Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (4 page)

5

I
t’s actually not so bad knowing when you’re going to die, and from what,” said Yiannis as Bruna was disinfecting and treating the deep bite on her arm. “And I do know that ten years is too short a time, but it’s not so bad to avoid old age. Apart from TTT, you reps have excellent health. You live without fear. While for us humans, getting old means becoming a hostage to your body. You naively think that you and your body are one, but as of a certain age you discover you’re really an alien in your own body, a stranger. Weirder than those aliens we refer to as creeps or
bichos
, stranger than Maio, our Omaá friend. To make matters worse, it’s your body that kills you. There comes a point when suddenly, without having suspected anything up till then, you realize that you’ve been sleeping with your worst enemy. Life’s like that: one day you look in the mirror and discover not a gray hair or a wrinkle but that part of your cheek has sunk, your nose has acquired a lump you hadn’t seen before, your mouth is starting to twist, your tongue is full of cracks, a little yellow island has appeared in the whites of your eyes, a greasy blob stuck to your eyeball. Or maybe a small asymmetrical bump comes up on your shoulder. You become frightened because, as I said, these revelations are sudden, not progressive; it’s as if they grew over the course of a single night. They’re killers who assault you unexpectedly as you turn the corner. Then you look at yourself, terrified because you’ve just failed to recognize yourself, and you wonder if this could be the symptom of some unknown, horrible illness. The good news is that usually they’re just monstrous mutations caused by age.”

“If getting old bothers you so much, have an operation like everyone else instead of insisting on wandering around looking like a wretched beggar,” muttered Bruna.

“You know perfectly well that I hate plastic surgery. I prefer to convert myself into a monster of my own making and not a monster carved out of someone else’s scalpel. I don’t care if not having an operation makes me look like a tramp who can’t have his skin stitched because he doesn’t have a cent to his name. Anyway, it happens to those who’ve had an operation, too. One day they look in the mirror and one of their eyes is halfway down their cheek.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“No way. Moreover, all those identical plastic faces don’t relieve us humans of our fear, of the terror, and our absolute lack of confidence in that stranger, our own body. Because one of those times that you look in the mirror and see that your mouth is deformed, it turns out it’s not old age but a stroke, a tumor, the devastating explosion of a heart attack. An illness that will mutilate you, leave you handicapped, rob you of life as you knew it up to that point, maybe even kill you.”

Bruna stopped applying the synthetic skin stitches and looked at the old archivist. “Yiannis, you’re seventy years old, dammit. Stop complaining. You infuriate me. You humans live for a hundred years.”

“I know. I know it irritates you, but what sort of state do we live in all that time? Well, if you can’t afford very expensive medical insurance, a horrible state. Bruna, we humans live in deadly fear. Fear is the only experience common to everyone.”

“To dogs, too. And Omaás. And technohumans,” said Bruna darkly.

“Absolutely true. Everything that lives fears death. But believe you me, you are all safe from that menacing, mutating, heartbreaking demolition that is old age. You should appreciate that there are also certain advantages in the tragedy of your short life.”

Yiannis smiled, and his lined face wrinkled like a piece of gathered material. He was the only old man Bruna knew who hadn’t had an operation, apart from a few very marginalized old tramps. Even in the Zero zones people stuffed their cheeks with cheap plastic. Well, Lizard hadn’t had surgery either. True, he was much younger—forty-three—but he already had wrinkles. As far as Pablo Nopal, her memorist, was concerned, his physique was perfect. If they’d used a scalpel on him, it must have been work of extraordinary quality and extremely expensive.

“By the way, did you call Lizard? Did he help you trace the girl?”

The old man continued to smile and stack up all the folds in his wizened face. Bruna asked herself at which stage in his hormonal fluctuations he might be: Was that anguished reflection on old age and death generated by a high or low level of endorphins?

“No. I didn’t call him.”

There were other fears in life apart from death.

“What are you going to do with Gabi, Bruna?”

“Send her back.”

6

B
runa’s arm continued to throb despite the analgesic. She knew that the human mouth is full of bacteria and that bites tend to become infected, but even so she’d committed the ultimate idiocy of not going to the doctor and trying to close the wound herself without having cleaned it properly. No doubt she was irritated by the whole process, and now she would have to show the bite and recount the whole story; a wound like that had to be explained, and she didn’t really have a good explanation. So she had let it run its course, and within three days her arm was so bad that they had to go to the hospital. An entertaining Sunday afternoon in the emergency room. The doctors had decided to run some tests on the girl to see if she might have transmitted any other pathogens, a specific disease together with the infection. The results hadn’t come back yet. The rep smiled: the nurses who had taken Gabi off had treated her with the same suspicion and precautions as they would a mad dog. The only thing they hadn’t done was muzzle her.

A boy of about fifteen was coming down the corridor. He was moving with difficulty on a clumsy prosthesis with wheels, something like a small metal cart attached to his legs, which were amputated above the knees. He rolled past where Bruna was sitting and continued down the long, otherwise-empty corridor, squeaking and wobbling like a defective device. The rep congratulated herself yet again for having stuck with her medical insurance. When technohumans gained their release after two years of compulsory service with the company that had created them, they could choose to receive either their entire settlement payment or only a tiny portion of it but keep their medical assistance for life. Bruna had chosen the latter. Moreover, since replicants were a very expensive product and combat reps tended to become damaged, her insurance was top of the line. They would never have given her a monstrous prosthesis like that cart on wheels, for example. They would have given her perfectly new bionic legs, covered with artificial skin, indistinguishable from the real thing. Bruna would never have been able to afford something like that any other way.

The wound was starting to throb less. Bruna hadn’t wanted to waste the three morphine vials she’d acquired on the black market and administered at home with the stinginess of a miser, so by the time she got to the hospital her pain level was above seven. In the hospital they’d given her a subcutaneous shot of Panadol, less effective than her morphine but pretty powerful nevertheless, and more importantly, they’d injected her with the latest version of a biocidal product of the sort only available in hospitals and with top-level insurance. That would fix the infection. She could still see the wobbling boy on wheels in the distance, still hear the metallic grinding noise.

“Hi, big girl.”

Bruna turned. It was that damned calculation rep. The one from the Radical Replicant Movement. Bruna didn’t reply. The little techno smiled and flopped down in a plastic chair next to her.

“I can see you’re pleased to see me. I’m pleased, too. What’s happened to your arm?”

“Nothing. Bandages are in fashion.”

“Right. And TTT as well,” came the curt sarcastic reply.

Bruna gave her a sidelong glance. Had the rep’s TTT been triggered already? Could that be why she was at the hospital? The RRM activist still looked somewhat old, but she didn’t seem much worse than the last time Bruna had seen her. Sensing the rep’s end, and being painfully aware that she shared the same fate, Bruna felt a sudden uncomfortable sympathy for her.

“What are you doing here?”

The little rep’s mouth twisted in what could have passed for a smile. “If what you’re asking is, am I dying, the answer is no. Not yet. I’m here on business. I don’t think you’d be interested in knowing about it.”

“True. I’m not interested.”

Silence reigned for a few moments.
They’re really taking their time with Gabi,
thought Bruna impatiently.

“Have you finally come up with a rep suicide?” the activist asked mockingly.

Bruna kept quiet.

“I knew it,” the other rep continued triumphantly. “The worst thing is that we don’t even go to the euthanasia companies. Have you ever seen a techno in Finis, for example? Other than the odd security guard who might be a combat rep like you. What I mean is, have you ever seen one there as a client? Because even when TTT is triggered we’re incapable of ending it all. We put up with the pain right to the end.”

Silence. What disturbing questions. Even more alarming, Bruna had not wondered about them before. She recalled Merlín’s terrible death throes. The slow passing of his final days. Living through the TTT of a loved one was like witnessing torture. Somehow you always ended up damaged forever.

“I’ll bet you’ve never been in a moyano either.”

At first Bruna had to remember what this RRM activist was referring to. Then something clicked: moyanos were crematoriums for technohumans—fringe places that no one wanted to talk about. She herself had managed to forget they existed. They didn’t even have a proper name. Moyano was the surname of the company’s founder. Moyanos were located in dark, unassuming, unmarked buildings. From the outside only the chimney revealed their function.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Have a look around one sometime. Nothing like human funeral homes, which are always full of flowers and weeping family members. Ours are . . . how can I describe it? Very industrial. Lonely. Practical. Just the mere fact that there are different crematoriums for technohumans is outrageous. Go and have a look for yourself. You’ll see what state the bodies are in when they arrive. Destroyed by TTT. You can’t make use of any organ.”

“It’s strange. I’ve never stopped to think about any of that.”

“Yes, life is full of dark zones, isn’t it?” said the calculation rep, laughing bitterly. “There are so many things we’d rather not know about. So many things we want to forget. We choose what we want to see, and our world is nothing more than a much reduced rendition of the real world. The exploiters take advantage of this laziness. Humans enslave us, and reps like you don’t want to know about it.”

A door swung open. They were bringing the girl. The doctor who’d attended to Bruna followed behind them. The rep stood up.

“Wait,” said the activist, grabbing Bruna by the arm. “My name is Carnal. You’ll hear from me. There are lots of things you should know about.”

“As you so rightly put it, I’m not sure I want to know about them,” Bruna replied, pulling her arm away.

She started to walk toward the little group that was approaching. Her mobile pinged. Bruna glanced at her wrist and saw that Carnal had forwarded her contact details. It was up to Bruna to accept them or reject them. She hesitated momentarily and then accepted them. She immediately regretted doing so. Now Carnal had her details, too. Carnal. A strange name for such a lean body.

Gabi was almost being dragged along, one arm held tightly by a human clinical assistant just as tall but beefier than combat reps, who were light and athletic because it had been demonstrated that this was the most efficient organic design for fighting. If the staff had to resort to the brute strength of that gorilla, it was obvious that the little Russian hadn’t made it easy for them to do their tests. There was an expression of knife-sharp hatred on Gabi’s face. She was a monster. A monster who bit. The assistant came to a halt a few yards from Bruna without letting go of the girl, while the doctor went around him to talk to her.

“Luckily, she hasn’t got anything else that she might have passed on to you. You’ve been lucky. The Zero zones are really afflicted.”

“I know,” said Bruna with unexpected relief. She hadn’t realized how worried she’d been until that moment. “I’m delighted. Well, let’s go.”

“Hold on a minute. There’s something else. Something serious. Very serious.”

The doctor looked somber. The replicant felt an icy finger run down her spine.

“What’s the matter?”

“The child has been exposed to a source of radiation.”

“What?”

“Possibly ongoing exposure. She’s received close to three thousand
millisieverts
of radiation.”

“But that’s impossible.”

The Atom Protocol had banned nuclear fission energy throughout the planet in the year 2059. The Earth was not yet unified, but successive catastrophes had occurred in two power stations, one Russian and the other French, and the extreme gravity of those situations, coupled with the fact that it was thought that nuclear fusion was almost under control, resulted in all the nations agreeing to the protocol. Then it turned out that fusion energy still hadn’t been achieved, or at least not clean fusion energy, without the use of radioactive tritium. But the mastery and massive development of tidal and solar power—in Africa alone, solar panels covered a thousand square kilometers—had been sufficient to allow the closure of all the nuclear power stations. Shortly thereafter, in the sixties, when laser guns and the devastating power of black plasma were discovered, the few atomic weapons that remained were destroyed. They had also stopped using nuclear medicine some time back, replacing it with more efficient means of diagnosis and therapy. The Earth had officially been free of artificial radioactivity for almost half a century, although the odd nuclear warhead occasionally appeared on the black market.

“I repeat,” said the doctor, “the girl has been exposed to radiation. Please raise your hand and join the tips of your fingers.”

“What?”

“Do as I ask. We’ve opened a nuclear incident report. We have to inform the Ministry of Industry, Sustainable Development, and Energy.”

Bewildered, Bruna did as she’d been told. The doctor placed a sort of flat, wide ruler on top of her fingertips. The device hissed.

“There’s only slight residual radiation, undoubtedly acquired through contact with the girl. Nothing to worry about,” said the doctor, putting the ruler back in his pocket.

“But she—”

“She’s another matter. The dose has been very high. She’ll die within ten years, maybe five, most likely from leukemia. Her blood is already looking abnormal.”

“Leukemia is treatable, isn’t it? Can’t you do something?”

“Oh yes, of course we can. There’s a really good treatment involving cellular and hemopoietic reconstruction that could certainly completely reverse the harmful effects of radiation.”

“So?”

“It costs at least two hundred thousand gaias.”

“My insurance covers everything.”

“Your insurance covers you, not her.”

“But you just did tests on her.”

“To eliminate the possibility of illnesses in you. As of this point, however, we can do nothing more for the girl. I’m sorry. By the way, it would be good if the girl didn’t spend a lot of time with pregnant women.”

The doctor turned around and nodded to the assistant, who released Gabi, and the two of them walked off down the corridor. The little Russian girl crossed her skinny arms over her chest and gave Bruna a look of fierce dislike. A wounded creature, a dying monster.
Three years, ten months, and eleven days.