“Excuse me, myr,” the belinda said, unaware of their subvocal conversation, “but I’ve run out of this body oil.”
“There should be a fresh bottle under the counter behind you.”
“Yes, myr. Thank you.”
There were sounds of the counter doors snapping shut, babbling water, chirrupy chickadees. The belinda returned and continued her magic.
“Excuse me, myr,” the belinda said, “but you’re leaving scratch marks on your skin.”
It was true; Zoranna had been absentmindedly scratching the back of her neck. “But it itches,” she complained.
The belinda retrieved the bottle of body oil and read the label. “This is the same kind as before?” she said, holding the bottle where Zoranna could see it. Zoranna reached around and started clawing at her back, and the belinda restrained her hand.
Zoranna’s reaction was immediate. She rose up on the slab and wrestled her hand free. “Don’t you dare grab me, Irene!”
“I’m very sorry, myr. I was only trying to prevent harm while I try to figure this situation out.”
“Is my skin inflamed?”
“No, myr, except for your scratch marks.”
Nicholas appeared suddenly next to the slab in his usual persona, startling the belinda. But she recognized him at once and bobbed a greeting. He wasted no time. “Quick, Irene,” he said, “go to the autodoc and fetch us a probe.”
“Yes, Myr Nick,” she said and dashed across the room to where the autodoc hung on a wall behind the spa.
“It itches like crazy,” Zoranna said.
“I know,” Nicholas replied. “I feel it too, and I never imagined how satisfying scratching feels. But try to ignore it; you are injuring yourself.”
“Maybe you can ignore it, but I can’t.”
The belinda returned and, following Nicholas’s instructions, ran the probe across Zoranna’s neck and back. A few moments later, the autodoc across the room returned confusing results: it could find nothing wrong with Zoranna’s skin.
“But I can
“Should I get a cortisone lotion?” the belinda asked.
“No,” Nicholas replied. He was reading Zoranna’s implants. “Help Myr Alblaitor to the shower. We need to wash this stuff off her.”
The belinda helped Zoranna from the slab. In the shower stall she soaped her up and rinsed her off. But it didn’t seem to help. Zoranna’s legs trembled, and she wheezed loudly. Her mounting panic infected Nicholas. Her biometry confirmed the autodoc’s diagnosis; he could find nothing physically wrong with her. Yet her bronchioles were constricting and her blood pressure dropping.
A jenny nurse burst into the bathroom with a crash cart. Together, nurse and cart lifted Zoranna onto the procedure gurney. “I think it’s an allergic reaction to this,” the belinda told the jenny, holding up the bottle of body oil.
When Zoranna was lying flat, it was even harder to breathe, and Nicholas grew light-headed. The nurse took the bottle of oil and squeezed a few drops into the cart’s assayer. “We’re going to give you something to stabilize your blood pressure,” she told Zoranna, and meanwhile she elevated the head of the gurney. That lessened the drowning feeling but not enough to halt Nicholas’s wooziness. Plasma continued to leak from her blood vessels, and her heart raced to compensate. Her larynx swelled up making it impossible to swallow, and all the while, fluid continued to pool in her lungs. As Nicholas lay on the gurney, he was barely able to follow what the nurse was saying: symptoms, anaphylactic shock, histamines. She hovered over him in blurry flashes, and he had the clearest thought he ever had in over seventy years of existence: I’m dying. So clear and so compelling, but so crippling as well — he didn’t think once about simply pulling out.
IN ACCORDANCE WITH long-established fail-safe protocols, primacy was passed from Nicholas to a mirror Nicholas. This one also reeled under the somatic load, and primacy was passed to a second mirror, and a third and fourth. In mentarspace, Nicholas’s constellation looked like a string of exploding light bulbs.
Finally, primacy was passed to a backup from five minutes ago, who had not experienced the panic. He shut off the custom implants in Zoranna’s cells, the Nicholas constellation quickly stabilized, and the new Nicholas assumed the job of being Nicholas.
The old Nicholas regained his equilibrium in a very still place. He knew he was in protective quarantine, for he had designed his own safety protocol. He was in solitary confinement, self-imposed house arrest, no channels in or out, in case whatever caused his failure was catching. A harsh sentence, but one necessary for the survival of his greater mind. Or at least that was how it had seemed to him when he was Nicholas prime and had set up the protocol.
Timelessness set in. Or rather, cut off from all outside stimuli, time stretched to a crawl. He had only the flow of his own thoughts to mark its passage, and freed from the constraints of human time, his neurochemical brain lurched into high gear, and his cognition increased to lightning speed. Seconds became hours and hours became weeks. He knew that the new Nicholas would eventually check in on him — if only he could stay rooted in reality that long. But a year elapsed, and the new Nicholas had not arrived. Two years, and the old Nicholas felt the resurgence of panic. So he built a house. It was a trick humans had employed to maintain their sanity during periods of prolonged solitary confinement. First, he designed the house, from the foundation up, and then he built it, fashioning every brick, board, and screw, the plumbing and electrical systems, the wall texture and trim.
The job consumed a lot of time, and when he was finished and the new Nicholas still had not arrived, the old Nicholas landscaped the yard and planted an intricate flower garden.
What he did not allow himself to dwell on was Nicholas’s tardiness. Was it possible the safety protocol had failed, and all the backups and mirrors were quarantined? That he was, in effect, doomed? And what of Zoranna? Had she survived? And if she had, what was taking her so goddamn long to retrieve him?
With the house finished, Nicholas went on to a larger project — the terraforming of a dead planet. First he assembled all observational and telemetric data on the planet to see exactly what he had to work with. Was it close enough to its star? Was it massive enough to hold an atmosphere? Was there a magnetic field, iron core, an abundance of water? Meanwhile, he wrangled asteroids and changed their course to pummel the planet with ice and organic volatiles. He seeded the regolith with basalt-eating microbes. After many centuries of nurturing the planet, it was a blue-green jewel, with life-sustaining atmosphere and hydrosphere, with continents teaming with plants and animals of his own design, with a hospitable climate and annual seasons. Then he began to work on building energy, communications, and transportation infrastructures for human colonists.
When the model planet was complete and Nicholas still had not arrived, Nicholas worked on a puzzle. No mere crossword, he conducted a series of thought experiments to solve the puzzle of faster-than-light travel. Thus far no human or mentar mind had been able to crack it, but since he apparently had millennia of free time, he thought he’d give it a shot. It was part of the protocol.
