Counting Heads

3.11

On Thursday morning, Reilly Dell was again on duty at South Gate when Mary arrived, only this time at the outer gate next to the brick drive. He greeted Mary warmly and inquired after Fred.

Mary passed through the gatehouse scanway, made her way around the barriers, and emerged in South Gate Plaza during the quarter hour of baked bread. On Mineral Way in front of Feldspar Cottage, she heard a strange sound, a sustained, dissonant chord. It grew louder as she approached the cottage door. The only thing it could be was some piece of therapeutic equipment. So she was surprised to discover the source of the sound to be the Ellen jacket lying on the daybed. Its arms were outstretched, its neck and spine arched back painfully, tendons taut as wires, and on its face a look of wild-eyed terror. “EeeEeeEee,” it screamed without pause. Mary searched the room for some explanation.

There were two male medtechs wearing elbow-length vurt gloves crouched on either side of Ellen’s daybed. Nearby, a gaggle of medical professionals, including Coburn, surrounded the tank and controller. The night evangelines, Cyndee and Ronnie, sat in the far corner. None of them had noticed Mary’s arrival.

The two medtechs at the daybed were rubbing the Ellen jacket here and there on its torso with their gloved hands. Their action must have been for some legitimate purpose, but it struck Mary as lewd. Then the medtechs each grasped one of the jacket’s outflung arms and tried to bend them to its sides. They seemed to be tearing them from their sockets. And all the while the jacket wailed its ululating cry.

“Stop that!” Mary shouted at them. “Leave her alone.”

The medtechs glanced at her and continued their efforts.

“Make them stop!” she cried to the others.

Medtech Coburn said, “Butt out, clone.”

Mary covered her ears but could not muffle the jacket’s cry. Outdoors, down the garden path, up the shady lane, across the athletic field, to the little pond she ran. Renata was already there, sitting on a wooden bench, contemplating the water. The two evangelines were at first surprised and then embarrassed to see each other. They had both arrived at the cottage within minutes of each other, and they had both fled to the same sanctuary.

Mary sat on the bench next to her sister. “So, they have you back on mornings,” she said.

“Looks like it.”

A mother duck swam across the sun-dappled pond, followed by a string of ducklings.

“The screaming upset me,” Renata said.

“Me too. I don’t know how Cyndee and Ronnie can stand it.”

Concierge strolled up the path and smiled when he saw them. “Ah, there you are,” he said. “I apologize for not forewarning you.”

“What’s happening to Ellen?”

“Without getting too technical, the jacket is expressing a condition similar to oculogyria. Note the position of the arms, the fixed stare, the cry. What you saw is a somatic response to a single thought pattern, probably a memory engram, that is restimulating itself in a continuous loop. When a human body does this, it can maintain a cataleptic fixation for hours, but eventually the muscles tire and the body collapses. A jacket, however, never tires; it needn’t even pause to draw breath.

“Of course, it’s not the jacket experiencing this but Ellen’s own brain. I think we can safely say that Ellen is no longer comatose, but her new mental state is just as grave.”

Mary said, “What’s causing it?”

“That’s uncertain. At the time it commenced, we were attempting to restore Ellen’s ideomimetic constellation.”

“Ideomimetic constellation?” Mary said. “You mean her ego?”

Both Renata and Concierge looked at Mary in surprise, and Concierge said, “Someone’s been doing her homework. Yes, Myr Skarland, her ego, or focus foci, or spirit, or soul, or any of the hundreds of other fanciful terms humans have applied to it over the centuries. It’s that particular and unique pattern of synaptic discharge that occurs inside our brains whenever we think, ‘Here I am. Here I am.’ In humans, it originates in the neocortex and branches downward into the evolutionarily more ancient lobes and encompasses the whole brain.

“In any case, we may have stimulated a memory engram instead. We believe it to be a part of her death experience, an impression not yet processed into long-term memory when her brain was flash frozen.”

“Can’t you make it stop?”

“That’s what the medtechs were attempting to do when you arrived.”

The evangelines exchanged a sheepish glance and rose to return to the cottage.

IT WAS WELL after noon, and most of the ’meets were still in bed, but April had decided to keep the lifechair a few more days, and Rusty and Denny were clearing a path for it in the stairwell above three.

Samson had spent the night in the chair in the administrative outer office, and Kitty was there trying to feed him breakfast.

“I’m not hungry,” he insisted.

“I don’t care,” she said. “You’ll eat or else.”

“Maybe after I see Ellie.”

Kitty stirred his gruel impatiently.

“You promised,” Samson went on. “You thought I’d forget, but I told the belt to remind me.”

“Fine,” she replied, “but not before you eat.”

“Buy me a Gooeyduk and I’ll eat on the way.”

Kitty sighed and dropped the spoon on the tray. “Oh, all right!” she said and went down to the NanoJiffy. The chair followed her down and tried to leave the house without her, but the homcom bee blocked the door with a large Do Not Exit frame.

“See?” Kitty said. “The HomCom denies you permission. You’re under house arrest, remember?”

“I remember nothing of the sort. Onward, Belt!”

“This chair is incapable of disobeying a Command order,” Belt Hubert said.

Suddenly the frame vanished, and the bee dropped to the floor, inert.

“Good work, Belt.”

“Let me assure you, Sam, I was not responsible.”

“Mush, Belt, mush!”

The lifechair stepped over the fallen bee and left the house. Kitty expected to hear sirens at any moment. In all honesty, she, herself, was sorely curious to meet this famous daughter of Sam’s, and after half a minute of hesitation, she knocked the bee into a corner with the toe of her shoe, picked up her busking costume bag, and followed.

THE DECATUR TRAIN station was a few blocks from the Roosevelt Clinic. Kitty’s bead car arrived first. She swiped a route map and saw that Samson’s car was still a few minutes out. She went to wait near the stiles and watched commuters walking by. They were mostly iterant service people at this station and a few free-rangers. No charter members that she could tell.

Kitty scratched herself. Her arms and legs were raw where she’d been at them all morning. She knew that the retirement of the slugs had been too good to be true, for they’d been replaced with tiny mechs that resided under your skin, the so-called nitwork. They were supposed to be less intrusive than the slugs. And they weren’t supposed to itch.

Finally, the lifechair, with Belt Hubert at the helm, came into sight. It looked as though Sam had fallen asleep again. She didn’t wait for them but swiped herself out to the street. It was a fresh spring morning. What caught Kitty’s attention, though, was how much valuable litter lay in the gutter and along the pedway. A gleaner’s treasure trove: bits of plastic and composites, gravel, scraps of metal. Kitty resisted the urge to fill her pockets.

The lifechair rolled out of the Decatur station and joined Kitty on the pedway. She gave it her busking bag and skipped alongside. Soon, they turned a corner and exited the pedway. From here on there were streets and sidewalks and no pedways. Grand houses were concealed behind hedges and walls. The neighborhood had an eerie sense of flatness because there was nothing in sight taller than a tree. And the streets were picked absolutely clean of all debris, courtesy of lawn scuppers that lurked in the shrubbery and watched them go by.

“Kitty?” Samson said. He was awake again. He smiled beatifically when she peeked over the rim of the chair basket. “Where are we going?”

“Oh, Sam, I’m tired of telling you. Ask Belt Hubert.”

They passed under an iron arch and proceeded down a brick drive that was lined on the right with a tall hedge. To their left was an expanse of lawn, a greensmoat that encircled the clinic.

In the wall at the bottom of the drive was a wide gate of pressed air. Behind a sentry window in the gate, a russ guard said, “Morning, myren. Can I help you?”

When Sam didn’t respond, Kitty addressed the russ, “This gentleman is Samson Kodiak. His daughter, Ellen Starke, is a patient here. We’ve come to visit her.”

The russ, Dell by his name patch, said, “Please wait while I ask Concierge.” A moment later a slot opened in the pressure gate, and the russ waved them in. He seemed startled when the odor hit him.

“Samson can’t go through a scanner,” Kitty hastened to say as they entered the gatehouse. “He has a special health waiver. The chair can show it to you.”

“No need, myr. We won’t be using the scanner.” The russ escorted them to a set of double doors with a sign above it that read, “Arbor Gate.” Behind the doors stretched a corridor with an usher line twinkling along the wall.

“Where does it lead?” Kitty asked.

“To Concierge’s office,” said the russ.

The lifechair with Samson led the way, and she followed. The russ closed the doors behind them, and they followed the usher line down identical corridors. The usher line beckoned, and they followed. Finally, at the end of what seemed to be the longest corridor of all stood a lone door labeled “CONCIERGE.” It opened to admit them and closed behind them, and they found themselves back on the street outside the iron arch.

“Son of a bitch,” Kitty said.

“My navionics must be malfing,” said Belt Hubert.

“No kidding?”

THE BLUE TEAM entered the gatehouse hidden in the hankie. The hankie was not successful in reaching the prize, but it had fulfilled its purpose, and the Blue Team abandoned it before it exited the gatehouse. The bee and wasp concealed themselves on the gatehouse ceiling.

KITTY AND BELT Hubert spent the next hour trying to reach the gatehouse again, but every time they launched forward down the drive, they seemed to veer left to the greensmoat. They tried to compensate by steering to the right, but then they were in the hedge. It was as if the gatehouse lay in a direction unavailable to them, and they found themselves back each time on the street outside the arch. Belt Hubert even tried aiming the chair at the gatehouse and locking its steering, but that got them no closer.

Samson slept the whole time. Finally, Kitty gave up and told Belt Hubert to steer them a course back to the train station.

“It’s an interesting conundrum,” Belt Hubert said as they rolled along the sidewalk. “If I was my whole self, I’m sure I could solve it.”

KITTY’S BEAD CAR was approaching Millennium Park when she got a message from Belt Hubert that Samson had diverted his car to the Museum of Art and Science. So she fed the new destination to her own car.

Kitty strolled through the main lobby of the MAS, past its trademark display of life-size dancing elephants made of shaped water. She knew exactly where to look for him.

She strode past galleries of traveling collections, past the rondophone display in which sounds made by historical persons and events—the actual sounds, not recordings—traveled in continuous loops and could be heard through a stethoscope.

She hastened through galleries of twenty-first-century art. Here were icky reminders of that troubled time: real babies splayed open like colorful little snowsuits, freeze-dried house pets dressed like prostitutes, and excrement from extinct rhinoceroses used as paint.

One twenty-first-century room was decked out as a banquet hall, the table covered in white linen and set with silver service and crystal wineglasses. A frame said that tickets to the “Next Last Supper with Bene Alvarez” were sold out. Each Thursday, artist Bene Alvarez hosted a gourmet dinner consisting of roasts, steak and kidney pies, pâtés, sausages, and all the trimmings. The meat came from his own body. Or rather, from his extensive personal organ bank. The odors drifting from the gallery were enticing, but Kitty hurried by.

There was another gallery where Kitty invariably lingered, though it was perhaps the creepiest of all the installations from that century. It was a simulated town house living room from eighty years ago with all the period furnishings and decoration intact. Standing next to a table piled high with wrapped gifts was a wedding couple, a bride and groom in all their formal finery, posing for their wedding simulacrum. They were flush with happiness, standing very still, and completely unaware that they weren’t real. The real wedding couple had broken their pose, returned to their guests, and lived out their lives a long time ago. It took the sim couple about a half hour to work this information out for themselves, an agonizing process, after which the museum staff reset them and started the whole thing over again. It was chilling, and Kitty could watch their repeating, painful revelation for hours—but not today. Kitty pushed on farther into the past, to the galleries of twentieth-century art. Here the work was tame by comparison. Statues that didn’t move and flat pictures that didn’t evolve. It was in this century that Samson Harger first made a name for himself. And it was here that she found him fast asleep in his lifechair in front of a wall-sized canvas of his own creation. Despite the chair’s airfiltering system, his odor had cleared other patrons from the gallery.

Kitty sat on a bench next to the chair. “Was he awake when you got here?” she said.

“Yes,” said Belt Hubert.

The canvas before her filled her entire field of view. Four large slashes of black paint divided five slanting fields of raw, chaotic color built up in dozens of layers. It looked to Kitty like a recording of neural frenzy.

“I wasn’t aware that Sam was an artist,” Belt Hubert said. “I am researching him on the WAD. He was quite famous.” Kitty seemed confused, and Belt Hubert explained: “I contain Sam’s history only in outline form and only for the last twenty years.”

“Why don’t you access his archives?”

“I don’t possess the access codes. Hubert has them.”

“I see. Well, this picture predates Hubert. It even predates Skippy.”

“Who is Skippy?”

“You, I think. Sam’s valet when I first met him, before there were mentars. Sam was still an artist then. Or at least he painted a portrait. It was much better than this—this mess. He showed it to me when he hired me.”

“Hired you to do what?”

Kitty tousled the few sprigs of hair remaining on Samson’s sleepy head, then stretched out on the padded bench and rested her head in her arms. “I was a grownup then. I had earned a degree in microhab landscape engineering, which is a fancy term for flower gardening for rich people. I started my own microhab maintenance service and was building my client base. My first big break was this gig for some affs high in an RT. They had a gorgeous little boreal rain forest microhab in a twelve-cubic-meter glassine bubble, with a fully self-contained atmosphere and hydrosphere. It was a little gem, with fiddlehead ferns, mushrooms, lichen, moss, devil’s club, a half-dozen kinds of berries, wild cucumber, and dwarf Sitka spruce—you name it—monkeyflower, spring beauty, saxifrage. It had many edible varieties, and my clients used it as an exotic salad and herb garden. It even had some fauna: mosquitoes, spiders, voles, birds. Quite the balancing act keeping it all in harmony. I was up there almost every day working on it.

“One day I was programming the resident scuppers—you couldn’t actually go inside the hab, and you had to do everything by remote—and there was a loud party in progress in a condo across the sun shaft. I didn’t pay it any attention until I smelled this really foul odor. I panicked because I thought there was something wrong with the hab. But the smell was coming from across the sun shaft.

“There was this sickly looking man leaning on the railing watching me. He’d come out from the party and was all alone. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him. He had me tell him the Latin names for all of the species in the hab, and he said he might hire me to do his own atrium. He said, ‘Give me some time to think about it.’

“Well, the next time I returned, all his windows were opaqued. They stayed that way for a long time—years. Eventually I forgot about him. I was very busy; I had so much work that I employed four of my housemeets to help keep up. Kodiak was still a real charter then. Also, I had just discovered retroaging and how much fun it is. At first I was afraid my microhab business would suffer if I was a kid, but just the opposite happened. The younger I got, the better my business. There’s something about little girls and flowers that’s magical.

“So ten years go by—ten years—and I’m up in the RT tending the boreal microhab as usual—it was quadrupled in size by then—and I notice the windows across the way are clear. I figure the place has been sold or something, but no, the door opens and out comes the same stinky fellow. He looks at the hab and then at me, and he says, ‘Well, I’ve thought about it. When can you start?’”

“That’s quite a story,” Belt Hubert said.

“You bet.” Kitty jumped off the bench and headed for the exit. “Come on. Let’s go to the park. I can at least get a half day of work in. He’ll sleep through it.”

THROUGH STEALTH AND patience, the Blue Team passed through the gatehouse into the clinic grounds without detection. Once inside, the Blue Team bee’s comm with LOG2 was cut, and it was once more operating on its own recognizance. It quickly located the prize. The bee took up a covert position overlooking a transparent container full of a liquid biomass conductor in which the prize was suspended. The bee sent its escort on a series of solo reconnaissance flights to explore and map the compound. Each time the wasp returned, it dumped its data to the bee.

The bee, meanwhile, analyzed the clinic’s command and control structure, the various local nets, and the olfactory and mote broadcasting systems. It paid special attention to the campus simiverse and diverse hollyholo population. It mined its growing pool of data and fed it to its scenario mill to determine the best way to facilitate the prize’s liberation. The difficulty of its task was compounded by huge gaps in its knowledge base. The prize was attached to unknown machinery. Human workers of unknown friendliness reached into its container and applied unknown objects to it. Chemicals of unknown composition bubbled through the liquid conductor. Meanwhile, a holofied simulacrum of the prize expressed human distress with an uninterrupted cry. Any or all of this might be sinister and require counteraction, but Blue Team Bee could not judge for itself, and since it could not contact LOG2, it did nothing but create a blind spot atop a ceiling beam in the cottage where it hid. From its invisible vantage point, it monitored clinic chatter and waited for some overt action threshold to be crossed.