Shelter (16 page)

    "Acclimated to what?"

    "Net translation," Jack said gently. "Do you know what that means?"

    I have been translated, the television had said. Merry swallowed bile. "Sure. MacroCorp's been working on storing and digitizing personalities; I know that much. I follow ScoopNet, same as anyone else. Virtual immortality, they're calling it. They're also saying it's years away."

    "Not anymore," Jack said. "We've been recording and storing your dad's memories for several decades now, as a test."

    "He died," Meredith said. "He died, didn't he? And you went ahead and did this translation thing. Well, it's not him! It's just a program! It doesn't have free will and it doesn't have a body!"

    "He no longer has a biological body," Jack said. "That's exactly right. As for the free will part—look, Merry, he was frantic about you and your mother. And when we translated him, the first thing he wanted to do was talk to you two. And we told him not to. We told him it would be too upsetting. We told him to wait until you were out of here. You can see how much good that did: At the moment, I wish he didn't have free will, but it certainly looks otherwise."

    "I have free will," came a metallic voice near Meredith's feet. She looked down and saw a medibot, one of the ones that usually drew blood. "I can have a body, too." The bot tried do some kind of complicated dance step, but instead its legs got tangled and it fell over.

    Jack shook his head. "Preston, that's really not funny. I asked you to give us some time alone."

    Meredith picked up the bot and rearranged its legs. "There," she said, putting it down again. "Now you can go away. Go away, bot. Jack, how'd he—it—get in there?"

    "The bot must have some kind of Net connection," Jack said. "To check blood values against medical databases, maybe? I don't know. Your father seems to be having some, ah, boundary issues. We're working on the problem, believe me."

    The bot wasn't going away. "I need to draw your blood now," it said.

    That was what it usually said. It climbed up onto Meredith's chair to reach her arm, the way it always did. But it was too soon. Meredith looked at the clock; she usually had blood drawn every four hours, but it had only been two.

    "It's not time yet," she said. "TV, on! Daddy, AI, whatever you are, leave the bot alone." Her father's face reappeared on the screen, but the bot kept about its business, swabbing her arm with antiseptic.

    "I am leaving the bot alone," said the television. "Meredith, how do you feel?"

    ''I'm fine! I'm not supposed to get stuck for another two hours!" She felt a pinch as the needle slid in, and cursed silently. That was all she needed: a vampire bot on top of this insane AI. "Is this thing broken?" Now it was climbing her shoulder to stick a thermometer in her ear.

    In the bank of readouts behind the isolation window, a red light came on, and a doctor strode into the room. "Okay, Mr. Adam, time to leave now."

    "What does that red light mean?" Merry said. "Jack—"

    "Bye, Merry. Good luck. We're all rooting for you." Jack left; two other doctors and a nurse came in. The doctor said, "Meredith, would you lie down, please? We'd like you to rest for a few minutes before we take your blood pressure."

    "Sure," she said. Her voice sounded as metallic as the bot's had, and in bed, she couldn't avoid the television set.

    "Meredith, you must do exactly as the doctors say," her father's simulacrum told her.

    "I know," she said. And then, with the grim suspicion that she already knew the answer, "Um, what's the incubation period of this thing?" Through the window, she saw two of the doctors exchange a glance; on the television, her father's image froze. "Hello? Look, I'm not stupid. We're getting close, aren't we? That's why you're sticking me more often. That's why all these people are here. So what is it?"

    One of the doctors cleared her throat. "Four and a half, five days." "Oh," Merry said. "So, uh, is all the bot stuff normal?"

    "Your temp's up a bit," one of the nurses said.

    "Oh. That was the light that went on?"

    "Yes, honey. But it could just be the excitement."

    Right, Merry thought. I don't think so; I don't think you do, either. Thirty thousand dead. Sweet Gaia. MacroCorp hadn't had her wired since birth; her personality wasn't stored anywhere except in her brain. She began to tremble. ''I'm scared."

    "Of course you are," the nurse said. "Do you want a sedative?"

    "No." Whatever happened, she wanted to feel it for as long as possible. "Do you have a headache?" the television said. "I had a headache. If you get a headache—"

    "Mr. Walford," the nurse said, "please be quiet. Can you do that?"

    If I die, Merry thought, I'm dead. They can't translate me. A tiny throbbing had begun behind her eyes. She lay very still, and tried to convince herself that it was just her imagination.

    * * *

    Afterward, there were entire weeks she couldn't remember, except in surreal snatches: being surrounded by figures in spacesuits, being covered in bots, waking from nightmares of immobility to find herself tied to the bed and tethered to thickets of IV tubes. She dreamed of her mother's face looking through the isolation window, mouthing words Merry couldn't hear, and learned later that it had been real: Constance had developed no symptoms, and after ten days had been released from her own isolation. And always, whenever Meredith was conscious, her father's face hovered on the television screen above her. "You will recover, Meredith. You must recover." Once she dreamed that she was well, that she had just woken up in her bed back home, and that all the animals she had ever had were gathered to welcome her. Squeaky was there too, and in her dream she wept because she was so happy to see him again. The dream was so real that she expected, when she woke, to find herself sourrounded by animals; but when she opened her eyes she was in the merciless comfort of the isolation unit, ringed by bots and spacesuits. The effect was one of sudden metamorphosis: her pets had been transformed into these ghastly mechanisms, possessed by the brutal logic of the machine, and she had no way to change them back.

    Meredith survived, as most people who weathered the virus did, because her family was wealthy enough to afford round-the-clock, individual medical care, teams of doctors to track the progress of CV in her system and to treat its various manifestations as quickly as possible. The pandemic was relatively limited in the United States, thanks largely to Preston's swift recognition of the dire nature of his illness. Because he had called the Biocontainment Unit as soon as he had, everyone who had been on the company jet back from Africa, and all of their contacts since landing, were promptly isolated, at MacroCorp's expense. A few dozen people died—the pilot and several flight attendants, and various people they'd kissed, spoken to, or visited since landing—but at least so far, Preston's foresight seemed to have prevented a major outbreak in the U.S.

    From the television news, when she was well enough to tell her father to vanish from the screen so that she could watch it, Meredith learned of the fate of thousands of Preston's African employees, one of whom had evidently infected him during a plant tour. Without access to isolation, they didn't survive. The virus spread so easily, especially in countries where people still spoke to each other most often in person, rather than over the phone or the Net. Neither did vast numbers of their relatives and friends. The ill soon swelled into the tens of thousands, a complex web of human relationships ensuring that by the time the epidemic ended, much of Africa and large pockets of Asia and South America, already ravaged by HIV, would be further decimated.

    Even when she was well enough, Meredith soon sickened of watching the news, with its relentless coverage of epidemic and death, its endless profiles of grieving families. She stopped watching the news at all. She sent her father away several times a day, because his own terror terrified her. She watched old movies when she could concentrate well enough, and children's programming when she couldn't, when she was so sick that her attention wandered after even a few moments. She watched cartoon characters, smashed into smithereens, miraculously regenerate; she watched brightly colored letters and numbers dancing across the screen, watched cavorting puppets, watched a gentle man in a blue sweater sing a song about loneliness.

    Please don't think it's funny

    When you want the ones you miss.

    There are lots and lots of people

    Who sometimes feel like this.

    She found herself humming that song for days afterward, because she missed everything. Once, weeping from pain, she heard the tune and looked up to discover Preston's face on the television. He was singing it to her.

    "You like this song, Meredith. I thought you would feel better if I sang it to you."

    "The man in the sweater sings it better," she said. She couldn't summon the strength to send Preston away.

    "Yes, that is true," Preston said. "You do not have to miss me, Meredith. I am right here."

    She had been wrong; she didn't miss everything. "I don't miss you," she said.

    "I think you would, if I were not here. There is another little girl in isolation, Meredith, in this same hospital. Both of her parents have just died. She is very sad. It would be nice if you could be her friend."

    "Don't want to," she said. She was tired of orphans. There were orphans on the news, constantly: that was why she had stopped watching the news. "Don't want sad things." She didn't have the energy to tell Preston what she did want: her animals, everything vital and sensory and simple. She hungered desperately for real sunlight, fresh air, the feel of another person's skin. She woke sometimes sobbing and choking for breath, despite the purified gases circulating through the unit's ventilation system. She longed to smell grass, flowers, baking cookies, the fragrant cedar chips in which the gerbils made their nests. During her good days, the days when she could sit up, converse, focus her eyes, Meredith was grateful for visits from her mother, grateful for clean sheets, grateful that she was slowly getting stronger. On her good days, she didn't even mind the bots too much; if they hurt her with their constant needles, it was only as much as a doctor or nurse would have done, and at least someone had thought to cover them with bright terry cloth so they wouldn't be quite so machine-like, quite so hard and cold. During her many bad days, when pain or nausea or dizziness wracked her body, when she was so exhausted she literally couldn't raise her head, when fever made the room bulge and pulse in surreal, ghastly contractions, she was aware of her mother's presence, if at all, only as a remote face pressed to the window of the unit, and of her father's as a maddening apparition that refused to go away. On those days, the bots terrified her, becoming giant, garish spiders whose hypodermic needles were poison fangs.

    Between the many terrible days and the fewer, but increasingly frequent, good ones fell another variety, the bridge days: the times when Meredith felt herself getting better, and prayed for freedom; the times when she felt herself getting worse, and prayed merely to survive. It was on one of those days, a passage from better to worse, when Constance told her that the animals in the house were gone. "Sweetheart, the hospital had the place disinfected before I went home, you know. Our things are still there, the furniture and paintings and so forth, because Daddy's head of security made sure the place was guarded when we were gone, not just with cybersystems but with people too, so nobody could sneak past the cameras to take something and maybe get sick ... anyway, they did a very thorough cleaning job. Very thorough. And your pets—honey, the cages aren't even there anymore. They were gone before I got back, you have to believe that, I didn't do it."

    "It was necessary," Preston's face said from the television. "Animals have been identified as CV vectors in Africa and Asia."

    "I know," Meredith said wearily. "You let me watch the news yesterday, Daddy, remember? I saw that story too."

    Constance sighed. "Merry, please tell me you don't blame me."

    "I don't blame you," Meredith said. "Really." She had known what Constance was going to tell her. "They must have been dead, anyway, Mom, from not being fed. It isn't your fault."

    "I'm so sorry," Constance said, and Meredith heard her voice catch. "I really am. I know how much you loved them. I'm sorry we had that stupid fight about them. If I'd known—"

    "It's okay," Meredith said, and discovered dully that it was. The world where her mother had been the villain, the world where Constance had cruelly tossed Squeaky out into the cold, was ages gone now. ''I'm glad about Squeaky now. That he's out in the Presidio somewhere. I've been thinking about that, you know. Because if he hadn't gotten out, he'd be dead now too."

    Constance nodded. "I know. I hope he's okay. He was a cute little thing, even if I wouldn't admit it at the time." She smiled wanly and said, "We'll get you new pets, Merry. You're going to get over this. You're very strong, all the doctors say so, if—if you weren't going to make it, you wouldn't have gotten this far. You're getting better, sweetheart. You'll be coming home any day now. You feel better today, don't you?"

    She felt worse, once again, yet another episode in the endless cycle of illness and seeming recovery. "I don't know. I guess so. I have a headache today." On the television, her father frowned, and she remembered that headache had been his first symptom.

    "It's just the air in there," Constance said. "That terrible canned air. I can't wait until you come home, Meredith! Any day now."

    It was many days after that—twenty, twenty-five? they blurred, only the cycles of illness and recovery distinct—before Meredith got to go home. She awoke one morning to realize that something was different. The air: the air smelled different. She glanced at the window and saw a nurse, who smiled and said into the intercom, "We're getting you used to the outside, Merry, gradually. In a few more days it will be entirely regular outside air you'll be breathing, and then if you stay well, you can go home."