"GUESSWORK"
- Chapter Thirty-Four -
"Best Kept Secret"
Lillian Chan used an intricate, ultrahigh-demand specialty board for everything she did on her computer.
As far as computers were concerned, this one was not a hybrid, but more of a "mongrel" in its technology, in order to have it adapt to her unique usage. It had been specifically built to her recommendations using components from Dell, Gateway, HP, Panasonic, IBM, Sony, and a few others. Her motherboard and hard drive were both by Cray. That renowned corporation donated their famous products happily when their board of directors discovered Lillian's living circumstances and her technological genius.
Lillian accomplished ninety-nine per cent of her life's work within a seven-foot circle of multi-electronics: servomotors, slave units, wall-mounted monitors, towers-of-power, printers, faxes, photographic sensors, stereo speakers, earphones and buzzers and tiers of blinking lights, each hooked to miles of wires and cables, fastened to the floors, the walls and the ceilings. The cockpit of a new 787 had fifty-or-so fewer telltales and switches.
Dual rows of elongated levers and oversized pushbuttons, all numbered and lettered, were controlled with relays she could reach easily by nodding her head or blinking her eyes. Thousands of printouts scrolled across her monitors and she sorted them out like dirty laundry, tossing them into the appropriate folders as nonchalantly as a child empties his toy box onto the floor. Aural relays bounced through her earphones or speakers, and she activated them, deactivated them, and controlled them all with minimal thrusts of her chin.
Lillian's greatest source of pride, however, was a small, alien-looking black, rectangular metal box, humming with electronic components and suffused with its own array of lights, bells and whistles. It was her own contrivance. Her own invention. It was a monstrosity. It was small enough to hook to the front of her wheelchair, but large enough to incorporate a multitude of tiny servos and master-to-slave units. She rested her chin upon a small sounding board, and she was joyfully experimenting with miniature bioelectrical and biochemical leads for programming the thing as a keyless piano. Would the bugs cooperate? She was determined to find out if nanocites could have fun too …
In the days before she'd finally told her colleagues what it was she was tinkering around with in her spare time, Lillian kept her own counsel and worked daily on its complicated programming. The first time she was able to produce a C Major chord, she was so happy there were tears in her eyes. But it had to be better than that before she revealed her secret.
"God! I could certainly use a couple handfuls of fingers here that actually worked!"
The thing may have read her mind, and then arbitrarily did as it pleased.
Sometimes it shut down without warning after blurting out a series of sour notes that sounded more like a wounded elephant. When that happened, she would have to wait for Earl to be available to troubleshoot. She would wait impatiently and go back to her nanotech duties. Earl would arrive on the scene, smile to himself at her folly and resolve the mystery of the burned-out components. He indulged her because he loved her dearly. Everyone did!
There was, indeed, a little maple spinet in the front office-reception area where Shaniqua Tolliver sometimes pounded out old-time gospel songs. But a real piano in the labs? No way! As a quadriplegic, Lillian could not possibly have played one anyway. Even that didn't change the fact of the pleasing sounds that sometimes whispered through the quiet corridors during unguarded moments late at night. Even Bobby would pause, perk his ears and listen. Everyone decided it was just somebody's radio set too damn close to the ventilation system again.
Lillian's colleagues gradually learned that she had an off-hours hobby. They had heard her at the strangest times, somehow playing notes on a piano where there was no piano; taking time to unwind from her difficult precision work with a few stolen strains of genius-magic that gave her … and anyone who listened … pleasure … at least until the components burned out again.
A chance excursion by Bart Kirkpatrick one night at midnight to his and Bill's quarters, took him past Lab #2. He paused, listening intently with his hand lying gentle against the door. "Moonlight Cocktails", the old Glenn Miller song from his early youth, reached his ears in soft strains.
He knocked, and then entered. He could not hear her. The music had stopped. She was sitting still and silent. He paused again, waiting, and then he could feel her excitement mounting in the surrounding air, and in the depths of her concentration. "I think I have it, Bart. Would you like to hear my piano?"
"Oh yes," he said. "Yes." Unmistakable soft piano music suffused the crannies of the room with waves of enchantment. Bart was fascinated.
Lillian welcomed him to her inner sanctum, "showed" him the sounding board that produced the musical notes, and explained to him how she had dictated the construction of so many components into a working "whole". Earl Keirkgaard had put the original black box together under her guidance, she told him, although Earl had no idea what it was that her intellect, combined with his skillful fingers, would conjure. She believed Earl thought she was crazy.
"Oh Bart … I'm beginning to feel like the 'Six Million Dollar Man'," she told him. He thought she sounded like a giddy schoolgirl.
Bart, however, knew there was nothing crazy about what he was hearing. He listened to Lillian speak of the project she loved, and was very deeply moved. He didn't understand it either, but that made no difference. A difference that made no difference was no difference! … or so he had heard it said somewhere …
Later, with Lillian's permission, Bart laid his hands upon her shoulders and grew very quiet for a time. His mind found a union with her mind, and he "saw" Lillian play her piano. She saw the dawning of his comprehension. He encircled her thin shoulders with his warm embrace and rested his chin against her carotid pulse. Bart understood.
Thereafter they were kindred spirits.
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Lillian looked forward eagerly to giving a full demonstration of her "piano" for Gregory House, mostly because she had become fascinated with him. Bart had recently told her that the good doctor was quite an accomplished pianist himself, and she had become particularly impressed with Dr. House because he was out of the ordinary, although on a different plane, for much the same reason she was.
Lillian had monitored House very closely while he endured the transition of the nanocites into his fragile-appearing body. She could feel his apprehension through her monitors, and knew he didn't hold much hope for any reduction in his pain. She had also felt the wonder and the exhilaration he'd experienced when the misery in his leg began to taper off and then dissipate completely while he rested there.
She watched the monitors as they showed the stress diminishing from his heart rate; saw the actual lowering of his blood pressure and the reduction in the intensity of his harsh breathing patterns. He did not have to fight the pain anymore, and he was almost holding his breath, awaiting its return.
But his pain did not return.
Lillian went with Earl Keirkgaard, and the two of them sat in their wheelchairs at the entrance to the quarters shared by Gregory House and James Wilson. They sat and watched the man for whom they had worked a miracle, as he slept, unencumbered and undisturbed, for the first time in how long??? Going on ten years?
His friend James sat on his own bed and talked with them awhile, a large foolish smile riding roughshod over his boyish features.
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Gregg awoke Wednesday evening while Wilson and Bernard were tending to his foot and conversing quietly. He squinted through sleep-clogged eyes and glared at them. His upper torso was bare, and he wondered where hell the blue scrubs had gone.
"First, I was under the impression that this place was into the eradication of pain, rather than the prolongation of it. Second, would you please hold the chatter down to a dull roar? And third, I'm starving. Doesn't anyone ever feed a hungry man around here? And what the hell did you do with my clothes this time?"
Wilson paused with a strip of adhesive tape in one hand. He straightened to full height and dangled the tape in House's face. "If I were you, I might want to keep quiet until we're finished, or you could find this stuff across your mouth instead of across your foot! We'll get you dressed again in a few minutes. You drooled on the shirt and got blood on the pants."
House huffed dramatically, but relaxed back into his pillows. He threw his forearm across his face to hide what might have been a smirk.
"But Maw-awmmm … !"
As usual, he'd gotten the last word. He finally got his supper at 9:00 p.m.
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Lillian Chan and Bartholomew Kirkpatrick relaxed together in Lab #2. Lillian's chin danced gracefully upon her little sounding board, and the strains of "Moonlight Cocktails" wafted across the rafters above them.
In the darkness of the room, task lights of all colors cascaded like summer fireworks against the exposed roof timbers. Touching shoulders and watching the display (in essence) together, they both laughed with delight.
In their minds, they were dancing …
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