by Ann Benson
Sixteen
The matron gave Janie a hot disposable towel to wash the residues of lubricant off her body, and when she had removed as much of the taint of bodyprinting as possible with the small cloth, she handed it back. She watched dazedly as the matron placed it in the yellow plastic bag with her first sterile garment, then sealed the bag shut. She tagged it with a label—Janie could see that it said “MERMAN, ETHEL J.—and set it aside. Then she gave Janie a fresh sterile garment and disposable slippers.
Janie covered herself immediately, for she had no doubt that the eyes behind the mirrors were still looking at her; she could almost feel those eyes boring into her flesh. She wrapped her arms around her upper body and hugged herself for warmth, for the temperature in the printing room was quite cool, and she was covered with goose bumps. The light plasticky fabric of the sterile garment did little to warm her, and as she walked back to the cell between two silent Biocops, she shivered visibly. The cold shame of violation lingered with enough intensity to make her feel as if the body she occupied were not her own anymore, that it was somehow foreign and different, that it belonged to someone else now. She returned to the cell in that disjointed state of mind, much more docile than when she’d left it in the company of the Biocops. They would have found her quite manageable had they returned with any more requests.
The floor of the cell was tile, and when Janie picked her clothes up again they were infused with its chill. “Turn around, would you?” she said coolly to Bruce, who complied in silence. “I’m going to change back into my dirty clothes.”
There was much he wanted to ask her, but he’d seen the humiliation and anger in her expression when the Biocops had brought her back, and thought it best not to disturb her until she’d had a chance to recover a bit. He’d hoped that she would speak without being prompted or questioned, but she remained quiet, her teeth chattering as she paced around the cell.
Eventually his patience ran out and the desire to know how she was faring overtook him. Still facing away from her, he said, “Janie?”
She continued to pace. “What?”
“Can I turn around again?”
“Be my guest.”
He turned around and looked at her. She would not meet his eyes. “Are you all right?” he said quietly.
She hesitated for a moment then answered in a soft voice. “I suppose you could say I’m all right.” She sighed deeply. “I’ve definitely had better days.” When she finally looked up at him through the cell bars, her expression revealed defeat and fatigue. She let out a long breath and said, “That was without a doubt the most degrading experience of my life.”
He looked at her with true remorse, as if he were somehow personally responsible for her trouble. “I’m sorry this happened to you. I know you disapprove of printing. It’s rough, but I don’t even think about it anymore.” He hung his head and continued, “Sometimes I forget how difficult it is for some people.…”
Janie sat down on the cold cement floor again and hugged her knees tightly to her chest. “I don’t see how it could be easy for anyone. All those probes and sensors … and the places they put them … I felt like I was on a roasting spit, like the flames would start licking my ankles any second.”
Bruce was quiet for a few moments, almost contemplative. When he finally spoke, his voice was contained. “How long did the printing take? I mean, the actual imaging.”
She sniffed. “I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t see a clock the whole time I was in there. It might have been half an hour. It felt like an eternity. But I really don’t know.”
“It’s been a long time since my last print.…”
Janie sat up a little taller. “Your last print? I don’t understand. I thought only one was required.”
He held back a few seconds before responding, hoping to find just the right words. Eventually he settled on the plain, unembellished truth. “I volunteered.”
She rose to her feet. “Run that by me again,” she said. “I’m not sure I follow you.” Her eyes narrowed on him. “You volunteered to be printed twice?”
He felt small under the intensity of her stare. “It’s been more than twice. Actually, I’ve been printed ten times.”
She gripped the bars of the cell, incredulous. “Ten times? For God’s sake, why, Bruce? It’s an awful thing to go through! Are you some kind of masochist?”
“I had to be sure we had it right!” He was upset now, and his voice betrayed the conflict he felt. His involvement with the development of bodyprinting had been intoxicating for him, but as he told his story to Janie, it felt uncomfortably like a trip to the confessional. “I was on the team that developed the earliest printing techniques. It wasn’t my idea, though I have to admit I’ve been intrigued with it from the start. Our first efforts were very rudimentary, and not terribly useful. But it didn’t take long before we started getting really meaningful results and it just sort of mushroomed from there. From concept to working model it was only six years.”
Then his voice became calmer. “I’ve been printed ten times because in those days it was a struggle getting anyone to volunteer, even prisoners. We all used our own bodies for experimentation, to test the controls and the radiation levels on the light probes. For the longest time all we printed was ourselves and whatever cadavers we could get access to … then we built a few beta machines and we sent them out all over the world for test runs. Eventually almost everyone who died in the first Outbreak was printed, even in the U.S., though that’s not widely known. We just used the same machines over and over again until we were satisfied with all the adjustments, and then we destroyed the first group and built new ones from scratch.”
“I don’t know how you could allow yourself to be involved in something like this.”
Bruce began to lose patience with her. “I don’t think you’re seeing this clearly, Janie. You seem awfully narrow minded about it. You’re a surgeon and you certainly must have benefited from—”
“Correction,” she said indignantly. “I used to be a surgeon before all this regulation came into being. Before all this technology, bodyprinting included, made pure simple medicine almost obsolete.”
“How could a superb diagnostic tool make medicine obsolete?” he said, his frustration building. “If you know precisely where you need to cut, isn’t your surgical technique improved? Doesn’t the patient heal faster with a smaller incision? Isn’t there less pain and less potential for infection? Isn’t everything better?”
“Of course, everything’s better. I loved being able to make a smaller cut and then slap a Band-Aid on it. It’s not that part of it that I object to. It’s the invasiveness of it.”
“You make it sound like cutting open a person’s body isn’t invasive. You probably did it several times a day.”
“Yeah, I did. But when I did it, it was only seen by the people in the room with me at the time. And though we weren’t always totally respectful about the people we worked on, we didn’t send out a report afterward on some computer network. It happened in one room, with a limited number of viewers, and with the patient knowing that his personal business wasn’t going to become part of some big computer file.”
“You’re overreacting. The information’s out there, but we’re developing regulations for limiting access to it.”
“You know as well as I do that any halfway decent hacker can break into almost any network on earth. There’s no privacy in computers anymore. What happens when some overly enthusiastic entrepreneur figures out that people can be blackmailed with information gathered in bodyprinting? Don’t you remember what happened to people who were HIV positive in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic? They were treated like pariahs, for the most part. They had no protection initially.”
“That’s not going to happen, and you know it.”
“Do I? Do I really know it? Do you? I think you might be giving the powers-that-be a lot more credit than they deserve. There are some really smart people out there with the brain
power to poke into a lot of other people’s lives. You wait—it won’t be long before someone figures out how to tell who’s got compatible organs for transplant. All that information is available in a bodyprint. Think how much money could be made by arranging an ‘accidental’ death so the organ could be harvested. There are also a lot of desperate people willing to pay anything to keep their lives going.”
“We’re only five or ten years away from being able to grow organs for transplant,” Bruce said. “It won’t matter after that.”
“But don’t you see? It matters now and it will continue to matter until then. There are just too many opportunities for people to be hurt by this. And now my own bodyprint is getting fed into that computer along with millions of others. I don’t know if I’m ever going to feel safe again.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “You should have given a lot more thought to what you were doing before you did it.”
Her remark stung him, and he lashed back defensively. “We did give it thought. We thought about all the good that might come of it. And who made you the guardian of world morality all of a sudden? There are a lot of people, some of them in a position to make solid, informed decisions about this stuff, who think bodyprinting is the best thing since the microscope. When we were in the thick of it we all knew we were developing the technology that would replace MRIs and CAT scans. It was very exciting to think that we might get to look at the whole body, to actually see it in full three-dimensional form. We were like a bunch of overgrown kids with a big new toy. No one was thinking about the Orwellian potential. That wasn’t our job at the time; we had politicians for that. We were just doing good science so we could improve the future of medicine for everyone in the world. None of us ever dreamed it would seem so insidious to some people.”
“Well, you should have given it some thought! You might have projected ahead—”
He interrupted her. “My God, Janie, how did you get so jaded? I can’t believe what a cynic you’ve become.” He reached out his hand through the bars of his cell as if he might touch her by doing so. “Try to take it easy about this. It’s not so sinister as you seem to think it is. I know you’ve been hurt, but it might do you some good to lighten up a little bit. You make it sound like the Apocalypse is right around the corner.”
She lowered her head. “That’s how it feels to me most of the time.”
“Then I’m doubly sorry about what you’ve been through. I wish there were something I could do to change how you feel. But there’s not.”
She looked up at him again. “I know; I know.” She resumed her pacing. She moved around the small cell like a caged tigress, back and forth, hating the limits of the walls and bars. “Everything seems so weighty to me. My future just seems so bleak and all these changes just make it seem bleaker.”
“Then think about this,” he said, “if you want something to be hopeful about.” His voice took on a tone of excitement. “You remember my mentioning a project that Ted and I were going to start, the one that’s been delayed?”
She nodded.
“Well, it’s based directly on information developed out of bodyprinting. I’m working on a way to customize artificial neurological impulses based on an individual’s neural print. Eventually people with neurological damage can have electrical implants done that will stimulate their nerves in a specific way to bring about natural movement. Like a pacemaker, but for specific nerves. They won’t have to wait for fetal transplants anymore.” His anger gradually shifted to excitement and his hands moved energetically as he spoke. “We’ll be able to do it because the print allows us to separate out the nervous system so the impulses can be timed and sized precisely. Right now I can simulate facial movements on the computer. I’ve got a bacterium that dances a jig in 3-D based on its print—”
“Oh, my God, Bruce, I never imagined—”
“Neither did I until we had a few years’ worth of printing data. Then the idea just popped into my head one day. I thought, what if we could use this information to send impulses so precisely that we could do a sort of electronic choreography? We could program people for specific movements so they could perform certain necessary tasks. It can all be controlled from a tiny chip implanted near the site of the injury, a sort of command center hooked up to the spinal column.”
His eyes grew wide and Janie could see the enthusiasm building in him. “There will come a time soon,” he said, “when people who can’t move because of neurological damage will be able to move again without assistance, using just their own bodies. Just think of it! Think of the joy someone will feel to rise up out of a wheelchair and walk for the first time in years. Think how exciting it will be to someone who’s been fed like a baby to be able to use a fork and spoon. I’d work the rest of my life to be able to make those things possible.”
She heard the passion in his voice, and understood his fervent belief that what he was doing was the absolute right thing to do. “I think I might be jealous,” she finally said. “When you speak of what you’re doing in those terms, it sounds like such wonderful work. I’m not sure how I’m going to feel about my work—that is, if I ever get certified to do it.”
“You will,” he said. “I’m sure of it. This whole mess is just a snag. And now that you’ve been printed, the pressure’s off. You don’t have to meet a go-home deadline. You can take your time.”
“But Caroline does,” she said. “And I’m not sure it’s just a matter of having been printed for me. My visa has a time limit. And I have Attila-the-advisor waiting back in Massachusetts to breathe down my neck as soon as I get home. He didn’t even want me to do this project. Said it was too complicated to dig out of the country. I thought it would be a nice change for me. It’s been a change, all right, but nice, I’m not so sure.”
“I’m sorry it hasn’t been nice for you,” Bruce said quietly, “but it’s been really nice for me getting to know you again.” He smiled expectantly.
Janie forced herself to set aside the last remnants of her anger at the events that had transpired over the last day. “I’m glad we’ve had the time to talk,” she said.
And when the guard finally came back a whole day later, they’d said more to each other than they had ever dreamed they would.
The rusty cart bumped over the London streets, rattling noisily on the cobblestones, but the ragged woman who guided it by the handles kept pushing it as she had for the better part of the day, mumbling happily to herself as they progressed.
Despite the jarring bumps Caroline did not awaken. She hovered just below the surface of consciousness, looking up through the film of a dream as if she were underwater. At times her dream was so beautiful that she prayed in her delirium for it to become reality; at other times it was so violent and wretched that her sleeping mind tried desperately to awaken her, but with no success.
No one paid them any attention or tried to stop them. They were just two among thousands of ragged, lost “Marginals” living outside the norm of London’s bright society. No one called them “homeless” anymore, but despite their updated name they were still the ones who could not find a proper fit anywhere in the rigid social structure of post-Outbreak England.
The woman now pushing the cart had grown accustomed to being shunned by so-called “normal” people. She chose to live as she did because the life was more pleasing to her than the demanding alternative. She reported to no one except her extended family of other Marginals. There were several “families” throughout London, clans almost, some of whom lived under bridges or in abandoned buildings. Her own had settled in a wooded area on the outskirts of a field on the south side of the Thames.
“Rest in peace,” she mumbled to herself, thinking about the former owner of the property near which she lived, an ancient woman who had recently passed over, leaving behind an addled son who was himself quite an old man by the time his mother died. She took one hand off the cart’s handle and crossed herself, then whispered a brief prayer for his poor befuddled soul, add
ing at the end a blessing for her passenger.
A siren sounded in the distance. She stopped the cart to still its creaking and listened carefully. The sound was growing louder. She looked ahead for a place to hide and saw an alleyway situated between two tall buildings. She stepped up her pace and hurried toward it.
She slipped the cart in between the two buildings and then stood in front of it, her large form blocking it from easy view, and watched nervously as the Biocop van sped past her en route to some virulent crisis. When she was sure it had completely passed, and there was no more danger of discovery, she emerged back into the daylight again, and pulled the cart out behind her.
And so it was that the shopping-cart woman with her bedraggled redheaded cargo passed quite invisibly through London, weaving through each street and alleyway according to a predetermined plan. Now and then she stopped, only briefly, for she knew that haste was important. Sometimes another Marginal would push the heavy cart, and she would walk alongside. During these respites she would dig around in her tattered brown bag and find a bruised apple or a dry crust of bread, or another prize from some household’s leavings. Ever mindful of Caroline’s worsening condition, one or the other of the accompanying Marginals would try to force small sips of water into her mouth, a difficult and trying task. No observer would imagine that such ruffians could provide the tender care they gave to their unconscious charge, but they had sworn long ago to do so, in gratitude for the care they’d received themselves in the household of the one to whom they’d made that oath.
The woman who now pushed the cart had been watching on the night when Janie and Caroline dug up the bedeviled fabric artifact, had stood in the shadows not a meter away from them as they hid in the woods to avoid discovery, and had understood how serious would be the consequences of their disturbing the soil. She knew that Sarin would need their help now more than ever. It was time to pay back his mother’s karmic kindness, and though she knew the price might be a heavy one, the Marginal woman was prepared to pay.
