Guardian

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Wouldn’t miss it.” Dorian dissipated into a cloud of fog and re-formed standing.

  “Show off.” She jogged to the elevator.

  As expected, Nicole’s patrol craft already waited in front of a cube-shaped four story building painted dark blue and covered with long strips of green, cyan, and purple neon mimicking the patterns of a printed circuit board. The logo 1UP flashed over the front door in a low-res pixelated manner, despite being a hologram.

  “Guess they went cheap.” Kirsten glanced up at it as she landed behind Nicole.

  “I believe it’s on purpose,” said Dorian. “It’s a reference to ancient video games. Fringers have an odd fascination with them… probably because they don’t require GlobeNet access, and you can fit several thousand different games on a device as small as your thumbnail.

  Two bodies wrapped in black Psi Armor emerged from the other car, one male and one Nicole. Squad Corporal Forrester approached and saluted her, while Nicole jogged up and gave her a quick hug.

  “I know you two shared a bunk in the dorms, but you could get written up for insubordination,” said Forrester.

  “Zero’s not that anal.” Kirsten checked her E-90. After verifying a full charge, she re-holstered it. “Ready?”

  “What are we doing?” asked Nicole.

  “I need to talk to a doctor about a stolen organ. I have no idea how she’ll react to questions, or what kind of augs she’s got for protection.”

  They nodded.

  Squad Corporal Forrester hurried to the trunk of their patrol craft and returned with a pair of laser carbines that looked as though someone stretched an E-90 to assault rifle size and painted it matte black. Small red lights swept forward from the area over the trigger guard to the tip of the barrel in a repetitious thrum. He handed one to Nicole. “Damn, I hope we don’t run into any augs.”

  “Yeah.” Kirsten led the way to the front door. “Same here.”

  Bands of neon tinted the waiting room blue; drab green chairs stood against three walls. To her left, a brown-skinned man with waist-length hair sat behind a partition of bulletproof glass. Two terminals and stacks of holodisk cases occupied the desk in front of him. At the corner past the window, a door offered a way deeper inside. Her eyes watered at the mix of fart and sweat sock in the air. One of the chairs bore a suspicious stain. Ugh. This stink would survive fire.

  Kirsten approached the window and held up her ID. “I’m looking for a Doctor Simonova.”

  “You got a ‘pointment?” asked the man without taking his eyes off his terminals.

  Before Kirsten could open her mouth, he flew up out of his chair and slapped into the window, face smushed against the glass, hands pressed on either side. Spit exploded from his lips in an artistic spray pattern.

  “Look up, jackass. Police,” said Nicole.

  When she relaxed her telekinetic grip, the man bounced off the desk and fell back into his chair, wide eyed and staring.

  “You are such a people person, Nikki,” muttered Kirsten.

  “Uhh, yeah… she’s here.” The man looked around with an expression as though he couldn’t remember where he was. “What the fuck just happened?”

  “Open it.” Kirsten moved right, heading to the door. She pulled it aside when it beeped, and stepped through.

  An opening to the left led to the small office where the man continued to stare at Nicole and Forrester as they walked by. Ahead, a corridor led among six doors that had probably been white many years ago. Three gurneys, one blood-spattered, parked against sections of wall between them. To the right, a small passage led to what appeared to be bathrooms and a third door labeled ‘private.’

  “Uhh, Doc? The cops are here. They wanna talk to you.” Blue/green light from a terminal screen tinted the face of the man at the desk. He offered a weak smile and rubbed his cheek.

  Nicole crowded Kirsten forward until she had line of sight on the man. “He’s not gonna do anything.”

  Dorian came out of the wall at her side.

  The third door on the right opened with a squeak. A woman with high cheekbones and long, straight hair, jet black with purple streaks, emerged. Aside from the hair, her outfit looked reasonably professional. Black sweater and skirt, white doctor’s coat, and black flats. Her face matched the file image of Doctor Petra Simonova, though the woman’s height caught Kirsten off guard. Looking up at people made it harder to project authority.

  “Doctor Simonova? I’m Age―Lieutenant Wren with Division 0.”

  Nicole giggled, but it only came over the comm channel, sealed from the outside world by her helmet. Warmth rode a wave of blush into Kirsten’s cheeks.

  “Lieutenant.” The doctor offered a handshake. “This doesn’t look like a clinical visit. What can I help you with?”

  “I need to ask you some questions about a patient you recently helped. I have reason to believe the organ he brought in for implantation was stolen. I understand you were unaware of this fact, so at the moment, we are not looking at any investigation of 1UP directly, but your cooperation is requested.”

  “I see.” Doctor Simonova turned on her heel. “Please, come in.” She returned to the room she’d come out of and walked in without looking back.

  Nicole and Forrester advanced on the room as if expecting an attack, rifles up, stances tactical. They relaxed about three steps from the door, evidently monitoring the doctor via the amber ‘ghost’ projected onto their helmet displays.

  Kirsten went past them and into a modest operating suite. Two medical tanks took up the far corners on either side of a gargantuan computer system connected to them by cables as thick as her wrist. A third line ran up along the wall and over the ceiling to an autosurgeon perched over a scary looking grey table with segmented black cushions and movable pads for arm support, upon which lay a bloody man in his early twenties, dark pants, shirtless, unconscious. His left arm from the elbow down consisted of gleaming plastisteel. Dark patches of metal on his head clustered at the temples, winking with tiny green and blue lights. His chest had been cut and peeled wide open, exposing his insides. One lung and his heart were missing―both of which floated in the tank on the right, and a tiny metal box sat on his spine with hair-thin wires running along the length of the vertebra out of sight beneath more tissue. A ghost of the same man paced back and forth by the head, muttering.

  The doctor half leaned, half sat on a backless stool by a small workstation against the near wall, to the right of the door. She waved a hand at a holo-panel showing a little blonde girl in a white dress running barefoot across a sunny meadow, chasing yellow butterflies. The pastoral scene vanished, replaced by an array of small moving line graphs and one box of scrolling text. “What is the patient’s name?”

  “Finally,” said Dorian. “Someone who doesn’t bother with the whole privileged and confidential thing.”

  The other ghost regarded Dorian with a hostile glare. “Oh great. You fuckers get to give me shit on this side too?”

  Dorian wandered over to him. “That depends. What’d you do?”

  Forrester and Nicole tucked in behind Kirsten, holding their rifles sideways across the chest, pointed down. They glanced around the room, seeming comforted by the lack of anyone with cybernetic arms looking to tear people into smaller pieces. Nicole positioned herself to use Kirsten as a wall so as not to see the body on the table.

  “Robert Lamb, though I’m not sure if he used his real name.” Kirsten projected a holographic bust from her armband unit. “He had a liver implantation done here.”

  “Oh, that wasn’t too long ago. I remember him.” A black keyboard panel appeared under her hands; individual keys flashed bright cyan when she typed. Seconds later, Lamb’s face appeared on the terminal screen. “The liver was in an old container. From the condition of it, I figured it wasn’t legally sourced.”

  “And you did the procedure anyway?” asked Kirsten.

  “It sucks the guy died… I assumed the donor was unwilling… but he was alre
ady gone and I couldn’t waste it and let Lamb drop dead on my floor. He was in bad shape, Lieutenant Wren. I don’t think he would’ve survived another month.”

  “Oh, a few more days on death’s door and he’d have caved in and financed the regen.” Dorian chuckled. “Lamb’s not poor, he’s just stingy.”

  The doctor waved her hand at the terminal, returning it to the animated display of the frolicking child. She crossed to the large computer between the tanks and tapped at a touchscreen. “Your heart is almost done, Zax.” She smiled back at Kirsten. “Even though he’s out cold, I like to talk to them.”

  Kirsten looked at the hovering spirit. “I’m sure he appreciates that.”

  “Come on, come on.” The not-quite-dead man bounced on his toes. “The fuck is taking so long?”

  “What happened to him?” asked Kirsten. “Does whatever you’re doing usually take long?”

  “Our friend here decided to pick a fight with someone who had better speedware. According to his associates who dragged him in here, he absorbed three bullets before he even got his weapon off his belt. He’s fortunate to have a Phoenix blood pump, or he’d have been dead instantly.”

  “Right…” Kirsten scratched at her eyebrow.

  Doctor Simonova smiled. “A mechanical blood pump that takes over if the heart is damaged. Lasts about six hours, assuming the nanobots it dispenses upon activation can close the damage to the heart to keep enough blood in the system.”

  “Man, that’s such bullshit!” yelled Zax’s ghost. “That dude was totally cheating.”

  “How is it cheating if the other man was faster than you?” asked Dorian.

  Zax punched air. “Fuckin’ lag man… I couldn’t move.”

  “I’m sorry ‘dude,’ but I think you’re confusing reality with a video game.” Dorian shook his head.

  “What can you tell me about the liver you put in for Mr. Lamb? I’m already aware it wasn’t a good genetic match for him and had to go through some processing first.”

  “That’s correct.” Simonova hit a few buttons on the console in front of her. “The market for this sort of thing isn’t what you’d expect. The NewsNet blows it way out of proportion. To hear them go on and on about it, a person’s got a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the trip to work every day without having a harvester grab them. Most illegal organs are custom-procured by wealthy individuals whose proclivities present certain obstacles to health care of that nature. The vast majority are scraped up off the street after gang warfare.”

  “Rich people don’t stay rich by spending big.” Dorian shook his head. “Some of them probably get off on killing peasants to sustain themselves.”

  Kirsten glanced at him. “That’s… a bit dark.”

  “It is, but it’s true. My guess is that whoever Lamb purchased this liver from had recently accepted a job to source a specific body part for a specific client. The whole point of stealing organs is to save money, so it is in their best interest to find a genetic match for the desired organ to avoid the costly and not infallible need to run genetic conditioning on the tissue. Even with everything I did for that liver, there’s a decent chance Lamb’s body might reject it months or years down the road. Any tiny event might make his immune system wake up and realize there’s foreign tissue. But to get back to the point, while your harvester was at it, they cleaned the victim out figuring they’d double or triple their money by sales of opportunity.”

  Doctor Simonova crossed to a small scrub station left of the door to wash her hands.

  “Hey, why isn’t he in the tank with the guts? I didn’t think doctors still did work manually,” said Nicole.

  “His friends left him there and I’m not strong enough to manhandle him into the tank.” Doctor Simonova held her arms into a dark purple energy field within a cube-shaped hollow to the right of the sink. “At this point, it’s too dangerous to try and pick him up.”

  Nicole looked at the ceiling and sighed before approaching the table. “What about even pressure across his body?” Ugh, this is so nasty.

  Kirsten looked away to avoid smiling in sight of Zax’s spirit.

  “If something like that were possible, it might work. However, any motion would need to be quite delicate.”

  Nicole handed her rifle to Forrester and held her hands out toward the body. “Open the other tank. I got him.”

  The doctor returned to the machine between the tanks. A few taps of her finger later, the left side tube drained to the halfway point and the cylinder wall sank into the floor, leaving about three inches of clearance past the top of the peach-colored gel.

  Zax approached Nicole, leaning into her face. “What are you doin’ to me, girl?”

  “Back up.” Dorian tugged him away from her by a firm grip on his arm. “She needs to concentrate. If you startle her, you could kill yourself.”

  “So you’re saying that this guy had a buyer for some specific organ, and the killers took everything they could tear out of the victim because they’d already killed him.” Kirsten hooked her thumbs on her belt and shifted her weight to her right leg. “So I need to figure out who initiated it.”

  Nicole made a soft grunt of exertion and Zax floated straight up off the table.

  “Fuckin’ what the fuck?” asked Zax’s ghost.

  “Truly a student of classic literature.” Dorian golf-clapped.

  “I would imagine so,” said the Doctor.

  Kirsten stifled a snicker at the doctor’s response fitting Dorian’s remark.

  Zax’s body glided at a creep to the other tank, reoriented vertical, and sank up to the waist in the goo. The doctor brushed her finger up in a sliding motion on one touchscreen control, which closed the cylinder wall. It sealed against a disc in the ceiling with a faint squeak. Another swipe triggered pumps. As soon as the gel filled past the body, Nicole sagged with relief. In seconds, the remainder of Zax’s clothing disintegrated, destroyed by the nanobots in the fluid. Metal buttons and a buckle glided to the bottom of the tank.

  “That was… impressive.” Doctor Simonova smiled at Nicole. “Telekinesis?”

  “Yeah.” Nicole tried to catch her breath. “That guy’s heavier than he looks.”

  “His major bones have been reinforced with indirium spars. These guys are all regulars… sometimes they’re here three times a week.”

  “Idiots,” said Dorian. “They live like they’re in a game.”

  Forrester shook his head and handed Nicole back her rifle.

  “Lamb couldn’t have been the primary buyer or the liver would’ve been compatible with him.” Doctor Simonova spoke without looking back. She tapped a command sequence that caused the floating heart and lung to rise to the top of the right side tank and disappear into a small opening. A short while later, they fell into the tank with Zax’s body.

  “Don’t get too far away from your body, Zax. You might not be able to get back in.” Kirsten winked.

  The doctor glanced at her. “The way you said that…” She looked where Kirsten’s eyes pointed. “It’s like you’re actually speaking to him.”

  “I am. He may or may not remember when he wakes up, but his spirit is outside his body right now watching. Not many people can handle that memory.”

  “Naw, I’m good.” Zax grinned. “This is my fourteenth rez.”

  “Rez?” asked Kirsten. “What, like in the Monwyn MMO?”

  “You’re not being resurrected, Zax.” Dorian rolled his eyes. “You’re being prevented from dying in the first place.”

  “Whatever dude.” Zax held his hands up. “Works the same for me.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.” Kirsten shook hands. “I’ll let you know if I need anything else.”

  Nicole shrugged. “Geez. That was kinda tame. You had me expecting mil-spec augs. You never ask for backup. Usually, Eze’s gotta make you bring someone.”

  Kirsten walked out into the hallway. “Yeah… Figures the one time I bring backup, I don’t need it.”

  “Better than th
e other way ‘round.” Dorian winked.

  he classroom blurred into a meaningless haze of colors and sound as Evan’s head grew heavier against his palm. His elbow slipped a half inch on the desk, startling him awake, but consciousness faded in seconds as the process started over. Mr. Vasquez droned on and on about the Corporate War, tax evasion committed on a national corporate scale that blossomed into violence.

  Evan’s mind filled with the image of a blue van with guns firing out the open side door.

  Hey! yelled Shawn’s voice in his head. Wren, wake up!

  Evan startled upright, blinking.

  “… with their own armed and privatized security forces providing defense against civil unrest, the corporations felt they were in a better position to do what a so-called ‘idle government’ could not.” Mr. Vasquez paced back and forth as he lectured.

  Evan blinked and glanced to his right at the big kid three rows right and one desk forward. Uhh, thanks.

  Shawn gave him a thumbs-up and shifted his attention back to the teacher.

  It’s boring, but don’t let him catch you sleeping. A girl’s voice drifted across his thoughts.

  He looked to his immediate left at Annika, who resembled Shani to a degree, only with darker skin and thicker eyebrows. Mom thinks I’m too skinny, but she’d freak if she ever saw Anni. Her blue sweater had a pattern of white lines separated by flowers. For a second, the pattern morphed to resemble the front end of a van.

  You okay? You’re falling asleep with your eyes open.

  Evan wiped his face. I didn’t sleep much.

  “… know why they should have to pay taxes to a government who they felt only wanted to sit back and collect money. Major cellular providers were the first to declare themselves sovereign entities, not beholden to the government. Can anyone tell me what event occurred that the big three cited as a reason for their declaration?” Mr. Vasquez looked around.

  A few hands went up; Evan’s was not one of them. He shrank under Vasquez’s probing stare, hoping the teacher would call on Mia in the front row who’d almost stood up due to the enthusiasm with which she raised her hand.