The Deep Look: Chapter One

“I’m not human.” Declarative, confident and obviously depressed. Anxiety leaked around the edges of his voice like ooze squeezing out of old plumbing. The other person in the room said something— denial, encouragement; it was dismissed as inconsequential, like the first five minutes of a presentation.
A window filled one wall; its Natek filter screening spectra and random molecules like ozone and particulate, but allowing clean air to wander through in a lazy parade of Brownian movement. Simian stood before the glassless window, a general inspecting his recalcitrant troops, or the philosopher king intent on inner discovery. The filter, at least as smart as a cockroach, kept the light low, and redirected UV into a local plasma cistern. Simian knew all about it— didn’t care, didn’t notice and didn’t want to bother— with the troops or the introspection. He just wanted not to be. Sad and angry, his thoughts twirled in charybdisian futility, as if Hamlet had possessed him in some kind of trans-dimensional one-act, as if he were mimicking the random molecular dance. The other person tried again; the messenger intent on not being killed over the news.
“Of course you are! You are as much human as you have ever been, as any of us are!” Belly blossomed over belt and reached like bread dough toward the floor, prevented only by the tucked shirt and bulging pants, stressed well beyond their simple engineering. The other person ate too much, didn’t move much, didn’t like himself much, but was okay with that. He liked Simian a lot— that’s what he was thinking as he spoke, choosing his words carefully but to little effect.
I really like this guy. He’s kinda my hero. How can he not be happy? How can he not want what they’ve given him? Although head of the Project, he always thought of the rest of his staff and their work as ‘they’, separated and distanced not so much by rank or authority as by an imagined gulf of ethical rectitude.
“They were careful, Simian. They wouldn’t have chosen you if they didn’t think you could do this.” I’d want it.

Simian, his hands clasped behind his back, his uniform crisp in the low light and filtered air, turned and gave such a blazing glare to the other person that he worried momentarily about combusting.
“They didn’t ask.”
They had coached him with the answer to this, but it hadn’t seemed very viscous at the time and as he prepared to say it out loud, he could feel it starting to leak, all the useful content suddenly liquefied and runny.
“You’re a soldier. They shouldn’t have to ask.”
This look was not as incendiary. It did have a certain thermal capacity, as evidenced by the new line of moist beads forming on the fleshy forehead of the other person. To Simian, who tended to think in military metaphors, the beaded sweat looked like a line of musketeers preparing for a fusillade.
Inside of him countless quanta of data became less theoretical, more possible and coalesced into information-derived thought during a packet of time so brief, that even quantum mechanics had no nomenclature for the event. He felt it like a wave, a pleasant shiver, over before it began, as if his inner world was now moving so fast that he was always on the cusp of what had happened last and what was about to happen next— the moment itself never registering, gone in an infinitesimal flare of potential reality. That was how his thinking process worked, now that the illegal and secret and diabolical Natek project, of which he had been aware, had come to fruition. And he was the fruit.
“I was a soldier. I died.” The argument was intrinsic in the declaration and he did not pursue the explanation. Let them do the work.
Swollen calves pumped unwilling muscle, legs moved with stiff and painful volition and the too-large man half-sat, half-fell into a Local Field chair. Simian heard him sigh; such relief and pleasure in the faux loss of unwanted mass.
“C’mon, you know what your contract says. You’re a line officer; you’re not allowed to die.”
Simian’s penetrating gaze began to peel layers away from the torpid skin lazing in the Local Field.
“Doctor Lucero, you know how much I respect you. In every sense but the obvious one, you are my father. We both know why they sent you.” The implication in his voice was as hard and clear as Fullerene-Matrix crystal, something that no one had ever actually seen. “They think that I cannot be angry with you, they think I cannot tell you no.” The other person, Doctor Lucero, did know that was why he was sent, and he hated it. He was thinking though, in that lateral way genius has, of how Simian had never called him anything but Doctor Lucero. He was stalling, but that information was pre-cognitive, a condition he knew Simian no longer possessed. What is it like? What goes on in there?
“Simian, it is done. You cannot go back; we cannot say we’re sorry. This is who you are now, what you are. Everyone on the team agreed, including me—” he emphasized the words so that his friend would know he included himself in the ring of responsibility, the stable of technological sin— “that of all the possible candidates, even the ones who might have died in the near future, you were the one most likely to assimilate the new construct. The application is no different than what is done to millions of people everyday, except for scope.”
Laughter, of a sort, escaped like live steam from his pressurized voice bellows.
“Scope? The only difference is scope? You are correct Doctor Lucero; the only difference is scope. Do any of you think you have any idea as to the nature of this ‘scope’, as you so blithely put it?”
Squirming like an eel in shallow water. Wanting to be elsewhere, to be on his friends’ side, to be- “Yes, we think we have a fair idea.” He said.
“No, you don’t. You have no idea. There is no metaphor capable of describing what has happened to me. There is no person, anywhere in the Union of Suns, who could understand what has happened to me— no one is smart enough Doctor!” It was eerie to see him stand there, still and calm. He made no gestures; his hands hung at his sides like shipped oars. His only method of asseveration was his inflection, his tonal dynamics.
“I will learn to accept the new body. I will learn to use the new technology and eventually it will become second nature. The psychological effects will take longer to deal with, but I will. All of these things you presumed.”
Doctor Lucero was distracted by Simian’s eyes. They were still dark, still brown as old molasses, but there was something in them now, something . . . a different . . . kind of a . . .
“What you could not predict with your models and your quantum stabilizers and your famous educated guesses-“ he threw that last word like it was a wattle of phlegm he was trying to dislodge— “is the synthesis of the interface.” The uniformed body, straight, tall, creased through to the soul, turned and stepped back to the window as it caught the last light of Brightside. His voice continued, thrown by some acoustical trick of the room until it sounded as if it was behind the Local Field chair; “You had no idea what would happen. You still don’t. It’s driving you crazy that you can’t find out.”
Doctor Lucero smiled at the perfect posture silhouetted in the waning light. A week ago he could not use contractions and now he was using them without thinking. Well, hardly without thinking . . .
“What’s worrying you even more is how badly I’m taking it. You have made me into something that has never existed before. You have given me Frankenstein’s gift, Doctor; given me what Prometheus tried to steal the first time and could not. You have no idea what you’ve done.” He swiveled without seeming to move. The body works as advertised.
“And I don’t either. But I know what I’m not.” Shoes moving softly on rare wool carpet, the sibilant swish of synthetic material rubbing friction into sound. The door opened silently and Simian vanished like a non-human.
Doctor Lucero sat in the blessed suspension of the Local Field. He watched the cockroach-smart window render itself opaque and solid, felt it begin to generate heat and watched the undulating waves of infrared spread like pond water into the room— not because it was interesting, but because that was where his eyes were pointed. He stayed in the room and thought. It was what he did— god knew he could do little else. He felt insubstantial, as if his prodigious bulk was just an extrapolation of his Quastab device, a sophisticated model of his projected self, but not his actual self. He thought he might know how Simian felt.