Authors: Alan Dean Foster
As he slid off the examination table he eyed her uncertainly. “You’re not going to call the police as soon as I’m out of your building, are you?”
Turning away from him she busied herself with shutting down equipment for the weekend. “I was able to treat your traktac infiltration but I’m afraid I can’t do anything for your paranoia. I took care of your most obvious problem and now any remaining problems are entirely your problems.” Dumping the traktacs into a small glassine envelope, she handed them to him. “Of course, the longer you stay here the more opportunity I have to change my mind.”
He nodded understandingly. Lean as he was, he reminded her more than anything else of the occasional stray dog she encountered from time to time in the city parks. Sodden and shaggy mutts drawn to the city’s green spaces for access to their automatic watering systems—and any edible leftovers abandoned by uncaring picnickers. These clever stray canines were smart enough to avoid the park electronics that were designed to discourage their presence. Just as this Whispr individual and his advisor had been smart enough to identify her as one of the few regional physicians bound tightly enough by their Hippocratic oath to help him in his moment of need without turning him in.
Had he been telling her the truth? Had he been harried with traktacs because of a dispute over money, as he claimed, and not because he had murdered some innocent in their sleep? She still didn’t think he looked much like a killer, and not just because of his skeletal appearance.
She chided herself. Her knowledge of the facades of convicted murderers had been acquired from casual perusal of the news and popular entertainment. Bodily dysfunctions she could diagnose with little effort. Mental ones lay outside her realm of expertise.
To her surprise she heard herself saying, “I don’t know what you’ve done, but why don’t you turn yourself in? Do the right thing, assume any debt you owe to society. Turn your life around. You don’t strike me as addled. You’re slim but based on what I see not physically impaired. Good health is a windfall for which even the most elaborate melds can’t compensate, and you seem blessed with it.”
How much of what she was saying came from the heart, she wondered even as the words left her lips, and how much from a desire to assuage any
lingering guilt over the service she had just provided to someone wanted by the authorities?
Whispr knew he ought to have felt insulted by her rebuke, no matter how well intentioned the sentiments. Had any of his street acquaintances ventured such unsubtle advice he would have told them promptly and in no uncertain terms where they could file it. But coming from her, after what she had just done for him, the suggestions left him feeling not angry but—uncomfortable. He chose to test their veracity by seeing just how far he could push her.
“There’s one more thing you could do for me, doctor. Ms. Seastrom.”
“ ‘Doctor’ will do nicely,” she replied tartly. “And for some reason you’re still here.”
He held up the little bag of traktacs. “I can lose these before the stall gives out. Dump them in an estuary, down a public toilet. Mail them out of the country. But no matter where they fetch up, sooner or later and most likely sooner the authorities in the area will catch the signals and they’ll be traced back to their point of origin. To Savannah. I know traktacs.” He spoke with confidence. “Try to destroy them and they’ll rightquick broadcast their location, even if they have to punch the signal through a stall.” He was eyeing her intently.
“The one thing that would really help me out now, now that you got them out of my body, would be if they could be deactivated.” He indicated the examination room. “You got all kinds of advanced gear here. I guess some of it would let you turn medical implants on or off remotely. You probably do it all the time as part of your work.” He jiggled the contents of the envelope.
“I bet you can turn these off.” He eyed her somberly. “That would
really
set me free. If I sent these to Istanbul, Interpol would pick up their signal and notify the police back here. Then they’d be able to trace them to the point of mailing and they’d know I’m still around. But if the little bastards never
start
broadcasting—nobody would know where to begin looking for me again. I’d have my life back. Or at least some freedom of movement.”
He was pleading with his eyes as well as his voice. By now she was having serious second thoughts about what she had already done. “I think you’d better leave, Mr. Whispr.” The words emerged hard and unyielding from between her lips as she edged toward a particular console. “I’m starting
to think maybe I might have made a mistake, Hippocratic oath or no oath. Consider yourself fortunate that I’ve helped you as much as I have. What happens to you now is none of my business and none of my concern—except that you’re still here in my office. Get out, Mr. Whispr.” One hand hovered over the contact plate that would summon an emergency surgical crew. They weren’t the police, but their presence should be sufficient to forestall any trouble.
“Just ‘Whispr.’ ” His whole body gave a despondent heave. Was he going to cry?
“Whatever. Leave, while you still can. If you can’t accept that I can’t and won’t do anything more for you, appreciate that compared to most of the street folk who come in here you’ve already received more than your fair share of pro bono time and effort.”
So that’s it
. His thought was mistaken, but the notion took hold and he clung to it desperately.
She wants to be paid
. His misperception was understandable. The lives of nearly everyone he had ever had dealings with in the course of his adult life invariably revolved one way or another around money. Specifically, the lack of it and how to rectify the deficiency.
Not that it mattered. He knew that the pittance he could access would not buy two minutes of this esteemed physician’s time.
Except maybe …
Setting aside the clear envelope that held the threatening traktacs, he lifted one leg and began fumbling with his right shoe. “I can’t pay you,” he began timidly, “but maybe we can work a trade. I have something that I think—no, that I
know
must be worth a lot of money!”
Watching his trembling fingers fumble with the shoe as he struggled to maintain his balance, Ingrid truly felt sorry for him. But not sorry enough to lavish any more time on his problems. The more he scrabbled and groped at himself, trying to locate something inside the scruffy footwear, the more she felt he was relatively harmless. A glance at the time projection that drifted decoratively around the walls of the examination room just below the ceiling revealed that afternoon was marching ever remorselessly toward evening. Her homeward commute was vertical and short-lived, but still constituted precious off-time that he was wasting.
“I’m afraid I don’t operate on a barter system, Mr.… Whispr. It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m a doctor, a general practitioner. Not a police tech. With the instruments I have here I
might
be able to deactivate the little locators
I extracted from your side, but circumstances and moral constraints dictate that I …”
She stopped in midsentence to gaze at what he had removed from a compartment concealed in the sole of the shoe. Her initial sight of it made her want to break out in sad, disparaging laughter. Reflexive closer examination of the capsule hinted at it—hinted at …
Within the transparent capsule lay a small bit of thread. To all outward appearances the thread was metallic in composition. One end terminated in a tiny but recognizable universal connector. The alloy of which the thread had been fashioned had a peculiar, distinctive cast. The way it caught the soft but bright light that suffused the examination room suggested something at once briefly glimpsed and familiar. As she stared at it the silvery mottling seemed to change and flow before her eyes. That was preposterous, of course.
More than anything else the thread’s general appearance reminded her of the singular sheen on the advanced molecular-level biomechanical insert that she had removed from the follicularly melded pate of young Cara Gibson. With one significant difference. Unlike that supposedly quantum entangled nanoscale device, this one showed no sign of disappearing.
Could it be touched? Could it be handled and manipulated? Could it (most likely of all) be entirely unrelated to the mini mechanical mystery she had encountered earlier? Was she ascribing unknown potential to it out of yearning instead of common sense? And if it did possess anything other than the most superficial similarity to that baffling set of inlab conclusions that had been drawn from the Cara Gibson incident—how had it come to be in the possession of this downcast street person?
“May I—can I—see that?”
Whispr was instantly on guard. “You know what it is?”
“No. No, I don’t. I don’t have a clue. But I may—I may have once encountered something similar.” Sensing his unease, she hastened to reassure him. “If you want to try and trade something so insignificant for my services, particularly for services not commonly rendered, I have to know whether what you’re offering is worth anything, don’t I? Surely you don’t expect me to take your word for it that it’s valuable?”
“N-n-no, I guess not.” Reluctantly, he handed over the capsule. His willowy, sun-browned fingers covered her pale palm like a predatory crab dropping gently down atop an oyster. As she stared closely at the thread inside
the capsule he watched her intently. “Did you mean to say that you’ve seen another thread
like
this one?”
“Not a thread, no. Something that might possibly be made of the same material, but smaller.” She looked up at him. “Much, much smaller. It had kind of the same color and shine. I took it out of the back of a young girl’s head. It was part of a bad meld.”
Whispr frowned. “A bad meld? That’s all?”
It made no sense. Why would the Greater Savannah authorities be so anxious and commit so much in the way of resources to recover something that had to do with a social function as common as melding? Unless maybe the thread contained the record of some really important individual’s particular meld. Despite the vast range of modifications that were freely available to all, there were still such things as illegal melds. Maniping an arm into a gun, for example, was more than just frowned upon. You needed a special permit. Then there were melds that were socially frowned upon, many of them often of a bizarre sexual nature. And if the person who had undergone the illegal or perversion meld was famous …
Yes, it was starting to make a little sense. He still had no proof of anything, no facts, but at least now he had a theory. Gradually, his suspicion of the doctor’s motives was becoming subsumed by his desperate desire to have some answers.
So excited was Ingrid at the discovery that the tiny item her strange visitor was offering to swap for her services might peripherally resemble the nanodevice she had removed from the teenage girl that it did not occur to her that due to the increasing lateness of the hour she was now alone with him not only in her office but in a large part of the medical complex as well. This Whispr person was not only her last pro bono patient of the day, he was her last patient of the week. Her receptionist had departed and the offices and medical suites with which she shared the tower floor were also rapidly emptying out. Of course building security, live as well as automated, was always available and on-call twenty-four hours a day. But still, if her visitor intended her harm it would take time to produce a response.
None of this intruded on her musings. Her thoughts were entirely on the metallic thread and any secrets it might hold—provided that it didn’t vanish under her gaze. Understandably, her visitor was equally enthralled. Had she known more about his background, she might have worried.
They spoke little as she carefully removed the thread from its
protective capsule, inserted it into an appropriate office inlab receptacle, and waited for the sophisticated medical analyzer to do its job. Eventually the lab’s synthesized male voice announced the arrival of preliminary results. Ingrid did not hold her breath, but she was focused. Left to himself, Whispr let his gaze rove over the multiple readouts that had begun to appear on a monitor while simultaneously trying to make some sense of a series of scrolling projections floating between the doctor and a wall. Their meaning being as alien to him as Malagasy he was grateful for the accompanying synth voice even if he could only make sense of a little of what it was saying.
“MSMH.” The inlab’s AI spoke confidently. “Insofar as I am able to determine, this storage medium is composed largely of the same material that was found in the smaller and more complex sample that you earlier submitted for analysis. However, there are also significant differences.”
Whispr’s brow furrowed. “What’s it talking about, an ‘earlier’ sample? Like that piece of a bad meld you mentioned?”
Ingrid ignored him, intent on the readouts and projections. “Specify the differences.”
“One end of the thread appears to terminate in a simple connector common to a wide variety of commercially available storage devices. I believe it may fit one or more flex plugs located elsewhere in this office.” Ingrid felt a little thrill of anticipation race through her at this revelation.
Patience
, she told herself. The inlab AI continued.
“Also, and most significantly, I can find no indication or evidence that this device is entangled. Though if such entanglement is among its inherent properties, it could conceivably vanish at any moment. Insofar as I can determine, however, it appears to be stable. If it is entanglement-reactive to simple observation, mine has not triggered such a feature.”
Remarkable, Ingrid found herself thinking. Given its astonishing composition, the mere fact of the thread’s enduring stable existence hinted at a knowledge of metallurgy beyond anything with which she was familiar. Not that it was a specialty of hers, but the use of a diversity of medical instruments carried with it a certain minimal knowledge of their makeup. The creation of stable MSMH might of itself make the thread incredibly valuable.