Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  Such a unit would never need to know it was a unit.

  The thing was, just when I had reached a certain level of understanding of the problem, the problem suddenly flipped inside-out on me and I wondered: what if I was, in fact, a real person who had been through some kind of spook mind-control thing sometime in the past, only now the programming was starting to leak through into my conscious mind? What if I was only being made to think I was a disposable? What if there were no unofficial models?

  As the golden light of Amundsen Station’s artificial morning slanted in my room’s windows, after the longest, most painful night I’d known in years, I found myself lying there, in the grip of full-body agony, screaming and swearing my guts out, demanding to know who had screwed with my head and what for!

  If I did nothing else with my useless existence, I would find out the bloody truth or die trying.

  CHAPTER 13

  “I see you had a bit of a hard night, Ms. McGee,” said Doctor Panassos. He was a young man who looked like a real human being, possibly of Japanese extraction. He wore a halo of external headware storage and processing pods suspended on tiny floatfields around his head, rotating back and forth as needed, according to what his probably extremely complex headware was doing. He wore black trousers, comfortable looking shoes and a traditional white doctor’s coat unbuttoned over a cheap colorful shirt displaying a picturesque animated beach scene from some fantasized tropical island: pale water, paler sand, dipping palms, leaping black and white manta rays in the distance. With the shirt he wore a big white bow tie. It was plain and there was no cliché animation. I loved it.

  It was mid-morning. Earlier, when they heard me screaming, the duty nurse came in and gave me something even stronger to help me sleep — and to get me to shut up. She said there had been complaints from other rooms. Such behavior was not acceptable in this hospital, I was told. I mumbled an apology and said I’d just been having a bit of a delayed reaction. Very stressful, all cooped up in a possibly doomed spaceship for a month. The nurse asked if I’d like to speak to someone about that. “God no!” I said and rolled my eyes.

  She went away and I felt a bit sleepy.

  Suddenly, though, here was Dr. Panassos, peering down at me while his pods spun this way and that like confused carousel horses. I didn’t remember sleeping, but here it was, hours later.

  I said the first thing on my mind, “What’s happened to Gideon?”

  “Mr. Smith?” The pods spun; the doctor stared into the middle-distance, consulting his interface. “He’s in the next room. Right now he’s asleep. His restoration treatment is going slowly.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He was extremely weak, Ms. McGee. At his age, stress and wear like that…”

  “He’s going to be all right, though, right?”

  “It will take some time.”

  I was getting annoyed. “Time? For Christ’s sake, just pump him full of bloody nano and get it going full blast!”

  The doctor flashed a quick, concerned smile. “Mr. Smith has specifically insisted that we not use rejuvenation technologies to heal his damage.”

  I swore under my breath. “Let me speak to him!”

  “He is asleep, and in any case—”

  I prepared to get up, march into Gideon’s room and tell him we didn’t have time for all this — but I couldn’t lift the bed covers. They were the lightest of woolen blankets, but they were much heavier than they should have been. And, as I went to sit up, I suddenly fell into a sickening coughing fit bad enough that I nearly had to vomit. I was weak and useless. Dizzy, clutching my head, I laid there and looked up at Panassos. “Thought this restoration thing was meant to fix me up by now…”

  “You can get up and move around, but gently, Ms. McGee. Gently.”

  “I feel bloody ancient!”

  “Give it a few days. Take some time out.”

  Hauling my head up to glare at the doctor, I said, “I don’t have time, Doc. I’ve got bloody work to do!”

  He eased me back into the bed and pulled the covers back over me. “What is your line of work, Ms. McGee?”

  “I used to be a homicide detective.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m a soggy bloody noodle, aren’t I?”

  There was the quick flash of smile. “When not engaged as a professional wet noodle, what do you do?”

  “It’s not all there in your files?” I nodded towards his head.

  “You appear not to have any headware, Ms. McGee. I’ve sent for your files from Serendipity, they should be here in a few days or so.”

  I muttered under my breath. At some point I’d have to get some more headware.

  “I suppose you could say I’m a private investigator. Got a case waiting down on Narwhal Island.”

  “The colony?” he asked, surprised.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “So what’s the case about?” he asked, being friendly.

  “A guy accused of murdering his wife and kids. All the evidence says he did it. The guy says he didn’t. He’s an old friend of mine, so I’m looking into it for him.”

  The doctor nodded, looking a little intrigued despite himself. “You believe him?”

  “I won’t believe anything until I see everything for myself.”

  “I could arrange for you to look over some of the newsfeeds from the time, if you’d like something productive to do while you’re recovering.”

  I hadn’t seen any news in weeks. Anything could have happened out in human space. Last time I had seen the news, things had been grim all over. People everywhere were starting to get concerned about the hypertube situation. You didn’t need a crystal ball to know that it was only going to get worse, much worse. I wondered, too, how long I’d be stuck down on the island — and if there’d be a way to get home when I was done. “Thanks. That’d be great.”

  “I’ll get the nurses to let you know when Mr. Smith wakes, if you like.”

  “Right. Thanks.”

  “Is there anything else, Ms. McGee?”

  I was all set to let him go, but then something else occurred to me. How to go about broaching the subject, though? “Um, Doc? Actually…”

  He noticed my attitude had shifted. “Yes?” He looked professionally interested.

  “There’s something I need to know. It’s driving me nuts.”

  “Would this be regarding our billing policy?”

  I laughed, which turned to coughing. When I could see straight again, and the room stopped spinning, I managed: “I need to know what the hell I am.”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question,” Panassos said, sitting down on the side of the bed and looking at me very seriously.

  “When you scanned me, when I got here, your tests, they showed I was … God, how to put this? They showed I was human, right?” I felt like a twit talking like this about myself, but I had to know.

  The doctor smiled. “Of course. What else would they show?”

  I coughed so much I nearly choked. When I recovered, I wondered how to broach the topic. “Doc, listen. This is going to sound completely bonkers, all right? But can you keep a secret?”

  Panassos looked bemused. “Are you unfamiliar with my line of work, Ms. McGee? Anything you tell me I have to keep in the closest confidence.”

  I was nervous as hell. “Doc, I’m an android,” I said quietly.

  He tipped his head to one side and studied me up and down. “I beg to differ, I must say.”

  I took a long, deep breath and tried to ease my anxiety. This was hard to do if you didn’t have headware psychostats working for you. “I can’t tell you how I found out, but it’s true, all right?”

  “All right…” he said skeptically. It was infuriating. He sat back, and stare
d into space while his floating halo of gadgets spun back and forth. I was thinking that, right now, that island beach on his shirt looked pretty tempting. At length, he frowned, blinked a few times, and frowned some more.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Our records indicate that you are indeed human, but if it will ease your mind…”

  I nearly swore. “So you’re humoring me. Thanks.”

  He looked a little amused, and quite unruffled. “Ms. McGee, you’re the one making an extraordinary claim.”

  “Have a good look at your bloody records, damn it.” I didn’t need telling that I was making “an extraordinary claim”. I was well aware of it.

  He nodded. “My apologies. It appears that when you were admitted, your body was riddled with a wide range of some extremely nasty, and surprisingly rare, infections. All consistent with spending a month stuck in a ship, living in environment suits long past their use-by date. So we took specimens to identify the infecting organisms.”

  “Let me guess, I was a regular bug zoo.”

  “More of a bug circus, I would say. There were some very odd organisms in your tissues.”

  “Odd how?”

  He looked like he was warming to his topic. “Our gamma nanoscopy people identified several strains of unusual nano-scale bacteria, and we thought they were odd enough. But odder still were these other things. Here, I’ll show you…” The doctor pulled out a small postcard-format display card and worked the controls, paging through hundreds of stored images in a bewildering range of wavelengths. “There, have a look at this.”

  I could recognize various kinds of blood cells and a few different common micro-organisms that excited pathologists had insisted on showing me over the years. These things, however, looked nothing like those familiar blobs. Rather, they looked like cube shaped golf balls.

  Panassos glanced at me. “Do you know what these are?”

  “No, should I?”

  “Well, this one, for example, was buried deep inside the mitochondria in one of your skin cells.”

  I felt an urge to scratch at my skin starting to build. I had a feeling I knew what the square golf balls might be. “What did you do with it?”

  “We’ve sent it to a specialist lab handling crypto-nano-organisms for further study. But you appear to have lots of these things all through your body.”

  I swore under my breath. “So you don’t know what these things are?”

  He shrugged. “We need to determine if they’re bugs or something technological.”

  “Or both…” I mumbled. Then, full of dread, I said, “Was it emitting anything?”

  He consulted his whirring pods. “No, apparently not. Should it have?”

  “You’ve never come across these things before?”

  “Is this something to do with your android claim?” said Panassos. “Ms. McGee, let me be frank. We don’t know what these objects embedded in your tissues might be, but in all other respects our tests show that you are one hundred percent human.”

  That did it. “I’m not a bloody human, Doctor!”

  He sat back and looked at me like I was an unusually bulky espresso machine. After a long pause, he said, “All right. I could arrange for you to speak to a staff psychologist.”

  I knew that losing my temper would lose me the argument, and next thing I’d be sedated up to my eyeballs. Winning the doctor over was crucial. I took a couple of deep breaths. “Look. Doc. I’m not crazy. Right? I’m not.”

  “No one is asserting that you’re crazy, Ms. McGee,” he said in a tone I knew well from hearing guys like him talking to lunatics back in the Winter City lockup.

  Keep calm, McGee. Keep it together. I looked at him. “Doc. When you do a regular scan, I show up as a regular person, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “But I’m not.” I suddenly remembered our chat with Dr. Song back at the Serendipity General morgue. “Wait! You said you found those things in my mitochondria, right?”

  Panassos frowned a moment, and his pods revolved back and forth a little. “That’s right. Are you suggesting we test your—?”

  “Why not? Assume you don’t know whether I’m human or an android.”

  He looked a little bemused, and I sensed he was playing along before referring me to a psychologist. “This is quite irregular, Ms. McGee.”

  “No, I’m the one who’s irregular, believe me.” I then forced myself to sit up as much as I could, and to give him my Zette McGee Look of Death. “Now do the damn test!”

  He looked like he was going to smile politely and say no, but he was thinking about the golf cubes too.

  Frowning, he said, “Give me your hand.” His voice was quiet.

  I had to hold up my right hand with my left, bracing the elbow. He held my hand in his cool, dry one, and stared into the distance while his modules spun back and forth. Occasionally he’d blink or squint, and the modules would rotate one space to the left or right, and then back again. “Now just let me touch your head…” he said. He let go of my hand and reached over and placed his palm on my forehead. Again, the modules turned; again, he frowned and blinked and stared.

  “Doc?”

  “Just running some scans, Ms. McGee.”

  “And?”

  “Good God,” he said, so shocked his voice barely registered.

  “What is it?” I said, full of anxiety.

  “Your cellular mitochondria. The nucleotides have been encoded with data!”

  This was both what I wanted to hear, and absolutely what I did not want to hear, all at once. I felt cold all over. “Which means?”

  He looked down at me. “Someone has arranged your mitochondrial nucleotides in such a way as to encode written information there. It’s an old spook trick. You don’t see it often these days.” He looked astonished.

  I knew what he meant by a “spook” trick. Spies and black ops and plausible deniability. I swore under my breath. “What’s it say? Can you break the coding?”

  He nodded and continued. “It’s your system specs. ‘In case of malfunction, contact Cytex Systems’, and… My God! Why didn’t this show up before?” He said this mainly to himself, and he started going through his records.

  “Because you weren’t looking for proof that I’m an android. You thought I was human, so you looked at me differently, and gave me different tests — and those damned cubes spoofed your sensors. But if you go deliberately looking for data in my DNA, the cubes can’t transmit their phony data to your machines.”

  Dr. Panassos was astonished. “But we checked your DNA. We…”

  “You only looked at my regular cell DNA. You never checked my mitochondria, did you?” Pathologists over the years had drummed into my pointy head the difference between regular DNA and mitochondrial DNA.

  Panassos was still poring through test results. “I’ll be damned,” he said. His pods were whirling constantly now as he blinked and stared and blinked again. “If you know where to look, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  I felt myself sag back into the pillows. So, at last I had proof. Somehow it didn’t make me feel much better. “Thanks for that, Doc,” I said. “I’ve been wondering about this crap for a long time now.”

  He looked at me properly now, as if trying to figure out just what the hell his eyes were seeing. It was as though he couldn’t make up his mind how he felt about me and my situation. I felt like a lab experiment.

  “I’ve seen plenty of androids, but I’ve never seen anything like you before,” he said.

  “I know the feeling.”

  Then there was a long moment of uncertain tension between us. I’d been in moments like this before, where things could go any of several different ways. I looked at him; he looked at me, and I could see he felt it, too. I said, “You will keep this secret, right?”

/>   He hesitated. It was only a fraction of a second, but it was there. Then he said, smiling reassuringly, “Of course, Ms. McGee. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  Funny when people say “don’t worry about a thing”: few things make you worry more. I changed the subject. “Any chance of a bit of breakfast?”

  He said he’d arrange it. Before he left, he turned back and asked, “Would you like to see a hardcopy of the scans?”

  “Damn right, I would!” I said. It would be like having a printout of your soul.

  Panassos nodded, smiled and left.

  I lay there, stunned. Why would Cytex Systems (and, presumably other companies like Genotech, who had made Kell Fallow) create androids that passed for human? Why would they not make it public? What were they up to? And who was buying these unofficial models?

  Again, I found myself thinking about certain government and semi-government agencies that might be interested in owning a number of such units. Law enforcement operations was an obvious one, considering my former employment, but there was also the secret world of intelligence and security organizations.

  I swore, thinking about that. Were the android makers in the business of supplying, say, instant sleeper operatives to the highest bidder? Or was there some entirely benign and uncontroversial reason why there might be so many men and women out there scattered across human space who had one day discovered, as I had, that they were not real people? The companies themselves were lying about our existence, but they were not, as far as I could tell, attempting to implement a defective product recall.

  I thought about how Kell Fallow had died, with a bomb in his guts. Maybe that was the start of a product “recall”. Again, I wondered if I had some secret bomb deep inside my own guts that not even Dr. Panassos’ scanning tools could locate.

  Back to the case. Must keep focused on the case. It was hard to think straight without dissolving into liquid anxiety and paranoia.

  A few minutes later, a disposable nurse brought me a modest breakfast of toast, fruit and coffee. The nurse was very pleasant, but as vacant as all the others. “Excuse me for asking,” I said to her suddenly, not aware that I was going to do this until the words were coming out of my mouth, “but is there anybody, you know, in there?” I gestured at her forehead.