The Old Man put his book down, slapping it closed with finality. He leaned back in the chair, crossing his hands high over his meager chest, the tufts of snowy hair peeking up out of his yellowed collar.
“So you want to be a real doctor—not one of these little brats in it for a paycheck,” the Old Man said.
I nodded eagerly, and bravely took the seat opposite from him.
He pushed back from the desk, reached over his shoulder into a shelf behind him, and pulled out a thick tome—a paper book. He pushed forward, and tossed it on the desk, where it slid along a landslide of books into my lap. I stooped to pick up part of the avalanche that had fallen to the floor.
“Don’t worry about that,” the Old Man said. “Just go take care of that patient. In the Index, under C, for Constipation. And tell me how it goes.” Then he picked up a pen and waved me out the door with a flick of his hand. I left and found it hard to read the printed pages, but I discovered an electronic version of the same book. The patient got well, and I returned the book.
After a decade of mentoring—an antique volume borrowed, a nod, a sentence here and there—our meetings were just a bit less brusque. I tried to get down to the basement at least once a week. Whenever I did, I felt refreshed, like I was a wide-eyed medical student with much yet to learn. I could tell the Old Man liked me, though he would never admit it.
So there I was, seeking his advice yet again. The basement office’s door was ajar. Complete darkness inside.
“Hello?” I said, knocking. “Neal, it’s Joe.”
A chain tinkled, and an old banker’s lamp cast an emerald glow on the ceiling, and a white halo atop the desk. In the shadows behind it, I could just barely make out the Old Man’s craggy features.
“Barnes?” he croaked. “Come in, come in.”
I came forward and once again sat down in the chair across from him. I could never be sure, but I thought the pile of scattered books on the floor were the very same that had slid off the Old Man’s desk that day ten years earlier when he had first tossed me Diet and the Senior Bowels, Volume 4.
“Neal, why are you sitting in the dark?” I asked. I felt I could call him by first name, at this point.
“Don’t get me started, Joe,” he said. “You know I think on Fridays. Sensory deprivation, down here in the dark basement. Keeps the mind sharp, in tune.”
“But I thought you only meditated at night,” I said.
“It’s not meditation—it’s thinking, Joe. Little breaks in the middle of the day to harness my inner resources. To find solace amid the raging storm of bullshit,” Wetherspoon said. “Sanity’s only for the seeker. I’ve told you this.”
I glanced in the corner of the office. Something glinted in the ray of the lamp. I could just make out the fragments of a smashed Atman in the shadows—the third yet the Old Man had destroyed.
“Neal, you broke another one?” I said. “You’d better watch your ass. Kranklein might try to force you to retire again. She’s done it for less.”
“That woman can do her worst,” he said. “Suzanne Kranklein would have gotten rid of me a long time ago if she could. Anyway, she knew that goddamned thingamajigger wouldn’t survive five minutes in this office. The cost is hers to bear.”
“Just be careful, Neal.”
“They’re the ones who should be careful. An old man’s got nothing to lose but borrowed time. They keep forgetting that. But anyway—you wanted something? I just got done telling you I don’t have all the time in the world.”
“There was a teenager who died yesterday, and I can’t figure out why,” I said.
“Someone once sang that only the good die young. But that person grew into a drunken old jackass, so don’t believe it.”
“This was a severe trauma case—car accident,” I said, ignoring his strange reference. “We administered stem cells, he was recovering nicely. The next morning, he was dead.”
“This is the hallucinating teenager everyone’s talking about? James Cruzen?”
“How did you know? I didn’t know you even left this office anymore.”
Wetherspoon scoffed.
“I have my sources. The bureaucrats on the fifth floor want to bury me down here, but I have my ways. So you want to know why the kid dropped dead overnight. There’s a growing contingent of researchers who suspect that stem cells have heretofore unknown side effects. I trust you tried them?”
“I did. The lead researcher is on sabbatical. In Guatemala.”
“Guatemala?” the Old Man said, scratching his chin. “Very interesting.”
“Why is Guatemala interesting?”
“Lots of research projects down there,” the Old Man said. “Nevermind, nevermind. So—have you checked the patient history, every number, all the contacts in the electronic record?”
“Of course.”
“Then check them again.” The Old Man paused. A match flared in the darkness, then illuminated the tip of a cigar, the underside of his jagged wrinkles. The smoke enveloped his shadow. “The devil’s always in the details, Joe. There’s always an explanation, even if it’s not immediate.”
The cigar glowed bright, the sweet odor of burning filled the room. It reminded me of something far distant in my childhood, a nagging hint of the past.
“Neal, you know the tobacco laws made everything…”
“Yes, Young Joseph, I know they’ve made smoking anything illegal. They’re getting rid of everything fun, law by law and decree by decree. But old habits die hard. If you don’t want to smell like an outlaw, feel free to vacate the premises.”
I nodded. That was my cue. I stood and stepped gingerly over the strewn books.
“Joe,” the Old Man rasped.
I turned around. A plume of smoke glowed with the Old Man’s inhale, then vanished into the dark as the cigar disappeared behind the desk.
“Check the room where the kid died,” he said. “There are ways to directly access the terminal’s full history.”
“Neal—that’s illegal, too. You know that only the regional health czar has access to that information.”
“Sure, it’s illegal. So don’t get caught when you do it. Especially by that idiotic Kranklein person we report to,” the Old Man said.
“Good advice,” I said. “Bye, Neal.”
The Old Man grunted. I left and went toward the elevators, snapping my fingers as I still struggled to remember where I had smelled tobacco like that last. I pushed a button, the door opened, and I got on. The elevator lurched upward. I smelled at my sleeves, and I could still breathe in the faint scent of the cigar. Of course, the Old Man was right. I had to hack into the system to really figure out what was going on. But the terminals were the most-tightly guarded pieces of equipment in the hospital, even more so than the locked prescription cabinets. Just the slightest glimpse of the database was an indictable crime. I never went into the system unless I had to.
The elevator stopped, pinged. The doors opened. I stepped out onto the third floor, muttering. I would be taking a risk, but long ago I had reached the conclusion that the real doctors in this world had to find a way to hold to the Hippocratic Oath, no matter what the law said. The all-seeing electronic system had all the information a doctor would ever need—the precise amount of insulin the patient needed daily, drug contraindications, psychological profiles. The Bureau of Wellness kept it all confidential—secret even from the attending physicians. Congress had battled over the law since the Great Purge.
But it remained. And at Saint Almachius, the law of the land was enforced by Suzanne Kranklein. As the boss, she had done a great job in uniting the nurses, doctors, and patients in a steadfast hatred of her. Since she had taken over the reins of the hospital five years earlier, she’d picked up a monstrous nickname. Kranklein had come to be known as the Kraken to a disgruntled, mutinous staff. She’d arrived after Wetherspoon had retired for the third time, in the span of a few months when he wasn’t around to organize the doctors against the arch-bureaucrat w
ho had never taken a biology class in her life. The scuttlebutt among all the doctors was she had a cousin from Maine in Congress who had gotten her the job, but no one could ever really be sure. Wetherspoon may have started that rumor, considering his dislike of New Englanders from the Nixon II days. Either way, the Kraken slithered into the hospital’s cockpit, and slowly but surely tightened her grip on the medical workings of the entire institution. Her opponents retired, died, or—in four cases—were visited in the middle of the night by special agents from the Bureau of Wellness, which ended with moderate prison sentences. All four had accessed the electronic records.
All four had done what I was about to attempt: break the law because the law was essentially killing our patients.
My steps echoed down the intensive-care-unit hallway. I forced a smile at three nurses who passed. They smiled back at me. Breathing hard with each step, I tried to calm my thumping heart. Other doctors snuck peeks at the electronic records. I had done it twice in the last month alone. But it always made me queasy—and something about it this time unnerved me even more than usual. I had no idea why. Maybe because the Old Man had suggested it, and I normally just did it secretly, on my own. After all, the black-market technology was nearly foolproof. I twiddled the thing in my pocket. It was a portable drive, hackers’ code built with one purpose. Every doctor had one, everyone used it.
It was only illegal if you were stupid enough to be caught. I took a deep breath.
I walked the final few paces to the room. The door was closed. I swiped my Atman, gently pushed it inward and stepped inside. The door was already closing behind me when I saw the person seated on the bed.
“Hello, Dr. Barnes,” said Suzanne Kranklein, glancing up from the screen in her wrist.
Though I recoiled, I did manage to muster a sickly smile at the erect posture of the dreaded Kraken. Her right leg was crossed over her left, black shirt and pants hanging loose off her body. She was a small woman, and there was something gnarled, elfin about her. It was as if a pretty little petite person had gradually mutated—a bulbous flushed nose, bloodshot eyes, flabby rolling gut, ratty hair—from the years of trolling in the sewers of bureaucracy. She and I always avoided looking at each other. We hadn’t made eye contact in years.
“What are you doing here, Suzanne?” I asked.
“I was about to ask you the same question,” she said. “I suppose you heard the patient in this room is already dead?”
“I heard,” I said. “In fact, I came here to check around the room. We still don’t know the cause or manner of death.”
“‘Check around the room’ wouldn’t mean illegally accessing the electronic Bureau of Wellness records, would it?”
She smiled, that hateful half-smirk reddening the blood vessels in her nose. Lopsided and patronizing, crooked and dangerous, that look of hers. Since the four doctors had been jailed a few years earlier at her behest, I had learned never to turn my back on that repulsive smile.
“Suzanne, I wouldn’t even know how. This new system is beyond me,” I said.
She looked up at me. Our eyes actually met, and I blinked. I couldn’t help it. Her face was more twisted and distorted than ever before.
“Sometimes I wonder,” she said, trailing off. She tapped at her Atman screen and stood. “Sometimes I wonder, Barnes, whether you and that Old Man downstairs aren’t the same person, just separated by a few generations.”
“I guess the Old Man and me, we’re old fashioned,” I said, looking up at the ceiling. “We expect people to say what they really mean.”
She stepped closer. And before I could react, she jammed a hand in my coat pocket, and plucked out the portable drive.
“What the f—”
“I don’t know why technophobes like you or Wetherspoon would want some advanced piece of technology like this,” she said, waving it in my face. “Especially since it’s illegal to even own one of these.”
The smile spread wide along her thin lips. I reached up to grab the portable drive back, but she quickly stuffed it in her own pocket.
“Doctors can’t treat patients if they’re flying blind,” I said. “You have no right…”
“I know what you and all the other doctors are up to, Barnes. Normally I just look the other way. But with a case this vitally important, everything has to follow the plan.”
My eyes narrowed. I pointed my finger in her face.
“What’s so vitally important about this case? Some dead teenager?” I said. “And where is this Esmeralda Foyle I’m hearing about?”
She glanced down at her wrist, and, like a zigzagging running back, stepped around me and made for the door. We turned to face one another, like gunslingers. Her eyes shone with that dangerous, sharp glint.
“Every patient is important,” she said, her voice flat. “But we obey the rules, Dr. Barnes. You’ve always been good at balancing the two. Keep that balance and keep your job. There is no patient named Esmeralda Foyle at Saint Almachius, and never has been.”
She pushed through the door. It shut. Silence surrounded me. I glanced at the terminal, which was still locked. I had come to Cruzen’s room for answers, only to find more questions than ever before.
I left the room. My footsteps rapped down the hall, and I brushed past young nurses whom I barely recognized. The Kraken’s words rang in my ears. “With a case this vitally important”—what the hell was she talking about? She never went into patient rooms, since her managerial role was above such menial duties. Something about that dead teenager, Cruzen, made this case vitally important to her. There had to be something in those records, and I had to see them.
I slammed through the stairwell door, and smashed into a person carrying a tray, which upended and sent glass vials of many sizes smashing on the hallway floor. It was Betty. She snarled and punched me hard in the arm. Then she stooped to pick up the shards.
“Betty, damn, I’m sorry,” I said.
“Why don’t you look where you’re going, Joe?” she said. She looked up at me, a few pieces in her palm. “What, you still got your head up your ass about that dead kid?”
“Yes, actually,” I said, my voice echoing loudly in the narrow stairwell. I stooped to help her scoop up the remnants of the urine specimens. “The Kraken’s hiding something about that kid. And she stole my portable drive.”
“Joe, she’s a Bureau administrator. She’s a pain in the ass,” Betty said. “She’s just doing her job.”
She reached for another piece of glass, and I grabbed her wrist.
“Betty, this is different,” I said, pressing my fingers into her flesh. “She’s hiding something. Something big. Maybe something criminal. I can feel it.”
She just stared at me, a question and challenge crossing her face. A hostile look crossed her face that I had never seen before, and I drew back a foot or so. But I didn’t blink. She finally broke her gaze away, pulling from her pocket a shiny new portable drive.
“Take mine, then,” she said, picking up more glass. “Figure out what happened to the kid, then get back to work. The last thing we need is you to keep running into people and breaking stuff because of these paranoid delusions.”
I grabbed the drive from her hand. It was smooth, and lighter than mine.
“Why do you have one of these?”
“Even nurses need them, Joe. How the hell else could we treat the patients?”
I smirked and shook my head. I picked up two more fragments, but she shooed me away, with a wave of her hands.
“Just hurry up. I need it back,” she said. “Besides, the Kraken’s probably leaving the hospital about now for happy hour. Now’s your best chance. I’ll run interference. Hurry, hurry.”
I kissed her on the forehead gratefully. She rolled her eyes, pushed a button on her wrist, and spoke into her Atman.
“Ladies, it’s Betty,” she said. “I had a spill over here in the east stairwell, if you can come help me clean up, it would really help a girl out.” She shooed me away
with her hand. A moment’s pause.
“Sure, honey,” a voice chirped on the other end. “Be there in a sec.”
I stood and turned back through the doorway and walked down the hall. A gaggle of nurses rushed past me toward Betty’s mess, and I hurried past the empty nursing station. I ducked into the room where Cruzen died, without anyone seeing me.
I went right to the terminal. There was no time to lose. I plugged the drive in and punched some buttons on the touchscreen. A wealth of information popped up before me, and on the wall monitors. The screen was full of icons and blinking things I had never seen before. Truly, her drive had even better access than my own. After a few moments, the menus started to make sense. I noticed the records of my own encounters with Cruzen, the routine check-ups of Betty Bathory and other nurses. It reconstructed everything—stem-cell booster shot, meal, fluids, vitamins infusion, another meal, a vitals check-up. And everything seemed in order, in tune, and timed correctly.
But then I found what did not belong. I blinked.
The second entry from the bottom: a visit listed at 3:17 a.m. the morning Cruzen died. It was listed as a regular check-in. But there were never supposed to be any non-emergent visits between two and six in the morning.
Most baffling of all was the name listed: Shiro Ishii.
Shiro Ishii. I snapped my fingers, I mouthed the name. It was a name that didn’t exist at the hospital, I was sure of that. Even with all the Bureau turnover at the hospital, I always knew all the names, reviewed them and studied them and memorized them. The hospital census was the first thing I checked every morning. I felt it was my duty to know the lay of the land, the complete list of both of patients and staff. I knew I had never seen the name Shiro Ishii before. But still—it struck me as familiar, somehow. I didn’t know why, but I felt I had read it before, on some nameplate or in some book, maybe a long time before. Maybe someone had whispered it to me, or it was someone I had met a long time before.
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