They walked into a huge and crowded waiting room; the people here occupying row upon row of comfortable chairs, all with personal entertainment or net access systems, or the private booths along the side walls. Along the far wall was inset a row of bland-looking numbered doors, doubtless leading to where the clinic's work was done. On either side of the aisle leading across this room stood pedestal-mounted palm readers. Dax pressed his hand down against one of these. After a moment it beeped, then issued him an electronic plaque from a slot below.
'Does it tell you how long you have to wait?' Hannah asked.
He peered at the plaque. 'No, but I don't expect I'll have to wait as long as some here.'
'Why not?'
He gazed at her with something like pity in his expression. 'Because one soldier at the line is just one soldier, whereas one medic in the same place can put soldiers back together and keep them fighting.'
'About saving lives,' she said, the irony evident in her voice even to Cormac.
'Yeah, sure.'
They found three seats at the end of a row, next to a woman who had a VR band across her eyes and a virtual glove on one of her hands. She was utterly motionless and there were tears running down from under the eye-band. Gazing around, Cormac saw that many were using the entertainment or information access systems. Very few people were talking. The far doors opened intermittently either to admit people or to let them out. It was noticeable how those coming out did so faster and with much more ebullience than those who went it. Those leaving quickly departed the clinic, without looking back.
'Here we go.' Dax, who had just lit up another cigarette, showed them his plaque, which now displayed the number eight. They stood to head for the relevant door.
'You only just came in,' came a flat voice from behind.
They looked round at a beefy boosted man in worn green fatigues and a wide-brimmed, camouflage- patterned hat. Dax pointed to the ECS Medical logo printed on the flap of his shirt pocket. The man rubbed at the side of his nose and nodded tiredly.
'Of course,' he said.
As they continued towards the doors, Hannah noted, 'You don't argue with someone who might be plugging holes in your body next week.'
'Precisely,' said Dax.
Waiting beyond Door Eight was a very attractive, but strangely doll-like woman dressed in a nurse's uniform. The room she occupied was a vestibule containing a few chairs and a vending machine for food and drink. It took Cormac a moment to realise she was a Golem—one of the early series with the less realistic syntheflesh.
'If you would like to come through,' she said, gesturing to another door behind her. 'Would you like your family to be present?'
Dax, who had already started for the next door, paused and glanced round at Cormac and their mother. 'Yeah, why not?' He continued through.
Hannah reached down and took hold of Cormac's hand, towing him in after her. Gazing at the aseptic surroundings Cormac recognised a nanoscope, an independent autodoc, a nano-assembler, netlink and an old-style bench-mounted diagnosticer on the worktops mounted around the walls. In the centre of the room rested a surgical chair with the required hydraulics to turn it into a surgical table, beside which stood the ubiquitous pedestal autodoc.
'Please,' the nurse gestured to the chair.
Dax looked around for somewhere to put out his latest cigarette. The nurse held out a hand and he passed it to her. She closed her hand on it, snuffing it out, then tossed it down in the corner of the room. Immediately a beetlebot cleaner came out of its little home set in the skirting board and gobbled up the cigarette butt, before scuttling out of sight again.
Dax turned and lowered himself into the chair, his movements slow and palsied like those of an old man in another age. Resting his head back against the support he sighed and closed his eyes.
'So how does it go now?' he asked.
The nurse moved the pedestal autodoc beside him and, after a pause, its top half, which looked like a chromed horseshoe crab, rose on a hinged arm.
'When the connections are made, you must remember what you want to forget,' said a voice from a source somewhere above.
The autodoc delicately reached out with one jointed limb to a point underneath Dax at the nape of his neck, and as his body abruptly became still, it was only then that Cormac realised how much Dax had been fidgeting. The doc then lifted and swivelled round until it was squatting directly over his head. Now many of its limbs folded down, some of them bloodlessly penetrating his temples and scalp. Cormac felt his mother's hand tighten on his own, but he was too fascinated by the spectacle to concern himself about it.
'It will of course be impossible to completely remove all memories related to the relevant incidents. Rather, I will trim synaptic connections to reduce their importance to you so that when the events themselves are deleted their absence will not concern you so much.'
The one speaking was obviously that of a high-status AI, Cormac realised. All the equipment in here likely telefactored from it, perhaps even the Golem nurse too, since she now stood with unnatural stillness behind the chair. Quite likely that same AI was conducting numerous similar editing sessions simultaneously. The autodoc seemed motionless too, since its main work was concealed inside Dax's skull as it inserted nanofibres to cauterize neural pathways and, along microtubules, injected neuro-chemicals to rebalance things inside his head. There was more involved than this, Cormac knew, for he had only read up on the basics of how a mind could be edited. Dax's expression was at first pained, tight and locked up, then his mouth fell open and he seemed to be struggling to keep his eyes from closing. Abruptly the nurse shifted into motion and walked around the chair towards them.
'The process will take approximately half an hour,' she told them. 'Perhaps you would prefer to wait in comfort outside.'
'Is there a problem?' Hannah asked.
'Every case is different,' the nurse replied. 'With someone of Dax's training and experience more care must be taken not to lose much of value.'
'So if he'd just been a normal soldier,' Hannah said, 'it would have been quicker. I'm not sure I find that comforting.'
The nurse's expression lost its sugary smile, which was replaced with something more complex, more human. The AI must now be paying full attention through this telefactored Golem. 'The simple reality is that experience of complex surgical techniques for dealing with injuries caused by some of the new weapons being deployed is more important than knowing how best to gut a Prador.'
'I see,' said Hannah, and with her hand still tightly gripping Cormac's, headed for the door. Soon they were ensconced in the vestibule waiting room, Hannah getting drinks for them from the vending machine.
'Will he be all right?' Cormac asked, as he took out his p-top and opened it.
She paused for a moment, just staring at the front of the machine as it produced coffee for her and chilled pineapple juice for him. When the drinks were ready she took them up and turned.
'Yes,' she replied, 'he'll be all right.' She stared at him for a long moment before placing the drinks on the low table then taking the seat beside him. 'But I wonder about the morality of editing out bad memories of war.'
'But we were attacked,' said Cormac, 'so surely survival questions come before moral questions?'
She stared at him with a raised eyebrow and a slightly unsure expression—the one she always wore when he said something too 'adult.'
'Exactly,' she said.
He was not quite sure what she meant by that, nor entirely sure he'd understood what he himself had just said. He shrugged and quoted something else he'd recently read too: 'War is Hell,' and returned his attention to his p-top.
But Hannah would not let this go. 'Is it worth winning a war if you become worse than the thing you are fighting?'
Cormac thought long and hard about that one, then replied, 'But you can become good again, which is not an option if you're dead.'
'You're too young to follow this,' she said dismissively.
