Project 137

by Seth Augenstein

  “So what you’re saying,” I said, “is that these people deserved to die because they were fans of a despicable popular culture.”

  “Last season’s winner had sex with a horse on live television, man,” Lamalade said. “But the guy couldn’t collect his winnings until after he got out of the hospital. And you should have seen the horse.”

  “Sam,” I said, affecting my most professorial tone. “Even if these people were not innocent—what does it solve, really? What does killing random people do to improve anything?”

  Lamalade grinned, and for the first time, I could see the lopsided nature of the man: the crooked teeth, the shiny-eyed glint, the splotchy cheeks, the glee in the premature wrinkles, and that bulbous wart. He was only thirty or so, but at certain angles he looked like a man twice that age. I cringed a bit looking into that visage.

  “Oh, you think it doesn’t improve anything,” the patient said, settling back on the pillow. “But you can’t see the forest for the trees, man. You can’t see that by saving a single life, you might cause a thousand to die. Or by killing fifty who deserve it, you can save ten thousand who deserve to live. You can’t see my point.”

  “Alright,” I said. “Make me understand.”

  With a coy smirk, Lamalade turned away, like a flirtatious young girl.

  “I’m not supposed to tell,” he said.

  I sat back down.

  “So someone gave you orders.”

  Lamalade scoffed.

  “Listen, man, I don’t take orders from anybody. Nobody’s pulling these puppet strings,” he said, pinching at the shoulders of his hospital gown, wires from his fingers dangling. “But we all have to answer to somebody in this lifetime.”

  He paused, glancing up at the ceiling. I felt around in my pocket to make sure the Atman was still there, still recording. Lamalade sighed, breath rattling in his chest.

  “Man, we have to be willing to do some bad things for the greater good,” he said. He labored to inhale. “Occasionally, you’ve got to take a great leap forward by being a person of courage and character. Not just obeying what you were taught in preschool, or what you read in a religious book. You can’t just be a couple of claws scuttling across the floor of the ocean, man.”

  Those words unlocked something in me, like an incantation. They were so familiar, from somewhere deep in my past. I could hear the echoes of my father’s voice, from his chair in the old house, a lifetime ago. This psychopath hadn’t gotten them exactly right. But I could nearly remember their pattern, that rhythm. Where had those words come from?

  “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this—I’ll probably get in big trouble,” Lamalade said. “You see, it’s all an experiment. Everything is an experiment. It’s all trial and error, man.”

  I shook off my reverie and pointed at him.

  “What do you mean, an experiment?” I said. “What are you saying?”

  “Man, you don’t even know. You don’t even know.”

  Lamalade yawned, slowly. He closed his eyes and sank further into the pillow, with a strange little shudder. In a single moment, his skin flushed to a patina green.

  “Mer-da,” Lamalade mumbled. His jaw fell limp, mouth agape.

  “No. Wake up. We’re not done talking yet,” I said, springing forward, shaking the patient’s shoulders. Lamalade’s head rolled limp on his neck. He wasn’t asleep. I felt for a pulse at his jugular. There was none.

  “Nurse!” I yelled, running to the door, looking both ways down the hallway. I rushed back to the bedside and pushed the red panic button on the wall. It started blinking. Footsteps tipped, tapped, slapped down the hallway. Three nurses and two emergency doctors burst into the room. I pointed at the patient, directed them to fetch the paddles. The doctors opened Lamalade’s eyelids, shone a light in, and opened the patient’s shirt. The oldest nurse came over with the defibrillator, slathered with gel.

  “We’ve still got a chance. He’s been gone less than a minute,” I said.

  The other doctor, a bespectacled young woman, pulled Lamalade flat on the bed.

  “What the hell happened?” she said.

  “I don’t know. He has plague,” I said.

  “Then what the hell good is the defib?” said a third doctor, also young and unfamiliar to me.

  “This man can’t die,” I barked. “He needs to live.”

  The male nurse among them charged up the paddles and waited for the order. I gave it. The nurse shocked the heart, and Lamalade’s torso bucked up violently. Nothing. I gave the order again. Again, a convulsion—and again nothing. The nurse looked at me. I nodded. A zap, and nothing more. Cursing, I waved them off. They scattered.

  Culling, who observed unseen from the edge of the room, emerged from the shadows in the corner to document the death scene, to download the data from the patient’s monitors. He moved around the body like a wraith, slow and silent. I stared at him in disbelief, like I was looking at the angel of death itself.

  The young doctor with the glasses came around the bedside to me. She had a shock of curly hair and the youthful face of the perpetual intern, the seasonal worker of the hospital.

  “Dr. Barnes, did you say this patient had plague?” she said, pushing the glasses up her nose.

  “Yeah, he was the suspect found in the apartment complex a few days ago,” I said.

  The young doctor looked at the bedside, where Culling took notes on his Atman. Her brow wrinkled, she shook her head.

  “Everybody around here knows this patient,” she said. “But I was with the treating doctor when he said the stem cells had worked. His blood was clear of Yersinia pestis. They were taking him to the county jail tomorrow. He was cured, the treating doctor said so.”

  “What treating doctor?”

  A young male doctor at her shoulder shrugged.

  “Asian guy. Never seen him before. Middle-aged. He didn’t talk much, but he muttered some affiliation with an Ivy League school. Very quiet.”

  The mention of an Asian doctor from an Ivy League school sent a jolt through me. I held my finger up, my mouth open like I was about to say something, but I turned and dashed off. I reached my office on the third floor in a minute flat, and frantically scanned through my computer looking for the name and the number of the stem-cell researcher. It had to be a coincidence; it couldn’t be that big a deal anyway. It’s not like doctors with Asian names were scarce at Ivy League schools, after all. I myself had worked with dozens matching that description during my time as a student. At the bottom of the screen, I found a small entry for the call weeks earlier: the doctor who had written the study on the premature deaths from stem-cell treatments, the one on sabbatical in Guatemala.

  The name was Yoshiro Fujimi.

  I checked the roster of doctors and nurses in the hospital’s database. And at the bottom of this list, like a speck of gold on a riverbed, were the same two words, although they were backwards. The shock of recognition hit me.

  Fujimi Yoshiro; Yoshiro Fujimi. The same exact name.

  I said it over and over again, practicing the pronunciation like it was some incantation, syllables meshing together like a sing-song spell: Yo-she-ro-fu-ji-mi, Ro-fu-ji-mi-yo-she. The words spiraled out of control, took on their own swirling life in my head.

  Mi-yo-she-ro-fu-ji.

  Head spinning, I picked up the Atman and called the Ivy League office number I had on file. No-one picked up. But the recording of a young female voice said the same thing I’d heard before: Professor Fujimi was on a lengthy sabbatical conducting research in Guatemala, and he was out of the office indefinitely. I hung up.

  But still it continued. Fu-ji-mi-yo-she-ro. Ji-mi-yo-she-ro-fu…

  I took a deep breath. Sitting back, I held my head in my hands as I slowed my brain’s revolutions. There was no reason to believe it was the same person. No name was unique any more, not after the world’s population had reached eleven billion, way ahead of predictions. Nothing new existed under the sun. Yoshiro Fujimi or F
ujimi Yoshiro—either way it could be a common enough name among the Japanese. No reason to jump to conclusions. I calmed myself, thinking of all the Joes I knew, all the Steves and Michaels and Claras and Patricias, and even the Blaines and Blakes and Jesuses, monikers which were unusual enough. I knew at least three of each and every name, and they were of all different colors and creeds. Hell, I knew a LaQuan who was redheaded Irish—and a José who was a hulking Russian. There could be any number of Yoshiros and Fujimis in the world, and they could be from any corner of the mixed and matched medley of the 21st-century global village.

  But Meruda. That was a name I hadn’t ever heard—except on the lips of dying men. Who was this woman who so captivated the flickering lives of men on the brink? I had to know.

  Turning away from the terminal, I thumbed absentmindedly through the paper book I had taken from Wetherspoon’s office. I came upon a picture of screaming children walking down the road, away from a blackened, burning sky. Soldiers talked in the background. In the center of it all was a naked girl howling, her arms held out at her sides, like her seared skin was balanced atop her arms and would fall off with any movement. Her mouth was impossibly wide, like she could swallow the world. I knew it was old, but there was no caption. For some reason the picture made me think of my unborn child. I picked up my Atman, tapped a message to Mary, and waited for her to respond. Stowing the book underneath the desk, I leaned back, with my hands behind my head.

  And in walked the Kraken. She rolled her eyes at my relaxed posture. I had to smile at her timing.

  “Thought I’d find you here,” she said, sitting down in a chair. “Dogging your rounds again, Barnes?”

  “Suzanne, do we have a new doctor on staff here?” I said, ignoring her question. I sat forward, folding my hands atop the desk.

  “Actually, that’s what I came to see you about,” she said. Her eyes were pointed down at her Atman. “Perhaps it was a mistake to designate you as our spokesman over the last few weeks.”

  “I thought I handled those responsibilities remarkably well,” I said.

  “You’ve been talking to that reporter—what’s his name, O’Creep or something?”

  “Jim O’Keefe. You told me to handle the press. I talked with him a few times. I had to.”

  She looked up and nodded, biting her upper lip to keep from smiling as she savored some delightfully-bad news. My heart sank at that executioner’s joy, the barely-suppressed mirth. Something heavy was coming. She was moving in for the kill, and I was the prey, I knew.

  “Well, the administrators were told that was not the case,” she said, slowly. “We have reports of you being seen with O’Keefe over coffee at a local diner.”

  I could feel my skin turn warm and clammy. They had seen. They had eyes everywhere.

  “Just a short interview,” I said quickly. “We ran into one another. He recognized me from the time I had him thrown out of the hospital.”

  “The hospital’s cameras show you receiving a call, then hurriedly leaving on the ultrahighway in the direction of the Lenni Lenape Automat Diner. The eyewitness also says you handed the reporter a pile of old papers stolen from the hospital.”

  I shook my head slowly. She was grinning.

  “They were only some documents shared between myself and another doctor,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “Dr. Barnes, we know you took those files from Cornelius Wetherspoon’s office,” she said. “You stole hospital property and made it public. It’s not only an ethical violation, it’s also a legal violation, according to Bureau regulations. I could have you arrested and charged by the end of the business day.”

  “It was not hospital property,” I said, scoffing. “It was my property Wetherspoon gave me before he disappeared.”

  “Yes, Doctor. I’m sure he also authorized you to kick in his door.”

  Now she was positively beaming. I smacked the desk, once, hard. My temper simmered, a dangerous feeling I struggled to tamp down. I had to maintain control.

  “Well, I guess you trust your spies more than your own employees,” I said. “So where does that leave us?”

  “Funny you put it like that,” she said. She paused, gazing down at the Atman as if it was a crystal ball. “Really, it’s out of my hands. The federal code says you must be suspended indefinitely.” She looked over her shoulder at something. Something black. I squinted. It was a camera in the corner. I’d never seen it before in all my years in that space. It had to be new. She snapped her fingers at it.

  Sweat beaded my brow. I looked at her face. She stared at me with dead eyes, appraising me as if I was just a broken gear to be yanked out of the machine. But I fought down the tremors in my voice.

  “Some Asian guy is taking my job?” I said, guessing.

  “When you say it like that, Barnes, it sounds racist. But in a word—yes,” she said. “Dr. Fujimi came to us highly recommended from the Ivy League school where he teaches. He’s an icon in the Bureau’s experimentation division. We figured while we had to fill an open slot, we might as well upgrade.”

  A shiver ran through me at the sound of the name. But she didn’t notice—she was staring at a few of my diplomas on the wall. She frowned thoughtfully.

  “Of course, if you were to return the stolen property back to the hospital, the Bureau might consider reinstating you.” She smiled, and she put her hand in front of her face, covering the wide smile, the hateful joy.

  I stared at her. I leapt up and lunged toward her, jabbing an index finger in her face. My hand quivered with rage. I had lost my battle for control, and my anger had taken over.

  “I don’t know what part you’re playing in whatever’s going on,” I said. “But I will find out. I will expose you.”

  She snarled, standing, eyes wild. She jabbed her finger in my face. We looked like two ineffectual fencers, with tiny swords pointed at each other. The ceiling camera rotated a bit, focused on us.

  “What’ll you do, team up with that idiot reporter? Don’t threaten me, Joe Barnes,” she said, sneering. “Your patients died, and you are a failure. You compromised hospital security. I’m going to ensure your medical license is revoked.”

  She smiled.

  “You can pack up your things, Doctor. And if you get the stolen property back, you can crawl back here, and grovel. Maybe I’ll consider—just consider—bringing you back on board.”

  I snarled at her, grabbed my necklace, picked up my briefcase, and walked to the door. I didn’t glance back once at my office. She walked behind me, step for step. Waiting in the middle of the hallway were Stash and Stanislaw, the security guards, looking at me with apologetic faces.

  “Come with us, Doc,” Stash said.

  “You can pack up some things first,” Stanislaw added, nodding sadly.

  I shook my head and gestured them onward.

  We walked down the hallway. The Kraken stayed at the office door, tapping into her Atman, which blipped brightly. We reached the elevator, went inside, and Stash pushed the button. But as the doors closed, I noticed a white coat and a dark mane of hair whisk by. I stuck my hand out in the closing slot, opening the doors. I stepped forward and peered out. Suzanne Kranklein looked up and said something inaudible to the fast-approaching man in the white coat. The two shook hands. She ushered the stranger inside my office. Just before he entered, he swiveled his head to me. I squinted, and could just make out the pinched, academic face of a man. The man waved a strange farewell. I started to step forward and opened my mouth to call out.

  But big hands yanked me back in the elevator. The doors shut.

  “Sorry, Doc,” said Stash. “We have our orders to make sure you get out of the hospital safe and sound. And fast.”

  “Yeah, sorry, Doc,” Stanislaw said. “Once you’re in the elevator, we have to get you out of the building.”

  “We have to go back,” I said.

  “No can do, Doc,” Stash said.

  Two floors ticked by, and the elevator r
eached the ground. I waited for the doors to open. After a moment, I slammed my fist into the wall of the elevator. Pain seared through my fist, and I sucked in breath through my teeth.

  “You’d think after years of slaving away at this goddamned place, I could at least talk to the scab replacing me.”

  The doors still hadn’t opened. There was some kind of delay. I glanced at the guards. Stash had his finger on a red button, holding the door closed. His brow wrinkled.

  “Not for nothing, Doc,” Stash said. “But this wasn’t any normal kind of suspension. I mean, Slav and I haven’t thrown many people out before. We’ve seen violent criminals walk out of here on their own. But for you, there was a notice…”

  Stash looked at Stanislaw, who nodded.

  “We got this notice on the terminal downstairs,” Stanislaw said, nodding eagerly. “It was from somebody way up. Way beyond the Kraken. Someone from the Bureau of Wellness, with the holographic seal authorization on it and everything. It was marked ‘Urgent.’”

  I nodded. I tapped Stanislaw on his massive shoulder.

  “Not to worry, guys,” I said. “You’re just doing your job. I’ll get this all straightened out. It’ll be fine.”

  They nodded at me, meeting my eyes. Stash took his finger off the elevator button, and the door opened. Together we all walked out into the lobby, neat as you please, like nothing was wrong. The two guards were on either side of me, cramped into the revolving door. We all stepped a few paces out onto the front walk.

  “Best to you and the family, Doc,” Stash said.

  “I hope you get this all sorted out,” Stanislaw said. “And be careful, for chrissakes.”

  I nodded and shook both their hands.

  “Take care of the place while I’m gone,” I said.

  Three cameras followed my march to the parking lot. I paid them no mind. I got in the car and drove away without looking back. Just before the onramp for the ultrahighway, I stopped the car. I attacked the steering wheel, punching it, elbowing it, headbutting it in a primal fury. Years of work at an end, everything was over because of a worthless bureaucrat and the faceless scab now settling into an office I had earned after years of slaving away in the ICU. I had earned everything, and now it was gone. I punched the rearview mirror off the windshield, and my hand exploded with pain.