Counting Heads

Meewee got out of bed and padded naked to the bathroom. Eleanor’s bunker shelter was roomy and well appointed. A party of thirty or so people, accustomed to first-class accommodations, could wait out a nuclear attack or biowar and its aftermath here in princely comfort.

Meewee cleaned up and dressed and went to the galley for breakfast. Wee Hunk was waiting for him as a life-size man in an ocelot fur robe. “A hearty good morning to you, O man of the cloth,” the mentar said, offering his ID in Starkese without even being challenged. “I do hope your little scuffle yesterday with the vacuum cleaners hasn’t interfered with your appetite. The kulinmate down here is loaded with exceptional dishes. You should try the sourdough waffles.”

Meewee only grunted acknowledgment and sat at one of the long, cafeteria-style tables. When a waiterbeitor rolled over to take his order, he eyed it warily before asking for juice, toast, strawberry jam, and coffee.

“You’ll be pleased to know I’ve identified the security breach,” the mentar went on brightly. “Apparently, there was dust adhering to your skin and clothes that carried instructions for subverting our household mechs. You probably picked it up while still at Starke headquarters.”

“Cabinet?”

“Probably, but not necessarily,” the mentar said, and a diorama of the clinic cottage interior opened on the table next to Meewee. “Ready for your update?” Inside the diorama, the tiny figures of evangelines and Johns were rearranging furniture. Meewee’s eye went directly to the daybed where a resurrected Ellen Starke seemed to be lying, asleep. It was a jacket, he assumed.

“She still comatose?”

“Sadly, yes. Her condition has not improved, and her prognosis worsens by the hour. According to the continuity counters, Concierge has not attempted to edit or distort my observations. However, it did intercept the amnio syrup sample I tried to smuggle out and terminated the employment of my evangelinian smuggler.”

“We must get our own specialist in there.”

“I don’t disagree,” the robed caveman said, “but I’ve come to the conclusion that our best course of action is to remove Ellen from the clinic and treat her here, with a specialized autodoc if necessary.”

“Here? In the bunker?”

The waiterbeitor returned with Meewee’s breakfast. He spread jam on his toast and took a tentative bite.

“Yes, in the bunker. In the null suite, in fact. I’m assembling an impromptu revivification clinic in there even as we speak. I’ve purchased a hernandez tank, syrup, controller, and all the various pieces. And I’ve located a suitable autodoc.”

They watched the activity in the cottage as Meewee ate. When he was finished, Wee Hunk said, “The big problem is how to remove her from the clinic.”

“I thought you were her guardian,” Meewee said. “Can’t you just sign her out?”

“Yes, but doing so would force their hand. If some agency is indeed killing her gradually, in order to make it appear to be a result of the reentry crash, giving them any notice of our intent would only result in her immediate murder. If we are to remove her, we must do so in a lightning assault with no forewarning.”

Meewee wiped his mouth and refolded his napkin. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

THE NEWS FROM upshift was that a swing shift evangeline, and not Renata, had been fired for breech of clinic policy. Mary couldn’t be sure of the particulars because of the inferential nature of evangeline communication, but it appeared that Celia, whom Mary hadn’t met, had dipped a small vial into the tank and tried to smuggle a sample of the amnio concentrate syrup out of the clinic. It was further intimated that she had done this under the instructions of their client’s mentar, Wee Hunk. Her smuggling attempt was discovered, however, and she was summarily discharged. Nick rescheduled Renata to cover today’s evening shift and assigned Georgine to fill in this morning.

When shift overlap ended and Cyndee and Ronnie departed, Mary and Georgine cast about for something “stimulating” to do with their client.

“Let’s read to her,” Mary said and took the library from the shelf. But it wasn’t a library. It was heavy, and the pages were made of paper. It was a book. The evangelines sat next to the daybed and examined the dusty antique. The first two pages were blank. The book had been published in 2013, in Boston. That must have been the old Boston. There were no glyphs, icons, or illustrations of any kind. The text was threaded across 240 actual pages. When you touched a word, it did not pronounce or define itself or display its links. It just sat there on the paper like a stain.

On the daybed next to them, the Starke jacket was arranged on her back with her head on a pillow and her hands crossed over her chest. She looked as peaceful as a corpse. “We’re going to read from your book,” Mary told her and lifted the jacket’s hand to touch the pebbly surface of the book cover. But the book had not been mapped with a vurt analog, and so the jacket’s hand went through it. “Never mind that,” Mary said.

She opened the book and read: “The Apple Orchard, by Delany Kay. Chapter One, ‘Jae.’”

It was a day out of days when persons of flexible demeanor irradiated themselves with units of satisfaction or puzzlement or anxiety in accordance with their prescription. Through an act of carelessness, a bolus of nonspecific grief was released into the forward compartment. It floated unnoticed throughout the ship until Jae Taxamany, pulling herself through a bulkhead hatch, collided with it. Suddenly, for no good reason, Jae began to weep.

Mary was drawn immediately into the tale—it was plainly a love story—and took turns with Georgine reading it aloud for an hour, when they were interrupted by Medtech Coburn. He led his supply cart through the cottage door and mumbled something unfriendly as he passed the evangelines.

“That’s enough reading for now,” Mary said. “Georgine, allow me to introduce Matt.”

“Coburn,” Coburn said.

“Matt likes to be called Coburn,” Mary said.

“Dittoheads,” he muttered under his breath.

Mary was stung by the slur, and Georgine opened her mouth to make some retort, but changed her mind. Instead, Mary asked the medtech if there was anything they could do to help. Coburn assured her there wasn’t, except to leave him alone. Nevertheless, the evangelines stood in front of the tank to watch what he was doing, and after a while he dropped an empty nerve spool on Mary.

The evangelines took the hint and returned to the daybed. Georgine rolled up Mary’s sleeve to look for bruises. The spool hadn’t been heavy, and this wasn’t the real reason she rolled up Mary’s sleeve. She was actually hiding a yellow stain of amnio syrup the spool had left on Mary’s sleeve. If Wee Hunk wanted a sample of the syrup so badly, perhaps this one would do. “How’s that?” she asked Mary.

Mary honestly didn’t know. Would Concierge see through their ruse? Was this sample valuable enough to justify the risk? It was hours before she’d be leaving the clinic, so she didn’t have to decide just yet. She held out her other arm for Georgine to roll the other sleeve to match.

WHEN MARY TOOK her lunch break, she wandered the grounds, greeting strangers, and trying to appear approachable. At the tennis court, she watched a match. On the golf course, she had a slice of cheesecake and an iced coffee at the Nineteenth Hole. A steve waited on her. When she asked for the check, he said no one paid for such trifles at the clinic.

Passing the dining commons on her way back to the cottage, Mary ran into Hattie with several of her jenny colleagues. “Here she is,” Hattie said, presenting Mary to the others. “One of our newest health care providers.” The Jennys fussed over Mary and told her that their aff guests had been asking about them. Also, everyone was acutely curious about the Starke girl.

Hattie told her colleagues to go on ahead, and she walked a little way with Mary alone. “I want to give you a friendly piece of advice,” she said, “since you’re new at this game.”

Mary immediately thought she’d been found out. She began to unroll her sleeve and was about to swear that she’d only been trying to hide an ugly stain, not to smuggle amnio syrup out of the clinic. But Hattie said, “We Jennys are trained to deal with this from childhood. It’s never easy, but you and the other ’leens should probably prepare yourselves to lose your client.”

“What?”

“It’s not your fault, and I’m not saying it’s a certainty. Heaven knows, we’ve seen miraculous turnarounds before, but it doesn’t look good for Starke. You saw her fetus. It’s not only not gained mass since yesterday, but it’s actually lost some. It simply cannot thrive while she remains in a coma. If she doesn’t regain consciousness soon, it will die.”

Mary, not sure what to do with her arms, held them behind her back and said, “But that in itself wouldn’t kill her brain, would it?”

“No, it wouldn’t, but there’d be no point in grafting on a second fetus. That never works. Starke’s only option then, assuming she eventually woke up, which isn’t a given, would be to live as a brain-in-a-box. Faced with this, most people choose to die.”

Hattie wrung her hands, a typical jenny gesture. When she continued, she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper and said, “There’s some who say that reviving the dead is an abomination against the Creator, but I say that’s horse pucky. In most cases, we can fix what killed you and restart your engines without resorting to deals with Satan.

“But in the case of trauma—deep, massive tissue trauma—the sort that Starke suffered before her safety helmet kicked in—did you know that the force of the crash liquified the rest of her body?—well, it puts these people into a different class of dead. It’s not like they died by drowning or hemorrhaging or something easy like that. Extreme trauma does something to people. It’s like they don’t even want to come back. And if we do manage to save them, they don’t fully recover. They’re broken people. So I wanted to warn you and your sisters that you should prepare yourselves for the worst case.”

The conversation with Hattie was disturbing. It sounded as if the nurse had already given up on Myr Starke.

MARY ENCOUNTERED CONCIERGE on Mineral Way. “Ah, Myr Skarland,” it said warmly, “I was just on my way to Feldspar. Our guest has company. Mind if I walk with you?”

“Please do,” Mary said, her guilty arm involuntarily slinking behind her back—for all the good that would do.

There were three realbody guests in the cottage, a woman and two men. They wore clothes that had not come out of an extruder, and they slouched in the insolent pose of wealth. Aff friends of aff Starke. Georgine was in the upper room with the tank, staying out of the way. One of the men wore vurt gloves and used a special comb on the sleeping woman’s hair. He looked up when Mary and Concierge entered. His lidded gaze barely glanced off Mary and riveted Concierge with an intensity that was at once commanding and dismissive.

“You be the clinic machine,” he said, not a question but a statement of fact.

“That is correct,” said Concierge, “the clinic mentar.”

“This all wired up?”

“Yes, Myr Orex. Myr Starke’s jacket is completely mapped to her brain.”

“Good,” he said and seemed to wipe Concierge from his awareness. He combed the jacket’s hair with long graceful strokes. The muscles of his shoulders and arms rippled in an odd way, and Mary realized they’d been rehung on his skeletal frame. It was a recent aff fad. Slight alterations in the attachment points; longer, stronger tendons; more numerous bundles of thinner muscle fibers gengineered with feline DNA. The bones were reinforced as well.

The visiting woman sat next to Myr Starke on the daybed. She, too, wore gloves, and she held the jacket’s hand. “Ellie, dear, it’s me, Clarity,” she said. “Do you have any idea how inconvenient this is? Did you forget about our touchstone test today? Baby, we’ve got a problem. Renaldo (the Dangerous) is all wrong for the part. Won’t you please come out to discuss this with me? I hate to make these decisions by myself. Enough of this coma crap.”

“You have to kiss her, Clarity,” said the other man. He was a generically handsome fellow with traditionally human musculature. “That’s how it works with sleeping beauties. I should know; it works on me.”

Clarity said, “Is that right? You’ve been tanked, have you?”

“Six times!” the man said. “And each time right here at the Roosevelt. I’ve got my own reserved tank. Isn’t that right, Serge?”

“It’s nice to see you again, Myr Thorpe,” Concierge replied. “I notice you haven’t managed to kill this body yet.”

The man guffawed. “Not through any lack of trying,” he said.

Someone new came into the cottage: a heavyset man with coarse white whiskers and fleshy jowls. He wore an iconic artist’s smock and beret, and he carried a large wooden case under his arm.

“A Sebastian Carol!” Clarity said upon seeing him. “I didn’t think there were any of those left.”

“There aren’t,” Concierge said. “At least not on the public nets.”

“Explain.”

“Because data flow is restricted through clinic space, we maintain our own simiverse here for the enjoyment of our guests. We have a subem dedicated to hollyholo generation and a stable of over a thousand characters, some of them rare collector’s items, like our Sebastian Carol here.”

Sebastian Carol moved about the room, checking angles with bloodshot eyes. Settling on a spot, he held out his wooden case, which sprouted legs and an easel. “You, negress,” he said to Clarity, “remove your garments and scoot a little to your left.”

She ignored him and asked Concierge, “If you have an independent simiverse, who does your plot management?”

“That happens to be my pleasure.”

“I see,” Clarity said doubtfully. “And what do your clinic guests think of mentar-driven plot mats?”

Before Concierge could answer, the man brushing Starke’s hair said, “Clarity, must you always talk shop? It’s so incredibly boring to the rest of us.”

The other man said, “Serge, how many hours since Ellen was unclenched?”

“Fifty-seven.”

Starke’s friends exchanged a look.

Two more hollyholo sims entered the cottage, the two doctors Mary and Georgine had passed on the footpath. When Clarity saw these, she frowned and said, “Do tell, Serge, how the clinic’s stable came to acquire a Renaldo (the Dangerous). Ellen and my production company bought out the entire edition of him, or so we thought.”

“Don’t be concerned,” Concierge said. “It’s a beta version. We were a test site for the original producers. Our private simiverse makes ideal testing conditions, something you and Myr Starke might keep in mind the next time you have a new character in development.”

The sims approached the daybed. The Renaldo character said, “’Lo, folks. Don’t get up. Just making my rounds. I’m Doctor Ted, and I’m giving my colleague here, Doctor Babs, a tour of the wards.”

“Good to meet you, Doctors,” Clarity said. “I wish my friend, Ellen, were awake. She’d like to meet you. Especially you, Doctor Ted.”

“I’m flattered,” Doctor Ted said and produced a medical chart from thin air. He studied it briefly and said, “A tragic case. This is Myr Ellen Starke of the Starke dynasty. Her space yacht was hijacked by a rogue mentar, and Ellen was killed.” Doctor Ted pulled an antique stethoscope from his jacket pocket and draped it over his shoulders before continuing. “Her cryonics helmet only partially stabilized her alma mater, resulting in insult to her cranial conundrum. But have no fear; our cracker-jack staff here at Roosevelt Clinic have put things aright, and our guest is making salubrious progress. We’ll have her decomatosed in no time at all.”

Clarity clapped her gloved hands and said, “We never thought of making Renaldo (the Dangerous) a doctor. Kudos to you, Concierge. Don’t be surprised if we steal your idea.”

“It would be an honor,” said Concierge.

Because they had begun to talk shop again, and because she was invisible in this crowd anyway, Mary joined Georgine at the tank. The medtech had applied skin-growth gauze to the skull, hiding most of it. Mary took a daisy she’d stolen from the lake path and crushed its bloom next to the control unit’s olfactory grate.

THE FAUX DOCTORS, visitors, and mentar departed the cottage, leaving only the Sebastian Carol behind. “Young ladies,” he said, waving a paintbrush at Mary and Georgine, “remove your garments and sit over there.”

MARY WAS HALFWAY to South Gate at the quarter hour of french fries, quitting time, before she remembered the stain on her sleeve. Somehow she’d managed to forget it all afternoon.

“What’s wrong?” Georgine said.

“Nothing. I just remembered something I have to do.”

Georgine gave her a shrewd look and said, “I saw a public extruder in the gym today.” That meant that Mary could order new clothes in the locker room. She could toss her incriminating suit into the digester and take a sauna, and no one would be the wiser.

But Mary hated to be such a coward, and she said, “Never mind. I’ll do it later.”

Without discussion, Mary held back to let Georgine leave the clinic grounds first, so she wouldn’t be implicated by association in case something happened. When Mary judged that Georgine had had time to clear the clinic property, she held her breath and went through the gate.

Reilly was still on duty, and Mary scolded herself for involving him in this. But no one stopped her. Reilly said he’d see her and Fred at Rolfe’s later for their regular Wednesday get-together, but Mary told him Fred had some big job tonight.

And then she was out and up the hedge-lined drive, and Georgine was waiting for her, full of sisterly pride.

“RESULTS?” MEEWEE ASKED.

“Still analyzing it,” Wee Hunk said, “but the syrup’s oxygen, nutritional, hormonal, and pharmaceutical properties all fall within normal parameters.”

“Then why hasn’t Ellen waken up yet? What are they doing to her?”

“Perhaps it’s as the nurse said: perhaps she was injured too severely.”

Meewee weighed this possibility against what he knew of the girl. Ellen wasn’t as bullheaded as her mother (who Meewee half expected to return from the dead herself), but she was no quitter either.

“I must say,” Wee Hunk continued, “the evangelines baffle me. They seem to have a communication system as subtle and flexible as Starkese, and largely nonverbal. It’s completely opaque to me; I can see that information is being passed, but I can’t read it. Is there such a thing as cellular communication?

“Also, I would have thought that news of their colleague’s discharge would have instilled fear into the rest of them, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. I didn’t ask them to make another attempt to acquire an amnio sample.”

“I know what you mean,” Meewee said. “I’d never paid much attention to the type before. I always thought they were bred to be lapdogs.”