Vital Signs

Harold

"It doesn't have blood," Toshi said, for the fourth time.

"I heard you the first three."

"I'm saying it again because I want you to understand it, Harold. It has no blood. It has no heart. It has a pump that circulates coolant, and the coolant is blue, and it smells like a new shower curtain." He was pacing the storage unit in tight little circles, the way he used to pace the back of the art room when a sculpture wasn't drying fast enough. "They're going to stick a needle in its arm, and what's going to come out is Windex."

Noah sat in his camping chair with his hands folded, looking pleasant. He had no opinion on the matter.

The invitation from Cyrus Vail lay open on the little folding table between us. Heavy cream paper, gold edges, a wax seal like an open book. Inside, in handwriting so elegant it looked engraved, was an address in Cincinnati, a date, and a line at the bottom that Toshi had read aloud in a voice of mounting horror:

A brief physical examination will precede your welcome. Our physician is very thorough.

"What does the unit have?" I asked. "On the outside. What will pass?"

Toshi stopped pacing. He counted on his fingers.

"Skin temperature, yes. It runs warm. Ninety-eight point four at the surface. Pulse at the wrist, yes, sort of. There's a little actuator there, for handshakes, so it feels alive. It breathes if you tell it to. Blinks, sweats a little under lights. It can pass a doctor who shakes its hand and asks about its golf game." He dropped his hand. "It cannot pass a stethoscope. It cannot pass an EKG. And it absolutely cannot pass a blood draw."

"Then we don't go."

"If we don't go, the most powerful people in America want to know why their candidate won't let a doctor touch him."

"Then we say he's sick."

"Then they send their doctor to him."

I rubbed my eyes. The shaved patch on the back of my head itched. It always itched when I thought too hard, as if the implant were thinking too.

"The man in the hangar warned us," I said slowly. "Vail. He said I'd prepare for that, if I were you. Why warn us if he wanted us caught?"

"Maybe he wants to watch us sweat."

"Robots don't sweat, Toshi."

"A little. Under lights." He sat down hard on the concrete floor with his back against the wall. "I don't know what he wants. I don't know what anyone wants. I used to fix torque curves in hip joints."

We sat there a while. Outside, a truck went by on the county road, and the orange door rattled in its track.

"We go," I said finally.

Toshi looked up.

"We go," I said again. "Because if we don't, it's over anyway. And because a man who meant us harm wouldn't have warned us. And because—" I stopped.

"Because what?"

I looked at Noah, sitting there with his hands folded and his eyes closed.

"Because I have a feeling," I said, "that we're not the only ones who need this to work."

* * *

The address was a townhouse in Cincinnati, three stories of red brick on a quiet street full of trees older than the country. A brass plate by the door said PRIVATE PRACTICE, and nothing else. The black sedan dropped Noah at the curb at 9:00 a.m. sharp, and he climbed the steps with the easy, loose-shouldered confidence of a man who had never once in his life been kept waiting.

In a storage unit in Paperton, two hundred and fifty miles north, I sat in a green camping chair with a blanket over my knees and a bucket beside me, in case the nerves came out the wrong way.

"Heart rate's a hundred and twelve," Toshi said, from the next room of my mind. "Your real one."

"Stop telling me that."

"It's my job."

"It's making it worse."

"Okay." A pause. "It's a hundred and fifteen now."

* * *

The waiting room was paneled in dark wood, with oil portraits of men in high collars who all seemed to have been painted in the same mood. There was one other person there, a woman in a nurse's scrubs sitting at a small desk with a clipboard. She didn't look like a nurse. She looked like someone who'd been told to sit in a room and watch the door, and who was very good at it.

"Mr. Fiatt," she said. "The doctor will be right with you."

Noah sat. I made him cross one leg over the other and look at his watch, because that's what important men do in waiting rooms. The watch said 9:04. I watched the second hand go around, and around, and I thought about all the drawings I'd done of clocks in my life, and how the hands always want to look like they're pointing somewhere.

At 9:09 an inner door opened.

I'd expected an old man. Some courtly society physician with a silver mustache, a pocket watch, a leather bag that had belonged to his grandfather. What came through the door was a woman in her forties, brisk and plain, in a white coat with her hair pulled back, carrying a tablet.

"Mr. Fiatt," she said. "I'm Dr. Veritas. Dr. Penrose is unwell this morning, so I'm covering. I hope that's all right."

The nurse at the desk looked up sharply. For just a second her face did something complicated. Then she looked down at her clipboard again.

"Of course," I said, in Noah's warm gravel voice.

As Dr. Veritas turned to lead us in, I caught a glimpse of the lanyard around her neck. It was tucked mostly inside her coat. But the clip was showing, and on the clip was a tiny logo I'd last seen on the Mindlink letter at my kitchen table, and on the wall of a clinic that used to be an Applebee's.

A little brain made of glowing dots, holding hands with itself.

"Toshi," I said silently. "Look at her lanyard."

There was a pause in my head.

"That's Mindlink," he said.

* * *

The exam room was bright and white and very cold. Dr. Veritas had me sit on the paper-covered table and take off Noah's jacket and shirt, and I did it slowly, carefully, the way you undress in front of a stranger, and I felt more naked than I'd ever felt in my own body. Noah's chest was perfect. Smooth, tan, lightly haired, with a small scar on the left shoulder that Proxy had added, Toshi told me later, because a man without a single scar makes people nervous.

The nurse from the waiting room came in and stood by the door with her clipboard. Nobody had asked her to.

"Deep breath," said Dr. Veritas, and put the stethoscope on Noah's chest.

I made him breathe. In, out. In, out. Under the cold disc of the stethoscope there was nothing. No heart. Just the soft, steady whir of a coolant pump, turning like a ceiling fan in an empty house.

Dr. Veritas listened for a long time.

In Paperton, my real heart was going like a hammer on a tin roof. I could feel it through the connection. I could feel both at once, my racket and Noah's hush, and the gap between them was the most frightening sound I'd ever heard.

The nurse at the door leaned slightly forward.

Dr. Veritas moved the stethoscope an inch to the left. Listened again. Then she took it out of her ears, looped it around her neck, and made a note on her tablet.

"Strong heart," she said. "Very regular."

The nurse leaned back again.

I didn't breathe. Noah did, because I'd forgotten to tell him to stop.

* * *

The EKG came next. Dr. Veritas stuck little white pads to Noah's chest and wrists and ankles, and clipped wires to them, and the wires ran to a small gray machine on a cart. Except I was watching, the way I'd learned to watch in thirty-one years of kids hiding phones under their desks, and I saw where the wires went. They didn't go to the machine. They went into the machine's side panel and came right back out again, bundled under the cart, to the tablet in her hand.

The screen on the cart lit up. A green line began to march across it. Up, down, spike, dip. Up, down, spike, dip. A perfect, healthy, middle-aged American heartbeat, beating for a man who had no heart at all.

"Beautiful," said Dr. Veritas, not looking at it.

Then she picked up the needle.

"Just a small pinch," she said.

Toshi said something in my head that I won't repeat.

She tied the rubber band around Noah's arm, swabbed the inside of his elbow with alcohol, and turned slightly on her stool, so that for just a moment her back was to the nurse at the door. It was a small movement. The kind a magician makes. If I hadn't spent three decades watching children try to palm erasers, I would never have seen it.

The needle went into the arm. I felt it the way you feel a pinch through a thick coat, far away and unimportant.

The vial on the end of the needle filled with blood.

Dark red. Real. Swirling.

I stared at it through Noah's eyes, and for one dizzy second I genuinely did not know what I was looking at. Then I saw it: the vial had been full before it touched him. There'd been a second one in her palm the whole time. The one that had actually gone into the arm was in her coat pocket now, and whatever was in it was blue and smelled like a new shower curtain.

She capped the full vial, labeled it, and handed it over her shoulder to the nurse without looking.

"For the lab," she said.

The nurse took it. She held it up to the light. She looked at it for a long moment.

Then she wrote something on her clipboard, and left the room.

* * *

"You're in excellent health, Mr. Fiatt," said Dr. Veritas, pulling off the pads one by one. "Better than most men your age. Better than most men half your age." She peeled the last one from his ankle. "Keep doing whatever you're doing."

I put Noah's shirt back on. My fingers, his fingers, fumbled a little on the buttons. She noticed. She didn't say anything.

She walked me to the inner door. With her hand on the knob, she paused, and without turning her head, she spoke, very quietly, in the voice people use when they're talking to someone who isn't in the room.

"Mindlink sends its regards."

I said nothing. I wasn't sure Noah's mouth still worked.

"And tell him," she said, even more quietly, "that the headaches are dehydration. Most of our older participants don't drink enough water after the procedure. Eight glasses a day."

She opened the door.

"Have a wonderful day, Mr. Fiatt."

* * *

The sedan brought Noah back to Paperton at two in the afternoon. By then I'd already let go, somewhere around Dayton, because my hands had started shaking so badly Toshi was afraid it would bleed through the connection. I sat in the camping chair with the blanket around my shoulders and drank a whole bottle of water in one long pull, and then I started laughing, and then I stopped.

"They know," Toshi said. He hadn't sat down since nine. "Mindlink knows. They know it's you. They know about the implant. They know about the robot. They sent their own doctor, Harold. They got rid of the real one."

"I know."

"They could have ended us in that room. One word to that nurse. One." He turned in a tight circle. "Why didn't they?"

I looked across at Noah in his chair, eyes closed, hands folded. Somewhere inside him was a line of code nobody could read, and somewhere inside me was a chip made by a company whose partners owned every thought I'd had since March.

I thought about page thirty-eight of the consent form. Mindlink Labs and its partners. I thought about how Toshi's cable had plugged into Noah so easily, almost like somebody designed them to fit together.

I thought about a vial of blue coolant, sitting in the pocket of a Mindlink doctor's coat, that could bring down a great deal more than one old man in Paperton.

"Because they can't," I said.

Toshi stopped circling.

"If they expose Noah," I said, working it out as I went, "somebody asks what Noah is. And then somebody asks who else is one. And whatever Mindlink's part in that is, it goes on the front page too." I set the empty bottle down on the concrete. "We're not the only ones hiding something in this room, Toshi. We're just the only ones who didn't know it."

The storage unit was quiet. Outside, the Dollar Depot sign buzzed. DOLL R DEP.

After a while, Toshi went to the cooler and got me another bottle of water. He set it down next to my chair without a word.

I drank it. Eight glasses a day. Doctor's orders.