He had never been a lucky person. Many stories begin this way, and so does this one. He was born on Friday the thirteenth, a day of pouring rain and hail. This fact alone hinted that his fate would not be easy.
Apparently, his mother thought so too.
An ordinary street fool who got pregnant by an equally intellectually unrefined "proper lad." They abandoned him on the doorstep of the local hospital. They didn't place him there, but literally threw him from a passing car. They were afraid of being seen or something of the sort. So it's not surprising that from birth, he was confined to bed, able to move only his right hand.
Perhaps with a broken spine and traumatic brain injury, he shouldn't have lived long. But he decided otherwise. He decided that he would live.
He was placed in a special orphanage. There he existed until he was twelve. Always alone, in a tiny room. Sometimes other residents of the orphanage would look in on him.
They thought they were excellent at joking about him. About how he couldn't speak and only amusingly twitched his hand when they played their games with him. Is it necessary to clarify that he never won?
Besides them, a worker would come in a couple of times a day. She washed him, cleaned him, and changed his bedding. She often cursed. Complained about life and the fact that she had to take care of a vegetable. Sometimes, when she was in a particularly bad mood, she beat him.
But he still intended to survive.
In spite of everyone.
At twelve, luck briefly smiled on him for the first time. A delegation visited the orphanage, which included a famous magnate. He immediately decided to use the "vegetable" for his own purposes. He placed him in an excellent clinic, in a room larger than many apartments. About once a month, he would come with the press, give gifts, and probably very successfully avoided taxes.
This is how the boy's life changed.
He was fed well, smiling psychologists talked to him, and other patients often visited. Some were terminally ill, others had recently lost someone. Being unable to speak, he was good at listening.
Nevertheless, music remained his only friend. He listened to it all the time. When he ate, when he read, even when someone was venting to him again.
At sixteen, they set up an excellent laptop for him with special software. Now he could communicate. He typed, the laptop spoke. The number of visitors immediately decreased. Only tired but smiling orderlies remained.
Then he began to write. No, not books or paintings, but music. Need it be said that the magnate made every effort to ensure that the paralyzed musician under his care became a media star?
By eighteen, hundreds of thousands of people were downloading his music daily. He didn't need the money, and the magnate gladly managed it. He said it was for charity. But probably not.
Everything changed on that day. He was lying in bed, though he couldn't feel it. With his right hand, he turned his own head toward the window. There, at the foot of the hill, in the distance, the city lights sparkled.
"Can't sleep?" sounded right next to him.
He turned his head back. This always made new visitors flinch, but not this man. About forty years old, maybe more, with a strong chin and a clear, bright gaze.
"Who are you?" asked the mechanical voice. "Who let you in here?"
He hated when people came in without knocking. It made him feel even more helpless.
"Oh, don't worry, I work here." The man sat on the edge of the huge bed. This irritated him even more. "We haven't met – I'm from the seventh floor."
"Neurosurgery department?"
"And bioengineering."
The orderlies called such people "Frankensteins." Interesting, what could one of the scientists want from a simple cripple. Just a slightly famous one.
"I'm also the local chief physician here," the snow-white smile wasn't pleasing either, "Doctor Daniel Walker."
Daniel extended his hand. The bedridden man shook it.
"Strong handshake," the doctor muttered, slightly massaging his palm.
The cripple smiled mentally. When you do everything, absolutely everything with just one limb, it develops much stronger than others'. Something like the particularly acute hearing of the blind.
"Please, get to the point," said the mechanical voice. "I'm not a big fan of... small talk."
He should have said that he wasn't a particular fan of people either. Difficult childhood and all that.
"Just as they told me." The white smile could rival the equally white walls. "I have a proposal for you."
"Sorry, I haven't thought about married life yet. Plus, you're not my type."
Stupid jokes had always been his defense mechanism. They repelled people better than anything else. Nobody likes when someone makes dumb, unskilled jokes. However, the doctor laughed.
He wanted Daniel to leave soon. He still had to finish a set for a new release.
"What do you know about neural networks?" asked Daniel.
"Only what they write in science fiction," the special emoticon shrugged on the screen. "Something like a neurointerface."
"Roughly so," the doctor nodded. "It's something like an additional nervous system."
On the screen, the emoticon raised its eyebrows.
"You think..."
"That if the operation is successful, you might be able to walk and talk. Not right away, you'll have to go through long and painful rehabilitation. It might take several years, but..."
"I agree."
"But..."
"I agree!" the metallic voice thundered.
Daniel looked into the bottomless, determined eyes of a man unable even to turn his head. And despite everything, there wasn't a drop of doubt in those eyes.
"Then, as soon as we settle all the bureaucratic issues, we can begin."
From that moment on, long and very crowded days of waiting dragged on. Various specialists came to him. They covered his head with different sensors, ran tests, checked some clever parameters.
They took so many samples from him that even astronauts would probably have felt sorry for him. It reached the point of absurdity – they took a nail clipping. And for this, they sent a special person with laser scissors. This was probably the only entertaining event.
Various psychologists came too. Even more than usual. As always, they asked absolutely stupid questions, and each time he honored them with the same smiling emoticon. When they really annoyed him – he would start making inappropriate jokes.
It seems he even managed to offend one of the graduate students. She asked what he wanted to get from the neural network in the near future. He answered almost honestly – that he wanted the opportunity to invite her to dinner and get her into bed.
She probably wanted to say something unpleasant to him but restrained herself. She just silently left.
He laughed to himself for a long time afterward. And she was supposed to be a psychologist... Being unable to feel anything except his hand, he had never experienced sexual attraction. Not even mentally – it was simply unknown to him.
Then journalists came. They pestered him for a long time under the greedy gaze of the magnate. He, having surely sponsored the operation, was already calculating future profits. Probably mentally blessing the day when he took the disabled orphan under his wing.
Finally, they dressed him in a special robe, pumped him full of some nasty stuff, and sent him down a long corridor. He slowly lost consciousness, disappearing into a deep, viscous whirlpool. For the first time in his life, he didn't resist this feeling. On the contrary. He opened his arms to this whirlpool. The last thing he saw was the concerned face of a young orderly.
He dreamed.
He flew over vast expanses of an even, green sea. That's how it seemed at first, but then, looking closer, among the sea he distinguished huge mountains supporting the sky. Beautiful cities, so large they could contain some countries. Strange animals soared in the skies, and even, it seemed, dragons. And the green sea turned out to be forests, valleys, and meadows. Blue veins – wide rivers, more like elongated oceans. And the seas – they were the size of the starry sky.
The wind was blowing.
A pleasant wind.
A wind promising to fulfill his only dream – to be free.
A silly, stupid dream.
But such a pleasant one.
Pain brought him back to reality. His old friend. He was more familiar with it than with many people. He was burning and twisting. A red-hot rod applied to his nerves, and molten iron poured into every cell of his body.
"Pressure is rising!"
"Neural activity is off the charts."
"Pulse... two hundred and fifty beats per minute!"
"We're losing him."
He heard all these voices from somewhere far away. They sounded as muffled as the scream. Distant, almost inaudible. That's how he heard his voice for the first time. And along with it, among the blurred faces, the unclear outlines of numerous devices, and a mirror in which his dissected head was reflected, a flickering information window appeared.
He often saw such windows on his laptop screen.
[Neural network activated. Version 0.17.6. Carrier condition critical!]
"Cardiac arrest."
Then everything faded. Only an otherworldly sensation remained. It made him laugh. Perhaps someone had opened the doors to the operating room, and the wind was blowing on his feet. He hadn't known before that it was so amusing.