“Did Ava forward the list?” I asked, but I could have torn off my clothes and shouted up and down the railcar for all the attention that I was getting. The dozen or so passengers were all running their own apps, watching cinematics only they could see, hearing synths only they could hear. They were checked into their own little worlds, but still, I was nervous.
“Nothing read as of yet, but there is a hanging message set to download upon arrival at the medical center.” Hera offered me a worried look as she canted her head to the side. “Your vitals are erratic.”
“Grave robbing will do that to a guy,” I said, noticing only then that my leg had been bouncing up and down the whole time. I put my hand on my knee and forced it down, holding it in place.
Hera's face flickered, the look of worry turned to annoyance in a flash. A part of me was glad to see I hadn't lost my touch.
“Not about your nerves, Holden. It's your synapses, they're shorting. Running diagnostic on current operating-”
“Cancel.” I vetoed my AI and offered a halfhearted smile. “I ran one earlier. I'm fine.”
“You're lying. I have access to your operational records and -” Hera was cut short by an elderly man sitting into the seat that her avatar had been occupying. She flickered out of existence, just like a ghost. The man offered me a grim stare and I broke eye contact with him, looking forward to where Hera was now standing, her hands on her hips as she shot him a frustrated glare. “I hate being sat on.”
“You're a program, Hera,” I explained for the thousandth time. “You only exist in my gray meat, you weren't actually on the seat.”
“You programmed me to interact with my surroundings as you see them. So, yes, they're really there for me and it is your fault!”
I shook my head, and watched as my cart pulled into the station. “This one?”
Hera nodded. I envied her as she flickered out of existence.
I grunted, grabbed my bag, slid it over my shoulder and fought the incoming crowd on my way into the city.
Hera floated by my side as I entered the main doors of the Bloomfield Medical Center's ER. I was happy to be out of the bitter autumn chill that was blowing down from the Great Lakes. It was a busy waiting room, with all manner of human misery on display, in every flavor of sickness and injury. I hated hospitals. They always had that antiseptic-but-still-urine-soaked-smell and everything was habitually clean. As I walked through the automatic doors, a second digital avatar appeared with a sound reminiscent of a door bell from one of those old Hollywood-era flicks. The second avatar was dressed like a 1950s nurse, complete with a red-cross emblazoned little white hat. She smiled her ruby red lips at me.
“Hello, Holden Klein! I wish we were meeting under different circumstances. My name's Mercy. Could you tell me the nature of your emergency?” The woman canted her head to the side as she awaited an answer. There was something creepy about the avatars that tried to look human. Maybe it was the way they blinked. Somehow not random enough.
“Uhhh. I'm sick?” I said, my eyes scanning the waiting room. “Can I speak to an attendant?”
“I'm sorry, Mr. Klein, but there are currently no staff available to speak with you. We're very busy, tonight! Could you tell me your symptoms?” the AI asked cheerily without missing a beat.
Hera chimed in, “The message arrived, Holden. It's the list. Would you like me to track it on your retinal display?”
“Go for it,” I said, and my macabre shopping list blipped into existence in blocky neon red letters, complete with boxes next to them for digital check marks. I spared another look around the room. There really wasn't anyone watching over the ER. I was expecting that; the weekdays didn't warrant meat at the counter. But I did notice the four cameras located in the corners of the room. They were barely –bottlecap-sized black circles on the wall, but when you’re as prone to trouble as I was, you tend to pay attention to the little things.
“Holden, I can't help you if you don't tell me what's wrong,” Mercy chided. Government AIs were always so damn condescending.
“Hera, run program – sublimate.” I gestured towards the hospital's AI.
“She's not really my type...” Hera began, but stopped once I shot her a withering stare. “Fine!” she stretched out the 'I' sound with a huff.
“I'm sorry, Mister Klein, could you clarify-” Mercy began to speak as Hera's hand slid into the AI's chest. Mercy shook like she was having a grand mal. Gleaming, crackling white tears appeared on her avatar as Hera uploaded a special virus I had designed for just such an occasion. Mercy froze up, her ivory-flecked ruby lips stilled in a ring of surprise.
Hera shuddered as she withdrew her hand. “I'll call you, promise...” she muttered to the stricken AI and played coyly with a long, floating white bang.
“On job,” I said as I pulled my coat hood up and over my scraggly black hair. “Nav me over to the-”
“Morgue,” Hera finished my sentence and a three-dimensional white arrow popped along the wall and slid past two maglocked doors with a sign above that warned against unauthorized entry.
“Good, and now that you're in the Mercy program-” I began.
“Doors.” Hera waved her hand in a bored manner and Mercy moved like a jerky marionette, her arms pantomiming opening the doors from across the room. The maglocks clicked off and the doors slid open, revealing a long lifeless hallway, painted beige and lined with soothing, government-approved landscape paintings. “Also, I'm taking the liberty of scrubbing you from the security feed, Holden. Both archives and streaming vid.”
“And Mercy's greeting backlog?”
“Obviously.”
“I love you,” I whispered.
“I know,” she said with a grin. “Now, get moving. I'll reroute Nav around meat patrols, so be ready to change direction when necessary.”
I shouldered my heavy, imitation leather satchel and stepped through the open doors nonchalantly. Like one of my favorite classic vid heroes from back when I was a little kid said, it was time to “fly casual”. I didn't spare anyone in the waiting room a second glance, and truth be told, I wasn't expecting them to wonder about me. We were all connected to each other like never before and yet, no one looked up anymore. Somewhere along the road, humanity's car had careened off an embankment and we've been slowly dying in a ditch ever sense.
I only had to take a few detours: once to avoid a doctor having a virtual conference in Mandarin, and another time to avoid a repair crew sent to fix a sparking autobuff. The doors to the morgue were in front of me, and with Hera wearing the hospital's AI like a glove, it wasn't any kind of problem to crack the lock. Hera's navigational assistance faded away as the thick metal doors slid open with a thick clunk and I stepped into the cool, climate- controlled dead body repository. With any luck, we'd be just in time to liberate some necessary parts before the stiffs headed on to their mandatory date with the crematorium. The back of the windowless wall contained the drawers, circular pods that held the bodies until they could be picked up by the sanitation crews.
“Pop 'em.” I gestured to the wall.
“Which?” Hera asked.
“All of them.” I shifted the bag from my shoulder to the floor and pressed the zipper release. I was too busy getting my tools in order to see what Hera was up to, but I heard the hiss of a dozen pods unsealing and the whir of their motors as they slid open on their tracks. “Run the death certs, find me a hanged man,” I whispered.
“The odds of finding a suicide victim that-”
“It doesn't have to be a suicide.”
“Still, the odds – oh...well, not quite a hanging, but these two gentlemen have suffocation listed as cause of death.” Hera's eyes glinted, and the pods she had been speaking about flashed on my retinal display like they were being backlit by a floodlight.
I took another glance at my “shopping list” and peeled the plastic safety tape off the laser-edged teeth of my bone saw. “That's pretty zip. Tell me more.”
Hera point
ed to one of the illuminated pods. “Choked on the 'Chipolte Jalapeno Whopper Senior,' it's a limited-time-only hamburger that-”
“Next,” I cut in.
“Auto-erotic asphyxiation gone wrong.”
“Rope?” I asked hopefully.
“Belt.”
“Crash it, close enough.” I shifted over to the pod and looked down at the dark-skinned male with the bruising around his throat. Hopefully the recipe wasn't going to be that picky. I revved the miniature chainsaw like the world's least intimidating slash-vid villain and set to work separating the poor bastard’s hand from his wrist. I ran into a little trouble with the polycarbon feed line to what I think was a grip augmenter. I'm a software man by trade and I've always found hardware a little trickier to savvy. I slid open a small, bioplast bag and slipped the now-separated hand inside, opening up a chilled side compartment on my satchel and sliding it all in. “'Hand of Glory,' check,” I said, wiping the remnants of Strangle Fan's meat on the side of my stain-proof yellow Levis. A bright blue X stamped across the checklist box and I looked down to the next item.
“Eyes of green?” I asked, switching over to my next high-tech tool: A table spoon.
“Mm...” my avatar hummed to herself. “We have a natural hazel, and a woman who received gene therapy to change her eye color. The second one is more green, technically?”
“I'm in the wrong mode here. I'll take them all and let Ava defrag,” I muttered. Maybe all the bloody Sims I played had desensitized me, but sliding the metal scoop underneath the soft meat and jerking the orbs free from their sockets didn't actually bother me. Even if I was a little anxious about the prospect of getting caught, I kept telling myself, it was for the good of the world. No twist. When did grave robbing get so mashed? I wondered.
“Perhaps since graveyards were abolished in the late 2040s, as they were found to be economically inefficient. The space could be better utilized to maximize corporate earning potenti-”
“Hera. Rhetorical.”
“Oh.” She flickered and a sheepish smile appeared across her alabaster features. “I knew that.”
“So. Many. Eyeballs. Check,” I muttered and packed them down next to the hand. “Liver of a dead woman, three days past her last breath,” I continued.
“Fortune! The woman with the gene-green eyes? Three days dead as of... two hours ago!” Hera replied giddily.
“Yeah, fortune,” I droned sarcastically as I pulled the sonic scalpel from its sheath. “I have no idea how meat is built. Liver is what? In the back somewhere?”
“Somewhere...right. Fortunate again that anatomy happens to be a special interest of mine. Go ahead and flip her over; I'll map your incisions for efficient removal.”
I gripped the woman by her icy shoulder and tried not to look at her unnerving, de-eyed, hollow stare. With a grunt of effort, I flipped the dead weight onto her chest and got her positioned more or less fully lying on her front. A dotted line appeared upon the skin of her back like the world's least imaginative tattoo.
“It'll take some effort to peel back the flesh. It also might get... slippery. Though at her level of core cooling, that may make things a bit easier to... um, get a handle on.” Her eyes were fixed on the corpse; she wasn't even bothering to blink anymore.
“You're fascinated by this,” I said.
“Entirely.”
“Because you don't have a body?”
“No! Because your meat bits are so... gross!”
“Thanks,” I muttered.I pressed the sharp edge of the scalpel against the woman’s skin and gave the handle a tight squeeze, sending a micro-pulse through the blade that helped shear the cool, dead flesh like a steak knife through a sirloin. I probably should have had something to eat before I started carving cadavers up - the fact that this was reminding me of food at all was kind of upsetting.
“Easy, Holden,” Hera chided. I hadn't noticed how badly I was butchering the job. My fingers quivered around the scalpel in a spastic grip. I clasped my free hand around my shaking wrist in a futile effort to steady it. “Are you all right?” she asked, a ring of concern in her synthetic voice.
“Solid... listen, this doesn't need to be a surgical job, can you broaden these cuts a bit? Just make sure the liver stays mint-in-package.”
“Holden, your hands. You need to let me run a diagnostic, plea-”
“I know what the problem is.” I cut her off a bit more deftly than I had been cutting out Green-Eyes' liver. The lines had swelled to about an inch across; it was less surgical guideline and more coloring book, but even that took all my concentration to trace along. Skin and meat yielded to the blade, parting around it like receding flood waters.
“Then why aren't you doing anything about it?” Hera huffed.
“Because, Ava says in a few days it won't even matter.” I offered her a grim smirk. “Now, can we have this conversation later? Somewhere other than a secure government facility where I'm in the process of committing oh so many, many felonies?”
“Fine,” she snapped, folding her arms across her chest and looking pointedly across the room. “You need to cut deeper. And hurry. Foot traffic has increased on the floor, shift change in fifteen.”
It took taking a look under the hood of human anatomy to get me to agree with Hera's assessment. The human body was a gross sack of slippery fluids and rubbery meat. Also, I learned that things designed to stay inside the body do not make it easy for you when you want them to come out of the body. Between thick, slick, semi-coagulated blood, my bout of Vibe and the fun fact that not all organs sit exactly in the same space from body to body, I was playing the filthiest, most frustrating game of hide and seek, and not doing a very good job of it. In the end, it took Hera highlighting the liver on my display before I noticed.
I hadn't asked for her to do that.
I didn't thank her either.
“Are you done yet?” she asked impatiently.
“Easy, Hera. You can't rush perfection....” I was just dropping the liver into the clear, environmentally- friendly plastic bag and admiring my handiwork. At least I hadn't managed to mangle the job too badly.
“Or whatever that was.” She gestured to the corpse's tattered flesh, but before I could snap at her she added: “Oh hell, Holden, get ready.”
“Ready for-?”
The doors leading into the morgue hissed open and a tall, dark-skinned man in a lab coat walked inside. If he hadn't been caught up watching a Sim or taking a call, or gaming, or... whatever, he might have had a chance to contact security.
The high tensile and highly illegal wire shot from the implant area at the base of my wrist, traveling the ten feet or so between the wage slave and me. The pointed ends of the wire embedded themselves in the attendant's face and I felt a twinge of guilt for activating the bolt program. A highly concentrated arc of electricity shot down the three-pronged wire so quickly that it was barely visible to the human eye as anything more than a flash. I watched as his muscles seized up, and with nothing more than a surprised look on his face and the sudden stink of burnt hair, the man hit the floor.
“I... I don't think you're supposed to shoot people in the face with something like that,” Hera whispered, her fingers cupped over her mouth as she gave the scene a look that came somewhere between shock and horror.
“Aiming for his chest,” I grunted and pulled the wires free with a rough tug. The retraction function was finicky. That's what I get for going to a Chopper that came recommended by some metal heads at a downtown dive bar. “Make sure his vitals appear stable; don't want a crash team finding Sleeping Beauty until we're ghosts.”
“On it...” she nodded. “Holden?”
“Yeah?”
She pointed at the man lying motionless on the ground. “Daniel Markman, married, two children. Employee of the Month, last February.”
“And?”
“I think you really hurt him.” Her voice faltered, like someone sharing a dark secret.
“Probably.” I wrappe
d the wires around my Vibe-wracked arm, tying it into place and shouldering my gory, scavenger hunt-tote-bag. “Good thing he's in a hospital, huh?”
I kept off the rails as I made my way to Ava's. It was easier to spot City Sec officers on foot, and though I didn't hear any sirens as I made my way across the lonely Detroit streets, my nerves were still shakier than my hands. Putting Hera to work scanning security feeds made me feel a little better, but Detroit wasn't the kind of city one looks to for comfort.
No one leaves their houses anymore, not unless they have to. And those without homes? Well, they've been shipped out too, since vagrancy became a federal offense. I maybe passed three people across ten blocks. Every one of them reminded me why I'm doing this with Ava. We don't even know how to walk by each other anymore, and I'm guilty of it too. What the hell happened to the world that just sharing a street with someone could cause so much discomfort? Looking at anything at all, but the other person. I refused to believe this anxiety has always existed, that it was always this widespread.
No. Something happened. Humanity took the reins of its own evolution, its own development and we just drove ourselves off a damn cliff.
We all let it happen.
Ava says this “Game” is the only way anyone can make a change. I don't know if I believe in it like she does. Oh well, like the old timers say: this should be good for a few lulz. I wasn't doing anything this week anyway.
My legs were feeling the burn when I finally made it to the garage door that led to Ava's place. Hera floated along next to me, the eerie, hazy glow that emanated from her not shedding onto her surroundings. Sometimes I forgot that she isn't really there.
“Hera... knock,” I panted softly as I leaned against a rusted, non-functional lamp post jutting lewdly out of the cement. Man, I needed to get more exercise.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2013 Page 55