Free King of the Worlds by M. Thomas Gammarino Page A

cochlear hair cells as would typically be the case.”
    â€œSo where is it then?”
    â€œWe’ll have to run some tests, but it could be in your auditory nerve or beyond.”
    â€œBeyond?”
    â€œYour brain, Mr. Green.”
    â€œI see. So I don’t have any hearing damage, but I might have brain damage?”
    â€œI can’t say anything with any certainty at this point, Mr. Green, but I’d like to do a functional MRI if that’s okay with you.”
    He shrugged his shoulders. She got the fMRI helmet out of its case and fitted it to his head. She read the results from her omni. “Hmm.”
    â€œIs there a problem?”
    â€œNone that I can see. None whatsoever. I’m not a specialist, but this is telling me everything’s tip-top.”
    â€œSo where does that leave us?” he asked. “I assure you I’m not just crying wolf here. My ears are really screaming.”
    â€œI have no cause to doubt that, Mr. Green. The next indication here would be for me to refer you to a psychiatrist. There might be a psychosomatic component to your condition. Do you have an inordinate amount of stress in your life, would you say?”
    â€œDefine ‘inordinate.’”
    She smiled. “All right then, if it’s agreeable to you, I’m going to refer you to Dr. Minus Fudge. MD in psychiatry from Stanford. He’s wonderful, and right next door.”
    Dylan nodded his assent.
    â€œDon’t worry,” she assured him. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
    He thanked her for her concern and left the office feeling even shittier than before. She’d been so confident last time in telling him his condition was curable that he had expected another course of Cochlerin at most, a stronger dosage perhaps. He had not expected any talk of brain damage, let alone neurosis. Could that be right? Was he doing this to himself? The ringing certainly seemed to be as objectively real as a fever or a broken bone. When he’d first noticed it, he’d even asked Erin if she didn’t hear it too. He’d tried countless times to wish it away, talk it down, reason with it, berate it, cajole it, but it didn’t seem to interact with the stuff of thought at all. But maybe that’s what it’s like to lose one’s mind? Surely madmen don’t will themselves mad. They lose control, become unhinged. Fuck . It felt like the beginning of the end, like he had embarked on that downward slope that would lead him through senility and decrepitude to bodily death and the ultimate indignity of oblivion.
    He dropped by the drugstore downstairs and got the diaper batteries Erin had requested. 18 He wasn’t ready to go home yet, so he went in the coffee shop next door. Dylan had actually come to prefer poxna to coffee, but it was nice to be in an American-style coffee house again. It was not unlike the one in the Borders he’d worked at several lifetimes ago. He ordered an espresso con panna and taught the barista how to make it. It was at once anticlimactic and altogether wonderful to have that particular combination of chemicals on his tongue again. He took a seat. The place was filled with native students mainly. Right next to him a rather lovely native male sat sipping his coffee and crocheting with carbon nanotube bundles. Dylan could hardly stop himself from staring until the creature caught him looking and changed his position. Dylan reminded himself that the thing had a penis anyway. He blinked on his omni, pretended he had something to do, and then realized that maybe he did. “Project a QWERTY keyboard on this table,” he instructed under his breath. It had become trendy of late to use a more ergonomic keyboard configuration like Colemak or Capewell, but Dylan was an old dog.
    18 _____________
    Electro-plasmic waste-disintegrating diapers were one of the more eagerly adopted technological imports for Terrans in recent