“Listen!” Michael said with exasperation. “Let’s get this visit over with before we launch into a lengthy discussion about what it all means. You seem to be forgetting we’re on borrowed time in hostile territory.” He undid his mask for a moment to wipe the perspiration off his face. It was warm and humid in the stairwell.
“Okay, you’re right,” Lynn said. “But I wish I’d had tried to see if there is any data on the incidence of gammopathy in here. Maybe on our way out, we can stop back in the NOC. It would only take a couple of minutes.”
“We’ll keep it in mind,” Michael said, replacing his mask. “Provided, of course, we are not being chased.”
“Don’t joke about such a thing,” Lynn said.
“I’m not joking,” Michael said.
As they descended the stairs down to level four, Lynn consulted the floor plan. When they reached the landing, they paused outside the door and she showed him that there were several ways for them to get to Cluster 4-B.
“Let’s stay as far away as we can from the room labeled ‘automation control.’ My sense is that is where the staff will be holed up.”
“Good point,” Lynn said. “That means we should go left out of the stairwell and follow the hallway to the end and then turn right. I hope the doors are labeled. If they are not, it will be the fourth door on the right after the turn.”
Michael cracked the door onto the fourth floor and listened. Except for the omnipresent sound of the HVAC, silence reigned. He opened the door just enough to look up and down the hallway. It was a mirror image of the hallway above on five and just as white and brightly illuminated. Most important, it was similarly without a soul in sight. The only difference was that, at its far end, it lacked a door to the exterior. “Let’s not make this our life’s work, you know what I’m saying?”
Lynn knew exactly what Michael meant. “I’ll be right behind you,” she said.
It wasn’t a mad dash, but they moved as quickly and silently as they could, passing under a number of what they guessed were ceiling-mounted video cameras. The doors that they passed were labeled, for the most part. They turned the corner and resumed their speed. They hadn’t needed to count. Cluster 4-B was clearly labeled on the door in black sans serif letters and numerals.
“You ready?” Michael questioned.
“As ready as I ever will be,” Lynn responded, bracing herself. Seeing Carl in this sterile, deserted place was going to be an emotional challenge.
45.
Thursday, April 9, 12:48 A.M.
The door to Cluster 4-B was a pocket door, like the one to the NOC, only stouter. And like the door to the NOC, it was operated electronically, with a lever to the right of the frame. Michael pressed it and the door started to slide open.
Before they could see inside the room, they heard the intermittent whining of electrical motors and the clanking of heavy machinery. The noise had been completely muffled by the sound-insulated door and the walls. As the door opened all the way, Lynn and Michael were treated to a view of what looked like a completely mechanized, highly complex assembly line in an automobile plant, with robotic arms, and a forklift-like apparatus with oversize rubber tires connected to a constantly moving conveyor system. No staff was in attendance.
With some trepidation they entered, and the door automatically closed behind them. It was a large rectangular room about the size of a small theater, with a very high ceiling. The level of sound was so loud that they practically had to yell to hear each other. The air was warm and humid.
“Can you fucking believe this?” Michael half shouted.
“It’s like a futuristic horror movie,” Lynn yelled. She was taken aback, unsure if she truly wanted to see what was in front of her. “This is automated patient care taken to the nth degree.”
“And there are eleven other rooms just like it,” Michael said in awe.
The entire right side of the room was composed of a hundred angled but mostly horizontal Plexiglas cylinders in twenty-five vertical stacks of four. Each cylinder in each stack was about four feet in diameter and seven feet deep, separated from other ones on either side by a three-foot-wide metal grate. These grates formed a scaffold as a means of access for service, and could be reached by metal ladders that were attached. The opening to the lowest cylinder was waist high and the highest was near the ceiling. Each cylinder was numbered and had a computer monitor on an adjustable arm.
As Lynn and Michael stared in horror, they could now appreciate that about half the cylinders contained a patient, each naked save for the headgear resembling a football helmet that they remembered the mannequin wearing during their second-year introductory visit.
Suddenly, through an opening high up, on the left side of the room, a supine, naked, comatose patient entered the room moving quickly on the conveyor system. He, too, had a helmet. In a manner that reminded Lynn and Michael of a modern baggage-handling system at a major airport, the patient was rapidly transported to a specific area of the room not too far away from where they were standing. With some additional clanking and grinding noises the entire conveyor system adjusted to bring the patient just outside the proper cylinder, which was the top container in the sixth row. There, the robotic arms went to work to make all the appropriate connections for the feeding tube and other embedded lines. Once all the connections were set up, which happened surprisingly quickly, the patient was slid into the cylinder like a rocket being loaded into a launcher.
Before Lynn and Michael could respond to what they had just seen, the conveyor system noisily repositioned itself seven rows away from where it had deposited the first patient, and rapidly extracted a second patient from a different cylinder. Once this second body was completely in the open, the robotic arms went to work disconnecting the various lines. Then, following a reverse route from that of the first, the second patient was zipped out of the room. Everything was accomplished in just a few minutes.
“Good God!” Lynn exclaimed when she could find her voice. “This is obscenely mechanized. There’s no humanity, no dignity! It’s against everything medicine stands for.”
“Where the hell do you suppose the bodies are going?” Michael asked.
“God only knows,” Lynn said. At that point they were treated to a repeat of the sequence, with another body coming back from parts unknown. After that, another body was taken away. The students soon got the impression that what they were witnessing was a constant process, maybe even 24/7, of bodies coming and going.
Being careful to steer clear of the huge and very active business end of the conveyor system that unpredictably moved back and forth on its oversize tires and up and down in front of the cylinders, the two students approached the last stack. Despite their horror, they felt a morbid curiosity. The cylinder at waist level was numbered 100. The one immediately above it was 99. Approaching the mouth of the hundredth cylinder, they looked inside. The patient was female, lying on a series of moving rollers to keep pressure off any given spot. While they were watching, a sprinkler system was suddenly activated inside the cylinder, rinsing and disinfecting the woman. A sucking sound came from the base of the cylinder as the fluid was drawn off. From their vantage point, they could appreciate that the container was angled down at an incline of something like fifteen degrees.
“It’s like a freaking car wash,” Michael commented with a mixture of disgust and admiration. “Somebody’s put some real thought into all this.”
“I suppose that’s why their survival rate is so good.”
The monitor to the side of the cylinder showed the patient’s home page, which included her name, Gloria Parkman; her age, thirty-two; her location, Cluster 4-B 100; RANIBIZUMAB 3+ ACTIVE; and a long list of real-time vital signs and other extensive monitoring data. The monitoring was so extensive that the students intuitively understood that the patient had to have sensor chips implanted to make it possible. There were even real-time electroencephalogram tracings.