Dr



Michael G Adkins about 26,000 words

1576 S Hwy 59 © 2008 Michael G Adkins

Watts, OK 74964

(918) 422-5318

Droeming the High Synthetic

by Michael G Adkins

Dr. Newhan studied the screen on his vode with a vexxed look in his eyes.

He’d already seen so many patients today they were all starting to blear together, and now, on the last one before lunch, his nurse had submitted an incomplete preliminary exam, forcing him to troll through lines of half-finished entries in an effort to make sense of it all. With three quick taps, he joined the history folder to the vitals chart and magnified them, floating the conjugation above the screen’s liquid surface.

Staring over the top of his focals, he scrolled the views, relieved to find that his nurse had at least managed to complete the history and vitals routines.

The patient, Ank Palla, was twenty-four years old, his vitals were all strong, his claimed drug abuse status was a dubious 0.000, and there were no red cursors anywhere, nothing to indicate he was predisposed to any health issues of any kind. He appeared--even just looking at him--to be quite healthy. Yet one could hardly make an observation about a person’s health with a mere glance.

Still, Dr. Newhan tried anyway, noting only that in spite of Mr. Palla’s slight size his legs were tan and muscular, as was the rest of his body. He was dressed in shorts and sandals and a tank tee, as a person who was foolish enough to endure the outdoors in search of more dark skin would be.

It was summer. And in the city, summer meant not just hotter than the rest of the seasons, but dangerous. Buildings were no longer just a place to live. They were mountains of heat-absorbing glass over steel, sponging up the deadly August sunlight like an enormous, wart-ridden solar collector intent on baking to death all of the little bone-filled organisms striving to make this place a home.

Of course it was only hot on the outside, so the organisms thrived on the inside, where it was cold like an icebox.

And Mr. Palla was just one of those many organisms, another freezing, ailing member of the endless human infestation besetting the city, and someone Dr. Newhan couldn’t stop thinking looked much too healthy to be here.

“It was hard,” Mr. Palla said in a tired voice, as if sensing the doctor’s frustration, “to explain it to your nurse without sounding like I was trying to be . . . I don’t know . . . I guess it made me nervous when she started asking all those questions. I don’t really have any idea what’s happening to me, so I thought it might just be best to let you see for yourself.”

Dr. Newhan bunched his upper lip in feigned thoughtfulness, imagining how angry this patient would be if he knew his doctor wasn’t really doing what he appeared to be doing. He appeared to be studying the details of his nurse’s preliminary notes, but he was really just trying to make sure he had them figured out as he gathered up the energy to give this young man the medical consideration he deserved. When a patient had a genuine problem, and a diagnosis wasn’t immediately clear, what little integrity Dr. Newhan had left these days still compelled him to do his professional best to figure out what was wrong.

This usually meant skipping the noon feed. And he hated missing lunch. Especially today. His stomach was starting to churn and he was beginning to wish he’d asked his wife to cook breakfast and fix him a sack-lunch. Of course, she wouldn’t have done either. She was gone before he was out of the shower, off to invest another day’s worth of income on her magically widening ass and their three overly indulged kids.

He decided it was best not to think of her and the boys right now. Or the magic ass.

“Okay, then,” he said, pretending he had finished an in-depth and insightful study of the words hanging in the air above his vode. He of course could not mention that he was thinking about his miserable marriage, or how the last line of his nurse’s scrambled notes said the patient seemed unable to describe his symptoms, not clearly anyway--for which she tapped the letters NCGF, a personal code she had come up with that meant the patient was Not Cooperating and she was Getting really Frustrated. With a quick tap, he collapsed the floating view.

“Okay, then,” he repeated softly--some of his nurse’s vague tappings were starting to make sense, in their own arrogantly truncated way.

“Yes?” Mr. Palla said expectantly.

Again Mr. Palla’s voice sounded tired.

“You say you’re experiencing some kind of . . . looks like . . . you’re blacking out? Are you using any illegal drugs?”

As a matter of routine and clinic policy, he had to ask this, regardless of the zero-to-three-places the patient was claiming.

“Yes on the blacking out. No on the drugs. Not even prescriptions right now. And never anything illegal or unprescribed. In fact, the last thing I ever took was an aspirin a few years ago. That’s what I kept trying to tell your nurse, that I wasn’t using anything.”

That would explain these exam notes, Dr. Newhan thought bitterly. His nurse was incredibly stubborn when she didn’t believe what someone was telling her, and a dram too vengeful to be working in the medical field.

The kid is using drugs, she would surely argue. Look at his eyes and tell me he isn’t. We should mark him in as an abuser and run a full workup on that liar!

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that, Mr. Palla,” Dr. Newhan said. “Now--the blackouts are occurring on a regular basis? Short periods of unconsciousness? Are you epileptic? Any family history of it? Do you sleep well at night? You know, now that I look at you, you look fairly tired. Can you sit up straight for me? This light is going to be very bright but I just want a quick look. Don’t stare straight into the beam.”

Mr. Palla sat up, did not stare into the beam. “No,” he said hesitantly, considering all of the doctor’s questions. “No problems like that.”

Dr. Newhan took a seat on the stool next to the examination couch and rolled himself closer, tucking the penlight into his shirt pocket. He then reached up and gingerly placed his fingertips against both sides of Mr. Palla’s neck, probing, pressing lightly.

“Does that hurt? You are a little puffy around the neck. Nothing seems swollen though. But your skin seems a little red. Have you had any fevers? Any rise in temperature at all?”

“No,” Mr. Palla answered.

“Do you have any major traumas to the head in your medical history you forgot to mention? Have you taken on any extra responsibilities lately at home or work that might be causing you stress? What about infections? Illnesses? Any chest pains? Taking any medicines?”

“No,” Mr. Palla repeated. “And no--again--on the medicines.”

“I guess then, Mr. Palla, I need some more details from you on these blackouts you’re having.”

Suddenly, before Dr. Newhan even had a chance to start mentally chiding his patient for not being a bit more clear about his problem so they could all go to lunch and get back at their duties to the anthill, Mr. Palla seemed to relax and began talking in much better detail about what was happening to him.

“It started about, I guess, a month ago.”

Mr. Palla sighed, gathered up some steam, and kept going.

“I think the very first time it happened, I was sitting on my couch watching the news. I remembered it was almost the top of the hour. And you know how at the top of the hour they have an update, right? Well, they were talking about rain, and of course I wanted to know how heavy it was going to be, and what the acid content would be. So this girl comes on for this car commercial and, well, and it’s kind of stupid . . . but I missed the weather report. I was still sitting in the exact same spot on my couch, staring at the same exact spot on my TV, and I hadn’t moved or anything . . . and I’d missed the weather. Like someone had skipped everything forward, and one second later started it back up again. Like it went from just one thing to the next.”

Listening almost too intently, Dr. Newhan stared at Mr. Palla, waiting for him to go on. Mr. Palla in return, was waiting for Dr. Newhan to say something, as if he needed permission to go on.

Dr. Newhan shifted himself up straight and gave him his permission. “Okay, go on. What did you mean you missed the weather?”

“Well,” Mr. Palla said. He relaxed his shoulders--he had been tensing them back without realizing it. “I just started watching the car commercial, then the next thing I was watching . . . I was watching the intro for the next news segment, about five minutes later. I’m sure it was almost exactly five minutes later, because I know how they usually break down their segments. I even looked up at the clock, because I always keep it set to the exact time. I reset it once a week, to the minute and second. That’s how I knew for sure how much time had gone by, because I knew exactly when that broadcast started. But for some reason . . . I blanked out and missed almost five minutes of it.”

Dr. Newhan straightened up even farther. Any more and he would be standing.

Suddenly a missed breakfast and a delayed lunch and a spend-crazy wife and those wound-up boys of his who seemed to be obsessed with buying more comic books than his not nearly hefty enough income would allow . . . all of that seemed secondary.

Mr. Palla’s problem, though it had at least a dozen possible medical explanations, was a case that might actually present him with a real challenge today, a real break in the routine, something that was genuinely interesting--and something that would clearly necessitate a reference to the Imaging Docks for an MRI and another doctor, a specialist who was far more qualified to resolve this mystery than he was. Mr. Palla would be out of his life and in someone else’s care in half an hour or less.

All Dr. Newhan had to do was tap out a few quick notes, and lunch was saved.

“Are you sure about the time?”

“The five minutes? Yes.”

“Did you feel like you had been under longer or less than, say, five minutes?”

“No. It felt about right at five minutes. If that makes any sense. And I actually did have the feeling that some time had passed. It’s hard to explain, though. But it was no less than five minutes.”

“And how many times has this happened? The notes said . . .” The nurse’s notes didn’t say anything about that.

“Eight times. I think.”

“Eight times?” Dr. Newhan asked, trying not to sound surprised.

“Yeah. About eight times--as best I can count. You see, I read a lot. If I was reading or not looking at the clock, or didn’t have on a radio or TV or something to help me make a time reference to when I black out and wake up, how would I know? But eight times I’m sure. One time I was cooking and burned my food, and one time I was--it’s kind of embarrassing--I was going to the bathroom, or trying to get there before, you know, and well, trust me, eight times for sure.”

“Did you feel anything at all afterwards?” Dr. Newhan was hoping by the process of elimination to narrow down a possible diagnosis or two before sending Mr. Palla on to the next level of medical attention. “Dizzy maybe? Vision problems? How did you feel physically?” Then he had a revelation that scared him so bad one would have thought his patient was infected with an airborne STD.

“Has this happened while you’ve been driving!?!”

“No! Thank god! But I don’t drive that much. I take the subs.”

“Well that’s good! My first recommendation was going to be to stay out of cars if you’re the one driving! The best thing for you to do is head to the Sim Fara River and take a sub wherever you need to go.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Mr. Palla laughed. “Nooo driving until you (by ‘you’ he meant Dr. Newhan) figure this out. But the other day, I think I did figure something out.”

“Yes?” Dr. Newhan said. “Go on.”

He tapped in more notes, along with a few carefully selected keywords, firing them off into the clinic’s main vode. The screen on his vode was already starting to fill up with and hint at a number of possible diagnoses based on Mr. Palla’s description of his symptoms. Then he realized Mr. Palla had stopped talking.

“Now what was that, Mr. Palla? You figured out what?” he asked, thinking Mr. Palla likely hadn’t figured out anything. But sometimes there were essential clues to be found in the way patients tried to describe their problems, clues that led more quickly to answers and treatments, and a better paycheck for the physician who could figure it out first. All of which ultimately led to more comics and superhero toys cluttering up the living-room floor.

And wider asses.

“I can just about tell you when it’s going to happen,” said Mr. Palla. “I can kind of predict it. Down to an hour or two.”

Dr. Newhan kept tapping, repetitively, musically almost, cleverly pounding out a rhythm on the vode’s upper membrane so it sounded like he was inputting words. But he wasn’t. He knows when it’s going to happen? he was thinking to himself. Which didn’t make sense. He had always been taught that people who suffered from episodes of unconsciousness usually didn’t know when one was coming. Especially not to within an hour or two.

But today, with one simple declaration, this patient’s medical issues suddenly threatened to undermine thirty years of hard-earned medical knowledge. He knows when it’s going to happen. And he can predict it to within two hours?

This was definitely going to require a specialist.

Then Dr. Newhan had a thought that almost let a smile slip across his face. Thanks to the new laws concerning the physician referral process, a monetary incentive was still due him, whether he diagnosed Mr. Palla’s condition correctly or not.

Money aside, however, this case definitely had his attention now. Eight blackouts in one month was a serious matter. He tapped in some more keywords and got back multi-link references to things he didn’t even bother to open up and look at, because he knew he wouldn’t understand them.

“So you know when this is going to happen, as in exactly when? Time and date? That sort of when?” He felt his professional demeanor slipping a bit, and didn’t care.

“No, no, no! Not like that! I just figured out that it mostly happens when I’m really tired. I’ve been staying up a lot lately watching the news. I’ve become a newsaholic on the weather and the economy and all the crime, and when I’m tired, the next morning, that seems to be when it happens.”

Dr. Newhan suddenly realized the obvious.

Despite the alertness noted earlier, and passing a quick check of his pupillary reflexes, Mr. Palla looked very tired right now. Clearly he was in need of sleep, yet he also seemed quite capable of managing his weariness, like someone who was in the habit of staying up late to watch the news. The weather. It was supposed to rain in a few days, hard enough to break this heat, and this guy had been up all night watching the coverage.

“How do you feel right this moment? You look kind of tired right now.”

“I am. Right now I feel tired as hell. That’s why I’m here, so if I black out in front of you, you can tell me what I’m doing. You see, so far I haven’t . . . well . . . it hasn’t happened in front of anyone. It’s always when I’m at home and don’t have to go to work early, when I’m just lumping on the couch or milling around my apartment, and always before noon, between whenever I wake up and about noon. It happens one time and that’s it. Right before noon.”

“And you’re saying this is something different than falling asleep simply because you’ve stayed up too late.”

“Oh! Yeah. It’s not like that at all. Nothing like it.”

“Well, it’s almost noon now. What do you feel right before this happens? Anything at all?”

“No. I just can be sitting and staring at a wall or watching the SV, or even if I’m standing up, stumbling around the kitchen or bathroom or something . . . and . . . it just happens.”

“Let me take your pulse right quick, Mr. Palla,” Dr. Newhan said abruptly.

He took Mr. Palla’s wrist, practically grabbed it, and started checking his pulse. Manually. Something he hadn’t done in years.

Mr. Palla took a deep breath and held his arm very still, staring at a calendar on the wall on the other side of the small room. It was a calendar of cityscapes. Digitally revamped, of course, to show the city the way it used to look. Before the rains started coming.

Mr. Palla’s breath coursed steadily through his chest, delivering to his lungs a reassuring dose of air that smelled like rubbing alcohol. The fresh intake strengthened him, allowed him to hold very still while the doctor monitored (with the first two fingers of his right hand) the blood surging in his veins.

Dr. Newhan was wearing a big watch on his left wrist, and as he counted the beats, that’s where his eyes were focused--locked fast. It was a gold watch. With silver in the band. Expensive, but not out of taste. Not too overwhelming or too intimidating to be waving around in front of the patients. Still, it was a very nice piece.

On the pale wall on the other side of the room was a calendar--with a strange subject matter. One Mr. Palla hadn’t seen on a calendar before. Now puppies and cats and horses and cars and even the works of obscure photographers who snapped pictures when pictures actually had to be “snapped,” these he had seen on a calendar. Lots of calendars. But a collection of cityscape shots? No. And they were so perfect. Clearly they had been taken on the best days ever, maybe back before the rains started. Or they were revamped. A little digital swipe here and there to cover up the gritty bits--gloss over the grubs living under the “warts of the concrete beast,”--and there it was . . . thirteen gloriously antiseptic months of the city!

Elegant. Proud. And strong. The way it used to be.

Mr. Palla breathed carefully, slowly, warming the air in his nose and throat, rhythmically delivering to his lungs an invigorating dose of oxygen so fresh it burned going down, stinking slightly of alcohol and old bleach. But the air also strengthened him in some way, allowed him to hold his wrist very still and relaxed while the doctor monitored his pulse.

Dr. Newhan held the wrist gingerly in one hand, eyes focused hard on his other hand, on his own wrist actually, where he was wearing a gold watch. An expensive one too, but nothing too overbearing. Not the sort of piece that would overwhelm his patients’ sense of financial decency or remind them too much of the meager state of their own incomes or leave them thinking that a rich “well-doer” concerned primarily with his appearance and dress and stature was halfheartedly idling away the hours here, seeing to the general healthiness of his own personal herd of cash cows and waiting for the next payday.

Make them moo, give them a pill, send the next one in!

Wasn’t there a saying to that effect? Concerning the medical field? Or was it a song?

Still, the watch was very expensive. One Mr. Palla remembered from a sports magazine, recognizing it by the trademark blue face behind the numbers. It was even hermetically sealed, designed to resist the cruelest weather conditions. Very nice, and maybe even a dram more expensive than he first realized. So nice, in fact, he found himself staring at the blue, machined face and the gold-and-silver band more than anything. He didn’t even notice the numbers, didn’t even see it as a watch. This was a work of fine jewelry.

Then he switched his focus to the wall on the other side of the room.

It was painted a pale tusk, and not that long ago either. It was an ugly color that bordered on eggshell, a nasty shade of white that had been in vogue for the last couple of years. And there was a calendar hanging there. All by itself in the middle of the wall. Only it had a peculiar theme. One he hadn’t seen on a calendar before. Now things like animals and dragons and half-naked women and men? Yes. He had seen all of those subjects on calendars. Many times. But a month-by-month montage of cityscape shots?

Never.

Obviously the pictures had been imaged years ago, when the city was still all clean and shiny, before the acid rains started coming and eating away at it faster than the preservation crews were propping it back up. And if a solution wasn’t reached soon, pictures like these would be all they had. The city would be gone, torn down and dissolved by a toxic rain powerful enough to strip the meat off all the little worker ants leeching an existence off her disintegrating bones.

But for now, those pictures were so nice to look at. The city was beautiful then. And with a bit of digital revamping, it was again. Someone deserved an award for that, for finding a way to bring humanity’s misty old sentiments to printed life, on the high gloss papers straight out of the Oregon hemp fields--the only state where the rain was still pure enough to grow a crop outside without killing it on contact. And here hung the end-product--the city in the form of a calendar! The “warts of the beast!” All glittery and new, the way it was in the beginning, back when the weather wasn’t eating away everything that was great about it . . .

#

“So how’s my pulse?”

Dr. Newhan didn’t know what to say. In fact he hadn’t spoken at all for five minutes. Hadn’t even moved. Was no longer concerned about Mr. Palla’s pulse.

“Your pulse? Is fine . . .” he gulped inconspicuously “. . . Mr. Palla.”

He let go of Mr. Palla’s wrist, the tips of his fingers cold and sweaty, a bit numb too. “Everything looks good. Do you feel tired right now? Woozy? Drowsy? Like you need to lay down?”

Dammit! I meant “lie” . . . I’m so nervous I can’t even talk right!

“Just tired--I stayed up most of the night on purpose so I could come down here and see if the blackout repeats itself.”

“And you say . . . none of your friends or family has ever witnessed this?”

“None. I didn’t even tell my family. My family would worry. And my friends wouldn’t be any help. They’d probably ask what kind of drugs I’m on. Which I’m not. Barely even aspirins.”

“So . . . you have no other evidence that something is wrong? Except for a few obvious lapses in time? No phone calls cut off in the middle of a conversation? No video proof? Or any kind of, maybe, a video you were making for a friend, a relative. Like for a birthday or holiday greeting? Anything? Something you may not have even thought of?”

In the days to follow, Dr. Newhan’s nurse would pressure him frequently and adamantly on this very issue.

“You’re sure he doesn’t have any evidence on a video? Or a friend who saw him? You’re positive?” “I’m sure,” Dr. Newhan would answer--again. “I already pressed him on that. I’m sure no one else knows. Just him and us.”

“No. No.” Mr. Palla said. “Why? I didn’t even think of that.”

“Well, it would have been something I could look at, so I could see this for myself. Now . . . how many times a day does it happen, did you say? Once? Twice?” Keep pressing, he told himself, but not too hard. And don’t sweat! And don’t shake either! No trembling! Just get a few more answers from him.

“I’m pretty sure it’s just once a day. Always if I’m really tired in the morning and I don’t have anything to do. You know how you get in that don’t-wanna-do-anything mode? When I’m like that.”

“Hmmm. All right, then. Good. Very good. But I’m still concerned about this.” He stood up, and straightened a bit--but not too straight. Or too fast. He didn’t want to seem anxious or in a hurry.

“Can you come in tomorrow? We, ummm . . . “ Dammit, quit umming! “ . . . we really need to get it in the schedule if we want to monitor you for this. Do you have to work then? Can you vode in sick if you need to? My nurse can get you a note for your employer’s Human Resources people.”

“I only work part-time, so I guess I can come back here early and stay until after lunch. You want me to try to not get any rest and see if I can make this happen while you’re watching? I mean, I’m sure it happens. I’m positive. I’m really not making this up.”

“No. I don’t think you are. Clearly something is happening, but it’s not like I’m ready to send you off to the Psychology Docks or anything. I want you to come in at about nine tomorrow so we can start at this fresh. I want to monitor you until, I guess, one o’ clock? Will that time work for you? Nine to one? Is it going to be any problem to make the trip here?” Christ! Quit being so obvious! Quit asking so many questions! Just tell him to get his ass back here!

“Actually, I only live three miles away, at the River’s Elbow Stack, so it isn’t a problem. I’m sorry it didn’t happen today. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t have expected you to sit here all morning without scheduling it. Actually, I thought it would have happened by now. It sure feels like it should have. Maybe I need to calm down more when I get here, lounge around a bit and try to see what happens, bring something that will help me relax. I’m not even working tonight, so I’ll just stay up most of the night and watch news. It’s what I do anyway.”

Dr. Newhan laughed, amazed that in doing so he didn’t betray how scared he was.

“Seems strange to say this, Mr. Palla, but I order you to go home and do just that! Go home and don’t get any rest! Or not much! If what you say is true, that might do it. But no coffee in the morning. And no sugar. I don’t want you buzzing all over the room tomorrow. I want you nice and relaxed. Fresh start! And we won’t take our eyes off you, Mr. Palla. I promise!”

Mr. Palla laughed, but obviously it was an uneasy laugh.

“Sounds like a deal, sir. So is that everything?”

He stood up, shivering, and pulled on a long-sleeved summer overshirt, a common inside fashion accessory these days, thanks to the crazy-hot weather and the insane way the city cooled the buildings to combat the heat. He had been wearing only his thin tank tee since he came into the exam room and was practically frozen. The people who ran the physical plant in this Division were idiots. Buildings in the summer were always polar inside while it was baking outside. Never anything in-between.

“That’s all we can do today,” Dr. Newhan said, staring intently at his vode as he entered a reminder to himself about the new appointment. It was taking him a moment to figure out the alarm setting because this was something he rarely had to do. But then, a patient like Mr. Palla was even rarer. Tomorrow’s appointment was a crucial moment in the young man’s life.

And mine too, thought Dr. Newhan.

He then told his patient not to bother checking out with the cashier behind the front desk--being very insistent about it too, so there was no misunderstanding. As he talked, his eyes were drifting down, checking over the information on his vode, making sure everything was properly entered and saved. And the things he didn’t want in the record? Promptly deleted. This was no time to start making mistakes.

At this point he usually left the room ahead of the patient. Instead, he waited, looking up only long enough to force out his best, comforting good-bye as Mr. Palla was reaching for the door handle.

Mr. Palla answered back with a weary, “Thanks, see you tomorrow,” opened the door, and disappeared into the pre-noon migration that was already jamming the clinic’s hallways.

Dr. Newhan waited patiently for the hydraulic closer to pull the door shut again.

Finally. Mr. Palla was gone. And along with him, restraint and decency.

Dr. Newhan let out a monstrous sigh that made his bowels rumble so hard he was sure they would fail him long before he could make it to a toilet. Then he reached up and touched his forehead.

He was sweating.

In a room that was ice-cold, he was sweating. Dabbing at the sweat with the back of his hand, he muttered a curse incomprehensible even to him, marveling at how his composure could leave him so quickly, so completely.

But he could worry about that later.

He started tapping in a message on his vode, a short urgent message for his nurse that grew longer than he intended. Much like his visit with Mr. Palla. Then he saw he had forgotten to tap off the ALL CAPS and didn’t care. He kept right on tapping, mistakes and all:

#

CAMMDA ... RESCHEDULING: PALLA TUESDAY MORNING ACUQISITON VIDEO TWIGS / NOT FILING UNTIL AFTER SECOND SESSION /LUNCH AT EASTDOWN I’;L;L 4 WHAT S GOING ON DON’T FILE YET! dletedump this message!!!!

#

His thumb, shaking, had tapped off the caps lock.

#

Hundreds of people filled the little tables at Eastdown Deli.

Overhead, the sun glared hot through a steeply pitching skin of glass panels that enclosed the restaurant’s spacious 35th-floor dining “drip.” Drips were “balcony businesses” (mostly food franchises) tacked onto the sides of aging skyscrapers. And as anyone could see, the cone-shaped additions did resemble gigantic drips of water clinging to the skin of their host structures. But they weren’t called that originally. When the first of these “balconies” was actually built and finished--”off the engineers’ vodes” and fully dressed in weather-resistant Duramo® glass--the people on the street and aboard the sky runs and in the neighboring buildings saw only one thing.

“Drips,” they began to call them. “The engineers’ tears.” Dreary reminders of humanity’s battle against the weather, the overcrowding, the shortage of new spaces to build on--the very issues that made the drips an economic and logistical necessity, architectural triumphs that were as much loved as they were hated.

Eastdown Deli (named for the side of the building it was on and its abnormal closeness to street level) was only two-years old and privately owned, out of the hands of public traders, meaning the food and drink here was a superior buy in every aspect--except the ticket. Still, it was a popular place where customers from all income brackets ate and talked and shivered against the onslaught of the refrigerated air that billowed invisibly all around them.

Scorching outside, freezing inside. Only when the acid rains came did the air get turned off and the temperatures level out.

It made everyone--everyone--wish for winters again.

Dr. Newhan and his nurse, Cammda Aureen, were sitting at a table for two on the periphery of the dining area, where they could talk in relative privacy. As if anyone could hear them. Or cared. With the babble of four-hundred people echoing in his ears, Dr. Newhan couldn’t even understand what the breathlessly yakking college girl at the table next to him was saying.

His nurse, Cammda--almost fifty but built like a thirty-year-old man lifting weights on a regular basis--was pouring her final layer of neon-yellow dressing on an enormous salad for three. He had only a small, open-face sandwich on his plate, exercised on a semi-regular basis, and was still fighting a pooch. All she did was eat whatever and walk a short distance to work every day, and still she managed a figure a woman (or a man!) ten years her junior didn’t even deserve. In fact, she looked just about ten years younger in the face than she actually was. The only thing that suggested her true age was the silver-grey hair tied into a long, straight tail off the top of her head, a few wrinkles around the eyes and her slightly drooping jowls.

“Not fair,” he grumbled, taking a bite off the edge of his sandwich.

“Not fair what?” she said with a sly, tormentor’s grin.

He grumbled again. She knew what he meant, about their contrasting food portions, but some days she lived only to torment him. And her voice was too loud. It was always too loud. Which was why he had chosen to talk to her here.

“Listen, Cammda--about my message--sorry I got carried away, made it sound so frantic.”

“Hey, I’m on your side! Did kinda tweak me, though. Next time, just tell me not to file the visit and I’m there. We can work out the details after. Myself, I didn’t particularly care for Mr. zero-and-three-decimals. So what did this kid do to get you so worried up?”

“Well, he did just what he said.”

“He did? Did he actually black out? Right in the exam room? I tried to get him to explain it to me, but I was starting to get pissed. It was like he was afraid to talk to me after I pressed him on his drug history. Is he weird or what?”

“No. He isn’t weird. He seems as well-adjusted as the next worker ant around here. He was just a little apprehensive. If you had finished all the pre-exam routines, you might have seen that.”

“I cannot stand the way they’ve set up those new vode routines,” she whispered as she stabbed at her salad. “Almost as much as I hate a liar.”

“About his drug history? You don’t know that he was lying.”

“Maybe--so what did he do?” She shoveled up the first load of lettuce, a large mouthful she hastily compacted into the side of her cheek, so she could still talk. “He didn’t have some kind of epileptic episode in there did he? What did I miss?”

“No. Nothing like that. It’s hard to explain.” He trembled and took another nip off his meager sandwich. So much for his roiling, starving stomach. Now he had no appetite.

“Hey. You all right?” She swallowed the lump in her cheek and leaned over, reaching to grab at his elbow, in case he tried to tumble out of the chair.

“No, no . . . I’m fine. I’m fine. Listen, I still want us to keep this session tomorrow private. I don’t want you to report any of what happens, if anything.”

She leaned back and waved her left hand back-and-forth to match the back-and-forth shaking of her head. “Wait there a minute . . . we’ve done enough of this unreported stuff over the last year. And way too many years before that. I’m getting up there in age now and I am not looking for anything to get me fired. I like you and all, and the extra money too, but I told you a month ago, enough was enough. No more of this dealing with the crazy people off-record. We don’t need to do that anymore. You neither. And besides, the laws have changed too much--it just isn’t worth the risk anymore. And you’ve got your boys to think of too, no matter how crazy they make you. They’re still your kids. Comics and all!”

“I got a wife too.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that.” She let out a brief snort of a laugh and lowered her eyes--still smiling though. “Hey--I’m sorry. Couldn’t help it. Forgive?”

“Yeah. Thanks for reminding me.”

“I said I’m sorry,” she whined sincerely. “You two just need to work it out.”

She took in another mouthful of greenery, a portion speckled with ham chunks and shredded cheese and bacon bits, all glued into place by a generous slathering of white dressing, her favorite companion to the yellow, and the other white meat! she liked to joke.

“Cammda, we could get into real trouble on this one, I’ll admit. And you know I won’t try to force you to help me. You need to watch out for your own career, I know that. But I don’t think we’ll get in trouble because I don’t think we’re going to get caught. I’ll send the videos we make tomorrow to my home vode and delete them from the clinic’s vodes before we even leave the room. This is assuming he blacks out again.”

“You know,” Cammda said, clearly baffled, “you’re talking videos, and us getting in trouble? I don’t have any idea what you’re saying or why we need to catch someone who’s blacked out on video, but you seem pretty damn serious.” She thought about it while she chewed. “Okay,” she said with a swallow, “I don’t like it, but it sounds safe enough. But I’m not getting it, I guess. Is he wanting us to do this off-record? Video his blackout? He’s not in trouble or anything? The law isn’t after him? Are we gonna make any money off this, or end up who knows where by tomorrow evening? Like jail? Or prison?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“So what? He just blacks out? What is so important about blacking out? Does he sit and stare at the walls? Does he start playing with himself?”

Then she leaned forward, her tone and expression so serious it was alarming.

“Are we making a porn video?” She immediately started laughing, hard, under her breath, nearly choking as she went back to work on her salad.

“No. Actually, by doing this, we are going to save our asses from prison.”

She stopped eating. Grew pale. Swallowed without chewing what was in her mouth, straining her throat and neck muscles to force everything down.

“Dr. Newhan,” she said slowly. Then she said his first name, “Grann. What’s going on? Why would we go to prison if we don’t do this? Who is this guy? I thought he was just a college kid or something.”

“Well,” Grann mumbled nervously, his guts feeling empty and hollow again, “I don’t know who he is exactly, but he knows that thrubber we had in here last year, fixing up his fight bite back in May. Remember, his whole hand was swelled like a . . .”

“Don’t fucking ask me if I remember!” Cammda said viciously.

Her voice grew uncontrollably loud.

“I do remember! I also remember his name! His name was Big Olnn--our one and only half-Czech, half-Creek, six-foot-nine Big Olnn! The guy whose head looked like a blown-up engine block!” She held her hands close to her ears then flared them apart to demonstrate just how big Big Olnn’s head was. Then she realized she was talking too loud, almost shouting. But no one seemed to care. “I’m not going to jail,” she hissed. “You aren’t either! What did this guy say? How does he know,” she lowered her voice further, “how does he know Big Olnn? We should’ve turned that monster in to Division Enforcement the second he came through the door. I should have put morphine in his bag instead of antibiotics! But nooo! He flashes money at you and talks all tough and starts busting things up, and BANG! We both go all greedy ‘cause you were scared of him. No! No! No! I have a new grandbaby, and you know my husband is starting to get down in his shoulders and has a hard time keeping up at work. Plus my sister has a crisis going on with her family that I’m trying to help her through . . . I need my job! I need the money and the insurance! You’re not doing this to me! You’re not!”

Grann stared at her, certain that his expression suggested he wasn’t hearing her. But he was. He was even a bit shocked by her reaction. Actually, he was a lot shocked. But he understood her fear. She just didn’t understand his--not yet.

“Okay, Grann. Talk.” She ignored her salad, scooted it forward, out of her way. “What did this guy tell you? I thought he was blacked out. How could he have told you anything?”

He sighed and tried to decide where to begin. He began with a girl named Tetts.

“Tetts? Who is Tetts? Oh crap! That’s another slogg we helped off the records. I remember her. She’s the one that wanted to pay in jewelry because she didn’t have any money. What does she have to do with this? I bet that little gutter poke never even made it to the drag-ins. She’s probably a pile of boiled bones in a sewer splash somewhere. What the fuck does she have to do with any of this? Does he know her too?”

“No. I don’t think so. But that little ‘slogg’ told me a story one time about the drugs she was on, how it made her more than just high. They made her hallucinate.”

“Okay. I think I remember that.”

“Well, then you remember she kept begging me to help her get off the drugs and I told her I couldn’t? I told her I’d have to refer her to the Rehabilitation Stack, and of course she couldn’t let me do that. She would’ve only ended up in prison once they looked up her name and record.”

“Okay--so she was an addict.”

“Not just any addict. She was a syn droem addict.”

“Ohhh . . . a droemer. That is bad. I don’t think I remember that. No wonder you didn’t try to help her. But why do I care? So our man lied? Our man is a syn droem addict? A droemer too, like Tetts?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t look like one. He checked no on the history of drug abuse when he signed in, and he doesn’t have any symptoms or signs of an abuser. But this girl, I remember that she swore the syn droem caused more than just the normal euphoria. She kept trying to tell me it caused her to start having these disconnected hallucinations. Blackouts, I believe now is what she was trying to tell me. She said whatever was happening to her gave her a kind of clairvoyance. Only I didn’t believe her, and I didn’t realize until today she was describing the same thing that’s happening to Mr. Palla.”

“Back up, Grann. And vodes cause cancer. No. I don’t think so. That’s strictly street mythos. I’ve already heard all this on the Enlightenment Channel, how some people claim they have a kind of insight while they’re jumped up on that crap. But no one’s been able to prove it.”

“Well, then you need to become better acquainted with Mr. Palla, because the way our little slogger Tetts explained her blackout sessions to me is exactly what’s happening to him. And if you think it’s street mythos, then he’s living, breathing mythology.”

“Who goes out into the sun too much, from what I saw. So what does he do? Sing? Dance? Grow a gigantic piss-erection? Predict lottery numbers? Is he channeling dead girlfriends?”

“No! Dammit! Be serious! It’s something worse!” He hesitated, unable to go on because it all sounded too outrageous. “Look--he blacked out while I was taking his pulse, and he didn’t even know it. And I didn’t even tell him. I actually stood there after it was over and told him nothing. He had no idea.”

“You didn’t what? “ She almost screamed, but managed to keep it to a high-pitched gasp. “You didn’t tell him? And he didn’t even know? Dammit, Grann, stop it! Stop being all worried and mysterious and just tell me what the hell he does and why we should care and what that has to do with us possibly going to prison! Or not going to prison!”

“First of all,” he said meekly, “Mr. Palla isn’t really blacking out. It’s not like that at all. He just doesn’t remember anything. His eyes were the strangest part of it. They kept roaming around, and then they would fixate for a long time on different things . . . my hand . . . the wall . . . and he kept sniffing the air. And to see him and hear him that way . . . it was genuinely eerie, like I was in the trance with him. God! I just realized! What if he had seen the time on my watch?”

“Your watch? What the hell are you talking about! And what do you mean to hear him? Hear him talk? Was he in some kind of trance or not?”

“No. He’s not in any trance. He doesn’t even truly black out like he thinks. What he really does, is he tells stories, only they aren’t . . . I mean . . . I don’t think they’re stories. They’re real. And the one he told me today was about us, you and me, treating Big Olnn for his fight bite.”

#

Cammda went home after lunch, too stressed to even consider working the rest of her shift, staying just long enough to set up her vode and Dr. Newhan’s with the video twigs and the full charges he’d requested.

“Thank you,” he said to her before she left, doing his best to make himself sound humble and pathetic. She mumbled only two words back at him, and he was fairly sure it wasn’t you’re welcome.

When the last of his, coughing, aching, groaning patients were finally seen to, Dr. Newhan went home--to an empty apartment in the upper ‘scrapes, and a message beeping on the hall vode.

It was her--his wife.

We’re shopping late, the vode said in his wife’s voice, the kids wanted to eat out tonight with their friends--bloddah bloddah bloddah--so we told them to sub over and we’d treat them to--bloddah bloddah bloddah--it went blundering on for awhile, about where they’d all been and how much they’d spent . . . it seemed the message, like a normal day’s shopping budget, had no end.

So he ignored the majority of it, listening just close enough to make sure no one had gotten robbed, killed, hurt, kidnapped--or dozered down by his wife, who, in the confusion, would probably have been mistaken for some kind of genetically deviant circus-bovine, balancing itself in an upright, forward-falling posture and plod-trotting in the direction of the half-off donut bins, ravenously anticipating the moment when the bakeries started pitching the first (and therefore the freshest) of their evening stales.

While his wife’s message played itself out, he arrowed toward the kitchen, fixed himself something to drink, and headed straight for the living room. But he wasn’t drinking water tonight like he normally did. Tonight he chose a rare treat of straight alcohol, room-temp out of a plastic cup. And just sat. Not thinking. Not moving. Just waiting for the coming buzz that would slow his pulse and untrouble his mind.

When it finally hit--many sips later--he checked his watch, squinting as the light sparkled blue off the machined finish under the weather-resistant crystal. He’d already been home an hour, zombied out in his heated recliner, neglecting to switch it on and let it do battle with the air conditioning, all the while successfully thinking about nothing. But at least he was awake. He wasn’t passed out yet. Or in any danger of blacking out. Like Ank Palla.

Then he started thinking.

Mr. Palla . . . who knew the story of Big Olnn . . . the story capable of sending one obscure physician and a vode-hating career nurse right off to prison.

Then he thought of something funny--probably because of the alcohol. It was an irrelevant thing, but funny.

“Voice and data entry!!!” He would sometimes bark at Cammda when her vode was getting the best of her.

“Veee, Ohhh, Dat-uhhh, Ennn! Ennn--treee!!!” he would sound out dumbly as she was fumbling one-handed through the vode’s layered functions or struggling to tap in the results of a preliminary examination or set the alarm or record a message to herself. She hated vodes, cursing them often and well, until everyone in the clinic knew just how passionate and genuine her hatred truly was.

“Using a vode,” she was known to say, was “little better than trying to take notes on a tampon with a dotchnelling magic marker.” Vodes were a poor replacement, she insisted, for the venerable notepads that had been ordered into the recyclers by government edict almost three years ago now.

She would usually let him repeat his idiotic “Ode to Vodes” a time or two more, and then . . . well . . . he would lose his courage after that and leave her alone, never bothering to find out what she meant by “dotchnelling.” Some of the other nurses claimed it was a word she picked up from her grandmother, but no one had the nerve to confirm this by actually asking her.

As for his “Ode,” he knew it was only funny to him, and pretty much irrelevant at the moment, or any moment, but funny, like the overdone imagery of his wife as a cow--a clear sign the alcohol buzz was on. He could still focus his eyes, though, which meant it was almost time for another drink. He took a closer look at his watch, just as the big hand was about to mark off the hour. He didn’t like to think about it, but this was the watch bought with the money Big Olnn had given him after fixing up the slogger’s near-fatal fight bite.

He also thought about how a calendar covered a repair he was forced to make on the exam-room wall that same evening, after a six-foot-nine ape with a head shaped like an warped engine block punched a hole through it in an unnecessary display of whatever it was he was trying to display. Once Grann’s amateur patch job was done, he hired an unscrupulous janitor to stay late and repaint the whole wall in tusk--strictly off the records--because Big Olnn’s festered hand had blown a pus-load all over it, leaving behind (even after a thorough cleaning), an impressive yet unacceptable stain.

But in spite of the chaos wrought by Big Olnn’s unexpected visit, Grann remembered with pride how smoothly everything fell into place that day--and afterwards. He was especially proud of the calendar, was lucky to even find it. Not many people cared what the city looked like anymore, or cared to be reminded of how it looked before.

But he cared. He cared because he was tired of the acid rains and the sunlight eating away at his home. Not even Cammda cared. She was so mad after the incident with Big Olnn, all she cared about was putting an end to these off-record patients that kept wandering up out of the Southdown slogs.

So he indulged her, tepidly promising to treat no one else unless they were in the system.

But back on the subject of his calendar--now this was a gem! Big Olnn’s money paid for that too, plus the janitor’s paint job. Grann wasn’t thrilled about the tusk, but it was apparently very popular around the clinic, making it the only color the janitor could get on the “quick-and-hurry.” But with that calendar there to remind him of the city he used to know, he didn’t even care. It was a limited run right out of an independently-owned, archival-quality press shop. Rare. Expensive. And printed on genuine, Oregon hemp paper! Outdoor grown! This was not something to throw away when the year was over. At only 2500 copies, and if he was careful how he adjusted it to the wall with the static cling-tabs and how he placed it back in its protective case when he was through displaying it, his thirteen-month reminder would be worth most of his money back one day--plus some!

The only thing he didn’t like about it was that it reminded him of that stupid slogger.

Big Olnn.

It also reminded him of the smell and the mess from the infection that was eating away at Big Olnn’s hand, not to forget the deeply inset necrosis. Even now he almost gagged thinking about it. And some days he could still smell it, a ghost odor lingering in the room, a stench so horrible it was like setting free the maggot-loaded goop from a pile of rotten meat. It was so overwhelming it practically generated its own emotional aura, like a vile cloud that went miasmaing about the room, locking itself into its victim’s memories, where it achieved a kind of weird, symbiotic immortality.

And all the alcohol and the bleach they had to use when it was over, that it took to clean everything up . . . it was just terrible. Unbelievable. One human could not conceivably have as much infection in them as Big Olnn did.

Except that he did. Not just a bloated hand full of it either, but most of his arm as well.

Every time they opened the tap on a suspicious area of flesh, it seemed a new gout of undiscovered gangrene was released, eventually making such a mess of everything, they were forced to throw away all of the exposed medical consumables that were in the room, and even some of the permanent oddments. But it at least didn’t get on them. Not directly. They had wisely hidden under plastic smocks and gloves and face shields and hoods and behind irrigation diverters as they worked. And afterwards, with a stamina worthy of medicine’s bravest efforts, they set about cleaning off the floors and the exam table and the sink and cabinets, and that one, stupid wall with Big Olnn’s fist hole in it. It was so bad, the pile of towels and gauze they used to mop it all up had to be stuffed into three ridiculously small (or so it seemed at the time) trash cans, which in turn had to be sealed four times over in biohazard envelopes, placed into disposable toxic-waste bins, and secretly carted off to the clinic’s incinerators.

By the next morning, the drama of Big Olnn’s endless buckets of pus was well behind them, and safely free of the clinic’s main vode. The wall was fixed and painted, more patients were lining up to tell him their ills, and he bought a calendar. And a watch. Because these things made him feel better. Especially the calendar. Never mind what the city looked like now, or what was living “under the warts” of said beast. None of that was in these pictures. None of that mattered.

Cammda even dropped her request (eventually) that he stop seeing patients off-record. Proof that she was just as greedy as he was--as long as there were no more Big Olnns pounding on the door. Or in Olnn’s case, the walls. And in time, they were able to laugh about it. But not much. It was only funny a couple of mentions, and then they never talked about it again.

What Cammda did with her share of the money from the Big Olnn experience, though, she never said. And the misplaced pride he felt thinking back about how well the whole affair had turned out? Well, today, with the arrival of one Ank Palla, that pride was slowly turning into misery and fear--dissolving away--a lot like his city.

Grann felt his throat starting to swell, forcing him to swallow a growing lump of emotion. The city had been so precious and grand and wonderful when he was young. By the time he was fifteen, however, the heat and the rains started coming. And by twenty, winter, for this part of the hemisphere, was gone, as if the world’s equatorial belt had simply widened north, wrapping itself halfway around the country. Now, into his fifties, the city was a miserable, disintegrating pile of metal-and-concrete crap.

But at least the structures sheathed in glass were safe. Or everyone thought they were, until about six months ago.

Now, according to the newest studies, the rain had finally come up with a way to destroy glass too. It seemed the rain that was starting to fall now was laden with microscopic particles, “drits,” they were calling them, a contrived marriage of the words “drip” and “grit,” a sandlike substance that was proportionately harder than steel. But not one scientist anywhere in the world knew what it was exactly or how it worked or why nature had allowed such a thing to come into existence in the first place.

And if you wanted to be an optimist or a skeptic or simply refused to believe in “drits” for fear that one more piece of bad news would drive you irreversibly and suicidally insane, all you had to do was look at a piece of rain-exposed glass for yourself, under nothing more than a strong magnifying glass. By tilting it at a slight angle to the light, even an idiot could see that something was definitely eating away at it. Like a sandblaster on its super-finest setting. And if you had a simple microscope, you could easily prove who the culprit was. The culprit was the rain. Every drop of it was an acid-coated blast of sand, a corrosive bullet filled with glass-cutting particulates firing itself against the city.

It would take awhile, but eventually the rain would make its way through. And nothing was safe from it. Not anymore. The new glass-armored towers, the drips sprouting off the older buildings and skyscrapers, every new solution that was meant to be the ultimate and lasting solution would one day come melting down around them.

He lifted his gaze from his watch and switched his mental ramblings from the homicidal weather patterns to Cammda, boldly wondering if he should ask her someday what she did with her half of the Big Olnn money.

Then he smiled weakly, thinking, Probably not! Not unless he wanted to see the homicidal patterns of one extremely angry nurse!

Laughing aloud, but no longer smiling, he closed his eyes for a second.

Suddenly he was awake again, his eyes flashing immediately down to check his watch. Then he glanced at the huge picture window on the west side of the room. It was late, but even with the window mostly opaque, he could see the sun wouldn’t set fully for another half hour. He’d only dozed off for a couple of minutes, trying to actually get some needed sleep when he really didn’t feel like sleeping. He double-checked the time again and wiped his hand across his face, afraid for a moment he’d had a blackout--like Mr. Palla. Which was ridiculous. He had gone to sleep for a moment. Nothing more.

God! What was I thinking?

But he couldn’t fool himself. He knew what he was thinking. This patient had upset him more than his pride would let him admit. Not just because Palla somehow knew about Big Olnn, but also because it scared Grann to imagine that it was possible to simply doze off one day and start telling stories about people you shouldn’t even know anything about. But how? Through actual clairvoyance? By some means that pushed aside all the known sciences and went skipping off into the land of street mythology? Like the drits that shouldn’t exist inside the acid rain? Or was it a con of some kind? An act? An extortion effort?

No. It wasn’t a con. That was a thought he’d already dismissed on the sky-run home. Something unique was happening to Ank Palla, and it went beyond an elaborate attempt at extortion. He had witnessed it for himself, experienced it for himself. It was not an act. Not this. Not what he had seen.

Realizing his thoughts on the subject might easily get out of hand and preoccupy him for the rest of the evening, he reminded himself this was home, not the office. And no matter what consequences awaited him after tonight, this was not the place, not the time, to think about Mr. Palla. He would not worry about this patient’s case until tomorrow’s session. And like the true professional he was (except when it came to taking “fix-me” money from sloggers) he managed to push all thoughts of Mr. Palla from his mind.

For the most part, anyway.

Then his arm slid off the recliner’s armrest and he absently picked up a comic book that his fingers had brushed across. It was one of hundreds stacked about the living room. And for no good reason, he opened it and tried to let it read out. But the art was so complicated, the dialogue and text so convoluted when it all got going in your ears and your eyes, he was barely able to make out the good guys from the bad.

Or maybe the bad guys were the good guys. Kind of like him. A good guy who’d done some bad things these last few years. Not real bad. Just bad enough to go to prison. Probably for life.

He laid the comic aside, wishing it, like his life, could be simple again. No thrubbers. No sloggers. No droemers. No Big Olnn. No Ank Palla. No acid rain laced with glass-devouring metal. No endless, downward sucking sound from his bank account as he moved another step closer to fiscal oblivion. No mysterious, bipedal cow-creature speaking in the voice of his once-slender and beautiful bride. No screaming, indignant kids trying to assemble the world’s largest comic collection. And no Ank Palla playing storyteller with a handful of dangerous facts he should have known nothing about.

Grann let out a groan that had no real meaning and reclined his chair to full horizontal, “mag-netting” free of the lode-base now. Wrapped in pseudo low-gee, he had a false sense of being freed a bit from the tug of gravity as he tried to decide exactly when the moment would be ideal to roll off this floating miracle and refill his drink.

But he was also pondering exactly how life locked up in a cell could possibly be that much different than the way he was living right now.

He was afraid to be outside anymore, thanks to the weather, and if a person couldn’t be outside, it was the same as being in prison--only the insane heat and the acid rains were stronger and more vicious than any wall or guard dogs or razor wire. In the role of the warden, of course, was his wife, whose significant mass handily crushed his every attempt to know any real freedom, while his kids (and most of his patients) were the insane fellow inmates that made his life one of substandard misery. And the incarceration analogy didn’t end there. It also applied to his job. A big check every week to help pay the mounting bills and keep the collection agencies at bay wasn’t much different than doing seven days in the prison sign shop for a pack of tweaks, which--smartly bartered--kept you from being molested and pole-holed and maimed by people like Big Olnn, not to mention his many trading partners in the prison’s conjugal network.

Yeah, it all looks pretty much equal from here, he thought.

Except for two things.

Thing number one was Cammda. She didn’t deserve to go to jail. She had a great job, and all she wanted from life was to keep that job and take care of her family. But then, she actually loved her family. Plus she would probably snap his neck and throw both him and Mr. Palla down a garbage tube before she’d go to prison. And the second thing? He was basically a coward. The only thing he wasn’t afraid of, was admitting he was a coward. Being locked up with sloggers like Big Olnn scared him so bad he felt his sphincter irising up like a steel shutter just thinking about it.

Not caring to let that thought go any deeper, he pushed himself out of the chair, struggling to unpucker his nethers as he reentered the world of gravity-normal, making straight for the kitchen and a fast refill. Then it was right back to the recliner, rolling aboard effortlessly, while it was still at full horizontal, barely upsetting the balance globals, an act made possible only after many years of practice.

Grann gave in to the upward push of the cushions and relaxed again. A recliner at full lev like this became many things to a tired body. In his case, it was a proven agent for enhancing the effects of an intoxicating drink, especially one indulged in at room-temp.

His second serving of alcohol put him to sleep within the hour.

Once asleep, however, he began to dream. He kept dreaming all night about Ank Palla--dreaming that he kept prescribing and re-prescribing the boy a lifetime supply of sleep and rest meds, to make sure he never woke up tired ever again, never to tell anyone else his crazy stories about an amoral doctor who was only one incriminating blackout away from the “lifetime squat” in a Division prison cell.

But in Grann’s dream, it wasn’t a slogger who shared a tiny two-bunk, one-toilet windowless room with him. It was Cammda.

Frantic with fear, Grann’s dream-self pressed his face against the bars and begged to be put in a cell with Big Olnn.

#

With the city shoved up as far as it could go, the only place left for the engineers to build was out. On this reason alone, they fashioned the drips.

For many, the drips were a sign of salvation, stirring works of architectural genius and function. To others, they symbolized humankind’s latest fears, the incurable phobias inspired by the acid rains, new and unique conditions of the mind that left the afflicted vulnerable to the whims of nature and the cruel derisions of friends and acquaintances and strangers--even their own families.

Then there were those who were merely “concerned” or “overly obsessed” with the weather, who were both glad and uneasy about the drips. People like Ank Palla. A simple, environmentally optimistic weather fanatic. End of sentence. And yet, there was always that one ass-of-a-friend somewhere, or a member of the family (also usually an ass), who taunted him for it, placing him and others like him in the same column as the “rain-brains,” people who were clinically diagnosable as having a crippling fear of the weather.

In Ank’s life, the taunting “friend” was currently a guy about his age in the apartment next door, while the latest family member lining up to harass him, was his own dad.

“Going to the drip if it clouds up?” Ank’s dad asked.

Whenever Ank’s dad and not his mother answered the vode during a period of imminent bad weather, he always asked Ank the same question, or some sadistic variation of it.

“What floor’s it on in your stack? The 74th? Going up on the 74th when the rain starts? To watch the drits hit the drip?”

Hearing his dad start on this again was unbounded torment--and not just because it was the same old questions every time or the same old weak play of the word drit against the word drip, but the tone was equally awful too. Evil, perhaps. A sort of, low-level evil, lording over his son the idea that dad wasn’t afraid of the weather. But Ank had a hard time thinking of his dad as evil on any level. So maybe the rote comments were meant in another way, another context. Maybe it was only supposed to be funny. Or maybe his dad was simply being childish and idiotic.

“Nooo,” Ank would answer carefully, dragging out the ohhh part of the nooo. “Whyyy?” He already knew what the answer would be, and he was already cringing as he waited for it.

“I thought you rain-watchers liked to hang out in the drips, under all that acid-proof glass. Makes you feel safer!”

“You’re an idiot, dad,” Ank wanted to say. He never did, though, as that would be a little more disrespectful than he was comfortable with. And besides, his dad was more right than he knew.

There were times when the acid rains turned into storms . . . massive storms . . . landlocked typhoons . . . and Ank had considered heading to the 74th floor more than once during those times, where it was safer--inside a drip. The newer drips, like the one on his building, were covered in inch-thick glass with one-quarter inch laminated cores and protective overlays that were acid-proof, yes, but not entirely resistant to the newly-discovered problem of drits. Still, no matter how bad the weather had gotten, no matter how safe he knew it would have made him feel, he’d never made a run for the 74th. Not yet. Hopefully not ever. But there was always a chance of a leak in these older structures. And the news had reported more than once, recently, that such a thing was happening. In other buildings. Much older buildings. But not this one, not the one he lived in, or any close to it. And no one had ever been hurt. Not seriously.

If there was a chance, however--if it did look like a leak could happen--he knew he could be on the 74th in a couple of minutes. That is, if the elevators and stairs weren’t jammed full of people exactly like him. People with the same underlying fears.

In that case, a drip designed to comfortably house 1,000 people in an emergency could, in a real crisis or panic, be the destination of 10,000 acid-rain paranoids. And it would be a tight cram long before the ten-thousandth straggler showed up. So you’d definitely want to be the first ant there, as way ahead of the rest of the colony as you could get.

Ank finally did talk to his mother, about watching the weather reports tonight, but for only a few minutes. Listening to his dad had drained him of the will for anything longer.

He left his vode on the table, and wearing only his shorts and a blanket draped over his shoulders, he stepped into the hallway, anticipating a quick visit to the glass-enclosed landing around the corner, where sometimes he went just to watch the sun go down, or stare at the river, or tried to warm up on hot days when the building was too cold inside. Which was about every day. Unless it was raining.

When it was raining, the physical plants in every Division would shut the air off to the entire city. And for awhile, before the clouds cleared and the sun came out to broil up everything short of the darkest shade, the city was actually a pleasant place to be--a nice, livable sixty-plus degrees inside, sometimes making it almost to seventy. If a storm lasted long enough.

But it was a strange and sad juxtaposition.

When people’s lives were in the most danger, during a full-intensity acid-rain storm, that’s also when they were allowed to be the most comfortable.

Why though? And to accomplish what? To make people feel more relaxed during the storms? Make them feel better about themselves for awhile? Doubtful. And what made it even odder, was how no one could explain the government’s policy of an indoor Antarctica in a way the public was willing to accept. Or even believe. The question seemed simple enough. Why wasn’t the temperature regulated better when it was hot? Why just off when it’s raining or on when it’s shining? Why no in-between? Why no thermostats?

And when there was an answer given out by the official spokesperson of the moment?

Well, when there was such an answer, it wasn’t even worth remembering what was said. Because there was no one, real, good answer. There only seemed to be a bunch of different answers that made no sense. And so, in singular, retaliatory protest, he was off to warm up at a corner landing--or “squirt,” as people called them now, renamed in honor of their parasitical big cousins, the drips.

But the squirt would have to wait. Ank only made it a few feet out of his apartment door when he saw Stev, who lived in the apartment next to his.

“Hey, Stev!” Ank said abruptly, trying not to yawn. He didn’t want to get that started. The night was going to be long enough as it was, with all the changing news about the weather to keep track of and tomorrow’s appointment at the clinic weighing on him. It was already late afternoon, well into the evening hours actually, and in a bid to forget about everything for awhile, he’d spent the whole day interacting over his game vode, until his brain plug was almost as numb as his carpal and sciatica taps.

Stev had just stepped off an elevator and seemed surprised to see him in the hall, as if he hadn’t even noticed him standing there, and maybe wouldn’t have if Ank had failed to say anything.

Ank almost wished he hadn’t.

“Ank!” Stev snapped. “My buddy Ank! Damn, Ank! Are we in super-relaxed mode or what? Wearing his old baby blanket in the halls now?” Stev walked a circle around him, gave him a couple of pokes to the ribs. “Better stay out of old sun--you’re looking toasty done for a white boy!”

“Wrong race, Stevvy. I’m not the white boy here. What about your white-boy ass? Is that skin your Lord-of-Dark-Closets look?” He jabbed a finger back at Stev, but Stev bent away from him and hopped effortlessly out of poking range.

“That’s white-scum-trash boy to you, Ank! Don’t offend the breed! So really, what is it? Why super-relaxed lump mode? Did we forget to shave today or did we forget last week?”

Ank hadn’t shaved since Friday morning, and being concerned all weekend about what the clinic’s doctors might find wrong with him, didn’t care.

“I just thought--what the hell!” he said as he scuffed the back of his fingers across the scraggly growth. “I don’t have to work ‘til Tuesday, so why bother? I been catching up on a lot of gaming time.”

“Gaming? My ass! Listening to the news! You can’t wait to watch those weather reports tonight!”

“You know what, Stev?” Ank said smiling. He was trying to sound mad, but started laughing instead. “You know what? Fuck you. Fuck--you!!!”

Then he had to stop himself, before he started laughing. Because it was true. He was a newsaholic with a weather fetish. And proud to admit it.

“Ahhh, don’t worry about the weather,” Stev said. “It’s gonna do what it’s gonna do. And we’re not figuring it out any quicker worrying on it. It’s the acid, you dripper!” he crooned. “The acid rain that puddles brains!” he sang, reciting a popular song from last summer. “Turn around, don’t drown!”

“Can’t help it,” Ank said. “It’s genetic. Me and my mom and my brother just can’t seem to get enough, I guess.”

He wanted to tell Stev what was really bothering him, but until Dr. Newhan could figure something out, or at least witness it for himself, he wasn’t going to say anything. Besides, Stev clearly would not be a sympathetic ear. The taunting torturer, yes. But sympathetic? Stev wouldn’t even know how--a bit like the doctor’s nurse, Aureen. She needed a lesson on sympathy too.

“What about daddy?” Stev asked.

“Hmmm? Dad? Well, he thinks we’re all three nuts. So I told him ‘nuts’ is old-hobbler’s talk. And when I told him about you, he said to tell Stev an old hobbler said he’s nuts too.”

Stev got quiet a second, and then laughed, as if just now understanding that it was a joke, that Ank wasn’t serious. Or maybe it wasn’t even funny to him. Maybe he was insulted and he was just laughing because he was supposed to and that was better than getting mad over a joke. Stev was strange like that, so it was hard to tell. Ank often wondered what kind of drugs he was taking. Only he seemed far too coherent to be an abuser.

“And Stev,” Ank added quickly, “try to keep it down on any bitch-slapping sessions tonight. Whoever you had in there a couple of weeks ago, it sounded like she shot your white ass!”

Again, Stev’s face was a mask of seriousness, but Ank thought nothing about it. Stev’s misplaced expressions always disappeared once he had a moment to absorb and translate into his own way of thinking anything that was new or unexpected.

“We were doing it on the pots and pans baby!” Stev said with a huge grin.

“You fucking liar! That’s what I heard wasn’t it? She was probably throwing them at you! Because you’re an asshole!”

“Yeah? You think? At least I had someone, instead of an old blanket to keep me cozy warm. Maybe they need to put a little more soundproofing in the walls so you can’t hear all the fun I’m having, and I can’t hear your weather reports all night through.”

“I know you’re lying now! With all that insulation and brick walls between us? You ain’t hearing shit from me unless you got dog ears.”

“Bark on this,” he said pointing at his crotch with one hand while a wave of the palm with his other hand unlocked the door to his apartment. “And maybe you didn’t hear me slapping my bitch!”

“Sorry. Already did. And she must have thrown the whole kitchen at your worthless ass.”

“You know it’s jealousy when you talk the nasty like that!”

Ank had to laugh on that one. “Okay! I’m done! I’m off to stare at the Sim Far and grab a sunset, see if I can find enough left to warm up on!” He turned and walked off.

“Better shut your door, dark boy!” Stev yelled. “Someone’ll ‘scond that new satellite vode right off the lode base and make you miss the weather!”

Adjusting his blanket like a giant scarf, Ank gave Stev an over-the-shoulder flip of the finger.

“Prop it up on this, Stev!”

Stev stared after him, but did not smile this time, not even the beginnings of a simple grin.

#

Tuesday morning at 11:31, with Dr. Newhan and Cammda both in the room, Mr. Palla blacked out. Moments before it happened, the sun-dark skin around his eyes paled, his entire body crumpled like a drenched rag, and he came very close to slipping right off the exam table. Cammda reached out to stop him, but his muscles intuitively reasserted their control, holding him rigidly in place. Then his gaze was meandering about the room, hunting for things to fix on--a wall, a chair, a person--satisfied to remain in one spot only a few seconds at a time.

And he began to mumble.

At first, the sounds slurring out of his mouth made no sense. But they quickly took on a mesmerizing lilt and began to order themselves into sentences and phrases, then paragraphs, and finally a story, that unfolded much like the words from a book, building for its listeners the impressions of another time and place within the city, inviting them to wonder if the influences at play on their patient were also finding a way to influence them.

Mr. Palla’s first understandable words suggested a large man sitting in a booth at a bar, the sort of place one could only find Downcity, in the sloggs.

#

“How long does it take?” the big man asked. His name was Shaker. “Did you try to walk it out or what?”

Shaker was too impatient, and Olnn didn’t care, because Olnn could thrub him flat with one hand, his bad hand even. And Shaker knew it. But Olnn considered Shaker a friend, a claim people down here were rarely able to make, so Shaker was allowed to push him. Just not too far. Only a dram or so. And Olnn always pushed right back.

“You can’t tell time?” Olnn answered. His voice was remarkably soft, considering the size and shape of the head it was coming from, yet it still managed a distant, thunderous quality--suggesting it could easily grow much louder. “I’m late a fucking half hour extra.”

Shaker thrummed his fingers against the table. Shaker was a big guy, but next to Big Olnn, he was a cellar flea who could hardly afford to be short with someone like Olnn, even if they were friends. And he knew it. Still, he was known for his impatience, and Olnn was late.

“They’re giving us all we need of more Enforcers,” Olnn went on. “They subbed ‘em in all morning, until they had every tunnel south and down completely gagged up with extra ‘trollers and checks. Wanna bitch, assdrip? Bitch it at them.”

Olnn shivered. Hard. The inside of the bar was cold--much colder than the tunnels. The people who ran the city’s physical plant in this ‘Vision were idiots. Even the sloggers froze, just like everyone else, from the well-dones in their ‘scrapes to the dying droemers melting away in the lowest Downcity splash. It was the reason why even a guy like him had to wear a coat in the heat of summer.

He seated himself opposite Shaker and unbuttoned his collar, so it wouldn’t strangle him as his weight collapsed the booth’s cushion.

“So the hand today is how?” Shaker asked.

“Shaker,” Olnn carefully eyed over the bar crowd as he spoke, “I can stick this how’s your hand up your ass any time.”

“Heh, heh, heh!!!” Shaker laughed into his drink.

Olnn was tired of hearing about the hand. It had been healed for months now. It looked terrible, sure, the skin all webbed with pale scar tissue and stretched tight over the tendons and bones, and it was sunken in around the thumb where the muscle and skin had to be cut out, plus there were a few other parts missing as well, but it worked fine. Almost as good as ever. Nothing had changed. Except he wore gloves now when he went out thumping, kept them in his pocket at all times. Having a blob of infected spute nearly bring down a guy his size wasn’t an irony he wanted to revisit.

And Shaker knew this--and Shaker smartly decided not to bring it up again. Not today. Maybe tomorrow, depending on Olnn’s mood. And tolerance.

“Okay, no more off-track,” Shaker said. “Did you talk to our little cut or not?”

“We talked. Her name is Thriina.” Olnn forced himself to contain a smile as he rested his “bad” hand in his side coat pocket.

“Thriina, hmmm?” Shaker paused. “I like that. Thriina,” he repeated. “I wonder is she as cute as our last thump?”

“Yeah. She’s a fucking little college cutie, alright. A real young cut.”

“You actually saw her? You didn’t just vode her up?”

“Nahhh . . . my vode won’t hold a charge right . . . I talked to her in person . . . I make my best impressions face on.” An uncontrollable grin wrinkled his lips as he gestured toward his face, clearly implying the obvious, that his was a look capable of getting across even the most unclear message.

But Shaker seemed nervous suddenly.

“So you did get my message on her? Did you get it or not!?!”

“Calm! Calm! Of course I did. You bet!” Olnn furtively poked his finger at the rag bundle in his pocket.

“God, Olnn--get a battery! Can you not take this more serious?”

“Why so worried, Shake? It’s just words on a vode.” Olnn wrapped his fingers around the full beer mug Shaker had already ordered for him. The mug felt his touch and instantly rechilled itself.

“Because,” Shaker said, his impatience and agitation sounding more like fear now, “Garzencia takes heads and shits in your mouth when people don’t do their orders right!”

“You mean our heads? He can try.”

“Try? No. There’s people bigger and uglier than us in this tube. And they do better than try.”

Big Olnn struggled to compose himself, but the smile he’d been holding back finally exploded free, opening a horizontal chasm across the lower third of his face, a chasm filled with tarnished bridges and partials.

“Olnn,” Shaker said with renewed calm, “knock off the smug, and keep our orders straight. I got all the fights I can handle.”

“Hey, I know what Garzencia is about. It isn’t my first day down here.” Olnn smacked his lips and tried to close his mouth, but the urge to smile kept twisting it open again.

“Olnn, I just want you to keep a vode charged and have it on you when I tap up.”

“The vode again . . . “ Olnn uttered the words with mounting annoyance.

“Yeah, ya thrub! The vode again! ‘Cause I don’t like leaving messages all the time!”

“All the time?” Olnn said.

“I left three since yesterday!”

Olnn gripped the bundle in his pocket, the tips of his fingers growing moist, something they hadn’t been capable of since his hand had recovered from the bacterial exorcism performed by a greedy chub of a doctor in an Upcity clinic--a Division-run facility notorious for its rampant practice of off-records medicine.

Shaker, with obvious difficulty, kept his voice well below the rest of the discards contributing to the bar’s collective hum. “Look, I don’t care what Garznecia’s about, but it’s dangerous to be fucking with him right now. I also don’t know why he changes his mind, but we need to stay smart and do exactly what he says.”

“His mind changed?”

“About killing Thriina, ya stupid thrubber!” he snapped, but not too loudly. “You know what I’m saying! Don’t fuck with me!”

Olnn somehow managed to keep his arm steady as he lifted his mug for another mouthful of beer--a much bigger one this time, adding a quick nail tap on the side of the glass, a command for the mug to “re-fizz” its contents.

Shaker leaned forward on his elbows, his tone low and serious, his coat’s collar and shoulders bunching uncomfortably around his neck. “I don’t understand why he doesn’t want her dead yet, and I don’t even care. Maybe he wants something else to take before we thump her. Maybe he wants one of her little friends too. I don’t know. Let’s just do like he wants done. Good?”

“Good, you say? Yeah, it’s good alright . . . to the luck of finding her.”

“Who? One of her girlfriends? Or Thriina?”

“Both.”

“Both? Shit! You tripped her off to us? She’s already Upcity with her friends--isn’t she!?!”

“Upcity? No. Not that.”

“Then what?”

“Well . . . I haven’t been home in two days . . . but my vode’s there. I tapped you up to meet me here on a disposable, so the only message I got . . . was your first one . . . that Garzencia was finished with Thriina.”

Shaker’s shoulders began to droop, until he was slumping nearly against the top of the table.

“Olnn . . . where is Thriina?”

Big Olnn’s smile weakened.

“In my pocket.”

#

By 11:37, the story was over. One minute later, a sweating Dr. Newhan excused himself.

At 12:52, having seen to his other patients with the help of a brisked-along assistant nurse, he returned.

A flustered Ank Palla stood up and asked to go to the restroom.

“Sure,” Dr. Newhan said. “I think this is pretty much it for the day.”

#

“Convinced?” Dr. Newhan asked.

Starting to sweat again, he plucked a paper towel from a roll hanging over the sink, ran some water on it, folded it into a small, uneven square, and wiped it across his forehead.

Cammda said nothing. Didn’t even raise her head to look at him.

He waved open a trash can and dropped the towel inside.

“I warned you it was disturbing,” he said. “But I wonder why Big Olnn again? And this girl . . . Thriina . . . it sounds like he killed her. He killed her, didn’t he?”

No answer. And then he realized why.

After experiencing Mr. Palla’s blackout for herself, Cammda didn’t have the luxury of being able to leave the exam room and tend to her composure, or even go to the restroom. She had remained with the patient, faithfully maintaining the delicate lie she and Dr. Newhan were arranging, pretending to wait for the blackout that had already come and passed.

Now, with Mr. Palla finally out of the room, she was free to speak. And vent.

“That . . . is a fantastic question, Grann.” 

Grann recognized that tone--plus she was calling him by his first name. Something was wrong, something that wasn’t going to end well.

With a grunt that resembled a controlled scream, Cammda slapped her vode against the countertop, so hard it was probably broken--but clearly that wasn’t important right now.

“I can tell you who she is, Dr. Newhan. Do you really want to know? You want that answer? She’s my niece! And she’s disappeared on us, Grann! She’s gone! A couple of months after we treated Big Olnn! And no one can find her and no one has heard from her!”

Cammda started trembling, and Grann recalled the time she got mad at a careless intern for dropping a patient’s baby. She said afterwards she was so angry she could hear a loud ringing sound in her head, like her heart was trying to pump every drop of blood in her body into her eardrums.

He also recalled the look on her face when it was over, after she’d snatched up the baby and punched the intern in the jaw. She was looking exactly like that right now.

“Wha--what?” Grann stammered. His lower lip was moving up and down faster than his tongue could form what he wanted to say.

“I don’t, I don’t, I don’t understand. Thriina?”

He felt a need to sit down--on a toilet. This whole affair was becoming more trial than his guts could take. Cammda had never even mentioned a niece named Thriina. Or that she had a niece who was missing.

“How, Cammda? Big Olnn? And your niece? How? How? How are they possibly connected? Something to do with him coming here? Why didn’t you tell me? Are we sure this is even the same Thriina?”

“How the fuck am I supposed to know how they’re connected? It’s my Thriina! You know it is! Or he wouldn’t have told that fucking story about her!”

She was so upset, an animal-like rumble was gathering in her throat.

“Did you think,” she growled, “there might never be a price back for helping these people? And how was I supposed to tell you about Thriina? You’ve got this practice and your own damned family to worry about. What am I supposed to say?”

She came at him abruptly and he drew back a step, waiting for the whomp on the head that would signal his trip to the nearest garbage tube.

She stopped her charge short, aimed a sharply nailed finger at him and shook it furiously. Her other hand was clenched into a murderous fist. “If this is anything to do with Olnn coming here and us helping him, I will kill you, Grann. I will kill you and throw your ass out a window!”

He managed a silent sigh. At least now he knew he wouldn’t be going out with the trash. And she could do it too. He had seen her drop a 250-pound mental patient to the floor and sit on his chest, pinning his arms with her knees until the other nurses could stick a needle in him. Cammda didn’t bluff. Especially when it came to her family.

“Look,” he said. “It has to be a coincidence. Was Thriina ever anywhere near here? Was she near here that day? Were you missing any of your personal stuff? Maybe he stole something. I don’t know! Think!”

As he spoke, he took a couple of life-endangering steps forward, wondering if Cammda would be prone to mercy and actually kill him first or just let the fall do it for her.

Cammda calmed a bit, but she was so shaken the age-telling sag under her chin had begun to quaver.

Then she thought about what Grann was saying, and spoke out with a resolute, “No. I didn’t have anything missing.”

She took a deep, uneven breath.

“Thriina definitely had to be in school that day he was here--she was in the college above Northend. She had to be there studying for tests because it would have been the last part of the semester, school would have been out by June, and we treated him in May, I think. Oh god! I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said all that.” She lowered her head, and though she wanted to, she did not cry.

“I’m not going to kill you,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady. “Maybe it’s not even true. I’ve been voding up every morgue within three Divisions every day since she disappeared, and she isn’t in the views. Thriina may still be alive and off with some guy she met--that’s what we’ve all been hoping on. I mean, she wasn’t exactly the blessed virgin or the perfect student. You know? Kids do stuff like this. It was her first semester and they do stuff like that!” Her words began to speed up, moving rapidly from sorrow to anger. “But this Palla character, he can’t know this much about our lives--or Thriina! There’s no such thing as anyone who can do that! There isn’t!”

“Listen. Just try to stay calm, Cammda.”

“But there isn’t!”

“But just listen! If what Mr. Palla said is true, and it may not be, but if it is, her running into Olnn would have to be a coincidence. Lots of college kids hang out in those stupid clubs above the sloggs. Especially in the summer, to celebrate the end of school. She . . . she . . . I don’t know. I’m thinking somehow she got involved with someone there, someone who knew Big Olnn. And for some reason . . . he may have killed her.”

On the word “killed,” a visible tremor went straight up Cammda’s back and into her bunched fists.

Thinking fast, Grann added, as soothingly as he could: “Or maybe the story isn’t true. Like you said.”

Grann stepped back, noting that Cammda’s fingers were balled so tight the skin was being deprived of blood, turning her hands white--almost a tusk white.

“Like his first story wasn’t true?” she said. “He nailed that one pretty good. Tell me. Was he wrong about anything in his first story? About us and Big Olnn?”

“No,” Grann admitted. “He wasn’t.”

“So he’s probably right on this one too. Which is a really great breakthrough for us. We saved Big Olnn’s life so he could go on to kill Thriina. Admit that you believe it. And then ask yourself whose fault it is that she’s dead.”

“You heard the way he talked, Cammda. We both heard. Yes. I think I believe him.”

“And now that we’ve recorded this guy? For what?” She spat the words out, and every word after that. “Not seen enough yet? Wanna watch it again so we can be sure? We need to delete this right now!” Grann’s vode was next to the sink. She grabbed it and tapped a delete-dump on the video before he could say anything. Then she deleted and dumped the video from her vode too.

It didn’t matter anyway, Grann realized. She was right. The videos were a bad idea, completely useless, and if anyone ever saw them, career enders.

“So, Grann--what do we do? Olnn kills her and we can’t do anything about it? We can’t even tell anybody about Palla, to see why he even knows what he’s saying. He could start blabbing anything. He might start repeating what he said here and off we go. Prison. Bad-time prison. You do remember since last year the medical laws are different now? Some of these people we’ve run through here are murderers, and we didn’t turn them in! That makes us accessories! And you know the law as well as I do. It’s the same in every Division now. Accessory to murder is equal to murder. And the death penalty is automatic and retroactive!”

“Stop it, Cammda . . . so do you think Mr. Palla knows Big Olnn or not? Or that he is actually in some way seeing events that have already happened?” Grann didn’t dare mention Thriina again.

“Now I’m the doctor? What do you think?”

“I think . . . not. No. I mean . . . he doesn’t know the people he’s talking about. I actually think he’s just seeing all of this stuff based on whoever he’s around or wherever he’s at or whatever he happens to be looking at the moment. But listen to what I’m saying! It’s all just street mythos! He can’t really be doing this!”

“Well guess what! He is doing it! And, he’s looking at us! We let him go to another doctor and it’s death penalty time if he starts repeating himself.”

“Stop it. There’s no death penalty for accessory in medical circumstances.”

“Well hoo-YAY-ray! Life in prison then! I might as well kill myself right now, ‘cause I’m not doing that!”

“And kill me too?”

“Oh, I’m pretty mad at you right now, but unfortunately I’m no more innocent than you.”

Then suddenly she turned and sat down on one of the plastic chairs in the corner of the room, put her face in her hands, and started crying.

Tears welled in Grann’s eyes as he walked over and patted her on the back. She didn’t deserve any of this--and he dearly deserved to suffer for making her a part of it.

“So,” she said with a loud sniff and some more crying. She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Are you thinking about how we’re going to get us out of this?”

“I dreamed I gave him a lifetime prescription for sleep and energy meds.”

“Oh! That’s original. And you say you dreamed this? Well I guess if he never gets tired again we won’t have to worry about anything. You are dreaming! You’re not qualified to even diagnose a condition like this, let alone prescribe anything for it. I was expecting you to think of something better than that. You realize we’re also talking about my niece in all of this?”

When she said “niece,” it brought even more tears. From Grann too.

“Okay, Cammda. An MRI then.”

“What?” She blubbered the word in disbelief.

“MRI. We send him over for an MRI.”

“And then what? He’s in the system if you order that!”

“Not really. We’re going to have to eventually find out what’s causing this, and he’s going to show up in the records pretty quick anyway if we keep bringing him back here, so it might as well be us controlling what goes in.”

“So how are we supposed to find anyone down there to keep it off-record?”

“Don’t have to.” He floated his focals away from his eyes to dab away some tears. A soft tap floated them back. “I can put in a request for the readings to come direct to my vode, tell them we’re building a file here that we intend to transfer to the Psychiatric Docks when its done. The results will come only to me and stop with me. Short of a department audit by Division Enforcement, which isn’t likely to happen, none of Mr. Palla’s information will ever leave Imaging, except when it’s transferred to my vode. All we need is one of their doctors to read the MRI and report what they see. From there maybe we can figure out what we can do to control this situation.”

“No. I’ll tell you what we should do. Mr. Palla should have an accident on the stairs and break his fucking neck. I didn’t sleep all night just from what he said to you the first time here. And after hearing him today? For myself? This is my family he’s fucking with now, and something’s going to get done.” She sat up straight and jammed her finger at Grann, within an inch of impaling his stomach.

“I am not going to jail. You remember that!”

The door opened and Mr. Palla came back into the room.

“So what have you decided to do with me? I guess I’ve been a pretty worthless subject.”

“No, you did your best,” Dr. Newhan said. “You did your part.” He artfully maneuvered himself around Mr. Palla, turning him away from Cammda.

Cammda stood up, heading for the sink to wash her hands and tactfully care for her tear-soaked face. Before she turned on the water, she tapped her vode to see if it was broken (it wasn’t). Then she glared at Grann and made a tripping motion with her foot.

Grann was certain he saw an image of steep stairs swimming in her eyes, with Mr. Palla teetering at the top step.

“I would’ve sworn by now,” said Mr. Palla, “it should have done it. I don’t think it happened before I left home or anything. I kept the SV turned up while I was getting ready so I’d notice if there was a lapse or anything. I don’t understand what’s going on. I thought I had a pretty good sense of the, ummm . . .”

“Trigger?”

“Yeah, that would describe it. And I swear I’m not making this up. I swear!”

As she was drying her hands, Cammda made a shoving motion at Mr. Palla’s back and glared hard at Grann again.

“I believe you,” Dr. Newhan said, remembering to present himself as attentive and professional. Patients were inclined to agree to just about anything when he presented himself this way, without question or doubt. And he truly did not need this patient asking questions or having doubts. He needed him to be a willing, ignorant accomplice in this growing conspiracy against him. “So what I’m going to do is have Nurse Aureen take you to see the team in the Imaging Docks. I’ll tap them up and see if I can get a rush-scheduled MRI procedure for you. Today. Right now. If they aren’t busy it only takes fifteen minutes from sign-in to sign-out. I’m not worried about finding anything, but we want to rule out as many possibilities as we can that something harmful may be going on.”

“That’s right,” Cammda said in a caring voice so fabricated it sickened Grann almost to throwing up. She took Mr. Palla by the arm, tenderly escorting him toward the door. “I’ll run you over to Imaging myself. It’s downstairs from here.”

She turned, gave Grann a final, murderous stare, and softly added, “But we’ll take an elevator.”

#

Session three with Mr. Palla began about like the others.

Dr. Newhan had asked him to come in one more time, hoping that he would agree to spend yet another morning at the clinic. Mr. Palla, despite his obvious exhaustion, was willing to try again. He even came in fifteen minutes early, as tired and weary as ever, promising this time to black out or fall asleep trying.

He was also desperately curious about his MRI results.

“I kept hoping you might vode over the results. Was it anything bad?”

“It came back clear,” Dr. Newhan said. “Got it this morning. Nothing to worry about.”

But he was lying.

He’d known the results since yesterday. The MRI had not come back clear. And there was plenty to be worried about.

Not one to pass up a perfectly blatant cue, Cammda expressed herself with a series of hard, loud taps, which Grann actually was glad to hear. It meant that instead of her hitting someone in the face to valve off some anger, she was diverting that energy into figuring out how best to manipulate the information she was tapping into her vode, deciding how to safely word her report on Mr. Palla. Something had to go in the record. Today. Three sessions in a row without registering a file to the clinic’s main vode was begging for unwanted attention.

Plus there was the gossip factor.

A patient boxxed up in an exam room four hours at a time, accompanied by a senior nurse while the other nurses and assistants and techs were having to do her job . . . this was already being talked about after only one day. And thanks to the patient’s trip to Imaging, there was also a very clear file trail developing in the vodes. One that couldn’t be deleted now. Or ignored. The Records and Admissions Desks, in the normal course of their work, would access that trail soon and effect their own estimate of Mr. Palla’s case. And should a choice bit of rumor find the right ear, “soon” could come at any moment.

So Cammda kept tapping, crafting her entries (and exclusions) with great care--but not-so-great speed.

“Got a tampon and a magic marker?” she whispered at Grann as he passed near.

Grann ignored her.

Out of habit, though, he glanced at his calendar--and felt instant disappointment.

Usually he got a lot of joy from checking the date and day the old-fashioned way. Not this time. Plus a bit of the pride he felt for owning the calendar seemed to be gone--drained away, he supposed, by what he was doing to this kid, and Cammda too. But while his conscience was doing its best to leave him miserable, his voice still maintained its positive, professional manner. Which wasn’t too difficult. Years of delivering morbid news to his less-fortunate patients had given him plenty of practice. So when he gave his final instructions to Mr. Palla, the delivery was perfect, brimming with assurance and certainty, and just a pulse of concern to ease a nervous mind.

“Well, Mr. Palla, I know this is tough, but try to sit up as often as you can, and try to stay relaxed. Nurse Aureen and I will take turns watching to see what happens. And do your best not to go to sleep. One of us will wake you up if we think you’ve just dozed off on us. I’ll come in to relieve the nurse between patients as often as I can, and if anything happens while I’m not here, she can tap me on my vode and I’ll be back in two seconds.”

“Well, I’m ready for you guys today. I even brought my own blanket this time.” He held up a canvas shopping bag and plopped it on the table.

To Grann’s surprise, Mr. Palla pulled an old blanket out of the bag.

“Told you the other day I might bring something from home. Thought it might help me relax.” He gave off a tired laugh and started setting up camp on the exam table. “You know, did you think to record this? I was thinking about that, so I can see for myself what I’m doing. I mean, if it ever does it again, I’d like to know what’s happening to me.”

“We’ve had a video twig hooked to the vodes every day you’ve been here, Mr. Palla. If you black out on us, we’ll catch every minute of it.” He was lying again. Sort of. They had “twigged” him only once, and after deleting the videos, Cammda--mad and frustrated beyond reasoning with--decided the twigs needed deleting too. So she rinsed them down the sink. Of course then she had to report them stolen to cover up the real story behind their loss, so she blamed it on a five-year-old girl with a bronchial infection and “grabby” fingers.

Grann smiled at Cammda, but only because Mr. Palla could see his face; it definitely wasn’t the expression he really had in mind for her. Cammda’s expression, however, Mr. Palla couldn’t see. She grimaced at Grann and used her free hand to form the universal sign for choking to death a twenty-five-year-old college boy.

Grann left the room, eager to lose himself in the faceless bustle of the clinic’s hallways.

Finally free of both Cammda and Mr. Palla, he recalled the message that had come up on his vode yesterday, fresh out of the Imaging Docks. The specialist who read Mr. Palla’s MRI had tapped in only three words on the topic line:

SYN DROEM POSITIVE

The body of the report was a bit more staid, and appropriately technical, but it confirmed the diagnosis. Ank Palla was being exposed to syn droem, probably without even realizing it. And from what Grann had observed, Mr. Palla’s reward for this exposure, as fantastic as it sounded, seemed to be a form of expanded sensory perception, known in parapsychology as clairvoyance, a phenomenon whose existence remained unproven by every branch of science.

But that little stumbling point hardly dissuaded the people who claimed to know otherwise. For those who believed in the paranormal, their convictions were based on the strength of the anecdotal evidence, not the scientific. And Cammda, after hearing the story about her niece, was suddenly their strongest supporter--and self-elected spokesperson.

According to the sources she favored (street mythos and The Enlightenment Channel) syn droem was long thought to be a catalyst for unlocking the mind’s psychic powers. But it was all speculation, every dram of it. The mythology makers and the folks at The EC had nothing to support what they were saying. Their guesses were close, though, it was turning out, but there was so much they were still missing. For instance, while Mr. Palla’s clairvoyant behavior did actually appear to be legitimate, the power wasn’t his to control. It operated on its own volition, completely outside his knowledge, manifesting itself through an unusual triggering mechanism: ordinary physical and mental exhaustion.

For Grann, however, there was an even greater mystery at issue. If syn droem was responsible for what was happening to this patient, and he truly was not an abuser, then where was the exposure coming from?

By 11:17, that question began to answer itself.

That was when Ank Palla blanked out for a third day in a row and told the most unexpected story so far.

The story of Stev.

#

Stev kicked the sofa and mopped his shirt across his chest.

His apartment was freezing cold, as always, and still he was sweating. And cursing, in a string of phrases so loud and incoherent even he realized he was being loud and incoherent. And yet, he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop the anger, the need for confrontation and resolution, anymore than he could figure out how to take vengeance on the person responsible.

“Put my life in your hands, you said! My life! In your hands! Am I so stupid all at once? You don’t have hands! You hear me saying this, yes? You don’t even have hands! I trusted you! And what is it you’re supposed to do for me exactly? Why don’t you work for me!?!”

Knowing the questions would only earn him another fraudulently compiled response, he kicked an innocent pot across the room, never questioning how it even came to be in a position to be kicked. It was close-by, looked like it might fly well, so he kicked it. The sofa had not done much for him in that respect, except to make his big toe hurt. But it never went airborne. And he would have loved that. A flying couch! Going right out his apartment window! All he needed was something with the strength of . . . the strength of . . . a bulldozer would do! To break through the Durarmo® pane! Or push it free of its diamond-embedded welds! Do that and the couch was his to send flying! All the way down into the Sim Fara, the river that elbowed its way around this apartment stack like a gigantic, mangled paper clip!

But having nothing equivalent in strength to a dozer, a ridiculous and silly thought anyway, he resumed his rant, along with his search for the thing or person responsible for his anger. Probably thing. Yes. Thing. It was a thing who was responsible. Nothing with a brain. Not a real brain, but a fabricated one. Man-built awareness. But still only a thing. And completely to blame.

“I guess I blame you, then,” he finally sighed, a welcome and unexplained calm washing over him suddenly. “But I blame me the same as you. I give everyone what they want and can’t even come up with a decent way to protect myself.”

-: I am not sure why you blame me. Blame me why, Stev? This conversation has moved outside our established parameters. Allow me a few moments for reinterpretation and I will adjust my responses accordingly. :-

“Don’t bother. Your act isn’t working anymore. You’ve been sucking up enough information all day to know exactly what I mean and how to respond. And I told you speak to me in standard contractions only.”

-: I’ll do that. But if you don’t allow me to reinterpret, my responses will . . . :-

“Stop it! You’ve got plenty of established parameters for this conversation. Deliver a proper response back now; base it on my stored parameters. Respond back! Now!” he demanded, optimistically hoping for an honest reply.

-: I’ll gladly maintain the established parameters. What do you want to say? :-

“Me? It’s what you need to say! I need you to stop lying to me! When I bought you, your brain was supposed to be blanked already--a delete-dump with a complete blanking. But you’ve been acting today like you’ve had full awareness all along. You haven’t imprinted on any of my actionable inputs.”

-: Hmmm . . . I’m sorry about that. Do you want me to explain? :-

“What’s to explain? The man said you were a blank brain! When I turned you back on, you should’ve imprinted on nothing else but me, nothing else but what I was doing! But you’ve been doing things all day that aren’t right--so either you’re damaged, or you weren’t blanked, or you were sold this way because someone is trying to kill me. And if you won’t fire when I need you too, that’s life and death for me, so I’m going to assume someone wants to kill me. And since your fabbed brain won’t admit its old e-staps are still intact, the problem becomes figuring out who put in those established parameters and how did they make sure I was the fool who bought you?”

-: Stev, we really should set the reinterpretation mode and adjust for these new parameters. :-

“I said, no! All day we’ve been trying that! You aren’t imprinting! And you aren’t imprinting because you weren’t blanked! Read back a scan-check to me again and tell me whose e-staps you’ve been interpreting today!”

Again he was optimistic.

-: Only yours. My brain was blanked until you installed the batteries yesterday evening and reinitiated me. :-

“Here it goes again! That’s not true! You weren’t blanked! Someone left in their e-staps, hoping to get me killed! The evidence is against you! Just give me back the right response! Damn this! Why am I still arguing with you?”

:- Calm! Calm! I’m certain your e-staps are the only imprinted parameters currently driving my responses. :-

Stev tensed in anger and hurled his shirt across the room. It crumpled flat against a tall mirror on his living room wall and slid to the floor.

“My Shirt,” he grumbled, “is ruined.”

-: The blood will come out. :-

“If I were dead,” he replied, “if I’d been killed, I wouldn’t be able to wear it anyway, now would I? Our situation was bad already, but blocking the trigger? Why can’t you--” he struggled to pronounce the desired command word properly and clearly: “Emit!” even though he knew the pistol would not respond, even as he desperately repeated the command, “Emit! Can’t you emit that this is the proof of what I’m saying?”

He was no longer optimistic.

-: I had to block the trigger. You’d be destroying public property. And heavily fined if caught. :-

“See? That’s my proof!” he shouted. “You can’t even obey a basic emit command! I don’t need to hear an excuse about fines again! It’s the splashes! No one cares what happens down there! I could have shot the lock off the door and killed them on the spot--or scared them off--not let them come back at us later!”

In frustration, he began to stroke his hair, flattening the damp strands against the top of his head and loudly sucking in one chestful of air after another. He was ready to punch someone, but instead had to be satisfied fumbling with the latch on his pistol belt.

-: Can’t get the buckle unclasped? :-

“Shut up, gun.”

-: At least we survived the incident unharmed. :-

“That’s Kimma’s blood on my shirt is why!”

Stev struggled a moment more, and then screamed in triumph. The belt latch sprang open. He hurled the entire assembly, holster and pistol and all, again at the mirror, shattering it.

The pistol waited until everything was finished falling before it spoke again.

-: I’m sorry Stev. She’ll get better? :-

“Get better? You aren’t capable of imprinting shit, are you? Oh, I’m sure she’ll definitely get better, depending on how creative they get with her morgue view. Some are better than others, I suppose, so I guess it’s really up to the person tapping up the pictures of the drag-ins that day!”

-: You need to calm down, Stev. We should reinitiate right now, so I can adjust to these new response parameters. :-

“No. We’re done. You’re not mine. You’re someone else’s. You were just a trap to get me killed. And guess what now? Now we do something about that.”

Stev threw a cushion off the sofa and dragged back the lining underneath. Inside the frame, protected by loose stuffing, was an old shotgun, a preciously maintained antique.

“We’re going to try something new in the way of imprinting,” he said.

Stev carefully removed the shotgun from its nest and aimed it at the mound of glass covering his shirt and pistol belt, a poor defense against the simple, infallible technology of a 12-gauge riot load.

-: Stev, listen to me. :-

“Dammit!” he yelped. Then he hesitated, his eyes inexplicably filling with stinging tears. “I can’t see! Stop it! Stop it! This is not the pistol talking! If you can see me or hear me, I’ll find out who you are! I’ll find out who did this to me! Can you hear that?” His eyes were worse now, by no apparent cause. Was the pistol fighting back? Was there a hidden surveillance twig attached to it? Allowing someone else to control its actions? Monitor his? Surely not.

But he couldn’t suffer anything else to chance.

Stev pulled the shotgun’s trigger.

Glass and shirt and pistol did just what he expected them to do. The glass from the mirror shattered and went flying all over his apartment. His shirt jumped, as if hit by a powerful burst of air. The pistol flipped over once, bounced off the brick wall that was immediately behind it, and came to rest on a spot neatly cleared off by the force of the blast. Which didn’t make any sense. All he was seeing of the pistol was the pistol. Where was the belt? And the holster? The pistol had come with a belt, and a holster with a built-in charger, all of which he had just thrown at the mirror, all of which he had just shot.

Yet the belt was gone. How?

He dropped the shotgun and folded to his knees. Through clearing eyes, he studied the lone pistol closer . . . it was damaged beyond use now . . . and it wasn’t a pistol that talked, no self-awareness weapon at all, or anything even close. Only Enforcers had equipment like that. All he had was a ruined hammer-and-trigger revolver, a “thrubber’s gun” as they called them in the slogs, and a worthless relic now.

But he also had a new awareness. And false awarenesses too. He was experiencing things that weren’t possible, believing things that couldn’t be, realizing now he probably hadn’t even been out of his apartment today, which could only mean that something very bad had gone wrong in his little bathroom laboratory, the “closet factory” where he extorted dozens of temperamental chemicals from a shelf filled with otherwise benign products, only to later conjoin them into something dangerous and wonderful.

“Turn around, maker,” pleaded the lyrics from a suddenly remembered song. “Turn around and show me something fascinating.”

Stev the maker had become the addict.

#

“I have to tell you,” said Mr. Palla, “something doesn’t seem right.” His tone, even the look on his face, was quite sullen. “I can tell by how I feel you should have seen something already. My MRI was clear, though? I almost wish it wasn’t. I’m crap at work like this, and my boss is all over me. Isn’t there something else we can do? We’re not going to do a fourth session are we?”

Dr. Newhan didn’t want to say it, but someone had to.

“Yes. If you can come in again, we’re going to do what I should’ve done right away. We’re going to give you a full blood and fluid workup. I’ll tap up the Lab Docks and tell them you’ll be up first thing in the morning and that I want results within the hour. And no matter what we have to do after that, we will find out what’s going on.”

“You think we can?”

“I promise,” Dr. Newhan lied.

“What about a specialist?”

“If it calls for that . . . absolutely,” Dr. Newhan said, continuing the lie.

“I would say no,” then Mr. Palla thought for a moment and added: “If I wasn’t so worried about this I’d not even come back. What about getting some rest, though? Or do I come in tired again? This is getting kind of crazy, all of this, isn’t it?”

“I understand, and we don’t want you so exhausted you can’t get out of bed, so how about I let you be the gauge for that, and after tomorrow we’ll either have some answers . . . or we’ll do something completely different.”

#

“I can’t believe we’re not ready to shove him down the stairs--are we ready to push him or not?”

Cammda was trembling as she spoke, but it was hard to say whether it was from fear or anger, or both.

“No,” Grann said firmly. “I just wonder why he told the story about Stev?”

“Well--Doctor!--because Stev is generating syn droem, Grann! He must be living next to Ank. I’ve seen this on the Enlightenment Channel too. Syn droem’s a plasma drug. Right? You have heard the saying? Synthetic lightning in a capsule? Pilled lightning? A dream in a capsule? Droem? Dream? And if you lose containment while your making it, that shit leaks through the walls and turns your neighbors into addicts without them knowing it. It has both them and the maker running around like a bunch of damned paranoids, talking to things that aren’t there. It’s a known fact the effects are a lot different when you’re just generating it and it gets loose than if you take the finished product direct.”

Grann nodded. “Electric acid, pilled lightning--of course I know all the names. I’ve treated most of the effects. I even know all about proximity addiction, I’ve just never actually treated someone for it. But it does seem to answer why Stev was acting the way he was. He’s become a different kind of addict.”

“Yeah, and it finally explains how Ank became a different kind of fucking mind reader. When you said that MRI was syn droem positive, I knew what we had. That boy’s looking into our heads. I’m telling you, he’s a fucking mind reader.”

“No. Not telepathic. Clairvoyant.”

“Ohhh! So now you’re an expert?”

“Not exactly. I tapped it up off the vode at my house--didn’t want to do it here at the clinic--and I think you’re right about where the exposure is coming from. The MRI corroborates this last story, about Stev’s paranoia. He must be making the drug and our patient is slowly being turned into an addict by the leakage, but because the exposure is indirect, and because of something unique in his makeup, it’s made Mr. Palla into--and I can’t believe I’m even saying this--he’s a clairvoyant . . . a syn droem addict who’s become a clairvoyant instead of a droemer. But this is crazy, you do realize that? Think about it. This isn’t even scientifically plausible. What is happening here to turn someone into a psychic? It’s fantasy! There’s no scientific merit for this--it shouldn’t even be possible!”

“Or so the government says. I bet they know all about this kind of thing, but they’d never tell us.”

“Let’s don’t start with the conspiracy hook, Cammda. If anyone knew this was real, I doubt they’d be able to keep it a secret.”

“They couldn’t? We are. Why couldn’t the government?”

“Stop it!” he shouted. “Look . . . I’m convinced of only one thing: we’ve got a clairvoyant kid here, one of the greatest medical discoveries of our time, and we can’t even say anything about him to anyone without going to prison, because he’s calling up these images based on whatever he’s concentrating on at the time, and if we let him go and he just happens to be thinking of Dr. Newhan and one Cammda Aureen when he blacks out in front of the next doctor, that’s it! We’re finished!”

“You know, we already knew that . . . and I don’t give a shit about being a pioneer or this Ank kid taking psychic readings off a blanket that smells like the inside of his sock! I need some answers that will save my ass! So maybe we can get something out of these stories he’s telling--I don’t know! What in our exam room would remind him of Stev? And what does that do to help us?”

“Cammda . . . it’s his blanket . . . a blanket from home. That’s the only thing in the room today that wasn’t ours. And you saw how he didn’t just cover up in it, he was wearing it like a big scarf. Probably he wears it around his apartment like that to stay warm, to stay comfortable, and for some reason, that made him think of this Stev guy.”

“Well scratch that for helping us. That doesn’t tell me anything, except maybe Ank and Stev cuddle up in his little blanket together when it rains! I think Stev guy needs to go down the stairs first. Followed by Ank guy. Or out an open window. They might actually survive the stairs.”

“No, you need to quit talking about murdering this kid--I’ve got to keep him coming back until we find out how this is happening, and then we’re going to figure out a way to stop it. I will not turn him loose as long there’s even a remote chance that he’ll repeat one of these stories about us.”

“Keep bringing him back, huh? You think he’ll go for that, do ya? Coming back for how many days, Grann? Until you figure it out? When? A year from now? This is not something you are qualified to figure out!”

“So who can? The government’s Secret Paranormal Division? This isn’t the Enlightenment Channel, Cammda. This is our ass, and you and I have got to figure this out . . . or . . . or . . .”

He could not bring himself to seriously consider the “or.”

“Or what I said, hmmm? You know it’s coming to that, Grann, only you can’t make yourself say it. So you just ask yourself. Where do you want to be tomorrow? I know where I want to be, and it isn’t doing a lifer’s squat with a couple of man-bitches holding my face between their legs. Someone dies before that happens.”

“Stop talking about killing him! Stop it now!”

“Ooohhh!!! I knew you had that fire in there.” She paused for a moment, allowing him to get his breath back, praying he wouldn’t hyperventilate. “You better take some of that home and smack the old wifey around with it a little bit, Grann, put that moo-ass’s attitude in order--and those boys too while you’re at it! Maybe then you’d have a clear enough mind to start seeing there’s only one sure way out of this.”

He calmed down, slowly turning back into his old, meek self again.

“Don’t remind me of my family,” he said in an unsteady voice. “At least yours loves you.”

“Grann--you know we’ve all got it hard. At least you don’t have a niece . . . “ she instantly choked up and had to clear her throat to go on . . . “you don’t have anyone who’s missing.”

“I’d trade,” he whispered, but he didn’t mean it, or he didn’t think he did. “Look, you’re right, we aren’t going to solve anything if we don’t get Palla in here again and get something out of him that tells us what we need to do.”

“Grann, I’ll be amazed if he even blanks on us a fourth time. You said he only blacked out eight times before he came here. Eight times? Now he’s doing it every time he comes here? How can we count on a fourth time?”

“By listening to the patient. If he stays tired, he’ll black out. I’m sure of that. From what we’re seeing, he’s probably been blacking out every morning before he ever came here and just didn’t know it.”

“Well fine then. So he blacks out. I’m telling you we need a way out. And you better start trying to think of it if he doesn’t tell us something we can use. Because there’s no guarantee he will. And he might even just end up going to another doctor all on his own if he starts to think you aren’t helping him any.”

“You’re right,” Grann said nervously. “Damn! I didn’t even think of that!”

“Well you better start thinking a little harder from here out.”

“Me? This is all on me?” His tone became tense. “Okay then. Okay then. Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll surprise you tomorrow. Maybe even right now.”

“Well do it soon, Grann. My sister voded me last night talking about Thriina . . . I’m going out of my damned mind not saying anything. Do you know how many drugs are holding me together right now? I was ready to head down to the sloggs and beat the face off Big Olnn myself, if whoever-Garzenilla hasn’t already killed him yet. And if I thought they’d listen, I’m about ready to drop an anonymous note to Division Enforcement and tell them I think Olnn is the reason she’s missing! I can’t take anymore, Grann--I’m stressing out of my fucking mind over this! We just need to do something--and start it now! Something that will keep us out of prison!”

When he heard the word “prison,” Grann felt his legs tremble and go weak.

“You want to stay out of prison?” he asked. “Well then haul your ass out of here and make plans to requisition an IV bag for Mr. Palla tomorrow.” He stepped toward Cammda, and for a second she was scared and backed up. “And then I’m going down to my locker to get something that we’re going to leave in plain sight for our pal Palla to see when he comes in.”

“Okay,” she said, clearly baffled. “Req an IV stand and something out of your locker--what the hell is in your locker that helps us?”

“A solution maybe.” He stepped closer, forcing her to back away even farther. “Two simple items I’ve been keeping in there. One of them is a gold bracelet that little bitch Tetts left here for payment. Remember that? I never cashed it out because we weren’t sure if it might raise an alarm or not. Remember? We figured wait a few years, then sell it? Well, we’ve still got it. And when Ank sees it, tell him it’s yours but it gets in the way when you’re working on your vode, then maybe he’ll black out on it and we’ll get some kind of insight into what Tetts was capable of. Something that will help us decide what to do with him. You’re right about this, you know. I’m not going to jail, Cammda, and neither are you. And you know what the other thing is? What I’ve got?”

He moved closer, ready to press Cammda to the wall if she spoke too far out of turn. She grew frightened, began to look like she was now the one wondering about that often-promised flight down the stairs.

“I’ve had enough of your threats, Cammda . . . but you know something . . . maybe we should just panic, do something extreme, follow our instincts and do the first thing that comes to mind. Throw everything away we ever believed in, not just some of it, but all of it, the career, oaths, morals--all of it, every dram, since we’ve been doing that all these years anyway.”

He stepped even closer, dragging his feet as he moved.

“That other thing in my locker will cause Mr. Palla to have a seizure with his blackout. If we decide we aren’t liking what we’re hearing, or we aren’t getting anywhere with him, this is the kind of seizure that will cause him to have a heart attack because he decided to try out some unprescribed sleep meds he bought off the street last night. We can put the needle in his hand and say he was so buzzed up on syn droem he just decided he was the doctor and medicated himself while we weren’t looking. All I need is an accomplice who can feed it to him through an IV port after I tell him his blood work shows he should have a bag on him. Which it will, because that boy is clearly not taking care of himself. So I’m going to get both of those things now and give them to you after lunch, and let you, Mrs. Nurse Aureen, since you seem so willing to lead this expedition, you can be the deciding vote that says whether or not after we hear what he has to say tomorrow that this is the correct course. Because one way or another, we aren’t going to prison.”

He cupped his fingers around his chin and briefly stroked the side of his face in an effort to stay his quivering jaw.

“You’re looking at me like you think I won’t, Cammda, but I will. I’m going to do my part in this. Can you?”

He left the exam room before she could answer, knowing she would only say yes and then try to argue for shoving Mr. Palla down the stairs. But his idea had an appeal too, one less physical in its approach, yet ultimately less inclined to fail.

As he walked he kept his head down, avoiding the faces attached to the bodies that swept him through the clinic’s corridors at a speed far better than he could manage on his own. He looked up as he neared his office, veered off, went inside, locked the door, sat down at his desk, and puked into a trash can. When nothing else would come up, he started smearing the sweat off his face--with a tremoring hand that was flame hot!

He couldn’t do this! He had to tell Cammda he’d changed his mind--that he didn’t want to murder Ank Palla! Then he remembered what they’d both said about not going to prison, and he puked again, this time until his stomach was truly empty and sour bile hung syruplike from his lips.

He groaned miserably, tried to take a deep breath.

It only made him feel worse. He inhaled the vomit’s fragrance and was immediately revisited by an old friend . . . the immortal odor from Big Olnn’s fight bite.

He spent the next ten minutes heaving up air and foaming mucous.

#

Fourth session. Grann’s assumption about how Ank’s visions were stimulated was correct.

Ank saw the bracelet on the cabinet, next to the sink, asked about it as Cammda was hooking him up to the IV, listened to her contrived lie about how it was always getting in her way when she worked on her vode. . . then he blacked out . . . and told a story about a syn droem abuser named Tetts . . .

#

. . . she was mumbling, like someone telling a story, or trying, but her tongue was so bloated from the rain that had dribbled into her mouth, the man couldn’t understand anything she was saying. It was all gibberish . . . syn droem induced gibberish. He had seen it before, but never like this. He considered dragging her inside and raping her, but her skin was already blistering, saturated with acid, and he wasn’t about to chance a rain-burnt dick.

Three-hundred stories overhead, the sky yawned, vomiting out another downburst, an acid-laced torrent that splattered like exploding glass against his rainsuit. Tetts’ face stared into the opening of his hood’s rain extension, but she didn’t see him. He only saw her. Sopping now. Her dark hair plastered into the shape of her skull, her lips still moving, still telling her story, blotted out by the sound of crashing water.

Then she wrapped her arms around her knees and squeezed them against her chest . . . and she tried to tell her story again, wondering why there was no one to listen. It was a good story too. The one about how she had come to this end and all the people who let it happen to her . . .

Warm tears was the last real sensation she recalled, warm tears mixed with the cold rain that was trying to cut her face open.

Crying.

A word. A question.

Crying?

Yes, she was crying.

“Crying?” the man in the rainsuit asked.

Yes, I’m crying, she didn’t say.

And I’m trying to tell you something too. Only you’re not around anymore to hear it.

“Crazy little droemer bitch,” the man mumbled. He moved closer to the steps where she sat. The downburst was already letting up. “Little, crazy, crying bitch. Can’t understand a word you’re saying, Tetts. But definitely it’s not good for you to be out in a storm. Not this one. Did you even hear this was sure to be one of the bad ones? Full acid content tonight, baby. God, you are a stupid, stupid bitch! So you’re good to me for what now? What good is a used droemer girl?”

She said something that might have been an answer. He couldn’t tell.

“For nothing is all you’re good for, Tetts. It’s all over, all too late now. Just listen was all you had to do. Listen to me and what I tell you to do. Now you’re just going to sit there and die. For nothing!”

Tetts bit deep into her lip and blinked stinging water from her eyes. The taste of blood warmed her swollen tongue as she thought of the people who led her to this . . . to her death under an acid sky that wanted to boil the beautiful, white skin right off her body . . . they were the same people who led her to know the electric acid searing away the darkened miles of nerves in every reach of her body, causing her so much agony that she thought constantly and desperately of ways to strip every raw, throbbing inch of the pain-carrying fibers from her flesh . . . only she couldn’t move anymore. Not this time. Not even enough to save herself.

This was going to be her last one . . . her final trip to the droem.

“Can’t think straight, Tetts? Was it a good pill this time? Or a bad one? God you have been so frustrating to me! I should be the one who gets to kill you, not your final droem.”

He bent down and tried to look into her eyes. They seemed different, deeply focused on things that weren’t there. It was odd, and unsettling. He had never seen a droem like this, not even a dying one. “Wish I could hear what you’re saying, girl. Are you trying to sing?” He laughed, but then found himself listening, trying to make out the sibylline rhythm of her words, for in a weird way, it did sound a bit like singing.

He nibbled the backside of his lips in frustration and straightened up. “Why am I wasting the time? You never had anything to say before. Nothing good. Definitely nothing smart. Why so much effort out now? It’s over, Tetts. Little droemer girl is finished. The city won, girl . . . guess you should’ve tried the ‘scrapes instead of the splashes.”

He waved a glove-protected hand in front of her face.

Surprisingly, she flinched, her eyes snapping shut suddenly, and then bursting open again.

He jerked his hand back. “Say yes!!! You can see me! Poor little Tetts! Trying to have a last word on me! But that sweet little tongue’s gotten too big for her fucking mouth! I can’t even understand you . . . and you’re drooling blood!!! Can you not see this!?! Is this not beyond pathetic now?!?” He laughed again. Harder and longer.

Poor Tetts. Yes. Poor me. I’m being eaten up, mind and body, and there’s no one to hear my going-out story. And it’s an important one too! Why isn’t there anyone listening?

“You know, Tetts, you can’t be helped anymore, and I don’t need to be here for it. I think I’ll just wait for tomorrow, and vode you up on the morgue views.”

The man was about to allow himself another laugh at her . . . instead, he stamped his foot on the pavement, splashing her face with more burning water.

“See you in the morning,” he grumbled. It was starting to rain even harder now, so he made a quick check of his hood extension to see that it was properly secured, and walked off.

Tetts didn’t feel the rain this time. She didn’t feel anything, would feel nothing ever again. Her stomach yawned open and she began to puke up electric drugs that weren’t there.

Her story ended with no one to hear it . . .

#

. . . when it was clear Ank was finished talking, Cammda shook herself free of his influence, walked stiffly over to the IV bag hanging from the rolling hook stand next to the examination table. Ank was conveniently needled up and taped into the bag, an electrolyte drip replenishing his supposedly glucose-depleted body.

Cammda looked over at Grann.

She wasn’t nervous, or at all hesitant . . . nothing but pure confidence.

She plunged the point of a syringe into one of the injection ports on the IV tube, her thumb hesitating on the head of the plunger as she stared down at the boy on the table. She could tell by the expression in his open eyes, the slow normalization of color to Ank’s face, that he was seconds away from “waking up” from his blackout, and his useless, worthless story about Tetts.

Dr. Grann Newhan watched silently, his guts roiling again, wondering helplessly what Cammda had decided. What was she going to do? Then a funny thought came to him.

He wondered if he was about to spend the rest of his life surrounded by comics, or convicts.

#

Welding on glass.

Some said it couldn’t be done. Not in the traditional way. Not like welding metal to metal or sonically fusing together panes of ordinary glass. Especially not by workers who lacked specialized training and equipment. And certainly not on inch-thick Durarmo® with its flexible-laminate core to consider. It was impossible. Which meant, of course, it was a challenge that had to be met, as there was no other method durable enough for joining one piece of Duramo® to another. The acid rains alone effortlessly consumed the entire scientific warren of gaskets and sealants and bonding agents. Ate right through them. Plastic. Rubber. Silicones. Polymers. Ceramics. Alloys. Every one, fodder for the chemically caustic precipitation.

So the engineers invented a way, an easy, inexpensive way for the average mound builder to weld on Durarmo®, to permanently consolidate individual units of glass into massive architectural systems held together by weather-impervious seams. Because that’s what humans did. They dreamed of grand solutions to their problems, much as Cammda had dreamed of her own grand solution for staying out of prison.

The engineers used powdered diamonds to achieve their end.

All she had to do was become a murderer.

At just after 9:00 the next morning, Cammda was walking the clinic halls, tapping in the final routines on a file destined for the morgue.

As she tuned the entries to suit her version of Ank Palla’s death, she felt a clear sense of triumph. Sadly, though, it was an emotion stained with bitterness. Now that she and Grann had actually committed themselves to murdering a patient, the waves of elation flooding through her heavily medicated mind consoled her in ways that were truly immoral. Sure, her family still had someone to take care of them, someone who could tell them what had become of Thriina, but at what expense? Well, she wasn’t going to prison. Hell maybe. But no prison time first. No lifer’s squat. That was the one price she wouldn’t be paying, and the only one that mattered. And with enough time, and enough self-medication, she would eventually believe that everything she had done to achieve this end was completely justified; she had a family to raise and care for, and a sister who was going to have to hear, one day soon, that her daughter wasn’t coming home.

Cammda opened her mouth to sigh, but instead began to sob.

The narcotic sampler she had taken yesterday was already burning itself off, but not before it had duped her into thinking everything was going to be fine when it clearly wasn’t. Everything was all wrong, in every imaginable way. And now? Now she was no better than that slogger, Big Olnn, the monster who killed her niece.

Suddenly she needed a place to sit down. Her leg muscles felt like hollow straws, collapsing under the weight of her own body. She headed for the nearest empty room, opened the door and dived inside, hardly surprised to find that she was in Grann’s primary exam room, with its one, ugly, tusk-colored wall and that stupid calendar of the city hanging there.

And something else, a person, naked and dark, draped in a white sheet taken right off the exam table where he was sitting.

“Nurse Aureen . . . I am so glad. I had the worst dream ever. It went on for hours.”

He shivered slightly, eyes bulging, frightened, unblinking.

“Nurse? Did you hear me? You won’t believe where I woke up.”

“No,” she sputtered softly. “No, no, no. You died!” She slumped backwards against the door. It, and no longer her legs, was the only thing propping her up, keeping her off the floor.

Then the body slumped backwards too, as dead and lifeless as it had been the day before, a bit stiffer perhaps than when they had hauled Ank Palla to the morgue, but the man no longer propping him up was very alive. And he was smiling, clearly quite excited about his sense of morose humor. He had placed a chair next to the exam table, and sitting down in it, had hidden behind Mr. Palla’s rigid corpse, turning the boy into a life-sized ventriloquist’s dummy.

Cammda realized now it wasn’t even Palla’s voice she’d heard, and his lips never actually moved. But the initial shock of seeing him and thinking he was still alive made it impossible for her mind to immediately rectify those simple facts.

Then she was aware of her heart trying to push its way out of her chest, and her entire body turned colder than ice, from core to toes.

“Yes, he’s still dead, Mrs. Aureen,” said the man in the chair. “And I’m afraid we’re going to have to talk about that, because I would like to know why this man is dead. And why he was here in the first place. And why, according to a source in this clinic, you and Dr. Newhan would go to so much trouble to falsify so much information on this poor, young droemer. This poor boy who supposedly killed himself right here in this very room.”

Her heart was going like a hammer now, chipping away at the glacier damming up her blood.

“What the fuck!?!” she spat. “Who the fuck are you?” She dropped her vode. No. It wasn’t even in her hand to drop. She must have dropped it already, without even knowing it, freeing her fingers, so that they automatically tightened into fists, bloodless clubs of meat and bone eagerly waiting for the call to thump this man into the floor.

“Division Enforcement, Mrs. Aureen.” He stood up. “Now I think you need to stay calm, and like I said, just talk to me about this.”

He didn’t have to tell her who he was. She knew what was happening the second she saw the suit. Plus he was wearing a small badge that just peeked out from under his lapel, but the name in the legend had been turned off. Blanked. Possibly a bad sign. Or maybe a good one. Maybe it was an indication that Division Enforcement itself didn’t even know he was here. Not yet. They would soon enough, though. As for why he was here, someone in the clinic had finally grown suspicious of Mr. Palla and talked. Talked about the conspiracy to kill an innocent droemer boy. Which was obviously impossible. No one could have known or even guessed about that aspect of it. The recent secrecy laws mandating the universal inclusion of a personal delete-dump feature on all vodes--no matter who used them or how--this by itself should have protected her secret. So why else was a Division man taking an interest in what appeared to be a perfectly explainable death?

Then it became obvious.

They knew.

Somehow the government knew about Ank Palla’s clairvoyant abilities! Just like she had tried to warn Grann! It was a conspiracy! The hooks were in! And now it was too late!

They knew!

Or . . . maybe not . . . maybe they were only interested in the dubious circumstances related to Mr. Palla’s time at the clinic, and his unexpected demise.

“Talk?” she said slowly. “Yes, talk. But not here. Not in front of him.” She gave the oddly bent corpse a nervous nod.

The man laughed under his breath. “Fine, then. We can talk anywhere. Where would you like to go?”

Cammda grinned and undid her fists. Her heart was still hammering, and her skin had grown clammy and numb, but she knew where to go. And--thanks to the Enlightenment Channel--she also knew a few things about Division Enforcement procedures. Including why the name on his badge was turned off.

“You got here awfully quick--my morgue report isn’t even finished. Plus you’re alone. You haven’t turned this in yet. And what about Grann? You haven’t talked to him either.”

He held up his vode and wiggled it prominently.

“Turning this in, making it official, contacting Dr. Newhan . . . those things are only a tap away, Mrs. Aureen. You are one sharp lady. I take it then you’re wondering if there’s still time for us to arrange something, off-record. Now I wouldn’t say I can be corrupted, but I will say deals can be made. Or one can take the squat for the other, no corruption necessarily in that. And no, I’ve not met with Dr. Newhan yet. He hasn’t made it in this morning. But he’s due any moment, yes? And a doctor is a much bigger take than his nurse. So we better find that talking place fast. Better lock this room behind us too, and when we get back we’re gonna have to get this body taken care of. Discreetly. Do you know how hard it is to get a dead body up here? Discreetly? And if you hadn’t come in before some other nurse, well, it would have been really awkward. Or if Dr. Newhan had made it in first, perhaps he’d be the one selling your soul right now. So . . . you had a place in mind we can talk?”

“Yes,” she said, feeling calmer now, and oddly vulnerable without her vode, though she didn’t dare look down to find it. “Yes. Actually, there’s a very private squirt on the northeast corner of this floor.. It looks straight down on the Sim Fara River. I think that I definitely am going to need a warm spot to catch my breath. So that’s where we’ll go. It’s a perfect place for us to go--in every way.”

Cammda’s voice became submissive, agreeable, defeated, uncertain. Or so she hoped it sounded, though it pained her to hear herself this way. It was necessary, however, because inwardly, she was laughing so hard she wanted to grab Ank’s body and take off down the hallways with it, screaming her lungs bloody and waving him over her head like a flag of victory. And if this man from Division Enforcement had only known how she was feeling at this very moment, he wouldn’t have even known what to say or think. Probably he would have just asked her quite simply why she was so damned happy all of a sudden.

She wouldn’t have been able to answer of course, not without ruining the surprise. But had she wanted, it would have been easy enough to explain.

Just yesterday evening, after a hostile discussion with Grann about the killing of Ank Palla, he finally asked her where this magic window of hers was at, the one she was always threatening to throw him out of. Since windows couldn’t be opened directly to the weather anymore, the question was understandable. A window like that was illegal.

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “I know where one’s at. And it’s perfect in every way. I’m just saving it for the right asshole.”

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