by J J Perry
Ivanna responded, “Not everyone is strong like you, Dr. Parambi.” She inched forward.
Suresh looked over his shoulder. “Please do not interrupt me, doctor. I am going to make Mr. Trujillo stronger, more able to withstand the temptations of the flesh. Lust is one of the deadly sins, you know.” Suresh lifted a laser scalpel and waved it toward Ivanna.
“So is anger, doctor. Are you angry?” She continued to move forward, now about fifteen feet away.
“No. And you should move back, or I will do more than an orchiectomy on my friend here.” He moved the scalpel to the throat of Raul, whom he had pinned against the wall. The touch of a button, and his carotid artery would empty his life into the room. “Back off!” Suresh growled in a near whisper. Ivanna took a step back.
“Your wife is here, Raul,” Suresh said, looking at Maricia. Turning back he asked, “Does she know?”
Raul looked at Maricia with terror in his eyes. He did not answer. “Did she know you were double dipping?” Suresh asked with more emphasis and grunted as he lifted Raul two feet higher against the wall. “Answer me, Raul!”
Raul screamed in pain. He went higher, his head against the ceiling. A blue-gloved hand had lofted him by the perineum, his genitals bulging, exposed. He was naked. “Answer me, or I cut something off.”
“No, for chrissake.”
“Interesting choice of words, my brother. Are you adulterizing for Christ’s sake or for your own? Or for hers?” Suresh jerked his head toward Lucinda. “Why introduce Christ into this? Why?”
Raul shook his head, not knowing how to respond.
“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” He flicked across the scrotum. A testicle squirted out and dangled, tethered. Raul shrieked in pain, writhing and kicking.
Savanna entered to see Ivanna flash forward and grab Suresh’s right arm wielding the scalpel just as it lacerated Raul’s femoral artery and vein. There was the sickening sound of an elbow wrenched out of socket, deafening screams of Raul in shock and crashing to the floor, and, on top of that, Lucinda’s bleating as she lunged to hold pressure on the gushing laceration. Maricia moved cautiously forward with the dipronyl gun. Suresh bellowed in pain. Wearing nothing but an open robe, he brought a knee up into Ivanna’s abdomen, lifting her four feet in the air. Unfazed, she struck his larynx and twisted his dislocated forearm, bringing the large man to his knees then to the floor as she landed on him. He swung with a punch, but his arm was parried and paralyzed with a jab deep into the axilla. Without the use of either arm, Ivanna easily immobilized his neck with her foot, making him an easy target for Maricia’s sedative. In minutes, he was chemically incapacitated.
Lola entered with a stretcher. Raul, with fading consciousness, was loaded with naked Lucinda still compressing his left groin, blood oozing slowly out despite the pressure. He was traveling deep into the land of dipronyl, his screams mellowing to moans and snoring. Lola took over the management of bleeding as they moved quickly into the elevator.
Maricia did not follow. She stayed in Recreation, surveying the damage.
“There’s something unusual in the air,” Ivanna said as she attended to Suresh. She positioned his head and neck so he could breathe. “A chemical. Do you smell something, Maricia?”
The room stunk of sweat. “No. It stinks like a gym.” She wandered around and picked up Raul’s T-shirt. There was a subtle scent of sex. His shorts were farther away, where he had been pinned by Suresh. She lifted Lucinda’s shirt then dropped it with disgust where she found it.
She had never been angrier in her life. She wanted to hit something, to scream, to escape. Despite this, a warmth in her groin and a tickle in her nipples began and grew stronger. The erotic feelings disgusted her and were completely out of place. Her neck turned pink.
“Is something wrong?” Ivanna asked. “You’re blushing.”
“I don’t know what’s going on. I think it’s a weird reaction to something, this whole farce, the entire disgusting mess.”
“Do you not smell anything different?”
“No.”
“You should leave and bring me a stretcher. Then you should stay out of here. There’s something in the air making you react.”
Reacting she was. She hurried up the stairs to Medical.
Zhivago took one look at Raul and said, “Spaniard with a bullfighting injury. Typical matador injuries, except this one is clean, not ragged and full of dirt.”
Lucinda responded, “You could say that.” She pulled a sheet from a nearby stretcher as Jekyll took over hemostasis. Lucinda wrapped up and moved into a corner. She was filled with loathing of her weakness, of her infidelity. She wanted to cry, but she remained strangely sexually unsated. Tears would not form. Her crotch beckoned. Her fingers began to stray down below her navel. With effort, she pulled back. She looked in a mirror. Her chest and neck were glowing pink, her pupils dilated. She left the room, panting and growling, conflicted, disturbed, and unbalanced to an extreme.
Maricia saw her in the sheet disappearing up the stairs as she arrived. She was glad they had not come closer. She was not sure she could have kept herself from clawing, hitting, or scratching her best friend.
4.2
Med-bots and multi-bots, such as Jekyll and Zhivago, were adept at managing trauma. Most of the initial medical programming had been battlefield oriented. Raul soon had two large IVs, and his bleeding was controlled. In less than forty minutes, the artery and vein were repaired; the femoral nerve was under repair and would take longer. The rather overactive, depleted, and abused testicle had been replaced in its baggy home, where it would have a longer period of rest than the owner preferred but less than it deserved. The delivery system remained somewhat tumescent, most definitely out of the ordinary when viewed with the data of hundreds of millions of injuries cataloged in the database of his physicians. Had they been human, they might have stood in awe. As it was, it became a random entry into a database.
Savanna, Cyrus, and Maricia stood in the chaos of the Recreation area, looking down at Suresh ten minutes after Raul and company had left the room. Ivanna was adjusting his larynx so he could breathe without obstruction. Then the four of them lifted him onto a stretcher. They moved toward the elevator.
“I think he was taking his meds,” Maricia stated.
“We can run a drug level,” Ivanna offered.
“Where are you going to put his locator?” Cyrus asked no one in particular.
“Between his scapulae,” Maricia replied. “That’s where we put them in prisoners.
“You and your lingo,” Cyrus complained. “Scapulae?”
“Wing bones. It is still possible to get them out, but it requires two people. We can also encase it in a mesh that will activate an alarm if breached. This will not happen again, guaranteed.”
“I would not underestimate this guy. We need to get to the root of the problem,” Savanna said. “You should go check on Raul, Mar.”
“So I can cut the other one off? Both he and I are better off if I stay away.”
“OK. If you feel like you want or need to leave, go ahead. Ivanna, what can be done about Parambi’s head?”
“If by that you mean his psychiatric condition,” said Ivanna, “there are a couple of options if his medications are not fully effective. Without a Psychotropion, probably the best is a stereotactic neurosurgical procedure or series of procedures that minimally affect intelligence while altering emotional and cognitive connections within the frontal and temporal lobes. We can do limited brain functional imaging on board, with a little reconfiguration and isotopes we can create in the particle accelerator engine. Jekyll and Zhivago can do the procedure with low risk, once we have the data. Another option is to try to construct a Psychotropion-like device. I would need to assess the assets on board to find material that might be usable. The result, however, will not be a reliable machine. It could mak
e things worse.”
“I vote for the frontal lobotomy. Even if it decreased his IQ by twenty points, he’ll still be the smartest one on board.”
“It is not a lobotomy, Maricia,” Ivanna corrected.
“I know that, but it’s similar in effect, and I like the way that it rolls off the tongue.”
“I like the surgical approach,” added Cyrus. “I don’t like the idea of using up resources for a project that may fail.”
“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” Savanna quipped.
“That is such an old joke,” Maricia chided.
“Let’s get him upstairs,” Savanna said. “We can decide later about how to screw with his insanity.”
“I’d like to be the one that drills the holes in his head,” Maricia said after Suresh was on the gurney.
“I bet Lucinda will outbid you,” Savanna replied.
“I’d like to drill holes in her head as well.”
“Copy that” came from Cyrus.
“That will not be necessary,” Ivanna stated flatly.
“Sarcasm, Ivanna—anger’s ugly mother,” Savanna defined.
They entered the lift. Ivanna asked, “Are you angry with Lucinda?”
“Oh, I am livid.” Maricia was quick to answer.
“Lucinda made a mistake that affects all of us and our mission,” Savanna said. “Raul made a mistake. We all make mistakes, some bad, some terrible. We could all be convicted at some point, guilty of fallibility.” The elevator door opened, and most of the entourage walked as Ivanna pushed the heavy load with apparent ease into the medical bay adjacent to the trauma surgery in progress. Cyrus continued on the lift up to CAC, holding the bridge of his nose as if trying to stifle a migraine as the door closed. “Any mistake a robot might make,” Savanna continued, “which, at this point, is unlikely, can be traced back to a specific human writing code badly. Errors in human programming are not so easily traced.”
Maricia went to a small adjacent office and sat down, placing her head in her hands.
“Experience is not considered programming,” Ivanna responded to Savanna.
“It’s not in code, zeros and ones. It’s random and starts early in life and never ends.”
“Perhaps one could program humans to make no mistakes,” Ivanna said.
“To err is human,” Savanna said. “To be error-free would be boring. Sometimes we love people for their flaws, not despite them. Besides, some mistakes turn out positives.”
“Parents raise their children to conform to ideals they espouse. I was raised with secular values. On the other hand, Cyrus was raised among Persians with a Zoroastrian influence: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. While we had vastly different programming as children, when we became young adults, a different set of influences affected our development. None of this was truly intentional. It is relatively random and extremely variable. So I characterize most of human programming as chaotic and idiosyncratic.”
“Pilots are not known for their thinking. You are unusual.”
“And I’m probably way off course. I need to get back to the bridge,” Savanna announced. “Take care of the locator, and we’ll deal with the psychosis later.”
She stopped on her way out to check on Maricia. Her head rested on a table. “Are you going to be OK?”
She waved without raising her head or eyes, without a verbal response. Savanna walked to the stairs, asking why she spent time blathering with a robot that undoubtedly knew more about human development and history than she ever would. Those damn med-bots look and act so human.
4.3
In the evening, there was repeated tapping on Maricia’s door. She touched her screen and activated the door, which slid open. Lucinda stepped inside.
“I am still angry, Lucinda. Are you sure you want to come in here?”
“There isn’t a place I’d like to be much less, honestly. But I need your help.”
“I’m not in a helping mood.”
“It is a medical kind of question. You are the best suited to address it.”
“Can it wait for a day or two?”
“It could wait a long time, but there may be consequences.”
“Then let it wait. I’m too angry and drunk. Go talk to one of the bots.”
“Yeah.” Lucinda stepped back to the door, which reopened, and was stepping out.
“Lucinda,” Maricia called out. Lucinda turned. “Aren’t you going to apologize to me?”
“Yes, I will apologize when I understand why this happened, just not right now. You are too angry to accept a simple ‘I’m sorry.’ I know you. You will want more. I want more. There is a lot more to know.” Lucinda stood still, looking at her close friend, who, in turn, looked away. Stepping back again, the door hissed quietly closed.
One floor up, she found Jekyll. Together they went up another floor to Science. Jekyll accessed the work log. For two hours, they searched. Finally finding a bevy of small vials, Jekyll went to work analyzing. He was taciturn as usual; his chatter algorithm was apparently not activated. Lucinda left when he indicated the process was going to take much more time.
She went up two flights to CAC where it was more dark than dim in the room. The place was always well lit to encourage alertness and raise mood. It seemed deathly quiet. She looked around and initially thought the room was abandoned. She entered the storage rooms to her right and found no one. An array of spare parts and seldom-used equipment were lashed securely to the walls. An access panel to the utility shaft that the boys used for climbing had been left open. She latched it closed, thinking they were a lax bunch. On her way out, she spotted dark hair barely visible over the back of a swivel chair. She cleared her throat. “Where’s Savanna?”
Cyrus turned. “You’ve made a lot of trouble today. Maybe you should just go to bed, your bed, and pray that your punishment will be brief.”
She instantly regretted not looking at a computer to find her locator.
“Are you thinking about punishing me? The arrogance!”
“There was a day when you would have been stoned.”
“And Raul?”
“He behaved as any man.”
“You’ve slid off the rail, buster. Where’s Savanna?”
“She is in quarters, asleep I hope.”
“Thanks.” She turned toward the stairwell to leave.
“Lucinda,” Cyrus said angrily, “let her sleep.”
It was five flights down to Recreation. Her footsteps echoed in the emptiness; not only vacant but also lonely. It seemed a long time to cover a short distance. She pondered Cyrus’s choice of words, “Pray that your punishment will be brief.” Strange, she thought but realized her thoughts and emotions were unsteady as well.
Recreation was dimly lit. She moved past a resistance machine and an aerobic trainer. Her clothing lay untouched, flung over the room. Her shirt was on the trainer; a bra dangled from the handle of a bicycle. Her underpants had been flung to a corner under a bench. From her rear pocket, she removed a plastic bag and carefully placed each article in it. When everything was inside, she sealed it. She looked around and remembered the morning, not with the glow from a passionate ecstasy but with sudden nausea. It began at the top of her nasal cavity and shot to her stomach. She looked for a sink but realized this feeling was fading.
She had never felt desire for Raul. He was good looking and refined but insensitive and emotionally clumsy. He was a beta male, not her type. But she had sky-high libido in the morning the last few weeks, especially today.
Suresh had been trying in his never subtle and insanely confident way to convince her to “get together.” Perhaps he had tired of sex with Einstein, or she was making it difficult or less enjoyable. Lucinda didn’t like to analyze it because it brought up disgusting visuals, enough to increase the nausea momentarily.<
br />
Most mornings for the last week or so, she woke up aroused to find a scented, suggestive note on her bedside stand. She had checked the locator log and found nothing. It was no secret that positions were logged about every four minutes. Whoever did the delivery did so quickly.
She disliked the months of celibacy, but until recently, it had not been so bad. The recent morning urges has been greater than she had ever experienced. The reason for this change evaded her. Psychologically, things had changed. She was widowed. Her mate had been killed in flagrante delicto with her friend. All of them were hurtling through space for a rendezvous with sleep that could last an eternity, trapped in a high-tech though luxurious prison without parole. There was stress piled upon conflict wrapped in uncertainty. She and everyone else no longer knew what was normal.
Lucinda’s sister’s husband had a dalliance years before. Her sister told her in one of those intimate moments that when she learned of the infidelity, she went mad with desire. The reason was unclear, perhaps fearing that she would lose her mate; possibly in competition. She tried to have sex with him often and in every conceivable way and place. Maybe Lucinda’s exaggerated lust was a confluence of factors she did not understand. Being widowed was not usually considered stimulating. With her behavior today, the cause of these urges suddenly went from curious to bizarre. She focused on the details of the last two days.
Yesterday, she talked to Cyrus. “I need your help. I think Suresh is sneaking into my room at night.”
“Why would you think something like that? Have you seen him?”
“Someone comes in and leaves a note on my table.”
“A threat?”
“No. The messages were always short, pedantic, and invariably a turnoff but with an obvious double meaning or overt sexual innuendo.”
“Have you addressed him about this?”
“Not yet. I’d like you to come with me.”
“Why me? He’s my friend.”
It’s interesting that Cyrus would refer to Suresh as his friend. Weren’t they all friends? It seemed at the time a quirky thing to say, and it still felt off. “You’re the commander and less threatening than a med-bot.”