Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  The quarantine unit was all white and chrome and smelled of profound cleanliness. As we processed through the outer layers of particle security, the orderly had to step into the full yellow NH suit. There were several layers to the processing, and each took time as machines in the walls scanned me different ways at the finest resolution and depth imaginable, looking for known and anomalous nano-borne infections. By the time we finished cycling our way through and emerged in the holding area, two doctors and five nurses, all in rigid Level One NH hardsuits, bustled around me, checking me out, talking to me, making sure I didn’t feel too stressed, asking if I knew how I’d got infected and other salient details. They also wanted to know about my level of medical insurance coverage. In other words, it was like going into a separate hospital within the larger hospital. It was also probably capable of complete isolation lockdown in case things got out of hand somehow.

  The thing that surprised me most about the staff here in the quarantine unit was how very “normal” they seemed. They knew I was a phage bomb waiting to go off, but it did not seem like a big deal to them. Where Dr. Panassos was still shocked out of his mind, the staff in the quarantine unit handled me like I didn’t have anything more worrying than the mumps. Admittedly, they wore the highest-level protection against nano infection available, but apart from that I would have guessed that they saw cases like mine a few times a day every day.

  I noticed, too, that there were no disposables here. The whole staff, doctors, nurses, everyone I saw, were all human to some degree. I took a wild guess and assumed they had been extensively modified, probably via nano. Disposables after all, could malfunction, and were particularly susceptible to being compromised in a high-risk environment such as this. It was probably the influence of insidious pro-human marketing at work in the back of my mind, but having an all-human staff around made me feel better about my chances, in case something went wrong.

  Later, Dr. Nildsen came by the transparent sealed box in which they had placed me. She was a serious-looking woman with display glasses perched on the end of her nose. I saw she didn’t have floating external headware modules. All her modifications, I felt sure, were more sophisticated and smaller.

  The doctor smiled. “This is no good!” she said, looking around the cramped confines of my isolation room. “How about a little privacy?” As it was, the quarantine unit’s staff could watch me at all times as they went about their duties. It was unpleasant.

  I liked her already. “Sure,” I said, and she opaqued the glass-like walls a little. It was a nice change.

  Nildsen came over, moving with surprising ease and grace in her cumbersome shell suit and sat on my bed. I moved my legs over to give her room. She smiled again. “So, Ms. McGee — do you mind if I call you Suzette?”

  “Yes actually. Only my parents called me that. My friends call me Zette, or just McGee.”

  She nodded. “I’m Sissel. Pleased to properly make your acquaintance.”

  I made similar small-talk, but went on to, “Any ideas what you’re going to do about my little situation here?”

  “As it happens, Zette, we do have a few ideas.”

  “Anything you can tell me about?”

  She looked a little coy, even mischievous. “We’re still determining if you are carrying any molecular surveillance devices. So no, sadly.”

  “Right. Tricky.”

  “Yes. Tricky is the word for it. We’ve already taken the liberty of spoofing transmission frequencies with a simulation of your voice and activity patterns, based on observations during the past few days of your stay with us. Which means—”

  “We can talk because any listeners are getting the idea that I’m still downstairs in the regular hospital.”

  “Something like that. We can take extensive precautions, but we can’t cover all possibilities. Surveillance devices develop faster than almost any other technology. To cover that possibility, we also have a system that would simply return a blank signal. It would look like you disappeared.”

  “Impressive,” I said.

  “Expensive, too,” the doctor added.

  “You know, I’d be grateful if you could find a way to get this bomb thing out of me without it, you know…” I made a hand gesture to indicate an explosion.

  Sissel smiled and nodded, looking a little bemused. “Indeed, Zette. Dr. Panassos wouldn’t say how you came to be the object of all this attention. Why is that?”

  I took a deep breath and explained about my murder investigation, leaving out the whole android situation. I said the victim was an “old friend” who came to me for help clearing his name. She nodded and asked intelligent, insightful questions in a quiet voice. I started to feel safe with her. At length, however, there was no more to tell except for my encounter with Hydrogen Steel, and at that point I stalled, and started to feel panicky again. Apart from the sheer difficulty of trying to verbalize the experience in all its horror, there was my perhaps irrational concern that somehow Hydrogen Steel would know someone was talking about it, and that it might consider such talk investigation. It all depended on how broadly or narrowly the firemind interpreted the term.

  “Listen,” I said, trying to think my way around the problem of wanting to explain about my encounter with Hydrogen Steel without actually talking about it, because that was still out of the question. Talking in a theoretical way about fireminds with Gideon was one thing, but actually saying the firemind’s name felt like a profound taboo. I felt like I’d rather die than utter it aloud in any way. And, for all I knew, maybe I would die if I did.

  Sissel was trying to help. “I’ve seen a few cases like yours in my career, Zette.”

  “Don’t tell me. You used to be in the military?”

  “No, actually. I was a civilian consultant to a security service attached to the Unity Europa, many years ago.”

  “That must have been interesting work,” I said, carefully.

  She nodded but revealed little. “From time to time, cases not unlike yours came to my attention.”

  “What did you do about them?”

  “It took us a long time to work out how to proceed, as perhaps you can imagine?”

  I said I could imagine only too well.

  “We did, in time, develop a somewhat drastic experimental technique. Until we complete our scans, I would prefer not to describe the procedure. We will, however, require your consent before starting, since there is a fatality risk.”

  “Show me where to sign, Doc, and I’m all yours.”

  “I’ll send in a nurse to see to that. There’s quite a bit of reading involved first, to make sure you are fully informed as to the risks.”

  “I promise I won’t sue if you kill me.”

  Sissel smiled again. “That is comforting. The problem, however, is that if your bomb detonates, it might conceivably take several of us with it, depending on exactly which type it is.”

  “God I love nano! Such a wonderful technology.”

  “It has its uses. Now, it’s also possible we shall need to perform the same procedure on your friend, Mr. Smith. I gather he’s being brought up here as we speak.”

  I nodded. “Poor bastard. When do you plan to get started, doc?”

  She looked conspiratorial again, leaning in close to me. “We’ve already begun, Zette.”

  “Already? Is it safe to tell me that?”

  “Just barely.”

  “Right,” I said. “Okay…”

  I was terrified.

  CHAPTER 19

  Sissel was not kidding when she said there was a lot of reading involved. The documentation referred to THE PROCEDURE. It took quite a bit of reading through the fine print before I could find out exactly what THE PROCEDURE actually was: they were going to make a quantum scan of my brain and nervous system and insert this into a freshly vatgrown body. Wh
ich, on paper, sounded so easy, as if people were built from component parts, like hovs. I wasn’t so sure it was as simple as all that. When I woke up after the Procedure, would I still be myself? Sissel told me the Procedure featured an application of android technology, more or less the same technology that had created the original version of me in the first place. So what would have changed? Would I still be an android? Would I be a human being? I was having trouble thinking through the issue, and it was making me feel a little ill.

  The real risks lay in doing the scan in such a way as not to somehow trigger the bombs, and in making sure the copy of my brain and nervous system embedded itself correctly in the new body. If it worked, I would wake up Zette McGee, but in a new body, with ninety-five percent of my memories intact, and with all, or nearly all, learned abilities and skills intact.

  If it worked.

  It terrified me thinking about what could go wrong, but, with shaking hand, I made sure to sign and initial the document in the 38 places the nurse pointed out to me.

  During the course of all this, I saw Gideon arrive, not looking well, propelled by perhaps the same orderly. Wait until he saw his consent form! He’d love it.

  Later, Sissel came back and said everything was sorted out, and they would proceed as soon as I went to sleep. So far they had determined that I was free of ninety-eight percent of all known surveillance gear, including all the common, cheap stuff. Whatever was left in that last two percent was the deeply scary stuff where it was like your soul could be tapped. She did report, however, that security people downstairs had run a sweep in the rooms Gideon and I had occupied, and found loads of listening equipment, including the transmitter sending signals to the dead-man switch of my bomb. Again, I wondered why an entity like Hydrogen Steel would employ such “crude but effective” measures. Then again, I thought, simple is often best.

  Sissel then scared me just about out of my skin by showing the transmitter to me. She had it in a utility pouch on the side of her hardsuit. “We had it sent up here so that any risk of the signal dropping out over extended distances would be minimized.”

  At first I thought she was just holding a small vial of water. Closer inspection showed something the size of about three grains of sand stuck together, sitting on the bottom of the tube. Giving it to me to have a close look, she said, “It’s still running. It’s emitting the faintest of signals. The techs barely spotted it.” I noticed she was almost whispering.

  “One of these in Gideon’s room, too?”

  She nodded. “Oh yes. Different spot, but yes.”

  “Have they started recycling those nurses yet?”

  “Not yet. There have to be some meetings first. Frankly, Ms. McGee, at this point we don’t have any definitive proof that our disposable nurses even infected you.”

  I opened my mouth to say something but thought better of it. I couldn’t tell them about Hydrogen Steel and how easy it would be for the firemind to crack through the seemingly impenetrable defenses in a disposable’s programming. If Gideon could do it with his secrets of the mystic East, then Hydrogen Steel, or its agents, could do it with barely any effort.

  I swore, this time doing it properly. Sissel looked shocked. I apologized immediately but tried to convey the sense of furious indignation I’d been developing over what one of these nurses had done to me.

  She understood. “It’s quite all right. Anybody would be upset in your situation. Now, then. It’s time for sleep.”

  “I’m not feeling particularly sleepy, doc.”

  “You leave that to us, Zette. I’m just going to adjust the bed to soothe your brainwaves, nice and gently, just like the regular process of going to sleep.”

  “You have done this ‘Procedure’ before, right?”

  “Many times.”

  “How many times did it work?”

  “About half.”

  I wanted to jump off the bed and run around screaming about those odds. Half the patients died during the Procedure? Strangely, though, I felt very sleepy indeed. “Bloody hell!” I said, surprised at the sensation. “I can’t keep my eyes…”

  And that was that.

  I survived, of course. But not in the way I’d expected.

  A nurse woke me to ask if I’d like her to tell the bed to put me to sleep again.

  I vaguely remembered when “put to sleep” meant euthanizing sick pets.

  Later, another nurse woke me to ask if I wanted something warm to drink.

  Later still, another nurse woke me while she ran some tests. She touched me with her hand in key spots around my body, all the while staring into interface-space. “I feel a bit strange,” I said, while she was doing this.

  “It’s to be expected,” she said. “You’ve had a busy night.”

  “I’ve had the Procedure? It’s done?”

  “We got all of it, Ms. McGee,” she said, smiling.

  “So it’s done? You got rid of the bomb? Even all those little pods of nano-goo and everything?” I looked under the bed covers, as if to see the evidence for myself. I looked more or less the same.

  More or less. I didn’t look exactly the same.

  Sissel came by as soon as she could. I was looking at my hands, back and front, trying the fingers and opposing the thumbs. These were not my hands.

  I was confused at first, unable to remember what had happened. At length, Sissel explained: “Don’t you remember, Zette? We grew you a new body and ported your consciousness across to it. It’s an application of android technology.”

  I almost choked with laughter thinking about the irony of the situation. “I remember now, Doc,” I said. “It’s just … this is a young body!” I looked like a normal twenty-five year old woman.

  I kept staring at my wrists and forearms. I was slender! Even when I had been twenty-five, I hadn’t looked like this. I was a Claudia 3.0. I was built like a brick shit-house. It’s who I was. Not this…

  I shoved the covers back and swung my legs out. “Oh my God!” It was all I could say for a long time. And then I noticed that my voice sounded different.

  “Doc…”

  “We made a quantum scan of your brain and nervous system and built a copy into this new body. We did discuss this before, Zette. You should be able to do everything and remember more or less everything you could before.”

  “I don’t bloody believe it!”

  I felt like such a stranger in my own body — except it wasn’t my own body. This wasn’t just a copy of the body I had; this was something different. I wasn’t ready for it, and didn’t know what to do with it. What the hell was I now — human, android, or maybe something else entirely? It was doing my head in just trying to think about it.

  “I cannot quite tell if you are happy with all this or not,” said Sissel.

  I looked up at her. “I’d say it’s a bit early to tell!”

  “How do you think Mr. Smith will feel about it? He’s still sleeping.”

  I swore, thinking about things. “You didn’t do this whole body transfer thing to him, too, did you?”

  “His body was similarly compromised, and in fact on the point of systemic failure due to age and abuse.”

  “But Gideon liked the idea of aging naturally,” I said.

  Sissel arched an eyebrow. “He decided he was not quite as committed to that idea as he thought.”

  This surprised me. “Even with a freshly-minted body?” I wondered what he’d look like as a younger man.

  “He said it was better than the alternative,” Sissel said with a shrug.

  Then I remembered more important matters. “What about my other body, then? What did you do with it?”

  “We deliberately triggered the bomb, remotely. Dissolution occurred in a little under three minutes.”

  I looked at her. “Three minute
s?”

  “It was fast. There was nothing left but hot water and some gases.”

  “God…”

  “The transmitter I showed you is no longer sending. It’s quite inert and already starting to break down. Indeed, all the surveillance equipment from both of your rooms downstairs has also died and is now breaking down. We’ve also contacted Station Police about the matter. They may want to interview both you and Mr. Smith.”

  I nearly panicked, thinking about another round of cops sniffing around in what was going on. It was getting out of hand. I hastily agreed, but privately I hoped to somehow get out of here without talking to them. It wasn’t like they’d believe me anyway.

  I began to see what Sissel was getting around to telling me, and what she probably wanted me to see for myself. Looking at my new hands again, I saw not a terrible mistake, but an opportunity. “It thinks I’m dead! It thinks you tried to defuse my bomb, but failed. I swore exuberantly, now getting it. “It thinks I’m bloody dead!”

  “We will be giving you some new headware, too.”

  I stared, amazed. “This is going to bankrupt my medical insurance.”

  “The new headware will contain the highest-level counter-intrusion modules we have. It seemed like a reasonable assumption that you would soon be exposing yourself to further attacks, all of which could bring you back here rather sooner than you might perhaps like.”

  “Are you saying I’ll be able to tell when they’re trying to put the bombs back and stop them?”