those two green blips together bordered on TMI—too much information. I wasn’t jealous … exactly. Carla was a cute little armful who definitely knew her Bac-T and cell chemistries, fun to talk to, easy on the optical nerves, and I imagine she’d be a bunch of fun to cuddle with in the rack. But I’d never tried to find out for myself, I suppose because I was still getting over Paula.
Damn, damn, damn. Here I was accelerating out beyond the orbit of Mars, headed for the interstellar abyss and a deployment twenty light years from home, and I was still dragging that around.
GOD, HAD IT REALLY BEEN A WHOLE YEAR AGO THAT I LOST HER?
I’d joined the Navy early in 2241. Three months of Navy basic in San Diego, followed by six months of near-constant downloading at Corps School in San Antonio. I’d met Paula one afternoon shortly after starting Corps School. She was an AI programmer, a civilian G-7 working on-base with a love of history and an enchanting sense of fun. I was on liberty in downtown San Antonio—at the Alamo, in fact, the site of a famous last stand four centuries ago—when I bumped into her, literally, in the snack shop, and started discussing Davy Crockett and last stands and the park’s ViR download recreations of the battle. We’d ended up in bed at a little park’n’fuck outside of SAMMC’s main gate for what I’d thought at the time was just going to be a one-night stand.
Three years later—three fantastic years that had me thinking I was head-over-heels in love—she was dead.
I’d long since graduated from Corps School by then, but I was still stationed at SAMMC—the San Antonio Military Medical Center, located at Fort Sam Houston on the northeast edge of the city. I’d gone straight from Hospital Corps “A” school to hospital duty at the Navy Orbital Medical Facility in low Earth orbit for microgravity training, then back to SAMMC for Advanced Medical Technology School. Both NOM duty and AMT were “C” schools, and absolutely necessary if I was going to go FMF, and my download schedule was insane.
Busy? My God, I was taking so many training downloads and ViRsim feeds I didn’t know who I was half the time. I was getting, I thought, just a taste of what physicians experience when they’re running a half dozen live-in expert AIs. But Paula Barton was still with me despite the hours and the week-long stretch while I was in orbit. We were even talking about getting married, though marriage was considered to be a bit on the old-fashioned side, something for love-struck fluffies with big red hearts in their eyes.
I don’t know about the hearts, but I was certainly love struck. My caudate nuclei were so saturated with dopamine my brain sloshed when I walked, and I had all the signs and symptoms that dreaded mental illness commonly called Being In Love.
So in the spring of ’44 I was working at the SAMMC base dispensary, still assimilating those gigabytes of AMT data and waiting for my orders for Camp Lejeune. I had a weekend free and we decided to run up to Glacier’s Edge on the Maine coast.
We caught the sub-O out of San Antonio for the twenty-minute flight to Boston. I had an electric eccount, of course, so I checked out the free e-car at the oport for the last leg of the trip up to Acadia. We oohed and ahhed at the 100-meter ice cliffs, of course, and did all the usual touristy things. Sunday morning, we drove out to the dometown of New Bar Harbor and rented a sailboat for a close-in run along the glacier coming down off Schooner Head and Mount Champlain.
She was a four-meter day sailor, sloop-rigged, and with a level-two AI smart enough to take over the sail-handling if the human passengers didn’t know what they were doing. I’d had some sailing experience already, so the AI was on standby and we were catching a gentle, cold breeze off the ice, making our way south along the ice-cloaked Mount Desert coast.
And Paula dropped her sandwich.
She had a puzzled look on her face. “I can’t feel my right hand,” she said, and when she tried to pick her sandwich up off the deck, her fingers refused to cooperate.
It took me a moment, though, to catch on that something was really wrong … but when she slumped over on the seat next to me, a shock ran through me that I will never, ever forget.
Oh, God, no! No! No! …
I dropped the tiller and scooped her up in my arms. Her eyes were glassy, and the right pupil was enormous, the left one small, giving her face an oddly lopsided look. Then I realized that half of her face was drooping, that she was trying to say something out of the left side of her mouth while the right side hung dead and useless.
I couldn’t understand the words, but I finally caught on to what was happening.
“AI!” I screamed. “Connect with Emergency Services!”
“I’m taking control of sails and helm, Mr. Carlyle,” the boat told me.
“Damn it, I need a link to Emergency Services!”
My in-head circuitry had various radio channels, including communication. It even gave me a navigational fix off of the space elevator, but I was out of range for voice communications.
“What course would you like me to set?” the oat asked me.
“Emergency! Voice! Channel!”
“Do you wish a voice channel with New Bar Harbor?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“Who would you like to speak with?”
“Emergency Medical, damn it!”
“Connecting with Emergency Medical Services.”
At last!
“This is Emergency Medical Services, Portsmouth,” a voice said in my head at last. “What is the nature of your emergency?”
“I’ve got a twenty-five-year-old female!” I screamed. “She’s having a stroke!”
It took almost twelve minutes for a med-rescue lifter out of Portland Medical to home in on us. During that time, I’d pawed through the on-board medikit—which turned out to be stocked with preprogrammed nano set to close wounds, stop bleeding, and treat sunburn, frostbite, and headaches.
I didn’t even have a CAPTR. I had nothing, could do nothing. The feeling of helplessness was overwhelming, terrifying, and savage.
The med-rescue lifter homed in on our sailboat, coming in 10 meters above the chop. Under the lifter’s control, the boat’s AI retracted the sail and lowered the mast so that the lifter could glide in and hover directly overhead. A grapple frame came down, closed in around and under the sailboat, and hauled us aboard right out of the water.
But by the time they had Paula hooked up to life support, there was no life left to support.
And they didn’t have a CAPTR either. Not too surprising, I suppose; that technology is still pretty new, and the frontier along the edge of the ice sheet can be decades out of date. But I was left grasping for a reason, any reason for what happened, like a fish trying to breath air.
For a long time, I blamed the North Hemisphere Reclamation Project.
I know, I know, it’s all perfectly safe. But there’ve been stories around for centuries about how HFMR—high-frequency microwave radiation—can harm people, causing everything from cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart
