John Scalzi - Redshirts

“So I faint and then wake up without a single memory of the last few weeks,” you said. “You understand why I might be concerned about this.”

“Do you want me to schedule you for an MRI?” your dad asked. “I can do that. Have the doctors look around for any additional signs of brain trauma.”

“I think that might be a smart thing to do, don’t you?” you said. “Look, Dad, I don’t want to come across as overly paranoid about this, but losing weeks of my life bothers me. I want to be sure I’m not going to lose any more of it. It’s not a comfortable feeling to wake up and have a big hole in your memory.”

“No, Matt, I get it,” your dad said. “I’ll get Brenda to schedule it as quickly as she can. Fair enough?”

“Okay,” you said.

“But in the meantime I don’t want you to worry about it too much,” your father said. “The doctors told us you would probably have at least a couple of episodes like this. So this is normal.”

“‘Normal’ isn’t what I would call it,” you said.

“Normal in the context of a motorcycle accident,” your dad said. “Normal such as it is.”

“I don’t like this new ‘normal,’” you said.

“I can think of worse ones,” your father said, and did that thing he’s been doing the last couple of days, where he looks like he’s about to lose it and start weeping all over you.

While you’re waiting for your MRI, you go over the script you’ve been given for an episode of The Chronicles of the Intrepid . The good news for you is that your character plays a central role in the events. The bad news is that you don’t have any lines, and you spend the entire episode lying on a gurney pretending to be unconscious.

“That’s not true,” Nick Weinstein said, after you pointed out these facts to him. He had stopped by the house with revisions, which was a service you suspected other extras did not get from the head writer of the series. “Look”—he flipped to the final pages of the script—“you’re conscious here.”

“‘Crewman Hester opens his eyes, looks around,’” you said, reading the script direction.

“That’s consciousness,” Weinstein said.

“If you say so,” you said.

“I know it’s not a lot,” Weinstein said. “But I didn’t want to overtax you on your first episode back.”

You achieved that, you said to yourself, flipping through the script in the MRI waiting room and rereading the scenes where you don’t do much but lie there. The episode is action-packed—Lieutenant Kerensky in particular gets a lot of screen time piloting shuttles and running through exploding corridors while redshirts get impaled by falling scenery all around him—but it’s even less coherent than usual for Intrepid, which is really saying something. Weinstein isn’t bad with dialogue and keeping things moving, but neither him nor anyone on his writing staff seems overly invested in plotting. You strongly suspected that if you knew more about the science fiction television genre, you could probably call out all the scenes Weinstein and pals lifted from other shows.

Hey, it paid for college, some part of your brain said. Not to mention this MRI.

Fair enough, you thought. But it’s not unreasonable to want the family business to be making something other than brainlessly extruded entertainment product, indistinguishable from any other sort of brainlessly extruded entertainment product. If that’s all you’re doing, then your family might as well be making plastic coat hangers.

“Matthew Paulson?” the MRI technician said. You looked up. “We’re ready for you.”

You enter the room the MRI machine is in, and the technician shows you where you can slip into a hospital gown and store your clothes and personal belongings. Nothing metal’s supposed to be in the room with the machine. You get undressed, get into your gown and then step into the room, while the technician looks at your information.

“All right, you’ve been here before, so you know the drill, right?” the technician asked.

“Actually, I don’t remember being here before,” you said. “It’s kind of why I’m here now.”

The technician scanned the information again and got slightly red. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not usually this much of an idiot.”

“When was the last time I was here?” you asked.

“A little over a week ago,” the technician said, and then frowned, reading the information again. “Well, maybe,” he said after a minute. “I think your information may have gotten mixed up with someone else’s.”

“Why do you think that?” you asked.

The technician looked up at you. “Let me hold off on answering that for a bit,” he said. “If it is a mix-up, which I’m pretty sure it is, then I don’t want to be on the hook for sharing another patient’s information.”

“Okay,” you said. “But if it is my information, you’ll let me know.”

“Of course,” the technician said. “It’s your information. Let’s concentrate on this session for now, though.” And with that he motioned for you to get on the table and slide your head and body into a claustrophobic tube.

“So what do you think that technician was looking at?” Sandra asked you, as the two of you ate lunch at P.F. Chang’s. It wasn’t your favorite place, but she always had a weakness for it, for reasons passing understanding, and you still have a weakness for her. You met her outside the restaurant, the first time you had seen her since the accident, and she cried on your shoulder, hugging you, before she pulled back and jokingly slapped you across the face for not calling her before this. Then you went inside for upscale chain fusion food.

“I don’t know,” you said. “I wanted to get a look at it, but after the scan, he told me to get dressed and they’d call with the results. He was gone before I put my pants on.”

“But whatever it was, it wasn’t good,” Sandra said.

“Whatever it was, I don’t think it matched up with me walking and talking,” you said. “Especially not a week ago.”

“Medical record errors happen,” Sandra said. “My firm makes a pretty good living with them.” She was a first year at UCLA School of Law and interning at the moment at one of those firms that specialized in medical class-action suits.

“Maybe,” you said.

“What is it?” Sandra said, after a minute of watching your face. “You don’t think your parents are lying to you, do you?”

“Can you remember anything about it?” you asked. “About me after the accident.”

“Your parents wouldn’t let any of us see you,” Sandra said, and her face got tight, the way it did when she was keeping herself from saying something she would regret later. “They didn’t even call us,” she said after a second. “I found out about it because Khamal forwarded me the L.A. Times story on Facebook.”

“There was a story about it?” you said, surprised.

“Yeah,” Sandra said. “It wasn’t really about you. It was about the asshole who ran that light. He’s a partner at Wickcomb Lassen Jenkins and Bing. Outside counsel for half the studios.”

“I need to find that article,” you said.

“I’ll send it to you,” Sandra said.

“Thanks,” you said.

“I resent having to find out you were in a life-threatening accident through the Los Angeles Times, ” Sandra said. “I think I rate better than that.”

“My mom never liked you as much after you broke my heart,” you said.

“We were sophomores in high school,” Sandra said. “And you got over it. Pretty quickly, too, since you were all over Jenna a week later.”