“It’s okay, honey,” the Nandroid said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Your mother loves you. Would you introduce yourself to her, please?”
“I’m Rachel,” the girl said, then blushed and ducked behind the Nandroid again.
The Nandroid laughed. “I’m sorry, ma’am. She’s very shy.” The robot gently maneuvered Rachel so she was out front again.
“Pleased to meet you, Rachel,” Nora said. “How old are you?”
“Seven.”
“That’s a great age.” What else could she say? Rachel was just a child. “What do you like to do for fun?”
“I like to draw. Do you wanna see?”
“I would. Will you show me?”
The girl brought out the construction paper she’d been hiding behind her back. It was a crayon drawing of a turtle. Or was it a shuttle?
“That’s a very nice drawing. I think you inherited that from me. I like to draw too, but I do it with a computer instead of crayons. Do you want to see?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said.
“I think you might like it.”
Nora brought up an archived video of a battle of bands: dinosaurs playing brass instruments versus monkeys playing techno music. Rachel howled with laughter as the two bands marched towards each other. She loved the marching band hats and the clumsy tyrannosaurus that kept dropping its baton. At the end a meteor crashed into the scene, and the dinosaurs were the only ones left standing. Rachel giggled and clapped, and asked to see it again.
When the Nandroid returned, Nora left Rachel in her office to finish the video she was watching. She met the Nandroid in the lift and shut the door.
“Nandroid, I have an idea.”
The Nandroid nodded and smiled.
“I think I know how to get us out of this. I think I’d like the children to help me with the site.” She spoke in a rush, so the Nandroid couldn’t interrupt and scold her. “With their wild imaginations, they could think up all kinds of crazy things. They might think it was fun, and each one could contribute something. But only if they wanted to, of course. I could spend time with them as I work, and it would make the site totally unique. Not even Helios could keep the curious away.” Nora finished and took a deep breath, eying the new Midge closely. “Well? What do you think?”
The Nandroid patted her on the shoulder. “I think it’s a wonderful idea. The children would love it.”
An unexpected rush of relief flowed through Nora. She felt giddy, but she tried to return to her normal businesslike demeanor. “I have a new task for you.”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Will you find out where my biological mother is? I’d like to meet her.” A giggle came from Rachel, within the office, and Nora looked back with a smile and tears in her eyes. “She must be very lonely.”
“Of course, ma’am.” The Nandroid turned to go.
“Oh, and Midge?” Nora smiled. “Thanks.”
Out on a Limb
By Tom Barlow
I’d been growing my new leg for almost three agonizing months when Dr. Athena Vance told me she was leaving the hospital. Just when I’d started to see cracks in that physician demeanor—a little gentle teasing, comparing movies we’d seen back home in the real world.
“You’d walk out on me? On all this?” I said, waving my hand to indicate the best medical facility the army could provide—tile walls with cement so eroded a sneeze might bring them down, the threadbare cotton privacy curtain, the electrical stimulation unit with bare wires showing, the sink crusted with lime deposits.
She finished massaging my forearm above my regenerated left hand, and then carefully scrubbed her hands and the chart pad, as she did every morning, with a towel that had been soaking in bleach water. The fumes kept my sinuses clear.
“With your reputation, I should be glad to get out of here before you get back on your own two feet.”
“Unfair,” I said. “The slanderous gossip of jealous grunts.” She was erudite, so I tried to use big words whenever I could.
Yeah, I was smitten, a feeling I wasn’t accustomed to. In a war zone, you usually measure love in minutes because permanence is just a bad joke.
But even if there had been other female soldiers in the regen ward, she would have stood out: auburn hair with a blond streak, cut high and tight; bold cheekbones; a wide, sensuous mouth; dimpled chin; lavender eyes; and a body with just enough padding to make it interesting. Too classy for a private like me, but I’ve always had aspirations above my station.
“Who’s going to chew me out for forgetting my legs lifts?” I said.
“I’ll leave you a recording,” she replied as she pulled the stimcap off what had been my leg stump, but which was now almost back to full length with a lump developing at the bottom—the first hints of a new foot. I couldn’t wait until it was fully formed; the pain of regen exhausted me. The feel of her fingers lightly prodding the proudflesh sent a fresh bolt of it through my head.
“Sorry,” she said. “Looks good. Maybe four weeks and you’ll be walking on it.”
“Four weeks? So soon?”
“Unless the power fails again. Keep your fingers crossed.”
Smartass. She was fully aware that I was still learning to coordinate my new fingers.
“Headed back to Walter Reed?” I asked. I’d always wanted to visit what was left of D.C.
“Hardly. I’m off to the front.”
My fantasy collapsed. The front was the one place in the world where I wouldn’t visit her even if she invited me. “Who’s stupid enough to put a regen doc in harm’s way?”
Her hands were back in the tub, scrubbing again. “I am. There’s something wrong up there; most of the soldiers that could regen are turning it down.”
I hadn’t told her about the bribe I’d had to pay to convince the triage doc to evac me; most of them favored augmentation with prostheses, so they didn’t see any urgency in transporting wounded from the med tent back to the division hospital.
“If I’d known how much pain went with regen, I might have gone silicon myself,” I said.
Vance grabbed the only remaining clean towel and wiped her face. She was actually sweating, something almost unheard of in the Yukon. “After fighting full-augment soldiers for five years? How would you like being joysticked by some puppet master a thousand miles away?”
“Don’t look at me. I’m hemo all the way.”
She gave me a look that was half pity, half exasperation. “You’re Quinn all the way. God knows why I’ll miss you.”
I knew, but I didn’t say anything. I was her most successful regen, and who doesn’t like to be constantly reminded of a success?
I watched her climb into the troop transport that afternoon with a sense of loss as keen as what I’d felt when I first realized I’d sacrificed a left leg and two hands to the arctic cold. I tried to lock in a mental image of her to remember her by. At the time, I assumed I’d never see her again.
Most soldiers return from the tundra in a box.
Six weeks later, while I was still learning how to use a brand-new leg and two hands, my orders arrived. I was expecting to be shipped south to manage a desk, or maybe back to balmy Pendleton to joystick a tank.
Unfortunately, the corps had a different idea. On the morning of my discharge from the hospital, I woke up and found orders lying on my bedside table—orders sending me back to the front.
Back to freezing my ass off in the winter and feeding mosquitoes in the summer while guarding the Northern Resource Zone from another attack from the Beaufort Sea. Shit. Double shit. I considered desertion-impossible. Suicide? I wasn’t there yet. Perhaps I could find the solution at the bottom of a beer stein.
I put on my uniform for the first time in five months, left the hospital, and limped across the street to the nearest tavern. I began to unwind a bit after a couple of drinks, and I reread my orders. I’d missed an important detail: I was assigned to assist Dr. Athena Vance, at her request.
&n
bsp; I was lucky, or unlucky, enough to catch a ride with a convoy hauling rations north. Most of the heavy stuff doesn’t go north until winter, when the lakes freeze and they can take the ice roads, but provisions must roll year-round.
Our convoy arrived in Camp Cochise at the end of the day, around 3 p.m.—winter was coming fast. I grabbed my bag and headed toward the huge round tent with a big red cross on the roof, set well back from the road.
I’d been away from the camp long enough that I’d forgotten the pervading smell, dirty socks and pine sap. Everyone looked overweight, but I knew they weren’t. They were just layering their clothes the arctic way—every couple of days, you remove the innermost layer, wash it, and put it on the outside to freeze-dry. We resembled artichokes in more than just color for most of the year.
I reached the tent, my foot already sore; you don’t develop calluses overnight. Inside, the working areas were arranged around the outside of the tent: triage, treatment rooms for the less seriously ill or wounded, emergency rooms (two equipped for surgery), recovery room, ward, and pharmacy. In the center, administration and a small augment repair shop.
I found Vance’s miniscule office, stepped up to the fabric door, and said, “Knock, knock.”
“Come on in,” she said.
I pulled the door aside and stepped into the office. She was seated at an inflatable desk, scrawling something on her pad. She looked up, saw who it was and smiled slightly. “Quinn. Welcome back to hell.”
I took a seat and loosened my new boots. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to be back in this shithole … because I’m not. But you’re looking great. How much longer are you planning to stick it out here? You won’t like winter, I’ll guarantee that.”
The bones in her face were more pronounced, and she was deeply tanned, typical at the end of the 24-hours-of-light part of the calendar. By spring, if she was still here, she’d be white as milk.
“I’m here for as long as I can stand it,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here. I need your help.”
Four words I’d prayed to hear, followed by four that a soldier hates to hear because it usually means something very dangerous, boring, or laborious is in store. But all that infatuation had come flooding back the moment I set eyes on her.
“You got it. What can I do?”
“Over the past three months, we’ve had 25 soldiers lose limbs. Twenty-two chose augmentation over regeneration, which doesn’t make sense, in my opinion. We promised their loved ones we’d do our best to return them home safe and sound, not slaved to some silicon.”
“You have to realize that nobody up here looks twice at an augment,” I said.
“Yeah, but that’s up here. Back home, they’re likely to find out that their girlfriends and boyfriends won’t be so accepting. Our enemy has turned augments into a dirty word.”
“So what am I—your poster boy?”
“You, a poster boy? That’s a laugh. No, I need you to talk sense to these soldiers. No one pays much attention to what I say—I’m an outsider. The problem, I think, is that two prosthesis manufacturers have shops here. It’s an open secret that they’ve been paying off a few of the officers to recruit patients.”
“Who?” I said.
“Rumor says Lieutenant Berger, for one, is lining his pocket with SuperLimb money.”
I told her that Berger was precisely the name I didn’t want to hear. He was the one that ‘forgot’ to send fuel oil to Port Carter, where I’d been assigned after I won six months of his salary by drawing two aces to the two in my hand. I lost my limbs to frostbite there. Still, that was better than Private Saul Stanley, who’d frozen to death.
His clothes had saved my life. I’d probably never forgive myself for that.
Vance stood. “Let’s grab some coffee.”
I shuffled after her as we made our way to the mess hall. They’d poured gravel over the mud floor of the hall since I’d last been there, not a good idea—it gave dropped food a place to hide and rot. The stench almost made me look forward to winter, which was due any day now. Then the air would be too cold to carry smells.
We filled our mugs and grabbed a quiet table in the corner.
“I know you think you’re doing the right thing here,” I said, “but the whole hemo ideal is losing traction with your common grunt. He sees his buddy crush a beer can with his augment hand, or jump over a tank with his new legs, and that power is seductive. And the augments get all the glory assignments anyway—incursions, scouting, guerilla stuff. They can go longer and harder, and they aren’t as afraid. They figure you fixed them up once, you can do it again.”
“How about you? Are you less scared now that you’ve regrown the limbs you lost?”
“Oh hell, no; I’m even more averse to losing one. I couldn’t tolerate the pain of growing another limb.”
“So you think augments make better soldiers because they have less fear? I’d argue that the best soldiers are the ones that are afraid. Look at the enemy augments that attacked us last summer. Charged straight into a killing zone.”
“That’s because they don’t think for themselves. We, on the other hand, don’t joystick our augments.”
Yet,” she said.
“Is there something I should know?”
She leaned forward, dropped her voice until I could barely hear her. “Those limb augments? They have a wireless remote operation mode so the mechanics can test them for damage. Our tech is no different from the enemy’s. We just haven’t chosen to joystick our soldiers. Yet.”
“And we won’t. The soldiers will laugh at you if you try to convince them they’re at risk of being controlled remotely.”
“I’m not so sure. Isn’t it a lot easier to push a button to send an augment a hundred klicks away into battle than to look a human being in the eye before you send him out to die?”
I spent the next couple of days hanging around the medical tent, drinking in the doctor’s fair visage. Not much was happening with the war; the enemy was busy withdrawing the summer flotilla that operated in the ice-free Northwest Passage, and the ships that could tolerate the winter ice pack had not yet arrived.
Vance and I were taking a coffee break in the mess hall again when she pointed with her cup to the far corner of the room, where a woman with Polynesian features was gamely spooning gumbo into her mouth with her left hand. Her right arm ended at the elbow.
“Angela Salii,” Vance said. “I thought I had her hooked up to evac to the regen ward at Whitehorse tomorrow, but now she’s ‘having second thoughts.’ Why don’t you introduce yourself?”
“Your wish, my command,” I said. I grabbed a coffee refill on my way across the hall. Salii looked up from her food when I stepped up to her table. She glanced at my shoulder to see if she needed to stand up and salute, but we were of the same rank.
“Mind if I join you?” I said, flashing my warmest smile.
She shrugged, still chewing.
I introduced myself. She nodded, chewing some more. She must have hit the mother of all gristle.
She finally swallowed and said, “I saw you with the doc. You here to sweet-talk me into the regen hospital?”
“Would that work?”
“Nope. You’re cute, but not my type.”
I held up my hands. “Then let me reason with you. Last April, these hands were frozen solid. I had them amputated.”
“Those are regens?” she said.
“Yeah.” I laid my hands on the table, palms up. “Touch them.”
She reached over with her fork and gently poked the palm of my left hand. “They’re like a baby’s hands,” she said. “All soft and pink.”
“They’re still growing,” I said, “and the calluses will come.”
“So why’d you go the hemo route instead of augments? Some religious thing?”
The truth, which was that I’d chosen regen because I mistakenly thought it came with a discharge, didn’t seem like the right message, so I repeated the argument that Vance ha
d used on me. Salii listened patiently, spooning more silage into her mouth. Her face showed no more interest than a cow chewing its cud.
When I finally ran out of words, she asked, “How much did they pay you to choose regen?”
“Pay me? I drew my army pay, same as any other wounded.”
Her eyes flicked around the room behind me, making sure, I guessed, that no one could overhear us. “Then you’re an idiot. I got an offer of $2,000 cash to go with an augment. Can you match that?”
I was dumbfounded. “Someone’s paying a kickback?”
She frowned. “Not someone, numbnuts: everyone. The government pays these companies so much that they apparently decided to start sharing the wealth. Plus, they got the return business when the augments wear out.
“Ask your friend the doc how much she gets paid per patient from E-Stim. She owes you a taste of that; after all, it was your hands that put cash in her pocket.”
I followed Vance back to the office to report. With only fabric walls between offices, we whispered. I briefly imagined us as married parents, trying to keep secrets from the kids.
I told her about the kickback.
“That’s news to me,” she said. “I haven’t heard of companies paying the wounded directly. That’s a court martial if she’s caught.”
“Obviously, she doesn’t think there’s any chance that could happen, or she wouldn’t have told me. She also told me that E-Stim pays you for every soldier you talk into regen. Is that true?”
“No, of course not. They did hint around about it once, but I told them to go pound sand.”
“You don’t like money?” I said.
“I like saving lives,” she said. “Money has no place on the battleground.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re cute when you’re naïve?” I asked. “The military’s been greasing their wheels with cash since cavemen appointed the first supply sergeant.”
She chewed her lower lip for a moment. “There must be something we can do. Maybe I should call the MPs.”
“Turning into a snitch is going to get you nowhere except shunned.”
“Could you talk to Berger? For me?” She actually, no shit, batted her eyes at me. Like a fool, I agreed.
Therefore I Am - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 2 Page 15
