The Dead Room Trilogy

by Stephanie Erickson

  The doctor went to work right away, and gently, but firmly, pushed Lehman out of the way.

  “Elder Lehman, please bring one of those candles over here, I’m getting a shadow,” he said as he cut some of the clothes and makeshift dressings away.

  “What happened here?” The question was a clear sign of his youth. He hadn’t learned not to ask such things of the elders.

  Mattli started the automatic response. “You do not…” A funny look came over his face as he straightened. “What has that answer ever gotten us before?” he asked, looking at Lehman. She panicked, thinking he wanted an actual answer.

  “He was stabbed by another elder. Branneth, if you must know. She’s lying dead in the woods. We have a bit of a mess on our hands here, Doc.”

  Lehman was shocked by his words. They were so forthcoming. So unlike him.

  “I see,” the doctor said, trying to cover his surprise by burying himself in the work.

  Sporadically, he asked for different items—towels, scissors, scalpel, water, and a few items from his bag.

  After hours of toiling, the sun started to rise as he sewed the last stitch on the outside of his skin.

  “He needs blood,” the doctor said.

  “Fine,” Lehman said. She rolled up her blood-soaked sleeve.

  “It’s not quite that easy. If you’re not the right type, it could kill him.”

  “How do I find out what type I am?”

  “We don’t. We don’t have that capability anymore.”

  “So, what? We just let him die?” Lehman asked, getting annoyed with the man.

  “Well, we could see if he recovers on his own, but that would take forever, if he even comes out of it. He could die at any moment. His heartbeat is faint, and his breathing is almost nonexistent. I can’t believe he even lasted long enough for me to sew him up.”

  “So what do you suggest?” Mattli said, his tone measured. Clearly, he was getting irritated with the man too.

  “Since he’s likely to die anyway, I’m suggesting a transfusion. Ideally from you, Elder Lehman. Elder Mattli is too old, no offense intended. Taking blood will unnecessarily weaken you.”

  “Fine. I already have my sleeve rolled up.” She held out her bare arm, showing him just how on board she was with the idea.

  “Great. I just need to run home and get a few extra tools to start the transfusion.” He ran out without another word.

  “Well, he’s a bit annoying.”

  Mattli didn’t answer. He looked up at Lehman. “I’m done, Elder Lehman. I’m done playing the games. This ends here, tonight. No matter what happens to Mason, we’re done.”

  The finality of what he said scared her. “What do you mean by done?”

  “I mean, the elders are over. There are too many of us. It’s become a power play, not the balance it was meant to be.”

  “So…” Lehman wasn’t sure what that meant for her or the island.

  “So, from here on out, you and I will govern the island with the input of the people. If Mason here survives, he will help. No one else. In the future, when one of us dies, the island can elect a new official to take the place. There will be no more career elders, no more grooming children to run the island. And no more secrets. Mason is right.” He looked over at the man, who looked like he might already be dead. There was so much time between each breath that it scared Lehman. She gasped when he finally breathed, not realizing she was breathing with him.

  “What was Mason right about?” Lehman asked, partly out of curiosity, and partly to keep Mattli talking. She feared he was on the verge of a total breakdown. The things he was talking about were so radical for such a traditional man, who was so set in his ways. The evening’s events had rattled him, and she wasn’t convinced he was making rational choices.

  “He always wanted more transparency from us. Not as much as his friend Ashley did, but they were both right. What good did keeping all these secrets do us? The dead room? Turning our people to ash? Nothing. It did nothing.” He turned away from Lehman rather dramatically and glared out the window on her back door.

  Struggling to keep up, she shook her head. Dead room? Ash? “Fine. So, we dissolve the elders,” she said, going to his side and staring out into the new morning.

  “Tonight, Mason may not have died, but the old way of life on this island did.”

  10

  November, 2024

  Ashby’s next four patients were a total success, just like the first. He was declared a miracle worker, with a stack of patients taller than him waiting for treatment. Doctors were begging him to go wide with his bots. Teach us how to do it so we can save the world, they pleaded.

  However, Ashby still felt it needed more work. The bots needed one last tweak before he felt comfortable unleashing them on the world.

  “We have to teach them to stop once they’re done. They should be learning bots, able to identify when their task is completed. We trained them to eat a specific disease. But their appetites are insatiable. Once the disease is gone, they’ll eat anything. And if I’m not there to supervise, things could get ugly with this many bots in play.”

  Hope nodded in agreement. “But how?”

  “There’s the rub.”

  He toiled over it for weeks, not getting to focus as much as he wanted on the problem with more and more patients knocking down his lab door. Who knew so many people were sick? For every Mrs. Loretti, there was another one right behind her, waiting for his miracle cure. It was exhausting.

  But eventually, something occurred to him.

  Programming. It was all about programming. They’d programmed them to eat the cancer. But he’d never gotten the programming quite right in teaching them to eat nothing but the cancer. It was time-consuming work, and he had to halt seeing patients for weeks while he worked on the bots, much to the chagrin of the medical community.

  Just when he thought he had it just right, a misplaced forward slash crashed the entire system, or an incorrect connection rendered the bot entirely useless. He’d fried more bots than he wanted to count by the time he finally got a result he wanted.

  He wanted to test his superbots on a chimp first, he did have one with cancer left, but the patients demanded help now. There was no time. So, against even his better judgment, he let them go into humans first. As he watched them make their way into the first patient, he somehow felt more anxious than he had with Mrs. Loretti. If this didn’t work, and they found out he hadn’t tested it first, he could lose everything, and Mendi would win. He hadn’t followed procedure. But he was simply giving them what they wanted. Or so he told himself when he was having trouble sleeping. He wondered if Mendi said similar things to himself, while he was lying in Judy’s arms.

  The night before the first insertion, he’d gotten the divorce papers back from Judy. Everything was final. She’d taken half of everything. He took the car, and he let her have the house. It was over. Anything he made from here on out was his. He’d even written that into the stipulations, and she’d signed them without pause. He wasn’t even sure she’d read them all. He wasn’t sure she even cared. He’d been replaced. Or maybe, he’d never even had a spot in her heart.

  He hoped that starting this new enterprise as a free man was a good sign as he lay awake listening to the lonely chimp in his lab that night.

  The procedure went off without a hitch. He’d selected a patient with a less-aggressive cancer so as to use fewer bots. But fewer bots meant more time to see results. Over the next several days, he monitored the man closely as his cancer shrank predictably. After about a week, it was gone entirely, and Ashby initiated the removal sequence. Only after they were out would he be able to tell if they’d stopped once the cancer was gone.

  To Ashby’s surprise, the man was not only cancer free but unharmed. It worked.

  Almost overnight, Ashby was made into a celebrity. The miracle man. The savior.

  Funds poured in as he struggled to keep up with production. Each hospital that could a
fford them got twenty bots. Enough to save five patients at a time with aggressive cancer, or up to ten with a lesser type. The price tag for that many bots was astronomical, and by the time Ashby paid for supplies, he ended up making a comfortable living, particularly now that he was on his own.

  The university allowed him to sell the bots this way because he’d included them in everything, even the patent application process. He struck a deal with them before agreeing to anything with interested hospitals. Each hospital agreed to make a donation to the university as part of the cost of the bots. Ashby didn’t know the details of Mendi’s deal, but Ashby hoped his had been better.

  As a result of their combined successes, the university was doing quite well. They were making plans to build a whole new wing on the school with the money. And it kept rolling in.

  Soon, he was able to rent a small, furnished apartment near the university, and it was then he realized how much he missed having his own space. For the first time in months, he sat in a comfortable chair and read the newspaper. He had leisure time. Granted, not a lot, and what he did have was stolen after a late night at the lab, but it was still there, and still better than that cot with his chimps.

  He was going places. Until something odd happened.

  One night, as he was reading the paper before going to bed, he noticed a small story buried on the bottom of page A12. It was a blurb, no more than three paragraphs along the left column of the page.

  A small headline read:

  Hospital worker dies mysteriously

  Doctor Leonard Greene, a renowned physician at Shands Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, died seemingly without cause doctors said. He was head physician and implementing Bennett Ashby’s new miracle cure for cancer.

  “He will be deeply missed, and the hospital is left scrambling to replace him and continue the work that was so important to him. Saving lives, that’s what mattered.”

  Greene is survived by his wife and three grown children.

  Ashby read and reread the article. Without cause. What did that mean? It could be completely unrelated, he told himself as he folded the paper and tried to stand from his chair, trying to comfort himself as he walked to his small bedroom. But what if it wasn’t?

  It gave him pause. In fact, it made him turn. Before he could second-guess himself again, he grabbed his keys and headed to the university.

  Normally, he rode his bike to his lab, but his car was faster. That late at night, he was able to park right next to the elevator and get to his lab quickly. He pulled out the first bot he could get to and double-checked all of its circuitry and functionality. Then he did the same thing on the next one. And the next, until all twenty bots had been checked. He had dozens more waiting to be shipped out in the morning to various hospitals, and he wondered if he should check them too, or chalk the doctor’s death up to an anomaly. Something totally unrelated to the robots.

  Before he knew it, morning was upon him. He didn’t notice Hope come in as he was standing over the hard cases of bots waiting for FedEx to claim them.

  “What’s up?” she asked, noticing his tense posture as he scrutinized the shipment.

  “Leonard Greene died.”

  “Oh, no. What happened to him? He seemed so nice.”

  Ashby thought that was such an odd thing to say. As if someone’s niceness had a direct coloration to how long they lived. Mean people must live very long lives, because no one ever said thank goodness, that person was a bitch. Good riddance wasn’t uttered when someone died young. No, it was always a shame. In this case, it really was.

  “Unknown cause is what it sounds like.”

  “What? Didn’t they do an autopsy?”

  “Not sure. If they did, it wasn’t listed in the paper. Poor man only got three paragraphs buried on the bottom of page twelve.”

  “Want me to call down there and see what I can find out?”

  Ashby looked up at her, grateful yet again for such an assistant.

  “I’ll do it right now,” she said, rushing off to the phone.

  She wasn’t gone very long. “I’m not sure you’re going to like what I have to say. I managed to speak to the pathologist who performed Dr. Greene’s autopsy. Told him you’d asked me to call and find out what had happened. Knowing how much Greene valued your work, they put me right through. He said Dr. Greene’s innards were like soup. He’d declined slowly at first, noting pain here and there, until it became debilitating. By then, it was too late. Scans and blood work showed failing organs across the board. The pathologist thought it was some superbug and has put the hospital on quarantine. They’re not accepting any new patients into the program until it can be locked down and cleared.”

  “A superbug?” Well, that was one explanation. Shands was a top-of-the-line medical facility in the nation. They treated everything. He could’ve been exposed to any number of diseases.

  Ashby took a shuddering breath. “A superbug.”

  Hope looked at the crate, now clearly as uneasy as Ashby was. “The way he described it…” She hesitated, and Ashby tensed even more, holding his arms out straight at his sides, frowning at the crate of life-saving robots. “Well, it sounded a lot like some of the early rats. Ones who’d been eaten alive by the bots.”

  Ashby shook his head. “It was a superbug, Hope. It had to be. Otherwise, other doctors, patients, and workers would be sick too. An isolated incident doesn’t add up to an epidemic. I’ve proven the new programming works. They learned to do their jobs. Remember, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one. Superbug makes sense.”

  “I think that’s what hospital officials are hoping,” she said, and Ashby knew they were right, except for a tiny niggling at the back of his mind, that he promptly ignored.

  11

  January 2025

  The call came two months after Doctor Greene died. Ashby was living the high life with his bots humming away and saving lives. He never heard anything more on Doctor Greene, or his cause of death. If it had been his bots, the pathologist would’ve been next. Someone. And it would’ve made more news. An outbreak of the superbug. However, things remained blessedly quiet.

  Until the phone rang. The number was out of state. “This is Ashby,” he answered, not sure who it could be. Maybe someone wanted an interview. Or another hospital wanted to join the program. Although, he had people who handled that kind of thing now.

  “Ashby,” the man on the other end said breathlessly, as if he was panicked. Something about his tone made Ashby grip the phone a little harder. “Please. We need help.”

  “Who is this?”

  “The bots. They’re out of control. People are…” Ashby heard a scream in the background.

  “How do you know it’s the bots?” Ashby said immediately, trying to think of a more logical explanation.

  “The containment room malfunctioned. It freed them all.”

  “Who is this?” Ashby demanded again, hoping beyond hope that it was a prank call.

  “It’s Frank Voskins. Director over at Colorado State Medical Center.”

  Shit. It was real. How could it be the bots? They would target diseases, not healthy flesh. Why wasn’t his programming working?

  Frank’s pleading interrupted his stream of questions. “Ashby, what should we do?” He expected an answer. Ashby was their savior. He would have an answer.

  But he didn’t. He had no idea.

  “Let me think. I will call you back.”

  Before Frank could respond, Ashby hung up and hurriedly laid the phone down on the table in front of him. He stared at it as if it were a foreign object, a bringer of death.

  “Is something wrong?” Hope asked from behind him. She was gently brushing the chimp’s hair, lulling her to sleep.

  He remained silent. He needed to think. “They could use an EMP. But it would destroy all the other medical equipment in the hospital. And could they even produce one large enough? Who knows where all the bots are at this point? It would have to be a large scale
.”

  Hope walked slowly over to him, but he didn’t notice. “Where could they get such a large-scale EMP?” she asked, picking up on the problem quickly.

  The military base wasn’t too far from the hospital. Maybe an hour or two. By then, the bots could be anywhere.

  His mind raced, volleying wildly between solutions and disbelief. How could this happen? He programmed them to be picky eaters, not voracious monsters. And the containment rooms. They were supposed to prevent this kind of incident. Someone must have breached containment protocol. It couldn’t be a malfunction on such a large scale. Human error made more sense.

  With a shaking hand, he picked the phone back up and hit redial. One ring. Two. Three. After nine rings, he gave up.

  He turned to look at Hope, feeling completely lost. “No one answered.”

  “Mr. Ashby, what is going on?”

  “A catastrophic failure.”

  He wondered if they’d thought to call in help other than him. “Hope, please look up the number for the closest military base to Colorado State Medical Center.”

  In the meantime, he called the CDC.

  “How can I help you?” a woman with a perky voice asked.

  “There’s some kind of situation happening at Colorado State Medical Center.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Not really. I got a call from the hospital director, saying the bots had gotten lose, and there was screaming in the background. I think they need to set off a massive EMP, but it will disable all the medical equipment that’s keeping people alive in the hospital. You need to take action and be prepared, or lives will be lost.”

  “Whoa, slow down, sir. What are you talking about?”

  He took a deep breath, and he tried to remember this woman wasn’t involved. She had no idea what kind of program they were running at the hospital.

  “My name is Bennett Ashby. Founder of C-Bots.”

  “Oh. Yes. I know who you are. What seems to be the problem, Mr. Ashby?”