Number Ten
by Nick Troy
Copyright 2013 Nick Troy
English translation 2013 Ingrid Wolf
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Number Ten
When a call came from the supply department, I was ready. In fact, I’d been waiting for their go-ahead for whole four minutes! That’s inadmissibly long in our business.
“There’s a contact,” I shouted, feeling everything inside me freeze with excitement. “The load’s come!”
From behind came a soft drumming on the keyboard, then Olga sang out, “Frankenstein is informed. I’ll establish the channel.”
Without waiting for the command, I jumped up from the desk and rushed out into the corridor. The ghastly light of fluorescent lamps slashed my eyes. It smelled of hospital, with some bitter tinge. After a moment’s hesitation, I dashed to the lift, trying not to drop the freshly printed pages of data on “the number ten.”
People in white coats shied back to walls. I heard an excited whisper behind, “Zombiemakers on alert again?”
Swine! I thought on the run. Every day a new nickname for us!
The lift had a queue by it, as ever. Ancient doctors, who have lived since the time of Lenin’s embalming, are stubborn in their refuse to improve health by walking the stairs. Sometimes the resuscitation team can’t get a trolley with a patient into unless they drive old hags out.
“No room, Chekhov!” a female doctor muttered peevishly. “You’ll have to stretch your legs on the stairs.”
Shit! They’ve also invented a nickname for me. Chekhov, dammit! Is it because I’m lanky, bespectacled and have a goatee?!
Distracted by thoughts, I almost rushed downstairs past the right level. The guards at the door of the “unit number eight” gave a start as I crashed into the floor. Fortunately, I’m no novice here, they know me well. I was not even required to show my pass, though our object is classified as “top-secret.” Back at the stairs I’d been examined thoroughly by both chemical and metal detectors, recognized, and the info had been transmitted to the security post. One of the special squad even called after me, “Hurry, tech! Frankenstein’s already there!”
The sterile-white corridor turned a corner, the anatomical theater doors flung open. A domelike room lurched to meet me. My eye was caught by rows of steel trolleys, each with a mound of distinctive human shape beneath a white sheet. Beside each one is a huge plastic box with bundles of wires, a monitor, and a server that looks like a very tall computer cabinet.
The bitter smell of formalin grew so strong my head went dizzy for a moment.
“Ogurtsov, a retractor up your gut! Where the hell have you been?!”
The rasping voice of Doctor Frankenstein brought me to. Followed by the intent gazes of surveillance cameras, I dashed to the control panel. While my mind was combating hastily the panic attack caused by the sight of dead bodies and scary glittering instruments, my hands prepared the equipment by their own.
“How much time we have?” I asked, hoarse with excitement.
Doctor Frankenstein, born Professor Edward Vitalievich Shterd, grunted peevishly, “About a minute and a half…why are you waiting, Ogurtsov?! Time is short, I say! Switch it on, a scalpel up your radius! Do it!”
I darted to the computer, tumbled into the chair. From behind came the nasty screech of a medical saw, the smell of burnt bone: Edward Vitalievich was preparing a contact. I strained all my will power not to look back, and concentrated on loading the programs. I’d seen the trepanation once before, and it had given me scary dreams for every night since. No point doing that again. But my ears, beyond my will, were catching every sound behind.
“What kind of provision we have?” Frankenstein mutters. The saw is squealing, I hear some vile champs and crunches. “All equipment old, primitive…oh, damn, I’ve cut half the ear off! Stick a konhotom in it!”
Pavel and Timur, two assistants of Shterd, crashed into the room. They make a pair: Pavel is a phlegmatic and thick-skulled strapper, while Timur a cynical and uncaring one, thin as a rake. Both wear leather aprons, just like Frankenstein, though missing blood stains. However, the stains are yet to come, once the channel is established.
“Ready to begin the scanning!” I rapped out, listening to the curses behind.
“Where are you poking this wire, an enema up your arse?!”
“Edward Vitalievich, the heart pump’s failing!!”
“Where are the nanobots, you botchers?!”
I listened to Frankenstein’s curses and Pavel’s sluggish apologies, panic swelling inside. The “number ten” was my second connection. And given that I remember nothing of my first one (I had only come to myself afterward, in a fit of vomiting by a lavatory pan), it was just the time for panic. And when each connection costs tens of thousands of governmental dollars, one might as well become a stammerer.
“What an awful heart he had!” that seems to be Timur’s voice. A complete cynic, he has a habit of commenting on the process. “He must have liked this pump of ours…”
“Look at the lung! It’s dripping with nicotine tar,” Pavel responded in a drawl. “And if you press on it–”
“Work, you! A scalpel up your liver!”
Thank God! I cried out mentally. Please, Frankenstein, shut them up, or I’ll demonstrate my stomach.
“Nanobots in the blood…”
“Ogurtsov, modeling!” Frankenstein barked.
“The signal’s present,” I replied, finally plunging into the work. “The modeling has begun! Got the primary scheme of the intravital position of neurons!”
The computer howled with strain, processing trillions of operations in a second. It has to scan a human brain, to receive and check the passcodes from the nanobots which the heart pump is now dispersing about the organism of our “patient number ten,” and to model the artificial activities of the CNS. Brrr! It even gives me the creeps, though I’ve seen the most high-performance computers in the world!
“Shit!”
Pavel’s short scream followed by clumsy dull blows on the tin trolley made me flinch. With an effort of will, I returned my eyes to the screen. I should better not have looked. There behind, a thousand of nanobots under my command are now spreading tannins and the cryonic balm throughout the “number ten’s” body to prevent its organic matter from decomposition. Clotted veins are swelling, wriggling like worms. The body is quaking, thrashing on the trolley. Tears are streaming from under the corpse’s eyelids, lungs are rasping in spasm and oozing phlegm. If it was a man, he might have an erection, and if a woman…no! Don’t think! Look in the display! Watch the millions of digits profane the most sacred thing a human has: the soul. Here, a very long string that looks like a mad mathematician’s equation. This scanned part of the soul is the chain of human reactions to external stimuli. And this one might have been coding love and affections…
“Time?!” Shterd roared.
“Total: fifty-six seconds,” I said in a wooden voice. “Expected: twelve seconds…eight…three…”
“The model copying’s completed!” Olga echoed in the earphones. “The signal’s received!” A moment after, she added triumphantly: “It’s functioning!”
I gave a mental nod to Olga, my double in the operator room, wiped my sweaty forehead with trembling fingers and said loudly, “The ‘number ten’ is in the system!”
* * *
I could barely recall making my way to the operator room: all in a haze.
“Ugh!” Olga crinkled her nose. “You are stinking!”
“We’ve been choking them,” I cracked a clumsy joke
and hid my trembling fingers in the pockets.
“Ugh!”
I collapsed into the armchair, stretched my legs. I felt giddy with the last events, my stomach spasming. The smell of formalin mentioned by Olga was cutting my nostrils. Damn! This caustic muck even remains after a shower! My people have already grown suspicious: what kind of a programmer you are, dear Seryozha, that you come home stinking of corpses?
Some hot thing was thrust into my hand, my fingers clasped around automatically. It was a paper glass.
“Drink some tea,” Olga told me gently. “It will help…”
The door of the operator room was pushed open. The one who almost tumbled into was Timur: without the leather apron but still in his white coat, his mug red, his eyes watering, a bitten ham sandwich in hand. As he heard the last words, he blurted, “What tea, dear Olya? Only spirit would save his tender brain! Let’s drink a little at the end of the duty?”
At the sight of Timur chewing his sandwich my stomach gave a painful flinch, jumped to the throat. Hastily, I turned away, trying to breathe deep and measured, deep and measured…
“What an even green color,” Timur commented with too much familiarity. “Flimsy people you are, techs. If you could see us extracting the spinal cord from a corpse at our university studies…”
“Leave him be,” Olga spoke up. “You are the ones accustomed to it, rippers, and Sergey is a new hand. Remember your first visit here!”
Timur shrugged, rummaged his pocket with glassy ringing for a while to fish out a vial of alcohol. Cautiously diluted it with water in a graduate, looked against the light as if it were a glass of wine. Then exhaled sharply and gulped it down. His eyes bulged, his mug went purple, even bluish. Timur took a hasty bit of the sandwich and breathed huskily, “Dear Olya, I’ve come here after a job in emergency. After I’ve seen all sorts of…So I’m an old soldier, and I don’t know the words of love.”
“You’re an old alky,” Olga pointed out, though her anger already turned to mercy. “I have sweet cakes here. Want some tea?”
Deep in thought, Timur clinked the glassy things in his pocket, rolled the sandwich half pedantically into the napkin and, while hiding it into the coat pocket, gave the go-ahead: “Well, bring me your poison.”
“You are the poison!” Olga snapped back eagerly and darted off.
I heard her put the kettle on and tell about different sorts of tea. How she buys it, what you must pay notice to, how to brew it. I listened to her untroubled chirping and could not fathom: was I lucky to have gotten this job, or just the opposite? On the one hand, here I have good colleagues, though with their own oddities. But on the other… all this nightmare in the “unit number eight,” the anatomical theater, messing with the dead…here I feel more like a necromancer than a programmer! Though in a month of this “necromantic” work I’ve made enough money to buy a car, I’m likely to spend five times more on psychotherapy afterward.
The duty of Timur and Olga came to its end, but they remained at the kitchen table, drinking tea with cakes. Olga kept asking me questions and telling some funny things until I finally realized: a responsive girl, she was trying to distract me, to keep me from slipping into silent depression.
“Why all that?” Olga asked for the hundredth time, putting out a feeler. She knows I can speak of technological progress for hours. “No one tells me the truth, for I’m an operator. But I am interested! Why do they bring us all those corpses? Zombiemakers, truly.”
I flinched at the memory of the depository. I’m a technician in the third generation, after all. Nothing to do with medicine, and with pathologic anatomy even less so. I think the soul exists, but never before have I seen a body being disemboweled, and I do not advise anyone to. It makes you forget the sublime at once.
“We’re doing what we must,” I said with a show of confidence, though my fingers were still trembling. “You know that discussing the military industry affairs is more trouble than it’s worth. Besides, we are working for the greater good. They say the experiments are made on corpses today to help living people tomorrow.”
“How?” Olga smirked. “Like hell I will allow anyone to my brain!”
“Well, you have nothing to worry about,” tipsy Timur put in.
“A boor!”
“Why a boor?” he took offense. “I’ve paid you a compliment! Do you remember that funny story: either clever or beautiful? So you are beautiful!”
I hemmed, said in a conciliatory voice, “Overall, Olya, it’s a real goldmine! How is a perfect computer made? First hardware, then software, by the way solving problems in both: either lack of capacity, or cooling, or both…And how much has been said of the immense capacities of the brain? No need to invent the perfect computer – here it is! We already have it. Just copy the scheme, the methods of functioning – and you may use it! That’s exactly what Frankenstein is doing: he tries to make it work to the fullest. And those, experimental…we will resurrect them too once the technology allows. I hear there will be such technologies in the future, but to develop them, we need applicable computers. Everyone would like to get immortality. And we grant it to them almost for nothing, embalming them, preserving their brain. Do you know the cost of cryonics today?”
“Huh,” Olga said caustically. “You store the body, but use the brain to the max. What resurrection can there be? Jesuses, damn you.”
“That’s always the way of it,” I shrugged. “We can’t experiment on living people so far. A normal individual would become abnormal soon after the connection. All the neural connections are engaged in the process, and so many new ones created! And so fast…Any human would quickly turn a vegetable: the progress and skill development would be too speedy. So we have to proceed gradually. Step by step, I dare say…”
Olga sniffed. That’s understandable: it is the hundredth time we argue on it, and give the same reasons again. Not for the sake of arguing but to while away the time. Olga, just like me, is not adapted to the work in a mortuary, even the most secret one. And Timur is snuffling beside, as he takes tea after the diluted alcohol. A cynical pervert!
“Why do the military need all this?” Olga asked. “So many of their people around, all armed and armored. Do they still want supersoldiers?”
I chewed my lip for a while, said with a quaver, “Can you imagine a pilotless fighter? Controlled by a computer instead of a brain? The States began to make those a short time ago, preserving the mobility and reducing the weight and size of the machine, which has a positive impact on dozens of other characteristics. And now imagine a pilotless fighter with a living personality in the computer. It would not only react to events in thousands of times faster than any human can, but also be able to navigate the situation. For example, when you have to choose just one target from a dozen of unknown and unidentified, or make a decision when the communication with headquarters is lost. That’s the dream of all generals – an immortal fighting machine. The personality in the computer would be permanently copied to hundreds of other data carriers, its experience increasing…”
I gasped with delight. But Timur, a pragmatic cynic, put in: “They care not a fig about your experiments, buddy. What we call by numbers – The Tenth, The Third – are just consumables. They lie dead, and we, after the activation of neural connections and embalming, use their brains for servers. Whatever we do is marked with top secrecy, recorded and controlled. Part of the data is used for technological advancement, as we are trying to overtake the Japanese with their organic computers. Another part – for development of nanobots. The rest for military, for cryonics…damn! Even for investigation of new medicines! And we can make no step beyond the control, you see. Probably even our visits to the bathroom are recorded on video, and everything we do at home. Oh, I wish I could get the records of Olga’s nights…”
“Get lost,” Olga snapped back sluggishly and, impressed by the secrecy, went off to make fresh tea.
Timur followed her with eyes, then suddenly bent down to me and said
in a whisper, “Keep chewing over this matter, Seryoga, but don’t blab too much. Even here in the lab. Understand? When we are done with the modeling, our bosses will tell us everything by themselves. Of drones, of the new computer generation, even of the AI…”
Startled by his tirade, I wanted to shower him with questions, but Timur only winked and leaned back in the armchair.
About an hour later, we were visited by Frankenstein. Just as usual, he cursed everyone including Ramil, the laboratory mouse. Told everyone who’d finished their duty to go home, or he would use them as working material, for his surgical schedule was not yet completed. Olga oohed and rushed to pack her things.
“Let’s drink a little?” Timur asked for the last time.
I just shook my head while pushing him out. Then locked the door carefully, checked the alarm system, and headed for the computer.
Each of us has own way of relaxation. Timur uses alcohol to untie the tight ball of his nerves, and Olga drinks tea. I don’t know what it is for Frankenstein, neither do I care, if truth be told. I have my own methods to remove the tension.
* * *
The on-line baim loaded almost in a flash. In the past, I’d had to wait half an hour for it to get loaded through the clinic’s channels, backwoods and prehistoric. But once I’d resolved: since we had nine free and high-speed servers lying in the unit eight, why not use them?
Circumventing the multi-layer anti-hacker protection had been easy, especially given that I was the one who installed and managed it. Connecting to The Eighth and using its channels had taken more effort. But two hours of labor were crowned by success. No one could match me in online shooters! The speed of data processing was so…
Today, just for fun, I changed The Eighth for The Tenth. I had to test our reinforcements. The memory of that “reinforcement” in the anatomical theater made me flinch, but at that very moment Bloody King ran a dead match.
What kind of weapon a pistol is?
The speed of The Tenth was enough not only to baim but also to evade the anti-hacker protection on King’s servers. A bit of typing in the command line – and here I am rushing about the maze with a mini-gun, my backpack stuffed with the first-aid kits and bandages supposedly bought for the game currency. The security software is allowing all the interferences bluntly: no way for it to trace my cheating when I’m cracking with one hand and covering my tracks at once with the other. And I am living it up…