Two Years' Past: Motion Control

“Again, please.”

Kailey lifted her right arm, up as high as the clearance inside the scanner’s tunnel would allow, which wasn’t much.

“Okay, now down.” The Wizard was giving her instructions through a headset, his voice crackling as the magnetic fields garbled the signal, even through the heavy shielding of the cable.

“Is it supposed to feel like somebody is using me for a tuning fork?” Kailey asked into the microphone.

“Not for normal people, no,” the Wizard said. “But normal people don’t have superconducting nervous systems.“

“Don’t the magnets hurt the computers in my head?”

“They don’t work like conventional computers. No magnetic storage. Left arm, please, up.”

Kailey raised her left arm.

“All right, now down. And.. Up again, please.”

Kailey followed his instructions. In many ways, it was like the warmups in ballet. First position, third position, fifth position, over and over again, until she didn’t even have to think about where or what her body was doing, it just responded to the verbal cues.

They were teaching the computers — both the motion control mainframes and the smaller versions in Kailey’s head — where her muscle groups were, and where they were located in her brain. The lacework of filaments overlaying her brain watched the neural activity, learning the various pathways, taking ‘snapshots’ as it were, of the various movements.

“We aren’t really teaching your computers how you move — it already knows the basics,” the Wizard had said on the first day. “Motion control therapy fine tunes that information to your body. We’re creating a filter of sorts, so when you think ‘jump’ the command doesn’t come back asking for more juice than your muscles can provide, and you wind up hurting yourself.”

“Right hand, up ninety degrees from the elbow, please.”

“Palm up or down?” she asked.

“Palm down. Good catch. And stop smiling. I see that. We’re not working on facial muscles yet.”

Kailey lifted her hand, until it pointed at the top of the doughnut.

“Now down. Now the left.”

* * * * *

After only two months, Kailey had completed the upper body filtering.

Jordan wheeled Kailey down the corridor, but they passed the doorway leading to the PET scanner.

“Aren’t we…?”

“Nope. Next phase of therapy is a little different.”

He wouldn’t give any more away no matter how much Kailey wheedled.

He eventually stopped before one of the Audio/Video labs. He tapped in a code at the keypad by the door, and it clicked open. He backed Kailey into the room.

This particular room was dominated by what looked like a dentist’s chair on steroids. A thick bundle of cabling snaked over to a server tower in one corner. The entire rear wall of the room, opposite the door, was a projection screen, and showed a blue screen.

Jordan lifted Kailey from the wheelchair to the other chair, again adjusting her scrubs to keep them free from wrinkles.

The Wizard looked up from the workstation near the tall mainframe, swiveling his stool around as he pushed himself across the small space to Kailey’s side.

“Okay, Kailey. We’ve done as much as we can with your upper body, the parts you still have feeling in. I have to tell you, I wasn’t expecting to hit this phase of the program for another couple months. Great work.” He smiled.

Kailey felt the blush creep across her face. “I… I didn’t to much, just followed directions.”

“Well, if we keep this up, you’ll have breezed through the conditioning in about two thirds of the time we were expecting it to take. I just hope Dr. Singh is ready by the time we finish up.” His smile shifted more towards ‘grin’ territory.

“So… what do we do now?”

“All you have to do is watch the films we’re going to show, and think about how the leg muscles would work out the actions.”

“Thats it?”

“That’s it,” the Wizard said.

“Wow. Okay.”

“Ready?” he asked, scooting back over to the workstation.

“Um, yeah. I guess.”

The Wizard tapped at a few keys, and the blue flashed into shaky, grainy video footage.

“Oh my God,” Kailey breathed. She leaned over, looking back behind the chair. “That’s me!”

The Wizard grinned. “Well, I said we were going to have to start over at the beginning. Your parents were most gracious in giving us every scrap of footage of you that they had.”

Kailey turned back to the wall, having a hard time watching through the haze of tears in her eyes. But she watched, and thought, very hard.

The Wizard tapped at the keys every now and then, or made an adjustment on a dial here or there, and the lights of the mainframe flashed, red-to-green-to-red, learning what Kailey had learned nearly a dozen years ago.

* * * * *

“You were cute as a kid,” Jordan said, as he wheeled her back up the corridor.

Kailey sat in silence. She knew what was coming next.

“What happened?” they both asked at the same time.

“Jordan, you really need some new material,” Kailey told him, her voice showing a weariness. How could it be more exhausting watching movies than the first phase of the therapy?