Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 22 / Chapter 24 –>

The last survivors of Persia Station–for all Brett knew, the last survivors of Archae Stoddard–gathered in the med bay. They formed a rough circle, standing with their backs to the sick, their shoulders almost touching. In addition to those he had expected, there was Garaby, the system hardware analyst. Reece and Whitney, though he couldn’t say at the moment remembered exactly what either of them did. But they were new faces, people from outside the circle he had come to recognize, and Brett smiled at them as a greeting.

He had let them all sleep in, and most had taken him up on the offer. Djen had awakened only after he returned to his quarters, changed into fresh clothes, then touched her face. He’d made coffee for the rest and roused them as gently as possible. Brett couldn’t explain this generosity to himself, but when he looked at them–Ashburn’s hard wariness, Vernon’s frenetic energy, Attler’s cool but bruised vulnerability–he was pleased. They’d suffered enough personal cataclysms.

It was a few minutes shy of noon, station time. Liston and Ilam sat on their stools against the microscopy counter and grinned idiotically at him because they had made the deadline. Both clutched large mugs of steaming coffee. Their eyes were sunken, their cheeks drawn. They looked gray with fatigue, but triumphant. Lined on the counter between them were nearly a dozen vials of clear liquid, each one labeled. Brett. Riley. Ashburn. Liston.

Brett waited until he had their attention. It wasn’t long. No one was in the mood to speak. Even Djen’s occasional hand on his elbow seemed inappropriately social to him considering the circumstances. Brett cleared his throat.

“Explain the procedure, Doctor.”

Liston nodded, then continued to nod as he spoke, like a palsied old man. “These vials contain an individuated nanomech suspension similar to the treatment protocol Ilam designed for himself, the details of which most of you should be aware. Each of you will receive the dose through auto-injection at a point roughly midway up the spinal column.

“The mech volume per ampoule is lower than a treatment dosage for standard illnesses. This is a slight deviation from the original treatment, but based upon the assumption that we have each developed a near critical infestation. The majority of the mechs we’ve selected are large, and they’ve been adapted from military grade rapier model nanomechs to seek out, recognize and destroy structures which fit the criteria which we’ve assigned to the organism.”

Ilam explained. “Rapier class mechs are specifically designed to protect the body from a chemical or biological weapons incident. They’re extremely fast, extremely efficient and strikingly aggressive. Imagine, if you will, the mech equivalent of Deep Space Marines. Only smarter, of course.”

“This should clear a safe passage through the spinal canal for the engineering mechs,” Liston said. “The liquid suspension has been impregnated with the silicon based components of a rapid-flux assembler. This unit will follow the advance of the rapier mechs up the spinal column and will be constructed on a membrane just inside the skull. The assembler will perform a dual function. First, it will emit a new set of signal instructions to the rapier mechs for more precise targeting of the hostile organisms. Second, and more critically, it will begin producing a hybrid rapier and medical scalpel class mech.”

Ilam placed his hand on Liston’s arm, and the doctor accepted the cue with the ubiquitous nod. Ilam said, “Scalpel mechs are standard medical issue. Our hybrid is larger, but still less than a quarter-micron in total length. It won’t work as rapidly, but it’s sleek and strong and has the instincts of a rapier. They’ll work in units of a thousand or more, some securing the interneuronal networks and eradicating pockets of resistance, others performing the actual work of restoring the network to the imaged original. This is based on the assumption that the larger rapiers won’t be able to penetrate some of the finer networks without causing neurological damage.”

Liston smiled. “Each mech unit within a functional unit team will be programmed by the assembler with a detailed image of the neural segment to which it’s assigned. This is a multiple redundancy system. Each mech will also transmit a constant digital info-stream back to the assembler which identifies it as an operating unit. Should mech casualties occur–and we suspect they will–the assembler will produce additional units to keep each team at full strength. When the task has been completed and verified by an external signal from Ilam, the assembled units, which will be constructed from our own bodies’ carbon atoms, have instructions to dissolve. They’ll be reabsorbed. The initial implant units will then deconstruct the assembler, which will proceed through the blood-brain barrier and be discharged from the body as waste product. The remaining rapiers have been programmed to stay in place until they are manually removed or fail to detect additional organisms over a period of roughly two weeks–to prevent further infestation, you understand.”

Brett was pleased with the explanation, perhaps more pleased that they’d managed to shape it in such simple terms without sniping at one another. He nodded his appreciation at them, then turned his attention to the others.

“Questions. Now is the time to ask them.”

Vernon was first. “Is this going to hurt?”

“It hasn’t hurt me in the past,” Ilam said, laughing . “But then again, I haven’t had the benefit of loosing a horde of rapiers into my skull with actual organisms entrenched there, and that’s even before they set to work mincing the gray matter. It could potentially hurt like bloody hell.”

“We’ve taken that possibility into account,” Liston said. He scowled at Ilam. “But there are two things you should know: there are no nerve endings inside your brain. You’ll feel no pain in the tissue as the mechs begin to work. In fact, I doubt very much you’d feel anything at all. Which brings me to my second point: much of the suspension we’ll be injecting is a heavy sedative, so you’ll be asleep long before any mincing begins.”

“If there’s no pain, why the sedation?” Attler said.

“Psychological reasons,” Ilam answered. “We don’t know what the effect would be of actively rewiring your synaptic patterns while you were conscious. There could be destructive psychological effects at the worst end, or it might just undermine the process. Your consciousness could struggle against the image placement and delay the success of the mechs. The brain does not happily comply with deconstruction and remodeling.”

Attler squinted at Ilam. “But you’re really not sure.”

“An unconscious patient is a happy patient, my dear.”

“The treatment looks good in simulation,” Liston added, “and Cassandra assured us that our theory is sound.”

“What is the estimated timeframe for this procedure?” Ashburn asked. “If we’re to be unconscious, I need to know how long we’ll be leaving the station to run on autopilot.”

“We won’t all be unconscious,” Liston said. “Ilam doesn’t require treatment, so he’ll be available for station emergencies as they arise. I’ll also be awake for much of the time, monitoring your progress. I’ll probably wait until most of you have recovered before beginning my own treatment.”

“You still haven’t answered the question,” Ashburn prodded.

“Maybe as little as an hour. Possibly several. The level of infestation will be a determining factor. You’ll each be supplied with additional doses of sedatives as the need arises. The bottom line is that when you awaken, you’ll be well.”

Djen crossed her arms and frowned. “Except we won’t have any memories of the last two weeks. And more than a few questions as a result.”

Brett glanced about the med bay at the bodies of the sick, the dying. The dead as well, he was certain, but he hadn’t bothered to ask yet this morning.

“We’ll have to clear out the others,” Brett said, though it sounded cruel to him. But his primary concern wasn’t for the sick. “That should help, or at least put off the worst of the shock until we’re more capable of handling it. Ilam and I will take care of that while Liston gets the rest of you started.”

Ilam seemed to agree. “And I’ll have Cassandra prepare a datafile with the content of our findings ready for access as soon as you’re revived. It might not hurt to have her seal the bay until the information has been reviewed. It might relieve some of the lost-time dissonance.”

“Lost time, lost friends, lost everything,” Vernon murmured.

Brett didn’t want them to dwell. “Who’s next?”

No one volunteered, but he gave them time to speak until the silence began to feel uncomfortable. They watched him, as hopeful and innocent as lambs. They trusted him and this therapy because he hadn’t ever failed them, because it was what they had always done, what he had always encouraged them to do. He’d made this choice for them because there was no other choice to be made, and they were willing to consent.

But Djen was closer to him than the others. She had always asked the questions he didn’t want to answer, always said the things he didn’t want to hear. She searched Ilam and Liston with her eyes, and her gaze had the quality of razors.

“Is it safe?”

Ilam answered immediately. “As safe as we could make it. Cassandra agrees with that.”

“Have you tested it?”

“The simulations look good.”

“On a real person?”

He hesitated, but Liston spoke for him. “Ritter and the some of the others here received their injections shortly before we paged the rest of you.” His eyes slipped away, momentarily skimmed the banks of monitors beside the nearest beds. “As you can see, the readings look normal, though they’re still comatose.”

“You expect them to recover?” Djen’s tone was sharp, demanding assurances.

“Of course.”

“And you expect us to recover?”

“None of us are in quite their condition. I expect a full recovery for us in a shorter period of time. We wouldn’t subject ourselves to this therapy if we weren’t completely confident.”

“And don’t forget that Liston and I will remain awake and alert through the duration of the procedure,” Ilam said. “The doctor and I have agreed that I should undergo the new therapy as soon as it’s possible, just as a precaution, so we both have just as much invested in the success of this treatment as the rest of you. We will monitor the work of the nanomechanical agents in situ and make programming adjustments as necessary.”

Djen lifted her face to Brett, and he looked back at her. She was scared. They were all scared, because what Ilam and Liston proposed was unknown, inadequately tested and hinged totally upon desperation. Choice had passed beyond their control, and the idea terrified them. Brett did the only thing he could, he smiled at her. It was enough.

“Last call,” he said. “Final questions.”

“I was wondering if you’d made any progress on our thought experiment.”

Brett looked at Ilam, surprised, but couldn’t read his expression. “What are you talking about?”

“The organism’s potential sentience.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“No, you haven’t made any progress, or no, you haven’t thought about it.”

Why was he bringing this up now? Brett wanted to glare at him. He wanted to silence him before he could sow seeds of doubt, but he didn’t do anything but smile. A curious smile, he hoped, one that would allow the moment to slide by unnoted.

“This isn’t the time or the venue, and frankly, your insistence is starting to make me a little nervous.”

“It’s a valid concern.”

“Only academically,” Brett said. His smile began to feel frozen, forced. “Shut up about it.”

Ilam shrugged. “I won’t press. But you might wish I had, later.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Maybe nothing. Maybe all the difference in the world. I don’t care either, Commander, as long as you remember when this is all done that there are consequences to our actions, and sometimes to our failures to act. And I don’t just mean EFTC sanctions, for God’s sake.”

Brett tensed. “Spit it out.”

But Ilam waved him off as though it had ceased to matter. “You chose this course. You’ve said that. Despite the risks, whatever the outcome, you chose this because it is the best one.”

“The only one,” Brett growled. “If you had a better idea, you should have offered it two days ago.”

“I never said I did.”

Ilam offered nothing else. He sipped coffee from the edge of his cup, never breaking eye contact, clearly not intimidated.

In that awkward space, one of the monitors began to wail. Ilam and Liston sprang to their feet as though they had expected this all along. Liston turned over his stool in his haste. He seemed to just remember his coffee and set it on the counter’s edge where it teetered, then sat. Ilam followed behind him and took a position before a stack of monitors. Everyone else seemed frozen, vaguely lost.

“Which one is it?” Liston demanded.

Ilam focussed on the readouts. “Micah. Blood pressure and pulse are up fifteen percent. Looks like erratic brain wave activity as well.” He scanned the parallel row of displays. “Ritter’s condition has not changed.”

Liston moved around the rows of hospital beds until he stood beside Micah. He sighed a sound like relief and wiped his hand across his brow. “All right. Kill the alarms.”

Ilam pressed a button and the med bay fell silent, though Brett could still hear the echo in his ears. He pushed his way through the circle and came to the end of the bed, near Micah’s feet, and stopped.

“What is it?”

“Waking numbers. We programmed the monitors to announce any significant increase in the vital signs,” Liston said. He grinned a bit foolishly. “It means he’s coming around. Sorry to have frightened you.”

Micah groaned. It was a small noise from deep in his throat, the sound of a zephyr crossing a vast, parched wilderness. His hands trembled, then his arms. His toes flexed, and the tension rippled up his legs, into his torso, stood the cords of neck taut against his skin.

He lurched upright, his eyes wide and nostrils flared. His hands stabbed out in front of his face–the warding gesture of a man who has awakened suddenly. He whipped his head from side to side. Liston, Ilam, Brett, the med bay surroundings. Brett met his eyes, a smoked green like jade, and saw nothing there. Nothing but panic.

“Where am I?”

It was all he said, all he had time to say. A flood of liquid like mucous, gray and menstrual pink, burst from his nose in two thick streams. It spattered the sheets, coagulated on his hands. It flowed from his ears, as thick as paste and fell in long, ropy strands onto his shoulders. Micah sensed it, cupped his hands beneath his nose and held the fluid up to his eyes. He stared, and his eyes grew wider, rounder.

He looked at Brett again, then lifted one hand, questioning. Brett took a step back, his mouth open, but he said nothing. Micah frowned, then vomited, and it was more of the same, but darker, more violent, a blood-laden explosion.

Then he began to scream, though Brett couldn’t think of it as that. It was a gurgle. A drowning man’s last cry. Micah pressed his hands against the sides of his head and roared his hideous voice, spilling mucous and blood down his chin. He squeezed his eyes closed as though he was desperate not to see.

“He’s crashing!” Ilam shouted, and the buzzers and klaxons and wailing alarms all fired at once.

Liston jumped. “What the fuck?”

Brett watched, drowning in noise, drowning in helplessness as Liston pressed Micah back onto the bed. They held him down with their hands. Liston tore open his shirt and touched his throat. He retrieved a stethoscope and listened at his lungs. Ilam shouted things Brett couldn’t understand and could barely hear over the screech of the alarms.

What can I do?, Brett demanded, but did not vocalize.

He only watched, mute, seeing things he had no desire to witness. He realized he’d never heard Liston say that before, fuck, and that struck him as being somehow horrible. It said everything.

After ten minutes, the alarms died. Roughly the same time that Micah did.

After a pause, Ilam scanned the bank of monitors again. He said, “The others are still good and holding steady.”

Brett faded back toward the others, trying not to see the mess that Micah had become. Trying not to remember the last several minutes. He stood next to Djen with his head down, pressing his shoulder against hers. He said nothing, and no one spoke to him.

A short time later, Liston followed him, then Ilam, when it was clear there was nothing left for them to do. Liston turned his seat upright. Ilam reoriented his stool from where he had knocked it askance with his leg. They sat without speaking for some time, the two of them sipping their coffee and acting as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

Brett watched them until it became clear that they would offer no explanation. He had dried fluid on his hands. Micah’s blood. Blood and mucous, or whatever the hell it had been.

“Do you want to tell me what that was?”

Liston shrugged. “Could be any number of things. We’d have to autopsy to be certain. Quick and dirty, of course.”

“I need an explanation. We’ve got to decide if we’re a go or not.”

“We’re a go. We’ll work it out. It was a testing failure, one failure out of more than a dozen injections. Cassandra told us to expect some problems, and now we’ve seen one. This therapy isn’t without risk–mech therapy never is.”

It wasn’t nearly good enough. Not for Brett, and definitely not for the others. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

“There is nothing better, Commander. I expected something unfortunate to happen in one or more cases, but I hoped it wouldn’t happen like this, in the public view.”

“Why Micah?”

Liston lowered his cup. His expression was flat, his eyes hard. “What would you like me to say, Commander? I had developed some projections based on the simulation evidence. Most would respond to the treatment, a fair number would not. The exact manner of that failure couldn’t be determined. At worst, I thought the organism simply wouldn’t be eradicated. For that reason, we injected Micah and Ritter first. The newest case and the oldest, as a sort of continuum study. Believe me when I tell you I didn’t expect the failure to be quite so. . .dramatic.”

The doctor paused as if he expected someone to interrupt here. He glanced around the group, but no one would meet his gaze.

He went on, “Yes, it would make some sort of rational sense that the more advanced case should have responded to the treatment with more difficulty. It should have been Ritter by all rights. But what do we know? Perhaps the organism is more sprightly during the early phases of infestation? Maybe Micah had an undiagnosed aneurysm. All we know for certain is that Ritter and the others are fine and Micah is dead. It presents some interesting puzzles, but that’s all.”

“This is highly theoretical terrain,” Ilam said carefully. “We’ve been forced to make several modifications to standard medical nanomechs, and though the simulations indicated our programming was sound, real-time dynamics often deviate from expectation.”

“Christ!” Attler said, scowling at him. “You just killed a man, and that’s all you can say? It was a deviation?”

Ilam frowned. “Micah was already dead. Each one of you knows that. Without medical intervention, he would have passed this evening or tomorrow morning. We tried to save him, and we failed. The work was sloppy, which is to be expected when someone is under such severe constraints. So it didn’t work. It’s morbid, I know, but if we’re going to save the ones with a reasonable chance of survival, sacrifices have to be made. One of those sacrifices was the safety margin.”

“You see what I meant when I said he was lucky he hadn’t lobotomized himself,” Liston said. “Nanotechnology is a fabulous tool. It is in many ways the future of the human race, or at least the future of medicine. But it’s a potent tool, and a sensitive tool. Sensitive beyond comprehension when adjustments have to be made to the character of the mechs themselves.”

Brett could feel an emptiness in his stomach, a pit of loss and fear from which only waves of nausea emerged. He’d said that himself, but condemning the crew to death during a late night meeting and watching it occur were two entirely different things.

And if he didn’t do something, others would begin to think the same thoughts and ask themselves if the risk was worth it at all.

“You’re right,” he said. The gazes slid away from Micah, away from Liston and Ilam. Brett could feel them clinging to him, needy and almost smothering. “And there are a dozen other cases that haven’t shown any sign of failure. Maybe that’s a one in twelve chance that we die. Maybe the numbers are worse than that–maybe half of us will die, but those are better odds than the organism isn’t giving us. It’s offered us no chance of survival at all.”

They heard him, and some began to nod. Ashburn didn’t. He braced his arms across his chest. “I still want to know what went wrong.”

“Poor image quality transmitted to the synaptic units,” Ilam said, his tone thoughtful. “Too aggressive an assault on the organism given the combat environment. Assembler failure. Those are preliminary diagnoses. They’re also programming issues we can re-parm fairly easily, even after the mechs are inserted.”

“If you notice them in time,” Ashburn corrected. “And if it’s not a different issue altogether.”

“It might not be the mechs at all,” Liston agreed. He spoke gently, attempting to calm them. “Maybe we made an error in our attack system. Perhaps it’s the organism itself causing the difficulty. Some acidic toxin inside the cells, a defense mechanism we haven’t encountered. The bottom line is that we do not know. We may never know, but that doesn’t change the future we face or the decision you will have to make. I’ll receive this therapy because I’ve seen the alternative. Compared to what the organism will do, it’s a risk I’m willing to assume.”

Ashburn apparently wasn’t buying it. “There has to be a way to make it safer. You’re tired, we see that. Let Djen take a shot at it. Or Attler, she knows something about mech programming.”

Brett stopped him before he could go on. “How much safer do you want it to be? What’s an acceptable margin of error? Five percent error? Twelve? We’re not going to make this a foolproof therapy, not if we had ten years to work it out. And we don’t have ten years, maybe not even ten hours. By this stage of infection, Malibu Station was a catacomb. We don’t have time for more testing. We have Liston and Ilam’s expertise. We have Cassandra’s seal of approval. The choice has to be made now–you can take the risk and accept the therapy, or you can choose to wait for the organism already inside you to finish what it’s begun. But I warn you, if you choose the latter, I’ll personally see you into an e-suit and locked out of the station. I won’t have any one of you going crazy and committing murder or something worse.”

“That’s no choice at all,” Reece said.

Brett stared him down.

He watched them now, their looking away, their staring at the floor, their quick body counts among the pallets and beds as they calculated the odds. He knew what they were thinking. One had already died, but how many would go after they were under sedation, ones they wouldn’t be able to see. Maybe all of them. Maybe this was just as much a losing proposition as doing nothing at all.

Vernon coughed, and said in a quiet voice. “Let’s get this over with. I think we should, really. I want to get started now. I’ve spent entirely too much time over the past few days thinking about trucks, and it’s got me worried.”

“Trucks?” Ashburn asked.

“I had one at home. Cherry red with this big rack of fog lights mounted above the cab. A certified antique with the original engine. The only thing I’d done to her was paint, restore the interior and replace the belts and wiring.” Vernon shifted his eyes back and forth, then offered a guilty smile. “I can remember just how it smelled. The feel of the interior. The way the whole frame would shudder when I jumped on the gas. Gasoline, I mean, when I could get my hands on some. It has a thirty gallon tank. I love that truck, but it scares me to think about it so much. Like the doc said, you know.”

Attler lowered her eyelids at him. “I’ve been thinking about my yard, in Minnesota. The way it looked in the summer, with the border of birch saplings. The way the grass rustled at night when the wind blew in the summer. The scent of clippings after a good mowing. The sun on my neck. I dreamed last night that I worked in the garden, right beside the house. I was planting flowers, and when I woke up this morning, it took me almost five minutes to remember where I was.”

She looked away. “I was too busy looking for my spade and gloves.”

Stuttering, Reece mentioned spiders. He’d felt like he was covered in spiders when he woke in the middle of the night. With Ashburn, it was facility security. An overwhelming urge to walk the floors, monitor the boards, see the panels reading five by five.

Brett heard Djen’s whisper. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

She squeezed his hand, and for lack of a better response, Brett did the same.

They went around, everyone but Brett and Liston and Ilam sharing their fears, their preoccupations and the things that might have been symptoms but which they’d told no one. They said it might just be their imaginations. Maybe just stress. Maybe hypersensitivity about the things they already knew, which amounted to too much for true objectivity. So they passed those around as well–the justifications that had carried them through the long night.

Finally, Ashburn, glowering, said, “It’s happening.”

It was the push they had all needed. Brett nodded at Liston. “Let’s get them started.”

<– Chapter 22 / Chapter 24 –>