In darkness, with his heartbeat a dull thump that pounded between his ears, and feeling an edge of raw fear, Bexie Montgomery gasped for air and forced his eyes to open.
The room was bathed in soft light, tending toward blue. Lying in a still-paralyzed null space of lucid sleep, he deciphered rounded walls. Slits of windows placed high up. The floor, a light tile of some kind.
The smell was neutral.
He was warm.
Anxious people can hear their bodies working, a feminine voice said as the heartbeat faded.
Angela? Or had the voice been Pritzi?
Fuck it either way. He wasn’t a goddamned pussy. He’d never been anxious a day in his life.
And who the hell were Angela or Pritzi, anyway?
“Seriously,” he said with a thick tongue. “Someone tell me who the hell they think they are?”
A mechanical system the size of a mini fridge rolled to his bedside, the only sound the hum of its electronics. A ring of pale blue and green lights flashed from a control panel across its surface. Extending an arm, it disconnected cords from Bexie’s bed.
Everything else was quiet.
Relaxing, he took in a large breath and blinked. Only then did he notice the sheets lying across his body, or in fact, the bed itself.
“Where am I?”
His voice was raw. His throat dry.
He needed to scratch his nose, but his arms wouldn’t budge.
Glancing, he saw his hands were locked down, engulfed by bulbous cuffs of some composite material, white and made of a plasticky rubber, that were attached to rails that ran down each side of the bed.
They were warm, though, the cuffs, soft and fitted to his hands in ways that were anything but uncomfortable. He could sit here forever if he didn’t have to scratch.
“How are you feeling, Mr. Montgomery?” the nurse said, stepping into view.
“Like a trillion bucks,” Bexie replied without knowing why.
She was female. Young. Probably just out of school — thin, with short, dark hair swept off a smooth face. Her skin was dark, her features at least partially Asian. She wore a uniform that was white and pink, and seemed comfortable.
The nurse’s lips curled upward in an expression Bexie thought was supposed to be a smile.
Yes, she was very young.
“Can I move my hands? I need to scratch my nose.”
She used an edge of his sheet to do the deed for him.
A pair of sapphires were embedded into her earlobes — or maybe they were aquamarines. Bexie had never been good with gemology except to note the fact that jewelry made women happy for a while. But he noticed the stones as she leaned over to adjust his pillow because they flared with a series of flashes.
A line of the stones ran along the back of her skull to disappear under her hairline.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in a resuscitation center in Geo-Span Medical Center, Mr. Montgomery. We’re taking care to bring you up properly.”
“Resuscitation center?” he replied. “Was I dead?”
Yes, he recalled. For some reason he was supposed to be dead.
She smiled again.
A holographic image appeared over the bed. Tables and charts.
The nurse waved a hand along a stream of color, then toggled a series of buttons.
“You’re going to feel some movement in your arms and legs,” she said. “It’s a process of autonomous isometric exercises. Good for your new muscles. Keeps things optimal while you’re processing. It means that once you’re ready, you’ll be able to stand up and move right away.”
“Sounds great.”
She pointed at several places in his chart.
A tension ran along his right arm, then his left, along his right leg, then the other. It didn’t hurt. Just the opposite. It was like a rolling pin was being run up and down the long lengths of each extremity.
“Feels like a massage,” he said.
Another smile came as she worked. Halfway, this time.
“What’s your name?” Bexie asked.
“Julia Epsilon,” she replied. “Of B-Ward.”
“Well, Julia Epsilon of B-Ward, can I move my hands?”
“Your blood pressure is high, but you are doing well,” she said. “I’ll bring the doctor.”
“I asked if I could use my hands.”
“Soon,” she said.
She glanced to the machine that had now moved to the foot of his bed. Bexie had been wrong before — rather than rolling, the thing was floating on a pad of air.
“Don’t mind the tripid,” she said. “They are going to test your nervous system and neural function.”
As the nurse left, the machine ran two arms under the sheets.
He tried to pull away, but he found his legs, too, were locked in place by more of the cuffs.
A pair of instruments latched onto his feet, and he gasped as rivers of cold flowed up his legs.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, bracing himself. “What the hell are you doing?”
The snakes stopped high up on his thighs, for which he was immensely relieved, then looped around his legs.
Another holo screen appeared, green lights flashing.
The hair on his legs tingled in patterns across his thighs.
That’s when the next chunk of memory dropped into place.
The room had reeked of leather and wood, with carpet that ate noise for breakfast. The air had been stale, the men aged.
He remembered contracts.
DNA. Simple swabs. A long day with his brain being scanned.
The smell of salt.
Goodbyes with work teams during his last day at the office. Email and video notes. Renee’s very vigorous going-away present later that evening.
And finally, he remembered his bank accounts — yes.
He remembered them.
He was thirty-nine when the diagnosis came.
He remembered not believing it.
Bexie Montgomery was not a man who came down with a terminal disease. The all-powerful curator of Creutzfeldt-Jakob — an ugly, degenerative brain infection — hadn’t gotten the message, though.
Blurred vision. Headaches. An inability to sleep.
“You’re not going to beat this, Bexie,” the doctor said. “Weeks, maybe months. Not years.”
He was not a man without contacts, however.
He remembered Dr. Michela Angelic, who had perfected a stripping process that could save a person’s brain patterns — personality, cognitive paths, and lived memories — but who had not yet published because she still needed to work out the back end of the technology.
Bexie understood her goal, though.
Clone and upload. Grow your own body, load your own mind.
He remembered discussions of risk.
That was his thing, after all — what separated him from the rest.
He enjoyed looking at a map of the moment and seeing probabilities. He prided himself in being able to parse reckless steps from those that were simply high-return events. Bexie Montgomery was a man who understood the value proposition of risk and benefit, a man who made a living seeing opportunities where others missed them.
He enjoyed making the right bets.
Bexie blinked with the impact of the memory.
He licked his lips and felt the stubble of growth along his upper lip.
He took several deep breaths.
With the nurse gone, he was alone, feeling the autonomous exercisers work through his legs and then up to his arms again.
At his feet, the tripid retracted probes.
“What year is it?” he asked the machine, as if it would respond.
“2372,” it replied.
He gave an involuntary chuff of laughter.
“Holy shit,” he said.
More than three hundred years.
He crunched numbers.
Assuming his pile could double every decade, Bexie was a gazillionaire many times over.
His laughter then was real.
Holy Mother of All that Was or Was Not Holy…
He had won.
He clenched his fists. Pressed his feet hard into the foot of the bed.
“Holy shit,” he said again. “It goddamned worked!”
Or had he?
Was his money still there?
This is when the floating football entered the room.
It was white and spherical, with a row of lights flashing a rapid spectrum of colors. Sensors and short probes stuck out at all angles, but they were mostly rounded and bristly rather than angular and sharp, making the ball look like a puffer fish that floated in midair.
“Good morning, Mr. Montgomery,” the thing said in a neutral voice that seemed to come from inside his mind like his heartbeat in the darkness had earlier. The phrase Welcome to Think Space came from somewhere. “I am your doctor. We are very happy to have you here.”
Male, he thought. The voice was male. He strained to look left then right. He pulled on his restraints to no avail.
His heart pounded.
“What the hell?”
“I said we are very happy to have you here.” The doctor hovered over his bed, blue lights pulsing slowly. “I see your blood pressure is up. How are you feeling overall?”
“I want out of here.”
“You will be released when your recovery is complete.”
“I’ve got things to do. I need to see my trustee.”
“You will see a counselor from the Central Inspector’s Office as we near your release.”
“Central Inspector’s Office? Am I a goddamned prisoner here? I want to see my trustee now.”
“I admit I don’t know what a trustee is, but the counselor will see you as you are ready to be released.”
“This is bullshit. I can make things very unpleasant for you if I don’t get my way.”
“I don’t understand.”
Bexie shook his head. “Look at me, arguing with a goddamned robot.”
He could believe a mechanical doctor wouldn’t be programmed to understand banks and trustees, but he was talking about a goddamned boatload of money. He couldn’t afford to take a cavalier attitude. And the fact was, his money was probably why he was in lockdown. Someone would want it. Someone with the wherewithal to lock him up.
“Can I at least get a real doctor here?” Bexie said.
“A human, you mean?” the doctor bot replied as it called up the same diagrams the nurse had.
“What the hell else would I mean?”
“Our nurses are made and deployed in such a way as to ensure our patients are comfortable in their presence, but we do not constrain our doctors to the physical limits of your human bodies. Perhaps we should consider doing that.”
“Configured for our comfort?”
The doctor bot didn’t respond, but Bexie’s mind ran in several directions at once. Clones? he wondered. Robots? Genetic engineering? AI interfaces? She could be any of the above, he supposed. She looked human, but memories of progress along all these lines came flooding back to him. Even in his own time, robotics and cloning technologies had been combining to create entities that were so humanlike they could fool a person. All he could say right now was that Nurse Epsilon’s touch was no different from anyone else’s.
His gaze went to the doctor.
“I’m not joking. I want to talk to a real doctor.”
“Your recovery is progressing well, Mr. Montgomery. I’ll have a nurse explain the acclimation process shortly. Once we’re certain of your body’s ability to control itself, the restraints will be released. You need to rest, though. Give your body more time to settle in. In the meantime, I will prescribe the release of your next collection of learning modules.”
“I don’t want a goddamned learning module. I want my trustee.”
The doctor left the room.
The nurse returned, and Bexie suddenly wondered what the doctor’s comment had meant.
“We’ll get you a conditioning nurse later today,” Julia said aloud, her gaze flashing to the tripid and a pattern sequencing along her gem line. “But first let’s get you a little more sleep.”
The box rolled closer. An arm swabbed something over his leg.
He felt his consciousness begin to fade and remembered a name from before. “Hey, Julia Epsilon from Ward B,” he said, sure he was slurring words. “Can you get Kinji Hall’s cell phone for me?”
“Nothing named Kinji Hall works here,” the nurse replied.
This confused him, but before he could decide why, the learning module’s low rumbling voice filled his mind.