Robert Wilson - Vortex

She wanted to ask him about it. But he turned away hastily when he saw her looking, and the moment passed.

In the morning Bose made French toast and coffee even though there wasn’t time to linger over it. He moved around the kitchen, heating butter in a skillet, breaking eggs, with a confidence and ease she found pleasant to watch.

A thought had come to her during the night. “You’re not working for the federal agencies,” she said, “and you’re barely working for HPD. But you’re not alone in all this. You’re working for somebody . Isn’t that right?”

“Everybody works for somebody.”

“An NGO? A charitable organization? A detective agency?”

“I guess we’d better talk about that,” he said.

Once we’d made the transit to Earth, the managers put us in adjoining medical care suites and we slept for most of two days. A team of nurses hovered over me at all times, and at intervals I asked them about Turk. They said he was doing well and that I could talk to him soon. They wouldn’t say more than that.

I needed the rest, for obvious reasons, and it was pleasant to wake, sleep, dream, and wake again without fearing for my life. Obviously, there were problems I would have to face sooner or later. Big ones. But the meds I was swallowing washed away all urgency.

My wounds were minor and they healed nicely. Eventually I woke feeling fit and hungry and for the first time impatient, and I asked the bedside nurse—a male worker with big eyes and a fixed smile—when I could have something more substantial than protein paste to eat.

“After the surgery,” he said blandly.

“What surgery?”

“To replace your node,” he said, in a tone of voice that suggested he thought he was talking to a slow-witted child. “I know how hard it must have been for you, surviving in the wild without it. When the Network went down it was hard for all of us. Like being alone in the dark.” He shuddered at the memory. “But we’ll have you repaired before the end of the day.”

“No,” I said instantly.

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t want surgery. I don’t want my node back.”

He frowned for a moment, then turned his maddening smile back on. “It’s perfectly natural to experience anxiety at a time like this. I can adjust your medication—would you like that?”

I told him my medication was fine and that I was simply and explicitly refusing surgery, as was my right under established Voxish medical protocols.

“But it’s not an invasive surgery. It’s just a repair! I’ve seen your history. You were implanted at birth like everyone else. We’re not changing you in any way, Treya. We’re restoring you.”

I argued with him at length and fiercely. I used words I shouldn’t have, both Voxish and English. He was shocked at first, then silent. He left the room with moist eyes and a perplexed expression, and I figured I’d won a victory, or at least gained a reprieve.

Ten minutes later they wheeled in the prep cart and the knives. That was when I started to scream. I was too weak to make much noise, but I was loud enough to be heard in the adjoining rooms.

The medical workers were about to strap me down when Turk came bulling through the doorway. Turk was wearing a patient’s gown cinched at the waist, and he didn’t look intimidating—our sojourn in the wilderness had left him skinny and brown as a nut. But the med staff must have seen the ferocity in his eyes, not to mention his balled fists. More than that, he was Uptaken, touched by the Hypotheticals: in Voxish theology that made him something next door to a god.

I told him in a few words that the medics were trying to re-install my limbic implant and turn me back into Treya.

“Tell them to stop,” he said. “Tell them to take their fucking knives away or I will personally call down the wrath of the Hypotheticals on Vox and all its works.”

I translated, with embellishments. The medical staff hastened out of the room with eyes averted, abandoning their surgical tools. But this, too, was only a reprieve. The medics were almost instantly replaced by a man in a gray jumpsuit, an administrator, a manager—a man I recognized from Treya’s training sessions. He had been one of my teachers, not one of my favorites.

Apparently he and Turk had already met. “Stay out of this, Oscar,” Turk said in English.

The administrator’s Voxish name was long and decorated with honorifics, but “Oscar” was a decent approximation of the patrilineal fraction of it. Oscar spoke English, of course. His English wasn’t as nuanced as mine—he had learned it mainly from ancient textbooks and legal documents—but it was functional, and unlike me he was empowered to speak on behalf of the managerial class.

“Please calm down, Mr. Findley,” he said in his reedy voice. He was a small man, pale-skinned, yellow-haired, a couple of years past young.

“Fuck you, Oscar. Your people were about to force a surgical procedure on a friend of mine. I don’t take that lightly.”

“The woman you describe as your ‘friend’ was badly injured in the Farmer rebellion. You witnessed that injury, didn’t you? In fact you tried to stop it.”

It figured that Oscar would attempt some kind of legalistic argument, schooled as he was in ancient writs and warrants. Turk ignored him and turned to me. “Are you all right?”

“I’m okay for the time being. I won’t be, if they put my node back in.”

“That’s irrational,” Oscar said. “Surely you must see that, Treya.”

“My name isn’t Treya.”

“Of course it is. Your denial is a symptom of your disorder. You’re suffering from a pathological cognitive dissociation that cries out for repair.”

“Oscar, shut the fuck up, ” Turk said. “I need to speak to Allison privately.”

“There is no ‘Allison,’ Mr. Findley. ‘Allison’ is a tutelary construct, and the longer we allow Treya to sustain this delusion the harder it will be to cure her.”

Treya herself would have deferred to Oscar without question, and I could still feel that old and craven impulse. But now it was hateful to me. “Oscar,” I said in a quieter voice.

He shot me a hard look and repeated his Voxish name with all its status markers: I was a worker, and it was an insolence to call him by his short name. “Oscar,” I repeated. “Are you hard of hearing? Turk asked you to shut the fuck up.”

His pale complexion turned red. “I don’t understand this. Have we hurt you, Mr. Findley? Have we threatened you in any way? Haven’t I served as your personal liaison in a satisfactory manner?”

“You’re not my liaison,” Turk said. “Allison is.”

“There is no Allison, and this woman can’t function as a liaison—she has no connection to the Network… she doesn’t have a working neural node!”

“She speaks English well enough.”

“Like a native,” I said.

“There you go.”

“But—!”

“So I’m appointing her as my translator,” Turk said. “From now on, any interaction I have with Vox goes through her. And we’re both finished with doctors for the time being. No knives, no drugs. Can you arrange that?”

Oscar hesitated. Then he addressed me directly, in Voxish: “If you were a whole human being you would recognize your behavior as an act of treason, not just against the administrative class but against the Coryphaeus.”

They were weighty words. Treya would have trembled. “Thank you, but I know what I’m doing,” I said in the same language. “Oscar.”

It was during this time that Vox began its lumbering, hopeless journey to Antarctica.