Technomancer

by B. V. Larson

  “We have a lot of dangerous patients here,” she explained, glaring at me and rubbing her right wrist. “We take in all the psychos the police drop off at night.” She looked at me pointedly as she said this.

  I shrugged. “So, was I brought in under arrest?”

  “No.”

  “Then who paid you off? Who gave the order to keep sticking me with these drugs and keep me drooling?”

  Miranda looked worried for a moment. Maybe, for the first time, she realized she might be the criminal here, not me. She shook her head slowly.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We just follow Dr. Meng’s orders. You were dropped off, like any other crazy off the Strip. The orders were a little odd…”

  “You don’t say?” I asked. I helped myself to a handful of Halloween candy I found in a bowl on the counter. It was slightly stale, but now that I was off my medication, my stomach was working again and I was getting hungry.

  “Did you kill Ron?” she asked, her eyes widening as she examined the surgical greens I was wearing, no doubt noting the dark stains and the name tag.

  I glanced down at myself. “Is that his name? No, he’s just having a nap.”

  Miranda glared at me. “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Let’s see, kidnapping, unlawful restraint, illegal use of prescription drugs…oh, and let’s not forget about assault. I would say five to ten years each in the federal pen should do it.”

  She swallowed. “I was just doing my job.”

  “Is that why you went for a gun under your desk rather than calling the cops?”

  “I’m not in charge here. I follow my employer’s orders.”

  I smiled. “Not a novel defense. But I’ll accept it. Just cut this cast off me and take me to your leader, the honorable Dr. Meng.”

  “She won’t be down until—”

  I cut her off, pointing with the black barrel of her pistol at the clock on her wall. It read five thirty.

  “Shift change at six?” I asked. “Things are pretty quiet around here. I’ve never seen such a quiet hospital at night.”

  “We’re private, and Sunset isn’t exactly a hospital. It’s a sanatorium.”

  I nodded slowly. That explained all the safety glass and the lack of external windows in my room.

  “I get it. When does the good Dr. Meng get to work?”

  Miranda chewed her lip. “Six,” she said.

  “We have just enough time then. Cut this thing off me.”

  Miranda got up and led the way. I humped along close behind her, expecting a trick, but she didn’t try anything. We went into an exam room and she produced a small circular saw built for the precise purpose of cutting off fiberglass casts. I sat up on the exam table and threw my leg onto it. I kept the pistol lying on my belly with my hand on top of it.

  She pointed at my toes, which I could see in the brightly lit room were fairly purple. “Are you sure about this?” she asked. “The fracture is only about a week old.”

  “That’s long enough,” I said, hoping that it was. I didn’t feel much pain inside that cast. I would have liked to leave it on to be certain, but I knew I couldn’t run with that thing. Of course, if I cracked the bone again I would be crippled. I breathed through my teeth as she began sawing.

  It didn’t take long. When she’d made the cut, I reached out and cracked the cast wide open with my hands. Inside the fiberglass and cotton, my leg was pale and crisscrossed with black sutures. I lifted my leg out and placed it gently on the floor. I leaned down with increasing weight. It tingled, but it held.

  “See?” I said.

  “I can’t understand how you can walk on it. And there were more fractures, ribs mostly.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Now, take me to the doctor’s office. We’ll wait there.”

  Miranda looked at me uncertainly. “What do you intend to do?”

  “Find out what the hell is going on—starting with why I’m here.”

  Dr. Meng’s office was totally unlike the rest of the sanatorium I’d seen thus far. There were expensive paintings, a high wall of real books in a cherry wood bookcase and thickly padded chairs of shiny leather. I sat myself behind the cherry wood desk and threw my sickly looking leg on top of it, knocking aside a tablet computer, an elaborate phone, and a cup bristling with gold pens.

  “Nice setup,” I said, looking around.

  “I’ve got to go back to my station now,” Miranda said, taking a step toward the door.

  I shook my head. “No way.”

  She halted, looking at me sidelong. “If I’m away for much longer, someone will notice and come looking for me.”

  “They won’t come in here.”

  She hesitated. “Well, what about Ron? I need to give him first aid at least.”

  “Ron’s asleep and doesn’t care about that right now.”

  Her shoulders slumped as she realized I wasn’t letting her go. I still had the pistol in my hand, aimed at the ceiling.

  “You really are a bastard. Has anyone ever told you that?” she asked.

  I reflected on it for a moment, but couldn’t recall. “Probably,” I admitted. I picked up Dr. Meng’s tablet computer and pecked at it.

  “Pull my records up on this thing, will you?” I asked.

  “Do I have any choice?”

  “We always have choices,” I said, waving the pistol in the air a little.

  The nurse tapped at the screen angrily and shoved it back at me. She looked at the clock nervously. It was ten minutes to six.

  “I see,” I said, studying my own record. I was determined to recall details. There weren’t many; apparently I was as blank a slate to these people as I was to myself. There was no prior address, no employer listed, and no primary care physician. No relatives were in the records either. There was only a list of injuries and operations, followed by a link to a billing record. I tapped at that, but was blocked by another password.

  “Sign me in so I can read my billing records, please,” I said.

  Miranda shook her head. “Sorry. I don’t have the password for that.”

  I believed her, and since it was almost time for the infamous Dr. Meng to make her entrance, I figured it didn’t matter much anyway.

  “What’s Dr. Meng like?” I asked.

  Miranda smiled prettily, but I thought I saw something mean behind that smile. “She’s tough,” she said.

  I frowned at her, not liking the way she looked at me. It was as if she thought revenge was near, and it was going to be sweet.

  Dr. Meng arrived in a whirlwind of energy at precisely 6:03 a.m. She was a small Asian woman with short black hair and flashing eyes. She appeared much younger than I had expected for a doctor in a management position at an institution like this one. Late thirties, if I had to guess. She wore the traditional white lab coat over professional-looking clothing. She didn’t seem to notice me at first, despite the fact I still had an injured leg thrown over her desk and a pistol in my hand.

  “There you are, nurse,” Dr. Meng said in irritation. “Why are you in my office and away from your station?”

  Miranda made a silent sweep of her hand, indicating me. Dr. Meng followed her gesture and curled her lip upon seeing me. She walked quickly into the room and began picking up the objects I’d knocked onto the floor. She moved with rapid, irritable motions.

  “You’ve made quite a mess,” she said.

  “I have a few questions for you, Doctor.”

  Meng straightened and looked at me with her head cocked to one side. “I’m not really surprised to find you out of your room and pestering my staff. You always were a rude guest, Draith.”

  It was my turn to frown. “Have I been here before?” I asked, reluctantly giving away that I had amnesia. I figured it was a secret I couldn’t keep forever anyway. If she knew me and I didn’t remember her, faking it was going to be quite hard. I had the faint hope she was a friend of some kind, but I didn’t get the feeling that our pr
ior relationship was cordial. There was no warmth in her toward me, no friendly greeting.

  She put her hands on her hips and tilted her head farther. Then, she slowly nodded. “If you are who you appear to be, then it must have been the accident.”

  If you are who you appear to be…I wondered about that statement, but I decided to file it away until later.

  “I want to ask you about the medication I’ve been receiving,” I said. “Did you prescribe it?”

  “Of course. But I hadn’t intended you to lose more than the unpleasant memory of your recent trauma.”

  “You might have overdone it, in that case. What were you covering up?”

  “Did you really wish to remember a car accident? Aren’t such unpleasant, frightening events best deleted?”

  I glared at her. “I certainly don’t think that was your decision to make.”

  Meng chuckled. “Who else then? This is my domain, after all, Draith.”

  There was something in her face, something predatory. It was as if she held the gun and not I. She didn’t seem perturbed by the fact I was armed. I wasn’t pointing the gun at her, but a normal person would have been eyeing the weapon with concern. Instead, she had the attitude of a principal sternly rebuking an errant student.

  “I’ll be getting back to my station, Dr. Meng,” Miranda said quietly.

  Dr. Meng nodded. She still wore that confident, bemused expression and continued to gaze at me. I thought about waving my gun around and ordering Miranda to stay put, but somehow, it didn’t seem worth it. No one appeared interested in calling the cops. They didn’t seem to know quite what to do with me, but they didn’t actually fear me. It was disturbing.

  “Could you take your foot off my desk, Draith?” Dr. Meng asked. “I believe you’ve leaked some lymph fluids on my blotter.”

  With a sigh, I eased my foot off the desk and put it down beside its twin. In a way, it was a relief. They both ached, but the one on the desk had begun to throb.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what all this is about?” I asked. “Start with the beginning. How did I get here and why have you been holding me?”

  Meng stared at me for a moment, then laughed loudly. She shook her head. “I’m not here to help you nose around, Draith! Have you forgotten everything?”

  I leaned back and tried to look confident. I had a flash of memory then, something I knew was a snippet of my real past. I remembered buying her a drink in a bar. It had been a strange place full of strange people. I grabbed hold of the memory before it could fade away and tried to make the most of it that I could.

  “Of course not,” I said. “I remember buying you a drink once—not long ago.”

  Meng shook her head. “You’re wrong. That was a long time ago, in a distant place.”

  I didn’t argue, having no way to judge the honesty of her words. I did note that she seemed mollified, however. She didn’t know how severely my mind had been erased. That was just how I wanted things.

  She took something out of her pocket, a metal object. She placed it upon the desktop between us with a mysterious air. It was bronze in color and looked well aged. Staring at it, I realized it was a statuette of a woman with wings raised in midflight.

  Dr. Meng was studying me, watching my reaction closely. “What do you think of that, Quentin?” she asked, using my first name for the first time. “How does it make you feel?”

  I flicked my eyes up to meet hers, then looked at the statuette again. I shrugged, feeling nothing special. “I thought the Maltese Falcon was supposed to be black.”

  She glared at me and moved her hand toward the thing, as if to snatch it up again in a fury. I felt as if I’d insulted a religious icon of hers. Perhaps I had.

  “Fine,” she snapped. “Your resistance is high—but that’s not an excuse for rudeness.”

  “Um, why don’t you tell me what it is?”

  “It’s a hood ornament,” she said. “The rarest of them. Found right here, on this scrap of land where they built this sanatorium.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, trying to sound impressed. It looked like a hunk of old bronze to me. It would serve fairly well as a paperweight, but appeared likely to fall over if bumped.

  “We think Harriet Frishmuth sculpted it around 1920. She did a lot of these, and due to the stamp, we know it was forged at the Gorham Foundry in Providence…”

  “Look,” I said, tapping my fingers on her desk, “I’m sure this antique is worth thousands, but I don’t see—”

  “Always you play the fool,” she snapped, cutting me off. She picked up the statuette and eyed it closely. “It’s worth millions, billions—perhaps more. It’s priceless, like all of its kind.”

  My eyebrows were riding high in disbelief. “Billions? For part of an old car?”

  “Not just any old car. It came from here, at this crux point. It was probably mounted on an automobile that moldered away in the barn of some desert rat before they developed the area. I’m not sure why it became a local nexus—but it did.”

  I let out a sigh of breath. She had used a long list of terms that meant nothing to me. I was having difficulty buying anything she was hinting at. “OK,” I said. “So what exactly does it do?”

  She released a puff of air, a tiny snort. “It rules this place. Or rather I do, as I’m attuned to it. Have you forgotten everything?”

  “Show me,” I said.

  Meng laughed. “A rare request indeed. Most people I meet in this office beg for mercy when I reveal the artifact—not a demonstration. But I’m going to take a chance on you, Draith. I’m going to assume you are who you appear to be, and not some copy from another place. I’m going to lie for you. I’m going to tell my associates you escaped.”

  “I did escape.”

  “No, not just from your room. In this fiction, you’ve escaped me. You’ve slipped from my grasp and vanished from my domain entirely.”

  Her domain? I thought, but I didn’t ask more.

  “This is a daring step for a person in my position, Draith. I’m not like you. When I take silver for a job, I stick to it. I’m not a wandering rogue. I have a reputation and a home.”

  I had the vague feeling I was being insulted, but I shrugged and waited for her to continue.

  “First, you will need better clothing,” she said, pressing a button on her desk. I’d not noticed it before. It was recessed into the wood itself.

  I shifted in my chair, concerned. Had she activated a silent alarm, fitted in with all kinds of bullshit meant to put me off my guard? I wasn’t sure, but if it was, it was too late to do anything about it. I leaned back, letting my pistol rest on her desk, and tried to appear calm and in control.

  “I would be happy with whatever clothes I came in with,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I’m afraid they were cut away and destroyed. We kept some of Tony’s things, however. They were in better shape and there was one item we were looking for.”

  We? I thought. Yet another reference to an out-of-sight cabal of allies. I was determined to remember that we and find out who they were. I wondered about this person she called Tony. The way she mentioned him, it seemed she assumed I knew who she was talking about.

  “What happened to Tony?” I asked.

  “Killed,” Meng said without a hint of concern. “In the same accident that brought you to us.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Of course I did. Everyone knew Tony. You were his friend, Draith. Pull it together, man. You must remember something.”

  I narrowed my eyes toward her. She didn’t have much of a bedside manner. She was telling me my friend was dead, but without a note of compassion. If I could have remembered the man, I was sure I’d have been upset.

  Miranda showed up, apparently having been summoned by the button in Dr. Meng’s desk. The good doctor ordered her to get Tony’s things. Miranda quickly returned with a plastic bag. There wasn’t much inside. Mostly, it consisted of a black overcoat with a few lumps in the p
ockets. I shrugged it on.

  “That’s all?” Dr. Meng asked the nurse. “Disappointing.”

  “He wasn’t wearing this at the time of the event, milady,” Miranda said. “The coat was in the backseat. Everything he had on at the moment of death has been…lost.”

  Milady? I couldn’t hide my wide eyes when I heard that. It sounded to me like their relationship went deeper than the professional norm.

  I cleared my throat. “It will cover these green scrubs, at least,” I said. I took this opportunity to slip the photograph I’d found under my pillow out of my scrubs and into a pocket.

  I decided I would play along with these two. I wanted a clean break from this place. If I could get out of here without further weirdness, I’d be happy.

  “What do you want me to do, exactly?” I asked.

  “I want you to go out there and do what you do best. I know there are strange things happening in the Community, and I know you’ve been trying to investigate them. Keep doing it. Keep pestering and sniffing about like a stray dog at a butcher’s shop. If you find anything interesting, come tell me about it. Find out what happened to Tony. I liked him—even if he was a petty thief.”

  All this talk of my being a mongrel and a loser who consorted with more of the same finally annoyed me. I waved the pistol around. “I don’t understand your attitude. I’ve got the gun.”

  “You do?” she asked.

  I felt a tingling in my hand. My eyes snapped to my fingers, which were still curled around a ghostly trigger. There was no pistol visible in my hand, however. There was nothing there at all. The freaky thing was I still felt the weight of it, for a fraction of a second. But then that was gone too, and I was left clutching air. The gun had vanished.

  “How did you do that?” I asked, feeling my first real thread of fear. Up until that moment, I’d taken all her hints as a big mind game, perhaps meant to talk me into giving myself up. She was, after all, a brain doctor.

  “Like this,” she said, and she smiled at me more broadly.

  I eyed her teeth, and they grew in my sight until they were big and white like the infamous grin of the Cheshire Cat. At the same time, the rest of the room that surrounded us faded. For a split second, it was just me and that grin in our own private universe. The rest of reality was a gray-white nothing, like an old TV tuned to static air.