30: Chloe – Hypocritical Oath

After the tour of the space farm, James took me to meet some of his heroes. This time it was in a separate building, so we took the TurboLift down to my office level, only this time we turned towards the COCK & PUSSY, or as James showed me on the map, now called the Gangway. I got to feel like a mouse scurrying between two train carriages. It looked just like the connecting corridor of a national express, just ten times bigger.

“You noticed all the buildings aligned in threes, didn’t you?” James said. “We have a threefold system, you see. Our building mostly deals with the maintenance and security of the ring. This one deals mainly with training, medical services and administration. Obviously some overlap.”

“And the third?” I said.

“Ah, that’s primarily storage, with quite a bit given over to entertainment. The buildings have essentially been given over to militaristic purposes, nurturing functions, and for a lack of a better word, babysitting duties. They’ve been nicknamed Father, Mother and Child zones, respectively.”

“How…traditional.”

He took me to another TurboLift, identical in design but for green backlights where ours had been blue. We shot down seventy floors, clinging to the hand and footholds, and when we arrived James gestured to me, “Ladies First.”

Like the other floors on our tour, this chamber spanned the width of the building. It had high ceilings, now far walls capping each side of the glass tunnel. From the perspective a mouse, I was starting to feel like a goldfish, only instead of the friendly face of some cosmic sized pet owner, what peeked into our tank was the disconcertingly giant eyeball of the moon, framed by platforms stacked from wall to wall, suspended on cables stretched between them.

“Normally, you would have been taken straight here, of course.” James said. “But I ordered your pilot friend to land at our tower for debriefing. Call it obnoxious, but I wanted to look after you personally.”

“These are beds.” I said, floating between the platforms. “This is a hospital?”

“State of the art, of course.”

“And you kept me on a rickety old gurney in your stupid bouncy castle room?”

James shifted his feet uncomfortably. “Chloe, patients were transferred here after we settled into the ring. We wouldn’t have been able to stack patients in here while we were still bound by gravity.”

I looked at the rows of bed towers. “Okay, well, that actually makes sense. So who am I interviewing here?”

“Nobody, if you want. You’re here for a checkup. You were shot a few days ago, remember? Time to see how you’re faring.”

He fished out his tablet and tapped an icon, and a deep tone echoed through the chamber. Then a warm light faded on over the nearest bed and a green one flashed behind its headboard.

“Someone should be here in a moment.” James said.

While we waited, I turned my back on the moon and watched the Earth hanging in the sky opposite, wondering when or if we’d ever return. The city I grew up in was gone. The places I’d visited in my gap year were now half smashed, half preserved in skyscrapers orbiting the planet. Our orbital ring was impossibly thin from where I stood, so thin I couldn’t make it out after a couple of miles, yet it encircled the whole world, a tight fit barely wider than the shell of ice around it. Our new home was a loop of thread around a mountain.

“Ahoy, James!” a young man called from above.

And young was the word. I wasn’t exactly out of the spring chicken age range yet myself, but there was no denying the nagging voice telling me any aspiring medical practitioner should have at least reached an age where his voice was fully broken. The boy dropped from an overhead platform, chased by a slender nurse, who slowed her descent on a handrail running up the corners of the stacks. She at least looked like she’d completed university.

“Sick already?” the boy said. “We’ve only been up in the sky three days.”

“Oh, I’m not here for me.” James said. “Chloe, this is this zone’s chief medic, Doctor Billiam McCrimmon, and our Matron, Eki Lou.”

“Will,” Billiam said. “Will or Bill is short for William. There’s no such name as Billiam.”

“Why not?” James said. “If William can have Will or Bill, why not Billiam?”

“Don’t start this again,” Eki said. “You do this every time. It got old the first day.”

“He sounds like my ex.” I told her. “And that’s exactly what I told him.”

We dispensed with the pleasantries, and Will asked my history while Eki strapped me into the bed. I got the once-over while James waited on the other side of a wraparound curtain, and was done in just a few minutes, passing with a clean bill of health. Eki handed me a bix of complimentary wipes to clean myself with.

“Thanks,” I said. “I was getting embarrassed to ask but I couldn’t find showers on the map.”

“No showers in zero gravity, hun.” She said, without a smile. “Just wipes. They’re unscented, so they don’t really make you smell any fresher, but they take the sting off. Listen, do you mind if I go on the record?”

“Shoot.”

This time she did smile, a sad one, as she pulled out a box of syringes. “I know it was for the greater good, and we saved lives and children, but I’ve been having nightmares about people we left behind for the last couple of nights and it’s really getting to me.”

I rubbed her shoulder and smiled. “Yeah, I can understand that. Might even look into getting counseling if its available here.”

“I wouldn’t want to see one. Whenever I book something now, I get reminded of my last day at my old job. I booked an appointment for a patient just before the soldiers came to empty our files. I was gonna cancel for her but we were swept out so fast.”

I squeezed her fingers. “I’m sure she understood.”

Eki squeezed back, then withdrew to unpeel a needle from its pack. “She probably took Repose and killed herself. Gawd, I can still see her face smiling out from her file. I had to leave it behind. Dumped it in the men’s room. Last line I read, she was pregnant. The baby’ll be dead, too.”

“You giving me a shot?” I said, eyeing the empty syringe.

The shake of her head was virtually imperceptible. She didn’t look up, and instead of medicine, drew air into it. “No. I just wanted you to report this. We live because they died, and I want everyone who hears about this to understand this is what true horror feels like.”

“Miss Lou?” I said. “Eki? What are you doing?”

This time she did look up, then looked higher as she raised her hand overhead and slammed the needle between her ribs. The arc of her hands fell in slow motion as I screamed “Don’t!” and lunged and pushed her fingers off course.

The needle snapped.

And the impact sent us tumbling in opposing directions, her through the curtain, me still strapped to the bed but twisted into the emergency cord. The lights crashed from sterile green to a siren of blood red and an alarm whooped through the chamber, and James and Will’s shoutsnas they fought through the tangle of curtains connected to railings both above and below, all competed for audio superiority.

Eki wrestled for her freedom on the inside of the curtains and the TurboLift dinged as security guards flew out to join us. A familiar bandaged arm slid through the gap, followed by the rest of Chris, and he yanked her away to slap a pair of cuffs on her wrists single handedly. She flailed and a stray foot smacked into James’ face. Chris smirked.

“This is your highly trained staff?” I screamed, pulling at the straps. “So far, everyone hates your guts and you’ve been hit twice in the space of an hour.”

“To be fair,” James said, nursing his cheek. “I was mostly involved in the physics of the operation, not the people side.”

“Then why the hell are you the one giving me the tour?”

Chris threw James away for the doctor to catch, and pulled a sobbing Eki back through the parting to sat her at the foot of the bed. He kept his eyes on her as he let go to close the curtain again.

“Hey, wise woman,” he called me. “Help me get this broken needle out of her boob. I’ve only got one working hand to work with over here.”

He pulled out a Leatherman and flipped out the pliers. I sat up and held her down as he reached out to perform what was essentially surgery in the most advanced hospital of all time, using a decidedly primitive hiking tool. Eki, for all her energy in the previous minute, sat like a rock as I held the fabric across her chest down.

“That didn’t go into your heart, did it?” I said, pointing to the needle.

“It’s only a couple of inches long. She’s fine.” Chris said.

He lost his grip with the needlenose and switched to snagging it sideways, pulling the remains of the metal out with the wire cutter.

“Y’know,” he told her. “Someone recently told me if we can keep the children alive, at least we’ll ensure they won’t have to face that same decisions we did. We can make sure they won’t have the nightmares we get plaguing them every night.”

I inwardly smirked as he paraphrased my earlier rant. Eki flicked her eyes at him as he continued.

“Once they’re safe and grown, once they’re independent and we’ve trained our replacements, then we can go kill ourselves. And it’s actually something I agree with. Until then, this ain’t about us. It’s about raising these kids not to repeat our mistakes.”

Eki’s eyes narrowed. “So you’re sticking the responsibility of your mental well-being on all the kids.”

Chris shrugged. “Maybe, but let’s not tell them that. Let ‘em be kids for a little while longer.”

Eki let out a sob and hunched over, pulling out the needle for us, and curled up on the bed. Her legs were tucked under it like Reece had done in my office, and like he had, she rocked back and forth. Chris gave her a hug, and in that moment all the hostility I felt for him melted away. He cared and she cared, both wracked with survivor’s guilt, but they still believed in what they were doing.

“Now why can’t there be more guys like you left in the world?” I said. “Well, in orbit around it.”

He didn’t answer me so I gave them their moment, unstrapped myself from the bed and slipped through the curtain. It seemed James had been listening in, and he sobbed as hard as the two inside, burying his face in the bewildered arms of the Doc.

“And maybe there are.” I said, and wiped a tear from his eye.