When I come to, it’s easier to orient to my surroundings. “I’m in a hospital.” I mutter. “In the twenty-fourth.” Pudgepot is back, tapping at the monitors.
“I see you’re awake, SO51399.” Cold hands hold my wrist, searching for a pulse. They teach an entire course called “Manual Medical Techniques” in nursing schools. Despite all the future’s advances, patient health declined over time. After extensive and expensive studies, researchers found that nothing beats the assurance of physical touch. Except for hers! Does she plunge her hands in ice first? Her fingers jump to my forehead. If I wasn’t already awake, those frigid digits would bring me to life pretty quick. “Do you know where you are?”
“Hospital ward.”
“Good. Do you know when you are?”
“Twenty-fourth century.”
“Good.” She says with the same tone of voice she might use praising a toddler for making poo in the potty. I’m trying to hold in the frustration. I need to know about Davey, but this woman doesn’t have the imagination to help me. She can’t see beyond her prescribed tasks. Probably why she’s nursing in a prison instead of one of the bustling cutting-edge hospitals on a main planet. Pudgepot excels at following directions because she is not capable of original thought.
“Your levels are all within parameters. I’ll notify the doctor. Hopefully, we’ll have you out of here and back in a cell by the end of the day.”
“How long?”
“I just told you ‘end of the day.’” She’s getting snippy again. I can’t afford to have her on my bad side. I need to stay in her good graces.
“I’m sorry. I meant how long since reintegration?”
“I don’t have that information. You’ve been in my care for four and a half hours, most of it asleep. Reintegration makes one quite tired.” I figured that one out for myself. I feel like she’s talking to a toddler again. “I don’t know how long you were in the procedure room.”
For David, this is an eternity. He doesn’t have time for me to be out of commission. I don’t have a second to waste around here. I need to get back to him—fast. But Pudgepot isn’t going to help me. No point in needling her about it.
I lie back and piece back together all the weird fragments I’ve had since I came around the first time. Emergency Reintegration. The emergency must have been the discovery that my Life Mod has been off script for several days. Some tech found the glitch and reported it to some superiors, who reported back to the warden, who reported it to the board of governors, who gave the order to yank me out of Life Mod. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars, do not take time to prep the body. That’s what it would be to them: a faceless, nameless blob of flesh. Certainly not a person, certainly not someone worthy of a heads-up or proper reintegration.
Reintegration is different than biotransposition. In biotrans-position, the host’s body is warmed up, as it were. The brain has been functional and in control of limbs, systems, and organs. Brainhitching acts a little like switching drivers while the car is in motion. The vehicle may swerve and decelerate for a moment but moves back up to speed quickly. The pain and vomiting are that swerve and deceleration, for all intents and purposes.
Reintegration behaves like cranking up an old car on a cold day. If it starts at all, it will sputter a few times before turning over: the electrical may misfire, and it will be several long minutes before the heat is up and running. My body has been in suspended animation for 781 days. To guard against atrophy, robots have been giving my muscles electrical stimulation. My brain hasn’t had a passenger, much less a driver. My gray matter has been sleeping in the back seat. Successful reintegration, as it was explained during my orientation, requires several hours of prep work. The body must be warmed up literally and figuratively before my consciousness can take over. With prep time, the process goes smoothly. Without it, well, there’s vomiting, seizures, unresponsive systems, and confusion. Lots and lots of confusion.
So, they’ve reintegrated me. What now? What’s the plan? I could waste time pondering it, but I’m not going to know anything until I talk to my Life Modification treatment specialist. That’s a corrections counselor, in your parlance. And I can’t do that until I’m medically cleared. I resist the urge to call back Pudgepot and ask how it’s going with the doc, because she’s the type to drag her feet with an annoying patient.
And that leaves me no other choice than to wait. I hate waiting. I need to be moving, taking action, not sitting around contemplating my navel while Davey rots in the past. My future, my destiny. Davey’s future, er past, er future-past—I wonder how Burnsey would conjugate these verbs? What tense would be proper here? But I digress.
All of this is out of my control. I’m in my own body, but I’m still impotent and powerless. Replay the theme of the week. I’ve gone from footloose and fancy-free, got no strings on me to the Father’s puppet. I haven’t felt this way since I was twelve years old, and I promised myself then I would never feel this way again. Even when I got pinched, I got into Life Mod—the cushiest bid out there. As far as I was concerned, Life Mod was just a bump in the road to getting me back to the life I wanted.
I think about the gray man. He would say this easy time was his doing, holding back the bad stuff. But that was just a hallucination. Then why did it feel so solid?
I inhale, fill my cheeks, and exhale a cleansing breath of air. Just like Burnsey. I chuckle. These people have worked their way under my skin for sure. I’d laugh more if it weren’t so terribly tragic.
I know how the next few days or possibly even weeks are going play out. According to Acceptable Conduct and Behavior for Life Modification Therapy Candidates, “In the unlikely event that an error in the programming of the Life Modification Therapy System precipitates the necessity of an emergency reintegration, a full and thorough investigation of the candidate and audit of the databases and system will be performed under close supervision of the board of governors according to procedures laid out in Subsection VIII of the Life Modification Therapy Code Enforcement and Processes Manual.” Something went way wrong with the system, and The Powers-That-Be are going to want answers. The techies will be spending every waking hour going back through the code looking for spurious 1s and 0s, auditing the databases, and examining the Candidate Selection System with a magnifying glass.
Everyone else, managers, supervisors, coordinating supervisors, interns, secretaries, and their next-door neighbors will be looking at me to see if I had a part. There will be lots and lots of interrogations. They’ll ask questions, plug me into various diodes and electrical doo dads, ask more questions, run neuro scans, ask the same questions in a different way. Then I’ll finally have the opportunity to talk with my Life Modification treatment specialist who will decide, in the end, whether or not to let me continue in Life Mod. If they do put me back into the system, is there any guarantee that they will put me back in the same time and place? Doubtful, but I suppose there’s a chance. It’s the only thing I can hope for.
Goal 1: Get back in Life Mod, which means I better get my story straight. How much do I tell them? Enough to prove my innocence, but not so much they diagnose me with Biotransposition Psychosis, aka Ripper Madness. No need to bring up disembodied voices.
At least, now I have something to do. It’s a fact of neurolinguistics that if you practice a story long enough it stops being a fabrication and embeds in your long-term memory. It comes across to investigators, eye pattern readers, and neural polygraphs like the truth. That’s why the fuzz ask the same questions over and over, they’re trying to trip the perp up, catch him in an inconsistency. It works on lesser criminals, but not Smullian O’Toole. I can make the most preposterous fable read like documented history.
A task helps me. Because I was wrong about goal one. Goal 1 Amended: Get cleared medically. None of the relentless investigation starts until Doc says I’m healthy enough. Doc won’t clear me until my vitals are all hunky dory. This stress bounces my numbers all over the place. I can hear the
annoying beeps of the machine I’m attached to and know it’s outside of healthy parameters. I close my eyes and, in my mind, travel back to the moment I was woken by Marvin’s alarm clock. Somewhere in the background I hear the machine’s high-pitched beeps slow to a rhythmic pace as I craft the story of a poor Life Mod inmate trapped in a situation beyond his control. I smile. It’s like being back in the game. If I do this right, they may feel so bad for me they reduce my time. Goal 2: Get back in Life Mod. Goal 3: Get a shorter bid.
I spend the next several hours running my story in my head. I try to anticipate every twist and convolution they may try to throw at me. I’m thoroughly satisfied, but one reason I am the best is I never rest until the job is done. Do the job right, and there’s plenty of time and loot for recreation after. So, I run it again and again.
Doc walks in. He a schlubby sort of man; in fact, he’s like an old hound dog in human form. Long face, slumped shoulders, wrinkled clothes. The staff in this place are definitely the cream of the crop.
“How are you feeling, Mr. O’Toole?” he asks, looking me right in the eyes. That’s when I see it, concern and a spark of intelligence. He called me by my name, not my ward number. He’d have had to look that up before he came in. Before this whole screw-up, my natural instinct would have been hostile, regardless of what I read in this man’s eyes. I’d have chalked it up to a profession that requires a look of compassion, that it was just a well-practiced tool of the trade, no different than the hours he spent practicing suturing. But now—I trust him. Ridiculous. The last few days have certainly scrambled my eggs
“Fine. I ain’t gonna lie; I was woozy earlier, but I’m rarin’ to go now.” It’s my aww shucks persona. Charming, a little slow, harmless. I break it out when I need to play an authority figure. They feel superior, and thus more likely to bestow a blessing on this poor little underling. No one in the legal system knows Smullian O’Toole at all. They’ve only met aww shucks guy.
“I imagine you were,” he says, chuckling. Hook set. “Your blood pressure and heartbeat look fine. But you did suffer a seizure during reintegration. I’d feel better if we ran another neural scan. I can schedule that for tomorrow.”
Tomorrow! Nooo! I need to get this show on the road. Calm down. Nose to the Grindstone, Smullian. It’s never mattered more in your miserable life.
“Whatever you say, Doc. But I really feel finer than Lortrel wine. Are you sure that’s necessary? I’ve only got two hundred days left, and I want to get back to my girl. She’s got the prettiest eyes you’ve ever seen.”
The doc pulls a chair over and sits next to the bed. Another considerate move. He’s putting himself on my level instead of towering over me.
“I understand your impatience. I do. I couldn’t imagine being separated from my Mary for that long, but you want to go back to her whole and functional, don’t you? If we rush things now, there could be complications. I’m not promising anything, but maybe I could move the Board to allow her to visit while you’re out. I could tell them it would aid in your recovery.”
Why is he so nice?
“Gee thanks, Doc. But it wouldn’t work; she’s too far away… (three hundred years away)… and she’s gotta watch our little boy Davey. I don’t see how she could make it. You thinkin’ about it sure means a heap.”
“If you change your mind, let me know. I’d be happy to facilitate it. But in regard to you, I do think it’s best to observe you overnight and run a scan in the morning.” He pats my arm; he actually pats my arm, like with affection. Why couldn’t I have gotten the old codger I assumed he was? I can’t even be mad about this turn of events. He is doing what he thinks is best for me. When he stands, his lab coat shifts, and a small cross pin on his shirt pocket reflects the bright lights of the room.
“You really believe that?” I ask.
“What?”
I point to the pin.
“Yes, I do.”
“How? I mean you’re a smart guy.”
“You mean how can a man of science believe in all this superstitious hoodoo?” he asks with a mischievous grin.
“Well, yeah.”
“I have never found the two mutually exclusive. There is truth in science, but there is more truth in my faith. I’d love to talk with you about it more, but I am forbidden by my contract with the board. If you are truly interested in Christianity, there’s a religion port in the prison library. You can speak with an approved, licensed professional there. It is your right, as a prisoner, to pursue the religion/belief system of your choice. When I discharge you tomorrow, you should ask to go. Once requested, it must be honored. Sleep well tonight, Mr. O’Toole.”
“Uh, Doc, do you think you could ask your, uh, Friend, to help some people I know? They know him, and they could really use it.”
“I will,” he says. “But why don’t you ask him yourself?”
“Pssht,” I say. “Why would he listen to a felon like me?”
He cocks his head, those hound dog jowls wobbling. “My friend doesn’t care what you’ve done. Those things don’t matter to him. See you tomorrow, Mr. O’Toole.” He turns and leaves the room.
“Thanks, Doc.” I say to the empty air. He would do well in my field. He has a countenance that belies his intelligence. People wouldn’t expect that old hound-doggy face to be capable of deceit or craftiness. I enjoyed the way he flawlessly found a way to introduce his faith regardless of the handcuffs the regulations placed on him. I wonder how many other inmates he’s reminded of their right to religion and how to find it inside these walls. Long ago, The Powers-That-Be stopped priests, shamans, and holy men from visiting prisons, but legally they still had to provide a modus for prisoners to worship. Thus, the religion port was invented. Press the appropriate button and an inmate has access to the clergy of their choice for five-minute intervals.
I’ll take Doc’s advice and visit the port. I’d never spill about the Father to the Fatherless to the screws that run Life Mod, but I can’t deny that he’s at the bottom of this little glitch. I guess it’s time to find out more about him. Know what I’m dealing with. Financial Planning Lesson Three—Thoroughly vet all business associates or find out everything you can about the unknown deity currently meddling in your life.
“How far the mighty have fallen. I can’t believe the great Smullian O’Toole is even considering religion. God! Pssht.” I mutter, but then catch myself. You have to be on your best behavior. Pudgepot could be listening. Can’t have her catch you talking to yourself. She’d love to report that to her higher-ups.
I admit my mind is in a different place than it was four days ago. Whether I believe or not, all the people I’ve connected with in the past few days have believed in this hoodoo, to quote the doc. Even the doc! What are the chances that I land the one Christian doctor in the entire prison system? More than that, I can’t deny the effect on their lives. It’s certainly something to ponder. But not now. I need to go over my story again. It has to be flawless before They throw me in the hot seat.
II
I’ve waited six grinding, mind-numbing, torturous days to speak with my Life Modification treatment specialist, and now I’m waiting again. She’s late. Why? I don’t know. I think it’s in the job description: Be late by forty minutes to every appointment. I’ve told my story so many times in the last few days I’ve started reciting it in my sleep, but the good news is I’m pretty sure I’ve achieved goal 3. While they’re trying to decipher me, I’ve been cold reading them. And one thing is for sure, they’re stumped. Grade A stupefied as to what’s happened with their precious, unhackable, indestructible Life Mod. They’re also pretty sure I’m just some poor ward that got caught in this grand cluster bomb and are starting to worry I might consider legal action against their precious system.
That’s when the bribes like a shorter sentence will begin. I need to decide how much I’ll let them grovel. It’s a fine line between getting as much as you can and getting greedy. Greediness leads to losing everything. Many a c
on has lost a good payday reaching for a great one. I learned early on that a mayor’s wallet in the pocket is better than a senator’s briefcase on the curb. I almost lost my right hand groping for that one. But I digress.
I don’t want to push it too far. I need them to put me back in Life Mod for Davey’s sake. A shortened sentence would be nice, but I don’t need a pardon at this point or, worse, some guilt-ridden hush money and a ride out of this sector of the galaxy. No, this interview will be the most important of the week.
My Life Modification Treatment Specialist rushes in. Her tan skirt has a small dark stain indicating she ate in transit, and her dark hair, which probably lay smoothly across her brow this morning, sticks out errantly. Even her rich, chocolate skin somehow manages to look sallow. She checks her holopad and smiles.
“So, Mr. O’Toole.” I met her a couple of times before I went into Life Mod. She cares as much as she is able. I imagine once she dreamed of helping change the system, of rehabilitating felons. But then she graduated, and a couple vampires named red tape and crushing caseload almost drained her bleeding heart. She still has enough red cells left to try her anemic best. Hence, checking the holopad for my name.
“I’ve been briefed on the case, of course,” she says, crossing her arms on the table and fixing her flat brown eyes on mine. “So, I’m not going to make you run through the whole thing again. I’m sure you’re tired of talking about it.”
Did I mention she loves aww shucks guy? “You can say that twice,” I answer with a light chuckle.
“I’m just going to ask your feelings about a couple of particular instances. Is that alright with you?”
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