Soon we came to an elevator and went up two floors. Its doors opened onto a drab hospital ward. I tried to look as nonchalant as Nick as we strolled down a long hall lined with dark silent patient rooms. The two nurses’ stations we passed were centers of inactivity. Several staff members wearing scrubs similar to ours sat at each station. They glanced at the alarms intermittently chiming from the patient monitors to make sure the problem wasn’t too life-threatening and ignored us as they entered data into computer workstations.
We’d almost reached the end of the hall when Nick and I stopped abruptly. Our path was suddenly blocked by three nurses wheeling a stretcher straight out from the room just ahead of us on the right. A human form with a bulging abdomen lay atop the stretcher, covered completely by a thick white sheet. As the nurses struggled to turn that cart with its heavy burden in our direction, a bare arm with rolls of fat slipped out from beneath the covering cloth. Its pudgy fingers dangled near one of the stretcher’s squeaking wheels before a nurse noticed it and tucked the lifeless limb back under the shroud.
As they passed us with their burden one of them muttered sadly, “Another one bites the dust.” Nick and I kept walking as I realized that nurse’s comment was more literally true than she knew. I’d recognized the ornate gold ring on the deceased hand we’d glimpsed. It belonged to the woman in our group who’d fallen on the treadmill several days ago.
Nick led me into another elevator and pushed the button to descend one floor. As its doors closed I whispered, “Are we near the exit yet?”
“It’s close. But there’s something important we need to do before we leave.”
We exited the elevator into another empty hallway. Nick led me to an inconspicuous closed door. He unlocked it with a key from his pocket and motioned me to follow.
It was pitch-black inside the tiny room after he closed the door. I heard the click of a light switch and blinked in the dim light.
We were squeezed together into a storage closet. Its walls were lined with skeletal metal racks stuffed with boxes of sterile surgical gauze, scalpels, needles, and syringes. This surgeons’ toy chest had little free space in its center to begin with, and our larger-than-average bodies made it an even tighter fit.
Nick’s face was of necessity close to mine in our cramped quarters. “I bet you’re wondering why I brought you here. Remember that detour I mentioned we had to make before we escape? This is it.”
I looked around at this prison cell he’d trapped me in and wondered what he was up to. He said, “Look up at the ceiling.”
All I saw was the typical institutional foam panels, with a silver ventilation grill right above me. Nick confirmed my suspicions when he continued, “Yes, our way out leads through the ventilation system.”
He glanced down at his fulsome belly, then at the significantly smaller opening above us. “Obviously I can’t get through it. But you’ve lost enough weight now that I think you can. That’s the other reason why I chose you. You’re the only person in our group who’s young and thin enough to get up there and go where I tell you for my little mission. There was another person in ELF who was supposed to be brought here with me. Unfortunately, the hospital filled its last empty bed and went on diversion just before my friend was arrested too. She must’ve been taken to another facility.”
I frowned. “You sound like you got yourself arrested on purpose—and that you’re really here for some kind of sabotage! I don’t want to be involved in anything violent!”
“Neither do I. What I want you to do won’t hurt anyone. In fact, it’ll help countless innocent people who’ve been persecuted for their eating habits just like us! It’s a little dangerous, but I’m hoping you’ll agree to do it ...”
Moments later I was crawling through a tight horizontal shaft in near-darkness. The penlight Nick had given me was clutched in my right hand, but its glowing tip gave little light. My left held another item pulled from his pocket—a scrap of paper with lines drawn on it as a crude map, showing me which of the ninety-degree turns in the shaft I had to follow to reach the destination he’d given me.
Back in the storage closet, while I was still deciding what to do, Nick had pulled three sturdy boxes from a nearby shelf. He’d stacked two of them on top of each other and used the third, pushed against the side of the bottom member of that pair, as an impromptu stepladder. Reaching up from his perch atop the two boxes, he’d yanked the grill off, exposing a gaping square hole that, he’d said, I should just be able to slip through.
I decided to keep going along with him and see what his plan was. He’d given me one last item to put in my back pocket before boosting me up through the opening. It was a thin, narrow card made of blank white plastic he told me he’d smuggled in when they’d brought him to the rehab center. I asked Nick how he’d managed to keep it from being discovered during that thorough search they’d done on us and our possessions when we’d arrived. He smiled and said it was a good thing Dr. Schuller had deferred his prostate exam.
Finally I reached the vertical shaft Nick told me about. It dropped down the height of two floors to my target area. After stuffing the flashlight and map into a pocket, I wedged myself legs first into that dark opening. Then, like my companion’s saintly namesake descending a chimney on Christmas Eve, I carefully scooted down it. The shaft was just wide enough to let me bend my knees and press them along with my hands and elbows against its slick metal sides to keep from falling through it.
It was tricky to coordinate those cycles of pressing and releasing the shaft’s walls with my limbs just right so I slid down it only a little at a time. After kicking out the shaft’s covering ventilation grill, I lowered myself about two meters through the ceiling to the floor of a new, brightly lit room. It was smaller than the storage closet I’d started from but seemed bigger because it wasn’t stuffed with metal shelving or anything else.
The chamber had four gray metal walls like a bank vault’s. Two walls were bare, while the other pair had closed doors centered in them and set opposite each other. Both doors were made of clear, thick plastic that looked bulletproof. Through one I saw another room unlit except for tiny red and green lights blinking along its walls. A peek through the other door showed a well-lighted anteroom. It contained an empty chair at a desk topped by a computer workstation.
Nick was right when he’d said the security station outside wasn’t manned this early in the morning. As I watched he entered through an outside door and waved to me. Several more steps and we stood facing each other, separated only by that clear door between the two rooms.
He pointed toward a small slot near me. I swiped the white card he’d given me through it. There was a brief buzz, then Nick pushed the door open. After closing it he whispered, “There’s a key pad outside that door they use to open it from the security station’s side. Unfortunately, they change the access code every day. There was no way my fellow hackers in ELF could find out what the code was and get that information to me soon enough for me to use it.
“That’s why you had to do all that crawling to get in here. Once somebody’s inside this room, unlocking it on this side just requires a key card whose code stays the same for months at a time.”
I said, “You haven’t told me why we’re here.”
He pointed to the darkened room behind me. “That’s ELF’s holy grail—the hospital’s server room. Those computers contain the programs and data we need to cripple this corrupt healthcare system that treats us like numbers on a balance sheet instead of human beings!”
He took the white card back from me and walked to the server room’s door. A swipe through a slot identical to the one at the other door made this one open too. There was a similar door and wall a meter away from that one. Nick motioned me to follow him into that cramped space, then let the first door close and lock behind us.
He said, “This little area is called a mantrap. To get into the server room itself, you have to open and then close that first door. Now, if I can’t get t
hrough this second door, we’re trapped here until security ‘rescues’ us.”
Nick took a deep breath. “Here goes!” He pressed his thumb against a small plate beside that second door.
He sighed in relief as, with another brief buzz, this final barrier opened. “You have no idea how hard it was for me to get my fingerprint into that thing’s database. But it worked!”
I followed Nick as he flipped a light switch to illuminate our surroundings, then moved to one of the metal racks holding squat rectangular server units. The room was uncomfortably cool. My teeth chattered as I asked, “What are you going to do now?”
Nick didn’t answer but went straight to his work. He pulled a server unit out on sliding rails from its rack and flipped up a monitor screen. His fingers raced across a keyboard sitting atop the unit.
Finally he replied, “This server unit is connected to only an extremely restricted part of the hospital’s intranet. Hackers like me can’t access it from the outside or even from hospital workstations. Special server systems like this one store the secret programs and codes used to control MNMs and those implanted devices doctors use to interrogate them. All those files are classified as ‘top secret’ and heavily encrypted. However, I’ve managed to fake a high enough permission level to copy them, even though I can’t use them yet. Once I get them back to my fellow hackers with ELF, we have a distributed computing system powerful enough to crack the encryption on those files.
“After we do that, we’ll be able to create our own working programmers and deactivate anybody’s MNM! Even better, we’ll have a copy of the Thanatos program inside every MNM that the government doesn’t want the public to know about. We’ll send proof of its existence to the media and broadcast it every way we can. Then people can decide for themselves whether they want something inside their bodies that will kill them when they become too expensive to keep alive!”
Nick stopped typing. “May I have my penlight back?”
I complied. He unscrewed the penlight’s back end, removed a small black disk concealed there, and inserted the disk into a shallow depression in the server unit’s top. “It’ll take just a few minutes to save the files I need onto the storage disk. Then we’ll be through with this detour and on our way out. I have a friend waiting for us in her car outside in the parking lot. Before long we’ll be making our getaway!”
I frowned. “You’d think, considering how sensitive this information is, that the security here would be even tighter than it is. Not that anything we’ve done has been easy or simple, but I’m surprised we’ve been able to get this far.”
“Until recently, security here was too tight to do this. Then the powers-that-be decided to save some money in their budget by scrimping on tighter measures. That’s why, in a classic case of bureaucratic shortsightedness, that station outside isn’t guarded anymore between midnight and six A.M. Everything we’ve done is being recorded by video cameras. But, just like in the rest of the hospital, they’re not watched in real time.”
He tapped the keyboard several more times. Then he extracted the storage disk and secured it back inside the penlight before slipping the instrument into his pocket. After returning the server unit and other equipment to their original locations, he turned off the light. We retraced our steps through that series of now unlocked doors, placed the ventilation grill I’d kicked out back where it belonged, and then exited this “secure” area leaving no obvious sign any unauthorized personnel had been there. Soon we were once again in the unrestricted part of the hospital.
As the two of us sauntered through a hallway on the first floor, Nick smiled at the few people we passed. He even whistled the opening bars of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” as we strolled past a wall-mounted security camera.
Then we arrived at a secluded fire exit door. Nick held it open for me, and for the first time in days I walked free beneath a starry night sky. A refreshing breeze caressed my face. Though it was cold enough on this winter night for me to see my breath, I felt warm inside knowing everything was going to work out fine.
There weren’t many cars in the hospital parking lot we soon reached. Scattered lights dangling from poles shaped like gibbets cast a faint pale glow over our path. Nick nudged my arm happily as he spotted his friend’s car nestled in a small cluster of other vehicles. He trotted ahead of me and tapped merrily on the window beside the shadowed driver—
Suddenly the lights around us flared like white-hot searchlights. I squinted through that dazzling glare to see the doors of the vehicles nearby swing open and uniformed men brandishing neuralshockers pour out into the parking lot. They grabbed Nick and handcuffed him before I could say a word.
Then the driver’s door of the vehicle belonging to Nick’s friend opened. My vision had recovered enough in the radiance surrounding me to recognize that familiar white lab coat and its wearer.
Dr. Schuller stood a close but safe distance away as Nick struggled in the arms of the police officers. The doctor said, “Look who’s out for an early morning stroll. Don’t you know it’s important to get enough sleep every night to stay healthy?”
Two officers removed Nick’s forged name-tag, penlight, and other incriminating evidence. Schuller smirked, “I understand you have a special interest in how MNMs work. Let me give you a demonstration.”
Nick’s frenzied attempt to twist away from the doctor ended as the touch from a neural-shocker made him go limp. Schuller raised the black glove sheathing his right hand. Nick’s eyes bulged as the glove came ever closer until the tip of the doctor’s right index finger rested over his patient’s MNM.
Seconds later Nick’s eyes rolled back into his skull. His mouth sagged open and exposed a lolling pink tongue. Even the white whiskers on his face seemed to droop as his head listed to one side—suddenly grown too heavy for his neck.
I doubted Nick heard the doctor reassure him, “Don’t worry. I gave your MNM a command to give your heart extra vagal stimulation and stop it for only ten seconds. It should be beating fine again now. You’ll recover soon.”
Then Dr. Schuller grinned at me. “Now it’s time to give you your just desserts ...”
Three weeks later I stood barefoot in my room, admiring my naked body in a full-length mirror attached to the back wall. The fat-devouring nanobots and other medicines Dr. Schuller prescribed during my stay had indeed sculpted my body back to centerfold standards. Those painful exercise sessions had paid off by toning my limbs, abdomen, and buttocks to athletic levels. The doctor’s expert medical regimen had even enhanced and firmed my bustline. And I was sure my internal organs were just as beautiful and in tip-top shape from those treatments too.
The alarm clock on the cute nightstand they’d given me showed ten A.M.—time for me to finally check out of this “resort.” I’d laid out all the new clothes a smiling orderly had brought me this morning on my bed. The underwear, pantyhose, frilly flowered skirt, and scarlet blouse looked like they’d fit my svelte figure perfectly. After I dressed and finished dabbing my face with the contents of the makeup case on my pillow, I’d be a vision of loveliness.
Without a warning knock or greeting, the door to my room opened. Dr. Schuller closed it—and blinked when I turned around and smiled at him. But he seemed to recover his professional insensitivity to nudity and focused mainly on my face as he spoke.
“I hope you had a good night’s sleep, Ms. Thompson. This is a big day for you. Think of it as the beginning of a new, healthier life.”
I interlaced my fingers behind my neck and arched my back to accentuate the fine job he’d done on my breasts. “I’m ready, doctor!”
I bent over to retrieve my panties from the bed and slip them on. Behind me the physician stammered slightly, “Of course, before you leave your MNM has to be reactivated. That’s what I’ve come here to do. Let your MNM help you, and you’ll stay as healthy as you are now.”
The mattress creaked as I sat on it facing him and raised each leg in turn to slide into my pantyhose.
“I appreciate what you’ve done for me, doctor. With the way I look now, I won’t have to worry about spending my nights alone anymore. But after all those wonderful lectures we received on good eating habits and exercise, I don’t think I need my MNM to help me. I can watch what I eat on my own.”
The physician shook his head as I took lots of time putting on my bra. “I’m sorry. You can file an application to do that, but processing it typically takes months. Until you get official approval to keep your MNM deactivated, the law says it has to be working. And don’t forget all those penalties like not being able to get a job or have a bank account if your MNM isn’t activated. Plus, no matter how motivated you feel now, there’s a high rate of recidivism back to bad eating habits without that device to help you!”
As I wiggled my skirt on I leaned over and displayed a generous helping of cleavage. I murmured, “I bet there are ways around those rules. If you were to certify you reactivated my MNM without really doing it, who would know? I imagine you even know how to fudge the monitoring reports it’s supposed to send on me to confirm I’m behaving myself.”
My lustrous golden hair fluttered breezily after I pulled the blouse down over my head. Slipping on a nice new pair of Mary Janes finished my reverse striptease. The doctor seemed unsure what to say as I applied my pink lipstick and other makeup. Then I stood up and displayed my fully clothed and preened glory to him.
There was only a single entendre in the coy smile I flashed at him. “Remember that first time you interviewed me, doctor? I wasn’t joking when I told you what I’d do for a Long John with frosting. If you help me with my MNM, I’ll give you a treat too.”
I nodded toward the bed. “I can get undressed again so you can give me a very complete physical right now and make house calls on me after I’m released. What do you say?”
His first response was wordless. He shoved his hands into his lab coat’s side pockets and pulled its flaps together in front—as if trying to conceal any anatomical evidence my words and actions had produced an effect on him. But what he said sounded coldly matter-of-fact.
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