He blinked three times, and the texts began to crawl across his eyes as he walked down the pavement, wading through a red and blue sea of the rain spheres people wore.
First, he learned that the neoplasm in his right lung was, so far, isolated and “eminently treatable.” The fancy Legacy oncologist he’d seen wrote with the tired, all’s-well tone of one who had simply chosen white and blue instead of red and black for their new yacht spinnaker and jib sails. “Long story short: you’re absolutely fine, etc. etc., and I’ll see you next month for a routine follow-up. And there’s a pill, as you must know.” Dr. Bajwa laughed aloud at the news. He had been quite worried.
A great number of Indigent children dressed in dirty T-shirts and denims, all sopping wet (none ever wore rain spheres), seemed to be jostling around him on the pavement.
“Spare a fiver, sir,” they kept asking.
As he tried to read the next Opticall, and shove his way toward the Underground entrance, he managed to pull a few pounds from his pocket.
“You’re a great man,” a little girl with an eye patch told him. She looked thin, with a pasty-gray pallor. “Truly, sir.”
“No I’m not,” he said, leaning down and scrubbling the girl’s thick black hair. “But I am happy, sweet one.”
When he opened the other Opticall, his happiness collapsed. As the awful words passed over his corneas, he began, instantly, to weep. It had been years since he had cried, and it strained his body. He crossed his strong arms, trying to stifle the hurt, and keep quiet. The little Indigent girl hugged his legs.
“Don’t cry,” she said.
His salty tears played havoc with the electro-photoreceptors in his corneal readers, turning the message script into tall, reedy, scary lettering. Nonetheless, the distressing bit was clear enough, and Dr. Bajwa scrolled it over his corneas a few times, taking it in: NHS élite Patient No. 87229109, Handley, Cuthbert Alfred. Arrest Notification. Offence: Drunk (Flōt) and Incapable, High Street, Camden Town. Result in Lieu of Fine and/or Detention: Compulsory Form B-810 Report, Mental Hygiene Exam, Ministry of Mind. Date: 1 March 2052 via SkinWerks Bond. Examiner: Dr. George Reece, 2nd Viscount Islington, 1st Psyalleviator (EQUIPOISE), Home Counties Region.
It was all that Baj had been fighting to prevent, and it almost certainly meant that his elderly patient would end up institutionalized—and, soon enough, dead.
“You can come home and live with us,” the little girl said. “You won’t be sad with us. I’ve got a mother, you know.”
Baj leaned down, and kissed the girl on the forehead, and walked away. He smelled the street in her hair—rain, spit, the earthy acridity of coal dust from a century ago.
He realized at that moment that he had no choice but to cooperate with EquiPoise when it came to Cuthbert, or risk his own medical registration. While the Watch might not have been unleashed on Cuthbert yet, one deviation from the Ministry of Mind’s examination procedures and detention was inevitable—should he survive the arrest itself. The next day, he was able to break the news to Cuthbert, who seemed completely and rather pitifully unfazed. It was the one reaction Baj feared most.
“You need to respect EquiPoise,” he pleaded with Cuthbert. “Oh god, Cuthbert. You don’t understand. They will want everything from you.”
“I’ve no worries,” he answered. “There’s a ‘force that through the green fuse,’ Baj, drives everything, and it’ll never let us down. And no EquiPoise will get their grubby donnies* on my otters, I’ll tell you that.”
Cuthbert had just as well, the doctor thought bitterly, handed his pureed brain to EquiPoise in a disposable jar. It was over.
CUTHBERT’S FATEFUL EXAM with Dr. Reece lasted forty-five seconds, over a scent-enabled SkinWerks screen, during which Reece put a mere two questions to Cuthbert: Do you hear voices? and Do you dedicate yourself to the King? Cuthbert answered, respectively, “Of course, don’t you?” and “More than you’ll ever know.”
Dr. Reece didn’t like him. Reece’s rather minor new Islington viscountcy, for which he outbid a few B-list media celebrities and paid the Windsors ￡130,000, hadn’t quite bought him the respect he felt he deserved.
An NHS élite First Psyalleviator who kept tabs on several thousand other destitute mental cases, Reece calibrated medications on bulk database screens and, in short, superintended thousands of unwell brains. At the start of the exam, Cuthbert’s marshy smell of Flōt and old clothes so bothered him, Reece had immediately activated his high-priced olfactory CoreMods (as he often did with Indigents), an insult clearly visible to Cuthbert with the Psyalleviator’s telltale swipe of his nasal septum.