Ian Douglas - Bloodstar

I don’t know about the hearts, but I was certainly love struck. My caudate nuclei were so saturated with dopamine my brain sloshed when I walked, and I had all the signs and symptoms that dreaded mental illness commonly called Being In Love.

So in the spring of ’44 I was working at the SAMMC base dispensary, still assimilating those gigabytes of AMT data and waiting for my orders for Camp Lejeune. I had a weekend free and we decided to run up to Glacier’s Edge on the Maine coast.

We caught the sub-O out of San Antonio for the twenty-minute flight to Boston. I had an electric eccount, of course, so I checked out the free e-car at the oport for the last leg of the trip up to Acadia. We oohed and ahhed at the 100-meter ice cliffs, of course, and did all the usual touristy things. Sunday morning, we drove out to the dometown of New Bar Harbor and rented a sailboat for a close-in run along the glacier coming down off Schooner Head and Mount Champlain.

She was a four-meter day sailor, sloop-rigged, and with a level-two AI smart enough to take over the sail-handling if the human passengers didn’t know what they were doing. I’d had some sailing experience already, so the AI was on standby and we were catching a gentle, cold breeze off the ice, making our way south along the ice-cloaked Mount Desert coast.

And Paula dropped her sandwich.

She had a puzzled look on her face. “I can’t feel my right hand,” she said, and when she tried to pick her sandwich up off the deck, her fingers refused to cooperate.

It took me a moment, though, to catch on that something was really wrong … but when she slumped over on the seat next to me, a shock ran through me that I will never, ever forget.

Oh, God, no! No! No! …

I dropped the tiller and scooped her up in my arms. Her eyes were glassy, and the right pupil was enormous, the left one small, giving her face an oddly lopsided look. Then I realized that half of her face was drooping, that she was trying to say something out of the left side of her mouth while the right side hung dead and useless.

I couldn’t understand the words, but I finally caught on to what was happening.

“AI!” I screamed. “Connect with Emergency Services!”

“I’m taking control of sails and helm, Mr. Carlyle,” the boat told me.

“Damn it, I need a link to Emergency Services!”

My in-head circuitry had various radio channels, including communication. It even gave me a navigational fix off of the space elevator, but I was out of range for voice communications.

“What course would you like me to set?” the oat asked me.

“Emergency! Voice! Channel!”

“Do you wish a voice channel with New Bar Harbor?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“Who would you like to speak with?”

“Emergency Medical, damn it!”

“Connecting with Emergency Medical Services.”

At last!

“This is Emergency Medical Services, Portsmouth,” a voice said in my head at last. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

“I’ve got a twenty-five-year-old female!” I screamed. “She’s having a stroke!”

It took almost twelve minutes for a med-rescue lifter out of Portland Medical to home in on us. During that time, I’d pawed through the on-board medikit—which turned out to be stocked with preprogrammed nano set to close wounds, stop bleeding, and treat sunburn, frostbite, and headaches.

I didn’t even have a CAPTR. I had nothing, could do nothing. The feeling of helplessness was overwhelming, terrifying, and savage.

The med-rescue lifter homed in on our sailboat, coming in 10 meters above the chop. Under the lifter’s control, the boat’s AI retracted the sail and lowered the mast so that the lifter could glide in and hover directly overhead. A grapple frame came down, closed in around and under the sailboat, and hauled us aboard right out of the water.

But by the time they had Paula hooked up to life support, there was no life left to support.

And they didn’t have a CAPTR either. Not too surprising, I suppose; that technology is still pretty new, and the frontier along the edge of the ice sheet can be decades out of date. But I was left grasping for a reason, any reason for what happened, like a fish trying to breath air.

For a long time, I blamed the North Hemisphere Reclamation Project.

I know, I know, it’s all perfectly safe. But there’ve been stories around for centuries about how HFMR—high-frequency microwave radiation—can harm people, causing everything from cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart attacks, learning disabilities, and high blood pressure to, well, TIAs and massive cerebral hemorrhage— strokes , in other words. The earliest studies go back to the early twenty-first century, maybe earlier, when technologies like cell phone towers were first coming on-line. In four centuries, there’s never been a solid, proven link, but there was a lot of controversy on the topic when they started beaming both optical and microwave wavelengths down from the Geosynch solar reflector arrays.

For a century, now, we’ve slowly been winning the global climate battle against the New Ice Age, partly by warming the waters of the North Atlantic, and partly by focusing heat on the edge of the ice sheets, from Vancouver to Maine. Paula and I both were picking up some microwaves as we toured the edge of the ice cliffs, of course. That second sun in the southern sky, forty or so degrees above the horizon, marked the reflector array at Geosynch halfway up the space elevator, but any harmful microwave component was supposed to be so diffuse it shouldn’t have caused a problem. The nasty high-energy stuff is all focused farther north, and we should have been getting only a little of the halo fringe off the Mount Desert ice sheet.

And maybe it wasn’t microwaves at all. Maybe it just happened … which somehow was far more terrifying. If the dearest person in your life is going to die in your arms, you want there to be a reason .

I came real close to dropping out of FMF after that.

Hell, I came pretty close to dying myself.

I’D BEEN LIVING WITH PAULA’S MEANINGLESS DEATH FOR THE NEXT year, which I suppose was better than the alternative, which was not living with her death. There was a time, there, after I got back to SAMMC, when I was thinking seriously of checking myself out. It’s simple enough to disable the safeguards in an N-prog, and custom-tailor a few billion nanobots to take you down into coma-level sleep before quietly shutting down all your CNS and cardiac functions. No pain, no awareness, nothing . You just go to sleep and never wake up. After about five minutes with no blood flow, your brain starts dying, degrading to the point where you can’t even capture the cerebral pattern any longer.

God , I wanted to die.

The problem was that I was afraid I would wake up.

I’d never been very religious. My parents were Reformed Gardnerians, which meant they believed in reincarnation, among other things. I’d never thought that much about it one way or another. So far as I was concerned, I’d live the usual three or four hundred years, then die, and then I’d find out what happened next, assuming that new medical advances hadn’t extended the expected human life span even further. No problem either way.

But I did start thinking about it after I lost Paula, thinking about it a lot, usually when I was alone in my rack-tube back at SAMMC, lying there in the claustrophobic dark thinking through, step by step, how I could reprogram my N-prog to let me kill myself. What if my folks were right ? I’d slip off into a coma, the ’bots would shut me down … only that wouldn’t be the end. I’d wake up on the Other Side, realizing that whatever lessons I’d been supposed to face in this life were still there waiting for me. Shit, I might have to go through the whole thing all over again. You know what they say about reincarnation. It’s the belief that you keep coming back again and again and again until you get it right .