[ExI] uploads etc.

[Keith Henson]

Page 4 of 6

When her parents had entered the clinic Suskulan told them that Zaba
could not move or feel anything yet, but if they wanted to speak to
her spirit, it was nearby and he would try to invoke it.  Tomorrow her
spirit would be back in her body.

Zaba had never used a telephone, the tata being well out of range of a
cell tower but she knew what they were like.  Suskulan's wire frame
image handed Zaba a cell phone image.  She reached out with her wire
frame body and took it from him.

"Mother?"  Her voice came out of the speaker Suskulan used.

"Zaba!"

"Are you going to be all right Zaba?"

"Suskulan says I will be, but he doesn't know how many days it will
take.  Can you get Tanko to finish weeding?

"I will do it myself."  Her mother said.  She did not want to risk her
other daughter.  After a strange hour of visiting with Zaba’s spirit
through a speaker and holding the warm but still hand of Zaba's
utility fog image her mother and father left promising to come back
the next day.

When they left, Suskulan told Zaba that tomorrow she would be able to
talk to her mother and feel her through the image.

He offered to let her sleep till the next day, but Zaba was curious
about what had happened to her.

"Who shot me?"

"That I do not know.  However, the bullet fragments can be matched
with the gun if someone else is shot or the gun is found.  It was an
AK-47 or similar.  The bullet went through your spine."

Sensing that she wanted to know more, Suskulan generated a wire frame
of her body and fed it to her visual circuits.

"The bullet entered the outer edge of your right nipple between ribs,
passed through your right lung just missing your heart.  It hit the
4th thoracic vertebrae, shattering it and severing your spinal cord."
Since butchering animals was a common (but not common enough!)
practice at the tata Zaba understood the picture she was seeing.

"That takes a lot of fixing.  Your body is being kept very cold so my
healing spirits can work fast without burning up."

"How do they work?"

"Ah.  Such a simple question; such a hard answer.   The problem is you
don't have the words; they don't exist in your language.  To
understand how healing spirits work would require that you learn to
read and learn another language."

Zaba, like 99% of the Tamberma, was illiterate.   Not that learning to
read in her language would have been much help.  The only literature
in the language was a translation of the Bible, not terribly useful to
people with traditional religions.

"Can you teach me this language and how to read?"  Zaba asked.

There was a short pause, which was really a very long pause for
Suskulan as he projected what would happen and thought about the
unstated (though obvious) reason he had been given the upgrade.

"Yes" Suskulan said at last inflecting his voice to a sigh.  "But it
will change you and the rest of the people of the tata in ways you
cannot foresee and may not like. You can sleep through the nine or ten
days it will take to finish healing you.  Are you sure you want to do
this?

"Yes," said Zaba firmly, "I want to learn."

And thus was the fate of this particular tata determined, though in
truth something like this had been ordained since Lothar and Mabo
traded the clinic seed that became Suskulan for a fetish and before
that when the Foundation organized the distribution of clinic seeds,
and before that when an early clinic design was released under a
creative commons license, and before that . . . leading back and back
in time to when proto humans first discovered that a broken stone's
sharp edge was just the thing to get at the meat under a hide.

Subjectively Zaba talked to her parents every ten days.  By the next
day Suskulan had animated
her image on the healing table so Zaba was able to speak through it
and to feel her mother holding her utility fog image when she visited.
Zaba’s real body was near freezing and 30 meters under the tata.

Her biological memory was being mechanically updated in her very cold
brain and her consciousness was running in a swarm of fast nano
computers.  Suskulan could have let her experience run even faster but
he didn't want Zaba to get too far out of synch with her family and
the rest of the tata.

Mechanically constructed memory is a very efficient way to learn.
With Suskulan's help Zaba learned to read her own language in a few
hours, to be fluent in English in 15 days (subjective), to an
eighth-grade equivalent education in 30 days and to a rough
understanding of the physical and chemical background for
nanotechnology by 60 days subjective.

Toward the end of her stay in the clinic, Zaba had an understanding of
what the swarms of repair devices were doing to restore her spinal
cord, patiently teasing out where the nerves should be reconnected
across the gap, replacing cell walls and myelin in the destroyed
section, rebuilding the shattered bone, muscle and connective tissue
and fishing out the bullet fragments down to single atoms of lead.
She even had some understanding of how her mind was being supported in
the nano computers that were acting in place of her very cold brain.

A few hours before her parents were to come on the last day, Zaba
warmed up her body under Suskulan's guidance.  Her consciousness was
continuous as the reactivated brain cells took over from the slowed
down swarm of nano computers that had been simulating them.   The
support and information umbilical connections withdrew and the holes
in her skin closed seamlessly as Zaba started breathing for the first
time in 9 days.

She sat up and coughed a few times.  Her physical body was different
from what she had experienced for the past subjective 90 days.
Better?  Worse?  She could not decide.  Zaba was delighted that there
was no sign she had been shot.  She walked around the huge underground
space, which had become familiar to her in the past 3 months as she
shifted her virtual viewpoint among clouds of utility fog.  Zaba
detected a few misconnected sensation nerves in one foot.  Suskulan
said if her brain did not adjust to them in a few days she should come
back and the clinic would fix them.

She was mildly distressed that she now had to voice talk to Suskulan,
who appeared as a projection, instead of "talking" directly to his
spirit in the spirit world she had inhabited.  Then she realized from
her new knowledge there was a way she could if she took a bit of the
clinic with her.  However, there wasn't much time to before her
parents came.

"Can I come back to visit even if I am not hurt?" she asked.

"Yes.  Anytime I don't have another patient."

"May I take the clinic's interface with me?"

"There is nothing so addictive . . ." thought Suskulan.

"You may."  Part of the cloud of nanomachines that had just left
Zaba's brain returned as a momentary haze.  Since they retained their
memory of where they had been it was a matter of a few minutes before
the machines reestablished their monitoring posts in Zaba's brain.

"I missed not being able to talk to you in the spirit world."   Zaba
said without voicing.  A wire frame image in Zaba's visual cortex
overlaid the physical projected image of Suskulan.

"Spirit talk does not reach as far as your garden."  Suskulan warned her.

Zaba lay down on the repair table that was now at the bottom of the
elevator shaft.   The elevator lifted it into its place in the clinic.
  Zaba was treated to seeing the rapidly thinning utility fog image of
her body that had comforted her family for the last ten days before
she merged into her image.

The nanomachine haze that had fogged her image and now her real body
withdrew into the low table.  She greeted her family as they came into
the clinic and in voice talk said goodbye to the image of an old man
Suskulan was projecting.  Then they stepped through the clinic's
keyhole door to where the other members of the tata were waiting for a
joyous celebration of the healing of Zaba.

Suskulan sent off a strictly factual report.  There were no replies
this time, but perhaps that was due to the high report traffic.

Her family had visited every day, but they were still delighted and
relieved that Zaba was back with no visible effects from being shot.
Her parents had been worried that her value as a bride might have been
damaged, but none of the tata seemed to be concerned, only very proud
of the growing powers of their clinic Suskulan.  (The elders had long
since wildly inflated the value of the fetish they had traded for the
clinic seed.)

Zaba had been warned not to flaunt her new knowledge to adults and
with Suskulan's help had built temporary inhibitions into her mental
processes.  She was under no such injunction toward the other
children, though.  They were absolutely fascinated and wanted the
ability to talk to Suskulan in the spirit world as well.  In spirit
world talk Zaba asked Suskulan if he would give the others an
"interface" like she had.

"Yes, though not in one day like I did with you.  It takes several
days to a week for an interface to establish itself unless you are
very cold."

And so, over the next month the children from 5 to 15 acquired
interfaces to the local net, some of them getting mothers to take them
to Suskulan for "belly pain" and others just slipping away to the
clinic for an hour.

A few days after Zaba was healed the village elders visited Suskulan
to see if he knew how to prevent another of their people from being
shot.

On Sun, Mar 10, 2024 at 11:52 AM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> He invited the village elders in for a visit, telling them he was not
> a man but a medical spirit attached to the clinic.  The elders
> accepted his statement with some relief and left to send in their
> sickest.
>
> The first was K'rekou, a five-year-old boy with “Dapaong tumor,” due
> to a parasitic nematode O. bifurcum.  Humans were not its normal host
> and that was part of what made it such a nasty disease.  The mother
> was startled to see the old man but obeyed his instructions in perfect
> Tamari to lay her boy on the low table.  K'rekou, emaciated and crying
> in obvious pain quieted, relaxed, and went to sleep.
>
> "This will take a few hours and your boy will be asleep for all of it.
> You may stay or come back for him after noon."  Suskulan told her, "He
> will not wake up until you come to get him."
>
> K'rekou's mother would have stayed but she had another child at home.
> She left with some misgivings.
>
> The low table became hazy with nanomachines joining the first that had
> infiltrated into the boy's brain through skin and lungs alike to put
> him under anesthesia.  The nanomachines reduced the firing of nerves
> just as simple anesthetics had been doing for 200 years.  The haze
> thickened and K'rekou faded from sight.
>
> "Dapaong tumor" may present as a painful, abdominal mass with a
> diameter of 2–11 cm, typically adhering to the abdominal wall.  Or it
> may present as pea-sized nodules in the large intestine.  K'rekou had
> both.  The mass, about the size of a golf ball and a little to the
> left of his navel, was the more obvious problem, but the damage to his
> large intestine was a greater drain on his health.
>
> Suskulan had sequenced the DNA left before he was activated, when
> K'rekou touched the sticky patch on the seed. K'rekou's compressed
> genome, along with those of the rest of the tata inhabitants, had been
> sent through the network, and his embryonic development and
> growth to his present age had been simulated with otherwise idle
> computing capacity.  What he should be like at this stage of his
> growth was a checkpoint in the medical database for the tata.
>
> The process of healing was primarily one of comparing what should be
> with what was, and reducing the differences.  Most of the comparison
> was done outside the boy in computing nodes cooled with a flow of
> ultra pure cold water.  Still, there was a lot of heat-releasing
> manipulation required that had to be done slowly.   To carry away the
> waste heat, K'rekou's blood was temporarily removed and replaced by a
> substitute solution pumped through him just above freezing.
>
> By 11:15 the parasites had been expunged, and the tissue around them
> reverted to normal.  Enough damage had been done by the parasites to
> require temporary scaffolding in a few places.  The scaffolding would
> release growth hormone until the cell proliferation filled in the
> gaps, and then it would dissolve.  Other minor parasites were
> destroyed; ones that didn't cause problems were left; a minor hernia
> was fixed; and cell repair machines restored fat by injecting lipids
> into the fat cells--a cell-at-a-time reversed version of liposuction.
> Then K'rekou's blood was warmed up and put back.  Finally the haze of
> nanomachines faded back into the table.
>
> By noon the boy, looking much healthier, woke up when his mother
> entered the clinic.  His mother was astounded at the change. K'rekou
> wanted to go play with his friends.  Suskulan, who had monitored the
> process rather than directed the fine details, was pleased.  He sent
> off a report of his first case and received a number of
> congratulations from other clinics and humans.
>
> Over the next five months all of the inhabitants of the tata spent
> time on the table getting old and new, major and trivial medical
> problems fixed.  Suskulan enjoyed serving the people of the tata and
> was extremely
> good at it.
>
> Once, four of the adult males came in back in agony after stumbling
> into a huge nest of enraged stinging insects.  Suskulan took all four
> at once by putting two of them on the floor.  The oldest were mildly
> regressed in age each time.  Other than a boy who died alone far from
> the tata and was not found for several weeks, there were no deaths.
>
> It was a particularly long dry season.  The spring dried up.  The
> fields and gardens shriveled, the animals that didn't die moved far
> south where they could find something to eat.  The granaries were low
> after a number of poor harvests, and food was short in supply and
> variety.
>
> Suskulan's patients started using the clinic to restore fat when they
> became gaunt.  Suskulan increased the size of his solar collector to
> provide it.
>
> When the rains came back there was a record deluge.  The only reason
> the tata was not swept away was the meter lift Suskulan had given it
> when he built his underground extensions.  He added another half meter
> to them.
>
> By the time the long dry season came back the tata inhabitants were
> used to the clinic.
>
> December 2042
>
> Far away, Lothar, Mabo and their fellow teams had completed planting
> clinics all the way to Cape of Good Hope. There were just short of a
> million of them, one for every 350 inhabitants on the ravaged
> continent.  The planting went faster in the decimated cities;
> sometimes a crew could plant two or even three clinics in a day though
> security was more of a problem.   After finishing Africa, Lothar and
> Mabo had a choice planting clinic seeds in South America, New Guinea,
> or Australia.  Vacations were not considered since the Foundation's
> goal was to provide clinics seeds to every human group on earth before
> the end of 2044.  In the opinion of the clinic seed planters, there
> was no more rewarding work on earth.
>
> May 2043
>
> Early in the second wet season Suskulan received a major system
> upgrade. The upgrade went swiftly because Suskulan had stockpiled tens
> of thousands of liters of parts and fuel
> --most of it in the form of methyl alcohol--that he also was keeping
> in stock to be converted to fat if needed.
>
> Suskulan's first serious patient after the upgrade was Zaba, a 12 year
> old who had been shot through her spine while working in a garden.
> She was near death, and far beyond help by pre clinic standards, when
> she was placed in Suskulan's "hands."
>
> As the nanotech mist enveloped her still body, Suskulan quickly
> evaluated her than told her parents:
>
> "I can heal Zaba but it will take at least a week, perhaps as many as
> ten days.   She will not be able to move or speak at first, but you
> can talk to her spirit at noon tomorrow."
>
> After they left Suskulan moved Zaba's body underground for better
> cooling and shorter connections to the mass of repair devices.  With a
> small amount of his attention he constructed an image of the repair
> table and Zaba out of utility fog including the ghastly wounds.
>
> This time the nanomachines didn't infiltrate her brain just to shut it
> down, though they did that and reversed the mild damage from shock and
> low blood flow.   The nanomachines mapped out all her neural circuits
> and cell connections.  Shortly before her parents entered the clinic
> the next day they tentatively restored consciousness, partly in her
> brain--which was far below the temperature needed to run on its
> own--and partly in the haze of nanomachines that were also simulating
> input in place of her eyes and ears.
>
> "What happened to me?  Where am I?  Where is my body?" Zaba asked as
> she became conscious.  She was calm because the nanomachines were
> acting as tranquilizers.  Suskulan was listening to an interface to
> her mostly simulated motor cortex.
>
> To give Zaba orientation Suskulan imposed on her visual cortex a wire
> frame image of the human form he usually presented then explained:
>
> "You were shot, you are in the clinic Suskulan at the tata, and your
> body is under the clinic being repaired.
>
> The clinic recently gained new powers to speak to spirits while their
> bodies are being healed.
> The healing will take some time, even I do not know exactly how many
> days," he added,  "You were badly injured."
>
> "My mother and father," Zaba started and then stopped.
>
> "They brought you to me yesterday and are very concerned.  Your mother
> is holding the hand of an image of your body in the clinic.  Suskulan
> switched her vision to one in the clinic looking at the repair table
> and Zaba’s parents.   “I can extend my power and let you use it to
> talk to them as if you were speaking through a telephone."
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Keith
>
> On
> > > > -----------------------------------
> > > >
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