The girls spent the next hour romping with Nate and plying him with questions. The interaction amazed Susan, even though she knew how much like a normal human Nate generally acted. He could easily have passed for their uncle, tirelessly providing them with horseback rides, startling them with a sudden ankle-grab that sent them tumbling, or allowing them to catch their breath in the crook of his all-too-human lap. Had Susan not kept reminding herself, she would have forgotten he had no childhood of his own, that he never aged, that he had no precedent on which to base his play and answers other than what he had read or watched. According to her father, the programming for positronic brains was minimal, a language chip, the Three Laws, and a basic idea of primary function. All else came to Nate from personal learning.
The hour ended too soon for everyone. Susan had a scheduled meeting with Goldman and Peters, and she wanted to make sure she handled any potential issues on the PIPU before she left. Better to address things that might never need her input than to leave them festering and risk getting called away. “All right. Fun time’s over. We need to get back to the unit.”
The girls made loud, disappointed noises.
Susan explained without apology. “Nate needs to go back to work, so he doesn’t get in trouble.” She suspected assisting a doctor with two psychiatric patients counted as part of his job, but the girls did not need to know that. An hour of playtime with two unrelated youngsters was enough for any adult. “And we need to get back to the unit before your nurses and parents start worrying I kidnapped you.”
“No one will miss me,” Sharicka said, almost proudly. “I could stay all day.”
Susan ushered the girls toward the door. “That won’t work for the rest of us.” She opened the door and gestured them through it, watching Sharicka closely, still worried the child might try to break for freedom. Without taking her eyes from the girl, she threw a friendly wave back over her shoulder toward Nate. She would get together with him later to compare notes; but, for now, she dared not remove her gaze from Sharicka.
Monterey fairly skipped the whole way back, though she lapsed into silence. Sharicka took the same dense interest in everything she had on the way to Nate. She studied the details of the walls and floors, the locks and keys, with a fanaticism that bothered Susan, though she could not quite say why. In the end, both of the girls hugged and thanked her, then trotted off together to the television room.
When the nurses pressed her, Susan had to admit the whole affair had gone off well.
When Susan arrived at room 713 on the seventh floor of Hassenfeld Research Tower, she found Ari Goldman pacing furiously between the metal desks and his own, clutching a pencil in his hand, the eraser savagely chewed. The willowy Cody Peters sat in one of the chairs, head clamped beneath his long arms. They both looked up as Susan entered, and Ari stopped in his tracks. “He’s not here,” he grumped.
Susan let the door spring closed behind her with a faint whoosh. Having no idea what Ari meant, she glanced at Cody, whose presence was obvious. “Who’s not here?” Alarm trickled through her.
Cody’s answer put her mind at ease for a moment. “Payton Flowers. Our first subject.”
Discomfort flared anew. “The schizophrenic patient?” Susan remembered his parents’ anguish at losing their brilliant future attorney to madness. She knew every subject had a check-in routine, but she did not know all the details. Goldman and Peters involved her as much as possible but tried to accommodate her ward schedule as well.
Cody explained, “He was supposed to be here an hour ago. We called his family. They don’t know where he’s gone, either. He took off during the night, apparently.”
Susan could feel her heart hammering in her chest. A man with schizophrenia wandering off was not usually a frightening or terrifying event. People with psychoses who took their medicines as prescribed posed no threat, and even those who skipped doses or went undiagnosed rarely caused problems that required concern. The media played up those one-in-a-hundred-thousand cases where a patient with paranoid schizophrenia murdered someone he mistook for the devil.
Ari explained, “If something bad happens to him, or anyone around him, we’ll have a hell of a time keeping the study quiet. And once it’s out, everyone will blame the nanorobots rather than the disease.”
Susan could not argue. Once someone posted an accusation, no matter how false or corrupted, others with an agenda would cling to it even after its debunking. Cody shook his head, turned his gaze to Susan, and rolled his eyes. “Nothing bad is going to happen just because a man who happens to have schizophrenia decides to lose himself for a day or two.”
Ari growled something wordless. He cleared his throat and spoke again. “Why did it have to be
Cody heaved a deep sigh. “Were you planning to pay for weeklong hospital stays for all our study patients out of your own pocket? Or do you have some magic words to allow them to stay for free?” He shook his head. “And how many of our patients would willingly allow us to coop them up? Would you hold them against their will?”
Ari had no answers. He continued to grumble to himself but did not speak aloud again.
Uncertain what to say, Susan shuffled her feet. She could understand Ari’s concerns. Although Cody made sense and spoke the truth, she could not throw off a vague feeling of dread. Her thoughts went back to the protestor. He had known about the study and her role in it, which meant the study was not wholly secret. She could not imagine him snatching a grown man from his bed, but coincidences did not sit well in those circumstances. “Is there anything I can do?”
Cody winced and glanced at Ari. He clearly did not want to speak of anything negative with his partner already in a snit. “We had another patient for you to inject, but he backed out. We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for possible replacements. Do you have any suggestions?”
Susan shrugged. “I’m the wrong person to ask. It’s my first rotation, and I’m on the PIPU. I’m only working with children.”
Ari said softly, “We’re cleared for children.”
That surprised Susan. She had little knowledge of research, but she had always heard safety and efficacy had to be proven on adults before the administration allowed children to participate.
Cody nodded. “Special exemption for time and need.” He did not go into details, which relieved Susan. She did not need to hear a recitation of hundreds of rules governing medical research. These two knew them backward and forward. If they said children could participate, it was the truth.
“Hmm.” Susan considered the possibilities. “Let me think about it for a bit, and I’ll get back to you.”
“Sooner is better than later,” Ari said. “The quicker we finish and get the data out there, the less chance the SFH has to interfere.”
Susan would have liked to wait until she found Ari Goldman in a better mood, but she realized not speaking now would make it look as if she had hidden something later. “You should know I got accosted on the way into work this morning. Nothing violent or dangerous, but this man knew enough about the study to call it” — she tried to remember his exact words — “‘making cyborgs from mental patients.’ And he warned me to ‘get out.’ ”
Now, even Cody’s smile vanished. “Did he say why? Did he threaten anything?”
“No,” Susan said. “They trained us to ignore protestors, and I disengaged as quickly as I could.”
“Good job,” Cody said, arousing a pang of guilt. Susan could not help remembering her first day and the conversation she had held with one of those protestors. She shook away the thought with the knowledge that the conversation had had nothing to do with robots or research. At the time, she did not even know the study existed.
Ari’s frown deepened. It seemed to permanently score his aging features. “Making cyborgs from mental patients. Now I’ve heard everything.”
“Oh, I’m sure I could say a few things you haven’t heard yet,” Cody teased his partner, running a hand through his unkempt hair and leaving it mostly standing on end.
Ari ignored the taller, leaner man. “But wouldn’t it be cool if we had that technology?”
Cody shrugged. “We do, depending on how you define ‘cyborg.’ There are people with functioning, robotic limbs with neural connections.”
Ari dismissed him with a brusque wave. “I mean mental cyborgs. Positronic brains in human bodies. Toss out the old, malfunctioning head and replace it with working wire coils that can think and learn.”
The thought seemed chilling to Susan, and Cody must have had a similar instinct. “Don’t say that where the Society for Humanity can hear you. They’d have a field day.” He rolled his gaze toward Susan again, indicating with
