The prosthetic arm was picking up new things. It was right there on the workbench in Lucien's brand-new lab—a place that smelled of ozone, fungus, and sweat—connected with a bunch of glowing wires to a console. On the display, neural signals were very lively, they literally depicted how the brain would send commands for movement.
Joan Rhodes was sitting there next to the arm, totally absorbed in her thoughts. She didn't physically move her body. She simply thought about the movement of the crystal fingers. The matching signals were also there on the screen, but they were faint. The fungus-threads inside the arm were twitching.
"The thing is built-in," Lucien explained to Benny, who was quite a spectator. "It goes beyond the messed-up part of her brain and link her intention directly to the nerves that we implanted in the arm. She is no longer instructing the arm, instead, she is simply doing it. It's really a small thing but, nonetheless, it's quite significant."
"Will it… be like a part of her?" Benny inquired.
"She will do it like it was her own decision. Though feeling is a lot more difficult. We did install some sensors for pressure, heat, and the condition of the connection. But she won't feel 'touch' as you do. She will feel… it is there. When she grabs something, she will know how firm it is. When she touches the fungus, she will feel how fresh it is."
Lucien adjusted a setting. "It's a sense. For this world."
Joan was totally hooked on it. She was dripping with sweat. The signal on the screen became stronger and more clear, thus the command was more and more obvious.
The crystal fingers of the hand on the table slowly took the shape of a fist.
Joan let out a sound of both effort and excitement. Her good hand slammed the table.
The fist remained clenched for a couple of seconds and then, it was unclosed.
It was the very first instance when she used her left side after the disaster.
Benny was yelling with delight, and he was also clapping his hands. Joan glanced at him and for the very first time since it happened, she smiled genuinely. It totally changed her, as if all the tough times were just wiped away.
Lucien copied the brain signal. "Awesome. We will make that much more powerful. Very soon, the console won't be necessary. Your arm will be the one to follow your nerve signals."
Throughout the next week, Joan was able to move from just making a fist to holding a pen and then a cup of water. She was not fast and precise, yet she was the one actually doing it. The arm was getting more and more like a part of her. The crystal fingers took on her body temperature. The fungus inside her arm gradually changed to the shape that fitted it better.
The final step was the link to the network. Lucien had her place the arm on a patch of living fungus that was interwoven in the wall.
"Don't think about feeling," he instructed. "Think about… listening."
Joan shut her eyes. At the beginning, there was nothing. After that, a soft sound, as if seeing a city from very far away, could be heard. That was the fungus network communicating. She concentrated, and the sound changed to different voices: the busy farms, the water pipes, the Heartforge humming deep underground.
She could know if the city was healthy by the way she felt it, not as data, but as a kind of feeling. Stress here (a fight over water). Happiness there (a good harvest). It was quite a lot, and it was just like hearing a lot of average problems and triumphs.
She withdrew her hand, thus breaking the connection, and took a long breath.
"What did you feel?" Benny asked, quite shocked.
Joan looked at her new hand, then at her son. It was difficult for her to find the words. "Life," she said, the word being very loaded. "Normal… hard… life."
It was not the magic she was hoping for. It was chaotic, demanding, yet still nice in the way it kept going.
She was not only relearning how to use her hand. She was relearning how to touch the world. And the world she was touching was not some god, but a sick person—and she was only one out of many nurses.