“Ssh. It’s around lunchtime, and everything’s all right.”
“If it’s all right”—Sam squeezes my hand—“how long have you been sitting there?”
“Not long.”
I open my eyes and look at him. He’s on the stool beside my bed. I pull a face, or smile, or something. “Liar.”
He doesn’t smile or nod but the tension drains out of him like water and he sags as it runs away. “Reeve? Can you remember?”
I blink rapidly, trying to get some dust out of a corner of my left eye. Can I remember—“I remember lots,” I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter. Just trying to sort it out makes my head hurt! I’m a tank: I’m a dissolute young bioaviator with a death wish: Maybe I’m a sad gamer case instead, or a deep-cover agent. But all of these possibilities are a whole lot sillier and less plausible than what everything around me is saying, which is that I’m a small-town librarian who’s had a nervous breakdown. I decide I’ll go with that version for the time being. I hold Sam’s hand tight, like I’m drowning: “How bad was it?”
“Oh Reeve, it was bad.” He leans across me, and hugs me and I hug him back as tight as I can. “It was bad as can be.” He’s shaking, I realize with a sense of growing awe. He feels for me that deeply? “I was afraid I was going to lose you.”
I nuzzle into the base of his neck. “That would be bad.” It’s my turn to shudder with a frisson of existential dread at the thought that I could have lost him. Somewhere in the past week Sam has turned into my anchor, my refuge in the turbulent waters of identity. “I’ve got . . . well. Things are a bit jumbled today. What happened? When did you hear . . . ?”
“I came as soon as I could,” he mumbles in my ear. “Last night they called but said I couldn’t visit, it was too late.” He tenses.
“And?” I prompt. I feel as if there should be something more.
“You were fitting.” He’s still tense. “Dr. Hanta said it’s an acute crisis; you needed a fixative, but she couldn’t do it without your permission. I told her to give it anyway, but she refused.”
“A fixative? What for?”
“Your memories.” He’s even tenser. I let go of him, feeling cold.
“What does this fixative do?”
Dr. Hanta answers from behind me as I turn round to look at her. “Memory is encoded in a number of ways, as differential weightings in synaptic connections and also as connections between different nerves. The last excision and redaction you underwent was faulty. You began to experience breakthrough. In turn, that was triggering alerts in your enhanced immune system, and then you got yourself exposed to a mechanocytic infestation, which made things much worse. Whenever new associative traces would start integrating, your endogenous robophages would decide it was a mechanocyte signal and kill the nerve cells. You were well on your way to losing the ability to form new long-term associative traces—progressive brain damage. The fixative is normally used as the last step in redactive editing. I used it to renormalize, erase, the old memories that were breaking through. I’m sorry, but you won’t be able to access them now—you keep those that you’ve already integrated, but the others are gone for good.”
Sam has loosened his grip on me, and I lean against him as I stare at the doctor. “Did I give you permission to mess with my mind?” I ask.
Hanta just looks at me.
“Did I?” I echo myself. I feel aghast. If she did it against my will, that’s—
“Yes,” says Sam.
“What?”
“She—you were pretty far gone.” He hunches over again. “She was describing the situation to you, and me, and I was asking her to do it, and she said she couldn’t—then you were delirious. You began mumbling and she asked you, and you said yes.”
“But I don’t remember . . .” I stop. I think I do remember, sort of. But I can’t be sure, can I? “Oh.”
I stare at Hanta. I recognize the expression in her eyes. I stare at her for a long time—then I manage to make myself nod, just a quick jerk really, but it’s enough to break contact, and I think we all breathe out simultaneously. Meanwhile I’m thinking, Shit, I’ll never be able to figure out where I’ve come from now, will I? But it’s not as bad as what was going to happen otherwise. I don’t remember the attacks, exactly, but I remember what happened between them, the consequences—it’s a consistent story. A new story of my life, I suppose. “I feel much better,” I say cautiously.
Sam laughs, and there’s a raw edge in it that borders on hysteria. “You feel better?” He hugs me again, and I hug him right back. Hanta is smiling, with what I think is relief at a difficult situation resolved. The suspicious paranoid corner of me files it away for future reference, but even my secret-agent self is willing to concede that Hanta might actually be what she seems, an ethically orthodox practitioner with only the best interests of her patients at heart. Which is a big improvement on Fiore or the Bishop, but at least one out of three isn’t bad.
“So when can I go home?” I ask expectantly.
IT turns out that I’m stuck in hospital for the rest of the day and the next night, too. Hospital life is tedious, punctuated by the white-clad ghosts wheeling around trolleys of food and different things, instruments and dark age potions.
I still ache from the fever, and I feel weak, but I’m well enough to get up and go to the bathroom on my own. On my way back I notice that the curtains around the other occupied bed on the ward are drawn back. I glance around, but there are no nurses present. Steeling myself, I approach.
It is Cass, and she’s a mess. Her legs are encased in bright blue polymer tubes from toe to thigh, and raised by wires so that the bedding dangles across her in a kind of valley. The bruises on her face have faded to an ugly green and yellow except around her eye sockets, which look simultaneously puffy and hollow, her eyelids sagging closed. She’s still thin, and a translucent bag full of fluid is slowly draining into her wrist through a pipe.
“Cass?” I say softly.
Her eyes open and roll toward me. “Guuh,” she says.
“What?” She flinches slightly. I hear footsteps behind me. “Are you all right?”
The nursing zombie approaches. “Please step away from the patient. Please step away from the patient.”
“How is she?” I demand. “What have you done to her?”
“Please step away from the patient,” says the nurse, then a different reflex triggers: “All questions should be addressed to medical authorities. Thank you for your compliance. Go back to bed.”
“Cass—” I try a last time. Gross memory surgery falls through my mind like a snowflake, freezing everything it touches. I feel awful. “Are you there, Cass?”
“Go back to bed,” says the nurse, a touch threateningly.
“I’m going, I’m going,” I say, and I shuffle away from poor, damaged Cass. Cass who I thought was Kay, obsessing over her, when all the time Kay was sleeping in the next room, and Cass was living in a nightmare.
I have a problem with the ethics here, I think. Hanta’s not bad. But she collaborates with Fiore and Yourdon. What kind of person would do that? I shake my head, wincing at the cognitive dissonance. One who’d perform illegal memory surgery then implant the recollection of giving informed consent in the victim’s mind? I shake my head again. I don’t really think Hanta would do that, but I can’t be sure. If the patient agrees with the practitioner afterward, is it really abuse?
IT’S a bright, sunny Thursday morning when Hanta comes and sits by my bedside with a clipboard. “Well!” Her smile is fresh and approving. “You’ve done really well, Reeve. A splendid recovery. I think you’re about well enough to go home.” She uses her pen to scribble an annotation on her board. “You’re still convalescent, so I advise you to take it very easy for the next few days—certainly you shouldn’t go back to work until this time next week at the earliest, and ideally not until the Monday afterward. Take this note and give it to Janis when you return to work, it’s a certifica
te of exemption from employment. If you feel at all unwell, or have another dizzy spell, I want you to telephone the hospital immediately, and we’ll send an ambulance for you.”
“Will the ambulance be much use if I’m incoherent or hallucinating?” I ask doubtfully.
Hanta shoves an unruly lock of hair back into place: “We’re still populating the polity,” she says. “The paramedics aren’t due to arrive until next week. They have to have additional skill set upgrades to their implants. But in two weeks’ time if you call an ambulance or see a nurse or need a police officer, you won’t be dealing with a zombie.” She glances along the ward. “Can’t happen soon enough, if you ask me.”
“I was meaning to ask . . .” I trail off, unsure how to raise the subject, but Dr. Hanta knows what I’m talking about.
“You did the right thing when you called the ambulance,” she says firmly. “Never doubt that.” She touches my arm for emphasis. “But zombies are no use for nonroutine circumstances.” A little sigh. “It’ll be much easier when I have human assistants who can learn on the job.”
“How big is the polity going to grow?” I ask. “The original briefing said something about ten cohorts of ten, but if you’re going to have police and ambulance crews, surely that’s not enough?”
She looks surprised. “No, a hundred participants is just the size of the comparison set for score renormalization, Reeve, a single parish. We introduce participants to each other in a controlled manner, ten cohorts to a parish, but you’re nearly all settled in now. Next week is when we open the manifold and link all the neighborhoods together. That’s when YFH-Polity actually comes into existence! It’s going to be quite exciting—you’re going to meet strangers, and there’ll be far fewer zombies.”
“Wow,” I say, my voice hollow and my head spinning. “How many, uh, neighborhoods, are you planning to link in?”
“Oh, thirty or so parishes. That’s enough to form one small city, which is about the minimum for a stable society, according to our models.”
“Keeping track of that must be a big job,” I say slowly.
“You can say that again.” Dr. Hanta stands up and straightens her white coat. “It takes at least three of me to keep track of everything!” Another errant curl gets tucked behind her collar. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to leave you. You’re ready for discharge whenever you want to go home; just tell the nurse on the front desk that you’re leaving. Is there anything else?”
“Yes,” I say hastily. Then I pause for a moment. “When I was having my crisis, were you tempted to . . . you know, change anything? Apart from administering the fixative algorithm, that is?”
Hanta stares at me with her big brown eyes. She looks thoughtful. “You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I’d never have time to do anything else.” She smiles at me, and her expression turns chilly. “And besides, what you’re asking about is highly questionable behavior, ethically questionable, Mrs. Brown. To which I have two responses. Firstly, whatever I might think of a patient, I would never act in a manner contrary to their best interests. And secondly, I expected better of you. Good day.”
She turns and stalks away. I’ve really put my foot in it now, I think, feeling sick with embarrassment. Me and my big mouth . . . I want to run after her and apologize, but that would be asking to compound the misunderstanding, wouldn’t it? Idiot, I tell myself. She’s right, they couldn’t run the polity without having a medical supervisor who has the subjects’ best interests in mind; and I’ve just pissed off the only member of the experimental team who might be on my side. She could have helped me figure out how to fit in better, and instead . . . Shit. Shit. Shit.
There’s really nothing left to do here. I stand up and rummage through the carrier bag Sam left for me last night. There’s underwear, a floral print dress, and a pair of strappy sandals, but he forgot my handbag. Oh well, he gets high marks for trying. I make myself decent then, after waiting long enough for Dr. Hanta to leave the ward, I head down to reception. On the way I pass the other ward, signposted MATERNITY. I guess it’ll be getting busy in a few months, but right now it’s depressingly empty. There’s a spring in my step as I reach the front desk. “Checking out,” I say.
The zombie on the desk nods. “Mrs. Reeve Brown leaving the institution of her own volition,” she drones. “Have a nice day.”
The hospital faces onto Main Street, sandwiched between a run of shops and a stretch zoned for offices. It’s a sunny, warm day, and my spirits rise as I go outside. I feel airy and empty, light as a feather, not a care in the world! At least, not for now, a stubborn part of me mutters darkly. Then I get the impression that even the part of me that’s always alert shrugs its shoulders and sighs. Still, might as well take the day off to recover. Fiore has actually let me off the hook, for which I can thank Dr. Hanta; so I’ve got an actual choice. I’m free to keep on kicking and struggling against the inevitable, or I can go home and relax for a few days, just play the game and settle down. (It’ll avoid attracting unwelcome attention from Fiore or the score whores, and I can pretend I’m having fun while I’m about it; I’ll treat it like a game. Plus, it occurs to me that if I want to get back at Jen, the best way to do it is to defeat her on her own terms. I can always go back to figuring out how to escape later.) Meanwhile, I really ought to try to sort things out with Sam because I don’t like the way paranoia and dread seems to have been levering us apart.
It takes me three hours to catch a taxi home, mostly because I pass the Lady’s Lodge Beauty Parlor and stop to get my hair tidied up, and then the department store. The staff in the salon and the store are still all zombies, which is annoying, but at least they don’t get in the way. I need some more clothes, anyway—I have no idea what happened to what I was wearing the other day, plus, dressing à la mode is a good, easy way to boost your score, and I can use that right now—and in between buying a couple of new outfits I fetch up at the cosmetics counter. The store is deserted, and I figure I’ll give Sam a surprise, so I wait while the zombie assistant applies a makeover with inhuman speed. Those dark ages folks may not have had much by way of reconstructive nano, but they knew a lot about using natural products to change they way they looked: I barely recognize myself in the mirror by the time she’s finished.
I’m still not very well, and find myself flagging much sooner than I expected. So I finish off in the shop, arrange to have my purchases delivered, and catch a taxi home. Home is much as I expected—a mess. The cleaning service I commissioned when I got the library job has been round, but they only come once a week, and Sam has been letting the dirty dishes pile up in the kitchen and leaving the glasses in the living room. I try to ignore it and put my feet up, but after half an hour it’s too much. If I’m going to settle down a bit, I need to take care of that—it’s part of the role I’m playing—so I move everything to the kitchen and start cycling them through the dishwasher. Then I go and lie down for a while. But a pernicious demon of dissatisfaction has gotten into my head, so I get up and start on the living room. It comes to me that I really don’t like the way the furniture is laid out, and there’s something about the sofa that annoys me unaccountably. The sofa will have to go. In the meantime I can rearrange where everything is, and then I realize it’s nearly six. Sam will be home soon.
I’m a very poor cook, but I manage to puzzle my way through the instructions on the cartons, and I’m just laying out the cutlery on the dining table in the dayroom when I hear the door rattle.
“Sam?” I call. “I’m home!”
“Reeve?” He calls back.
I step into the hall, and he does a double take. “Reeve?” He gapes at me: It’s a priceless moment.
“I had a little accident at the cosmetics counter,” I say. “Like it?”
He goes cross-eyed for a moment, then manages to nod. In addition to the makeover I’m wearing the sexiest, most revealing dress I could find. I’ll take my praise where I find it. Sam’s n
ever been a great one for expressing his emotions, and this is going pretty far for him. Come to think of it, he looks tired, sagging inside his suit jacket.
“Hard day?” I ask.
He nods again. “I, uh”—he draws breath—“I thought you were ill.”
“I am.” I’m more tired than I want to admit in front of him. “But I’m glad to be home, and Dr. Hanta’s given me the next week off work, so I figured I’d lay on a little surprise for you. Are you hungry yet?”
“I missed lunch. Didn’t feel much like eating back then.” He looks thoughtful. “That wasn’t such a good idea, was it?”
“Come with me.” I lead him into the dayroom and sit him down, then go back to the kitchen and switch on the microwave, then pick up the two glasses of wine I’d poured and take them back to the table. He doesn’t say anything, but he’s agog, eyes tracking me like an incoming missile. “Here. A toast—to our future?”
“Our . . . future?” He looks puzzled for a moment, then something seems to clear in his mind, and he raises his glass and finally smiles at me, surrendering some inner doubt. “Yes.”
I hurry back to sort out our supper, and we eat. I don’t taste much of the food because, to tell the truth, I’m watching Sam. I came so close to losing him that every moment feels delicate, like glass. A huge and complex tenderness is crystallizing in me. “Tell me about your day,” I ask, to draw him out, and he mumbles through an incoherent story about missing papers for a deed of attainder or something, watching my face all the time. I have to prompt him to eat. When he’s done, I walk round the table to fetch his plate, and I can feel the heat of his gaze on me. “We need to talk,” I say.
“We need.” His voice is congested with emotion. “Reeve.”
“Come with me,” I say.
He stands up. “Where? What is this about?”
“Come on.” I reach out and take his necktie and gently tug. He follows me into the hallway. “This way.” I take the steps slowly, going up, listening to his hoarse breathing deepen. He doesn’t try to pull away until I reach the bedroom door.
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