I also shut Sally out of my senso, which hurt me more than anything. But I couldn’t be sure of anybody. You’d think that programmed ethics would be enough to prevent an AI from doing anything really sketchy. It’s not like anybody looks at a constructed superintelligence and says, “What if we made this one a ruthless Utilitarian, just to see what happens?”
… Actually, somebody probably would, but with any luck the review board would catch it in time.
Better safe than sorry, as my allofather used to say.
When I moved into the corridor, I walked like a woman on a mission. There’s a focused, hurried gait that makes other experienced hospital personnel flatten themselves against corridor walls, and I adopted it, heading toward Casualty with all deliberate speed.
It was less of an abattoir than when I’d left it, at least. Gravity—or the simulation of it—helped. There were still cots lined up against two walls, sheets draped over improvised stands between them for some semblance of privacy, but that was far more orderly than the situation during the disaster. Walking wounded had returned to their own quarters to convalesce, and some were probably back on duty.
I noticed open panels in the floor as I passed, and people of various descriptions working inside. I guessed that the artificial gravity retrofit had been stepped up, and that getting it installed in Casualty was now the first priority. Good.
It’s always comforting to see the return of normalcy, and that the system has not completely broken down.
I nodded to an attending physician and a couple of specialists with whom I was acquainted, waved to the triage nurse, and stepped toward the doors to the private ward as if I belonged there.
The door didn’t open to my scan.
Now, that was interesting. But I wouldn’t be much of a heavy rescue specialist if I didn’t know how to override a standard lock panel. I hadn’t done this last time because I was still mostly following the rules. Still mostly being polite. And my exo had been an anchor at the time, come to think of it. Now… using my exo instead of a handheld—and instead of reaching into the senso with my fox—I hacked into the panel’s working memory and flipped the switch.
The door hissed open and I stepped through.
A white lab coat makes you anonymous in a hospital. My ID dangled, and given the experience with the door I half expected my signal to be rejected by the sensors inside. No flashing lights greeted me, however. No whooping sirens. Just the humming quiet of an intensive care unit between emergencies.
I was in the same hallway I’d passed through when my exo had been running on fumes. This time I was fully charged and full of adrenaline, however, and I had more time to look around.
It seemed much as it had; a quiet nursing unit in the middle of sleep shift. The desk was staffed with a Ceeharen nurse who didn’t look up. The unit coordinator who had spotted me on my last intrusion was nowhere in evidence. I hoped that meant he was off-shift or asleep. He’d been too alert by far, and—I blushed to admit it—I was a terrible spy.
Fortunately for terrible spies, most people are terrible observers. I sailed past the syster at the desk—they were deeply involved in something invisible to me in the air before them, making notes on it with a light pen—and walked along, checking the panels beside private rooms as if I were looking for a specific patient ID. The rooms were privacy-shielded, but my senior physician clearance was enough to de-encrypt them. I guessed when they’d locked the entrance, they hadn’t thought uninvited guests would be resourceful or determined enough to get in anyway.
My accessing the records would be logged. But I wasn’t planning on keeping my visit secret. Either there was nothing to hide, and this really was only a ridiculously posh unit devoted to keeping those who exploited more resources than they needed away from the proletariat… or Calliope was right about the hospital using indigent folks as spare-parts repositories, and I was about to blow the worst abomination in modern Synarche history sky-high.
If I ever got off this quarantined hospital. If the hospital itself even survived.
It didn’t occur to me that there might be an answer somewhere in the middle. An answer whose implications might be almost as unpleasant as organ farmers murdering people for parts.
In retrospect, this was an oversight.
The majority of patients whose data I accessed were old. Very, very old, even by modern standards, where the human life expectancy in reasonable health exceeds our natural span including senescence. I’m hardly the picture of perfect health, but I was honestly better off than many of my ancestors would have been at my age—their panoply of undiagnosed and untreatable autoimmune disorders blossomed in the early Anthropocene, for a variety of genetic and environmental reasons—and I could expect another fifty or sixty ans or so as a contributing member of society.
If I made it to tomorrow alive.
But these patients—the human ones—had birth dates that made them older than my great-grandparents had lived to be. Admittedly, my great-grandparents lived on a marginal colony world where people reproduced young. But my great-grandparents were no longer alive, and neither were their children. Or their children’s children, though that had been an accident.
These people were.
So maybe they needed the peace and quiet. Maybe they had come here to die. That seemed like an intolerable waste of resources, but… these people had resources to burn. And didn’t seem inclined to return their surplus to the commonwealth, beyond whatever they were taxed.
You can’t take it with you, as somebody wise observed. But you can sure roll around in it for as long as you’re alive.
The next thing I noticed, pulling their med charts, was that none of them were on antirejection drugs. I had expected it, but it still
