A.I. Zombie: Book 1 of the Space Station At The Edge Of The Black Hole Series

by L. A. Johnson

  "Okay," he said, looking as panicked as she had ever seen him. "You're right. Let's think it through. Maybe he did regain consciousness. And what if he's just blind? He was unconscious when he was brought in, so there's no way for us to know what condition he was in before he got here."

  Okay, that actually made sense. And it helped Lyra feel a little better. Maybe this simply wasn't as strange as it appeared to be.

  That's when the patient turned his head to look right at Lyra. She screamed and backed into Nancy, who also started screaming.

  Lyra's blood ran cold with those eyes staring right through her soul. Despite the pupils being huge and unreactive, she could swear he was looking at her on purpose.

  Vax just stood there with his mouth open. Then he drew his sword. Lyra wasn't sure whether he was planning on using it to think, as usual, to defend himself and Nancy, or to kill the patient. He looked pretty freaked out.

  Just when Lyra was sure that the singing noise the patient was making was the creepiest thing in the entire universe, the patient stopped. He took another long, deep, ragged breath and started again. This time it was louder, at a higher octave, and had a desperate, ominous tone to it. In other words, even worse than before.

  Lyra, Vax, and Nancy covered their ears with their hands. Lyra got another set of texts from Ian. Are you kidding me with this? She wanted to take out all of her current frustration on him, but halted, fingers poised over the phone keyboard, when she read his text.

  Numbers went even crazier again. What in stars name is going on tonight? Hope your crisis is going okay.

  Lyra frowned. Indeed. What was going on tonight? Was there any chance at all that the incidents could be connected? Ian obviously had nothing to do with the weird, singing, brain-dead to genius output medical mystery patient, but something was obviously going on. What if there were other weird things happening here on the station that were connected? One, it was all she had to go on right now, and two, she'd be willing to run down almost any lead no matter how crazy in order to get out of this particular room.

  "Hey, guys?" Lyra asked, texting Ian back a question that was nagging her.

  "Do you think now is really the time for us to be dealing with your relationship issues?" Vax asked.

  Lyra shot him a dirty look and tried and failed to ignore the comment. "Yes, this has to do with my date tonight. You should try dating. It would probably improve your mood and your bedside manner. Anyway, my date tonight, Ian is a scientist, you see. And he said that the algorithm experiment he was working on went all haywire, just now."

  Vax crossed his arms. "So?"

  Lyra ignored him as she received another text from Ian. She skimmed it and then turned her attention back to Vax. "You see, his experiment went all wonky exactly twice tonight. The first anomaly seems to line up timewise with the new song here from top forty radio patient, and the other one coincides with the exact minute that we all got the Patient Emergency Notification a little while ago."

  "That is weird." Nancy looked dubious, but interested. "It couldn't possibly be connected though, right? How could it?"

  "I don't know," Lyra answered. "But what if it's not just us, not just the patient. What if something is going wonky right now on the space station itself? What if it's affecting more than just us?"

  "Seems like a long shot," Vax said.

  Lyra knew he was right. She also knew she was going to get the hell out of this room now. "I know it's a long shot, but since there's no other working theories right now, I'm going to check it out."

  She texted Ian that she'd meet him at a coffee shop that was approximately halfway between his apartment and the hospital and headed out. "You guys text me if you figure anything out in the meantime," she called over her shoulder.

  Gorb doodled in a notepad he pulled out of his desk drawer. A doctor came in and called the next patient. He looked up before turning back to his doodling. Already behind on his paperwork, he was avoiding it. All of the cases so far this morning had been so boring.

  A tune played in the back of his head. A strange tune that was not familiar to him. At least not that he could remember. It seemed to come and go in his head and he found that his ideas about it had made their way into his doodle.

  Instead of the usual boxes and waves that he usually drew, there were quite a bit of circles. Which was funny, because circles were hard to draw with tendrils and were his least favorite.

  It seemed to him, thinking back, that every once in a while, he could hear one of the patients singing, but he couldn't be sure. He stopped doodling for a minute to listen, but right now there was only silence, so he couldn't confirm his theory.

  He went and got a cup of coffee and brought it back to his desk. Then he stared at it. He couldn't drink it, of course, he was a jellyfish. But he liked the way the liquid sloshed in the cup, and he liked carrying it around like he was important. Look at me with my coffee.

  He swished back and forth and took stock of the waiting room. There had been a dozen patients today, give or take.

  He grabbed a pen and began his morning ritual of trying to find a way to balance it where his ear would be if he had one. He had just begun when the odd singing started again. The same strange song he had been hearing on and off, even when he wasn't paying attention.

  He tried to place the tune. There was something familiar about it, but he still couldn't place it. He drifted up the hallway to confirm that the sound was coming from a patient room. Yup.

  Satisfied, he went back to his desk. Whew, there's that mystery solved. He grabbed the pen again and started to concentrate.

  Blaring alarms and red flashing lights lit up the room. These particular warning lights were rare, signaling a space station-wide emergency.

  Gorb loved the adrenaline of these moments and it always seemed to him like the place turned into a magical disco. That was, except for all of the shouting and running and stuff.

  Lyra came running in. "Hi, Gorb."

  "It wasn't me, this time," Gorb said, holding innocent tendrils in the air for her to see.

  Lyra didn't pay any attention to him, though and continued running past him down the hall.

  Gorb drifted down the hall to see what she was doing, which he could, because he could propel himself around without making any noise whatsoever, which usually allowed him to hear all kinds of juicy information.

  This time he drifted just close enough to not be noticed. That was the room with the patient that had been taken in while being pursued.

  Gorb remembered. The excitement from it had not died down yet, not by a long shot. Sure, the hornet EMT had recovered well and had left in a day, but the other guy.

  Well, Vax and Nancy were spending more and more time in there trying to figure out why the guy wasn't recovering properly. And they weren't in there just doing the usual hanky panky either. It seemed to have something to so with brain waves, but Gorb couldn't be sure.

  Gorb couldn't hear anything interesting from the room with Lyra in it, so he drifted back to his desk, continuing to think of all the weird recent events.

  And then there was the whole rat thing, he thought. Gorb hadn't been invited to the upper level management emergency meeting, of course, but he had heard about it. And the rat bar fight. And the possible quarantine.

  He smiled. Sort of. Not a smile that a non-jellyfish would notice, but it was there just the same. That's right, nothing happened in this hospital that he didn't know about. He prided himself on his nosiness.

  The alarms and flashing lights turned off, presumably because Lyra was there fixing whatever it was that needed to be fixed.

  He looked around the waiting room. All of the patients seemed to go back to being occupied by their phones or books.

  Vax came running around the corner too. "Hi, Vax." He didn't say anything, though, he just went to join Lyra.

  Gorb was just about to leave to go eavesdrop again when he heard a whirring sound behind him.

  "Oh hello," Gorb said. "W
ho are you? Are you that kooky robot that they talk about? The one that hangs out in the doctor's lounge even though you're not a doctor?"

  The robot was adorable. He was silver with a blue fin on his head. Gorb liked him. He was beeping like crazy, and also going around in circles.

  "Beep boop to you too!" Gorb shimmied back and forth in time with the robot's circles. A person ambled up to the counter. "Hello? I'm here to check in?"

  "In a minute," Gorb said, "can't you see that I'm busy?"

  "You're dancing with a robot," the guy said.

  Gorb didn't like his tone, and he didn't look all that sick. In fact, Gorb was torn between a comment and a threat to sting the guy for interrupting when Lyra went running by again. That's when he remembered that he had meant to go eavesdrop.

  "Hey, Lyra!" he called, "where ya going? Look! I made a new robot friend. This little guy is adorable, isn't he? He's all beep boop boop."

  "Sorry, Gorb," she said, blowing past. "I have to go. In the middle of a crisis. You know me."

  "But he's really cute," Gorb called out. "Look, he rolls around in circles, and his little antenna keeps blinking red. I think that means he likes me."

  Lyra stopped and came back. Her eyes flicked from Gorb to the robot and then stayed there.

  "Isn't he cute?" Gorb repeated.

  "Gorb," she said, her face scrunched up into an adorable frown. "How long's he been doing that?"

  Gorb did his best to shrug, but it didn't work. Probably because he didn't have shoulders. "I don't know. Maybe twenty minutes? Hey, what's the big crisis, can I help?"

  "Oh yeah, Ian," Lyra said. "Sorry, Gorb. I have to go right now, but I'm going to come back, ok? You keep MACRO here. I have some questions for him when I get back."

  "What's a Macro?" Gorb asked.

  "The robot's name is MACRO."

  "Ok!" Gorb waved a tendril at her, but she speed-walked out the door. "Bye, Lyra!"

  15

  L yra walked quickly toward the coffee shop where she was meeting Ian wondering what the deal was with MACRO. She had never seen him act that way before. Not with the circles, and not with that tone or frequency of beeping.

  She had to admit that most of this new theory of hers was simply an excuse to sneak out of that patient room, not that she believed that there was actually a connection. But what were the odds that Ian's issues would line up with the weird patient's timeline or that MACRO picked this exact moment to go crazy?

  She wanted to get the robot manual and do some more investigating, but she knew she didn't have time right now. Things were getting serious. One mystery at a time. Then it hit her. Arthur.

  She forced herself to slow down so she could text him.

  Remember our secret project? Grab manual, go to emergency room waiting area desk and figure out what in the name of our black hole he's trying to communicate. This is a priority. Text me when you know anything. Please.

  There. That done, she walked faster in order to find Ian. If nothing else today, she was getting her exercise. She was further toward the coffee shop than she thought however, and by the time she finished her text and lurched forward she nearly ran headlong right into Ian.

  The two collided.

  "Lyra? You okay? You look like you've seen a ghost." He chuckled.

  "Great," she said, "and here I was thinking I was doing a good job of hiding it."

  Ian's expression changed. "You mean you did see a ghost? What's going on at that hospital, anyway?"

  "No, no," Lyra said, trying to catch her breath. "No ghosts. Not exactly. But I am interested in finding out more about what is going on with your research tonight."

  "You really came all the way here to meet me in the middle of your crisis to ask me about my project?"

  "Well, it's more like Vax's crisis than mine," she said. That was the whole point of sneaking out of the room earlier.

  Lyra could see by his face that he was starting to seriously wonder what was going on. And she didn't blame him. She also wasn't exactly sure where she should start. Or how much to tell him. The last thing she wanted to do was to cause a panic. She didn't even know exactly what it was that she didn't want people to panic about.

  She took a few deep breaths and suggested that they keep going to the coffee house they were originally supposed to meet at.

  He nodded and led the way. At least that gave her a plan and a few minutes to think about what she was going to say and how she was going to say it. And if her hunch was right, and something weird was going on, then some caffeine wouldn't be a bad idea anyway.

  They ordered their individual coffee drinks in a surreal moment of normalcy.

  Strange things were afoot, she could feel it coming, she just didn't know exactly what to do about it or how to stop it. Maybe Ian could help. Maybe he would just leave thinking she was crazy. Only one way to find out. They found a table in the back that offered a little bit of privacy and sat down.

  "Thanks for the coffee, Ian."

  "Any time. Although, and please don't take this as a criticism, you already look a little stressed out, and I'm not sure that a double shot of expresso was the best idea." He held his hands up in a sign of surrender, upon seeing her eyes narrow at him. "But I'd also like to say that whatever this thing is, I'm in. And if this thing is going to keep us up really, really, late, and I hope it does," he stopped to wink at her, "then I want you to know I'm extra in. One hundred percent. Lay it on me."

  Lyra thought through the possibilities of what to say to him and then winked back at him. Then she whispered. "Okay, but no takebacks, because this is going to get really weird."

  Lyra wasn't at all sure that Ian was ready to hear what she had to say, no matter how eager he seemed. She took a gulp of expresso for courage before beginning.

  Ian raised an eyebrow. "I want to hear all about this medical weirdness. I think. But if that's what this is about. And I guess it is because we're whispering now. Then why in the name of your black hole would you be the least bit interested in my research?"

  Excellent intro, Lyra thought, I'll start there. "Because you texted it to me."

  He looked more confused. She took a sip of expresso.

  "Okay," she started again. "You see, there's this patient who's acting very strangely. He had no brainwave activity briefly, so technically you could say he was dead. Except that later he was sitting up and singing and at one point appeared to respond to stimuli."

  The stimuli in question being me, she thought. She repressed a shudder and decided that last part was better left out.

  Ian's face went a shade of white that Lyra found fitting for the turn in the conversation.

  "You're saying you have some sort of zombie patient?" He scooted his chair slightly away from her. It made a skidding noise and she gave him a sharp look. "Sorry. Um, but do you mind if I ask if the whole zombie thing is catchy? Because I've seen a bunch of these movies and they never, ever, end well."

  Lyra opened and closed her mouth. She hadn't even thought about it. Zombie patient? To be fair, it had been a very odd night, but probably not zombie apocalypse odd. "I don't think he's a zombie."

  "Why not?"

  "Well one, because there's no such thing as actual zombies. It's not in medical terminology at all. For a reason. Sure, there are rumors, but I've certainly never seen anything to believe that any of that stuff was real."

  "Until tonight," he countered.

  "Pretty sure it's not a zombie. Can we stop talking about zombies? I mean, if we're worried about anything possibly being catchy, what we should be worried about is the oversized mutant rat that started the bar fight."

  Ian's eyes got huge and that's when Lyra figured out that she had gotten off topic. And also, that she had already had way too much caffeine. She decided to stop talking for a minute. Except that she couldn't stop, because she had this horrible nagging feeling that bad things were happening right now, and she was running out of time. "Are you kidding me? You have to be the only person on Celestica w
ho hasn't heard about that bar fight."

  "Okay," he jumped in mercifully, "you do appear to have a lot on your mind tonight. There's the zombie patient zero and the mutant rat. Anything else?"

  Rats, plural, she thought. Lyra decided to go ahead and tell him everything. If she had to deal with all of the crap thrown at her, then he could as well. Hopefully. She would consider this whole thing a test for him. "Oh yeah there's one more thing, the robot's gone crazy."

  "What robot?"

  "The one that hangs out in the doctor's lounge. He always seems to know when something is about to happen."

  "Why does he hang out in the doctor's lounge? Is he a robot doctor?" He looked way too excited about the possibility.

  "No, Ian. He's not a robot doctor." She ran her finger through her hair. "Look. I know that this is confusing and that you're trying very hard to keep up, but that's not what's important right now." Her cellphone buzzed. It was Vax. She skimmed. The patient was doing something weird and new.

  "What's that?" Ian asked, probably seeing her expression change as she read the text.

  "That's Vax, head of surgery. He said the patient is doing something else that's new and creepy."

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know, maybe his head is spinning around. Maybe he is a zombie." Hold it together Lyra.

  Ian's phone buzzed also. He looked down at his phone and then back up at her.

  "Ok, what's your news?" Lyra asked.

  "Weird," he said. "My numbers just took another sideways leap."

  "See?" Lyra asked. "That right there. That's why I asked you about your work," she said triumphantly as she realized that at long last she had finally gotten to her actual point. And it was true, as far-fetched as it might be, it was why she was right here right now.

  He looked dubious.

  "Because the texts you were sending me about your project turning in a new direction, well it seemed to correspond to when the patient was flat lining or altering his behavior. And I thought that maybe strange events were happening on the entire space station and not just to this one patient. I was hoping anyway, because then maybe it would be less weird. But now that I say it out loud, I don't believe that to be the case. Not at all."