by Jim Rudnick
“I also learned, that in our Library, we are going to have full POD capabilities to be up and running in about two months, which is well before the start of that semester. Seems to me that all a prof might have to do is to deliver to the library electronic copies of their textbooks. The library can print same and then put them in the hands of the first semester students,” he said and then held up his hand to stop some of the faculty from interrupting him as a few were starting to rise in their seats.
“Yes, I know about copyright. Yes, I know about costs. Yes, I know even that some of you are the authors of those books and there might be royalties involved. But my job is to get the first semester at our new RIM Navy Academy up and running. You may have an alternate workaround—but that one will work for you. Plus, as a sidebar, it would make your publishers more eager to provide the texts if they learn that they’d lose revenues if we do it our way,” he said, and that got a few nods from the crowd.
The admiral chimed in. “That’s what we’ll do. POD if they can’t meet our deadlines. Plus I’ll ensure that there will be small student costs too so that the books will be produced and used. End of discussion, and the end of our meeting. See you all in one week,” he said, and he gathered up all of his items and turned to Tanner.
“Nice catch on that, Captain. I take it you’ve not as yet been over to Tower Number Two yet? And your offices are ready for you beside my own down in admin at the Dessau landing port,” the admiral said and bustled out.
A hand touched Tanner’s arm and he turned to face Professor Watkins.
“Captain—thank you. That will get my students the texts they need. I had no idea that speaking to you a few hours ago would get me an answer that I can work with so quickly. My thanks—my students thank you too, Captain,” he said, and he reached out to shake Tanner’s hand.
“You have at least one friend on the faculty, Captain—come to find me anytime you’ve issues,” he offered and smiled.
Tanner nodded and then remembering that he was going to be a faculty member himself in four months, he smiled too.
#####
She spun on her heel and strode down the alley between the treadmills, aiming at the farthest one from the group of other early morning gym users behind her. When she reached that last machine, she noted it had an Out of Order notice taped to the display plate. She threw her metal water bottle against the close wall that was currently showing some kind of scene from some other world than Neres, and the screen skipped the vid and went black.
Angry?
”Yes,” she said to herself, I am about as angry with Tanner as I’ve ever been.” She was even angrier than she was when he’d drunkenly stolen a robo-cab out of her Embassy lineup years ago on Conclusion and had been too drunk to even acknowledge his failure at protocol days later.
Upset?
”Yes, I am upset,” she said to herself, as she sat on the edge of a close-by treadmill and hung her head over the top of her crossed arms. In her now sweaty gym outfit, with the tight leggings and bodice, she was one large sweat-ball, but she knew that not going to the gym every other day meant she was going to fall into that fat Royal group that she so didn’t want to join. She pulled the towel down from around her left shoulder, mopped her face and the back of her neck, and dragged a towel end down between her breasts as she tried to get the sweat off of her.
“More sweat coming,” she said to herself, as she rose, dropped the towel on the floor beside the treadmill she was at, and said, ”Go” to the AI that ran that gym machine.
As it started up, she half-smiled. Why couldn’t she fall in love with an AI type of guy—one who’d do as ordered all the time and comply? To her wants and needs all the time. Yes, that was the kind of man that she’d thought Tanner might have been—except, as she shook her head and began to quicken her pace, not really.
The kind of man that Tanner was, was a navy man. A follow-the-rules type except when the rules held you back. An obey-the-rules type except when you had to stray outside same. She remembered that he’d saved her life—along with other heads of state too—at the prison riots on Halberd. She remembered he’d been drunk or half-drunk most of his life here on the RIM. She remembered he’d beaten the Pirates too, as well as making his own vacuum jump to save the Ikarian vaccine from being stolen on the Barony Hospital Ship.
All in all, exactly the right type of man to be a Baroness’s husband—not that she was the Baroness as yet. But one day soon.
She picked up the pace again. The treadmill gauged her increase in her pace, and the machine sped up to a full nine miles an hour, her normal pace for the next fifteen minutes.
Tanner had left her.
Or, perhaps even more honestly, he had asked her to abdicate’ her position as a Royal in the Barony—the heir apparent, in fact, to rule someday. To give that up.
She’d never give up the Barony.
He had said that he felt like he was just the same as the furniture. That even though he loved her—it was the Royal in her that he couldn’t handle.
And then she threw him out of her bedroom, off the Sterling, and with the prompting from Gillian, her Adept Issian, he was assigned to Eons as punishment. He could help order new blackboards for all she cared. She pounded down even harder, and the treadmill AI upped the pace to eleven miles an hour.
Sweat came, of course, and she let it run down her brow and even enjoyed the slight sting as the salty fluid filled up an eye. She drove her legs even more, her pace increasing once again, and she knew she was up there with her own personal best as the treadmill AI chimed again, and she hit a full twelve miles an hour.
She ran.
She hated him.
She ran.
She loved him.
She almost fell when that broke into her train of thought, and the machine slowed instantly.
Gillian the Adept had said—or at least implied—that the punishment tour of duty for Tanner was an idea from the Master Adept herself. Or did she? It had been broached by Gillian. She went along with it, but now she wondered what else might be behind that duty, and she nodded as she reached forward and toggled the treadmill to begin the slowdowns.
As she slowed her gait, the whole thing was sounding somewhat odd to her.
Why in the world would a pirate-defeating, prison-riot-defeating navy captain be needed to count blackboards?
Why indeed.
She slowed and stopped as the treadmill chimed at her, and she stepped down to sit on the edge once again, picking up the towel to sop up what she could.
Probably lost like five pounds so far. Rowing machine will be the end of today though.
But Tanner—she missed him.
She missed that slightly crooked smile and the crinkle of the crow’s feet at the side of those light blue eyes.
She missed him.
She grunted, rose, and went back up the aisle toward the side off to the right where the rowing machines were in a row and wondered what time it was.
She looked up at the ceiling—she didn’t know why she always did that—to ask the Sterling AI what the shipboard time was and found it was coming up to lunchtime.
She also wondered how long in days it might take for the frigate to get to Eons, but she left that unasked as yet.
More thought here, and if possible, maybe even a small heart-to-heart with her Gillian might be the first thing to do.
#####
“Dr. Twelves … please report to MedWards Maternity dome, room number three-one-one-two, please,” the AI said throughout the MedWard domes, and as he heard his name again, Dr. Twelves nodded. Doctors were always called last, when all the other staff and patient were ready and waiting. So it was time.
Finishing up his quick lunch—if one could call some kind of cardboard wrapped around wilted veggies and then deep fried so it’d be cooked, lunch—he jammed the tail end of the stuffed tortilla into his mouth and dusted off his hands.
We should have more napkins; the food should be better too; an
d more importantly, maybe we could eat out in the major public areas of the Aporia dome city—instead of being locked up here in the MedWard domes.
His standard rant delivered, he got up, nodded to the two nurses over in another booth, and left his table cluttered with his lunch items.
“Doctors never cleaned up after themselves either,” he said to himself, as if that kind of behavior was common and the accepted norm.
He left the small cafeteria, went down the main dome tunnel past administration and other offices, and then turned into the patient areas. Here, he glanced into some of the recovery rooms and saw other doctors and staff handling whatever it was they had to. Being a doctor, he knew, was a long, long road to a life of fulfillment … but one that was clouded with items that the rest of the Issians never had to deal with. Sickness, disease, mental issues, body issues—the list was longer than he even knew. But that was the path he’d chosen those decades ago.
He nodded to an intern he’d watched drain an abscess on a patient just a few days ago and made a note to send through to the attending that the girl had done fine. Perhaps—maybe barely—but perhaps a bit too much bedside manner, which he knew for a female doctor to male patient relationship was often misunderstood by the patient. “But that story was for another day,” he said to himself as he turned to leave the in-patient dome and went down the long single corridor to the SecureWard, where he worked most of each day.
He reached the end of the long corridor, lit well from the recessed lighting above tucked away in the ceiling, its matte green deck, floors, and walls all spotless and clean. Moving up to the login panel, he stared straight ahead at the bull’s-eye target while the SecureWard AI scanned his retina. A green light now replaced that bull’s-eye, and the AI said, “Welcome, Dr. Jack Twelves, please report to the Maternity Ward room number three-one-one-two,” and the door ahead of him slid open to admit him.
He nodded, made his way into the secured area, turned left immediately, and went down another long corridor to move over to the Maternity dome. He smiled as he entered the room. Today was going to be an easy procedure—seeing as all he had to do was to instruct and watch, and he went over to the cleaning station side room.
Scrubbing up and donning a new gown, gloves, and mask, he returned to the room to take stock.
On the table, of course, lay the pregnant patient, but he purposely did not check her chart. There was no need to know the personal details of either this young woman or her ID. He’d learned long ago, that this was best for him, to be an unknowing participant only.
Beside her, the anesthesiologist stood, monitoring the patient on his equipment. He gave the doctor a thumbs-up gesture, and that was a good thing.
On either side of the table were the OR nurses again that he didn’t know, but then they tended to move about so much up here on the MedWards and down on Eons too, it was a usual thing to be working with strangers.
Above the table on a large monitor, the ultrasound screen showed the patients
At the foot of the table stood the twins.
These two he did know—Inner Circle members Zara and Ella something. He knew that he knew their surname, but he had tried hard to forget it. No need to be that close, and he walked over to the table to stand on the left-hand side of the deeply breathing woman.
“And time line—we’re exact on that, agreed?”
The same nurse nodded, looked at the chart to her left, and said, “Guaranteed, Doctor, that she is less than week five.”
Good, Jack thought, perfect timing once again.
“What did we use this time?” he asked no one in particular, but the nurse across from him said, “Small growth on her cervix.”
When faced with the choice of a simple medical procedure to remove same—as opposed to the fact that such a growth could affect the birth process negatively and in some rare cases, cause a stillborn—the mothers always opted for the simple in-patient clinic procedure. The patient had walked in here today expecting a single child, but Jack knew she’d walk out expecting twins—Issian Inner Circle twins.
He nodded and then said, “Let’s get this done, shall we?” He took the remote ultrasound tool handle and slowly drilled down on the embryo as it sat within the patient.
At the foot of the table, Zara and Ella were fixated on that image up on the screen, as Jack moved the apparatus around a bit looking to show the embryo at the best angle, and yes, there it was—the best view.
“We’re looking at about a … say, a less than one-thousand-cell structure,” Jack said as he gently moved the reader around the woman’s lower abdomen.
“And from the declension of same, I know that the cells are all totipotent, which is what we want. Zara and Ella, you’re good to go,” he said, as he now locked the ultrasound reader at that viewpoint.
Zara reached for her twin’s hand, and together they stared up at the monitor with a focus that was intense.
Nothing happened at first on the screen. Not a hint of movement or for that matter anything at all.
Then, without warning, it was like a line or an edge appeared at the massed cells in the center of that embryo, moving to each side at the same time. As the whole room watched, the one embryo now was split into two, each about the same size, but he knew small variations would not matter.
He looked over at the twins beside him and said, “Time to choose,” and then he looked back up at the screen.
The twins were busy continuing to stare at the monitor, but he really had no idea how they could use their minds to sort and to choose from within such a tiny few-celled-sized embryo what to sort, what to move, what to keep, and what to dismiss, yet it always happened right in front of him.
On the screen, smaller than cell-sized structures or pieces or items—whatever one called them, Jack thought–moved from the topside embryo down to the lower one. Karotypes moved to the lower embryo as did chromosomes, genes, and all the parts that makeup an Issian baby. The top cells looked no different, yet they’d been stripped of what would make them another Issian baby.
He looked over at Zara and waited until he got the nod that the twins were done, and then he turned back to the apparatus on the mother’s belly. Choosing a new toggle on the remote, he quickly coated both embryos with artificial zona pellucida, and he finished off the making of the twins inside this patient. He slowly disengaged the apparatus and the ultrasound remote too.
Moments later he looked back and noted the twins had left. One of the nurses had stayed around to work with the awakening patient as the anesthesiologist said, “Coming out of it in about five minutes.”
Jack stood back as he took off his gloves, snapping them into the organic wastebasket beside him.
“Okay, then when she’s awake, wheel her down to recovery—I’ll join her there—tell her in about twenty minutes—and explain how she’s now carrying twins. Surprise!” he said with a bit of levity in his voice, and he tossed the mask too into the bin and walked out of the Maternity OR.
An hour later, he sat in his small office back in the administration area of the MedWard main dome as he finished his report on the procedure. Another set of twins. One with all the right items plus all of her sister’s too—and one that would be stillborn.
He electronically signed his report, sent it off encrypted as usual to the Master Adept and her Inner Circle, and half-smiled … another day that had gone well…
#####
Again, the Master Adept sipped her water and wondered how soon the plans that had been in the making for more than ten years would come together. She bubbled a bit of that mouthful of water under her tongue, enjoying the odd sensation, and then swallowed it completely.
At more than one hundred years old, no one, she thought, experiences much that’s new to them anymore, yet somehow the advances that medical science made had surprised her.
The fact that she could now control—at least via her plans, which yes, still needed to work out—getting the best and brightest on the Inner Coun
cil, which was important. Issians, some only mind you, had always had the potential ability to read the future, use telekinesis, or mind read others close to them physically had always existed. But the new medical advancements allowing them to now split an embryo into twins and then harvest from one twin all those special genes and Karotypes and move them into the only twin that would live was a process she had been quick to use.
We must always try to grow, or we die.
Like Eons itself—almost, she added, knowing that one day the planet’s massive blue sun would level out and the climate would return to being normal—or at least better for agriculture, she hoped.
She walked over to the window to look out at the deserted farm that lay to the west. As always, she stared at the barn leaning sickly and the farmhouse without a roof. She stared at the scene that never changed. Barns, farmhouses, corrals, and paddock fences for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles would look the same—long forsaken and left in a state of deterioration.
She looked up at the sky. It was the seventh month, and at this time of the year, that blue sunlight often lit up—yes, there it was. She looked up at the ring that circled Eons. It was thin and yet still a bit shiny in the bright daylight. As Eons in a few of its summer months moved along its orbit, the sun often lit up the single ring that circled the planet. It was better seen on nights when the moon was full, but even so, it was still so natural. Yet, the sunlight that shone down and lit up the ring was the same sunlight that had so severely affected the Eons climate.
Our planet is sick, but we are prospering
It had taken some years of trial—testing on young pregnant women—and many embryos were lost. In the days past, the embryos had been split manually by medical staff, separating the single embryo into two of same, after removing it from the mother in a long and tedious operation. Once out, it used to be that a single Master from the Inner Circle tried to move the items from one embryo to the other. Then the embryo was re-implanted into the mother, and they waited to see what would happen. And as she well knew, the procedures failed for the most part, or the twin that had been stripped of all things that made an Issian a mental power died. Or worse, was born and could be seen to be less than normal.