Holy Fire (10 page)

“I can see that this is a matter you take very seriously, Doctor.”

“I do take it seriously. NTDCD is a very important technical development. I don’t say that merely because I myself have been working on it. The experiences of the first NTDCD patients are of crucial interest to society and polity. Please have a look at this.” Dr. Rosenfeld opened his notebook and showed her the screen.

An animation ran. A nude young man appeared. He was festooned from head to foot in what seemed to be junk jewelry. A plastic coronet. Earrings. False eyelashes. A little glued-on breastplate. Armlets. Bracelets. Ten identical finger rings. A dozen adhesive patches on his torso, groin, and thighs. Knee buckles, anklets, and shiny little toe rings. His hair was very short. He was strolling about an apartment, a bit clumsily and gawkily, and methodically petting a black cat.

“Those are positional tracking devices,” Mia said.

“Yes. Also galvanic skin response, a tiara encephalometer, basal core temperatures, stool and urine samples, and a battery of comprehensive lab tests twice a week.”

“I’ve never seen so many positional trackers on just one person. It’s as if he were doing virtuality.”

“Yes, rather. Muscular coordination is one of the critical factors in convalescence. We need complete and accurate readouts on the positioning of the limbs at all times. For tremor, palsy, cramping … Especially at night, because sleep disturbances seem to be one of our more prominent effects. The encephalometer you see him wearing is for
possible strokes, infarcts, preseizure activity, neuronal or glial abnormalities.… This patient is Professor Oates, he’s been one of our stars. He’s a hundred and five.”

“My goodness.” She looked at him. He was a beautiful young man.

“He’s been most cooperative. I’m sorry to say that cooperating with us is necessarily obtrusive and cumbersome. It very much hampers one’s career and social life. Professor Oates is very kindly making the necessary sacrifices for the advancement of medical knowledge and the good of the polity.”

Mia watched the screen. The nude Professor Oates did not look particularly happy about the situation. Mia spoke carefully. “I admire his courage in making such a brave act of self-abnegation.

“Professor Oates has always been very disciplined, very public-spirited. As you might expect of him, given the situation … He was a physicist, actually. Now he says he’s giving up physics. Wants to take up architecture instead. He’s very enthusiastic about architecture. As eager as a new student.”

Mia closely studied the screen. In point of fact, although he was very attractive, Professor Oates did not look particularly human. He looked like a gifted professional actor posing for the cameras in the role of an ungainly nude undergraduate. “Would that be actual architecture, or virtual architecture?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” said Rosenfeld, surprised. “You could take that matter up with the professor. Naturally we have our own NTDCD civil-support group. It meets regularly on the net. Brilliant people, charming people. I must be frank, and tell you that you’ll have your share of misery—but at least you’ll be in very good company.”

Mia sat back. “Well, Professor Oates is obviously a very accomplished young man. I beg your pardon—not young. A distinguished scholar.”

“You aren’t the first to make that mistake,” said Dr.
Rosenfeld, pleased. “People genuinely think they’re young, these patients. People tend to believe what they see.”

“That’s lovely. I’m glad for him. It gives me a lot of hope.”

“There is another matter. You remember the professor’s cat?” Dr. Rosenfeld reached beneath his desk and pulled out a plastic lab cage. Inside there was paper litter and a small sleeping rodent. A hamster.

“Yes?” Mia said.

“We’re going to do to this little animal what we’re going to do to you. This hamster is five years old. That’s very old for a hamster. Everything you go through, she’s going to go through. Not in the same tank with you of course, but as part and parcel of the same procedure. You’re about to become posthuman. And she’s going to become postrodent. We want you to look after her for us, when she’s done.”

“I don’t like pets.”

“This isn’t your ‘pet,’ Mia. This is a very valuable fellow entity which is about to share your unique state of being. Humor us in this, please. We know what we’re doing.” Dr. Rosenfeld tapped the cage with his thumbnail. The elderly hamster, in a doddering doze, showed no response. “There’s a big difference between surviving this procedure and truly getting well. We do want you to get well, Mia, we truly want you to be all right, and we know that this will help your healing process. We can tell a great deal by the way you choose to treat a fellow creature who’s been through your own brand of purgatory. It can be very lonely on the far side of humanity. Think of her as your lucky charm and your totem animal. Believe in her. And the best of luck to both of you.”

Mia made her will. She fasted for three days. They shaved her, all over. They stripped her. They stuffed her
with the paste. Then they started on the lung work, and they narcotized her utterly. All the rest of it went into the place where experiences that cannot be experienced must.

W
hen she awoke, it was January. She was very weak and tired and she had no hair. Her skin was blotchy and covered with lanugo, like an infant’s skin. There were cold hard rings on her fingers and something nasty and tight around her head, but they made her keep everything on. She spent most of the first two days clenching her fists, raising the fingers into eyesight, slowly and deliciously stroking her face, and sometimes deliberately licking her fingers and the cold smooth rings.

She ate the mush that they gave her, because they complained if she didn’t eat.

She had forgotten how to read.

On the third day she woke with a brisk new sense of intelligence and clarity and discovered that the little angular scrawls had become letters and words again. She opened her notebook and looked into it with a sense of absolute wonderment. It was full of the most abstruse and ridiculous economic and bureaucratic nonsense imaginable. She spent the day in gales of laughter, kicking her feet and looking at the screen and rubbing the itchy stubble on her head.

In the afternoon she climbed restlessly out of bed and began tottering about the hospital room. She put some chow and water in the hamster’s cage, but the hamster was sleeping almost all the time, just lying there inert and pink and very slightly furry. One of the nurses asked if she had given a name to the hamster. She couldn’t think of any names that would fit the circumstances, so she didn’t call the hamster anything.

In the evening her daughter called from Djakarta, but she didn’t want to speak to anyone from Djakarta. She
told the nurses to say that she felt fine. She didn’t say or do much during the rest of the evening. She’d come to realize that the room was saturated with machines that were always watching her, and some of the machines were so clever that they were practically invisible.

On the fourth day they gave her some new hard and chewy food and also some sweet things that were quite delightful. She asked for more, and pouted when they wouldn’t give her any. Then they dressed her in very nicely double-stitched blue cotton overalls and took her into a room that they said was a children’s room. There weren’t any children in it, so she had it all to herself, and it was a very nice room. It had bright colors and the lighting was as clear and fresh as summer sunlight and it had machines to swing on and climb on. She worked herself into fits of laughter climbing and swinging and tumbling off onto the padded floor, until she had kind of an accident in the coveralls. Then she made them stop so she could clean herself up.

Then she went back to her room and watched some political news on her notebook. She had a long intense chat with Dr. Rosenfeld about American politics in the 2030s. She had been intensely interested in politics during the worldwide crisis of the 2030s, and when she thought about what had happened back then, it made her so mad she could scream. She talked a great deal about her favorite stupid policies and politicians of the thirties, and she got a lot of indignation off her chest. Dr. Rosenfeld said she was coming along very well. He asked her if she had named the hamster yet. She couldn’t understand why they were getting so worked up about that topic. She didn’t much like the hamster.

On the fifth day they introduced her to another NTDCD patient named Juliet Ramachandran, a very nice young woman who was one hundred thirteen. Juliet had been blind before the treatment because of retinal degeneration, and she had a postcanine Seeing Eye dog who
could talk. Mrs. Ramachandran had been in civil support for many years and had a very polished manner. Mia and Juliet and the dog all got along together very well, and had a long talk about the treatment and other things. The dog had grown all its fur back, while Juliet had a lovely silk turban. The dog was a real chatterbox, but Juliet said that was a passing phase.

Juliet kept saying the words, “Mia Ziemann.” This made her laugh.

“Do you know that your name is Mia Ziemann?”

She could tell that Juliet was getting agitated. “All right, have it your way, miazeeman, miazeeman, don’t rub it in.” Life wasn’t easy for Juliet, recovering her sight and everything. Juliet was very frank about her troubles, and kept talking about the peculiar sensation of objects “touching the backs of my eyes.” It was kinder to be gentle with poor Juliet. She decided that she would try very hard to answer whenever anyone said “Mia.”

On the sixth day she made a point of responding to “Mia,” and they began to treat her differently and better. When they asked if she had named the hamster, she said “Fred.” When they said that that was a boy’s name she said it was short for Frederika. She took the hamster out and dandled it and made sure it had its chow. They were very pleased with this behavior.

The hamster was a nasty little ratlike thing that waddled and had beady black eyes and shrunken jittery paws. It was growing some nice soft brown fur, though. One day the hamster had a kind of brief fit in its cage, but she decided not to tell anybody. It would only upset them.

On the seventh day, she realized that she had once truly been someone called Mia Ziemann, and that there was probably something pretty seriously wrong with her. She didn’t feel at all sick, however. She felt terrific, wonderful. She felt very glad to have the privilege of being whoever she might be. When she thought seriously about really being Mia Ziemann, however, there was a taste in her
mouth as if she had bitten her tongue. She felt a peculiar kind of dread, as if Mia Ziemann was hiding in the closet and waiting for dark. So that Mia Ziemann could come out and caper ghostfully around the hospital room.

In the afternoon she put on some of her Mia Ziemann clothes and went for a long walk, five or six times around the hospital grounds. The Mia clothes were very well made, but unfortunately they didn’t fit. She was not only thinner and svelter but she had grown five centimeters taller. She was walking pretty well now, but there was a strange wobbling roll in her hips. During her walk, she saw quite a few people around the hospital who were truly and profoundly unhealthy. She realized how lucky she was.

In the evening she started reading net discussions from the NTDCD support group. It was very flattering to have her intelligence overestimated by such brilliant people. She felt that she ought to contribute, and that probably she had some worthwhile medical experiences to write about, but her typing had gotten all rusty somehow.

She was always very good and patient with the support people when they did the tests, even though the tests hurt her quite a bit. They had some other tests that were just puzzles: playing chess problems, doing crosswords, stacking oddly shaped blocks. The word tests were plenty tough, but when it came to stacking blocks she was a whiz. Apparently her geometric modeling skills had increased by about 15 percent. Much of this result was improved reaction time, but some of it seemed to be genuine neoneuronal integration, according to the emission results. When she’d paged through this medical prognosis, she grew very proud of her achievement, and firmly decided she would do less talking from now on and just look at pictures more. Play to her cognitive strengths. Maybe even draw some pictures, or take some photographs, or model in clay or virtuality. There were so many fabulous possibilities.

After they gave her some plasticine, she had a stroke of insight and did the hamster. She put a lot of cunning effort into the rodent’s portrayal. When they saw the results, they were delighted with her, just as she had firmly suspected they would be. They said that it would soon be time for her to be released and continue the convalescence at her newly remodeled apartment.

She’d been suspecting the truth for quite a while, but she now fully realized that the people guarding her were as dumb as bricks. It would be fairly elementary to get out from under their thumbs and go someplace else where she could pursue other activities—something a lot more interesting than hanging around eating medicated mush with a hamster. This prospect was very enticing. Her only regret was that one of the male support people was really good-looking, and she had fallen for him a little bit. It was just as well, though. Even if she’d asked him to kiss her, it would only have been one of those severe medical ethical standards things. He’d never even make it to second base.

She was answering to “Mia” all the time now. She even did some of Mia’s work. There was a trick to it, like throwing your eyes out of focus. She would relax deep inside and let the Mia feeling come up, and then she could do quite a few useful things, type a lot faster, enter passwords back in the LEL-SF Assessment Collaboratory, collate spreadsheets, examine her flowware, sign the Mia name even. She came to recognize that the Mia thing didn’t want to hurt her. The Mia wasn’t jealous, and didn’t mean her any harm at all. The Mia thing was meek and obliging and accommodating, and not very interesting. The Mia seemed to be really tired and didn’t care very much about anything. The Mia was nothing but a bundle of habits.