had somehow made it to the grove from Africa, a

butterfly that Dack could swear was a Commodore. He then

saluted the Commodore with his plastic arm, which made the not-

quite-six-year-old chuckle and ask if he was a robot to which

Dack replied no, not yet.

That was the moment. That was it. Jova was done. She

loved her man, and would be treating him to some Neanderthal sex

that evening, right after tea. But she had to do one thing

first. She let him know that she thought it was cute that he

told the little girl that the butterfly was from Africa to which

Dack replied that he’d told the girl this because it was true.

Laughing, Jova said that this wasn’t really possible, and

that Dack was most certainly mistaken, that this was a grove of

Monarch butterflies and that she could believe that one of the

false Monarchs might be in the grove, she could not believe that

there was a butterfly from Africa in that same spot, especially

not one that would land near them, near a person who had seen

these butterflies before and would be able to identify them. It

was a Monarch, and that was, indeed, that. Dack just smiled,

shrugged and gave her the victory. She loved him more for it.

It wasn’t until after the room-rending sex that she saw the

news about the overturned truck near the park, a truck that

contained a live exhibit, a live exhibit of butterflies, a live

exhibit of butterflies from around the world. The only

specimens that escaped were the ones in the African exhibit.

Dack said nothing, just smiled, and not a smug smile, just a

genuine smile, not caring that he was right and she was wrong.



She turned her half-lidded pupil-dilated eyes towards him and

decided the room needed more rending.

It was another six months before they were to break up.

And many years after that before they were to cross paths (by

crossing heads) again.

quantum prosthetics

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