A Stand-In for Dying Page 16

  “We’re there,” she said at last, and the catheter froze in place, its tip alongside a tiny opening in the blood vessel. A pocket of extruded blood sat just outside the opening. The tip tilted slightly until it filled the opening in the vessel. “Now or never.”

  A faint hiss and the blotch adjacent to the artery shrank and vanished. A few clicks and the catheter tip withdrew from the opening in the vessel, which now appeared sealed.

  In a time long past aneurysms were plugged with tiny wire coils. Now the defects were fused instantaneously via catheter with a stem cell impregnated mesh that adhered to their edges. A few weeks and all traces of either the aneurysm or the bleed would be gone.

  “It’s holding,” said the doctor at the screen. “Time to finish.”

  “What about the other ones?” asked another member of the team, pointing on the screen to a scattering of tiny bubbles on blood vessels throughout the brain.

  “There are way too many to fix,” said the first doctor. “We’ll just have to leave them and hope that they hold.”

  Within less than a minute, the catheter was withdrawn completely and the surgical wound was closed. Ray still lay quietly within the dome. His breathing was slow and regular.

  Twenty minutes later, Ray was back in his own bed, asleep. The mobile operating room had been packed up and moved out. The team vanished as swiftly and mysteriously as it had arrived. Terra was the last to leave.

  “What do I do now?” asked Lena, grabbing Terra by the wrist.

  “You wait,” said Terra, “and be patient. It may take a while for him to wake up, but he should recover fully.” Before Lena could articulate her next question, Terra was gone.

  Lena sat vigil at Ray’s bedside until daybreak. As the sky began to light up with the crimson glow from the rising sun, Ray’s eyes fluttered open.

  “Thank God,” said Lena, embracing him, tears streaming down her cheeks onto his chest.

  I’m...still me,” said Ray, taking a long, deep breath, his eyes scrunched and the creases in his face exaggerated with bewilderment. “I didn’t...die.”

  “What an odd way of putting it,” thought Lena.

  “What happened to me?” Ray asked.

  “You seem to have had a stroke,” said Lena. “An aneurysm burst in your brain. And your mysterious redhead showed up for a house call with a team of doctors and a portable operating suite. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Terra,” said Ray. “She came to save me.”

  “Whoever Terra is, you must be very important to her. I’ll let you rest for now. But we’re long overdue for a talk.”

  26

  CORINNE TAKANA haunted Ray’s thoughts. He awoke every morning to the image of her face while his eyes were still closed. He traced its oval outline, ran his gaze along the fine straight ridge of her nose, lingered a moment on the moisture between her slightly parted lips, and came to rest on her bottomless, ebony eyes, dilated with arousal. Her ivory skin was flawless, flowing smoothly over her forehead and the crown of her head. How sweetly sensual he found the barrenness of her skin. He would wait as long as possible before opening his eyes and allowing his surroundings to swallow his dream.

  She returned to him each night when he closed his eyes and lingered in the twilight stage of sleep. Now he saw the outline of her body beneath the diaphanous nightgown and allowed himself to reach out and draw her body close to his. As he slid his hands past the material, he felt the luxurious silkiness of her skin, embellished with its surfactant film. And his body was no longer old and soft. His muscles were firm and his skin as slick and bare as hers as their bodies glided seamlessly together until sleep overtook him.

  Against the backdrop of his fantasies, Ray’s days became tortured. From the moment he looked in the mirror at his age-lined face, straggly graying hair, and pudgy belly, he felt disgust at who he was. He’d once considered himself a decent looking man, but the soft hairy image before him paled in comparison to the sleek, youthful perfection of the body he’d fleetingly inhabited.

  It wasn’t just his body that disgusted him. His life was tainted with failure. He’d become a pariah, responsible for one of the worst disasters that had befallen civilization. The revulsion with which the world regarded him for the rampage of HibernaTurf had only been partially mitigated by the reversal of its devastation by Takana Grass. Marcus Takana was now enjoying the adulation to which Ray had once aspired and had briefly attained.

  Even more than Ray longed to be with Corinne, he longed to be Marcus Takana.

  But Terra had made clear that he didn’t have the power to choose when that might occur. Suicide was against the rules of the contract and out of the question. He was sure that Terra would terminate him if he deliberately killed himself. And as jealous as Ray was of Marcus Takana, he understood that suicide would be tantamount to murdering an innocent man. Even Ray had limits of what moral lines he was willing to cross to get his way.

  He became obsessed with finding a solution. He was a resourceful man. There had to be a way. He considered what had happened with the hack. His brain had been tricked into perceiving that he’d died in order to trigger the switch. If he could only find another way to flirt with death without it becoming final, then perhaps he could go back to being Marcus, while Marcus would get to live out his life as Ray. Not exactly fair, but at least not suicide and not murder. Maybe Terra would let him live.

  He considered ways to slow his biological functions sufficiently to simulate death. Stimulating the vagus nerve was one way to slow heart rate, sometimes drastically. There were a number of natural ways to trigger the vasovagal reflex that would slow the pulse, but the duration and degree of such slowing would be hard to modulate. On the other hand, heart rate and respiration could be controlled more precisely via the modulating functions of his MELD chip. Even so, getting to the cusp of death and maintaining his vital signs there long enough to trigger the switch without damaging his brain would be close to impossible by this means alone.

  Hypothermia was another means by which biological functions could grind nearly to a halt without compromising brain tissue. This had been used to protect surgical patients from irreversible brain damage during cardiac surgery early in the century. It would be both difficult and painful to self-administer and still might not achieve the degree and duration of suspended animation to convince the implanted transducer behind his ear that he was dead.

  There were also chemical means of slowing metabolism while protecting the body and brain from oxygen deprivation. One approach involved a combination of adenosine, lidocaine, and magnesium, powerful regulators of heart rate and rhythm. But even with all the resources of the UDB, finding just the right combination of doses to create a near death experience would be daunting.

  Perhaps, though, combining each of these three imprecise approaches could provide sufficient protection to balance him on the razor’s edge of death just long enough for the transfer of consciousness to occur. If he failed to get close enough to his target state, then nothing would happen and nothing would be lost. If he failed to limit the duration of his intervention, then Marcus would certainly die and his fate would be up to Terra. In Ray’s flawed moral calculus, it wouldn’t be murder if he didn’t intend for Marcus to die. He was willing to take that chance.

  Ray scanned the UDB for a suitable setting in which to execute his plan. He found an abandoned warehouse that had once belonged to a charity that distributed food to the poor. It was still equipped with an aging refrigeration unit and a laminar flow device for circulating cold air throughout the containment room in which fresh produce had been stored. It was capable of maintaining the temperature as low as 38 degrees F, perfectly suited to his purpose.

  When he surveyed the warehouse and walked inside the 8X10 ft windowless storeroom enclosed by slick white surfaces, he smiled.

  “This will be perfect,” Ray thought, “and remote enough to work in secrecy.”

  The next step was to acquire the pharmaceutic
al agents. That was a snap. They were all common and readily available. The only remaining question would be the route of administration. He’d have to give himself precise doses of each drug simultaneously, so that they would act immediately, then dissipate within minutes. An intravenous line could get the drugs in quickly, but it would take too long for them to become inactivated.

  Ray settled on a transdermal injector invented in the early thirties. Its unique capability was that it could extract drugs back through the skin once their action was no longer needed or desirable. The duration of action could be dialed in prior to injection.

  It took Ray five weeks to prepare all the components of his system for the experiment. He tested the cooling system in the storeroom. It worked amazingly well, considering its age and years of disuse. He tested the transdermal device with a fast-acting sedative, setting the duration of action to five minutes. When he applied the perforated round head of the delivery device to his forearm, it attached by suction, resembling a leech and releasing only after its payload had been extracted. He became briefly drowsy, but was fully alert within ten minutes.

  Lena might have noticed something amiss about Ray’s behavior had she not been preoccupied with a project of her own following the appearance of the mysterious redhead. Ray wondered how long Marcus would be able to escape her detection once the exchange was completed.

  Ray woke early on the morning of the experiment. He lingered on Corinne’s image, anticipating seeing her in the flesh hours later. It took most of the day to prepare the room and was nearly dusk when he finally closed the door and locked it behind him with the biosensing lock that he’d installed. He climbed naked onto to the table in the middle of the room, lying supine on its pliable surface, and turned on the motor that sent waves of fluid coursing down the length of his body to prevent pressure from damaging his frigid skin.

  Then he engaged the laminar cooling system with his MELD chip and set it for 40 degrees. The transdermal gun was poised for action in his right hand, already loaded with its near lethal concoction.

  As his body began to cool, he drew slow deep breaths and willed his heart to slow. His pulse dropped to fifty, then forty, thirty-five, thirty. He shivered, then willed his body to be still so that its temperature could continue to fall. When his pulse hit twenty, he felt lightheaded. The cold made him drowsy. He struggled to stay conscious as long as possible, then applied the injector to his forearm and pulled the trigger.

  The lights went out.

  27

  MARCUS’S BODY shook violently. He lay naked on a pliable surface that moved in waves beneath his body. Frigid air flowed across his body and face. He opened his eyes to darkness.

  “Where am I?” he wondered, “and how did I get here?” But for the moment, all he could think about was the bone-chilling cold.

  Then the moving air stopped. The room began gradually to warm as his shivering body labored to warm him from the inside.

  He lay still, allowing time for his body to restore its equilibrium. It was difficult to think with his chilled brain. He could hear the slow bounding pulse in his neck and counted the beats. Thirty. His oxygen deprived brain struggled to make sense. Thirty-five...forty...forty-five. His thoughts began to clear.

  He brought his right hand to his face to rub his eyes. It brushed his right cheek. Prickly. Stubble? He slid it over the top of his head. Strands of hair. His pulse now rose more rapidly with the rising panic.

  He moved both hands over his chest and belly. More hair. Soft flesh. When he pushed on his belly, the flesh gave easily beneath the tips of his fingers. He couldn’t feel the underlying ridges of muscle that he’d worked so long and hard to define.

  As he explored the contours of his body, it began to feel familiar. Not his body, but he’d been here before. He swallowed hard, nearly choking on his dry tongue. The last time he’d occupied this body, he’d nearly drowned and was shot. How did he get back here? And what was in store for him this time?

  As his eyes adjusted to the dark, the scant light seeping under the only door in the room enabled him to see the shadows of objects. Tilting his head, he could see his protruding belly with its hairy swirls around his navel and his toes beyond it. He moved his hands away from his sides until they dropped off the edges of the surface. He was on an elevated platform of undetermined height.

  He sat up on the edge of the platform. A gun-like object lay on the floor. In the corner of the room was a pile of neatly folded clothes. The door had no visible handle or lock.

  Sensation was gradually returning to his body. His hands and feet went from numb to pins and needles. It seemed to take forever for the tingling to go away and the normal sensation to return. Then he felt the pressure in his bladder rapidly building until he was desperate to pee. The pain concentrated in his prostate at the base of his bladder. He stood and piled the clothes on top of the platform before relieving himself on the floor in the corner. As badly as he had to go, it took several minutes before he could start his stream, which finished weakly in a series of dribbles. The smell of the freshly voided urine assaulted his senses within the otherwise sterile enclosure.

  He slipped on the clothes: boxer shorts, jeans, a collarless button-down shirt, socks and running shoes. They all fit well, tailored precisely to the irregular shape of his badly flawed body. It felt good to be covered and warmer. He looked around for something that might cast his reflection. There was nothing.

  It was time to find his way out of this prison. He stood in front of the door and ran his hands around its edges. Around halfway up just to its right was a barely perceptible heat gradient, defining a rectangle of wall surface about the size of his hand. Placing his palm flush against the wall within the outline of the rectangle opened a small portal just above it with what looked like a camera lens. He looked into it and the door slid open. Beyond it the dark of night was broken by the faint light of a sliver of moon. Then the sky slowly filled with a canopy of stars.

  There were no other buildings, no vehicle, no road, no landmarks. He still had no way of knowing where or even who he was. He’d need to find some way to navigate back to civilization. But what would happen to him when he got there? Would anyone have missed him? Was he a fugitive? Would whoever was responsible for his predicament try to finish the job?

  “Not likely,” thought Marcus. “Whoever did this did it to himself. And now I’m him and he’s me.” He considered the implications of this conclusion.

  A whirring sound broke the silence around him. He looked up to see an object hovering fifty yards or so away and approaching fast. As it got closer, he could make out a human form suspended from a small aircraft, a personal passenger drone. It stopped ten feet in front of him. Its passenger unhooked the harness and stepped free. Marcus could make out the silhouette of a woman.

  “Hello, Marcus,” said the visitor. Her voice was unmistakable.

  “Terra,” replied Marcus. “What the hell is going on?” The sound of his own voice startled him. It was low pitched and gravelly, the voice of an older man.

  “I’m afraid we’ve both been double crossed,” said Terra. “Your partner in this contract is both resourceful and greedy. He found a way to game our system and has reclaimed your life.”

  “Then you can switch us back like you did before?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not that easy. The last time, all we had to do was interrupt a rogue script in the program. Your experience in his body then was virtual, playing in his brain as his body slept. When the script ended short of death, you switched back. This time was different.”

  “How?”

  “The exchange was completed before we detected it. He simulated death long enough to convince the system it was final. It’s too late to undo it.”

  “There must be something you can do.”

  “No, at least not now,” said Terra. “Even if we had a way to reverse the exchange, we have no idea what the effect of multiple exchanges would be. It’s too dangerous.”

  �
��What happens now?”

  “You live each other’s lives. The Director is very angry with your counterpart, but he has reasons to let him live, so your body will survive, even if you may never get it back. And if you want to stay alive, you’ll both have to continue to obey the rules.”

  “Which rules?”

  “Mainly secrecy,” answered Terra. “You will have to fit into his life and never let anyone know what happened. This project has a lot at stake if it were to be exposed.”

  “Fit into his life,” echoed Marcus. “Whose life? Who am I supposed to be?”

  Terra held a small mirror in front of his face. The face in the mirror was familiar. He watched it turn white at the moment of recognition.

  “This can’t be possible,” he exclaimed.

  “I’m afraid it is,” said Terra. “Welcome to your new life, Raymond Mettler.”