by Judyth Baker
“Don’t give me that crap, I demand to see a human.”
“Do not demand anything,” the Robo-Doc replied.
“Says who?”
“Warning…” the Robo-Doc said, raising its shiny, stainless steel arms.
Larry realized that his black stripes were turning from black to pink; a signal that he had to keep his emotions under better control. If the stripes turned red…
“OK, I’m calm,” Larry said, carefully and cautiously. “I understand. I own a dozen of you, back in the labs. But may I talk to a human? Please?” Despite his words, the steely arms of the Robo-Doc began to reach out to subdue him.
“OK. Never mind. I can wait.”
That did it. The arms retracted.
“So why am I here?” Larry asked, as gently as he could. “And I’m hungry.” He tapped the bladder meter embedded at his wrist to show that his blood sugar was too low.
“We found you just before the blast,” the Robo-Doc told him, pointing toward the circular entrance. “You do not remember what happened out there, do you?”
“No, I don’t. What do you mean, a blast?”
“Nuclear energy plants. They are blowing up, all over the world.”
Larry slumped, as the implications hit. “All over the world?”
“So far as we know. The only reason you’re alive is because you were wearing body armor.”
“I was?”
“Sorry, we had to probe your brain. To find out why you survived.”
“What do you mean? You said I had on body armor.”
“We wanted to find out how you survived the leprosy contamination.”
Larry let it sink in. “Leprosy contamination?”
“It is present in this entire area, but you were clean. We don’t know why. We believe it had to do with your lab, but you really wouldn’t let us do a proper probe.” The Robo-Doc paused. “Something was blocking us. To put it diplomatically, because you resisted so strongly, you may have lost some of your memories. But it was an emergency.”
“You could have talked to me!” Larry complained.
“You were entirely uncooperative. You even fought us, with your fists. Foolish of you.”
“I must have been out of my mind,” Larry said, “I’m sorry. But I don’t remember a thing, so far. And with these stripes on, how can I get my memories back, if it keeps punishing me for my emotions?”
“Sorry. It’s all we have. The ordinary issue was all contaminated. Had to be destroyed.”
“So I haven’t broken any laws, or anything?”
“Not that we know of. But we have nothing else for you to wear. Your body armor was contaminated, too. Our main interest is why you don’t have leprosy, like the others have.”
“Is that why I’ve got puncture marks all over my arms?”
“Yes.”
“If you want me to get my memories back, at least turn off the emotion detectors,” Larry snapped.
“Sorry. We hadn’t concerned ourselves with that detail.”
The Robo-Doc fiddled with something on his panel, and the stripes on Larry’s prison suit vanished.
“And I’m hungry, to a dangerous level,” Larry reminded it.
“We are trying to find adequate food for you.”
“Adequate food?”
“Please relax. If you waste your energy, we’ll have to put you to sleep and give you intravenous feedings. We have found an uncontaminated food source on a remote Hawaiian island. Meanwhile, you must not leave this place. If you try to leave, we’ll have to terminate you.”
That was pretty blunt. It got Larry’s full attention. Hoping he could get out of the hospital, he said, “There aren’t any nuclear plants in Hawaii. So Hawaii is still OK. Right? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to just fly me over there in a drone?”
“The people there are all dead,” the Robo-Cop told him. “They died from the leprosy.”
Larry stiffened with horror. “They’re all dead there, too? From something like leprosy? Whoever heard of such a thing?”
“It was a biological weapon.”
“Who did it?”
“We don’t know. All we know is that everyone outside the Domed cities, so far as we are aware, is dead. But the residents of the few surviving cities have sequestered themselves. They will allow no immigrants inside. Most outsiders are dead, but there are a few, such as yourself, who survived. You seem to have some kind of natural resistance. Or perhaps, the virus is late in developing. Of primary concern is to find out if you have an uncontrollable urge to eat meat. Or to eat other people.”
Larry, exhausted, lay back into his pillow. “Is this leprosy really worldwide?” he asked.
“We think it is worldwide.”
“I assure you,” Larry said sincerely, “that I don’t have any uncontrollable urges to eat meat or other people. But I do have an almost uncontrollable urge to eat something. I’m starving.”
“We can hook you up to an intravenous feeding,” the Robo-Doc told him. “Would you like me to order one?”
“Can I get it right away?”
“Yes. Or you can wait approximately fifteen minutes for your first safe plate of conventional food.”
Stupid damned robot, Larry thought to himself. “I prefer the conventional food, thank you,” he said aloud, as nicely as he could.
“We will do our best to supply you with what we’ve been able to fly in,” the robot told him. “We do apologize as to its quality and quantity, but we had to make sure no leprosy virus was present.”
“Leprosy isn’t caused by a virus,” Larry objected.
“This one was.”
“Whatever.”
When the food arrived, Larry had his first memory flashback and his first real insight into the extent of the food problem. He was being fed a bowl of Space Semolina. This was material broken down from furniture made of processed semolina, rehydrated by being soaked in water for two days. It was an experimental form of emergency rations that had been developed for Mars Colony space ships at the Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory.3
As he chewed on the white, gooey mass of carbohydrate, he wondered if there would ever be a permanent colony on Mars now. He’d been involved in various hibernation experiments, inspired by his friends … his friends had names.… No. He shouldn’t think about that. It could be discovered…
But other thoughts started opening up in his head. He found himself going over the short list of Domed cities that had sophisticated filtration systems, wondering which ones had been able to keep the “virus” out. It would have to be big enough to filter.
A virus could be so small that it could pass through a sheet of plastic wrap, or it could be big enough, one of the giant viruses, to be seen under an ordinary microscope.4 It was likely a mega-virus that could carry a leprosy bacterium inside it. He vaguely recalled that both elephants and the reclaimed new breed of mammoths had almost been wiped out by a species of revived Pleistocene mega-virus, which had been unearthed during oil drilling in the Arctic. Geneticists were forced to isolate the world’s remaining elephants and mammoths to save them, which was accomplished by infusing them with human genes resistant to the ancient mega-virus. Humans had developed immunity to the mega-virus, apparently through eating mammoths. The result was a race of super-intelligent elephants: he was unsure if any of the mammoths, much fewer in number, could have survived the infestation.
All well and good. But why was he thinking about genetic manipulation, anyway?
Then another memory danced into his brain … he had been helping to develop insect intelligence. Yes. That was it! Larry felt his hands begin to shake as excitement rose in him. Thank God, the prison suit had been deactivated.
How had that begun? Oh, yes … he had been interested in a species of ant that, in a mass, demonstrated high intelligence. He had found them in the Sierra Nevada, while studying the black-and-red seed bug, Melacoryphus lateralis, better known as the Plague Bug. Swarms of them had once plagued the American so
uthwest, one of the results of ruining the region’s ecological balance.5 His work with insect intelligence followed, thanks to a big grant from – he paused. Now he remembered! This is what he had to keep to himself!
The Robo-Doc and a Nurse-Bot rolled in just as he calmed himself. As they watched him in silence, he finished his meal.
“You now remember something, don’t you?” the Robo-Doc stated. “I can sense all the physiological changes.”
“What I remember is that I always hated Cream of Wheat,” Larry answered. “Surely you have some cinnamon or something, don’t you, to make this stuff more palatable?” In the few minutes he had been left to himself, it was true that an enormous degree of anxiety had begun to build up within him. Would they kill him if he tried to leave? Was it because he might still develop leprosy, and could spread it thereby?
“We detect a higher level of anxiety,” the Nurse said, in a clickety mechanical way that betrayed her need for maintenance.
“You might as well get an update,” the Robo-Doc told him. “Perhaps your anxiety came from my comment that we would have to terminate you if you tried to leave. Is that correct?”
“Of course it’s correct,” Larry shot back. “I’m not like you. I have feelings!”
“I have been given feelings,” the Robo-Doc corrected him. “When a human dies, our punishment circuits get activated. If we see a suffering human being and don’t respond, our punishment circuits are activated. We have been punished today too many times.”
“We thought we could save the other three,” the Nurse said. “But they all turned to lions.”
Larry realized that he must be dealing with more than a huge nuclear disaster. The medical robots apparently had also been damaged. There was no known virus that could mutate tissues that fast. He had never heard of medical robots with hallucinations.
“We have learned that you have had advanced medical training yourself,” the Nurse said. “I finally found your records under your real name. It took a DNA search to locate you.”
“I thought you could do that right away,” Larry replied.
“Most of our data banks have been destroyed,” the Nurse told him. “As for this hospital, we’ll soon have to shut it down. All our clients but you are now dead. From the virus.”
“You’ll let me go, won’t you?”
“We have observed that you have created some kind of antibody to the virus in your system,” the Robo-Doc said, waving his steely arms up and down. “So we can’t let you go. We will be collecting all your antibodies as fast as possible. Even if it results in your death.”
“Can’t you just recreate the antibodies in your labs here?”
“We’re losing our best Cyborgs to radiation poisoning. They didn’t have the gear you had to protect them when our power plant blew up.”
“We need your antibodies to send to Houston,” the Nurse explained. “They will save many humans. We apologize in advance if it kills you.”
“All you need is to send me!” Larry declared. “Just fly me to Houston.”
“That would be cost-inefficient,” the Nurse said. Larry had to smother his disgust. These isolated robots had obviously been programmed to run the hospital at minimum cost.“Can’t you see that they can duplicate everything there, without killing me?” he asked them. “If I die, also, you’ll get punished. Think about that. Want some more?”
To himself, he wondered why they hadn’t thought of that. “If I’m alive, they can also check to see if I have made more than one kind of antibody. How do you know if I made one, or several? Let Houston do it, since you can’t.”
He had made his point. Half an hour later, after they had drawn blood for a backup, which they would send if something happened to Larry, he was helped inside their best Drone. As he sat slumped and weary in its cockpit, so drained of energy that he could hardly lift his head, Larry noticed that he could take control. With his embedded wrist calculator, he was able to estimate the distance from Carson City, Nevada to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. It was about 1200 miles. The distance between Carson City, Nevada and Houston was about 1900 miles. He would have fuel to spare, but first, he’d have to pass the Recall Point, beyond which Carson City couldn’t turn the drone back. Grateful that he had been supplied with an IV to build up his fluids, Larry prayed that the Drone would fly above the radiation clouds from the Coffey, Kansas, nuclear plant, the plants in Palo Verde, Arizona, and the ones in California. It all depended on the wind currents, weather and altitude. He would keep the Drone high enough to avoid any remaining radiation, at about 40,000 feet.
As the Drone purred on, Larry tried to find out what had caused the explosions of the world’s nuclear power plants. What he did learn, from old broadcasts cycling in the information systems that were still up, is that humans affected with the virus had somehow been programmed by the virus to destroy power grids, dams, chemical plants and factories. In most cases, they had no power to do much damage, since they used their bare hands and primitive tools such as axes. Many of them only smashed walls and cars. But it was different where scientists had been involved.
The broadcasts were saying that all Domed cities were now off-limits to anyone who had been caught outside. Though Larry had clearance to land at a quarantine station in Houston – his drone’s original destination – it seemed no one else would be accepted. Looking down from his perch in the sealed Drone, which had only minimal equipment for human passengers, Larry was nevertheless able to observe, with a scanning lens, what had happened to Las Vegas (this is where he intended to take his sudden turn to Kansas).
What he saw was a lesson in the power of an arcane virus to transform one kind of mammal into another. He saw the bodies of lions. Heaps upon heaps, some with jewelry around their necks. Some were still staggering around, obviously in their death throes. Lions! Who would have believed it? How it had been created, he wasn’t sure, but he doubted that anything in nature could have done it.
“Planet earth, forgive us. We know not what we do,” he murmured to himself, as a wave of intense sorrow engulfed him. He avoided looking through the scanning lens at any other town or city between there and the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
When he was within an hour of his destination, for the first time, Larry dared to make a transmission on the exclusive band that would link him to Dr. Haywood.
It was all highly classified: he prayed the secret lab had survived, that his transmission would get through and that somebody on the other side was still alive to hear it.
“Calling C-Q! Calling C-Q!” he shouted into the tiny microphone that the drone carried, using a call signal that had been obsolete decades ago. “Come in! Come in!”
He kept trying, but there was only static, barely audible above the sounds of whipping wind and the drone’s whining engines as he began descending, daring to expose himself to whatever might be in the atmosphere.
He needed to reach Haywood and the termite team. It had been Haywood’s idea to use specially developed termites to process coal cheaply for emergency generators, should nuclear or solar power ever become compromised. He and his team had also been breeding termites for super-intelligence. The matter was considered unethical, but the team had seen possibilities to use termites in hibernation projects. Termites kept their nests at exactly the correct temperature and humidity that was optimal for the equipment that had been developed to run hibernation capsules for the long space journeys to Mars.
“What if we end up blowing up the world?” Haywood had quipped. “What if humans had to sleep for a hundred years or so, to avoid radiation, or contamination from some outlandish disease? To hell with the Mars Projects; we can hibernate here on earth, if we have to. We have the chambers and the basements, thanks to the defunct Space Program from last century. We just need a few more years to get our caretakers programmed correctly, to take minimal care of the equipment.”
He meant the termites.
Why not robots?
> “We can’t be sure they wouldn’t be discovered, over time. But nobody now alive knows about the termite project,” Haywood had explained. “It was the dream of one of our most talented and wealthy entomologists…” and he had patted Larry on the back.
Larry had been born rich, as well as being endowed with a passion for exploring insect intelligence. Physically powerful, he’d never been sick a day in his life. Only now did he realize how important his immune system was. For that, he had to thank his equally wealthy father, who had genetically altered him before birth to have an inordinately powerful immune system. To be sure, there would be some survivors out there who could also beat the leprosy virus – if they had managed to survive the radiation.
Luckily for him, Larry had been wearing Climate Shield Armor to protect him in the harsh desert clime. His memory was returning fast. He remembered, suddenly, that he had been approaching a lonely hydrogen fuel station on his motorcycle, planning to refuel for his trip back to Carson City, when he saw a man with thick, yellow hair attacking the fuel pump with a shovel. It blew up, the blood from the vandal mixing with the shockwave and its heat against Larry and his motorcycle, sending him whirling into a ditch.
That’s all he could remember, but a robot ambulance must have found him and brought him to the hospital.
Now that he could remember, Larry almost wished he had kept it all buried. Slightly adjusting the band-width, Larry tried again to get through to the lab. He had unpleasant visions of landing near the lab and finding the university campus filled with roaring lions.
This time, he could hear sounds in the static: it made chills run down his spine. Worn out as he was, his spirits lifted. It was her!
“Sandra! Sandra!” he called out. “Is that you?”
“Larry! You’re – you’re alive!” Never had a voice been so welcome.
“Do you have a safe port where I can land a drone?”
“Omigod, I don’t know if it’s operational! Wait!”
It was.
As he ordered the Drone to obey the local landing instructions, its helicopter-style propellers emerged and the Drone began its descent into an inner port, not far from the underground labs. As the Drone’s engines whined to a stop, Larry tried to leap from the cockpit, but he was too weak to manage more than an ungraceful flop-out to the ground. Through a thick glass wall, he saw the anxious faces of Sandra, Dr. Haywood, and several tall termites, whose semi-transparent bodies seemed to glow.