The five years have been kind to her. Very kind. It was something he probably couldn’t say about himself. In those five years, he’d been through all manner of physical punishments, from shrapnel to trench foot. Not to mention what the sun exposure did to his pale skin—a ginger’s curse. Smoke and flames. Insects. It wasn’t something he’d normally think about, but seeing Fiona in scrubs brought back the memories. Looking into the soft light of her eyes was like peering into a time portal. A time before five years of lessons and punishments and some mild victories. But mostly of aging poorly. The battlefield wasn’t the place to stay youthful, both physically and mentally. He’d imagine a hospital environment was similar in that respect. But damn, she did look good.

He wondered, immediately, like some dumb animal, if she’d already found a mate. Maybe some rich doctor. A guy who wouldn’t have to fly around the world to earn a decent paycheck, doing some rush job deep in the bush or sweltering in the mirage of a scorching desert.

“Quit staring at me,” Fiona told him with a nervous laugh as they stood in the elevator.

But it was hard not to.

“Just making up for some lost time.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Five years, huh?”

Jasper nodded. “You married?”

She waved her hand at him, her ringless finger in particular.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Jasper, careful not to lean much weight on his hand as he swayed back into the hand rail. “A lot of nurses I know take their rings off at work.”

“Maybe they’re trying to send you a message.”

“No,” he said. “I’m pretty clear about stuff like that. They know I keep it professional at work.” He finally looked away, feeling a little sheepish about the topic. He definitely lived by a different philosophy back when he was training with Fiona. Their relationship had been partly the reason for adopting that philosophy.

He waited for her to say something snarky about it, or at least something. But she just kept smiling at him instead.

They got off the elevator on the ICU floor, where she showed him the room and the machinery that were supposedly the cause of an untimely death.

The bed, of course, had been emptied and stripped. All traces of the poor patient were missing, as was the paperwork.

“Can you get me any records or anything?” asked Jasper. “His charts?”

Fiona starting looking around the room, checking the empty file folders.

“If not, I can probably wait and then look them up on the system. But I’d rather do this off the record.”

She agreed to go check for them and snuck out of the room.

Jasper turned back to the scene of the crime. The room almost reeked of death. Recent death. Misery. He looked at all the instruments and wires and different life support apparatus hanging in various locations around the bed like a cluster of angels. Only now they’d all been switched off, cold and dark and useless, the unattached and half-disabled tubes and wires hanging pointlessly.

In the far corner of the room were a few black garbage bags surrounded by plants and flowers of various life stages. Soon they’d all be as dead as their recipient, and life would continue, as it would for Jasper and everyone else in the hospital, all those busy people walking by the doorway, bodies rushing by so full of life. It was the great circle, an idea that he tried not to dwell on too often. But it was an idea, nonetheless, that provided some solace when he needed it. It was something he’d turn to upon some tragedy or another, such as his losing a patient. He felt almost like that here, in this man’s room, without ever seeing or knowing him. But maybe he wouldn’t have died in vain.

If this was the result of a cyber attack, then maybe he could learn something from it. Hopefully he would learn it before the prince arrived. But that seemed so secondary now. People—civilians—were getting caught in the mix.

That is, if it had been deliberate.

He might not know, or ever know. But the charts and the readouts on the computers would provide the first clues either way. He looked around at each of the different machines, each of them keeping some facet of the man’s body alive. He would have to download the readouts for each of them. It was looking like it was going to be another very long night.

He began wondering how late Fiona’s shift ran. When she got off . . .

“I couldn’t find the charts for you,” said Fiona, slipping into the room with a huff. “Sorry. They moved on already.”

“No problem. Thanks anyway,” Jasper said as he climbed out from behind a dialysis machine. “I’ll have to look it up tonight.”

“Do you want his name and number?”

Jasper typed the patient’s name and ID number, and then said, “I’ll need your number, too.”

“My ID number?”

“No. Phone.”

“For official business?” She was grinning. Cute little dimples formed at the sides of her mouth.

“Of course.” He cleared his throat and looked away, at the empty bed, reminding himself not to get too cute in this room. It was no place for picking up women. Not even nurses.

“So, uh . . .” Fiona looked slightly uncomfortable also, perhaps also wanting to change the subject. “So, he passed away when the respirator stopped working. There was something wrong with the alarms, too. It stopped passing air but the alarms never signaled.”

Jasper thought that it was at least some form of consolation that the patient wasn’t conscious while he suffocated.

“It didn’t show up anywhere,” said Fiona. “So, no one had any idea what was happening.”

“I thought you said the family blamed the doctor for doing something?”

“He just tried to restart the machine, but it was already too late.”

Jasper imagined the grim sequence of events. The family just sitting there with him as he died, not even knowing he was suffocating. Some poor nurse just casually checking on him and finding him dead, and then probably panicking and calling the doctor. They weren’t trained to deal with cyber attacks.

“That’s all he did?” asked Jasper. “He just restarted it and got the alerts going?”

Fiona nodded sadly. “They thought he killed him.”

“Jesus Christ.”

He pictured it in his mind. The malfunctioning alerts meant that no one would hear a flatline sound. And thus, when the doctor restarted everything, they finally heard it kick on.

“I’m sure it will be investigated to death,” said Fiona.

“Yeah. I’ll have to try to beat them to it.” He walked over to the ventilator. “Maybe I should talk to the coroner, too.”

“I don’t really have any contacts there.”

“It’s okay, I’ll figure something out.”

“I try to keep my patients out of the basement.” She grinned at him.

“Me too.” He studied her face again, remembering the good old days, a celebration for Jasper completing his rotation training. The drunken hilarity, the loosened inhibitions. He still didn’t consider it a mistake. Though he worried that she might not think the same thing. “So how have you been doing? How’s life been treating you?”

She smiled weakly. “Uh, good. I’m good. Working, you know . . . How about you?” She appeared a little reluctant to play catch-up in an intensive care room. Jasper gave her a similarly halfhearted answer and then let her get on with her day. He probably took up too much of her time already.

“But let’s catch up,” she said. “After I’m done.”

The problem was that Jasper didn’t know when he’d be done, if ever. He looked back at all the machines he’d have to run diagnostics on, feeling increasingly swamped with work. So that was it, then. Time to get to work.

He said goodbye to Fiona and then opened his laptop on a table. While the machine booted up, he ran an ethernet cable from it to the back of the ventilator. It fit into the machine with a little plastic snapping sound. He returned to the laptop to begin downloading whatever information he could from the faulty medical device. As he looked around the room for what to scrutinize next, he noticed the white shape of a medical coat in the doorway. A tallish, older man. A doctor.

“What the hell is this?” the doctor asked gruffly.

“IT,” said Jasper, sounding as bored as he could.

“What?”

“I’m just running some diagnostics on the machine here. I understand there was a problem with it today. Were you here for that?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the IT guy,” Jasper said again, head down, still working.

“Do I need to call security?”

“No. Are you the doctor that was having trouble with this machine? It would be helpful if we could go over some things . . .” Jasper stopped talking when he noticed that the doctor was again looking out of the room down the hall. He seemed to be motioning to somebody. Maybe security. “Sir?” said Jasper.

“Who is this guy?” the doctor asked someone outside of the room.

“What guy?” It was the sound of Fiona’s voice, and her footsteps, the sounds approaching the room.

“This guy in here saying he’s IT.” The doctor stepped aside for Fiona to enter the room before following her in. “Does this guy look familiar to you?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Fiona,” he said, standing inside the room but still blocking the doorway. “I just saw you in here talking to him. What the hell’s going on?”

“He said he was from IT and he just had a few questions for me, about the . . .”

“About the what?”

“The respirator,” she said.

The doctor turned to Jasper. His face flashed with anger. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Rick.” Jasper was back to hovering over his laptop. “The new guy.” He watched the progress of the data transfer come to completion.

“You’re new? What kind of permission do you have to be in here, Rick?”

Jasper moved to detach the ethernet cable, “Well, I don’t need yours.”

“Buddy, I’m two seconds away from calling security on your ass.”

“How about I just call my supervisor?” He stopped working for a moment to give a look at the doctor. “How about we all just relax, and I can call my supervisor and then we’ll—”

“I don’t care about your supervisor.”

“Ever heard of a man named Clarence Mitchell?”

The doctor frowned. “That’s your supervisor?”

Jasper nodded as he packed up his gear. He’d have to have a discussion with Clarence one way or another. There was no way he could get any work done in this type of environment. And he’d also like to ask about this asshole doctor.

“Alright, then,” the doctor said. “So get him on the phone. Right now.”

Jasper just kept packing up, stuffing the laptop and the cable into his bag.

“Well, go ahead. I presume you have his personal cell number, right?”

Jasper, without a word, pulled out his phone. He started thumbing through his contacts.

“Dr. Wahl,” said Fiona. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I have to work to do . . .”

The doctor grumbled something to her, and then Jasper heard her footsteps walking away from the room. As the phone began to ring, he took another glance at the doctor. “You sure know how to bother people when they’re trying to work.”

“And turn on the speaker so I can hear it.”

Jasper chuckled, and then complied. The room filled with the warm ringing sound until a man’s voice came on with a “Hello?”

“Is this Clarence Mitchell?” Jasper asked.

“Yes.”

“This is Rick. You know, your friend Rick.”

“My friend Rick, sure. What can I help you with?”

“Well, I’m standing here with a very nice gentleman who seems a little confused about what I’m doing here. I don’t know if he’s a doctor or what he is, but I just don’t want him to make a fool out of himself.” Jasper had his eyes trained on the doctor as he spoke, each word seeming to infuriate him more than the last. But it wasn’t just anger. He started to look scared.

“Who?” asked Clarence. “What are you talking about?”

Jasper asked the doctor for his name, but Clarence jumped in. “Put him on the line.”

Jasper held the phone out to the doctor. “Who is this?” Clarence’s voice squawked loudly from the speaker.

“Well, go ahead,” said Jasper. “Talk to him. I thought you wanted—”

The voice interrupted again with an angry barrage of, “What the hell is going on here?!”

“He’s afraid to say his name,” said Jasper, walking toward the doctor, trying to get close enough to read his name tag.

“I’m not afraid to say—”

“His name is Dr. Wahl,” said Jasper.

Dr. Wahl looked like something had been stolen from him, like a boy in the sandbox losing his toy truck. “What the fuck is this?” he barked at Jasper. “The fuck you think you’re doing?”

“Dr. Wahl?” called the voice on the phone, sounding as unimpressed as ever. “Did I hear that right?”

“Sir, the . . . The gentleman was . . .” Dr. Wahl sputtered to a stop.

“The gentleman was what?” asked Clarence.

“He was working,” said Jasper. “The gentleman was working.”

“I . . . I wasn’t sure who he was,” said Dr. Wahl.

“Clarence,” said Jasper. “I think we’ll have to meet today and discuss this. I can’t have this happen every time I’m trying to get some work done.”

“You were supposed to have an ID badge, Rick” said Clarence.

“Yes, I was.”

There was long sigh on the other end of the call. “We’ll have to get you an ID badge. Especially for tomorrow.”

Dr. Wahl stormed off.