I did not want tiny machines journeying through my digestive system; but Dr. Havel said a number of them had already gone down my esophagus, and it did not hurt a bit, did it?
He was correct. It did not hurt, so I could not punch: him. But everything itched a great deal, as I have already said, and some of the nanos ventured into places they were not welcome. Though I wore my Explorer jacket, the coat did not seem sufficiently skilled at protecting the parts of me that needed safekeeping.
Myself Exposed
After five minutes of such indignities, Dr. Havel clapped his hands together with Anticipatory Zeal. "Well then, let’s see what my clever little helpers have discovered."
He scurried to a table in the middle of the room: the sort of table one might lie upon when being examined by a real physician.[9] However, Dr. Havel never once asked me to lie down; and when I looked at the table, I saw why not.
[9] — I am familiar with physicians because there were excellent medical machines in my home village. Once every month, I was required to recline on a proper examination table and submit to Necessary Regimens Of Health. These entailed authentic poking and prodding, not annoying little itches that lacked the courage of their convictions.
The entire table-top was a viewing screen… and there on the screen, life-size, was the exposed anatomy of a woman who could only be me. I do not say I recognized myself — instead of a face, there was an opaque rendering of my skull, not to mention whitish versions of other bones in my body, laid over internal organs depicted in ugly unnatural colors — but the general outline matched my own, so who else could it be?
"I do not look like that," I said. "My bones are not white; they are pleasingly transparent."
Dr. Havel laughed the way he laughed at everything. "Quite right, Ms. Oar, quite right, ha-ha. I got the computer to colorize your lovely insides so we could see everything better. You’re clearly designed to be clear, ha-ha, at least to human eyes; but once we scan you on IR and UV, not to mention X-rays, ultrasound, MRI, bioelectrics and so on, we get a lovely picture of what we can’t discern in the visible spectrum."
He proudly waved his hand toward the image — which I found most disconcerting to look at. When I breathed in, the picture’s lungs inflated; when I exhaled, the picture’s lungs did the same. I tried taking breaths in quick little gasps, hoping the machine would be thrown off and unable to match my rhythm… but no matter what I did, the image on the table imitated it exactly.
If I held myself quiet, I could fed my heart beating in perfect unison with the ugly crimson heart shown on the screen. Just noticing that made my heart beat faster. The picture’s heart beat faster too. I had the most disquieting sensation the image controlled my pulse instead of the other way around; so I looked at the floor until the sensation went away.
Meanwhile, Dr. Havel went around the table and placed his finger against the screen — not on my picture, but off to one side, where there was nothing but blank blackness. A host of squiggles appeared where his finger touched: printing in four different colors of light, and little diagrams that probably revealed vital facets of my health.
"Hmmr Dr. Havel announced. "Ms. Oar, it turns out you’re yourself."
"This is not a clever machine if that is its best observation."
"Oh," said he, "you think it’s reporting the obvious? Not at all, ha-ha, ha-ha. Before you got here, Admiral Ramos called to brief me… and when I heard your story, I bet the good admiral a modest sum you’d turn out to be a clone of the original Oar. But you aren’t."
"How can you tell?" Uclod asked.
The doctor must have been hoping for that question. "See here?" he said most gleefully. He patted his fingers against the screen, right on the picture of my ribs. The image expanded to show a magnified view, twice as big as before. Havel patted again and the picture expanded a second time; several more pats, and all you could see was one little patch of bone, blown up to fill the body-sized screen.
"All right," the doctor said, "fourth rib, right side: look at this area here." He circled his pudgy hand above the center of the picture, where there was an obvious line etched into the bone. "See this ridge running up the middle? And the bump at the top: one side of the ridge is a bit higher than the other. That’s a fracture site. The bone broke and didn’t quite knit cleanly. It’s only a microscopic discrepancy — whoever set the fracture did a fantastic job, better than any human surgeon. And the healing was more complete than anything I’ve seen in Homo sapiens, But magnify the image a few hundred times, and ta-da! The glitch is there, plain as day."
I stared at the picture. I did not like thinking my rib had a flaw in it, no matter how small.
"And," the doctor went on, "there are dozens of similar breaks throughout the skeletal system: the chest, the arms, the front of the face. Ms. Oar, you definitely suffered massive trauma at some point in the past — consistent with falling from a tall building, and your upper torso taking the brunt of the impact. Since I don’t know your species’ rate of recovery, I can’t tell how long ago the damage happened; but it’s safe to conclude you’re the same Oar who plummeted off the tower four years back."
"I know that," I told him. "I suffered Grievous Wounds and it took me time to heal."
"You didn’t heal by yourself," Havel said. "If the bones had knit on their own, the fracture sites would be a million times worse. A lot wouldn’t heal at all — the bone ends would be too apart to grow back together again. Someone damned good at orthopedics set each little break so it would fuse as good as new… and the surgery was performed within a few hours of the damage.
"On top of that," the doctor continued, "here’s the real telltale sign you got high-class medical attention." He pointed to a series of squiggles written in bright red on the table screen. They were not an alphabet I recognized; I assumed they were some hateful Scientific Notation describing tedious Chemicals.
"Your spinal fluid," Havel said, "contains the residue of a nifty little drug called Webbalin: developed on the planet Troyen several decades back, when the Mandasars were the best medical researchers in our sector. Webbalin prevents cerebral degradation after your neurons stop getting fresh blood; without it, a human suffers irreversible brain damage within five to ten minutes of coronary arrest. Even if someone gets your heart pumping again later on, you won’t be the same person. Your old brain architecture has fallen apart — the trillions of linkages that make you unique get erased by neuron decay. Even if we grow you new neurons, they won’t link together in the same way. Without Webbalin to keep your original gray matter from rotting, your body might get brought back to life, but your memories and personality sure won’t."
"And you found this Webbalin stuff in Oar’s spinal fluid?" Uclod asked.
"She obviously received a massive dose," Havel replied. "Enough to leave traces four years after the fact."
"Doctor," Nimbus said, "how soon does Webbalin have to be administered after death? In order to be effective."
"It’s usually given before death," Havel answered. "If a trauma victim’s in danger of dying, you want Webbalin in the patient’s bloodstream as soon as possible. Get it circulating while the heart is still working; then when the crash comes, ha-ha, the brain will be safe for ten hours instead of ten minutes. Gives you a lot more leeway for patching up the poor bastard."
"But suppose the patient has already died. Does that mean you only have ten minutes to inject the drug?"
"Worse than that," Havel told him. "Ten minutes to get the drug saturating the brain. Which is damned difficult if you don’t have blood circulation. You can force-pump a dose inside the cranium and hope it soaks into the cells… but that’s just farting around to mollify the next-of-kin. It seldom works at all, and it never works completely. If you’re lucky, you salvage thirty percent of the brain, tops. That’s rarely enough to keep the patient alive, let alone, ha-ha, help him remember the password to his bank account — which is often the family’s prime concern."