Ascending - James Alan Gardner [66]
I did not want tiny machines journeying through my digestive system; but Dr. Havel said a number of them had already gone down my esophagus, and it did not hurt a bit, did it?
He was correct. It did not hurt, so I could not punch him. But everything itched a great deal, as I have already said, and some of the nanos ventured into places they were not welcome. Though I wore my Explorer jacket, the coat did not seem sufficiently skilled at protecting the parts of me that needed safekeeping.
Myself Exposed
After five minutes of such indignities, Dr. Havel clapped his hands together with Anticipatory Zeal. “Well then, let’s see what my clever little helpers have discovered.”
He scurried to a table in the middle of the room: the sort of table one might lie upon when being examined by a real physician.9 However, Dr. Havel never once asked me to lie down; and when I looked at the table, I saw why not.
The entire table-top was a viewing screen…and there on the screen, life-size, was the exposed anatomy of a woman who could only be me. I do not say I recognized myself—instead of a face, there was an opaque rendering of my skull, not to mention whitish versions of other bones in my body, laid over internal organs depicted in ugly unnatural colors—but the general outline matched my own, so who else could it be?
“I do not look like that,” I said. “My bones are not white; they are pleasingly transparent.”
Dr. Havel laughed the way he laughed at everything. “Quite right, Ms. Oar, quite right, ha-ha. I got the computer to colorize your lovely insides so we could see everything better. You’re clearly designed to be clear, ha-ha, at least to human eyes; but once we scan you on IR and UV, not to mention X rays, ultrasound, MRI, bioelectrics and so on, we get a lovely picture of what we can’t discern in the visible spectrum.”
He proudly waved his hand toward the image—which I found most disconcerting to look at. When I breathed in, the picture’s lungs inflated; when I exhaled, the picture’s lungs did the same. I tried taking breaths in quick little gasps, hoping the machine would be thrown off and unable to match my rhythm…but no matter what I did, the image on the table imitated it exactly.
If I held myself quiet, I could feel my heart beating in perfect unison with the ugly crimson heart shown on the screen. Just noticing that made my heart beat faster. The picture’s heart beat faster too. I had the most disquieting sensation the image controlled my pulse instead of the other way around; so I looked at the floor until the sensation went away.
Meanwhile, Dr. Havel went around the table and placed his finger against the screen—not on my picture, but off to one side, where there was nothing but blank blackness. A host of squiggles appeared where his finger touched: printing in four different colors of light, and little diagrams that probably revealed vital facets of my health.
“Hmm!” Dr. Havel announced. “Ms. Oar, it turns out you’re yourself.”
“This is not a clever machine if that is its best observation.”
“Oh,” said he, “you think it’s reporting the obvious? Not at all, ha-ha, ha-ha. Before you got here, Admiral Ramos called to brief me…and when I heard your story, I bet the good admiral a modest sum you’d turn out to be a clone of the original Oar. But you aren’t.”
“How can you tell?” Uclod asked.
The doctor must have been hoping for that question. “See here?” he said most gleefully. He patted his fingers against the screen, right on the picture