The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [94]
They decided to take eight-hour shifts supervising Russo, keeping the steady drip from the IV lines flowing, noting the volume of his waste every hour, and ensuring his vitals remained within the limits prescribed by Floyd. She preferred the hollow hours between dusk and dawn and had volunteered for the night shift, seeking a little peace and quiet away from Lukas Hurley’s frightened face. Everybody had carefully avoided any mention of Bastien, as if silence could somehow deny the harrowing reality of his death.
Laurel jolted after hearing a floorboard close to the door creak. She held her breath and released it slowly when Floyd’s figure, clothed in jeans and a loose plaid shirt from the supply provided by Tyler, materialized. A far cry from the debonair figure he’d cast when he welcomed them from the sewers, but a sight better than the refuse-encrusted man he’d been at the subway station. Laurel could still feel the cauterizing fear she felt before the fat fields. “Damn, you scared me,” she muttered.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to. Everybody is knocked out?”
She checked her watch—22:45—and nodded. “You couldn’t sleep?”
He didn’t answer but stepped over to Russo, checked the machine readings, drips, and lines, then neared the settee.
Laurel gathered her legs and moved aside to make room.
“That man is incredible.” Floyd nodded toward the bed.
She waited.
“When I first saw him, I was shocked. I was expecting someone who had been serving a hibernation sentence for a few years, not a living corpse.”
“What do you mean?”
“At the sugar cubes, the inmates are monitored constantly. Once their vitals show signs of decay, they are raised to the medical facility. There, an army of specialists backed with advanced instruments flush their organs of built-up toxins and redress most of the damage.” He nodded again in Russo’s direction. “I doubt that man was ever brought up from his tank.”
Laurel didn’t know, but Floyd was probably right.
“Back at Nyx, I would have given him a one in ten chance of recovery, maybe. If he were one of my patients, I would have recommended he be terminated.”
“You’d have killed him?”
“No. I wouldn’t have tried to revive him.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Life is not an absolute, but death is. Some patients decay to such an extent that recovery is almost impossible. Yes.” He turned to look into her eyes. “You can be ninety-nine percent dead with an active brain. Before we return a patient from torpor, we must always weigh how alive the patient will be when we finish. This is an issue we have to consider daily in my line of work.”
“You play God?”
“That’s a spiny subject. We play at being God whenever we extend life by artificial means.”
She picked up her book, placed the beer coaster she’d been using as a bookmark between the pages, and closed it, laying it down on a small side table. “And now? What are his chances?”
“I don’t know. His metabolism is responding and his blood chemistry is much better. Not normal—that will take a long time—but acceptable. The problem is what will happen after I withdraw sedation.”
“His mind?”
“If they’d do this to his body, what did they do to his mind? Yes. I’m familiar with standard hibernation side effects—the physiological