Chapter 4

Three months later:

It was almost exactly ninety days later that they finally took him to their ‘testing facility.’ The implant surgery went off without a hitch, but for that they used a state-of-the-art medical/surgical center near D.C. The room they put him up in to recover was nicer than most resorts he’d been to! They checked his progress daily, and ran so many tests he grew tired of asking when they’d be done. Not that his days were empty, though. Veronyka brought their linguist, a dorky guy named Melvin, appropriately enough and their psychologist, Malcolm Brown several times so they could reconfigure his first implant to perform the way they needed. That part turned out not to be very difficult. He was already using it to adjust his voice output, and for other non-verbal communication on line. That was basically what they wanted him to do. Instead of speaking aloud, they wanted him to think his statements as output through the implant, then repeat either what they said in translation, or read aloud a printed one that appeared on a screen. When he displayed greater affinity for repeating the audio translation, and they rated him healed enough to accept some input from the second implant, they had him practice talking to either Malcolm or Veronyka while one of them spoke to him in another language. That part wasn’t so easy, not at first. But after several weeks, he had the hang of it. Once he’d proved he could converse using any of the five languages they were set up to translate for him, and both Veronyka and the neurosurgeon, another pretty woman named Mariana, cleared him to use the new implant without restriction, they told him it was time for his first attempt as a tester.

They wheeled him into what turned out to be a re-purposed commercial building near Dulles Airport. He would’ve preferred to walk in under his own power, but they explained about the harness he’d be suspended in, and were concerned about interference from any of his prosthetics’ tactile feedback. So, he asked if there was any reason they couldn’t put dead weights on his prosthetic attachment points. If his body was going to move around anyway, he might as well get a fitness benefit from it.

“That’s a great idea!” Veronyka gushed.

“Yeah. We should’ve thought of that.” Steve agreed when they discussed it.

“If we do this for all future testers,” Mariana commented, “it will substantially decrease the medical need to have them spend significant time outside the simulated environment.”

Fabricating the weights wasn’t difficult. They even made them so they could adjust the amount as needed to provide a true exertion/rest/recovery cycle. So, he had five pound ones on his legs, two pounds on his missing, left arm and a single pound attached at his wrist on his right. He sat patiently in the wheelchair they got for him while they wheeled him into the building. The security checkpoint, manned by uniformed Defense Department Police, passed each one of them only after a thorough identity screening.

Whatever was really going on here wasn’t a joke, that much was certain.