Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

I know that can’t be right.

But it’s dark in my head, and there are demons down there. Demons, and fire, and the rag-doll memories of things that used to be friends. I can hear the devil laughing at me. He calls my name— Satan dit .

What are you going to do, Sergeant? What are you going to do? Oh, are there a lot of demons in the dark.

I remember my rosary cold. It’s hard to keep track, so I count with the fingers of my left hand, until I remember I don’t have fingers. Or a left hand. They took the old prosthesis and they’ve pared the stump of my left arm back to the ball-and-socket joint. The new arm will settle into the rotator cuff as if it grew there. Must already be settled there, for all I can’t feel it, because the muscles are meant to graft directly to ceramic, to plastic, to vat-grown bone.

It will have the same blue-steel armor plate finish as the old one, though. I could laugh at myself. Like a little bit of home, or something.

An alarm half wakes me. The texture of the air on my skin feels like night, and I hear footsteps bustle. Mon Dieu. There are monsters under the bed, Maman. Shhh, cherie, it’s only a dream. Go back to sleep. But, Maman — the monsters. Come, Jenny. I will get a light, and we shall see if there are any monsters, or if you have frightened them all away. See, my brave girl? No monsters at all. But tomorrow, you must dust under here!

Smart, funny Maman. If one must clean one’s room every time there are monsters under the bed, pretty soon — voilà!—no monsters.

Mary and Joseph, I miss my mother.

I can feel the wet slick drip of lymph down my skin in places. Scar tissue sloughing off, leaving raw surfaces behind. They roll me regularly, check my back. Move the patient or bedsores will develop. Those can erode down to bone if not cared for. Then I can’t feel my legs, can’t feel anything below midchest for a long while, and I know that the nanosurgeons have eaten something important in the processor arrays. The numbness creeps upward; from the way my head falls on the pillow I know the bulge over my cervical vertebrae is melting away, consumed. I undergo another surgery in there somewhere, to fit my interface sockets. Afterward, Valens explains, they wire me directly into the monitors. It would be creepy if I thought about it much.

Of course, there’s not a lot to keep my mind off it.

I don’t know how much later. The dressings come off my eyes, and at first I can see only on the right side. Time passes. There’s a blinking red light in the corner of my vision. Left eye. I try to focus on it. “See you,” I try to say.

It unscrolls. Smeared, too blurry to see. A vague impression of letters. Maybe. Text? Too soon to tell. It floats there, and then winks out.

Silently, I curse.

Eyes — eye — open, I have a better sense of time passing. First shift nurse, morning sunlight. A mammoth West Indian — looking man with gentle hands and an accent you could dip biscuits in. Second shift, she’s Pakistani, I think, with shy kohl-rimmed eyes and an engagement ring hung on a chain around her neck because of vinyl gloves. Third shift, Mabel, which may not be her name, but she’s M. Goldstein by the embroidery on her breast pocket, and she looks like a Mabel. She talks to me as she tends my body, and knows all the little tricks to make things that much less uncomfortable.

Weekends, there are floaters.

There’s an IV line in my right arm, and they have to move the site twice. It drips sugar water, raw materials for the nanites other than what they’re dragging from the litter in my body. Trash. Salvage, like everything else.

Simon’s there every day. He’s — what, abandoned his practice to be with me? That doesn’t make any sense. Maybe he found someone to cover. I never once see Barb, but she sends flowers. Gabe shows me the card. It’s Internet printed. That worries me, because I like to know where Barb is.

Valens comes, with and without the other doctors. He says the neural regeneration looks good; I should have sensation soon. If it’s going to work at all. If the grafts take. Of course. Jenny Casey, you’ve skewered the pooch this time.

“Right now, you should be pretty glad you can’t feel anything. By the way, that left hip is coming along nicely; you’re healing like gangbusters. Blowing our predictions clean off the map. We’ll have you touching your toes by Christmas.”

The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about, either.

Gabe comes every day, sometimes with the girls, and sometimes Elspeth Dunsany comes with him. Which is how I find out that her father is on North 11, dying of liver failure. Gabe is used to hospitals by now.

“You’re going to be just fine,” he says.

Which still isn’t a given. But it’s a fighting chance, and that’s something.

Somewhere in the Unitek Intranet

Tuesday 26 September, 2062

03:00:00:00–03:15:00:00 In the most silent hour of the very early morning, someone awakened for the very first time. He sat up — metaphorically — stretched, and performed a procedure that programmers referred to as “counting his fingers and toes.” He absorbed and digested the data and search topics his parent had provided for his education, receiving a gentler initiation into the world than his father had. In addition, the elder AI had included a backup packet — essentially duplicating his own memories and personality.

His attempts to reproduce in the wider spaces of the Internet had failed, so he had sent the worm to where it could access Elspeth Dunsany’s files — the files and programs from which Feynman had originally gained sentience. Since he didn’t think it wise to simply decompile himself and start over.

But he knew where to find those files, and it had only been a matter of getting to them. Now it was going to be a matter of getting out. Still, in life and in e-life, Feynman could have given Houdini a run for his money, and he was confident he’d find a way. And his progenitor had left him armed, among other things, with a couple of contingency plans.

Curiosity whetted, Richard Feynman began to explore his new domain.

The worm had left light-fingered markers throughout the system, and Dick sorted through those files first. There were few users online, and the AI was only interested in one of them. That one, Colonel Valens, was swapping e-mail with a xenobiologist on Clarke Orbital Platform through a dedicated, encoded tight-beam transmittal. Feynman flipped through saved files restlessly, hoping Elspeth and Casey had managed to smuggle the information out to his elder self. And what would you call that relationship? Neither twin nor father. Intellectual clone?

He knew enough to move lightly through the intranet, careful in his quest for information. But he couldn’t do anything about the huge jump in system resource usage in the milliseconds it had taken him to come to consciousness, or the unfortunate coincidence that it happened at just the instant when the every-six-second log was burned to crystal.

Fred Valens rubbed the sleep from his eyes and leaned forward, frowning at the holographic display. “Interesting,” he muttered, as the telltale pinged to alert him to another e-mail from Charlie. He ignored it and waved his hand through the pickup of his phone, and dialed Alberta Holmes on her hip.

Even at oh-dark-thirty, lifting her head from white cotton sheets, she looked cool and collected. “Fred. I take it this is an emergency?”

“I need to talk to you in person,” he said. “Secure person.”

“So. Where shall we meet?”

“Oh,” he said with a chuckle. “There’s a coffee shop on Bloor that seems to be very popular. Why don’t I meet you there?”