NK3

by Michael Tolkin

The disorder cannot last.

  That’s good.

  Not for you. She is not safe.

  Who? Pippi?

  She is not safe.

  But I’m just talking to myself now, aren’t I? I’m saying what I want to hear.

  Is this what you want to hear? How long could you get away with it?

  Away with what?

  Have you forgotten? Ask the mythologist. What is intuition?

  The organization of deduction from random evidence.

  Subconscious recognition of what is not recognized.

  Someone is coming. For Pippi or for me?

  Dr. Kaplan, Dr. Piperno

  The man in the white coat introduced himself. “I’m Dr. Paolo Piperno, director of medicine here at UCLA Medical Center. How are you today?”

  “Today?”

  “Do you understand where you are?”

  “No.”

  “Is your Silent Voice telling you not to answer my questions?”

  “Silent Voice?”

  “The alienated echo of who you were, reinvented by what remains of the circuitry of context. You were a whole man once, just as I was a whole man once. We were doctors, men of subtle skills developed over years of training.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you think I do? NK3, North Korea 3, following the failures of North Korea 1 and North Korea 2? Never heard of them?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “Well someone gave you a solid jolt or three on the rehab table. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here with your Silent Voice, Dr. Kaplan.”

  “I’m a doctor? I don’t understand.”

  “Who understands anything anymore? I can tell you that I know certain things but can I tell you that I understand them? Of course not. Some of us have Silent Voices that scream; some of us have Silent Voices that mostly keep to themselves. We have a saying in Center Camp: the earlier the rehab, the quieter the Silent Voice. Of course that’s not much of a saying, not like: employees must wash their hands, or objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Generally, after we’ve been awhile in Center Camp, the Voice goes away. Theories why? Something to do with trust or exhaustion. Theory mine? Something to do with the way a plant dies if you don’t give it water. The Silent Voices fade away after they’ve spent some time in Center Camp, because they get tired of being ignored. I’ll just talk to you and if your Silent Voice has something to say, I’d appreciate your sharing it.”

  Piperno watched as Kaplan’s eyes changed their focus from the room around them to something inside his head.

  “He wants to know where we are,” said Kaplan, surprised that his Silent Voice would give permission to speak for him.

  “Excellent question. I’ll start more slowly. Slower. Slowlier. This is the UCLA Medical Center. It was a great hospital, with thousands of doctors and millions of patients. Now there are only twelve of us: twelve doctors, with fifteen nurses. We’re not what we were. The medicines are mostly past their due date. We don’t know how to run a lot of the equipment. Most of the information that might be useful to us is on the computers. Most of the computers are working, but all of the computers require passwords and all of the passwords have been lost or forgotten. We hope that with your help, we will be able to get around the loss of data, Dr. Seth Kaplan. Do you know what kind of doctor you were?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “A very important doctor. A pediatric oncologist. That’s children with cancer, by the way. We looked you up. Here’s the big surprise. You worked here. Apparently, I knew you. Yes. There’s a picture of the staff and you’re in it. And so am I! And your office was here. I’ll show you. Let’s go.”

  On the way, Piperno asked, “Do you understand the Gift Economy?”

  “There’s food for everyone. Forever!”

  “They say it’s a gift from the Founders, but I’ve seen some numbers here, the number of dead. I think maybe we’re eating their food.”

  “Whose food?”

  “The food of the dead! Massive fortresses with things to eat and wear, who was it set there for but the dead who once lived here. It’s my theory and I tried my theory on June Moulton. She said I was contradicting the myth. I persisted; she said I was crazy. Two things can be true, do you know?”

  Seth’s office was in the medical school building. On the desk and wall were pictures of a man with a woman and two children, a woman and one baby, a woman with a baby and another child.

  Piperno pointed to the man in each picture. “That’s you, that’s you, that’s you. And those aren’t different children. They’re the same children, growing up, and that was your wife. She changed her hair color. We still do. My beard, you think it’s black.”

  “It’s gray.”

  “And so it is, today. Like your wife’s hair.”

  “Where is she?”

  “We have a saying: what the Fence forgets, no one remembers.”

  Piperno touched Seth’s diplomas. “Can you read these?”

  Seth’s Silent Voice told him not to answer.

  “That’s fine,” said Piperno. “Not important yet. But you went to the University of California at Berkeley, then medical school at the University of Vermont, and then you came back here, back home to California, for a fellowship in pediatric oncology—as I said, that’s children with cancer—and never left. So you’re not just a visitor to the Fence. You are one of those rare people, like me, who are of the Fence, too. It shouldn’t be surprising, since the people left alive in Los Angeles were already living here, but so many things surprise us these days.”

  “What’s cancer?” asked Seth.

  “You can look it up later. Something about the wrong kind of cell things. Truthfully, I’m not exactly sure myself, but treating children with cancer is not a useful specialty now and may not be again for many years to come. Not many children, if you know what I mean. I was a heart surgeon, one of the best in the country, and I was lucky enough to be here at UCLA, in a position of power, when the damn North Koreans overdid their thing. So I got as thorough a rehab as anyone, and still, I don’t have a memory. You had a very partial rehab; otherwise you’d be dead of course. Or a mindless Shambler. However, you’re reasonably alive and you’re here and let’s keep it that way. How does that sound?”

  “I’m a doctor?” The question was put to his Silent Voice, but Piperno took it as an insult directed his way, suggesting that Kaplan’s Silent Voice doubted Piperno’s credentials. “What does a doctor do?”

  “Don’t worry. We have videos. I’ll watch them with you. We can start now. Why not?”

  Seth’s Silent Voice explained, “He asks questions but he’s not expecting answers.”

  Piperno led Seth through the hospital corridors. They passed a room with an old man in a bed and a woman standing beside him. She had a hand around his wrist and she was looking at the wall clock. She wore tight leather pants and a leather vest with nothing underneath, a version of Erin’s style.

  Piperno introduced her to Seth. “Sarabeth, this is our new doctor, Dr. Kaplan.” She nodded but said nothing until the second hand on the clock was at twelve.

  “I was just taking his pulse. Thirty-eight. Blood pressure is low.”

  Piperno explained. “He’s our best dentist but he’s dying. We only have three more. We don’t know the problem. Maybe it’s cancer. You want a look? Probably better not. Thank you, Sarabeth.”

  They passed another five rooms with nurses tending patients. “You see all that medical equipment. Heart monitors, oxygen monitors, brain-activity monitors, blood pressure, we’ve got the best machinery ever made, but none of us are all that comfortable trying to make this stuff work and the manuals are confusing.”

  Seth thought about the place where he’d been found. It was when, yesterday? His Silent Voice said, “Always ask if you need to know.”<
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  They settled into a small classroom. The seats had writing tables that folded away, but two tables were set with food. “You must be hungry,” said Piperno. “The Center Camp food isn’t what you’re used to, because you haven’t had a Vayler Monokeefe and his Inventory Committee looking out for what you eat. We’ll have a fresh salad of avocado and grapefruit, and spaghetti with a fresh tomato sauce. A far cry from making your way through the canned food at whatever Costco you suckled at. We all work a day on the farm here, and of course we trade with the farmers in the Central Valley. All in good time to explain.”

  Seth lost track of Piperno’s words as he looked at a whiteboard with the drawing of a spiked ball cut away to show its internal structure of layers and squiggles. The spikes were labeled: NEURAMINIDASE, HEMAGGLUTIN, M2 ION CHANNEL, LIPID BILAYER, NANOCULES, and HORMONIRUPTORS.

  “That’s NK3, or a drawing of it,” said the older doctor. “I don’t know who drew it and it doesn’t help us, but there it is, what they knew of it. We were just starting to talk about it. Why NK3 you asked?”

  “I did?” Seth wasn’t sure he’d heard himself ask anything.

  “We know all this from the newspapers left to us by doctors who are probably out there drifting now, poor bastards. NK1 and NK2 were savage drugs with short lives, and not contagious. NK3 targeted the deepest links between genetics and sociology to create the new man to be ruled from Pyongyang. That’s the capital city of North Korea. Language retained, check. Literacy, under limited circumstances, check. Connection to family, uncheck. Ability to care for children, uncheck, but not necessary because the children weren’t going to survive. NK3 targeted the markers for hormones that don’t get released until adolescence, and without those markers, most of the children died. As for more children: fertility, sabotaged. Follow the leader confused. Violent tendencies, uncheck. Without rehab, the people of the world wandered into starvation. There’s a hint in this outline that the scientists who created this had designed a way to protect themselves, but if they did, it was only for them. So there may be a few thousand North Koreans with full immunity, with full memory. Completes, we call them. But they haven’t shown up yet. The problem was that NK1 and NK2 were short-lived and NK3 was supposed to be short-lived, but, well, they made a mistake in the formula. That’s the best explanation for what went wrong. So what was supposed to be a limited attack on South Korea— Excuse me, Dr. Kaplan, but are you listening?”

  “No.”

  “Then let’s get back to medicine.”

  Seth asked his Silent Voice to explain now, but there was no answer.

  “While we eat we’re going to look at some videos, Dr. Kaplan. They’re not a substitution for the real thing, and we’ll be getting to that soon enough.” Piperno weighted his tone with the looming insinuation that everything from now on was a test.

  In the first video, hands in pale blue latex gloves held knives that cut through isolated squares of skin framed by cloth and stained brown with disinfectant. Other hands in gloves joined to assist and the hole in the body was spread apart and held open by steel clamps as the knife probed more deeply into the bleeding wound.

  “Bring anything back, Dr. Kaplan?”

  “From where?” asked Seth.

  “That’s not the answer I was looking for, Dr. Kaplan. Let me explain. That’s one sick appendix. I’ve done a few of these myself; the video is very helpful. Let’s switch to this one. Here’s an open heart.” The next video showed a masked surgeon using an electric saw to cut through ribs and expose a beating heart. “Do you recognize the eyebrows above the mask? That’s me doing the operation! This was my patient. I recorded this video because I was so important that when I changed the way an operation was done, the hospital sent the video to every open-heart surgeon in the world. That white stuff is fat,” said Piperno. “I don’t actually remember this, of course, but I have to say I’m impressed by my skills. This is a quadruple bypass. We haven’t done one yet, but it could be that you’ll get the honor if Chief thinks you’re ready.”

  Seth put his right hand over his own heart, as he understood the connection between the heart on the screen and the thing inside him that he felt thumping all the time, the thing that thumped harder when he was running or scared.

  Piperno said, “Yes, you have one of those. We all have one. One each. The heart. Didn’t you ever wonder what was beating inside there?”

  “No.”

  “Now you will. This is your first lesson in anatomy.”

  They watched more operations: the amputation of an arm mangled in a motorcycle crash, a hip replacement, two more appendectomies, a caesarian section.

  “That’s a baby,” said Piperno, with confidence.

  When Seth’s right hand twitched in sympathy with the movement of the scalpel in the video of an operation on a cancerous lung, Piperno grabbed his wrist.

  “Do you see that?” he said. “Your hand, do you see the way it’s moving? It was moving while you were watching the operation. That’s a great sign, a powerful sign that you’re going to do fine, that you’re going to pass the test, that you’re going to do more than live, that you’ll thrive, that you’re going to be a real doctor.”

  “Do I have to do those things? Do I have to cut people open?”

  “That’s what we’re here for. Yes, you’ll have to do the doctory things that doctors do.”

  “I was a doctor?”

  “I don’t expect you to remember. None of us do, but I can still perform operations because of the doctors who took care of me.”

  “Where are they?” asked Seth.

  Piperno sighed. “If they’re alive, they’re in the same kind of place you were when the Inventory people found you, drifting with the Drifters and unverifiable because they’re not in the database. Sad, sad, sad. When it came time for them to be given the rehab, something happened. It was too late; it didn’t work. But that’s all past. Let me show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

  Seth followed his new mentor through the hospital to the surgery ward, where Piperno turned on the lights in a large operating room. Trays in the middle of the room, under bright lights, surrounded a hospital bed with surgical knives and clamps, an electrocardiogram machine, an oxygen monitor—everything needed to keep a patient alive during a long operation.

  “We set this room up for you.”

  “This is where they cut people,” said Seth.

  “Very good. Yes, this is an operating room. We’ll show you more videos and help you read the books. Do you remember how to read?”

  “Read?” Seth didn’t know if the answer should be yes or no. Piperno pointed to a label on the wall.

  “What does that say?”

  “It’s not saying anything.” Seth lied. The label said “oxygen.”

  “It’d help if you could read, but we’ll do what we can with the videos. Until you pass the tests, you’ll sleep here to absorb the vibrations of the room, to bring back the feeling of your training by setting you in the place of your work.”

  “I’m supposed to become a doctor by sleeping in an operating room?”

  “Do you know a better way?”

  Hopper

  In a small dead city called Redlands, Hopper found a bike store across from a park. The front door and window were behind a metal gate locked with a chain and padlock. The back door was steel and flush to the wall and needed two keys. The batteries in all the cars on the street were dead so he couldn’t drive through the gate or pull it away with a rope. He needed a tool to break the lock. He couldn’t picture it, but he thought if he rode his bike around the town, the thing he needed would appear to him. His Silent Voice would tell him, when he found it: “This will do what you want it to do.” He stopped at a looted hardware store, but there was nothing left for him to use. From there he rode into a neighborhood of small houses, with no direction from his Silent Voice, until he passed RED
LANDS HIGH SCHOOL, a central building three stories tall between two low wings, behind a chain-link fence. The football field was now a nursery for tumbleweed except for the green circles around two manual water pumps. The front row of the home team football bleachers was obscured by rows of blue and white plastic outhouses. If they stank, the light breeze moving the shreds of the flag on the school’s tall pole carried the smell away. There were children looking down at him from a second-floor classroom. He’d seen a few children in Palm Springs. Children were weak.

  He locked his bicycle to the bike stand by the school’s front door.

  He waited for the children to come to him.

  The children stayed in the classroom.

  He looked back up at them for a few minutes and then took a Kind power bar, chocolate and coconut, out of his pack and ate it.

  His Silent Voice spoke to him: “You’re already a day behind schedule. Your Teacher expected you to be fifty miles down the road by now. Don’t waste your time here. Find the tool someplace else. Get moving.”

  He knocked on the front door of the school. The light of three candles came from down the corridor, with a child behind each point of fire.

  Hopper asked them: “Are there any older people with you?”

  They didn’t answer.

  “How many are you?”

  No answer, although one imitated the sound of the question the way he might have hummed or whistled a melody he had just heard for the first time.

  “My name is Hopper.”

  A child, in the darkness, said, “Hah-puh.”

  Others repeated, “Hah-puh. Hah-puh HappoHah-poo.”

  “No, Hopper. Hopper.”

  “No. Hah-puh. Hah-puh.”

  He asked, “Who are you?” None of them could explain who they were or why they were there instead of someplace else.

  Some of them smiled. Two boys pushed each other and laughed at the struggle. Others argued with the two boys, but not with words, only a few grunts and whistles. They sounded more like coyotes than children.