LOVE PLUS ONE
NANOTECHNOLOGY completely changed the health-care industry. Gone was the need for sterilized equipment, brutal surgeries, and physically skilled doctors. Most medical issues could be solved with over-the-counter sprays and bandages and whatnot, but people still had to go to a hospital for major traumas or fixes. Trauma meant you were in mortal danger, whereas fixes meant you didn’t like something about yourself and wanted to change it. A nano cream, for example, might get rid of your crow’s feet, but if you lost an arm, you needed to go see a doctor. I also think it was so people didn’t do weird black-market shit like they did in the early days—adding extra limbs, extra organs, grotesque stuff like that. Nanos still did all the work, mind you, but doctors were there to explain, architect, and supervise the procedures. Surgeries were glass-walled, clean rooms occupied by billions of tiny self-replicating, highly specialized robots, but patient rooms still had the feel of an efficiency motel.
In Costa Rica, at the San José CIMA hospital, Joel Byram lay in one such room. He was dreaming.
(Okay, this is kind of confusing. I can’t call him Joel, but I need to tell you his side of the story. Sorry, it’s just difficult to talk about someone who’s not me like they are me in the third person. Let’s call him Joel Two, or better yet, Joel Too. No? Joel 2.0? Okay, yeah, that’s way too retro. Hmm. How about Joel2? Yes, that’ll work.)
So. Joel2 was dreaming. My wife stood beside him. Eyes puffy, red, depleted of tears. She planted her head on Joel2’s chest, wanting to hear his heartbeat. There were machines that could track it for her, but her faith in technology was exhausted for the day.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. She had done it. He was alive.
Sylvia lifted her head, looking out the window. Beyond the palm trees and whitewashed buildings, she could see a thin column of black smoke rising into the air from the hole that had been the San José TC. The explosion had occurred thirty minutes ago, but people were still running through the streets and emergency vehicles were still racing past, sirens blaring. No one had noticed a distraught American woman in vacation clothes enter the hospital’s teleportation chamber. Nor did they see her exit a few minutes later, dragging an unconscious American man behind her. When she brought him into the ER on a gurney, the on-calls were too preoccupied with the influx of damaged bodies to wonder why his injuries seemed relegated to the internal brain stem and spinal cord. The tissue surrounding his comms implants had not ported over, since inorganics get scanned, stored, and ported separately from organics, and he’d arrived comms-less. His injuries were deemed not life threatening, and so nanites were set to rebuild, from scratch, his comms and the soft tissue with which they needed to mesh. Then off they sent him to recovery.
It worked. Joel2 was alive. His heart was beating because of her.
Because of what she’d done.
Before she could follow that train of thought any further, there was a power surge. The room lights brightened, no longer running off the hospital’s backup generators. At the same time, Sylvia’s own comms came back on. A jumble of hysterical news feeds, social media alerts, messages from concerned friends and family members, and apoplectic work e-mails filled her field of vision. She closed them all, putting her head in her hands. Sooner or later she’d have to deal with them, particularly the work e-mails, but she couldn’t face any of it just yet.
A different alert sounded, making her open her eyes. “What is this, Julie?” Sylvia said.
“I’m so sorry, Sylvia. I know you said no interruptions whatsoever, not even if the world was ending, but someone found a way to engage my emergency protocols. It’s Pema Jigme from IT.”
Sylvia bit her lip. So much for avoidance. On the upside, if she was going to get chewed out, it could have been by somebody a lot worse. She took a deep breath. “Put her through.”
Pema’s angry compact face appeared in a close-up vid stream. Her overmanicured eyebrows made her look particularly pissed. Sylvia couldn’t stand that much self-righteousness that close to her, so she moved the stream to the room’s hologram projector. Her short coworker stood before her, arms folded, in a green pindot skirt and boxy business suit that definitely fell into James Bond–villain territory.
“What were you thinking, Sylvia?” She sounded exasperated. “Bill and Corina are freaking out. First you use Honeycomb, then you disable the hospital’s TC? Do you know how many laws you’ve broken?”
Sylvia nodded. “Comms were down. My husband was dead. I did what I had to do. And for all my efforts, he’s still barely alive!”
Her voice broke, and again she buried her face in her hands. Pema’s projection watched, her severe eyebrows softening slightly. Soon Sylvia raised her head.
“I made the call. I’m willing to face the consequences. If you’re here to fire me or arrest me, then go ahead. Anyone else in my position would have done the same.”
“I’m not here to fire you, Syl.” She looked over at the sleeping man in the hospital bed. “How is he?”
“It was touch and go for a bit. He was mostly intact, just his comms didn’t quite make it. That caused some damage to his spinal cord.” Focusing on the scientific details helped calm her. “The restore data from the glacier was incomplete because the Gehinnomites took out most of the networking infrastructure. I couldn’t access anything remotely. But—I think he’s going to be okay.”
“Good. Look, we will figure this out. But you need to get out of there. Now. Take your husband, go off comms for a day or two. IT is working up a solution, but it will take some time, and we need to keep this quiet. It is imperative that no one—no one—realize what really happened, do you agree?”
Sylvia nodded quickly.
“Good,” Pema said, relaxing her tone. “The Costa Rican police are so overwhelmed right now, you should be able to slip out unnoticed. But if the police find you, I don’t know what they’ll do. And we won’t be able to help. Do you understand?”
Sylvia nodded, looking from the dreaming doppelgänger of her husband to her coworker. “Why are you doing this for me?”
“It is my belief that, given the circumstances, anyone might have done what you did. Anyway, no use dwelling in the past. We’re in damage control now. It doesn’t help anyone if you’re not in the loop. Corporations don’t make decisions; people do.”
While the two women were talking, Joel2 dreamed. He found himself standing on the stony shore of a dark flowing river. He felt as if he were in a cavern, but he couldn’t see the rock walls or ceiling that surrounded him. The ground beneath his feet was made up of small gray pebbles that crunched when he walked. Everything was dark.
He saw a light shining on the opposite shore. Joel2 felt a strong desire to go toward it. He stepped into the frothy fast-moving water, only to find it wasn’t water, not exactly. It was room temperature, and flowed around him like smoke, or foam. There was something relaxing about it. Soothing. He started to walk toward the light, as if gently nudged by an invisible hand.
But then a tune began to play from somewhere behind him. A familiar 1980s New Wave song, one of his favorites. Joel2 stopped in the middle of the river, turning back to the synth drums. The gray foam sloshed around him, as soft and quiet as whispers.
What happened was this: as Sylvia and Pema discussed life-and-death matters, Joel2’s freshly printed brain was being connected to my comms. Once they came online, he started auto-playing my—now his—1980s music playlist. Specifically, Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon.” The song resumed from the point where my comms had been disconnected. The melody filtered into Joel2’s dream, the electric harmonica echoing softly over the dark rushing foam to where he was standing. He knew the lyrics well.
I’m a man without conviction
I’m a man who doesn’t know
Joel2 bopped his head to the beat. Something made him want to sing along. So he did.
How to sell a contradiction
As he sang, he began to walk away from the distant, beckoning light. He ran through the gray foam, speeding back to the shore from which he had come. As the breeze ruffled his hair, he increased the volume of his singing.
You come and go
You come and go—oh, oh, OH!
Joel2 drew near the rocky shore and leaped out of the dark, foamy river, landing solidly on his feet and spreading his arms. Embracing the moment, he belted out the words along with the chorus.
“Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma chameleon!” he shout-sang in the hospital bed, making Sylvia and Pema jump. Joel2 sat upright, arms wide, then froze as he saw his stricken wife and the projection of a woman he didn’t know standing beside his bed.
He turned off the music on his comms. “Where am I? What happened?”
Tears sprang to Sylvia’s eyes. They were happy tears, but she was at a loss for what to say next.
“I’ll leave you now,” Pema told Sylvia quietly, giving Joel2 a once-over. “Remember: be as quick as you can. And no comms,” she cautioned. Then her projection vanished.
“Who was that? Is this Costa Rica?” Joel2 tried to get out of the hospital bed, but his body wouldn’t cooperate.
Sylvia rushed to his side. “Yes, but take it easy. They’re still fixing you, babe.”
“Did something break?” said Joel2, inspecting himself.
“Yes and no.” Sylvia sat next to her husband-copy, picking nonexistent lint from his bedsheet. “You, um—there was an accident at the San José TC. An attack.”
Joel2’s comms—previously my comms—filled with a frenzy of news feeds and social media alerts. “Holy crap. Was I in that?”
Sylvia shook her head, then nodded, then settled for a head motion somewhere in between. “But the important thing is, you’re here now, and you’re gonna be fine. Do you remember what happened?”
Joel2 blinked. He recalled sitting in the Escrow room in the Greenwich Village TC. He remembered the conductor, a ginger-haired guy with a Michigan-shaped birthmark on his face, and hitting agree on the legalese, and the lights going down in the foyer. But there had been no bright blinding flash, and his next memory was standing on the rocky shore of that dark, foamy river. There had been a light, too; he’d felt drawn to it, compelled—but evidently all that had been a dream. He’d made it to Costa Rica, with his wife, and he felt—actually, he felt pretty terrible.
“No,” he said, dropping back to the bed in exhaustion.
Sylvia took his hand, tears still running down her cheeks. “You know, I thought I lost you today,” she said, the corners of her mouth twitching. “I can’t go through that again.”
“Me neither. Whatever it was.”
She smiled for real then. He pulled her forward, kissing her full on the mouth. Sylvia stiffened, but soon responded hungrily, her hands roving up and down his arms. I suppose it wasn’t cheating because, technically, she didn’t know I was alive in New York yet. Still, it felt a little wrong. Just as things were starting to heat up, she broke off, wiping the tears from her face. “You wanna get out of here?”
Joel2 looked his wife—my wife—up and down. “If it means more of this kind of medicine, yes, please.”
“I’ll go have a nurse clear you—I mean, release you. Sit tight.”
“As you know, my love, sitting down and resting are my two greatest competencies.”
Sylvia patted Joel2’s arm and exited, the glass wall breaking apart as she passed through it. As she spoke with a young Costa Rican woman who may have been a doctor or a nurse, Joel2 studied his reflection. The nanos were doing an amazing job. He looked fresh out of the box, not a scratch or a scar on him, except for those he’d already had. This was his first time in a bona fide hospital. He’d been to clinics a few times for minor wounds or broken bones. But those were more like hotel rooms: soothing pictures on the walls, courteous staff, comfortable bedding. The room he was in now was more like a bank. White walls, glowing blue power strips, and a spare, utilitarian bed. There were holographic displays of his vitals on one wall, but the only other indication that he was being worked on was the occasional metallic tickle on his bare skin.
Outside, Sylvia finished speaking with the young woman. She nodded, pulling up something on her comms. Her fingers pressed a few buttons only she could see, giving Joel2’s nanos a new directive. The tiny robots knocked him out, sending his brain directly to REM sleep. He drifted off into warm, healing darkness.
In the early twenty-first century, a company called Amazon began marketing a storage cloud service called the glacier, which included unlimited storage of data in what they referred to as cold storage. Within the Amazon Glacier service, data was stored in archives. Customers could upload archives as large as forty terabytes (I know, funny that was a lot back then), and once an archive was created, it could not be updated unless it was retrieved, modified, and then restored. The service became the status quo for data storage because it didn’t charge for the storage of data, but rather for the retrieval of it. This eventually led to the creation of unlimited storage tiers whereby data’s value was directly attributed to its utility and accessibility, a theory known as “Data Gravity.” Basically, the lesser utility a piece of data had, the lower its value, but if it suddenly gained value, then the cost of its retrieval would be directly proportionate to its utility. So useless information could be archived forever, but if it suddenly became very important to retrieve it, then the cost of retrieving it would be based on the speed with which someone wanted it retrieved. Eventually the dictionary definition of the word glacier became amended to include these utility-based data storage services, and the word outlasted the company that invented it.