xp_communication | Email to Geek Squad, Medical

To: [Ghost Girl], [Babelfish Boy], [Epidermis Lass], [Clotho], [Lachesis], [Atropos], [BigFurryBricklayer]
Cc: [Blaire, Alison]
Subject: Phase One success!

The new MMI chip is done - we have a working prototype that I'm burning Doug and Kitty's adaptive AI language onto now. It will translate impulses from the spinal cord into instructions to the cyberware; everything from motion to diagnostics, to shifting into flight mode.

Kitty and Doug - I'm still going to want to be able to call on you if I need help, but the bulk of the gruntwork is done. Someone put Doug's brain back together if we broke it.

Doctors - as soon as is feasibly possible, the MMI chip will need to be implanted before the full cybersurgery. His spinal cord will need to start transmitting to it before it can give a reliable output - similar to a brain forming instinctive engram paths in utero.

Yes, much like a stegosaurus, Jetstream's MMI chip will be like a backup brainstem located in his butt. Closer to the first iliac vertebrae, but I do digress.

Ms. Blaire: If you could contact me offlist, I have some things I need to run by you for the design of Mr. al-Rashid's cybernetics that only you have the capacity to assist with.

If anyone needs me, I will be in the gym for a few hours.

JHF

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

x-madelyn.livejournal.com

What sort of time frame do you need for the chip, Forge? We're almost at the point where we're ready for the next stage of the 'cure' for this spore, but it's going to require we remove every bit of hardware he has - radiation and metal/electronics don't mix, I seem to remember. We're looking at around the 23rd for the surgery, and the radiation the next day once he's had time to recover. The chip could probably go in the day after that, depending of course how long it needs to adjust.

We might be able to push things a little further ahead of schedule than that, but we risk the spore not being weakened enough and throwing off the treatment. Which makes everything else moot.

And normally Hank would be asking these questions, but he's ears-deep in the radiation chamber design/construction and sounding rather like Doug when you talk to him.

Madelyn.

From:

x-forge.livejournal.com

If removal is the 23rd, radiation the 24th - as soon as you can get it implanted after he's not glowing, the better. Radiation might scramble the fractal memory paths - let me run some tests on that.

I'll have the fully assembled cyberware for you by the 26th, then.

From:

x-jeangrey.livejournal.com

I don't think pushing things forward would be a good idea, especially since, really, we still wouldn't be implanting the chip any sooner relative to when the hardware goes on. We'd be better off keeping to the schedule up through the radiation treatment, and then installing the chip and delaying the attachment as much as possible to allow the neural pathways to develop. Forge, what's the minimum time you'd want to have the chip in before hand, and what would be your prefered time?

From:

x-forge.livejournal.com

In all honesty, the chip will need 24 hours to fully prime to the nerve impulses. The important thing is that it be allowed to fully integrate before the system shock of the implantation surgery.

I'm no doctor, but I've done a lot - and I mean a lot - of reading on the psychology behind cybernetics, specifically in amputees. Vested interest, of course. I don't know how old Mr. al-Rashid was when he lost his legs and most of his lower torso, but from what I'm given to understand, he's spent at least eight years, maybe more, with the cyberware? And from his medical profiles, which include his psych writeups, he never fully adapted psychologically to his injury.

I attribute this to the inhumanity of his original cyberware. As brilliant as the design was a decade ago, it doesn't mimic natural human function. To give an example - it took me almost five months to become accustomed to the use of my initial prosthetics - and I was a fast adaptee due to my powers. My design for my arm after the recent surgery? A fifth of that time.

The closer a cybernetic implant resembles natural form and function, the more the mind will psychologically accept it. Psychological rejection is as dangerous as an autoimmune rejection - and something I'll wager that Mr. al-Rashid's been fighting off ever since the day they put the first implant in him.

He's a Muslim. Part of the tenets of his religion is that the human body is a temple, something not to be defiled. That's part of his self-image, part of who he is. Look at his diet, his workout regimen, the man is - pardon the reference - a machine when it comes to perfecting his body, what little he feels is still his.

Biologically? He can survive the procedure whenever you do it. Right now his body basically ends at the navel and he's still floating in a tube of thermally neutral biostabilizing gel in a partial coma. And he's tough enough to pull through.

Psychologically? There's liable to be ten plus years of damage all suddenly brought back to the forefront of his mind. Letting his body adapt to these new cybernetics will, I think, take the first big steps towards integrating that. And to that extent, I am working to make the cyberware as seamlessly integrated with his existing physical structure as possible. Which means that the MMI chip has to be one hundred percent synched to his nerve impulses before he's put into the implementation surgery.

Best estimate? Give it twenty-four hours. If his mind's fighting it, though, it may not take at all. And that possibility, I'm afraid to say, is completely out of my ballpark.

I'll be in my lab.

JHF