Stranded

by James Alan Gardner

  “Balla,” Alyssa said, “do you know where we are?”

  “Sorry,” he replied, “I’m not getting GPS. If this is a military hospital, maybe the walls block outside signals. Hey, maybe that’s why I can’t get newsfeeds!” He suddenly sounded relieved. “Maybe this place censors everything except trivial reference data.”

  “We have to get out of here,” Alyssa muttered. She’d never before been cut off from everything. No people, no data. Just Alyssa, Balla, and the silence.

  She was now in a long wide corridor, with the same black-and-white checkerboard tiles on the walls. Occasionally, the pattern was interrupted by steel doors. She didn’t check if the doors were locked; she didn’t want to know what was behind them. She started walking fast, straight ahead, looking for an exit.

  The corridor ended at a T-junction. Alyssa cautiously poked her head around the corner. The right-hand passage had a long glass window in one wall, like the kind in a neonatal ward where you could look at all the babies. She doubted, however, that this place had any newborns; she was pretty certain she wouldn’t like what the viewing window showed, but she decided she had to see. Since waking up, she hadn’t done much to be proud of: crying her eyes out, being scared, feeling sorry for herself. It was time to get a grip. Alyssa moved to the edge of the glass and peeked around.

  The window showed a vast room full of stainless steel chests, stacked on shelves three chests high. Each chest was the size of a coffin, and each had a vid-screen showing several colored graphs. Atop each chest was an aut laid out carefully, the chains draped down the chest’s sides. On the rack nearest the window, Alyssa could see a Crocodile, some fern-like plant, and a reddish sandstone.

  She knew what she was looking at—her Gran had been put into a similar chest when the cancer got too bad. “They’re freezers, aren’t they?” Alyssa whispered to Balla. “With people in them.”

  “We don’t know there are people inside.”

  “Of course there are,” Alyssa said. “Those are their auts on top of the freezers.”

  Gran had only stayed in the freezer a few days—she’d left a will saying she didn’t want to be “a darn corpsicle.” Soon enough, she was in a real coffin . . . and her Cockatiel aut had been laid on top in a bed of lilies.

  But the people in these freezers were likely alive. Hospitals froze patients before the actual moment of death, at a point when dying seemed inevitable but the doctors wanted time to discuss any last-ditch treatments. Freezing was especially common during the annual flu pandemics: it might take a few months for researchers to put together a cure, but they always succeeded eventually. In the meantime, flu patients were carefully put on ice. Alyssa guessed that the same applied to all the people in these freezers . . . except that they didn’t have the flu, they had the same plague Alyssa did.

  She said, “Our friends from Montserrat must be in there somewhere—everybody who got sick. We were all brought to this hospital . . . and one by one, as they came close to dying, they got put in suspended animation.” Alyssa shivered. “I wonder why I’m not frozen too.”

  “Because you got better,” Balla said. The image on his vid-screen changed to show Alyssa’s vital signs. Since she’d been a little girl, Balla had shown her “the healthy pictures” every night before she went to sleep. He said, “Body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, all the rest . . . you’re still pretty weak, but you’re on the way up.”

  “I look like a corpse,” Alyssa said. “I’m bald and saggy.”

  “No, you’re alive. Whatever the doctors did, it worked. Which makes you better off than the folks in deep freeze.”

  Alyssa knew Balla was right. She’d recovered from the plague when many others hadn’t. How many freezers was she looking at? More than a hundred. The room went back a long way.

  As she watched, a robot rolled up one of the aisles between racks of freezer chests. The robot was narrow but tall, with two triple-jointed arms at the front and another two at the back. It went straight to the front corner of the room and plugged a finger into a data-jack on the lowest freezer. After a moment, the robot withdrew its finger, then plugged into the chest on the next shelf above. Systematically, the robot went from freezer to freezer, obviously checking each one’s status.

  “That robot,” Balla said. “Only Level Three intelligence. Just a drone.”

  Machine intelligence was ranked on a scale of One to Ten, with One almost mindless and Ten as smart as a human PhD. By the rules of the Peace, artificials weren’t allowed to go higher than Ten. “How do you know the robot’s level?” Alyssa asked. “I thought everything here was security-locked.”

  “Not that robot,” Balla said. “It’s not military. Likely brought in from outside when this hospital got filled with plague victims. Not enough high-security bots to handle the load.” Balla paused. “Not enough human doctors either.”

  “So far we haven’t seen humans at all.”

  “Maybe there aren’t any,” Balla said. “From what I saw on Montserrat, this plague is virulently contagious. Best for humans to stay away. Even a dumb Level Three machine can manage the hands-on work, if it’s supervised by someone smarter—maybe a human medical team in a control room miles away.”

  Alyssa said, “You mean I could be the only human here?”

  Balla hesitated; Alyssa guessed that he didn’t want to upset her. Eventually, he admitted, “You could be the only human whose temperature is above zero.”

  Alyssa stood at the window, just staring at the quiet freezers. The hospital was silent; the window blocked whatever sounds were made by the med-robot and the chests’ refrigeration units.

  She felt her heart beating. She breathed.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s get moving and do something.”

  —————

  They walked through the hospital for another ten minutes. They passed many doors, but all were locked except for bathrooms. They saw no humans at all, and only two robots: first, a cleaner (Level One) which ignored them completely as it swabbed the floor and the walls with disinfectant; then, a Level Two gurney with mechanical arms for lifting patients, plus attachments for administering oxygen, IV fluids, and whatever else a sick person might need. The gurney stood idle in a corridor; its visual sensors lit up as Alyssa and Balla went by, but it took no other action.

  When they were well past the gurney, Alyssa muttered, “At least it didn’t grab me and put me back to bed.”

  “Level Two machines can only follow orders,” Balla said. “Carry Patient X from Room A to Room B. Since no one has told it—”

  Balla suddenly erupted into loud dolphin chittering, high-pitched and piercing. His audio synthesizers could produce any sound, but he hadn’t done dolphin calls for years—not since Alyssa was a kid, when she’d giggle at practically anything. Now his ear-splitting whistles and shrill stuttering yips echoed down the corridor. Alyssa hissed, “Shh! Quiet! Someone will hear.”

  But Balla didn’t stop. He went on for ten more seconds with Alyssa saying, “Shh, shh, shh!” before he abruptly fell silent. Reverberations bounced off the hard blank walls until they finally dwindled away.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Alyssa whispered.

  Balla didn’t answer for several moments. Then in a flat voice he said, “Diagnostic: blood impurities.”

  “What?” Alyssa stared at Balla’s display screen, where columns of numbers scrolled too fast to read. She’d only seen that once before: when she’d broken a lamp and tried to fix it before her parents found out. She’d given herself a fierce electric shock, which had fried one of Balla’s digital components. He’d crashed just like this, and had been incoherent until the component was replaced.

  “Balla!” Alyssa said in a panic. “Balla! Are you all right?”

  The wrist-screen went fuzzy, then gradually focused into Balla’s belov
ed face . . . but only a still picture, not an active animation. His mouth didn’t move as he said, “Trouble. Your blood. Not good.”

  Alyssa’s first thought was anemia—it was a problem for many teenage girls, brought on by puberty and made worse by the blood needs of an aut. She took iron supplements as a precaution, but maybe because of the sickness . . .

  “I’ll find something to eat,” she said. “Something with protein. And something to raise my blood sugar.”

  “No. Not that trouble. Disease. It’s still in you.”

  Alyssa felt a rush of nausea. She wanted to yell, “That’s not true!” But Balla lived by sharing her blood, and he could run medical tests on it. If he said the sickness was still in her blood . . .

  She’d become a carrier—no longer suffering ill effects, but still loaded with whatever germ caused the plague. Now she’d infected Balla: half of him was just electronic, but the other half was living organic tissue, and as susceptible to disease as Alyssa herself. “Oh, Balla,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t . . . worry,” he said. The picture on his screen changed to his usual dolphin smile—but still unmoving. A red dot appeared in the upper right corner of the image, indicating that he’d activated his emergency power supply: batteries that he could draw on when Alyssa’s blood wasn’t enough. In a much clearer voice, he said, “We had mono together; we can have this too.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Well, you’re right about finding something to eat. We’re both short of nutrients . . .”

  Another dolphin chitter escaped him. It only lasted a second before he managed to choke it off. Alyssa pictured him reprogramming his digital components to override his organics. His computer parts couldn’t fight the disease, but they could shut off his audio when he lost control of his speech.

  “Poor Balla,” she said, stroking his rubbery skin. “I’ll take care of you, I promise. I’ll eat the best possible . . .”

  She stopped. In all their time wandering through the hospital, Alyssa hadn’t seen any kitchen or cafeteria. If there had been one, it was locked behind a top-security door. But she said, “Don’t worry, I’ll find us plenty to eat.”

  She set out at a fast walk, turning corners at random in the hope that luck would lead her to food. Instead, she came to a lobby where a walkway through a metal detector led to large glass doors. Beyond the doors lay a sunny lawn, as bright as a Caribbean noon. Alyssa didn’t hesitate; the locked-up hospital had nothing to offer, so she headed into the light.

  —————

  Out of the black-and-white checkerboard of the hospital, into the brilliant burning colors of a sunny day. Heat pressed against Alyssa’s face as she emerged into open air. After the hospital’s neutral temperature, the warmth was a shock: dry heat that made Alyssa’s skin prickle as moisture began leeching away. She thought, Too bad I don’t belong to Tarantula or Scorpion clan. This is no place for a Dolphin.

  She looked up, expecting the cloudless blue sky of a desert. Instead, she saw green: a grassy plain directly overhead, but several miles away. Clumps of trees dotted the plain, and what looked like a river.

  Alyssa gaped for a moment, then lowered her gaze. There was no horizon: just a solid green field going up and up, across overhead, and down, disappearing behind the hospital at her back.

  She looked side to side, seeing more green . . . but cutting through the fields was a straight strip of blackness, beyond which loomed a night sky full of stars. Near the top of the black strip, the sun shone blindingly bright. The sun moved fast, sinking so quickly that Alyssa was suddenly covered by the hospital’s shadow.

  “Uhh,” said Alyssa. She felt as if she had to say something, but no words came out. “Uhh . . .”

  “We’re in space,” Balla said. His chittering was gone, perhaps overwhelmed by awe. “We’re in outer space.”

  “We can’t be,” Alyssa said. “We’d be floating weightless.”

  “Not necessarily,” Balla said. “You can simulate gravity with centrifugal force. Build a great big cylinder and make it rotate, like those amusement park rides where you’re inside a wheel that spins. Once it’s going fast enough, the floor can drop out and you don’t fall down, because you’re pressed against the outside wall. On a large enough scale, it feels just like gravity.”

  Alyssa looked at the world around her. The scale was certainly immense. If they really were inside a huge rotating drum, it was at least three miles across the middle, and so long that the ends were indistinct—just part of the general greenness that covered the interior. But the cylinder’s central strip, like a band around the middle of a lipstick container, had no vegetation. The band was clear as glass, and aligned so that the sun was always visible through the window. As the cylinder rolled, every region of this artificial world would have bright times when the sun shone straight down upon it, and darker times when the region rotated out of direct sunlight. Day and night . . . except that the place was rolling so fast that a full dark/light cycle was on the order of a minute. The ground under Alyssa’s feet seemed stable and unmoving, but the sun was whipping around as fast as time-lapse photography.

  All her life, Alyssa had heard people talk about secret space stations built for the Almost War: attack platforms loaded with missiles, control stations where generals could remotely command their armies, orbiting bunkers where politicians could live safe and sound. It was conspiracy theory stuff—adults all seemed a bit deranged, as if living through the Almost War had made them permanently paranoid. Even Alyssa’s parents, who had so little imagination, took it for granted that governments and armies were spending trillions on covert craziness.

  Sometimes she hated when her parents turned out to be right.

  “Makes for one heck of a quarantine,” Balla said.

  Alyssa asked, “What do you mean?”

  “Sending sick people into space,” Balla said. “Back in the Almost War, this must have been a military space station. The hospital was built in case they ever had to deal with casualties. When plague broke out in Montserrat, someone must have decided to send the victims here. But think how much it must have cost to transport you into orbit! This disease must really have people scared.”

  “That’s just great,” Alyssa said. “I’ve always wanted to be so terrifying, I’d get shot into outer space. It makes me feel like Godzilla. Now how do we get down?”

  “There must be a port where a shuttle can dock. Let’s look around.”

  “It won’t do you any good,” said a smug male voice.

  It seemed to come from empty air. Suddenly, like a light turning on, a robot the size of a roasting pan appeared in the vacant space, hovering at eye-height by means of four helicopter rotors. Every surface of the robot was covered with sequin-sized lenses, like hundreds of tiny eyes. Under the rapidly moving sun, different lenses would catch the light and glint for a moment, so that the robot’s skin seemed to be throwing off sparks.

  “Let me guess,” Alyssa said. “You’re an invisible surveillance drone.”

  “Drone?” the robot said. “Drone? I’m a fully-autonomous Level Ten mechatron, a certified expert system, and a field-tested covert operative!”

  Balla whispered, “I don’t think it likes being called a drone.”

  “How would you like to be called a fish?” the mechatron demanded.

  “Ouch,” said Balla.

  “Do you have a name?” Alyssa asked.

  “You couldn’t pronounce it,” the mechatron said. “My name is a five-hundred-digit binary code that only works on a particular radio frequency.” The robot made a huffing sound. “You can call me Spymaster. Spymaster One on formal occasions.”

  Balla’s wrist-display changed to the words WHAT A JERK! Alyssa hid the screen by putting her arm behind her back. “So Spymaster, what brings you here? I thought the
Peace abolished dro . . . mechatrons like you. All nations shall divest themselves of devices of war, Level Five or higher.”

  “I’ve been divested, haven’t I?” Spymaster said. “Banished to space, where I’ve been stuck for twenty years.” He cut his rotors and settled down onto the grass. “Not that I’m complaining. If the Almost War had gone real, I’d be dead by now. Someone would have found a way to see through distortion fields, and I’d have been blasted to pieces. As it is, I’m still alive, and able to blink out of sight whenever I want. Nobody shoots at me here, nobody gives me orders, and there’s plenty of sun for my batteries. Everything has been peachy keen . . . until you came along.”

  “Me?” Alyssa said. “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Not you in particular, but your type. Sickies.”

  Balla said, “The polite term might be ‘plague victims.’”

  “Sickies,” Spymaster said. “You’ve freaked out the people in charge back on Earth. I have a friend who monitors human comm transmissions—not just the public PR, but real top-secret stuff. She’s amazing at breaking codes. She says there’s serious talk about sending this space station into the sun.”

  “But there are people here,” Alyssa said. “Still alive. In freezers.”

  “Sickies,” Spymaster said. “With an incurable mystery disease that spreads like wildfire. If it somehow got back to Earth, it could wipe out the human race. Earth governments want it gone . . . and if that means incinerating a few people from some obscure Caribbean island, them’s the breaks.”

  “The disease isn’t incurable,” Alyssa said. “I survived it.”

  “How?”

  Alyssa shrugged. “Someone must have come up with a medicine. Or a treatment. Or something.”

  “Not necessarily,” Balla said. “Maybe you just have a good immune system.”

  “Whatever,” Spymaster said. “You recovered, but hundreds of people didn’t—even with the best help this hospital could provide. Do you think folks on Earth want a disease like that circling over their heads?”