“Huh,” I said. “Did the unit AI tell you that?”
“There is no unit AI.”
“There what?” I sat up so fast I almost dropped myself out of the hammock.
“There is no unit AI.”
A sour feeling settled inside me. “That can’t be right.”
“Nevertheless,” said Sally. “It is true.”
It was a terrible reason to break into a medical unit. Well, all right, it wasn’t technically breaking in. But as much as I was a full-time doctor now, I’d been a doctor and a cop before. One does not become either of those things due to a congenital lack of curiosity.
I was tired and in pain. I tuned myself for wakefulness and pain relief, knowing that it would cost me later in backlash. But later was not now. I climbed back out of my hammock and dressed in fresh scrubs. I even combed styler through my hair and programmed my overworked frizz to a nice, tight, professional cap of curls.
My exo’s charge light was still blinking. It could process a certain amount of electricity from my motions, but that wasn’t the same as a nice fat eight-hour trickle. Still, I should be good for another standard, if I didn’t try anything too strenuous.
Even if I ran out of juice, it wouldn’t be as if I couldn’t move at all. It would, however, hurt much more, and involve a lot of groaning and hobbling.
Piece of cake.
It wasn’t far to Casualty. I suited up in the hall, for the anonymity it offered—and the biohazard protection. Just in case there was something unsavory going on back there that was also contagious, rather than merely the exploitation of resources by the rich.
Imagine what it must have been like hundreds of ans ago—back in Carlos’s dia—when there was no Guarantee, no Income, no useful work for anyone who wanted it. No promise of safety and health and security. Only exploitation under various systems all claiming to be different, but all amounting to the farming of the many to make wealthy the few. Serfdoms and indenturehood and chattel slavery.
Explaining the future to him was going to be interesting.
The Casualty Department was positively eerie in its emptiness. I hadn’t been back to Sally recently, and I hadn’t expected the complete lack of patients and the nearly complete lack of staff. One lone Ceeharen triage nurse waved to me from behind the desk across the big reception deck without raising their head. They appeared to be bent over a reader or game board of some sort.
I waved back and kept walking, angling far enough from the desk to preclude casual conversation, and headed toward the entrance to the private unit.
My footsteps echoed through the eerie emptiness. I braced myself for whatever bullshit I might be about to witness, and keyed myself in through the door.
Battery levels critical, my exo said. Fatigue levels excessive. Recommend recharge and sleep cycle as soon as possible.
I know, robot. I know.
My exo quit about ten steps after I crossed the threshold. I couldn’t see the telltale on my wrist through the suit, but I knew it would be blinking orange.
“Exo, are you there?”
The only thing breaking the silence inside my suit was the soft echo of my own voice inside the helmet. The senso link in the lower quadrant of my visual field blinked EXO 0% BAT, just to add insult to injury. Orange, when moments before it had been yellow and at 7 percent.
One thing primitive humans did have going for them was a lack of stuff that runs on batteries. And, more to the point, runs out of batteries.
I realized I had stopped in a doorway and, pushing against my exo, hastily stepped through. Decompression shields are designed like guillotines.
It’s a terrible thing if an unsuspecting sentient happens to be standing under one when it closes. Worse, though, if that didn’t happen—for all the other unsuspecting sentients that might be explosively decompressed if the doors failed.
That was another reason for me in particular not to stand in the way. My exo was featherweight, breathable, barely there. And made of sandwiched nanofilms and conductive, contracting polymer. Conceivably, the door might not be able to cut through it, if I was under it when it fell.
They might be privileged fuckers in here, but I’d hate to be the person who ensured the deaths of every patient in the private unit. And the staff certainly deserved better.
Once I was moving, I continued to step forward as briskly as I could manage. Now that it was dead, the exo offered resistance rather than assistance when I moved. It seemed to compress my limbs and torso, pushing back against me with every step as if I were strapped into a zero-g resistance machine.
There were patient rooms down the hall. Maybe I could get to one and peer through the window, check the monitors. I made it five steps farther into the private unit and dragged myself the last sideways half meter into an alcove along the corridor. Two multispecies bench seats crouched intimately across from each other. An old-fashioned curtain on rings hung from the bar across the top of the door. Enough privacy for delivering bad news. Not enough privacy to encourage bad behavior.
I flipped the curtain across to hide my distress. I didn’t sit down because if I sat, I was only going to have to get up again. And I’d rather not embrace that particular experience.
But I needed to get out of the public view for a moment. Gather myself. Force myself to move confidently, like a medical professional with every right to be here.
And not like somebody on the verge of a total systemic collapse who had stolen a staff uniform in some misguided attempt at escape.
A sensible human being would have gathered her resources, steadied her nerves, and turned right back around as if she had forgotten some important piece of kit. A sensible human being would have marched back through
