I, Robot: To Protect

Chapter 7

Susan chose to lunch alone, heading to the hidden charting room that had served as her on-call hideaway. She took her lunch and her palm-pross, dropping them on the central table in the cozy nook, but her real reason for coming was to find Nate. She sank into one of the unmatched chairs and opened her reusable lunch sack. Her father had packed her favorite: peanut butter on twelve-grain bread. She removed it from its container, took a bite, and chewed thoughtfully, studying the modular shelving, the well-worn textbooks, the computer-processing units, and the plastic storage boxes.

Susan had nearly finished her sandwich, her legs flopped over the arm of her chair, when Nate finally arrived, his tread light and his footsteps nearly silent on the tiled floor. When his gaze fell on her, he stopped, and a welcoming grin split his face. “Dr. Susan Calvin.”

Susan sat up properly in her chair. “Robot N8-C.”

“Call me Nate.”

“Only if you call me Susan.”

“Deal.”

For the second time in two days, Susan studied the robot. He still looked like nothing other than a tall, male human. He might have gears inside, but they did not stutter and whir. If anything, he seemed more graceful, more easily gliding than most humans. “Nate, can you sit for a little while? Do you have some time to talk?”

“I do.” Nate chose the chair catty-corner to Susan’s.

It amazed her how human that action seemed. Most people would have selected the exact same spot, comfortably close for conversation but not violating any personal space. Nothing about him suggested mechanization. Had he not told her, had her father not confirmed it, she would never have known his true nature. “Would you answer a hypothetical question for me?”

Nate spread his hands and nodded, clearly trying to calculate a purpose that had not yet become obvious. “If you wish.”

Susan leaned forward. “Let’s say a fire broke out in a chemical factory with one man trapped inside. Based on the last-known location of the man, and the composition of the fire, he is certainly dead. You also know exposure to the particular heated chemicals involved would destroy your circuitry. You’re told to go in and rescue the man. What do you do?”

Nate laughed. “Someone just learned about the Three Laws of Robotics.”

Caught, Susan could only join the laughter. “Indeed. So, what do you do?”

“Hypothetically.”

“Of course.”

Nate sat back with a sigh of consideration. “It would greatly depend on the specifics of the situation. The Laws have a balance that can actually push Number Two ahead of Number One or Number Three ahead of Number Two in certain situations. It’s not as black and white as the wording might, at first, seem.”

Susan continued to smile. She had been right.

Nate went on. “If I knew for a fact the man inside was alone and dead, Law Number One no longer takes priority. The issue of a human coming to harm from my actions or inactivity becomes moot.”

Susan nodded.

“Law Number Two commands me to obey all orders given by human beings. In your scenario, I’ve been ordered to rescue the man, presumably by a human being. If I know the man is dead, then the command becomes nonsensical; and, therefore, I am no longer obligated to follow it. In that case, Law Number Three comes into effect, and I must protect my own existence. So, assuming all the facts you and I presented, I would not enter the burning chemical factory.”

Susan had surmised as much when she had discussed it with her father.

“However,” Nate added, “if I had any reason to believe the man inside might still be alive, or another human being might be in danger, Law Number One would override all the others. With or without the command, I would do whatever I could to rescue those humans, even if it led to my own destruction.”

Susan liked that she could predict Nate’s actions, and she wished humans were that easy to read.

“Now let me add something to your scenario that might surprise you.”

Susan became all ears. This, she had not anticipated. “All right.”

“Let’s say I heard meowing coming from that burning factory and saw a girl crying and calling for her Fluffy. Then, I would also go inside.”

Susan paused in uncertainty. “To save a cat?”

“Yes.”

Susan tried to guess the reason. “Because . . . if the cat survived . . . the man might . . . also —”

“No.” Nate did not allow her to finish. “We’re still assuming the man is definitely dead.”

“The cat . . . ,” Susan started, then stopped. “The cat is not a human being. Law Number One says nothing about animals.”

“True.” Nate met Susan’s gaze directly. His brown eyes looked placidly into hers, so very real, so human. “But the girl is. Losing her cat would harm her emotionally. And so, by Law Number One, I’m driven to save it at risk to my own existence.”

Excitement thrilled through Susan, and she could do nothing more than stare. Instinctively, she had known the Three Laws of Robotics would not prove as solid and obvious as they originally seemed. However, she had not expected to discover such critical and expressive thinking from a robot. Her father had not given this positronic brain concept the credit it deserved. Clearly, robots did not just think and learn. Nate had applied logic to circumstances to account, not only for facts in evidence, but for complex human emotions. Susan knew more than a few living, breathing people with a lesser grasp of empathy than Nate. “Wow.” She could think of nothing else to say.

Nate straightened his dress khakis, then ran a hand through his short hair. He had gestures and mannerisms that made him seem all the more alive. “Are we finished, Susan?”

Susan met Nate’s gaze again, the remainder of her lunch forgotten. “Do you have a few more minutes?”

“A few.” Nate remained in his chair. “Do you have more hypotheticals?”

Susan sighed and straightened her own clothing. “Actually, this is a real situation. I have a patient who had brain surgery performed by a man they call ‘one of the greatest neurosurgeons in the world.’”

“Dr. Sudhish Mandar,” Nate filled in.

Startled again, Susan managed only a “yes.” Then, “Do you know him?”

“If you asked him, he’d say the greatest, not just one of a group at the top.” Nate planted both arms on the armrests of his chair, gripping the ends in his hands. “You should know that, although I have read all those books” — he gestured vaguely toward the shelves — “I am not considered a medical expert.”

Susan’s attention followed Nate’s motion. If he had read every book on those shelves, and retained even a quarter of it, he had as much knowledge as most physicians. “It’s not a medical question. It’s . . . moral.”

“Moral? And you’re asking me? Morality is a human construct.”

Susan disagreed. The Three Laws inflicted an honor on the robot that humans might not appreciate, even if they recognized it. “Nevertheless, I’d like your opinion.”

“Okay.” Nate settled back into his chair.

“The neurosurgeon has declared the surgery a success and no longer looks after the patient. For months, she was believed to have dementia” — Susan looked up to see if she needed to define the word; Nate waved her on — “due to presurgical swelling of the brain because of the initial problem or damage to the brain tissue during the surgery.”

Nate continued to nod his understanding.

Susan downplayed her role in the upcoming information. “Yesterday, we discovered this young girl’s dementia is actually due to heart failure. The cardiologists put her on medicine to help control it, and her mental status is clearing.”

Nate smiled. “That’s good news. Right?”

“Well, yes.” Susan gave a less than enthusiastic response. “Except they had to put her on very high doses of serious medications, and it’s only helping to keep the problem in check. It’s not a cure. My concern is the condition will soon overcome the medications; and, not only will the dementia return, but the heart failure will worsen.”

“And she’ll die?” Nate guessed.

“Eventually.” Susan knew a young, strong body had ways of compensating for congestive heart failure. Starling Woodruff’s already had, or it would have been discovered sooner. “She can probably go home, but she can’t live anything approaching a normal life until we fix the underlying problem causing the heart failure.”

“Which is?” Nate prodded.

Susan shook her head. “We don’t actually know. Heart failure occurs when the heart can no longer meet the metabolic demands of the body at normal venous pressure. A lot of things can cause it.” A huge list ran through Susan’s head. “Most of those have to do with the heart itself or the large vessels that pump blood to and from it. But the cardiologists have examined her heart and vessels with every scanner known to modern medicine. The heart’s electrical systems and tissues, its valves and chambers are normal. The large vessels have no abnormalities. There’s no big, honking tumor sitting in or near it.”

“And the other causes?”

Susan’s head did not stop moving. “Simple blood tests. She isn’t anemic. Her endocrine system and kidneys function normally. Her blood pressure is fine.”

“So the reason for her heart failure is?”

Susan still shook her head.

“You know, Dr. Susan Calvin. Don’t you?”

Susan’s head finally stopped moving. She bit her lower lip. “I believe I do.”

“And?”

Everyone else, including the cardiologists and her own attending, had dismissed her idea; but nothing else made sense. She wondered what Nate would think, especially in light of his reading those books. “The initial abnormality in her brain is called an arteriovenous fistula. In Starling’s case, it was congenital, meaning she had it at birth.”

Nate nodded his understanding.

“Normally, blood with oxygen in it flows from arteries to capillaries. The capillaries give the oxygen to all the tissues of our bodies, and the now-deoxygenated blood flows into the veins and goes back to the heart, then to the lungs, for more oxygen. With an A-V fistula, the blood flows right from an artery into a vein, bypassing the capillaries.”

Nate was clearly still following.

“Vein walls aren’t meant for the high-pressure flow of arteries, so the vein wall stretches. Blood pools in the stretched area, making it bigger. If it’s big enough, blood pressure falls. The heart has to pump harder to make up for it, and congestive heart failure can develop.”

“So,” Nate said carefully, “your concern is that the original A-V fistula wasn’t fixed properly.”

Susan cringed. Nate had summarized it perfectly. “And I, Psychiatry R-1 that I am, don’t see how I’m going to convince the greatest neurosurgeon in the world he made an enormous mistake.”

“Surgeons don’t have high opinions of the nonsurgical specialties.” It seemed more statement than question.

Susan could not forget her conversation with Kendall about that exact subject. “In general, that’s true. The more specialized the surgeon, the less he respects the medical specialties. Unfortunately, many of them consider psychiatry the lowest form of medicine. And, of course, R-1s are the lowest form of doctor.”

“Yet you are a doctor.”

“Yes.”

“And obviously a fine diagnostician.”

Susan flushed. She had no idea how Nate would know such a thing. “I’m all right, but mostly unproven.” She returned to her original question. “So here’s my thing. If you were in my shoes, what would you do?”

Nate sucked air through his nose and let it slowly out his mouth. “In your position, I would have no choice but to act in Starling’s best interests.”

“Of course.” It was the job of physicians always to act in the best interest of any patient, regardless of age, situation, symptoms, or desires. “And it’s clearly in Starling’s best interests to find and treat the cause of her heart failure. The question is . . . how?”

Nate drummed his fingers on the end of the chair arm. “It seems to me you’re in a better position to answer that. Are you sure the cause is a botched surgery?”

Susan doubted anything in medicine was a certainty. “Reasonably sure. If it’s something else, it’s an amazing coincidence; but amazing coincidences do occur.”

“Can you prove it?”

Susan bit her lower lip in frustration. “I could, but not without doing tests I have no authority to order, ones that require a neurosurgeon’s approval. It would also take a skilled neurosurgeon to reopen the skull and take another look.”

“So . . . you need a neurosurgeon.”

“Yes.” Susan realized bringing in another neurosurgeon would cause more problems than facing the old one. She doubted any other neurosurgeon at Manhattan Hasbro would dare to second-guess Dr. Mandar’s proficiency and decisions, and they would want to know his opinion first. “Someone has to talk to Dr. Mandar about taking another look inside Starling.”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Who indeed?” Though Nate spoke without emotion or accusation, Susan knew the answer. The cardiologists would only throw it back into her lap, and her attending refused to believe the great Sudhish Mandar could have made a mistake.

“Me,” Susan said meekly.

Nate only bobbed his head, more in thought than answer.

Susan glanced up at the clock. It read twelve thirty; she needed to get back to her patients. Sweeping the sandwich container into the bag with the rest of her uneaten lunch, she headed back toward the unit. “Wish me luck.”

“Luck,” Nate said, rising from his chair and heading back to his own work.

The unit phone felt like a lead weight in Susan Calvin’s hands as she punched in the Vox number for Dr. Sudhish Mandar and watched it enter the callback number. She considered using her own Vox but imagined she had a better chance of getting an answer if the neurosurgeon knew for certain the call originated from a number inside the hospital.

To Susan’s surprise, the callback came almost immediately. She picked up the receiver, her palms suddenly slippery. She felt as if someone had dried her mouth with a sponge and then shoved it, in a lump, down her throat. “Hello?”

A male voice in a thick, subcontinental Indian accent came through the receiver. “This is Dr. Mandar.”

Dr. Mandar himself. Susan had expected a resident or fellow, even a secretary or nurse to return the call for him. “This is Dr. Susan Calvin. I’m an R-1 on inpatient peds psychiatry. I have a patient —”

Anger tinged the voice. “You paged me during surgery!”

“What?” The word was startled from her.

“How dare you disturb the greatest neurosurgeon in the world in the middle of a procedure. I’ll have you know —”

Susan quailed, and her thoughts muddled. On her M-4 surgery rotations, the attendings and residents had always handed over their Vox to a nurse or unit clerk while they scrubbed. In her experience, surgeons never answered their own calls while performing an operation.

Dr. Mandar’s voice got louder, shriller, and ever more enraged. “The tiniest interruption can mean the difference between life and death. Who do you think you are that you can bother me while I’m completing —”

Susan stopped listening. She could not bear the thought of abandoning Starling, not when she had screwed up her courage to face the self-proclaimed greatest neurosurgeon in the world. She waited only until Mandar took a breath to say in a voice edged with deadly calm, “You can’t shout at me like this. I had no idea you would answer your phone in the middle of an operation. When you’re ready to have a civil conversation, call me back.” Decisively, she hung up the receiver.

Only then, tears stung Susan’s eyes. She found herself trembling in every part, and that only fueled her anger. She doubted anyone had ever spoken to Sudhish Mandar like that, and she wondered how long it would take for the consequences to reach her, how long before she lost her residency at Manhattan Hasbro.

Worried someone might see her in such a state, Susan wiped the tears from her eyes and sought a distraction. She saw the younger children lining up to use the outside playground, including a heavyset biracial girl who could only be Sharicka Anson. The four-year-old wore a pink dress with embroidered flowers, her hair swept back into a curly ponytail. Through the one-way glass, Susan watched Sharicka reach forward and pinch the boy in front of her.

The boy whirled, snarling, “Cut it out!”

Eyes locked on the television, Sharicka appeared innocently startled by his sudden movement, and the boy slapped the larger girl behind her instead. The other girl screamed bloody murder.

The nurse dashed over, pulling the two children on either side of Sharicka out of line and scolding them. Susan could not hear her words, but her face looked angry. The two youngsters waved their arms and shouted in reply, loudly enough for Susan to catch most of the conversation.

“She pinched me. Really hard.”

“I did not! He hit me for no reason!”

“She did, too.”

“It really hurt,” the girl said, sobbing.

Through it all, Sharicka remained focused on the television, appearing an oblivious spectator to the entire process. Susan suspected chaos broke out a lot in Sharicka’s vicinity; yet, somehow, she never became directly involved in the matter. Susan made a mental note to watch the girl closely, starting immediately.

Susan grabbed up her palm-pross and moved to the head of the line. The July sun beamed down upon the rainbow-colored playground, with its plastic slides, ladders, and runways. The sandbox contained the airy, antibacterial sand that had replaced the grit and cat turds that had characterized Susan’s own sandbox experiences growing up. A rideable ditch digger filled most of one corner, with pedals and levers for the children to dig in the sand.

A nurse unlocked the door. Susan went through first. The children followed, some pausing to blink in the direct sunlight and cautiously study their play area of choice. Others charged through the opening, heading pell-mell for the welcoming plastic structure, with its turrets, play bars, and tunnels.

Sharicka funneled through with the rest. Though she had surely played there many times, she scanned the equipment with a seasoned eye. Susan could almost hear the gears spinning in her little head as she marched to the tubes and ladders, climbed a slide, and rode down the plastic surface, bumping loudly against the sides. She seemed almost wooden in her play. She did not raise her arms to touch the wind, did not make “whee” noises, made no attempt to engage her caretakers or peers.

Susan feigned a complete lack of interest in the children, trying to look as if she were focused exclusively on her palm-pross and had only come outside to enjoy the beauty of the day. Sharicka went down the slide a second time, kicking and elbowing the sides but making no verbalizations. When she reached the bottom, she dug the toe of her shoe into a well-worn indentation in the recycled rubber. Soon, she became engrossed in it, scuffing at it with both feet while the boy at the top of the slide waited for her to move out of his way.

It soon became apparent Sharicka had no intention of clearing the path. Susan looked for the nurse and found her pushing a tall, silent girl in a swing, oblivious to the quiet drama unfolding at the slide. Susan did not interfere. She wanted to see what happened next.

“Sharicka, move,” the boy called down to her.

Sharicka continued exploring the worn spot without looking up, though she had certainly heard him.

The boy’s patience waned. “Sharicka, I’m coming down.” With that, he started down the slide.

Sharicka did not budge. Susan saw her roll an eye in the boy’s direction, but she did not step out of his way.

As he reached the bottom, the boy twisted sideways, hitting Sharicka in the side with his hip. Her knee came up as they fell, delivering a blow to his groin. As they tumbled over each other, he collapsed awkwardly to the ground, while she rolled a bit, then exaggerated it into a long, skidding movement that made it look as if she had sustained a heavy hit. She shrieked.

The nurse came running. “What happened?”

The surrounding kids started talking at once, describing the events of the last few moments from various angles. As Susan suspected, certain details became clear to the nurse. Sharicka had gone down the slide first. The boy had gone next and smashed into Sharicka. Therefore, it must be the boy’s fault.

Neither Sharicka nor her victim added much to the discussion. She only smiled, seeming to revel in the lecture the boy got about slide safety and in the tender way he walked, and let the description of the events play out in her favor. She headed to the other end of the play structure and crawled into a tunnel.

For several minutes, play continued without a problem. Then a smiling wisp of a girl entered Sharicka’s tunnel. Susan heard a thump. In an instant, the girl came out the other side, seemingly propelled and crying wildly. She had a red mark beneath her right eye that would surely bruise.

Again, the nurse came running over. “What happened?”

The weeping girl attempted to explain, but Susan could not understand a word of what she said. Sharicka poked her head out of the tunnel. “She tripped climbing over me.”

“Whoops.” The nurse swung the sobbing girl into her arms and carried her to the opposite side of the structure. “We can’t have that.” She turned her focus to consoling the girl, who buried her face in the nurse’s chest.

Worried Sharicka would notice her watching, Susan turned her attention fully on her palm-pross for several moments, actually managing to type some documentation before she dared to look for the girl again. This time, she found Sharicka studying the sandbox. A boy sat alone in the middle, meticulously sculpting something Susan could not yet identify.

Relieved of her burden, the nurse took a seat on a bench on the opposite side of the playground. She rubbed her brow, looking harried and tired. The moment the nurse’s bottom touched the seat, Sharicka ran over and hurled herself into the nurse’s lap. Susan could not hear what she said, but the nurse laughed and hugged her tightly. They sat there for several minutes, talking, laughing, and embracing occasionally. Had Susan happened upon the same scene in a park outside of a psychiatric facility, she would have assumed them a loving mother and daughter team.

More telling for Susan, during the time Sharicka sat safely on the nurse’s lap, the remainder of the children played without interruption. No one cried or shouted in pain. Nothing required refereeing. Not that anyone could mistake these for normal, happy children. They tended to play alone rather than in groups. Like toddlers, each engaged in his or her own activity, often despite the potential playmates less than a foot away doing much the same thing. Some chose one repetitive activity, such as the boy who did nothing but ride one slide from the moment he arrived until playtime ended. But all strife disappeared with Sharicka.

The quiet lulled even Susan, who managed to get some actual work done while Sharicka and the nurse interacted. The sounds of swings creaking, of children chasing one another through plastic tunnels, was so peaceful after the crying and screaming that had preceded it. The warm sun and natural light seemed a welcome change from stuffy corridors and low-energy bulbs.

Then, an anguished cry rent the air. Susan’s gaze went instinctively to the nurse’s lap rather than to the sound. Sharicka was no longer there. Susan then looked toward the sobbing child, the same girl Sharicka had kicked in the tunnel. The nurse confronted the child and a boy nearby. Sharicka appeared to have had no hand in the conflict; yet Susan suspected otherwise. It stirred memories of her M-4 psychiatry rotation. A resident she considered a fabulous teacher had once told her, when trying to find the conduct-disordered child in a family, not to ask which one is involved in the most conflicts but instead to ask which child is always on the scene when conflicts occur. A child with a problem on the conduct spectrum, whether simple ADHD or full-blown Conduct Disorder, can cause chaos merely by entering a room.

While the nurse dealt with the current problem, Susan watched as Sharicka took a seat on the excavator. The boy in the middle of the sandbox had, by now, constructed a lavish series of roads, with hills and valleys, populating them with stone “cars” that ran around dry sand hills while he made motor noises. Susan watched, fascinated, as Sharicka’s digging drew closer and closer to the boy’s art. Soon enough, a new conflict would occur, with the boy screeching about his ruined work and Sharicka proclaiming it all a bizarre accident.

The glass door opened, and a unit clerk poked his head through it. “Dr. Calvin!”

Susan looked in his direction.

“There’s a call for you.”

That surprised Susan. Though accustomed to pages, she rarely received direct calls on the unit. If Stony, Clayton, or one of the nurses needed her, they used the Vox system. Only outsiders or consultants used the phone. Consultants. Abruptly, Susan remembered her interaction with Dr. Mandar, and her heart started pounding. Oh, God. I’m fired. She raced to the door.

The nurse stepped aside to let her through, then handed her the cordless.

Susan tried to sound professional. “This is Dr. Susan Calvin.”

She recognized Mandar’s voice at once. “Dr. Calvin, this is Dr. Mandar.”

Susan’s heart felt as if it were trying to slug its way out of her chest. When he did not continue, she took a deep breath and began. “I’m wondering if you remember a patient named Starling Woodruff. She’s a thirteen-year-old white female on whom you performed an A-V fistula repair about two years ago.”

Mandar made a wordless noise that spoke volumes. Apparently, he did not recall Starling’s particulars, but he wanted Susan to continue.

“She’s been on the psych unit ever since because of odd behavior they attributed to brain damage from the surgery.”

Susan could almost feel Mandar’s ire rising. “That’s wrong. I have never damaged a brain with a fistula repair.”

Susan remained composed. Starling’s life depended on it. “I agree, Dr. Mandar. That was why I looked for other causes and discovered congestive heart failure.”

There was silence from the other end. Dr. Sudhish Mandar was listening, raptly, to a psychiatry R-1.

“Which is not responding well to medical management. The source of the failure is clearly still present, but Cardiology can’t find it. The only possible source, Dr. Mandar, is . . .”

“The original fistula,” he filled in for her. “I’ll be down this afternoon.” In an instant, the line went dead.

The moment it did, all the excitement of the moment hit Susan at once. She sank down on the nearest couch, not even noticing she was still in the patient area and that the boy on the next cushion was Diesel Moore. She felt dizzy, faint, and her hand trembled as she clutched the phone in white-knuckled fingers.

Diesel stuck his moon face into hers. “Dr. Calvin? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she assured him, though her voice sounded far away.

Kendall seized Susan’s arm and pulled her to her feet. Looping an arm around her back, he guided her toward the office. “Did I hear you say ‘Dr. Mandar’?”

Susan went with him without bothering to wonder where. He could have guided her to a slaughterhouse, and she would not have noticed. “Yes. Dr. Mandar. He’s coming down to see Starling.”

Kendall’s hand tensed on her arm. He did not speak again until he had taken her into the charting area and sat her down on a chair in front of one of the larger computer screens. “You talked Dr. Sudhish Mandar into coming down to see a patient?”

In an instant, all the residents in the staffing area, Stony, Kendall, Monk, and Nevaeh, were at Susan’s side, all talking at once.

On demand, Susan told them the story of her conversations with the hospital’s greatest neurosurgeon. Monk clamped a hand to his mouth. Stony laughed. Nevaeh merely stared at her through widened eyes. Kendall nodded knowingly and spoke first. “I’d heard the way to gain surgeons’ respect is to stand up to them. I’ve just never had the gall.”

Stony slapped Susan on the back. “Apparently, Susan has enough gall for all of us.”

“A whole bladder full,” Kendall agreed, and the others laughed. “I once watched her decapitate a neurosurgery resident. Should have figured she could handle the most important one in the hospital.”

Susan accepted the gibes good-naturedly, though she felt more nauseated than triumphant. She clutched her left upper abdomen. “At the moment, I think my gallbladder has boulders.”