Hemispheres
“I think I have a cold. I’ve had a runny nose for a month.”
Vivia’s thin, metallic arm reached toward Rex’s face. In a voice resembling a human’s, it said, “The substance dripping from your nose is brain fluid. You require a painless procedure to repair the meningeal membrane within your skull. Shall I begin?”
As Rex lay back in his bed for the procedure, he closed his eyes and recalled the moment 14 years ago that he first learned of the surgical robot. On that day in 2028, Rex, then ten-years-old, sat between his brother and mother and watched an announcement on the screen in front of them. Speaking into a camera, an unknown scientist, Kaia X, unveiled the machine from the cave in China where she had built it. “Vivia can make a person healthier and smarter,” Kaia announced. In its own voice, the tall, red lacquered machine beside her explained its capabilities as its surgical arms gestured.
The billions of people watching the announcement beheld the headless, legless robot. It stood a meter taller than its inventor. A lens and speaker were centered on its body.
Within an hour, the world government announced a prohibition of the machine and sought its creator.
While soldiers and drones hunted her, Kaia X made a second, hurried announcement. “I have risked my body and mind to create Vivia. After I built the first model, it operated on my brain to improve my intellect. With my enhanced mind, I advanced the machine’s capabilities. It performed a more advanced neurosurgery on me. And that let me improve the machine further. This virtuous cycle resulted in successively more advanced models. Vivia can make people smarter than those in government, and that’s why they want no one to have it. But I have finished the first duplicate, and I give it to humanity.” Kaia X reached toward the camera trained on her and turned it to reveal the second machine. Her message ended abruptly.
The 36 hour search for the inventor ended in an underground cave where only one Vivia machine remained. The government confiscated the robot and destroyed it while a transfixed world watched.
A month later, on the other side of the world, Rex’s mother, Giada, found a watertight foam container, larger than herself, floating beside rocks in the Pacific Ocean. Gripping its deflated parachute, she dragged it onto her stretch of land, through woods, and into her home. With an arsenal of tools, Giada pried the case open. She stood stunned when she recognized the shiny red surfaces within. The machine’s eight arms were folded neatly into its boxy figure.
Giada’s distrust of people kept her isolated to her wooded acres where she prepared her identical twin boys for a collapse of civilization. “After the apocalypse, you’ll use this machine to trade medical procedures for whatever you’ll need.”
A week after finding the machine, Giada underwent two simultaneous surgeries, one to enhance alertness and another to reduce her need for sleep. The boys sat on the floor as close as they could to her without getting in the way. Mid-surgery, Vivia told the boys to move back. The surgical arms moved more frantically. Instruments became blurs. Then the machine stopped. Vivia announced, “The patient is dead.”
The boys sat dumbfounded. Leo walked to his brother, knelt close behind him, and wrapped his arms around his shoulders.
The boys raised each other. They rarely needed others. Years passed.
At the age of 24, Rex and Leo were venturing more often from home. Returning from a daytrip on their electric motorcycle, Leo pulled himself closer to his brother to talk in his ear. “Do you want to move to the real world?”
After a few seconds, Rex said, “Sure.”
“If you’d said no, I would have said I don’t want to either.” Leo paused. “But I’ve been thinking of cities we could live in. We’ll earn money. We’ll buy food. We’ll use communicators and make plans with new friends.”
A few months later, the twins began adjusting to a new life on the 88th floor of a shimmering glass building. Robots had built it and the rest of the coastal city; anyone could afford to live there.
The brothers’ machine lay on its side in a container in the basement, hidden from drones that peered through the windows of every dwelling a few times a day on routine searches for people and things. Rex, the practical one, had selected this building because of that storage space. Leo enjoyed the building’s novelty; each story rotated. Most nights, through the glass wall encircling their apartment, the brothers gazed out as the Pacific’s sunset passed before them.
One morning, the world’s citizens received an announcement that government robots would inspect spaces invisible to drones. Within 48 hours, the basement would be searched.
Wide-eyed, Leo clicked a button in the apartment to transform the outer glass walls. They turned a frosty translucent, blurring the city and sea. Through the building’s center, they rode the elevator down and loaded Vivia in.
“Our machine would never fit in any other elevator,” Rex said as the white circular platform rose. He looked up the endless black shaft while leaning against its frictionless wall.
Like always, the elevator’s sensors detected the weight on the platform, the number of people on board, the floor departed from, and the floor bound for. This and every other modern elevator transmitted its information through a network. So did weather instruments, body monitors, drones, and countless other devices. Information flowed across continents and under oceans toward the European province. There, thick black panoptic cables snaked toward the world government’s headquarters and into a black cube three stories tall. Water flowed over this whirring computer to remove heat produced by analysis of the world’s data. The cube predicted weather, detected crime, monitored infrastructure, and performed a myriad of other government functions.
When the computer received the weight the elevator had detected, a sequence of computations began. The computer subtracted the weight listed in the medical records of the two inhabitants of the 88th floor the elevator was destined for. The calculation’s result triggered an automated search through the residents’ history of financial transactions. No purchase of theirs matched the weight of the heavy mass in the elevator. An alert appeared on a terminal attached to the computer. “An unidentifiable 234 kilogram mass has been detected. Possible match: Vivia surgical machine.”
The computer terminal belonged to Enzo Steppe, the cabinet minister who had conceived of the government’s computing cube. Eighty-five years old, Enzo basked in the green light of the screen he stared at. His skin sagged from his hollow cheeks. Age had pulled down his lower eyelids far enough to expose the gleaming red tissue inside.
Before he invented this computer, Enzo Steppe had ascended the ranks of government with aid from shadowy organizations. Once he reached his desired ministry seat, Enzo built the government’s computer and used it to surveil and wipe out those who had helped him get there. His knowledge of the computer’s workings permitted Enzo to run secret algorithms that competed with the government’s official efforts to find the surgical robot.
Upon reading the alert, Enzo stepped to another terminal. “Let’s have a look,” he muttered. With his eye movements, he manipulated images on the screen.
The elevator carrying Rex and Leo arrived at the 88th floor. They dragged the case from the elevator, unpacked it, and positioned Vivia between their two beds.
The surfaces of the machine showed no sign of age. The reflective white floor on which Vivia stood doubled its height.
Leo switched the robot on. “I wonder if I remember how it works.” The machine released its arms from tense positions.
Rex, who had been sliding the case across the floor, stopped. “Be careful.” Rex focused his eye on his brother as he had when they were children. Whenever they fished from cliffs, Leo would stand precariously close to the edge. Rex would spend more time watching his brother than his own fishing line.
A moment later, movement outside caught their eyes. A dark shape, blurred by the hazy glass, slowly rose. A shadow crept over the floor as the round form blocked the sun.
With a bang, the apartment’s rotating floor jolted to a stop. The brothers stepped back to maintain their balance.
Untouched, the button that controlled the windows clicked. Through the now transparent glass, the brothers’ wide eyes met the stare of a spherical drone. Its lens shifted and fixed its gaze on the red robot. The two men froze as the hovering black eyeball moved close to the window and drilled a hole the size of a fist into the glass. A panel slid open on the front of the sphere. From it emerged a mechanical dragonfly that teetered in the wind. The insect darted through the hole. Wings buzzing, the dragonfly trained its electronic eyes on the surgical robot and began circling it. A red steel arm rose from Vivia’s side and swatted the fly. The bug fell to the ground. A few moments later, it fluttered its wings and flew erratically toward the window, through the hole, and into its parent. The drone closed its front panel, turned, and flew into the distance.
Leo ran to a shelf where his communicator sat. Hands shaking, he tapped its controls repeatedly, but the image on its screen was frozen. Rex punched the elevator button. It did not light up. He tried again and again and gave up. Chests heaving, the brothers stared at each other. For minutes, they paced.
The transparent window clicked on its own and went cloudy again, concealing the sky and dimming the room. A ding rang out from the elevator. Its doors slid open to reveal Enzo Steppe. He approached the surgical robot and laid a hand on its surface. “Can it really make a person smarter?” he said without looking at the people he addressed.
Silent, the twins stared at him.
Enzo waited for an answer. “I can see I’ll gain nothing keeping you around.” With a flick of his arm, Enzo pulled a laser gun from his pocket and aimed at Leo. As the young man threw his body toward a space behind a chair, his face and limbs froze. As the gun’s silent, invisible beam fired, the skin on Leo’s forehead heated to a red. He collapsed.
Turning to Rex, Enzo said, “Your machine is mine now.” He raised his gun. Before Enzo could fire, Rex dashed for the button on the window. Just before the click that would turn the glass wall transparent, Enzo gasped. With the threat that he could be exposed to a drone, he turned away from the window, cloaking his head with his baggy sleeves. He scampered into the elevator, whose still-open doors shut behind him.
The elevator’s platform lifted Enzo to the 150th floor, where he disembarked, climbed a staircase to the roof, and boarded his transporter.
During the six minute flight back to the world government’s headquarters in the European province, Enzo deleted the landing records of the transporter. When he arrived at his office, he slunk to his green glowing terminal. He erased the images the drone had captured, the holograph the electronic fly had produced, and the weight the elevator had measured.
In the apartment, Rex stood above his brother and breathed smoldering air through his heaving lungs. He looked desperately at the communicator, then the elevator, then toward Vivia. He knelt down, worked his arms under his brother, and picked him up. Rex pressed Leo’s breathless chest to his own while carrying him to his bed, a white oblong bowl.
Turning toward the red robot, Rex said, “Preserve him.”
Vivia responded, “Would you like to suspend or plasticize?”
“Suspend.”
Vivia moved an arm over the length of Leo’s torso. “Remove his clothing so I can monitor the body’s temperature.”
Rex pulled the shirt off Leo, then draped it over his own shoulders, tying the sleeves together. He next removed the pants. Leo’s thick thighs lay limp.
Robotic arms moved toward each side of Leo’s waist and abruptly latched on. Through one robotic arm, blood flowed from Leo’s body into Vivia’s. Mechanisms pumped, cooled, and oxygenated the blood, which then ran through the other robotic arm and back into Leo’s body. The blood cycled with a gentle hum.
Holding Leo’s cooling hands, Rex wept until his body was exhausted, then moved to his own bed. From around his shoulders, Rex removed Leo’s shirt and slid his pillow into it. He rested his head on it and slept fitfully.
In the cool morning light, Rex sat on the floor where he opened a box containing childhood mementos. He first read an advice-laden letter from his mother. She began with warnings. Among other things, “Beware of the government so you avoid the same brutal death your father suffered.” Further into the note, she instructed the brothers in how to care for Vivia. She concluded, “But most of all, care for each other.” Rex put the letter aside and picked up a small green rectangular paper. On one side, in Leo’s handwriting, it read, “Coupon for One Favor.” On the other side, a scribbled note.
Rex,
Thanks for defending me on the playground. – Leo
For stretches of the day, Rex stared out the window with a furrowed brow and darkened eyes. Centered in the glass, the hole, edged with small, roiling bubbles, slowly healed itself, but never drew Rex’s attention. From under a draped blanket, Vivia continued pumping, hidden from the eye of the occasional passing drone.
By sunset, a look of resolution had taken hold of Rex. He walked to a shelf, picked up a silver memory urn, and rested it on his knee as he sat on his bed. He opened the hinged lid.
“It’s me,” Rex said.
From a speaker in the urn came a tinny, female voice. “It’s been a while.”
The ashless urn contained his mother’s memories, extracted by the undertaker after her death. Memory urns from that time could perform basic reasoning. They replicated the voice and a few personality characteristics of the deceased. Emotion came only in later models.
“Leo is dead,” said Rex.
“I’m sorry.”
“I have a plan, though. I’m going to transplant half my brain into his body.”
“You will remove half your brain?”
“It’s fine. The brain has enough redundancy. The procedure to cut off half has been around since the 1900s.”
“But has anyone ever transplanted it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Even if it works, you will not resurrect Leo. The mind in that body will just be your own.”
“I know,” Rex said looking out the window. “I suppose I will wake up in both beds.” He sat for a while, then closed the lid and walked the urn back to its shelf.
“I want a hemispherectomy,” Rex said to Vivia.
“Specify the side.”
“Left. Then transplant it to him.” Rex pointed at his brother. Vivia eyed them both.
Rex lay back in his bed and watched a robotic arm swing toward his dead brother’s head. A blade sliced through the skin on one side of Leo’s scalp. Fingers at the end of a surgical arm folded the hairy skin over the right ear. With a high-pitched squeal, a spinning saw ground through the skull. A bone shard vaulted into the air at the very moment another robotic arm shot out to catch it, causing the hydraulic tubes draped along Vivia’s side to swing from the sudden movement. Once the sawing was complete, Vivia lifted the arch of skull from Leo’s head.
Rex looked away as a robotic arm squeezed its four long, thin fingers around Leo’s dry, blackened brain and pulled it through the opening. The steel arm rested the dead organ on Vivia’s top surface.
Rex flinched as an arm swung toward his head. Vivia’s lens turned toward him. “This won’t hurt a bit.” A tube reached into Rex’s nose to deliver an anesthetic. His eyes drooped. He began to dream. With blade and saw, Vivia opened the left half of Rex’s head. A long blade sliced into the center of his brain as a thin, wiggling extension snaked inside the skull to sever connections near the spinal cord. Half of Rex’s body went limp.
Vivia grabbed the glistening, dreaming hemisphere, thrust it toward the opening in Leo’s head, and lowered it in. An instrument already in the cavity attached blood vessels to the brain matter taken from Rex. Into the half-hollow head, a tube injected a thick, blue liquid containing a half million nanobots, which began wiring neurons from the spinal column to the base of the hemisphere.
Vivia returned its attention to Rex. Sealing blood vessels, the robot’s cauterizer fizzed. Vivia dropped a dose of writhing blue goo into this skull too. Rex’s body began to overcome its half paralysis.
Working on both bodies, robotic arms restored skulls and skin.
Vivia unplugged the two tubes that circulated Leo’s cold blood. A robotic arm holding a thick disk descended and hovered just above his chest. A thud emanated from the disk. A moment later, another thud. Then another. Leo’s mouth opened as the lungs took their first breath in two days. His eyes remained closed. In Leo’s body, the left half of Rex’s brain continued to dream.
Four hours later, cerebrospinal fluid had filled each head’s cavity. Vivia woke both men with a soft tap. Each reached toward his wound.
“Don't touch that,” Vivia said.
The two men sat up and stared at each other.
One said, “I guess I’ll have to get used to sleeping on this side of the room.”
Several days later, the two men walked the city. Secured in their waistbands were laser guns. Gray hoods hid their faces from drones in the sky. One of the men said, “Keep your head down. Any of those drones could be controlled by the guy who ended Leo’s life.” Possessing identical memories and plans, they had little else to say to each other.
After the walk, they entered the lobby of their building. Before summoning the elevator, they looked above its doors to a panel that displayed the elevator’s position: it was on their floor. The men paused.
“Are you still happy with our plan?”
“Well, I’m looking out from a body I saw die. So yes.”
They both reached for the elevator button at the same time, then withdrew their arms before touching it.
Finally, just one pressed it. “I’ll go.” He waited, then stepped in and rode up. On the 88th floor, the elevator doors opened to reveal a visitor. In the apartment sat Enzo Steppe, leaning forward in a chair facing the elevator. His arms and laser gun lay on the wide armrests. “I’ll let you live,” he said with a wave directed at the red machine, “if you teach me everything.” His face partially suppressed a look of achievement.
With a detached air, the young man looked down at the seated visitor. “I will teach you nothing.” He looked up and into the distance. Each deep breath swelled his chest.
The look of satisfaction fell from Enzo’s face. As he glared, the red tissue of his lower eyelids glistened. His jaw tightened. He raised his arm and fired. The younger man collapsed. His hood fell back as his head crashed against the floor. Enzo hurled the gun at him. It bounced off the young man’s hip and slid across the room.
Enzo strained as he started dragging Vivia toward the elevator, kicking the fallen body’s legs out of the way.
A ding rang out from the elevator. With a puzzled expression, Enzo jerked his head toward it. The doors opened. Enzo’s eyes widened as he beheld another cloaked figure. The newly arrived man stepped forward. He pulled back his hood, revealing a mirror image of the scar of the man on the floor. He raised his weapon. “You only killed one of me.”
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