Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

over her specialized combined micro- and macro-surgery and set to work.

As he gazed at all this, Saul understood the detail, but only as a distant spectator. Nothing seemed real; he drifted in a dream, in some half-conscious state. Then, maybe because of some repair she had just made in his skull, everything momentarily slid into proper focus.

‘Must remove all . . . damaged matter,’ he told her via the intercom, causing her to jerk and quickly withdraw her hands from the telefactor gloves. He was only aware of having spoken after the fact, and wasn’t entirely sure of how he had accessed the intercom. The two men looked up in amazement, and some horror, for they were being spoken to by the mess on the surgical table before them.

‘I think I know what I’m doing,’ Hannah replied, returning her hands to her telefactor gloves, and her attention to the screen images the optics were providing.

‘Repair . . . then use tissue stores from the failed unit, rebuild and . . . regrowth.’ Why did he say that? He didn’t know. Time passed; images on a screen, but no emotional content.

She had shaved and then lifted his scalp to remove a hemisphere of skull from the back of his head. His brain had pulsed blood as she pulled out pieces of shattered bone and ceramic bullet, and injected numerous probes and other instruments. She was now cutting out lumps of tissue killed by the impact shock and depositing them in a kidney dish, then micro-cauterizing and repairing veins, so that the bleeding became less. She had also begun putting in struts and discs of collagen foam for support, for without these his brain would deflate like a speeded-up film of a rotting orange.

‘You’ll be on life-support for six months before I can even restore your autonomic nervous system – if I even can.’

‘I can guide regrowth,’ he replied. ‘I can run my body . . . through the implants. My body will . . . restore . . . I will . . .’

She paused, absorbing that.

‘You’ll control regrowth, just as you control your robots?’

‘Yes.’

And the truth? The truth was that it was taking a substantial portion of his erratic mental function to keep his body running. His perception of the station had crashed, and his control of the machines within it was now minimal. Maybe he could fully control one spidergun, but definitely not two. His cam vision had dropped back to something wholly human – for he could only manage to look through one cam at a time without becoming confused. But, worse than all this, his perception of himself seemed to have faded, as had his perception of time and place.

He felt adrift in a dream that was Argus Station.

4

The Reaper’s Blunt Scythe

Before doctors and medical technology came along to queer the pitch, death was a quite easily definable state. If your breathing and your heart stopped, you had achieved that state and little else was considered. This, in its time, could lead to some unfortunate results when the person checking the death failed to make absolutely sure, as fingernail marks on the insides of lids of ancient coffins attest. As time progressed, it became possible to restart the heart, restart the breathing and then to maintain both. Brain death due to the total necrosis of cerebral neurons then became the point of no recovery, but even that was a movable feast and a hunting ground for lawyers. This line was then blurred when the necrosis became a matter of degree, when cerebral matter could be regrown or replaced, and then became almost invisible when it became possible to programme new neural tissue. The new line was then the death of the personality, but even that became a moot point and was not necessarily connected to the death of the human body concerned. Combine the fact that we can now clone human beings with the seeming likelihood that we will soon be able to record most of the information a brain contains, and the meaning of death moves into the territory of philosophers – a place where ancient certainties themselves go to die.

Argus

Damn, she didn’t need this now. She wanted to stay with Saul, to be ready if anything went wrong, to be ready to ensure that he lived. But the implications of what Le Roque had told her, and the images she had seen, could not be denied. Her expertise was required, and essential. Not only that: her refusing to come would hint to Le Roque, and others, the extent of Saul’s injuries, which was something she hadn’t broadcast. She would see this through and get back to him just as fast as she could.

Twenty-two people had died, all within an hour of each other, all of them repros and erstwhile delegates. Others had conducted the initial autopsies and revealed some derivative of Ebola, but now, factoring in those pictures from Earth and the fact that the deaths occurred shortly after the EM shield had been shut down . . .

Arcoplex One, where most of the deaths had occurred, was quarantined, as were the quarters outside the arcoplex which the victims had occupied, but there were no further deaths, and subsequent blood tests, both within the arcoplex and throughout the station, had revealed no further spread. The corpses had been consigned to the outer ring, to storage in rooms open to vacuum, along with the numerous other corpses that were a product of this station’s recent history. It was a puzzle Hannah had not been involved in because of her focus on Saul, and it was one to which she suspected little effort had been applied in solving since, in the end, the victims had been Committee delegates. Now she was involved because of what was happening on Earth; because, according to some recent data intercepted, people had been dying back there of something similar.

‘Keep me apprised of what you learn,’ Saul whispered to her through her fone.

These words sounded rehearsed to Hannah, as if he had readied them for this moment.

‘Why? You’ll probably know before I do.’ She pulled on her spacesuit helmet and it automatically dogged down.