Clinic
From CleanPosts
The Clinic
Nano-engineering is inspired by the molecular machines of life, but it bypasses the trial-and error watery sloppiness and superceded functions that are carried out by all cells, and duplicates life's useful functions with more deliberate precision.
In 1943 no one was anywhere near actually working on that scale except Binah. What the Artifact did to Kimberly Lokken and that little church mouse she found was infect living nerve and brain tissue and one-by-one gradually replace each cell with a nanotechnology facsimile after "learning the ropes" and figuring out how each cell responded to hormones, nutrients, and signals from other cells.
Soon after her mother discovered the bump, Kim was taken to the small hospital in Wiley. The doctors could not diagnose her, so she was handed off to the Federal government, and placed in quarantine.
At that time, the United States had embarked on a vast but secret project to develop atomic weapons for use in the Second World War. These would be weapons of fearsome, unknown power, and to be safe, the research was conducted in the Great American desert east of the Enfilade Range where population was sparse. But the medical facilities at the Olowade Reservation were very good, especially for treating radiation sickness. And Olowade was roughly the size of an entire county, with unprecedented security arrangements. The wildest portion of the Olo River itself formed the northern and eastern border. So Kim Lokken was taken there.
She remained silent about the Artifact. If there was one thing the Endomites were good for, it was keeping a secret.
In a few weeks the bump in the back of her skull cracked open and Kim was sedated so the doctors could take a close look at what happened to her. Apparently her brain wasn't even alive anymore. It was now opaque to x-rays. Part of her brain actually penetrated her skull and terminated in a white oval cup made of bone. The cup had smooth inside walls and many short, fine black graphite bristles growing out of the cup's floor. It was an electrical connector with exactly fifty-five pins.
If the pins were crushed or snapped off they grew back just like the lead in a mechanical pencil. The doctors tried shaving off the whole external structure too. It just grew right back. They manufactured a cable that fit the connector perfectly. Kimberly came to call it simply the Purple Cable.
The cable had proven mostly useless. They could read electrical signals from Kim and print them on a roll of paper, but they didn't know what to do with the information. Attempts to write information to Kim head using the same 15 millivolt level that was present on the pins only gave her bizarre total-body sandpaper sensations she found very unpleasant and refused to endure again.
When the first anniversary of her quarantine rolled around Kim began to hold back during the psychological tests and remained generally uncooperative in their interviews. Dr. Gary Trochmann, the technical director of the project, decided to bring things to a head. He was being pressured by Olowade Operations Officer Earl G. Roland to produce more "science" and Roland was being pressured by the War Department.
"This program has been totally compartmentalized," Roland had told him. "No one has any more than a very tiny piece of the jigsaw puzzle, apart from myself. I'm looking for someone I can present the big picture to. I'm looking for someone who can bring scientific expertise to the table. We need a program czar who can look at everything and maybe see implications that we're missing."
"Why do you need an M.D.?"
"This is a medical problem. Plus you already have a T.S. clearance. And I was very impressed with your work on the anthrax rockets we salvaged from that sunken U-boat."
And so it went, with the doctor being given more and more information the deeper he was willing to go, until finally he was shown Kimberly herself in the flesh moments before Trochmann actually accepted the position as Technical Director.
The contagious disease ruse was beginning to show cracks. Clara Lokken wanted to see her daughter again, even if it meant looking at her through six inches of glass. She had gone so far as to get her congressional Representative to make inquiries. Time was short.
Kimberly had long despaired of trying to adequately describe to him the subjective sensations she was feeling. Her daydreams were as vivid as real life, and she could control them utterly, limited only by the breadth of her imagination. Her memory became perfect. Kim retained everything she learned with a clarity that no human being had ever experienced, although the memories she had acquired before being infected remained relatively indistinct.
One day Kim realized they were watching her on cameras up in the corners of her “suite” flush with the ceiling. There was four little clear domes, one in each corner, and two of them were active. Kim did experiments with wads of chewing gum. She learned which two lenses got cleaned off when she was marched off to eat and which ones they left alone. And now they knew that she knew.
The door to her room was locked, and it was a fancy combination lock with a number pad and relay logic. Kim's plan was to punch every combination on the door. It wouldn't even be boring. After doing the first two or three numbers she could go automatic and snap out of the trance when the door clicked open. But she could never do it while being watched on camera.
Kim decided to go on strike. Meaning: she would not cooperate with her captors at all. She would sit there all day and do nothing except eat, drink, and use the restroom.
There were two ways of dealing with all that dead time. At first Kimberly made the clock speed up before her eyes. Her heartbeats ran together in a butterfly flutter and became a quiet hum. She would speed up, cruise for a short while, then slow down. Her muscles would be a little sore from staying in one position for too long but four or five hours were gone.
Eventually she decided the time-lapse movie method was too gross because she could feel her bladder fill up and she didn't like the way food felt moving through her intestines when she sped up. She switched to taking a series of hour-long "naps"--little jumps in time with her consciousness simply turned totally off. She didn't even dream. This method was also her safety hatch if Doc Troch resorted to using physical pain.
Either way she chose, Kim was well-disposed to play the waiting game with Trochmann.
She only ate about every two days. Large meals, to be sure, but the other times when the nurse arrived to escort her out the locked door to her meal she refused to budge. Otherwise it would seem to Kim like she was continuously eating. Showers and stops to use the restroom or drink some water made for a rather busy "day" that compressed a full week of real time. She could have kept it up indefinitely. Finally Dr. Trochmann relented and asked for a truce.
"Kimberly, time for a heart-to-heart, the whole truth and nothing but the truth," Dr. Trochmann began, in what would be the girl's last interview with this well-meaning technical director of the Kimberly Project.
"Time for both sides to tell the truth," Kimberly agreed. "So tell me, if I'm not contagious why are we still locked in here?"
"We have not ruled contagious out."
"You're not afraid to talk to me face-to-face."
"We know it's not transmitted through the air, like by sneezing," he explained. "Otherwise you'd be in total isolation. It remains to be seen if your bodily fluids can transmit the disease."
"Disease? I don't feel sick."
"Kimberly, your brain isn't even alive anymore! So far it's only had an affinity for nerve cells but we've been watching to see if it changes, and starts attacking other tissues in your body."
"Okay Doc. If my brain is not alive how could we be having this conversation?"
"I'll tell you what we know so far. It spreads just like a virus. When it gets in a nerve cell it...learns the ropes. It learns everything that the cell does in response to chemical signals from other cells, to nutrients, hormones... everything. Then it takes over the cell's job. It uses material found on hand to remodel the nerve cell into a black structure that straddles the length of the old cell but it's skinnier, more compact. No more sloppy proteins floating randomly in water. More like a machine."
"What do you mean, like a machine?"
"All those cells are dead. You have been hooked up to the EEG and it shows nothing. Legally, under State Code you are brain dead."
"You mean, our whole body could be changed like this?"
"We don't think it will mutate by accident, it's got this amazing two-out-of-three voting scheme that it uses when it replicates. A random mutation would have to occur at two data points at the same time. But we don't understand the programming. We don't know if some timer inside will go off and make it change its behavior. That's why we've had you under observation."
"Why can't I see my mother?"
"That's a decision for Mr. Roland."
"My mother dotes on me," Kim warned, "and she wrote that she was talking to our congressman to get permission to see me."
"Mr. Roland knows about that."
"So you're just going to keep me here forever," Kim snorted. “And read my mail.”
"Because we think this has happened to you for a reason and so far we haven't learned what that reason is. That's where a little more cooperation from you would go a long way. For instance, we don't know what the connector in the back of your skull is really for."
"Sometimes I feel like some hidden things are getting more and more clear," Kim offered, after a sigh of resignation. "I keep having the notion that I've been picked to be a go-between or something. Like a translator. In any event I want the cameras removed from my space."
Poker face. "What cameras?"
"Come on, Doctor. You think I'm just a brainless girls, don't you? I've had a lot of time on my hands, being locked up in there, and I found your two filthy little spy lenses peeping in me."
"I see there's no fooling you. But the cameras were not used for what you seem to be implying they were, Kimberly."
Kimberly said, "Look, yeah I'm infectious, and you've got some federal law that says you can take away my liberty and keep me in this quarantine of yours, but guess what? I'm eighteen now. I have basic human and Constitutional rights like plain old-fashioned privacy! You wonder why I don't want to play any of your games anymore? Who can blame me? I'm just pissed off for being on camera all this time without knowing it."
"I think this whole spat between us has been due to nothing more than bad communication."
"I agree," Kimberly said. "We should clear the way between us and continue to talk."
"OK!" he said, his mood brightening at this breakthrough. He seemed a different man. "There are some security things I need to change first, but then I'll let you have your privacy. Honestly. You have my word."
Kim didn't trust them to just turn the cameras off so she jammed more wads of chewing gum over the fisheye lenses in the corners of her room, even over the ones she decided were inactive dummy lenses, just to make sure. No one came to clean them off like they had before, so it was working so far.
There was only one change in routine as far as Kim could tell. In the past her tormentors seemed to have the code for the door memorized and they just punched their way out without a second thought. But now, very often they would take out their wallet, or look at a scrap of paper from their pocket before punching the buttons that would let them out. That could only mean that they were now scrambling the code daily to balance the loss of their camera eyes.
Kim almost despaired but after thinking about it some more she realized that the change actually did not make their task any harder at all. She just had to pick a fixed range and try all the combinations in it, night after night, until the daily shifting combo happened to fall into that range.
It was a hexadecimal keypad, a four-by-four square with sixteen buttons numbered 0 through 9 and A through F. Kim also knew from listening carefully that the code was always four taps. The problem was that there was a ten second delay after trying a number before the red light would reset to the yellow light and it was ready to accept another try.
Kimberly figured if they started at 6:00 PM and went all through the night to 6:00 AM they would just be able to do all of the "Lucky 7's." That is, the whole range from 7000 to 7FFF.
The changes to Kimberly's central nervous system made her especially good at doing repetitive tasks like this. She didn't even have to think about it. After the basic rhythm set in she could go on for hours and it would seem like no time had passed at all. But the muscles in their hand would soon cramp up, so she changed hands every half hour. Kimberly figured it would take about two weeks to score.
She got the green light on the sixth night with the winning number 76FC. It was 11:14 PM on Saturday, September 18, 1943 when she stepped out into the darkness of the rest of the clinic, hoping it was deserted for the night.
Kimberly wore the Purple Cable as a belt, wrapped around her twice. Now came the part she dreaded. There was another lock on the outside door of the clinic proper, for those times when Kimberly was let out of her living quarters for medical tests or to eat. She hoped no one was so paranoid over security that they would have a separate combo for the outside door, with two numbers to memorize, or their escape would become a dramatically more difficult and time-consuming process.
76FC. Green. Go. She was out of the building.
It wouldn't do to have Kimberly locked up inside the clinic in the unlikely event of a fire, so for fire safety and also as a precaution in case the girl did get out, a guard was posted in a shack nearby with bright lights flooding the doorway. Kim stood there illuminated like a doe frozen on the highway.
Fortunately for her the guard wasn't expected to just stare at the outside of the clinic for the duration of his watch. Just staying awake was sufficient, it seemed. So he had his back turned, hunched over a newspaper. Kim crept around the outside of the clinic as quietly as she could until she was exactly 180º around from the guard shack, and then she headed straight out in the long shadow of the building.
There was no outer perimeter of eight foot high barbed wire fences or rolls of concertina wire or dogs or land mines as she had feared, since the clinic was intended only for treating Olowada's radiation burn victims. Soon she found herself trodding through sand and sagebrush on a gentle slope down to the Olo River. Kim looked up into the clear and dark night-time desert sky and gasped at the beauty of the many, many stars and the white phosphor Milky Way above. But she was wearing a tan and white dress that ended about mid-thigh, began to shiver in the night-time desert cold.
Shortly she came to a wire fence, and Kim put her hand out to spread the wires apart so she could crawl through, but quickly pulled back again when she suffered an electrical shock. She looked at it for a moment and decided to try to roll under it, with a little bit of burrowing into the sand to get more clearance. Soon she was through the electric fence and standing at the river's edge. In the moonlight she dimly saw the roaring whitewater of the untamed stretch of the river called Olowade Reach.
Kim knew she couldn't set foot in the water here, or she'd be swept away and drown. She had to find a bridge. There was only the Olowade Bridge, a left turn here and five miles upriver at the place where men could ford the Olo long ago. But Kim would have never made it. Military police were crawling all over that whole area. Kim wanted to get away from lights, not move toward them. So she started walking on the river bank downstream.
At about 12:30 AM she came to a section where the river was gradually shifting in its bank and she was faced with the choice of getting wet or going back through the electric fence, because there was dang little beach to walk on. So she dug another hole and squeezed under the wire, giggling at what she thought was pretty lousy security for a nuclear reservation. It didn't cross her mind that the electric fence was simply to keep critters out so the MPs wouldn't have to investigate every breach of their network of infrared trip points inland, exactly like the glaring breach the girls now made with not a clue of having done so.
By 1:00 AM a call was made to the guard shack at the Allard clinic, and soon after that the word was out on the street that Kimberly was gone.
Half-asleep, E. G. Roland fumbled with the phone receiver and there was quite a pause before he remembered he was supposed to bring it to his ear and say, "Hello?"
"Sorry to wake you up at this hour, Mr. Roland, but you wanted to be informed if the Lokken girl escaped."
"What time is it?"
"One fifteen in the AM, sir."
"And who are you?"
"Sergeant Jim Lasker in Building 1002 at Pearl."
"How did she get out?"
"As far as we know, sir, she just punched the right combination on the door and walked out."
"The sentry at the clinic dropped the ball. Has she been picked up yet?"
"Not yet sir. But we'll get her. We've had some level two motion detectors tripped on the riverbank near Nancy so we're concentrating downstream and northeast of the clinic. There's nowhere to hide."
With 960 square miles, the Olowade site was large enough to require "town" names to identify places within it. They had chosen to use mostly women's names. So there were places like Ruth, Edna, and Susie, which were nothing more than railroad junctions, really. The clinic was only a mile north of Helen, which was just a large electrical substation and a cluster of warehouses.
Kim had been steered away from the Mulberry trees along the river by the electric fence and deep gravel pits connected by a maze of unpaved roads that made up the relative highlands of Nancy. There was a single rail line crossing the area from southwest to northeast.
Kimberly veered off the gradually ascending scrub-brush plain into a newly dug mile-long trench intended to hold contaminated water from the Q West reactor. This would prove to be a mistake. When she had walked about halfway down the huge ditch, which was only wide enough to hold perhaps four cars side-by-side, a pair of headlights appeared ahead and turned to line up on her.
Kimberly threw themselves flush against the gritty trench walls. She could feel the cool moistness of the face of newly-exposed gravel, and a flinty smell. The tiny rocks were somewhere between sand and small pebbles in size, and they were held together loosely by a sheen of underground moisture. She thought about climbing, but it would be useless to try because the gravel face was unstable. In some places clods of dirt and gravel were actually overhanging. easily knocked down by the brush of a hand. In other places a single scrape would unleash a miniature slide of loose gravel, the tiny rocks piling around Kim's feet.
But that gave her an idea. She began scraping the walls of the trench and deliberately pulling the gravel down over herself.
A third light mounted on the windshield and hand-operated by the driver was sweeping methodically up and down the slopes of the gravel pit as the vehicle slowly advanced.
Kim knew she could hold her breath for a minute, but with the change to her brain, she thought she could do it for much longer now. She was already brain dead. But there would be a limit of four or five minutes before it messed up her heart. She had no other choice.
She scraped at the walls until enough gravel had collapsed to leave only her head and one arm free. Then she hyperventilated to get as much oxygen in her bloodstream as possible. Then, as the MP's white jeep approached very close she held her breath and completed her self-burial, hoping the soldier was too intent studying the trench sides to glance at the little ongoing rockslide ahead. Since the newly-dug trench was pretty unstable anyway there were many such piles of gravel along the walls.
Kim calmed herself as much as possible, but as the minutes ticked off, fatigue poisons began to accumulate in her heart muscles, an her hearts was beginning to stumble and miss beats. A heart attack was close. It was time to come back out for air even if it meant staring at the cop face to face.
She pushed through and tentatively took a breath after four and a half minutes buried alive. No loud gasping, because the jeep was still very near. But the red glow of tail-lights meant that it had passed by. In fact the driver had not even given the brand-new little landslides a second look, he was checking the nooks between the landslides where he figured someone could hide. Kim patiently and quietly recovered. The crisis of the first security sweep had passed.
After the guard's jeep had left her far behind Kim continued on her way east along the dry floor of the long waste-water sump. Her ordeal had not gotten her very dirty. The gravel she had buried herself in was a lot like wet sand at the beach, only with bigger grains.
In about fifteen minutes of walking she rose a bit to stand where the jeep had been when she had first seen its lights. Railroad tracks were here. A white sign said "Bettie".
Kimberly decided to walk along the tracks, and though she didn't know it, the tracks were a good choice, because they would cross no sensors or trip wires, and there was no road paralleling the track, paved or not.
Two miles to the south across a sagebrush plain many yellow lights illuminated Olowade's main cluster of tritium production reactors. They were preparing the “Fat Boy” bomb that would be used on Japan in 1945.
At about 3:00 AM Kim reached the halfway point across the wide, flat tongue of land she were crossing formed by a northerly bend of the Olo. Here was a major rail junction identified as "Ginger" and a cluster of paved roads. In the distance to the southeast a few approaching vehicles could be seen by their headlights so Kim hid behind some rolling stock on a Ginger side track. She chose a low, brown Burlington-Northern gondola car to climb into. With many other identical railroad cars sitting around it was a good place for them to hide, as long as she laid down.
Kim realized if she managed to contrive an escape, she would have to change her name. Sofie had already changed her name to Hunky. Kim settled on Robyn. But she knew she could never risk going to a judge to make it official.
Out there in the night the army police were setting up a tripod. Television had been nearly perfected, but the War had intervened just before it could be rolled out to the public. After the war, TV would replace radio as the main source of family home entertainment. In the hands of the army, television permitted a kind of night vision. A bulky television camera could be modified to respond to heat rather than light, and when the image was displayed on a CRT, warm bodies would stand out in the night.
Once the camera was mounted on the tripod they stared at the green screen and began slowly sweeping the horizon all around Ginger. The dark boxes of many railroad cars crept across the screen. There was a single infrared source out there in one car, but the cold steel walls shielded her well.
It was 3:30 AM. The second sweep by the military police was over and they bundled up their primitive night-scope and drove away. Kimberly Lokken had crawled into a rail car to hide from them but she was forever dead. Only Robyn would crawl out and go on.
She decided to stick with the train tracks and continue northeast. If anyone came again, with any luck she could hide in another one of the scattered rail cars.
In a mile she reached a place where the tracks, a paved road, and a gravel road all came together. Now the gravel one ran parallel to the tracks on their right , making Robyn feel a little exposed. A half mile after that a paved road took its place alongside. She could see a hint of the coming dawn in the eastern skies. Robyn felt her available choices were becoming fewer and fewer.
The rail curved sharply north, then northwest for a quarter of a mile, then north again for about fifty feet before coming to a dead end. Here was an old forgotten box car, forlorn in the dim gray light of 5 o'clock in the morning. Now there were only two choices. She could hide in there and wait to be picked up, or she could hoof it across the sand.
Robyn saw a line of white cliffs about two miles to the east and guessed that was the far bank of the river. They were hideously exposed here and the light was getting slowly but steadily brighter. There was little else to do but to make for the water again and hope to find somewhere to hide.
She struck off due east. In 800 feet she crossed a row of fence posts without any barbed wire strung between them. This was another line of IR sensors. The army cops had her on their lighted map again.
Five minutes after tripping the infrared picket she crossed a wide paved road on the brink of a gentle slope down to the river. She heard sirens. Blue flashing lights were visible to the north and south. Almost the entire Olowade police force was closing in like the jaws of a steel trap. Robyn ran downhill toward the river, kicking up sand.
Robyn met that old electric fence again, and dropped to worm herself under the bottom wire. She heard dogs now, but once she had gotten to the other side of the fence she figured they wouldn't have to worry about them. When Robyn got her first good look at the river current she knew she was in luck. Not too fast, not too slow. She had completely run out of other options. So Robyn carved out for herself a new option by simply wading straight out into the water.
A grin broke out. She was pleasantly surprised. It being the late summer, the water had baked in the sun behind a dam twenty miles upstream, and behind another damn before that. So it wasn't too cold. Like old bath water. Here the river slowed and silt had piled up to form several islands. Seven miles per hour. It wasn't the dangerous speed of the whitewater at the rapids upstream, but it wasn't the still water backed up behind a dam, which would force her to swim for it.
There was a wide zone shallow enough to permit Robyn to touch her feet on the bottom now and again. But her bobbing head was very visible in the brightening dawn.
There was a hard splash in the water a fraction of a second before she heard the sharp report of a rifle. Up until now it had been almost a game for Robyn. It never occured to her at all that she would be shot at. She took a few breaths, and went underwater, but she had been unprepared, so three minutes down there was all she risked.
When she came back up she was hopefully beyond rifle range. But the southern group of MPs were getting out of their jeeps to look at the river with rifles in hand, and Kim was coming up on them fast. She hyperventilated and dove again.
One of the itchy trigger fingers up there thought he saw something and fired a round. The sound of his shot sparked a barrage of blind fire by the other men. Robyn passed through a gauntlet of instantly-forming white bubble-lines as dozens of bullets laced the water.
After she surfaced again it would be almost two hours of drifting along, with her eyes darting and scanning the shore, before the river carried her past a roadless marsh and she could begin to relax.
