The people in Building 1 saw Mr. Easyrider and Mr. Scatflinger as media entities, nothing more. No odors, no fluids, just images on TV monitors, tracings on oscilloscopes, graphics on their Calyx workstations, and the occasional disembodied sound effect coming out of a speaker. This, Dr. Radhakrishnan reflected, made it a lot easier to deal with them objectively.

There was not much to do for the first few days. The brain cells in the biochip had not yet had time to connect themselves up to the patients' brain, so the chip was neurologically inert, just a dead piece of shrapnel embedded in the head. Then, one morning at about three o'clock, computer screens all over Building 1 suddenly came alive as a neuron in Mr. Scatflinger's brain hooked up with a neuron on the fringe of the biochip.

As soon as Dr. Radhakrishnan got there, they popped the corks on a few bottles of champagne and then stood under the monitor for a while, watching the data stream by. Zeldo did some typing on his workstation and brought up a new window on the screen, this one showing a running graph of the brain activity.

"Someone go shine a light in his eyes," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

"Yes, Doctor!" said one of his Indian grad students. He ran out of the building, pulling a penlight from his pocket. A few moments later the grad student was visible on the closed-circuit monitor that had been showing live coverage of Mr. Scatflinger from Building 2. All eyes flicked back and forth between the closed-circuit set and the computer monitor as the grad student leaned over the sleeping Mr. Scatflinger, peeled back one of his eyelids with his thumb, and shone the penlight into it.

The graph jumped. The crowd went wild.

"Well done, Doctor," someone was saying. It was Mr. Salvador, shaking his hand, offering a cigar. "Remarkable success, especially under the circumstances." Around nine a.m., a burst of activity showed up on Mr. Easyrider's heretofore quiescent monitor. But even in the corner of his eye, Dr. Radhakrishnan could see that something was wrong. The signals coming in from the biochip showed no clear pattern in terms of intensity or duration.

"Glitches," Dr. Radhakrishnan said.

"But a whole hell of a lot of glitches," Zeldo said.

"Glicherama," said one of the other Americans. Dr. Radhakrishnan bit his lip, knowing that for the rest of his career, this phenomenon, whenever it occurred, would be referred to as Glicherama.

Sudden movement caught his eye. He looked over at the closed-circuit monitor for Mr. Easyrider and saw, instead of the patient, the backsides of several nurses who were standing around him, working feverishly.

By the time Dr. Radhakrishnan made it over to Building 2, Mr. Easyrider was dead. His heart had stopped beating. They wheeled out the defib cart and shocked him a couple of times, trying to get a stable rhythm back, but in the end they could get nothing but bad rhythms on the scope, and finally no rhythm at all.

When they were sure he was dead, when they had closed his eyes, rolled away the cart, and washed their hands, Dr. Radhakrishnan picked up the intercom to Building 1. "Are you getting any signals from the chip?" he said. He asked the question out of purely academic interest; supposedly there was as bit of random electrical activity in the brain after death. "It's been dead for a couple of minutes," Zeldo said. "Completely dead?"

"Completely dead. We didn't think to include a surge protector."

"Surge protector?"

"Yeah. To protect the chip from sparks and lightning bolts, you know."

"I haven't seen any lightning."

"You held the lightning in your hands. You shocked him, man. That jolt from the defibrillator blew our chip to kingdom come." They did a postmortem more or less on the spot. A sterile environment was not required for an autopsy, so they partitioned off one corner of the room to prevent other patients from seeing what was happening, and Dr. Radhakrishnan took Mr. Easyrider apart, piece by piece, paying special attention to the head.

Building 2 was a distracting work environment because it was full of head cases - old ones dying of natural causes and new ones being wheeled in all the time, from all over the subcontinent. Brain injury sometimes left people as vegetables, but in some cases it could cause bizarre behavior, and over the brief course of this project they had already seen their quota of screeches and headbangers. In the middle of Dr. Radhakrishnan's autopsy, they apparently brought in a new one. A loud, coarse voice began to echo off the tin ceiling:

"WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA..."

It was no worse than a room full of excited baboons. He continued working, narrating his observations into a tape recorder; but he had to speak a little more loudly now because underneath his words was a constant background noise of WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA...

The cause of death was obvious enough. Mr. Easyrider's body had rejected the implant. Dr. Radhakrishnan tried to be clinical about it.

WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA... "The organic portion of the biochip shows pronounced atrophy ..."

WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA... "The inorganic or silicon portion of the biochip is virtually rattling around loose inside the skull..." That was not very scientific. He took a deep breath.

WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA...

"There is considerable scarring and atrophy in the portions of the brain adjacent to the implant." His head was spinning. He was tired. He just wanted to sit down and have a drink. "Conclusion: the host rejected the graft."

He was becoming conscious of another irrelevant sensory input besides the stream of WUBBAs: he was smelling perfume. It was not something that would really pass for perfume in India, where people knew as much about tastes and smells as Americans knew about heavy metal music. This was some kind of tedious lavender-and-roses concoction, something stupid and English.

"It appears that necrosis started at the site of the implant and spread to the brainstem - leading to the patient's demise." WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA... "Doc?" someone said. Zeldo.

He looked up at Zeldo, feeling very tired. Zeldo had pulled the curtain aside and was now gaping at the bloody, dismembered corpse of Mr. Easyrider. He was not a medical person and was not inured to this kind of thing.

Dr. Radhakrishnan turned to face Zeldo, bumping the table with his hip. The hemisphere of Mr. Easyrider's skull rocked back and forth a little bit on the tabletop.

"Two things," Zeldo said.

"Yes?"

WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA...

"There's a problem with Scatflinger. And there's a lady here to see you."

All of a sudden, the fact that he had gotten up at three in the morning was really getting to Dr. Radhakrishnan.

Maybe these were simple problems, easy to fix. He emerged from the autopsy room still wearing his rubber gloves, smeared with blood and gray matter. If this was just going to take a minute, there was no point in getting ungloved and then regloving later. "First things first," he said, and led Zeldo toward the room that, as of this morning, Mr. Scatflinger now had all to himself.

As he approached the door, the sound of WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA grew louder.

No. It couldn't be.

He opened the door. Half of his staff was gathered around the bed.

Mr. Scatflinger, who had been unable to do anything except he in bed since his accident, was now sitting bolt upright in bed.

He had been totally aphasic as well, unable to make a sound. But now he was saying, "WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA" as loudly as he could.

Everyone was looking at Dr. Radhakrishnan to see how he was going to react.

"Well," he said to his staff, "I think one can make the case that being able to say 'WUBBA WUBBA' is better than not being able to say anything at all, and that, at least in a limited sense, we have done Mr. Scatflinger here a great service."