Master Chief Carlos responded a little differently.
“Holy,” Carlos said. “Holy… cow.”
Greetings, friend Carlos, Cheeirilaq said. I am Goodlaw Cheeirilaq. A constable, of sorts.
The translation came from Carlos’s tablet, because he didn’t have a fox. He touched his ear, and so I noticed he was wearing a bud in the canal.
He said, “A giant praying mantis cop? You have got to be kidding me.”
You are not in any trouble. I would like to ask you a few questions about your experiences.
Carlos looked at me. I said, “You don’t have to cooperate. But the Goodlaw would not lie about your legal status. If it did, and you were in trouble, the courts would throw that out.”
“Due process,” Carlos said, his shoulders relaxing. “That’s a relief.”
It was a bit of a relief to me that he recognized it for what it was. That made me think that integrating these survivors of the deep past into Synarche society might actually work out pretty easily.
I was worried about Carlos’s wife, also. I knew she wasn’t in Ruth’s load of pods, because we had the serial numbers and Helen had checked. Singer was coming in behind her—or might already be here—with a bigger load. But that meant I didn’t know where she was, or if our colleagues had retrieved her yet.
And nobody could know if she would survive rewarming.
I thought Carlos’s continued avoidance of the question meant he was scared for her.
He looked at Cheeirilaq, tipping his head. “Well, you might as well come the rest of the way in.”
Cheeirilaq did, and shut the door behind it. Even folded to its smallest profile, it seemed to fill up the entire isolation room. It slowly extended one raptorial forelimb and pointed at the datapad. You are studying government, friend Carlos?
Carlos waved one hand. “I think it’s some kind of educational game.”
I stepped forward, glancing at the pad. “That’s the modeling protocols. It’s a sector of the government. Synizens can play through simulated problems, and then one or many of the Grand Council’s subcouncils process the results to a series of models to determine policies and outcomes.”
A line formed between his brows. The hand dropped. “Is this really how you run your country?”
I had to look up the archaic word. “Our polity, you mean?”
“If you prefer.” He sounded amused, as if I were splitting hairs. Didn’t country specifically refer to physical terrain on a planet?
“It’s part of the process,” I said. “I’m not an expert. But the game allows Synizens to model an extremely large number of policy paths, and from the repeated models and results—and occasional individual inspiration—a superior policy emerges. Structure modeling has been experimentally proven to consistently produce better results than relying on experts. Democracies, from Before, were a primitive way of managing the math.”
His face stilled, as if assessing a threat. “You don’t vote?”
“You haven’t woken up into a totalitarian nightmare,” I said, laughing. “Don’t worry. The Synarche’s index of personal freedom is around seventy-nine percent, and the index of well-being is close to eighty-seven percent. Those are the best numbers in human history.”
They’re the best numbers in Rashaqin history, too, Cheeirilaq stridulated. It hadn’t moved from its post near the door—it hadn’t moved at all, except to breathe. Essentially, I’d been treating it as a large, emerald-colored chitin statue, and from Carlos’s start I could see that his limbic system had forgotten to be afraid of it.
“Just the local constabulary,” I reminded him as his heart rate spiked.
“Do they eat you for traffic tickets here?”
I have never eaten a sentient, Cheeirilaq said. And only once or twice contemplated it. Your amino acids probably wouldn’t agree with me anyway.
They would be fine, but this seemed like a bad time to point that out.
Carlos looked at me. “Joking,” I mouthed.
He sighed. “You are very large,” he said to Cheeirilaq. “But not too different from some Earth species that were part of my ship’s biosphere.” Carlos held up his fingers about eight centimeters apart. “Is it offensive if I say we carried them for pest control?”
As long as you recognize that I am a great deal smarter, I will not be offended. Cheeirilaq’s head rose, its thorax inclining toward the vertical. Its face swiveled toward me. I assume I am a great deal smarter?
“Infinitely,” I agreed.
Excellent. After a fashion, I also specialize in pest control.
* * *
I walked back to my quarters, contemplating a nap. It had been a long dia, and it wasn’t getting any shorter. My exo didn’t let me trudge, but it was definitely doing 90 percent of the work of motivating me along the corridor.
I should have been planning my data requests regarding the “safety incidents.” But I kept thinking about what Rhym and Hhayazh had told me. I was a Core General staff physician. I could just… go and see what was going on back there in the private ox ward.
Couldn’t I?
My fox was all-access. I wouldn’t even need a suit. And there was direct access to the private unit from the Casualty Department, so I wouldn’t have to worry about the still nonfunctional lifts, or suiting up beyond decontamination protocols.
I had every right to be there. And nevertheless, I felt a chill as I contemplated it.
My species is very good at picking up unconscious cues and aversions, being highly social animals. We are excellent at reading the room and knowing what is expected of us and whether we have overstepped somehow.
And yet I didn’t want to go back there. For no reason at all.
So I found myself wondering, given the intensity of my desire to avoid finding out what was back there—or even speculating on it—if some small aversion (a don’t-see-me, a denial bug, a Somebody Else’s Problem field) hadn’t been added to the hospital staff fox updates at some point.
Sally, I asked inside the privacy of my own senso, what do you know about the private units?
She hesitated.
Sally?
Know from personal experience? Nothing. Additionally, I am unaware of any public details regarding the functioning of these units.
What do you speculate, then? Or what have you discerned?
As you know, she answered, everyone in the Synarche is guaranteed a high minimum standard of care. Everyone is entitled to be as healthy as possible, given the limits of technology.
I would have tapped my fingers on my exo, but I was much too sore for extraneous movement.
Up to and including transplants and regeneration therapies.
“Clones,” I said. “We don’t grow them with anything more than autonomic brain functions, because that would be unethical.”
So all patients receive the highest standard of care. Anything else would, likewise, be unethical.
I slid through the door to my quarters. It had hardly closed behind me before I stripped down to my exo, wiped myself off with a lemon swab that didn’t smell a thing like real citrus oil, and tipped myself into my bunk before my gear had even stowed itself. My limbs ached. My feet felt heavy and overlarge.
My exo needed a charge. I hooked it to the trickle and tried to get comfortable.
“Right,” I said. “I certainly try to provide that. And I know that you do, too. So… what’s in first class? What are they getting that we’re not?”
Now that we were in private, Sally spoke out loud. “Concierge service. Their pillows fluffed. Chocolates thereon. Expensive resources: human labor, surface foods.”
“Huh,” I said. “Did the unit AI tell you that?”
“There is no unit AI.”
“There what?” I sat up so fast I almost dropped myself out of the hammock.
“There is no unit AI.”
A sour feeling settled inside me. “That can’t be right.”
“Nevertheless,” said Sally. �
�It is true.”
* * *
It was a terrible reason to break into a medical unit. Well, all right, it wasn’t technically breaking in. But as much as I was a full-time doctor now, I’d been a doctor and a cop before. One does not become either of those things due to a congenital lack of curiosity.
I was tired and in pain. I tuned myself for wakefulness and pain relief, knowing that it would cost me later in backlash. But later was not now. I climbed back out of my hammock and dressed in fresh scrubs. I even combed styler through my hair and programmed my overworked frizz to a nice, tight, professional cap of curls.
My exo’s charge light was still blinking. It could process a certain amount of electricity from my motions, but that wasn’t the same as a nice fat eight-hour trickle. Still, I should be good for another standard, if I didn’t try anything too strenuous.
Even if I ran out of juice, it wouldn’t be as if I couldn’t move at all. It would, however, hurt much more, and involve a lot of groaning and hobbling.
Piece of cake.
It wasn’t far to Casualty. I suited up in the hall, for the anonymity it offered—and the biohazard protection. Just in case there was something unsavory going on back there that was also contagious, rather than merely the exploitation of resources by the rich.
Imagine what it must have been like hundreds of ans ago—back in Carlos’s dia—when there was no Guarantee, no Income, no useful work for anyone who wanted it. No promise of safety and health and security. Only exploitation under various systems all claiming to be different, but all amounting to the farming of the many to make wealthy the few. Serfdoms and indenturehood and chattel slavery.
Explaining the future to him was going to be interesting.
The Casualty Department was positively eerie in its emptiness. I hadn’t been back to Sally recently, and I hadn’t expected the complete lack of patients and the nearly complete lack of staff. One lone Ceeharen triage nurse waved to me from behind the desk across the big reception deck without raising their head. They appeared to be bent over a reader or game board of some sort.
I waved back and kept walking, angling far enough from the desk to preclude casual conversation, and headed toward the entrance to the private unit.
My footsteps echoed through the eerie emptiness. I braced myself for whatever bullshit I might be about to witness, and keyed myself in through the door.
Battery levels critical, my exo said. Fatigue levels excessive. Recommend recharge and sleep cycle as soon as possible.
I know, robot. I know.
* * *
My exo quit about ten steps after I crossed the threshold. I couldn’t see the telltale on my wrist through the suit, but I knew it would be blinking orange.
“Exo, are you there?”
The only thing breaking the silence inside my suit was the soft echo of my own voice inside the helmet. The senso link in the lower quadrant of my visual field blinked EXO 0% BAT, just to add insult to injury. Orange, when moments before it had been yellow and at 7 percent.
One thing primitive humans did have going for them was a lack of stuff that runs on batteries. And, more to the point, runs out of batteries.
I realized I had stopped in a doorway and, pushing against my exo, hastily stepped through. Decompression shields are designed like guillotines.
It’s a terrible thing if an unsuspecting sentient happens to be standing under one when it closes. Worse, though, if that didn’t happen—for all the other unsuspecting sentients that might be explosively decompressed if the doors failed.
That was another reason for me in particular not to stand in the way. My exo was featherweight, breathable, barely there. And made of sandwiched nanofilms and conductive, contracting polymer. Conceivably, the door might not be able to cut through it, if I was under it when it fell.
They might be privileged fuckers in here, but I’d hate to be the person who ensured the deaths of every patient in the private unit. And the staff certainly deserved better.
Once I was moving, I continued to step forward as briskly as I could manage. Now that it was dead, the exo offered resistance rather than assistance when I moved. It seemed to compress my limbs and torso, pushing back against me with every step as if I were strapped into a zero-g resistance machine.
There were patient rooms down the hall. Maybe I could get to one and peer through the window, check the monitors. I made it five steps farther into the private unit and dragged myself the last sideways half meter into an alcove along the corridor. Two multispecies bench seats crouched intimately across from each other. An old-fashioned curtain on rings hung from the bar across the top of the door. Enough privacy for delivering bad news. Not enough privacy to encourage bad behavior.
I flipped the curtain across to hide my distress. I didn’t sit down because if I sat, I was only going to have to get up again. And I’d rather not embrace that particular experience.
But I needed to get out of the public view for a moment. Gather myself. Force myself to move confidently, like a medical professional with every right to be here.
And not like somebody on the verge of a total systemic collapse who had stolen a staff uniform in some misguided attempt at escape.
A sensible human being would have gathered her resources, steadied her nerves, and turned right back around as if she had forgotten some important piece of kit. A sensible human being would have marched back through the other decomp door and gone back to bed. Would never have come here on a restless sleep-shift whim in the first place.
A sensible human being would spend less time jumping out of perfectly good spacecraft than I did. I was not, perforce, a sensible human being.
I squared my shoulders, embraced my inner warrior, and flicked the curtain aside.
The corridor was not crowded by Core General standards. I spotted a variety of ox-breathing staff and one lone Ceeharen, whose beneficial metabolic needs split the carbon dioxide my type of sentient produced and converted it back into oxygen and carbon. Nobody looked strangely at my softsider quarantine suit, or even appeared to notice me. It was a reasonable enough precaution, and doubled as a light environmental suit if the environments you were passing through weren’t too extreme.
Given the lack of functional lifts, we were seeing a lot more of them in the hospital corridors. People had to get to work.
I had no idea what I might be looking for. I had no reason to be here, other than curiosity and a nasty itchy sensation.
I felt, to be perfectly honest, like I was going through my wife’s private messages, looking for evidence because I suspected her of misleading me. Not that I had a wife anymore, or any reason to suspect one of malfeasance. But you know what I mean.
I knew it was ridiculous. I believed in this hospital. I had faith in this hospital.
And yet, here I was. Checking up.
* * *
The private unit looked like a perfectly normal hospital unit, albeit one with nicer rooms. Several were inhabited, bodies in a range of beds designed for three different species. I spotted holowindows and possibly even a real viewport or two through open room doors. Several more rooms were obviously empty. Waiting for the next sentient with the resources to buy their way in.
I kept walking, sweat stinging my eyes inside the helmet. Softsuits weren’t meant for anything this strenuous. As strenuous as walking down a hospital corridor under moderate spin gravity.
It hurt, and because I didn’t feel like being in pain, I decided I would rather be angry.
Being angry is a skill I have a lot of experience with, though I worked pretty hard in my military years to learn not to tote anger around with me all the time. There’s constructive anger, which motivates you to get up off the ground and get things done. There’s righteous anger, which motivates you to protect the afflicted and downtrodden. There’s helpless anger, which just makes you feel useless and turns you mean.
And there’s self-pitying anger, which gets under your skin and eats you away like a slow d
rop of acid if you let it.
This was probably two parts righteous and a half part each self-pitying and helpless, which wasn’t too bad a ratio to work with.
What could these kinds of resources—these resources that lay behind these quiet corridors and mostly empty private rooms—have meant to me as a kid?
The alchemy of my anger made the pain easier to bear and gave me energy. I tried to put my feet down softly, so I wouldn’t seem to be either staggering or stomping past the admin station, and because it hurt when I slapped them into the deck.
Don’t get so pissed off you lose your shit, I told myself. These people are not getting better care than everybody else. It’s just that the décor is a little bit nicer.
And they got to be important. There are some people, even in these enlightened diar, who do enjoy being important. That got up my nose as much as anything.
It was easy to forget, once I was angry, that I had decided to let myself be angry. Because it was useful. Because the adrenaline gave me strength to keep moving when exhaustion weighed me down.
One room had a human in it. An old woman, asleep on her pillow, gray locks spread around her in the most photogenic possible manner. I thought about going in and talking to her. I might have, if I hadn’t been so tired, and in so very much pain. The ache seemed to start in the soles of my feet, the nape of my neck, and the small of my back and radiate through my entire body.
Beyond the private rooms, I found another decompression door with another staff filter. It was too much; I’d come too far. My heart pounded so hard that I felt it in my belly. The corridor walls seemed to pulse in the edges of my vision.
I rested a hand on the back of another chair set against the wall, trying to look as if I were casually checking my senso. I wished on the first evening planet in the skies of whatever the closest world might be that I could lock the knees of my exo to help hold myself up. But a stiff-legged limp would be pretty obvious.
At least the softsuit hid my heavy breathing, though my faceplate had fogged around my mouth and nose. Not a top-of-the-line faceplate, but Core General used a lot of them.
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