Page 49 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Phantom Limb

“Without belaboring the obvious,” offered Leith Mauker, “once
Barron has the weaker academic in thrall, you have a race against
time for such mischief to be carried out. I presume the crime lord’s
head and torso are connected sketchily to various tubes for input
and output, the entire life-support system subject to breakdowns
and opportunistic infections. Therefore, unless he has one big caper
in mind, his best choice would be to transfer his mind—whatever
that is, physically—to Cyphen’s brain, allowing him to continue life
in another body. Apart from the horrors that would inflict upon
society at large, it might be amusing what that hybrid human would
have to do to pass as Cyphen until he could again become the well-
concealed boss of a criminal organization.”
“I’d like something with a little more poetic justice.” It was
Hydrargyrum, steepling her fingers. “Once Barron has this new
body—with Cyphen reduced to a tiny voice in the background,
upset that his experimental results won’t be published—he will be
able to get at those Swiss bank accounts: all it takes is a number and
a password. So, not merely could he rebuild his web of evil, perhaps
for a sequel, but he could take revenge on anyone and everyone he
thinks took part in fingering him to the police. Then you could
introduce more characters, maybe the innocent daughter of either
Cyphen himself—whose boyfriend could be a cop—or a rival who
desperately wants to discover who has taken over Barron’s old turf
and is using the same M.O. as the by-now deceased gangster.”
“Right,” agreed Brad. “Or maybe final redemption for Cyphen if
he can sacrifice his body to stop Barron by paralyzing his trigger
finger at some crucial shoot-out. But you’ve portrayed him as
almost as ruthless as Barron himself. I could just as easily imagine a
melding of the two personalities into an even greater monster.
Instead of phantom limbs, in that bizarre mélange, you would have
a man with the talents of four arms and four legs. What sort of
prodigy would that be? Not even the ancient Greeks had such a
fantastic being in their pantheon.”
“Speaking of phantom limbs,” added Cyril Kornfleck, “it would
also be a nice touch of poetic justice if the researcher, as a result of
the electrical brain-melding, developed a sort of schizophrenic

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