Page 48 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Phantom Limb

and suffering. That doesn’t bother him—he’s a bit of a sociopath,
himself, with little sympathy with or empathy for traumatized
people. Then he learns, via sensational press reports, of Barron’s
trial and ongoing agony. Aha! A perfect candidate—a multiple
amputee with few legal rights. He arranges with the prison
authorities to use their moribund star prisoner for his experiments.
Barron cannot very well refuse, as his burns have destroyed his
powers of speech along with those of vison and hearing.”
“At first, Dr. Cyphen’s attempts to stimulate his subject’s brain
into sending and receiving signals to non-existent arms and legs are
a failure. The adjunct professor becomes desperate: if he can
demonstrate the validity of his brain-mapping ideas on this extreme
case, then he will have pulled off a coup leaving his colleagues in
the dust. But his software, with its highly-assumptive algorithms,
does not trigger stimulation of the nerve centers it would have to in
order to prove him right. If he abandons the work now, he will be
the laughingstock of the psychology department and never gain
tenure. His only chance of success, as he sees it, is to connect his
own brain to Barron’s to stimulate the paraplegic’s nervous system
at the most basic level to act as if it were in touch with real muscle
tissue. He, Cyphen, would attach the electronic paraphernalia to his
own scalp, connect to the analogous points on Barron’s scarred and
hairless scalp, and then perform simple movements like squeezing a
ball or sitting down and standing up. According to Cyphen’s theory,
the proprioceptive as well as activator pathways in the still
neurologically-active brain of his subject would fire in concert with
his own. What could possibly go wrong?”
“Was that a rhetorical question?” asked Perversity Tinderstack.
“Not at all! It was the clichéd mock-surprise response to human
self-outwitting, a stock situation in these mad scientist stories. Now,
if Dr. Cyphen were simply to fail, that wouldn’t amount to much.
No, once hooked up, the stronger personality would have to take
control of the weaker—effectively giving the criminally insane
Barron another shot at mischief beyond his hospital cell. I have a
few ways in mind for this to play out; maybe you have others. How
about it?”

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