~
Consciousness… strong lights… gummy, sticky eyelids that wouldn’t open very well.
A nurse, noticing the fluttering, came over and smiled. “Whoa, easy now,” he said. “You can relax. You’re out of your first round of surgery and in ICU. Lots more to come, but we have to do this in stages. Not good to keep you full of the anaesthetic all the time. Just rest. Are you in pain?”
Ray couldn’t answer. It was all pain.
~
His eleventh birthday.
A blistering hot day, with the sun so strong he felt the tops of his ears cooking.
The knife made a noise almost like a zipper as it tore down his forearm, opening his flesh.
Ray staggered back and blinked. The pain came a moment later, sizzling down from his elbow to his wrist, and the air stunk like overheated metal.
“You little hūndàn!” the man spat. “What you looking at?”
The man was short and hunched over. His left eye looked off to the side while his right eye bored a hole through Ray’s head. He had several black teeth.
“I said what you looking at!”
“Nothing! I…” Ray looked down and swayed. His arm was dripping already.
A hunk of concrete whistled past his ear and smashed into the man’s face. The man reeled backward and down, hitting the broken pavement hard, the knife clattering to the ground.
Mick came up from behind him, grabbed his other arm, and pulled. “Run!”
Running. Running. So much running. Tumbling down the bank to the drainage ditch that ran under Finch and pushing away the overgrowth to get into the hole between the concrete and the culvert. Mick’s sanctuary, a secret hiding spot. Mick was always saving him. Mick was everything.
Blood. Cheap scotch poured all over his arm. Fire and flames that seemed to go all the way up, into his chest, and down to his gut. The smell of Mick’s sweaty shirt, torn into long strips and wrapped around his arm.
~
Somehow, he came to during a surgery. He was draped in sheets. A massive surgical robot hovered over him like a steel octopus, two arms snipping and probing, another pair poised with a light and a tiny camera. He flicked his eyes left and saw a blurry rectangle on the wall; he blinked, and the image resolved into a high-definition screen. There, in full colour, were the shattered remains of his gut.
He could hear beeping over his own gasping into the tight mask over his mouth and nose. His breath was hot. Suddenly, his face and neck were blazing, he couldn’t breathe, and he felt like he was drowning, underwater, breathing hard, the beeping went faster, he couldn’t move…
And then he melted into the darkness.
MEIKE
In the lab, the macaque’s body was laid out on the table, now covered in black dots laid out in a grid pattern. Meike turned to a touch screen and used a gloved finger to poke an icon. Overhead, a camera moved silently on a track and imaged the whole body.
When it was finished, she flipped the creature so the macaque was face down, and set to work putting more dots all over the macaque. When she was done, she put the camera on again. She stared vacantly at the readout screen while it ran through another imaging cycle.
This felt like her childhood all over again: nobody around, and nothing but a variety of screens — some big and wall-mounted, others handheld — to babysit her, and feed her media. Flat images, flat people, living vicariously through endless videos, feeling nothing.
A three-dimensional image of the outside of the dead macaque rendered on the screen. She saved it to a file, removed all the dots, and scooped up the body roughly in her arms. She took it over to a waiting body bag and zipped it in; the other macaque was already in a bag of its own. She slid both bags onto a gurney and wheeled them out of the lab’s back door, which opened onto the facility’s quad. The air was bitterly cold, and there was enough of a breeze to make it gnaw at Meike’s cheeks. Even though she didn’t have her coat, she walked at her usual slow pace across the open area. The pain on her face, the stinging, the burning, was exquisite.
By the time she reached the other side, she was shivering hard. Opening the door and stepping into the warmth was a disappointment. It was safe. Normal.
Flat.
The other sections of the quad consisted of a state-of-the-art veterinary hospital they shared with the zoo. She eventually arrived at the imaging and diagnostics department. It contained several different scanners arranged in a series, each one connected to another by a short section of conveyor belt. As most live patients typically objected to being passed through a group of scans without human intervention and reassurance, this setup was reserved for examining dead bodies and inanimate objects.
Meike unzipped the bags and dumped the bodies out onto the cold trays that would carry them through the scanners. She ordered a thorough diagnostic set and then walked to the other side of the section where the macaques would roll out in about an hour.
There was a waiting area here, complete with a few chairs and a small food fabber. Meike sat on the chair and fidgeted. She stared at the grey machines, the grey walls, and the grey ceiling. The lights flickered briefly, as the first scan began. She focused on the light directly overhead until her eyes ached and watered so much she couldn’t keep them open.
She was still wearing her gloves. Meike pulled the stretchy cuff of one as far as it could go and then let it snap back into place. She did this again and again, and then again. Her wrist reddened, but it didn’t feel nearly as interesting as the wind had done.
On the table near the fabber, she spotted two cylinders filled with forks and knives. On a whim, she jumped up and grabbed a knife. She felt the hardness of the handle in her right hand, the weight of it balanced against the silver blade. Suddenly, she could smell the rubber of her gloves, the scent sticking in her throat. She splayed her left hand, and drew the tip of the knife across the upper palm, just below her fingers. The knife carved a long line across the taut rubber, slowly, slowly, and then in a flash, the glove split, parting to reveal the pink flesh below. She pressed harder and watched as the skin split too, red blood welling up and seeping darkly underneath the glove. The searing pain raced up her arm, and she sucked in a sharp breath.
The door to the department banged open. A technician walked in and checked the manifest screen before noticing Meike. He strolled over for some friendly conversation, but his smile quickly disappeared when he saw her hand.
“Oh, hey, wow, are you okay?” He quickened his pace to get to a first-aid station on the wall. With his back turned, Meike put the knife down on the table. “I keep telling them to restock the thing with the blades down,” he said. “I poked myself only last week. We might have to raise this with the health and safety committee.”
He brought over a small, portable haemostat and an alcohol swab. “Here, let me help you.” He peeled off her glove, carefully dabbed the wet swab on the wound to disinfect it and ran the device over the cut.
Meike watched as the bleeding stopped, felt the skin tighten and pull back into place. In a moment, there was little more than a reddish line.
“There, that should do it. You’re lucky that wasn’t deeper or longer, we’d have to take you to emergency.”
Her hand tingled and stung. She thought again of the cold outside and hoped the scans would hurry.
KEL
A few days later, and another late night had morphed into early morning. Kel slapped the top of her desk in exasperation and pushed her chair back.
“Wake screens,” she said.
The wall shimmered as the various camera views came into focus. The macaques were just stirring. She put her feet up, thumping her heels hard on the desk, and crossed her arms, glaring at a habitat that had stubbornly refused to give her any clues as to what had happened.
The refusal was all the more galling because of the wealth of data Kel had at her fingertips. The habitat, besides being a faithfully reproduced biome, also contained a vast network of hidden sensors. There were t
he cameras and microphones of course, but also devices for measuring everything about the habitat like temperature, air quality, humidity, airflow, and everything about the residents, like movement, speed, thermal and spectral signatures. And her implants reported many kinds of biological data, from heart rate to bacterial load. It was a micro thingweb all by itself.
And yet with all of that, there was nothing to explain why two of her subjects had just dropped dead. The computer hadn’t found anything, and neither had she.
Robert trundled into the office, and she straightened up quickly. As usual, he went straight for his coffee, but instead of heading into his own work area after that, he came and sat on her desk.
“So,” he said, slurping. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing much, why?”
“Oh really?” Robert looked annoyed.
Kel braced herself. She drew a breath to tell him about the macaques.
“What happened to this quarter’s research paper?”
Kel groaned. She’d forgotten all about the deadline. She was supposed to produce a minimum of four per year, and posters as well. At least one paper had to be accepted and published in a major journal in her field.
“Yes, that paper,” he said.
“I’m sorry, I have a draft,” she was astonished to hear herself lying, “I just need to polish and submit it.”
“I have a hard time defending your project as it is, Kel,” Robert said. “You’ve got to produce something regularly. This habitat eats up heaps of public money, and your current study isn’t necessary.”
Kel was shocked. The display on her desk chose that moment to change images, and a much older version of her grandmother, looking dull-eyed and slightly sad, stared out at her. The image gave fuel to her indignation. “How can you say that? We have thousands of people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s every year!”
Robert waved a hand dismissively. “It’s thousands, not tens of thousands, these days. And drugs manage the symptoms quite well.”
“They still come with side effects and cost a lot!” Kel said hotly. She couldn’t believe he could be so cavalier. “Why wouldn’t we want to understand it better and stop it from happening in the first place?”
Robert pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is what comes of having to give hotshot kids access to the big toys straight out of grad school,” he muttered. “Did you not spend any time in the industry? Or socialising with your profs in person? Grab a beer with anyone after a conference?”
Kel raised her chin a notch. A smart, driven woman, she’d fast-tracked through most of her studies and achieved her PhD at University College London by age twenty-two. She’d studied hard and had spent most of her nights doing lab work. The conferences Kel had attended because of her degree requirements had felt like a nuisance. Why waste time travelling to these things when you could just read the proceedings after and do a quick VR discussion with someone you wanted to follow up with? Until now, she hadn’t thought her approach was a liability.
Robert tried to smooth his hair. “Fine, let me be the first to disillusion you: the reason we’re publicly funded is private pharmaceutical manufacturers have never been very interested in curing diseases. Drug research is incredibly expensive and really risky. Drugs for disease management are income streams for them, so that’s what they focus on. If they cured people, how would they recoup their R&D costs, much less make a profit? I’ll bet all your job offers were from publicly funded places, right? None from private corporations?”
Kel frowned and nodded at him.
“And as for the public, ever since we got really good at microfluidics for targeted drug delivery, stuff like this has dropped out of the ‘I need to care’ file. As long as Grandpa seems okay and isn’t wandering into the flows at night, it solves the problem. I can’t believe someone with your brains hasn’t cottoned on to this before.”
“These people are still suffering!”
Robert nodded. “But they’re hurting much less. And living longer. And those drugs cost a lot less than they used to, right? Frankly, there are other, bigger issues taking up more news cycles. Now if you were working on antibiotic resistance, maybe finding us some novel antibiotics, that’d be a different story.” He paused for another long slurp. “We’d be swimming in funding from all kinds of sources. But you’re not, and thus we’re not, so get those papers done on time. You must produce research data that justifies the resources you use up here.”
Her colleagues were filtering into the office. Robert left her to go talk to Padraig, the resident entomologist, and Bao-Yu, a visiting herpetologist.
Kel leaned forward against her desk, exhausted. More than anything, she wanted to go home and get some sleep. But even with her track record of putting in long hours, she suspected leaving just now would not go over well.
Nothing for it but to get something written, she thought. Did she even have anything useful right now? Feeling desperate, she pulled up the implant log for Pika, a newborn macaque almost certain to become diseased later in life. It would be a stretch; but she consoled herself with the thought it wouldn’t be the only academic manuscript produced just for the sake of getting a paper published. Kel had once dated a maths postgrad student who had spent much of their first — and last — date telling her how he’d churned out several papers by running the same Monte Carlo simulation with different starting parameters. Yes, she could look to see if there was any interesting preliminary data or any way to compare Pika’s baseline to others in the database with a narrative that would be meaningful enough to produce a paper.
Only there wasn’t anything interesting. In fact, there was no data at all.
The entire log had been erased.
MAURA
In the summer, one of Maura’s favourite office break-time things to do was watch the meticulous agribots tending their open-air rooftop food gardens, carefully weeding, or pruning, or vaporising pests. Their work was so orderly and so precise.
Maura sometimes thought of Toronto as a living body, with the flows being the streams of air and life-giving blood and all the little bots and people like cells, all so different, all equally important, and each with their individual jobs to do. And the thingweb was its nervous system: each tiny sensor a neuron, measuring and reporting on things like load bearing stress on the bridges, air quality in the suburb, and noise levels in the downtown.
She also loved to watch the vertical wall gardens, the lungs of the city, filled with various leafy plants and ornamental grasses that helped to filter the air, as they waved and flittered in the breeze. Their random movements stood in sharp contrast to the more rhythmic tick-tick-ticking of the microturbines or the not quite natural flashing of the leaves on the piezo-trees that dotted Toronto and provided electrical power. So much quiet activity. It was all so calming.
Today however, the roofs were smothered in snow, and the walls had been covered to protect the dormant plants there, so she had turned her attention to the enormous lake that Toronto overlooked. The wind always blew hard across the vast expanse of water. If the conditions were right, wind and the water motion could break up the ice cover and fling large sheets of ice towards the shore. Over time, the slabs would stack in a haphazard fashion. The piles were already taller than most men were; it looked as though a giant had smashed the windowpanes of his castle, leaving huge shards in jagged heaps. Maura admired the raw power nature still wielded over the landscape.
After a few minutes of quiet contemplation, she moved to the other window and glanced down at the city traffic flows, below. “Overlay,” she said to the glass. “Pod occupants.” Immediately, all the pods sprouted labels showing who was inside; data hacked from the various public and private networks and piped into Maura’s personal server. The majority of the labels were white, but a few people that particularly interested Maura were highlighted in green.
“Pauline,” she said quietly. The sensors in the room heard the request and pinged Pauline in her office.
&nbs
p; A few moments later, Pauline came in. She walked to the window to stand next to Maura. After a moment, Maura said, “Did you know this city produces nearly thirty percent of its own food?”
The question seemed to surprise Pauline. “I didn’t. I assumed we brought most of it in from the countryside.”
Maura shook her head. “We bring in most of the naturals — the plants that create large amounts of biomass — from outside the city. But all the feedstocks, like the dwarf grain and insect flours used to supply the food fabbers, are grown within city limits. Rooftop gardens like that one over there produce about ten percent. The other stuff, such as the lightweight, fast-growing leafy greens, is grown in the vertical farms like the ones in the re-purposed condos east of here. Just one of them produces about eighty thousand heads of lettuce a day.”
“I didn’t eat any naturals until I was in my twenties,” Pauline said. “All we could afford were the basic fabber prints, one set for every day of the week. If it was Monday, you knew what was for dinner. Flavoured pasta, in our case.” She paused, looking thoughtful. “I think the first thing I tried was a cherry. Even now, I have a difficult time getting past the idea I am eating part of an actual tree.”
Maura smiled faintly but said nothing.
“You know a lot about the city,” Pauline added.
“I make it my business to know a lot of things about a lot of things, whether or not they seem immediately relevant.” Maura gave Pauline a look meant to imply Pauline should do the same thing. “Now then, we have a meeting with a certain Councillor Brown in twenty minutes.” One of the green pod labels on the window brightened: Brown was on his way. “Tell me what you know.”
Pauline nodded. “Brown wants to become mayor in next autumn’s election. He’s sixty-two, married, and became a father for the second time earlier this year. He entered politics about five years ago, gaining his council seat after a viciously personal campaign, and a platform against crime, immigration, and taxes. They’re still piecing together his new platform, but there are hints he plans to do the same again, only with more venom. He’s coming to us to secure good rates on an advertising buy in our flagship entertainment bundle.”
Echoes of Another Page 4
