Black Star

Chapter Eight

Had he overdressed for the first meeting with the subject? 

It was difficult to say at this stage until they had opened up some form of communication channel. He'd decided that the initial meetings would be conducted in reality so as not to disorientate the caveman. Caveman was a rather unkind nickname that had stuck but made no sense in reality, him being from the year 2015. The caveman had been given a mentor named Bluu, who'd used V-World to help bring him up to date with Heathen history, in the doctor's opinion this was a mistake. 

There was no possible concept of virtual worlds 500 years ago yet regardless they had apparently used some private sims already. There could be problems with a primitive man already in a world completely alien to him being taken into an alternative reality. Because V-World taps directly into the brain stem, it is experienced as real by the subject. They had already transplanted the brain into a new younger body, this might be strain enough as it stands. So be it, as far as the doctor was concerned reality would best suit any initial investigations as far as he was concerned. If he was able to communicate well and they made good progress, then they could use his information to create V-World sims. 

These would enable the exciting prospect of simulated history and creating an environment similar to that which existed over 500 years ago. There are plenty around but none based on fact from someone alive at that time, another reason to proceed with caution.

It was common knowledge that in and around the 21st-century tastes that formed attraction were most usually centred around members of the opposite sex. For this reason, Bluu was both female and attractive. A lot had happened in the world since this fellow had been frozen, shipped to Mars and brought back. Touchreik expected he would have experienced only the most primitive levels of technology, not the complete digitisation of data and certainly not the shutdown. Everything in human history wiped clean in a single disastrous year. The major's mission to Mars and his heroic return to save humanity or what was left of it, moreover the very existence of the saviour machine. Since then? Well, hundreds of years of stability, order and peace. The society that existed now had eliminated all the world issues that would have been prevalent in the caveman's world. The doctor tapped his comms unit and took a moment to refresh himself with some background information on the sample.

As Wade had said, part of the major's mission to Mars had been to use the planet as a storehouse for organic DNA samples. The organic human was found amongst these as part of the Major Zero's original expedition. Somehow a 21st-century cryogenic human sample had been stored with everything else. No one knew how or why he came to be there or how Mother had instigated his return. His records showed him to be a man named Nova. 

There were a number of reasons he could assume him to be held in high esteem by his peers in 2015. The Cryogenic freezing indicated he may have been a man of means; in all likelihood, it would have been an expensive process in those days. Secondly, his record hinted he might be a skilled musician who could play instruments with no A.I. input whatsoever, a skill highly prized in his time and long forgotten now. There was so much to learn both personally and publicly; he hardly knew where to start. 

The timing of this project was perfect, had it not been for the 22-year delay the whole thing might never have fallen to him at all. The record repeated how the old body was useless and he'd been stored whilst a new one was gestated from his DNA, a process that took over two decades. There was no medical cure for such an old form of decay in his body. Initially, there was the prospect of simply thawing the brain, trace the data and see what could be learned until a change of heart. A simple and ingenious solution. Mother would usually gestate normal organic humans as she did with us all. Why not simply do the same using DNA from the sample itself? And so, it was that a child was gestated but instead of being given life was left to grow into adulthood. This surrogate body was allowed to grow until it was old enough and strong enough to become the donor. The brain was then transplanted into the 22-year-old body. This could never halt the recurrence of the illness that would affect him in middle age. He will almost certainly suffer that fate again as a relatively young man of 69 years. That is, when he reached 69 years for the second time. As for what to do then and whether to give him the 60 years of life he would be owed before euthenisation? It can only be assumed that we might have to cross that bridge when it arrives.