Элизабет Бир - Machine

A white lab coat makes you anonymous in a hospital. My ID dangled, and given the experience with the door I half expected my signal to be rejected by the sensors inside. No flashing lights greeted me, however. No whooping sirens. Just the humming quiet of an intensive care unit between emergencies.

I was in the same hallway I’d passed through when my exo had been running on fumes. This time I was fully charged and full of adrenaline, however, and I had more time to look around.

It seemed much as it had; a quiet nursing unit in the middle of sleep shift. The desk was staffed with a Ceeharen nurse who didn’t look up. The unit coordinator who had spotted me on my last intrusion was nowhere in evidence. I hoped that meant he was off-shift or asleep. He’d been too alert by far, and—I blushed to admit it—I was a terrible spy.

Fortunately for terrible spies, most people are terrible observers. I sailed past the syster at the desk—they were deeply involved in something invisible to me in the air before them, making notes on it with a light pen—and walked along, checking the panels beside private rooms as if I were looking for a specific patient ID. The rooms were privacy-shielded, but my senior physician clearance was enough to de-encrypt them. I guessed when they’d locked the entrance, they hadn’t thought uninvited guests would be resourceful or determined enough to get in anyway.

My accessing the records would be logged. But I wasn’t planning on keeping my visit secret. Either there was nothing to hide, and this really was only a ridiculously posh unit devoted to keeping those who exploited more resources than they needed away from the proletariat… or Calliope was right about the hospital using indigent folks as spare-parts repositories, and I was about to blow the worst abomination in modern Synarche history sky-high.

If I ever got off this quarantined hospital. If the hospital itself even survived.

It didn’t occur to me that there might be an answer somewhere in the middle. An answer whose implications might be almost as unpleasant as organ farmers murdering people for parts.

In retrospect, this was an oversight.

The majority of patients whose data I accessed were old. Very, very old, even by modern standards, where the human life expectancy in reasonable health exceeds our natural span including senescence. I’m hardly the picture of perfect health, but I was honestly better off than many of my ancestors would have been at my age—their panoply of undiagnosed and untreatable autoimmune disorders blossomed in the early Anthropocene, for a variety of genetic and environmental reasons—and I could expect another fifty or sixty ans or so as a contributing member of society.

If I made it to tomorrow alive.

But these patients—the human ones—had birth dates that made them older than my great-grandparents had lived to be. Admittedly, my great-grandparents lived on a marginal colony world where people reproduced young. But my great-grandparents were no longer alive, and neither were their children. Or their children’s children, though that had been an accident.

These people were.

So maybe they needed the peace and quiet. Maybe they had come here to die. That seemed like an intolerable waste of resources, but… these people had resources to burn. And didn’t seem inclined to return their surplus to the commonwealth, beyond whatever they were taxed.

You can’t take it with you, as somebody wise observed. But you can sure roll around in it for as long as you’re alive.

The next thing I noticed, pulling their med charts, was that none of them were on antirejection drugs. I had expected it, but it still comforted me. It disproved Calliope’s conspiracy theory categorically. Without protein matchers and immune tuning… well, organ rejection is a real thing, and it used to kill patients, or severely limit their lives after transplant. They needed their immune systems suppressed for the rest of their lives, or their own bodies would destroy the transplanted organs they also needed to keep them alive.

Clone parts solved that—as far as your immune system is concerned, a clone finger is your own finger. So now I knew that nobody was kidnapping indigent teenagers and stealing their retinas or kidneys.

Since I hadn’t actually expected to find evidence of that, I was surprised by how relieved I felt. So now I had to find out what was really going on in here, and why it was so secret. I was pretty sure I’d figured out why O’Mara and Starlight had been pushing me toward uncovering the information on my own: so that I wouldn’t be bound by the hospital’s privacy strictures regarding patients. I wasn’t supposed to know what was going on here. Therefore nobody had bothered to put a block in my fox about it.

I downloaded a few more sets of records, and then when I was well away from the desk (glossy Ceeharen syster still engaged and on-task behind it) I pretended I had found the room I was looking for, and stepped inside. The occupant was a human female, 135 ans of age, Beyte Denarian by name.

It was almost the last room in the corridor, and when I walked in I was surprised by how quiet and empty it seemed. Hospital rooms are usually full of stuff: wires, equipment, monitors, tubes to put fluids into the human body and tubes to take them away again.

This seemed like a bedroom, and a pleasant bedroom at that.

I crossed to the bed and looked down.

A woman lay there, head shaved, blonde hair beginning to regrow, skin translucent as the skin of low-melanin humans who have never stepped out under a living sun becomes. Eyes closed, hands folded neatly on her breast atop covers that had never been wrinkled or disarrayed by human sleep. I felt as if I were looking at a corpse arrayed for the funeral.

I could see the blue veins under the skin of her throat, her cheeks, her temples. The backs of her hands.

She could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen ans of age.

She could not be Beyte Denarian. And yet—I checked the chart again—she was.

I touched her shaved scalp gently, the soft hairs fuzzing against my palm. There was a scar there, a tiny scar, tidy and neat. She was about old enough to have had a fox implanted, if it was done early. Usually, my species waits until our children are aged around twenty-five ans. Their neural development is more or less complete at that point, and they have learned social skills and how to experience and control their emotions without intervention. They have learned who they are.

So this woman was young, biologically speaking. But she was not unreasonably young.

She did not wake up when I touched her, but there were no signs that she was sedated, or that she was being supported through a period of unconsciousness due to illness or injury. She was lying there, inert. Breathing regularly.

I lifted an eyelid and flashed a light against her pupil. It contracted normally. Her pulse was even and tidy.

I set her hand down where I had found it and slowly left the room. The syster had not looked up from their work. You don’t find many people that devoted on a sleep shift, but maybe they were studying for advancement. Or maybe they were playing solitaire.

There was a little more corridor beyond this room, and at the end of it, another door.

I squared my shoulders. I was ready to jimmy this lock, too.

I wondered what I would find there.

At first, I thought the space beyond—too large to call it a room: a hold, maybe, labyrinthine—was full of cryo tanks. Much more modern ones than those that had lined the vast hold on Big Rock Candy Mountain , naturally—but it still left me with a shiver of recognition.