Memento Mori

by W. R. Gingell

  “You followed me, sir,” pointed out Arabella.

  “And I’m sure a WAOFy court would agree with you,” Mikkel said, with meaning. “Speaking of WAOFy courts, I’d really prefer to stay out of one—which will be a bit difficult considering the likelihood that my face has been recorded by both 2-D and 3-D sweepers, my biochemical signature by scanners, and probably my stride by underfloor sensors. As soon as whatever it is that’s going down goes down, they’ll come straight for me.”

  “No need to worry, sir,” Arabella said cheerfully. “Ah, do you think you could stand to one side for a moment?”

  With great politeness, Mikkel said, “Don’t let me interrupt you, Ensign.”

  He watched her kneel by the side of an old-fashioned lunch trolley. All those doors with long doorhandles and the general retro décor of the place—wouldn’t it have been nice if the security was as old-fashioned as its décor purported to be! He wouldn’t have felt as anxious as he currently did.

  Arabella gave the trolley a testing shove and it moved stiffly, wheels shrieking.

  “Anyway,” she said, removing a small tube of something from one of her tidy regulation pockets, “all of the security data for today will be completely gone by the end of our excursion.”

  “How? Ensign, are you greasing those wheels?”

  “Lubricating them, sir. Grease evidently wasn’t enough for this job. Don’t ask me why. I did tell you this was part of the job.”

  Since her voice was slightly reproachful, Mikkel felt himself bound to protest, “Yes, but you tell me true things in a devious way so often that I’m never sure what to trust. How is the security data going to be erased? Do we have to do that, too?”

  “Oh no, sir. The security data is far out of our reach: we only have access to this hall. I understand it’s being taken care of by someone else.”

  “Your employers hired someone else? I thought you were their sole recourse.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a case of hiring anyone. They have a habit of using moving pieces in unique ways.”

  “Sounds like an advertising slogan.”

  “I’ve told them they should go into business.”

  “Why? Why would you encourage them!”

  “I don’t know, sir; this sort of thing is quite enjoyable, don’t you think?”

  “Enjoyable isn’t the word I would have used.”

  “What is the word you would have used, sir?”

  “I can’t say it aloud while in the company of a lady.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you, sir.”

  “Are you finished?”

  “One more to go.”

  “I mention it because the lunch lady seems to be coming back out.”

  “Bother!” said Arabella. “Can you distract her, sir? Just make sure you don’t take any longer than a minute, won’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” Mikkel said sourly, and crossed the doorway to lean into the wall beside the opening door. As she came out, he gave the lunch lady his brightest smile. Gratifyingly, that made her blink and then smile back at him. He said, “You don’t happen to have the time, do you?”

  Behind the lunch lady, he saw Arabella smiling. It was a well-known Time Corp joke, Do you have the time?, the answer to which was, I might have. Depends on the price and who’s asking.

  The lunch lady, who was evidently not as well versed in Time Corp humour as Arabella, blushed and looked down. It took Mikkel a moment too long to realise that she was looking at his timepiece. When he did, he grinned his best boyish grin at her and pulled his cuff down to cover it.

  “It’s just after twelve, sir. Do you need anything?”

  “I’ll let you know,” said Mikkel, and winked at her. Then he peeled himself away from the wall and sauntered after Arabella, who was now continuing placidly along the hall.

  “Oh, well done, sir!” she said in a congratulatory manner, when he caught up. “She won’t be able to think of anything else for the rest of the day.”

  “You could at least pretend to be jealous.”

  “Where’s the fun in that, sir?”

  “I think you might have gone overboard with your wheel-lubricating: there were patches of grease on the floor beneath the trolley.”

  “They did say to be thorough.”

  “That was thorough,” agreed Mikkel, looking through the maxi-plex viewscreen on his left with disfavour. Earlier, Arabella had told him the maxi-plex was one-way, and he could understand why. One of the three occupants of the room seemed to be trying to murder the second, while the third occupied himself with an immaculately dressed and coiffed doll. Mikkel rapped on the maxi-plex to separate the murderous one from her limp roommate, and Arabella tugged on his sleeve.

  “Please don’t tap the maxi-plex, sir.”

  “I thought you said it was one-way! Can they see me?”

  “I didn’t want to frighten you.”

  “That one’s looking right at me.”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t mean anything by it.”

  “He’s wringing the head off his doll.”

  “Look, sir, he’s smiling.”

  “That doesn’t make it any better.”

  “I’m sure he’s very sweet when you get to know him.”

  “I don’t want to get to know him. What now?”

  “We stay here for about five minutes. Do scooch in a bit, sir; the lunch lady needs to get through the door behind you. No, don’t look around, you’ll only distract her.”

  Mikkel tried not to feel too pleased. “You are jealous.”

  “Just keep looking through the window. Oh, look, isn’t that nice? He’s found another doll.”

  Mikkel grimaced. “He probably just wants to—yes, there goes its head, too. Why did you pick this viewscreen, of all the viewscreens?”

  “Well, if you’d been a bit quicker with the lunch lady, we would have been on to the next one,” Arabella said sweetly. “Just another few minutes, sir.”

  She was as good as her word; the child in the room before them had only managed to decapitate another two dolls before Arabella nudged his arm and prompted him into a slow stroll onward. It wasn’t a walk of great distance, however; at the very next door she stopped and glanced at the number on the sensor pad.

  “What are you doing now?” Mikkel asked, with great longsuffering.

  Arabella consulted a small note and glanced briefly at her timepiece. “This one, I think. They could have been more specific.”

  “I thought you said we were going straight through without leaving the main hall.”

  “We are.”

  “Won’t that panel open a door into the next hall?”

  “It will open all the doors,” said Arabella calmly.

  “Don’t!” Mikkel said frantically, but it was too late. There was a mechanical kind of click that seemed to sound all along the hall, and every door, left and right, opened out into the hall.

  Arabella smiled primly. “Don’t you wish you hadn’t tapped the maxi-plex, sir?”

  “Will you think less of me if I run for it, Ensign?”

  “Not at all, sir. Perhaps a brisk trot further down the hall? Ah…don’t turn around right now, please sir.”

  “Why?” demanded Mikkel, his head half-turning instinctively. He caught a flash of quickly moving scenery in the viewing glass to his left; a very tiny, familiar figure had passed behind him and was now threading through the melee further down the hall, her skinny elbows jabbing here and there to make space for her path. “Good heavens! The brat! She’s a patient here?”

  “For now,” nodded Arabella. “Not for much longer.”

  “She’s limping. Did one of these neck-twisters hurt her?”

  “Careful, sir,” Arabella said. “You’re starting to sound a bit too protective for a Time Corp Captain tasked with her capture or death.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Ensign. Well, I suppose this explains a lot: I always knew she was more mad than sane.”

  “Do keep mo
ving, sir. Right through here; don’t worry about the patients, they’ll be cleared away shortly. We need to make sure we’re in the right place in another twenty seconds.”

  “What now?”

  “Now, we’re going to go a bit further down the hall,” said Arabella sunnily. “This is the fun part.”

  “Sounds like a riot.”

  Arabella shot him a look of reproach. “This way, sir.”

  Mikkel followed her willingly enough, but asked, “Isn’t this the door the little brat went through?”

  “Yes, and I feel rather bad about it.”

  “Why?”

  “If I pretend to be distressed, do you think you could put your arms around me in a comforting sort of way?”

  “Why didn’t you say so earlier?” Mikkel put his arms around Arabella’s pleasantly plump figure with alacrity. “You don’t have to pretend to be distressed if you want me to hug you, you know.”

  “A little closer, I think, sir.”

  “Well, if you insist.”

  “Can you reach the door handle from there?”

  Mikkel sighed into her hair. “Just when I was enjoying myself, too!”

  “All you have to do for the next forty seconds is make sure you hold the handle so that no one can get out.”

  “Wait a minute!” protested Mikkel, seizing the handle just in time. Someone was dragging down on it with considerable strength from the other side. “We just opened all these doors! Why did we do that if we’re only going to hold one of them shut?”

  “Reasons, sir,” said Arabella, with her prim smile.

  It was that prim smile that made Mikkel say thoughtfully, “All I have to do is hold this handle?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “Then since we’re so comfortable—” Mikkel dipped his head, and saw the blush he liked so much bring a rosy glow to Arabella’s cheeks.

  “Aren’t you a bit too occupied for that sort of thing, sir?”

  “I don’t need my hands for this.”

  Arabella made the smallest clearing of her throat; looked away and back. “Well, we don’t have to be anywhere for the next few minutes, after all…”

  Delivery Schedule #3

  If Marx had regretted stepping into the hall below, he regretted riding the chute to the second floor even more. The unsettlingly fewer amount of people up there only served to convince him that although he couldn’t see it, there was a great deal more security. He let his stride become as loose as it could with his stiff leg, and tried to step more lightly. There was a lunch trolley ahead of him with a small, flower-aproned lunch lady pushing it. She hadn’t yet heard or seen him, and he had the feeling that he would very much prefer her to remain in ignorance of his presence.

  He hoped to slip past her and into a more promising hall where there weren’t so many obviously occupied rooms around, but to his disappointment the lunch lady didn’t go into every room. After that first room she exited as he came into the hall, she didn’t enter another until nearly the end of it. Marx breathed a sigh of relief and began to move more quickly, taking less care with the sound of his footsteps. That was a mistake; as he passed the trolley he heard a female voice call sharply, “Who’s out there?” and the sound of brisk footsteps coming toward the door.

  Marx said something pleasingly biting in First World dialect and ran for it, disregarding security sensors. Behind him, something hit the trolley with a crash! and sent it careering across the hall, trailing trays and covers and something small and crumpled that could have been a body. Marx threw one look at the mess and kept running before the lunch lady could come back out of the room and see him. Whatever had happened, it was flaming good timing, and it would be bad sense not to take advantage of it. He slowed to a trot and then a walk in the next hall, passing by more numbered doors that could only be patient rooms, and soon began to see un-numbered doors. Some of them had viewscreens through which he could see lab equipment, control panels of some species, and even an area that could have been a medical bay. Unfortunately, in the last of these he happened to catch the eye of an uncomfortably alert boy in a more official uniform. The boy’s eyes met Marx’s, his hand hovering over what Marx assumed to be a requisition alarm of some kind. As Marx passed on more quickly, he saw the boy take two decisive steps toward the door of the bay.

  Trouble, warned the grimmer side of Marx’s mind. He could take the boy on easily enough, but probably not before he alerted more security with that alarm. He wondered, uneasily, how well the boy had seen his face. Marx broke into a trot again, but found to his increasing annoyance that there were no more doors in this hall. He made it to the end of the hall and passed hurriedly into the next via the only door; it branched off to the left, which caused Marx to feel as though he was slowly being herded into the centre of the Institute like a rather greyer, grimier version of a lab rat in a maze. He hoped rather gloomily that the alert boy from the other hall wouldn’t follow him this far, but he was reasonably sure he could already hear footsteps approaching the door behind him.

  Unfortunately, there were only two doors in this hallway. One was closer but looked suspiciously plain; the other was further along and had some species of sign on it that could have said Mess Room. Footsteps neared the door, jolting Marx into decision: the plain one would do. He slapped his stolen security ring against the sensor pad.

  Nothing happened. The red light remained red, and footsteps neared the door behind him. Any second now, he would hear the click and hiss of it opening, and that uncomfortably sharp-eyed young staff member would come through. Marx had the feeling that the boy’s fingers would still be hovering suspiciously above the alarm trigger on his belt.

  Too late now to run for the mess room; he wouldn’t make it halfway there before the door behind him opened. Marx tried his ring again, and the red light blinked at him once more. His head dropped into the door; his arm to his troublesome parcel. Maybe it would have been better if he had simply delivered it after all, no matter the consequences.

  There was the smallest of clicks, and the door popped open by a centimetre. Marx jerked forward and caught himself against the door frame, looking suspiciously first at the lock and then around at the hall. The door to the mess room was still blinking red; the one at the end of the hall, green. Marx threw one last, suspicious look around and ducked into the open room.

  Patient #51: Codename, Trouble

  Kez could have simply travelled through space. Here in the milky Other Zone her fear was able to seep away in peace without anything else to excite it, and she could think clearly. There was no real reason to slip through time as well—unless you counted the simple fact that she could do it—but Kez found herself slipping back into the Time Stream at an earlier point, avoiding her younger self by a scant fifteen minutes. She wasn’t sure why she’d done it until she thumped the grate above that room in the Violet Quarter, sending a shower of grime down onto the boy’s bed, and he said: “You’re back. It didn’t take long at all.”

  His voice was quiet, and there was no reason to think that he was pleased or grateful, but Kez had the indelible impression that he was both. Because of that, or because she had come back more quickly when she could have lingered, Kez said more gruffly than usual, “Yah. Well. Surprised meself an’ all.”

  “The door.”

  “Oh yeah, that.”

  “Did you—did—it hasn’t opened.”

  “’Course it ’asn’t,” said Kez, who, along with those things she did need, had stolen a few things not strictly needed from Marcus’ office. She hammered at the grating with the small screwdriver that was always in her pocket, dislodging dirt, encrusted dust, and pieces of the grating. Below, the boy scrambled away from the shower and narrowly avoided being hit on the head by something that was neither dirt nor grating. “You gotta open it wiv this. It’ll work for all of ’em, but only for a few hours before he finds out I pinched it. You’d better get a wriggle on, yeah? Anyway, there’s visitors today; they’re passin’ al
ong the hall and stirrin’ up the crazies. Reckon you can use that.”

  “Me?” The uncertain note was back in the boy’s voice as he picked up the ring she’d dropped for him. “Aren’t you coming?”

  “Don’t reckon I’d get as far as the front door,” said Kez. Her ankle was still hurting badly. More importantly, there was an itching, crawling sensation scurrying along the back of her neck. The ankle was an annoyance, but it was the crawling sensation that had her spooked. Odd things were going wrong today—little, unconnected but effective things—and if she hadn’t seen Marcus so fully occupied with his guest, she would have been certain he was playing games with her again.

  Kez thought about that, and came to the uneasy conclusion that she couldn’t be sure he wasn’t playing with her, guest or no.

  It wasn’t until the boy spoke that she realised he’d fallen into one of his silent spells. He said, “I’ll take you with me.”

  “Oh?” Kez’s voice sounded distinctly unenthusiastic, even to herself.

  “I can do it,” the boy said, correctly interpreting her lack of enthusiasm. There was the slight suggestion of indignation to his voice.

  “You don’t even know how to open the doors,” Kez said, unimpressed. “I got that. Wot you gonna do?”

  “I can—how does this open the door?”

  “Hold it up against the—Oi! ’Oo done that!”

  “Oh,” said the boy, at the same time. “The door—it clicked. I think it’s open.”

  “Oi!” said Kez again, in disapproving surprise. “Someone opened ’em!” and then, belatedly: “Ah! Fergot!”

  “That wasn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Then who did?”

  “Dunno,” Kez said shortly. “Forgot it was gonna happen. Fergot about the time.”

  “Should I—should I try to get out?”

  Kez shrugged. “I wouldn’t, but you can do wot you want.”

  The boy climbed carefully out of bed and approached the door very slowly, still dusting scraps of dirt and grating from his hair. “Why wouldn’t you?”