The Tomb and Other Stories

by Stanley Salmons

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I grumbled. No point in chewing him out; he was shaken up enough already. Inside, though, I was spitting tacks. I wasn’t just responsible for this clown; I was responsible for the project, and we were already behind schedule. But there was no way we could carry on with only one of us operational. In any case I had to go with Paul – that was the buddy system we worked out here. So there was nothing for it: I’d have to shut down the robot force.

  Well, serve the bastards right. Yeah, the Company too, but I don’t mean them. I mean the goddamned robots.

  My contempt for robots is pretty well known in the Company. Someone asked me once why I still worked with them. Well, the truth is you can do a lot of neat stuff if you work around robots. When I first joined the Company I used to get my hands dirty, going in to deal with power delivery systems, hydraulic actuators, control systems, that kind of shit. As I went up the promotion ladder I started to specialize in AI – that’s Artificial Intelligence. It suits me better. Okay, I’ve put on a bit of weight since the early days – I admit it – and it’s not that easy to get into the confined spaces any more. Look at Paul. He’s thin as a rake. He loves those jobs. That’s okay, the division of labour suits me just fine.

  You may think that most of the AI is built in during development – and you’d be right – but there’s still a lot of programming to do on site. Sometimes the boffins haven’t been given a decent spec and the software just isn’t up to snuff. Sometimes the software is pretty good, but in the real world something unexpected crops up, something it can’t cope with. Then you’ve just got to reprogram. And things still crash, in spite of fault-tolerant systems and error-catching routines. I like field work and I’m good at my job, otherwise the Company might have been less tolerant of my attitude to robots.

  I shouldn’t blame the robots, really; it’s not their fault, the poor dumb bastards, it’s the nerds who do the research and development. Some of the responses they build in can be a real pain in the ass. And people get taken in. You hear these old bats in town, clucking about their domestic robots. They’re convinced the damned things have a personality. I know better. Robots don’t think; they process data. When a robot does something that looks halfway intelligent, it’s because an intelligent human has written a good algorithm. You forget that in a place like this and you’re lost, man.

  They’ll have to get another team out here to restart the project. It shouldn’t be too hard for them; I always leave a good trail of comments when I modify the code, and most of the actual engineering is pretty well covered. Well, that’s their worry. Right now I’ve got to get my dumb partner some attention for his stupid thumb. Damn, damn, damn.

  We don’t keep a Rotorcraft here; normally the Company drops us off and picks us up when we’ve finished. Even if we had one I couldn’t fly it. Paul would claim he could, but I would no more have him fly me than a five-year-old, least of all with one hand. No, I know what I have to do – hell, it’s my job to know. The nearest hospital is hundreds of miles away, but there’s a network of medical stations out here. The Company had enough money and clout to make sure there was one within reach of any ongoing project. It wasn’t philanthropy; it was good business sense. Compensation claims can be expensive, especially if there’s a smartass lawyer involved. The nearest Medistation is on the other side of the lake.

  “We’ll get a clean dressing on that and take you to the Medistation,” I said to Paul. “The weather’s good, it’ll take about an hour. All right? Is that giving you grief?”

  Paul grimaced. “A bit.”

  “Well I’ll bring some painkillers in case it gets bad but I’d sooner you didn’t take anything right now. They might want to give you something at the Medistation, and it could fuck things up if you’re on something else already. So hang on if you can. Okay? I’ll be as quick as I can now. While I’m tidying up you get your personal stuff together, because we won’t be coming back. Anything you can’t manage, give me a shout.”

  I thought it would take his mind off the damned thumb if I could at least give him something to do.

  After I’d closed down the project we took our gear down to the boat. As soon as we were under way I contacted the Medistation to let them know we were coming – they like as much notice as possible. I could have used a hand communicator, but the one in the boat has a longer range. When I got through, the monitor put up a selection of flags and icons and a moving hand, inviting me to touch the appropriate one on the screen. I selected the Stars and Stripes; we’d be communicating in American English. Then there were some choices: sound only, vision only, sound and vision. I selected vision only. You wouldn’t hear sound anyway over the roar of the boat’s twin turbines. We were bouncing along nicely. Paul was crouched in the stern, cuddling his bandaged hand against his body. Like as not it was throbbing plenty, but he didn’t say anything. I looked back at the screen.

  “HOW MANY IN YOUR PARTY, PLEASE?”

  I entered “Two”.

  “DO YOU HAVE ACCESS TO AN OPTICARD READER?”

  I entered “Yes”.

  “PLEASE INSERT OPTICARDS FOR ALL MEMBERS OF YOUR PARTY.”

  I remember reading somewhere that more than fifty percent of the people who take someone to a doctor have a problem themselves. Either they’re stressed out because their friend or partner is sick, or they’re the real reason for the trip. So to cover themselves and the medical insurance companies properly, the Medistations were set up to include everyone in the party in the examination. It wasn’t a problem; there were usually four to six examination rooms, so unless there’d been a disaster, like an aircraft crash or a mine collapse, there was plenty of spare capacity. Maybe I should have mentioned it before: there are no human personnel at these Medistations; the whole process is handled robotically. You can imagine how good I felt about that right now.

  I slotted our Opticards into the reader, one after the other. They contained our personal information, medical insurance details, and entire medical history, including previous illnesses and operations, allergies, adverse drug reactions and genetic abnormalities. If you’d ever had an X-ray or a scan of some sort, the image was in there too. By the time we arrived the computer would know exactly who to report to and which insurance account to bill.

  You may wonder why I’m willing to give all this information to a computer and why I’m consenting to a medical examination I don’t want. This is the clever part. If I refuse they’ll bill Paul’s credit card instead of his insurance and he probably won’t get it refunded. Cunning bastards.

  “Anything wrong, Marty?” Paul had come up from the stern to watch me punch the information in. He must have seen me wince.

  “Nah, just a bit of indigestion.”

  “You taken something for it?”

  “Yeah, I chewed some antacid tablets, but they didn’t touch it. It happens from time to time. Don’t worry ’bout it.”

  The computer had read in the data and the communicator had a new screen up.

  “THANK YOU, MR MURPHY AND MR ROBERTSON. YOUR DATA IS NOW ON FILE. MAY I CALL YOU PAUL AND MARTIN?”

  That was the other thing the data enabled them to do: be friendly. Except I call it altogether too fucking familiar. I was about to enter “No, you bloody well may not” but then I thought it would probably make Paul feel more relaxed if it did. Right now he was tight as a drum. I entered “Yes”.

  “THANK YOU. WHICH OF YOU IS THE PRIMARY REASON FOR THE VISIT?”

  I entered “Paul”.

  “WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM?”

  I entered “He seems to have a large cut in his left thumb”.

  I don’t know if it registered the sarcasm but it spotted the syntax.

  “IS PAUL ABLE TO ANSWER THE QUESTION HIMSELF?”

  I entered “Affirmative”.

  It went through a few routine questions with Paul. It was trying to establish the nature of the injury and the extent of blood loss. This was the stage when it would decide if outside help was
needed, taking into account the information in his history. For instance, it would make a heap of difference if he was a hemophiliac. These stations could handle a lot of routine emergencies, including a bit of surgery. Anything more and they’d just do a front line job and stabilize the situation while a Rotorcraft was on its way to take the patient to the nearest suitable hospital. It would alert the hospital, too, in case a specialist had to be brought in, and all the details would be on the sheet before the patient even showed his face in reception.

  I was still thinking about some of the tasks I’d left behind. It was so frustrating, having to break off like this. I wondered how the Company would react to yet another delay. I popped another couple of antacid tablets. The indigestion was real bad today.

  We’d been going for half an hour now. The air was clean and clear, and the Medistation was already visible on the approaching shoreline. It wouldn’t have been much use designing it to merge with the scenery; it might have to be picked out from the air in bad weather. So the whole building was glistening white and the sides and the landing stage on the roof were painted with large red crosses inside fluorescent green circles. The communicator had closed down now. Their computer had all it needed for the moment. It didn’t want anything from me. Not yet.

  •

  I announced our arrival to the security panel. It responded in an infuriatingly calm voice:

  “Hallo, Paul. Hallo, Martin. We’ve been expecting you. Please follow the flashing green arrows.”

  The door slid open.

  There were several doors opening off the hallway, but a line of flashing green arrows on the floor and ceiling made it abundantly clear where they wanted us to go. We opened the door to the examination room. I suppressed the instinct to knock first. These things die hard.

  “Come in, Paul,” said a soothing male voice.

  If you thought this voice might have belonged to some kind of tin man with a stethoscope round his neck, think again. All there was in this room was a padded bench on one wall and an examination couch in the middle. It was my job to know what was going on in robotics, so I knew quite a lot about this system. It was called FLAUBERT. That stood for First Line Auxiliary Unit for Backup and Emergency Remote Telemedicine.

  The equipment was all concealed, in the floor, in the ceiling, in the sides of the couch. That figured: if it had been on show the first patient would have pissed his pants. The policy was to deploy only what was necessary at any one time for diagnosis or treatment. But it wasn’t just tin men who were lacking: the voice wasn’t even associated with a face on a screen. The medics were responsible for that. They knew just how gullible the public were about robots and they didn’t want the slightest suggestion that the care they were getting here came from anything other than computers and automatons.

  “Paul, please get undressed down to your underpants. You can put your clothes on the bench.” Then it must have picked up the second presence in the room.

  “There is a comfortable waiting room at the end of the corridor, Martin, if you would like to wait there.”

  My name’s Marty. I hate being called Martin. No one, not even the senior bosses in the Company, call me that. When I was little, my mother only called me Martin when she was all set to give me a pasting. But this smartass computer already knew too much about me; my nickname would be a small detail that I would hold back and continue to feel smug about.

  “No thanks, I’ll stay,” I replied, seating myself resolutely on the padded bench.

  There was a slight pause and then the voice said:

  “Paul, do you mind if Martin stays during your examination?”

  “Me? No, I don’t mind.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, no problem. It’s cool.”

  “Oh, would you like me to raise the temperature in here?”

  I smacked a fist into a palm and let out a whoop of exaggerated, derisive laughter. The software had tripped over a simple ambiguous phrase. I was totally delighted. And now that it had forked to a new logical sequence it couldn’t return to trying to pursue me out of the room. It would have to wait until its place in the program was reset by an event.

  “No, it’s okay,” Paul answered.

  I continued to giggle, although my amusement was a bit forced by now.

  Paul put his clothes on the bench next to where I was sitting. He wasn’t bothered about undressing in front of me – we’d been skinny dipping together, so he wasn’t going to come over all coy now. You had to admire his build; slim, good muscle definition over the shoulders and chest, and a nice six-pack. He went over to the middle of the room and said:

  “Er, shall I get on the couch?”

  “Yes, Paul. Please try to relax. There’s nothing to worry about. I am going to look after you.”

  Interesting, I thought. I knew these systems computed voice spectra routinely. They were designed to pick out the tell-tale frequencies that signified emotional states, like fear or aggression. It was the first time I’d seen it in action and it obviously worked: it had picked up the tension in Paul’s voice.

  He climbed onto the couch.

  “Thank you, Paul. Now I am just going to inflate some arm rests for you. Please place your arms on them, palms face up.”

  A segmented balloon came up on either side of Paul and he put his arms on them.

  “Now I’ll take your blood pressure and pulse.”

  The blood pressure cuff was an extension of the balloon segment that started just above his elbow. It inflated and deflated slowly. Then both the balloon armrests inflated some more and I noticed that his arms were sinking into them. If they’d been filled with warm gas, which was my bet, they would feel very comfortable. At the same time his arms had been stabilized without obvious restraint. The lower segments of the left-hand armrest hadn’t been inflated, leaving his injured left hand clear.

  I saw the illumination and looked up. A panel in the ceiling had opened noiselessly, and I knew the light had come from a brief laser scan, designed to establish Paul’s exact position. Somewhere in the computer’s memory there was now a wire-frame model of Paul lying on the couch. The soft voice continued:

  “Now I’m going to take a look at your hand, Paul. Please keep still, but breathe normally.”

  The scanning probe consisted of a main arm from which about eight jointed arms diverged. Each arm terminated in a metallic cylinder. Using the information from the laser scan, the computer lined up the main arm with the axis of Paul’s arm, the cylinders arranged in a circle, pointing inwards. Then it rotated slowly around Paul’s bandaged hand. This would be a multimodal scan, I guessed. The computer was powerful enough to build images simultaneously from the ultrasound units and the high-resolution computed tomography. The image processing software would start by looking at the bones and then reduce contrast to look at the soft tissue. By now the computer would know to a small fraction of a millimetre the thickness of the dressing and exactly how far the cut had penetrated. It had probably used narrow-band reflective infra-red spectroscopy as well, to see whether there was any dead tissue around, and if so how much.

  “You have a bad cut, Paul, but the damage is not serious. And there are no foreign bodies in the wound.”

  I was about to say “Hey Paul, you didn’t leave the knife in your thumb, then?” but I told myself to shut up. Paul was looking relaxed and confident, and that was more important right now than my need to make cheap shots. And actually FLAUBERT hadn’t done a bad job so far. The next bit was really impressive though.

  “If you would like to hold still, Paul, I can fix the hand for you. Just relax, and breathe normally.” No doubt the system had already reopened a communication channel somewhere and told the hospital that it could come off alert. “You will just feel a few blasts of cold air as I clean it up.”

  I was watching very carefully, and I’ll explain what it did step by step, but the whole thing only took about ten seconds. First it produced an oscillating saw, which neatly cut op
en the dressing. Then I saw a cloud of vapour. That would have been a mixture of volatile antiseptic agents to clean things up, and a local anesthetic. Then four pairs of forceps moved in and pinched the edges of the cut together. Their ends were like tiny two-pronged forks. There was another blast of vapour. One of the forceps was repositioned. Another blast of vapour. Then a minute hollow needle was inserted between the prongs of each fork and withdrawn, leaving a polymeric suture behind. A clamp welded a tiny bead on each side of the suture, tight enough against the skin to raise it in a slight ridge, and trimmed the excess. There were no knots, and nothing across the top of the cut. Then a final blast of vapour, all the instruments were withdrawn and it applied one of those tubular dressings, working back and forth until the thumb was adequately padded. Like I say, the whole thing took about ten seconds.

  “Paul, your Opticard tells me your anti-tetanus vaccination is up-to-date, but the thumb may start to hurt soon, so I would like to give you something to dull the pain. Is that all right?”

  “Yeah, sure. Whatever you think.”

  “You will feel a little vibration, and then a slight prick.”

  I understood that. It was going to make the injection into the left antecubital vein, and it would locate it with a vibrating probe, sensing the difference in compliance. Moments later the injection was done. There was one thing left.

  “I will sit you up now, Paul,” it said, and the couch angled Paul to a sitting position. “Paul, do you see the loop of bandage I have left around your wrist?” I hadn’t noticed it myself. “I suggest you put it around your neck. Your thumb will be better protected if you keep it in this sling for a couple of days. It will take the pressure off the wound too, and limit the bruising. We’re all finished now. The stitches will not dissolve by themselves; I used a material that will cause the minimum tissue reaction. You can visit your doctor in about a week to have them removed. See him before that if you have any concerns, but I don’t anticipate any problems. When it heals, the scar will be almost invisible. Don’t worry if you can’t take all this in now. I’ll leave a print-out of what I’ve done, and what you need to do, in the slot by the side of the door. And I’ve already sent a report to your regular doctor at home, so he’ll know what’s happened.”