The Conscript
“Most of us don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the blasts and the bolts that miss us.”
First Names
Ren was waking up. Fieldstone could tell. It was her habit to stir, roll over, and snooze for a spell before getting up, but she had a sudden straightness about her posture before she snapped-to, and usually, her mind went straight to work.
“She’s fine,” Fieldstone reported preemptively. “Harold’s been monitoring the girl all night.”
“He’s a housebot,” Ren mumbled back.
“Take a breath. It’s early. The girl’s sleeping. The assassin is in there sleeping. You’d only wake them both.”
Ren exhaled.
Fieldstone was seated in the chair at the foot of their bed. Ren sat up halfway and looked down toward him. He could see the question coming.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he replied to her inquiring gaze.
Then he shook his head at the follow up look.
“What then?” she asked. “It’s not the assassin, is it?”
Fieldstone shook his head. “I had a thought.”
“Big day,” Ren replied, sitting up properly in the bed now. “I’ll have Harold fix a cake for the occasion.”
Fieldstone ignored the sarcasm. “Jamison Scott Griffin,” he said, looking over at her directly.
“You thought your name, Bo? Is that like ... I don’t know if I’m supposed to infer something deeper here. I haven’t even had a coffee yet.”
“You knew?”
“What? Your name?” She was shrugging. “Of course I knew your name.”
“I didn’t know yours. When that assassin called you Renata, it took me a second to realize who he was even talking to. Oh, sure. My wife. I don’t even know her name. Great. Figures you’re one step ahead of me. Per usual.”
“Steps,” Ren replied. “Multiple steps.”
The way he shook his head at her encapsulated all the responses she expected from him.
“The little things,” she said, nodding.
“For a while there, I thought your first name was Doctor,” Fieldstone joked. “But it did occur to me that there are some things we could talk about.”
She sat silently, contemplating. And as she did, she looked over at him and realized that he might as well be reading her thoughts. Did they even need to talk, she wondered.
“Renata Schorr,” Fields said. “I know Dr. Ren a little, but that woman, she’s a stranger to me.”
“Me too,” Ren said. “Never quite got to meet her—at least the grown-up version anyway. I knew the girl pretty well.”
“How’d you get your first name?”
She looked at him, and he answered her question with an expression she understood.
“Oh, Doctor.” She shook her head.
He could tell by her reaction she didn’t really want to talk about it. They stared over at each other for a few seconds. It was an entire debate through their eyes. And she could tell. She’d lost. He’d been up all night working up the steam to demand something of her. He didn’t usually. It was a big step.
“We can talk about it, I guess,” she said.
He shook his head.
“Now?”
“They’re asleep, Ya-ya. Everyone’s asleep.”
“Get me a coffee and I’ll talk.”
He shook his head at her and she returned a stern look.
“Charity’s for strangers,” she said.
“Funny,” he replied.
“I’m serious, Bo.”
“I know you are. Now I’m actually curious.”
“About what?”
“About how you became a doctor.”
“It wasn’t by choice, that’s sure.”
“I guess I better fetch you that coffee.”
Ren exhaled and shook her head. He could tell she didn’t want to talk. Fieldstone knew exactly what she was thinking. Why did they have to start talking now? That was exactly why he insisted. If they didn’t start talking sometime, they never would. Old habits are hard to break.
He got up and left her to gather her thoughts while he fetched the coffee.
Conscription
I was conscripted. That’s the short answer to how I became a doctor. But before I became a doctor, I was a doctor. That’s the longer version. I guess you want the longer version?
That’s the idea, Ya-ya. We should know these things about each other. I was conscripted too, but that’s what we Etterans do, not your people. And we get conscripted to fight, not to patch people up. That seems odd to me.
Would you like to talk, Bo? Or do you want me to?
I want you to.
Then let me talk. It’s a long story. I’m trying to think my way through it all.
You said you were a doctor before you were a doctor. How does that work? Maybe start there.
Well, who needs a human surgeon, right? That’s what I thought when he came to me. If it wasn’t such a ridiculous hassle to get down there, I’d have thought it was a joke. Conscription? To what?
You’re losing me.
What?
You’re not a very good storyteller, Ya-ya. How about some specifics. Where were you at the time? And it was a recruiter, right, who came to visit you?
Okay, so. It was kind of a secret project I was working on. I sorta fell into it. The doctor thing, it was kind of a joke we had, because technically we earned the credential, but it wasn’t to practice medicine, because, well, any outpost in the Letters that’s anywhere has an Andrew or a Saraswathi clone that’s a hundred times better than a human doctor anyway. And who the hell would let another person cut on them, right?
Says the surgeon.
I know. But it’s true. They’re all better than me.
You’re good at what you do, Ren. That girl would be dead if it weren’t for you.
I suppose. Anyway. Where was I?
You got the credential with no intention to practice.
Right. Yeah. Credentials, actually: MD PhD. And the idea is that you’ll make a better researcher if you spend time learning the practical applications for what you’re researching. I’m kind of ambivalent on that point, but it’s hard to have a strong opinion on the matter. I wasn’t a researcher very long.
What sort of research were you doing?
Neurology. And it was actually very interesting work. I was excited about it. I stumbled into the project at a conference over lunch between panels. I wasn’t even presenting anything, just assisting my mentor with his keynote, and then I fell into this conversation about neurotoxins and alien DNA, and before I knew it, I was on my way to Beta-Coronado to do field work on this weird little nearby water planet that was driving people crazy. Or, well ... Nobody really knew what was happening with them. People were getting all ... I don’t know. Weird. They were getting weird.
Alien DNA? That’s what you were researching?
We didn’t really know what we were researching. There was life in the oceans, so biologists were starting to study the ecosystems there, and then they’d come back to Beta-Coronado like fully transformed.
How do you mean?
They got weird and culty and religious, I guess. Really straight, scientific people suddenly started talking about seeing ghosts and angels and hearing music, seeing lights in the darkness of the oceans. They couldn’t function anymore, not on the science. So my boss on that project naturally thought neurotoxins and got funding to go looking for them, to try to explain some of it. Maybe discover some new drugs. I was there for all of sixteen days before the LSS showed up and snatched me off to become a combat surgeon, which I thought was a joke.
Why would you think that’s a joke? It’s about the least funny thing I could think of. About as life-or-death as it gets, Ya-ya.
Yeah, no. I agree now. But first of all, conscription. I didn’t even know that was a legal possibility. Not in the Letters. Who has say over that? What system? I didn’t even know there was a federalized body that had any ... what do you call it? Jurisdiction?
I guess that’s a good enough word for it.
Sure. But for you guys, it’s a totally different thing. You grow up on Etterus expecting it, right? If you don’t choose to volunteer for something, you can expect to have the Guild choose for you.
That’s right.
I don’t even think I saw an LSS military vessel or outpost or soldier until that recruiter dropped out from his transport in a drone suit. It was absurd. Nissim is a water planet, and nobody knew about it. There isn’t even an outpost there. Not even an icecap you can land on. So we were all on a ship, and this guy comes flying out of the sky like he was stopping by for lunch or something. We had to take down the nanosheet so he could land on the deck. In retrospect, we probably should’ve just let him drop in the water. Get his own dose of Nissim’s religion.
Funny.
I’m not joking, Bo.
Yes, you are.
Well. I wish I wasn’t. Mostly.
He was just doing his job.
Right, yeah. Snatching people out of their lives to fight a war we weren’t even supposed to be in.
At least you didn’t have to actually fight it.
No? You want to talk about that, Fieldstone? You go ahead and tell me every horrible story of the ones you lost—the Elles you watched bleed out in front of you. Total them up. I lost that many in a week while Dana Point was popping off. Right on my table. Right in front of me. Hardly had time to strip off my kit and clean the blood off the floor before they were dropping off the next body.
Take a breath, Doctor. You know what I mean.
If I could go back, I’d have let him drop in the water, that recruiter. He was an asshole. Just doing his job. Right.
Maybe so. But plenty of the ones who got dropped onto it lived past your table. I bet a lot of them are grateful that corporal did pull you off that boat.
I bet a lot of them aren’t too. It doesn’t always go so well for them after all that.
Regardless, that’s more than I ever saved, Ya-ya. It probably doesn’t feel like it, but I hope you know it on some level.
Don’t try to imagine what I feel or don’t feel. I walked a long road before I met you.
Maybe that’s what I appreciate about you most. Familiarity. I never have to wonder if you can relate. But you’re wandering off topic again. That corporal.
He was a lieutenant.
Sorry. Just assumed. We wouldn’t waste an officer on that.
Yeah, not with everyone getting conscripted anyway. Why bother? The conscription thing was a rarity. He told me all about it, and I didn’t know my legal rights and had no access to representation out there. He conned me into it.
How so?
Technically, you have due process under Common Treaty in the Letters. So they can conscript me forcefully. But I had a right to legal appeal, which I didn’t know at the time. So Lieutenant Asshole had to get me to sign of my own volition, which he tricked me into.
How’d he manage that?
I had a research assistant he also drew papers on. And the thing neither of us knew, and he didn’t tell us of course, was that the LSS had to demonstrate a specific aptitude they were lacking and that the conscript was uniquely capable. So my joke MD, plus my test scores and personality profile made me the perfect sucker to put a case on. But still, if I’d known what the hell was up, it would’ve been a legal fight. Months? Maybe even a couple years before they could force me into the service. But he came with papers on my lab assistant too. Nisa Qou. And she was ...
Not surgeon material, I’m guessing.
She wasn’t dumb. She was a sweet kid, and she was very helpful if you told her what to do. But the thought of her ... Just. No.
Not somebody you’d want cutting anybody open.
No. It’s like ... You know she might have had the scores on file. It’s possible. The Lieutenant said she did. I don’t know. But you need to have command, not just of the knowledge and procedure and process, all the possibilities and contingencies. She might have even been able to get there eventually with about a decade of training. But to stand there in the moment and decide a course of action while a life is on the line, somebody bleeding right in front of you. She was never going to make it. And then he told us that we had to do it, like we had to make it through the training or they’d divert us. You don’t just get to fail out and go home; otherwise people would fail on purpose. So it was like if he pulled Nisa in, she was going to end up on the other side of things.
The fighting side?
Yeah.
And with that personality, she was likely going to put a few people on your table before she got herself killed, if my experience has taught me anything.
Probably. Sure. But that was the last thing on my mind back then. I couldn’t even conceive of the reality of it. The war was abstract—even the idea of being a surgeon was. Like I said, I thought it was a joke. At least part of me did.
But not for her—for Nisa. He knew which button to push.
I’ve thought about that. I’m not certain. I think it was as much a test as a purposeful strategy. He wanted me, and either way he was going to get me. Legal fight or with my consent. But if I let Nisa go too, or if I didn’t, he was going to find out something about me—what kind of person I was.
And?
I thought I was very noble, and I thought he was doing us both a huge favor, that he would owe me one big time. That was how he let me think it was. “You did the right thing” I remember him telling me. It was actually ... they pulled me up on a tether, to a ship not all that different to the Yankee-Chaos. Then right to Nu-Amro. I got to skip right past the licensing process—lucky me, Dr. Renata Schorr MD PhD. Lots of surgeries. No research.
Any idea what happened to Nisa?
No. Knowing her, I imagine she’s still on Beta-Coronado. Probably hallucinating about gods and angels on that fish planet. Poor kid. I hope she’s alive and happy though.
I bet she is.
I bet she doesn’t give a second thought about me—that project leader she spent a couple weeks on a boat with when she was twenty.
Fair. Most of us don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the blasts and the bolts that miss us.
Just the ones that land.
They didn’t let you start cutting on people right away, did they? Credentialed and all that?
Hell no. They sent us to Nu-Amro. I got trained by a Saraswathi clone. I hate that bitch. Maícon I can tolerate. I actually even liked the Kayella clone on Merced. But I detest the Saraswathis. To this day, I hear that voice anywhere and I vomit in my mouth.
Nu-Amro
Nu-Amro? What the hell’s out in the Nus?
All kinds of things that don’t exist. Apart from that, even if I did know what was out there, I couldn’t talk about it. That and the Rexes and whatever the hell they get up to out there.
So they just snatched you up and took you right out there?
I didn’t get a week holiday in Beta-Aurelius if that’s what you mean.
You didn’t even get a ride home first? Pack a few things?
Home? Yeah, sure. Closest thing at that point in my life was that boat. I pinged my parents to let them know I’d signed up, but I couldn’t tell them what I was doing or where I was going. No. They just took me straight to the Nus.
I know that ride. Just you and the Lieutenant and crew?
We picked up two others on the way.
Conscripts like you?
One signed up for it; one got duped like me. The girl, she didn’t make it a week before coming apart. I think they sent her to logistics after she crapped out. The other conscript, he did okay. I heard he’s dead now, though. No idea where or how.
How did they train you?
VR mostly. Scenarios. Tests. Qualifications. And they test your baseline psychometrics going into it—three days of psych tests, and they tease out your way of reacting to everything so they know how to break you down, how to build you up, how to push you, get every last drop of energy out of you. And they did shit purposefully to confuse you, so you didn’t know why you were doing a lot of what you were doing.
What do you mean?
I mean, well ... if you know why you’re learning something, you know how to place it. You can find motivation to learn things you know you’re going to need.
Right.
And, for example, they didn’t even explain to us why they needed human surgeons for weeks. Probably over two months. I can’t remember. But it was still a bit of a joke to us, like my medical degree. We didn’t ever think we were going to have to practice medicine, so out there at Nu-Amro, everything from Saraswathi was about how terrible a doctor I was, all the things I’d forgotten or didn’t learn in the first place because I was never actually going to have to be a doctor. If an AI could be programmed to have contempt, I don’t know. She sure acted like it. Just brutal. Every failing. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. How did you never learn that, Renata? I don’t know how the LSS thinks you’d ever be any use at all.” You probably know, I’m sure, Fieldstone.
Know what?
Why. Why they needed me. It’s the same for you guys right?
We’re probably better at hardening our mechs, so, it sounds like it’s more of an issue in the Letters. But we have our share of human surgeons. It didn’t really strike me as odd to find one on a ship like this. I guess that’s why we’ve never had this conversation before.
Well, I didn’t know. I didn’t have a clue. I think maybe they wanted to see how many of us they could filter out before they started showing us what was really happening. In the Letters, even now, nobody knows anything. The shit that goes on in the boundary systems? Everyone’s just oblivious.
How’d you find out?
They had this major general. He was a ... I don’t know. Maybe you’d call him like the commodore of the surgical corps. So he came out to see how his reinforcements were coming along. And they finally allowed us to ask some obvious questions, and he answered.
How did he explain it?
“Civility in warfare is a lot to ask.” I think that was his exact response. Then he explained that going back all the way to Earth, even in gang warfare in cities, the gangs used to shoot at ambulances that came to treat their victims. “We shot those bastards for a reason, you dumb assholes. Let them bleed.” He said you Etterans operated like that too. Only it was usually what? Technological sabotage? EMPs? Things like that?
We have our methods. Yeah. The Trasp have theirs too.
And we’re decades behind in countermeasures. So our guys would send out medical units, and they’d go dead and our casualties would just bleed out staring a vacant surgical Andrew dead in the face. Hell of a last sight to see.
So they’d send you guys to the action?
Never quite that close. We were always just a step away. But never so far back that the poor bastards they kept from bleeding to death right away had a long stretch to critical care. I had a few hot rides into ground bases, though. Probably nothing by your standards, but it jolted me around a bit the first few times.
So they trained you at Nu-Amro and then right into the fray?
We got six weeks training at the body bay on Alpha-Richard. The first three as assistant to an AI so we got used to working on live patients. Then they put us as primary until the bots passed us on, usually in three weeks. Then we got put on rotation.
Like … on call for duty?
No. We were always on. We stayed in Alpha-Richard either assisting or primary to keep our skills sharp, but the rotation was for the field, so you knew if things got hot somewhere, you were first to ship forward. Sometimes we were stuck at the body bay for weeks. I had a stretch where I didn’t get back there for probably four months.
That’s what you call it, huh? The body bay?
You’ve never talked to Sōsh about it?
I’m not even sure I’ve ever talked to Sōsh. Not apart from like “Dinner’s ready, Fields” or “Clear that corner, asshole,” or whatever. Have you?
Talked to Sōsh? I’m his doctor, Bo. We talk.
Huh? I wasn’t sure he talked to anyone.
You don’t talk to anyone.
I guess.
No. That’s a fact.
We’re talking now. Anyway, that’s it? Plucked off a boat and then a few weeks on Nu-Amro, was it? Then a few more weeks and you were cutting?
I was on Nu-Amro for a year and a half, almost two. I got extensive training out there. Like I said, relentless. Saraswathi.
And then you did what, rotations in and out of service?
Frontline service, yes. Rotations. But we got shipped back to Alpha-Merced or Richard when we were called back out.
How long did that go on for?
I’m not sure I had a break in five years. You lose track of the days and the weeks, doing that work.
Isn’t that a fact.
Yeah. It’s a fact.
And then you, what? Got let out when your five years was up?
They didn’t let me out. Look around you, Fieldstone. I’m still sleeping on a rack on a Letters transport ship.
Do you want to talk about it? Your time there?
Do you want to talk about what happened after you put a knife in my heart, Fieldstone? I mean, while were talking about all the fun stuff.
I did that to save you, Ya-ya. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to properly explain what I did spare you.
You are going to have to try.
I understand that.
They must be awake by now, the assassin anyway.
He’s not. We have time. Don’t pull away from me. This is hard enough to bring up in the first place.
You want to hear about my bullshit baggage? As if you don’t have enough of your own?
We all do.
Do you want to talk about that?
I would. Maybe. I’m not like Transom, that lucky bastard. I have to carry it. It’s why you assholes found me halfway to Hellenia out in the Indies in the first place.
I got so messed up, Bo.
You think I wouldn’t understand?
You already do understand. Why should we have to bother with the specifics?
Renata.
Yes?
No. I mean ... I’m sorry, but that bothered me. That big dumb asshole assassin comes on this ship and knows something that important about my wife that I don’t know. So what? All these doctors at that body bay know something about you that I don’t have the first clue about. That doesn’t seem right to me. I don’t know. Does that make any sense?
Sure.
I’ll tell you about my life, Ya-ya. I will.
Sōsh never told you about the body bay?
Like I said: “Dinner’s ready, asshole.”
All right then. Fine. I’ll tell you about Alpha-Richard. I’m going to need another coffee though. And stop by and check in with Harold. Make sure the girl’s not awake yet. The patient comes first.
Deal.
The Body Bay
So I’d say the body bay was where I spent the bulk of those years. That was where all the poor bastards whose lives we saved got sent back to for extended care then rehab and prosthetics and their first stages of physical therapy. That was on Alpha-Richard. Sōsh and Burch were both residents there for extended stretches, as you can imagine. There were a lot of follow-up surgeries, mostly done by mech surgeons, but we did a lot of our continuing education at those tables under the direction of the mechs and mentors.
Wait, Ya-ya, hang on. There’s one thing I’m hung up on still.
What?
At Amro, you said you did years of training, right?
Yeah. A little under two years.
And only a couple weeks before you were cutting at Merced or the body bay or what?
The body bay is at Alpha-Richard. There are similar satellite facilities around the Alphas and Betas mostly.
But only weeks of training on live patients?
You’re talking about the physical movements and such?
Yeah. And, I guess I’m just trying to figure out how they trained you so fast.
I was a doctor already technically, so I didn’t have to learn what? About three or four years of anatomy and pharmacology and basic medicine.
I thought you said you were a terrible doctor?
Relative to a Saraswathi clone? Yeah. I was. But I’m not stupid, Bo. And I caught up fast once I was in the training pipeline at Amro.
But the physical stuff, your hand movements, cutting, the feel of it? You obviously learned all the procedure in VR first at Amro, and then only weeks to train your hands?
Oh, I see what you mean now. No. I was already trained when I got to Alpha-Richard. I honestly could’ve done surgeries as a primary on day one. They trained our hands from the first day at Amro. The VR was ... how can I explain it? It was eyes and ears, obviously, a full headset, and then they had a top-half suit that we wore. It was this skin-tight electro-kinetic training top and gloves that simulated the textures. The feel of the tools, weight, temperature, resistance.
Really? Was it close? I mean, to real surgery on a person?
Not close. Exact. I don’t know how they calibrated that setup, but we practiced on varying types of gear all the way down to no-tech tools. You could do surgery in a cave as long as you had someone to bag the patient while they were out. Old, old school. Scalpel, sutures, actual glass for eyewear to magnify the field, hand lamps. And then of course we had typical hand tools that bots use, lasing, nano-stitchers—the things we almost always ended up using. But if an EMP went off and someone was going to die if we didn’t intervene, yeah, we cut bones with a saw and flesh with a knife. They prepped us for all of that at Amro.
So by the time you got to the body bay it was just about seeing the real thing, more or less?
Yeah. By then, they were really just monitoring how we managed our emotions about it, composure, the feel of doing it for real. Those things. And always with a bot or a senior surgeon looking over your shoulder.
Okay. I get it. That makes a hell of a lot more sense now.
I had a mentor too. The guardrails didn’t come off until after we got to Merced. And I think what’s most shocking is that they don’t really tell you—or maybe they can’t really tell you, I don’t know—but that first time it’s just ... chaos going on around you, people bleeding, screaming, and someone’s in the process of dying right in front of you, and then eyes turn to you, like, do something!
Yeah.
So, I think really, I figured out pretty fast that my job was to identify a little piece of the chaos that I could fix, you know, one patient at a time, and then fix that first piece—
Or fail trying to.
Or fail trying to. Yeah. And then move on to the next one as fast as you could. But I think I skipped over Merced.
Yeah. So you get sent to the body bay on Alpha-Richard, and then you went on call to go forward?
Right. When we were on call to go where the fighting was, usually in the boundary systems, we were stationed at Merced, and some of that time—I don’t know, maybe a quarter of the time—we were waiting to get called forward. It was about the only time I wasn’t working on any given day. But when we got forward deployed from Merced, that was really when we were in it. The Alphas, Betas, Indies—really just about every system along that line that had outposts with fighting over those years—I got deployed to all of them.
To the hospitals there, or what?
If only. Not usually. We’d set up a pop-up sterile site in the closest safe place that made sense, usually at the discretion of the CO on the incident. I did ten surgeries in a ballet studio on some random outer cylinder in Alpha-Ben. The Trasp had hit three of the cylinders in that group, all civilians. That was a fun day. Fun couple weeks really. Poetic irony really hit on my second lower leg amputation of the afternoon, right in a ballet studio. I was deep enough into it that I’d gotten pretty dark by then. You know. My mindset and all that.
I know how that goes.
Sure. You know I told you about having a mentor—another human surgeon. Jahno Kouts-Goff was his name. Great surgeon. But I remember early on, probably the first day I met him, he asked me, “Do you care about people, Renata?” And I was just confused by the question. Who doesn’t care about people? And to have another doctor ask me that question—never mind that neither of us had really chosen to be practitioners. My first thought was: who the hell is this guy? So I told him, “Yeah. I care about people, Jahno. Of course I care.” I did at that point, I think. That was true. “You’re going to have to be careful about that,” he says to me. “It may be a problem.” And he could see me reacting. Kind of shocked. “Most people only have so much empathy to give in a lifetime, Renata. Runs out fast around here. Best thing to do is to figure out what to do about that right away.” So I asked him if he had any suggestions, thinking I was being a smartass. And Jahno says, “Okay. Judging by your response, I’d say hyper-cynical is probably going to be the route you choose. Tough way to go, but better than caring and crashing out in a few years, which is option two. Option three is to find God.” And I laughed, thinking he was joking. He wasn’t joking, though. So I told him I should have eaten the fish in the first place. He didn’t get it, and he didn’t really care to hear my explanation. He just thought I was weird. Jahno didn’t care about much, just really detached in a way I could never be. He was right about me, though. Hyper-cynical. That I could see. Cutting off legs with a bone saw in a ballet studio. God’s work, right?
Damn.
What?
I sorta wish I’d known some of this about you before ...
Oh, yeah, like how getting our parts chopped off one-by-one was my own personal hell. I don’t know. That was just a deeper, darker irony. Those artifacts. I guess they’ve got their own sense of poetic justice deep in their workings too. Maybe I should’ve eaten the fish, Bo. What do you think?
I don’t know about the fish, but I’m glad we’re talking about all this, Ya-ya. I really am. So you held it together for how many years doing all that?
I’m not sure I did hold anything together. I managed to function, if that’s what you mean. I showed up for work. I did my job. I was actually pretty good at it too.
We’re all aware.
I guess that’s the redeeming bit of it. That was the part I learned about what Jahno was saying that day. You cannot give a shit and show up and do a tremendous amount of decent work. Not for long. Not if you want to stay sane. The tank’s only so full.
Can I ask you about Dana Point?
I suppose Sōsh told you I was there?
Transom.
Right.
I don’t know where he learned it from, but he said you were there for the worst of it.
Probably Burch running his mouth, I’d guess. Maybe Leda. I don’t know. What’s to say anyway, though. You know how it goes.
Maybe. I ran a lot of ops, though. Don’t get me wrong, Transom and I have both been out there in the places where shit’s really popping off, but we mainly operated in the shadows. I’ve heard stories about Dana Point, though. I don’t particularly envy the heroes or the villains of them, whatever it means to be either.
The perspective of the storyteller, mostly.
Probably fair.
I don’t really know what to say about it, Bo. Actually, again, another irony was that the worse it got, probably the closer I got to what Jahno said—you know, not caring. You can’t really care. You don’t have time to feel it. I was getting shuttled from safe house to safe house, setting up and moving almost every day depending on where the lines were. I probably averaged twelve surgeries a day for three weeks straight, many of which didn’t end well.
Dead?
What do you mean?
What do you consider a bad end, I guess? A dead patient, I presume?
Or not. There were some surgeries where I couldn’t save a limb, or times I couldn’t try to because of the circumstances. Cases where you’d have made an attempt if you were in a real surgical suite where you knew you could observe the patient and follow up afterward, give the arm or the hand or the leg a chance to see if it could pull through. Not there. I cut a lot of early losses those weeks, and you just hope your patient got out and got a good mech hand or whatever. And you never find out, which is fun. I have no idea what happened to any of those people. That was all knife work by bug-light, and I had a headlamp. But the Trasp drones were strafing any kind of magnetic or EM field they could detect. So we didn’t even flick on an armband or take scans. If you had a bleeder you had to go digging. Sometimes you found it in time, sometimes you didn’t. It was either work that way or get incinerated, which could have happened any second anyway.
You were that close?
I don’t know how close I was, to be honest. It was just the room I was in, the work, and when I got told we needed to move, head down, follow directions, slip out to the next safe house, next patient. Catch an hour or two sleep here and there. Try not to lose your shit. I try not to think about those weeks.
So the girl? Shiann? Is that ... you seem very determined to save her arm.
I don’t know if that’s related. Notwithstanding the fact the galaxy’s most dangerous assassin brought her to my table, I’d like to believe I’d want to save her arm anyway.
Fair. I didn’t mean ...
I know.
And then after all that, you got sent back to Alpha-Richard?
Yup. I got a couple days of debriefing, which for us was more or less having the Andrews or the Saraswathi’s go over our reports. They’d review footage if we had any tech recording the procedures, tell us what we did wrong, what they’d have done better, which ones shouldn’t have died, all that. And I’m sure they tortured the next round of surgeons at Amro with those scenarios in their VR training. I hated those debriefings as much as the work probably. Arguing with a robot that wasn’t even there.
Trying to explain to a housebot what it’s like to be up for two days in a war zone having to think straight? Something like that?
Sometimes. I think it was almost worse when they made assumptions like that. You know, “Oh, I’m sure you did your best, Dr. Schorr. It was a challenging environment to perform that type of a procedure.”
Commendable job.
It would be bad enough if it was from one of the senior surgical officers. But the bots patting you on the head. “Good job for a human,” you know? Last thing you wanted to hear when you knew you should’ve saved that kid’s hand or kept that old woman alive, at least through the night. You don’t get it back.
Sometimes you wish you couldn’t feel it, but you also need to feel it.
I don’t know, Bo. You don’t really get a choice either way. So what the hell. Feel it. Don’t feel it.
That was the worst of it?
Dana Point?
Yeah. Dana Point.
For me personally? I don’t know. What do you know about me, Fieldstone?
What do you mean?
Did Sōsh ever tell you what happened to me? How I ended up on the Yankee-Chaos?
Not in so many words. No. I think we all have a sense of it, though, even if we don’t have the details.
Do you want to hear them?
Only if you want to share them with me.
Objects
I’m not sure where to begin, Bo. I’m not sure you understand this part.
There’s a lot I don’t understand.
Me too, but I don’t know.
It’s shit you’ve never said aloud before. I get it.
Yeah. But it’s deeper than that.
So, I know we didn’t do this in our other life because we couldn’t, and hell, my other life before that certainly didn’t make for any ... I don’t know what—
Relationships?
I guess if that’s the word for it.
Fieldstone?
All I’m trying to say is if you can’t say it to me, you’re never going to be able to say it, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe you just stuff it down and get by, right? That’s been good enough for me for most of my life. But with all the shit we went through together never saying a word about it, now that we can talk?
I know.
What can hurt us, Ren? Really. Look at us. We’re free. We can do what we want.
I shouldn’t be a doctor. I’m the last person.
You feel that way?
It is that way.
I’m sure that girl sleeping in the med bay with her arm still attached would say otherwise. Plenty of others. Not to discount the feeling, but I’m sure glad your around too, for when things go sideways, with all the stupid shit we’ve done in the past year.
I had to think about that for a long time: Does it matter what I think or what I do?
That’s a question. I don’t know. I suppose it depends on a lot of things but mostly what the outcome is, for you and for others, I guess. For Shiann, it certainly matters what you did.
That’s if she keeps the arm, Bo. That’s far from a certainty at this point.
I have faith in you.
Maybe you shouldn’t.
That’s my call, though. You have some doubts, I see. That’s fine. You want to convince me otherwise, give me a reason.
Clever.
You do want to tell me. I know you can’t see yourself, but we did spend years holding back everything we needed to say to each other. I know what it looks like when you’re dying to tell me something. Just start, Ren. Say the first word. Nothing you can say will shake me loose.
There are reasons. Deep reasons why I am the way I am, but I think probably the worst one of them was getting trained by a machine.
You clearly don’t like her. That’s sure.
She made me, Bo. I’m a better surgeon than probably all but a handful of human surgeons who came before they started getting trained by AIs. Take Shiann for example, the vascular repair, the microscopic stitching, the intricacy of it. Sara would’ve looked over my shoulder at hour fifteen and if she had the capacity for admiration, sure, she’d have felt it. Shook her embodied head with pride in the surgeon she created.
And you hate her for it?
That’s not why I hate her. I hated the torment that made me that way, sure. But I hated that she made me like her. When she trained us, she talked about people like objects, always “the body reacts this way” or “the bone requires that.”
That sounds normal enough.
The part that got me was that it was normal, so we adopted that mode of thinking, but we also adopted the other part of her manner. And I’m not sure there’s another way to say it than that I came to think of people as other. She would say things like “humans are emotional creatures, so no two will react to a procedure the same way.” And that sounds true.
Isn’t it?
It is. But it’s also an easy trap to fall into when you’re cutting off three arms in a day. Bone. Muscle. Skin. Human. Objects. I stitch objects. I fix bodies the way a technician braces up a fusion drive. I hated people, Bo. I hated that they got hurt. I hated that they hurt one another. I hated the sight of their bloody bones. I hated that they cried and screamed before I put them out, the sound of their voices, the smell of their blood. Would these stupid, bloody creatures just stop. Just stop it.
I can see that.
I had a Lieutenant I saw every few months for a couple years. He was on the fleet, and their group was stationed near enough Merced that his ship took us around fairly regularly. And I could tell he was sweet on me. It was flattering, or I should say I should have been flattered. Parts of my mind knew that. I knew that he was attractive, and he had a good personality. And I played with the idea of it. That was before Dana Point even. I think it was. Anyway, he kissed me one night, and it wasn’t disgust I felt—the feeling I had for him. It was like I hated his body, viscerally. I hated that he was near me. I wanted to bite his lip off. I thought about it.
Huh? You didn’t though.
No. I just pushed him away. I had a lot of dark thoughts after that. But those bipals. What they did to us, cutting off every human part of us? I understood it, because I’d been down that road, all the way down it.
I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe ...? We have a lot to talk about, not just me, I mean, everyone. I did go all the way down that road, though. I don’t say this to discount what you’re feeling, Ren, but if you had gone all the way down it, those feelings wouldn’t bother you the way they do. It’s good news actually. You went a long way down that road and you came back again. And you were hardened for it. You didn’t flinch for a minute on Yaal. That was one of the things I loved most about you. Your resolve made me focus. I think it made us stronger.
I don’t know. I don’t think I thought of it in that way.
Not that we could talk about it at the time, but that planet—that existence—would’ve broken just about anyone. But it didn’t break you. You just got stronger and stronger, and that’s probably because on some level, you knew exactly what it was. You’d walked it before and deep down you knew better.
Vesper
Keep going, Ya-ya. I don’t want to stop you.
I’m not sure how much more there is to say after that.
Then tell me everything. You don’t have to be afraid of it anymore. How’d you crack out?
Crack out?
That’s what Etterans call it. You snapped, right? Otherwise, you’re still young enough, I imagine they’d have kept you in the corps for another five years or so, willing or unwilling.
I cracked out. Yeah. I did. That’s a nice way of saying it, compared to the reality.
How’d it happen?
The short version is that I pulled a sidearm off an LC who was visiting a friend in the body bay, put it in my mouth, and damn near blew the back of my head out.
For real?
What do you mean for real, Bo? I’m not lying about it if that’s what you mean.
No. I mean ... It’s not the most admirable way to crack out, but I’ve known of guys doing the same to get a 10-14—that’s what we call it. You know, mentally unfit for duty. Can’t hack it anymore. Or did you actually snap?
I lost my mind, Bo. So I guess I’m not really sure. Was I close? I think I was, but I don’t really know. I remember it happening, but it was like an out-of-body experience. Almost like I could see myself doing what I was doing and saying what I was saying, but I wasn’t really in control I don’t think.
That’s fair. So it was just like that, one day, see pistol take pistol. No real trigger?
Oh, there was a trigger. It was more like the final straw of a thousand triggers, but there was certainly a precipitating incident.
Okay?
You want to hear it?
If you want to tell me.
There was a girl, a kid, Bo, a baby. She was a third-class FT on a support ship that got hit. Two of the older technicians managed to pull her through a bulkhead as the ship was venting, and their ship had been there floating dead for half a day before my transport got diverted to respond, seeing as we had a surgeon aboard. The girl suffered plasma burns along about half of her face from the initial blast, not too unlike Sōsh, except she didn’t have any damage to her torso or legs, minor burns along her shoulder and upper arm, but it was her face that got the worst of it. And by the time we got there and breached the compartment she was incoherent, and the boys were just traumatized. She’d been screaming from the pain for hours, lapsing in and out of consciousness. So I did what I could to stabilize her in the setting, turned us right back around to Richard where they could treat the burns and make a proper attempt at reconstruction and certainly better grafting than Merced or the field. But it was clear she was going to make it. I kept telling the boys they did right. They’d saved her life. She was going to make it. And the way they looked at each other when they heard she would live was far closer to regret than pride. I thought she would come around. But just the way they reacted gave me pause. I think they wanted to believe me, but they’d gone through those hours with her, and they’d known the girl, served with her, and I could tell they cared about her, took care of her like a little sister on that ship.
I’ve had a few little sisters and brothers over the years, Ya-ya.
I know you have. You’re a good man, Fieldstone. But you also probably know there are times when you question whether saving someone isn’t the proper thing to do. And those boys had saved her without considering it, pulled her in behind them in the seconds they had to rush to an intact bulkhead. Of course they saved her. But as we made our way back to Richard, I began to really struggle to assess her mental status. At first, I thought she’d suffered moderate head trauma, but I figured that she’d re-orient after I got her pain moderated and the right balance of analgesics. Naturally I was heavy handed in the initial hours. So I thought the narcotics might be a factor in her mental state. She kept calling me Vesper. She’d been burned around the orbit on her right side, so her eye was covered up on that side, and she had burns to her eyelid as well, but I thought she’d probably be able to keep that eye. Anyway, she was looking at me with her left eye, and almost singing it, “Vesper, I know you’re there. Vesper. Vesper.” I asked the boys whether they knew who Vesper was. They didn’t know, but I found out later at the bay she had a little sister called Vesper. I kept introducing myself, telling her I was a doctor and I was there to help her. I had to restrain her so she wouldn’t prod that burned area. And she just never came around. But while we were transporting her, I spent a long time with her, sitting there, and when I tried to hand off care at Richard, she freaked out, kept calling for Vesper. And I promised her that I’d come see her again.
I see.
Yeah. It was one of those things that you know you should just let it go, like Jahno would have just let it go. As though that girl would’ve ever remembered that promise, but I did. My rotation got delayed because of that diversion, so I got shipped forward to Merced and then back to Richard six weeks later, and I did. I went looking for that girl. Even her nurse, when I told her who I was, that I brought her in, she told me it wasn’t a good idea to go in there. “She hasn’t come back, doctor,” she told me, and I thought, with all the shit I’d seen, as long as it wasn’t going to upset the girl what could it harm? Just poke my head in, fulfil that promise, clear that card.
What was it that got you?
I honestly don’t know. The grafts weren’t terrible. It was actually a pretty decent foundation for facial reconstruction. If her family found a decent plastician, she might have looked almost normal after a few years, but she was gone, Bo. She never came back. She didn’t recognize me apart from the fact that I was there, another person in her presence, and she was still saying it over and over, “Vesper. I know you’re there. Vesper.” And it didn’t hit me in that moment. I left, walked all the way over to C-wing on the south campus, maybe a twenty-minute walk. The farther I walked, the more I kept hearing it in my head, “Vesper,” and I thought it was funny. Not funny, but dark-funny. I don’t know if there’s a better way to describe it. I started sorta whispering it to myself as I walked. Vesper. Vesper. And then I saw that LC, and I thought, No, no. Vesper’s not coming around here anymore. She’s proper finished coming around here. And that was it. Next thing I know, I was lightheaded and huffing down air, struggling to breathe around that gun barrel as my mind made up whether I was done with this life or not.
What ended up happening, Ren? Somebody talk you down?
In a way, I guess. You know most people are invisible in a hospital. Everyone’s minding their own business. A doctor, a bot, a patient, a nurse. They’re all just part of the background to everyone else. I’d never had everyone on an entire floor all suddenly turn and look at me, and like really look at me.
I can imagine.
And it shocked me, all those eyes staring at me. But I wasn’t reacting clearly. I was already sort of outside myself. And then I hear this senior surgeon. I think he was a major. He walks over toward me just glaring at me and shaking his head and says—and I’ll never forget the contempt in his eyes as he said it. “If you’re going to do it, at least point that barrel at the sky. There are people behind you.” And he was serious, and on some level I understood the sentiment so thoroughly—like, don’t make us clean up your mess, lady, for real? And, speaking of dark-funny, Bo, in that moment, I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. I started laughing and laughing, and I don’t know how but that LC and some other guy on the floor pulled my hands away from the gun and pulled me to the floor. Next thing I know I was getting dragged off. And that was it, Dr. Renata Schorr, cracked out.
Carrot Cake
So how did it go from there?
Not well is the short answer to that.
No, I mean, obviously there were some hard days after that. No doubt. What I’m asking is how you got from there to here.
I got isolated pretty fast. And in the first few days, my mind was not, I don’t know ... Let’s say I wasn’t in a stable enough mindset to be all that introspective or analytical about what was going on. I was bouncing between staring at the walls catatonic for hours on end and deliriously laughing about nothing. The surgical corps was trying to figure out what to do with me, I’m sure. I think the part that seemed funniest to me was that they treated me and talked to me like they cared about me now, but it was precisely because they didn’t give a shit about me that I’d gotten so crossed up. From that point, I was just a problem and what does a military organization do with a problem?
They either solve it or hide it.
More or less. I think first they were trying to figure out whether I was what you said, Bo, 10-something?
A 10-14. But you mean whether you were faking it or not, right?
Yeah. We call ours a Section 6, and they had to evaluate me for a Section 6 to figure out whether I was just trying to get discharged from duty or whether I’d truly cracked out, as you say.
The Etteran HC is actually more humane than you might think, but I think that’s more of a calculation than any humanitarian motive. Ketch’s AI can pick out a faker almost instantly, but then it’s about how to deal with the aftermath—what’s more useful: punishment or placement elsewhere the subject might be functional. Not everyone who can be trained for combat is fit for combat.
I think they figured out pretty fast I wasn’t faking. They just didn’t know what to do with me after that. They couldn’t let me go and have me jump off the building an hour later, and I was bursting into uncontrollable bouts of laughter in the middle of their evaluations, mostly at the thought that they even pretended to give a shit about me. I was the patient now, you know: bone, muscle, skin, human, object. Renata. Funny. Dark-funny.
Yeah. I like that. Dark-funny.
It was, in its own way. It still is a little. Funnier now than when I started talking, Bo.
So how long did they keep you penned up?
Well, the surgical corps didn’t want to give up on rehabilitating me, I think. Or they couldn’t figure out what to do with me. That’s the only explanation I have for how long I was in there. It was about six weeks, and they didn’t want to mix me with patients, especially because so many medical patients had psych issues as well, and the last thing anyone wants to see is one of the medical patients recognize their surgeon from the psych ward. So I was isolated in a locked wing with a few other doctors who were getting medical care for LOD injuries. They even kept me separate from them. I’ve never felt so isolated.
Six weeks like that?
More or less. I’m not sure what they were going to do with me. But they were clearly trying to figure something out. So this part I only know because he told me after. But my room was locked and damn near soundproof, I think. I could hardly hear anything, but I heard him coming, thump, thump, thump on the floor. So I got up and looked outside and here’s this pretty banged-up triple with about the worse lower extremity setup I’ve ever seen them fix to a person, and he was outside talking to the wing’s medical director and this commodore. He pokes his head in my window and shrugs, goes back to talking to those other two for a minute or two, and they all disappear.
Burch?
Who else, right? So I come to find out later that Sōsh heard a rumor about what happened with me and convinced Burch that they’d be better off having a doctor on board. Between him and Burch and Leda, they were all going to need the occasional tune-up on their prosthetics and the other things that go along with getting as injured as they all were. Sōsh figured they’d have a lot more freedom if they weren’t relying on flying in to an LSS clinic every time one of them needed something checked out.
Smart.
That’s Sōsh in a word if there is one word for him. Anyway, Burch tells the commodore that he’d have a talk with me, and the medical director tells him I wasn’t talking to anybody, just laughing and acting strange. But Burch insists, tells them to make it happen. I couldn’t hear any of that, of course. I just saw them out there talking in the corridor. They all walked off after a few minutes. I thought nothing of it after they left, and then maybe fifteen minutes later, I hear him again, thump, thump, thump. And he taps with his foot to have the nurse open the door. In his right hand he’s got two coffees, and in his left—no lie—he’s got an entire sheet of carrot cake from the commissary. “Mind if I come in?” he says. “I thought we could talk. You want a piece of cake?” And I start laughing. But I swear, he could tell right away, Bo. They couldn’t figure it out for weeks. He just smiled at me and he knew. He knew everything he needed to know. One look.
Seems about right.
I hadn’t really been eating. I had like four pieces of cake with that coffee. And Burch says, “You’re on Q-wing. Commissary’s pretty bad down here, but I remembered the carrot cake was decent.” He had the medical director fix him up with a sheet of it as a favor before talking to me. It was the funniest thing. He told me the look on her face when he asked for it was priceless. And I remember the first thing I ever really said to him was, “You’re joking?” And he said, “You’re going to find out it’s a short list of things in this universe I won’t joke about, but food’s one of them.” Plus, he figured they wouldn’t be feeding me right in there. And then he just asked me, “So, Dr. Ren, you want to get out of here? Cruise around the Letters for a spell with us? No pressure or nothing.”
Just like that?
It was that evening. They discharged me under his command. I didn’t even know what kind of ridiculous unit it was or what we were doing. I could just tell. It was a hell of a lot better than where I was, and I knew I was supposed to go with him. I’ve been aboard the Y-C ever since.
I’ve heard of favors like that before in ops teams, Ya-ya. You know? You take the problem in my unit off my hands, I’ll give you X, Y, or Z down the road. First time I’ve heard of the price being a carrot cake.
You’ve never traded with Burch before. That’s a pretty high fare in his book. Turned out to be a good deal for both of us.
I’m glad it worked out the way it did.
Speaking of food, Bo …
I’m not sure we have any carrot cake, but I could sure use some breakfast too.
Carolina likes that cinnamon crumb cake Sōsh stocks up on every time we’re in the Alphas. I bet there’s a pan or two tucked away, probably in the right floor panel sternward.
We’ll hardly get a bite if we have to share it with that assassin. That big bastard eats.
Best to keep him fed and happy regardless, Bo. I’ve got to check on the girl’s arm anyway. See if you can find me something to eat while I’m looking in on her.
My pleasure, doctor.
I’ll take a lot of shit from you, Bo, but I won’t have you of all people calling me doctor. Not even to get under my skin.
Yeah?
Not unless you want to try sleeping out in the atrium with that Murkist snoring all night.
Renata it is then, Ya-ya.
I’m getting up now, Fieldstone, I swear.
I’ll see you out there. I’ll always see you.
Not if I see you first, Jamison Griffin. I’m glad we talked. Let’s keep talking.
It's interesting how that name reveal completely snuck up on me, which just proves how brilliantly it was written, truly.