“Fascinating!” the room responded. “Belladonna was popular in the sixteenth century for its ability to make women’s pupils dilate; apparently, large pupils were considered attractive back then. Strangely, in the twenty-first century, I see references to pornography.” Its tone became worried. “Atropa belladonna, however, contains atropine and seems quite toxic. Shakespeare referred to it as ‘deadly nightshade.’”
I waited while its code collided then consolidated bard and biology. “Unfortunately, I cannot provide these berries to you, Joel, because I cannot contribute to the harm of a human guest.”
“I see,” I remarked. Down but not out. “But I’m in so much pain, Mr. T. Look at these bruises!” I pulled off my shirt, showing the tender areas where the security bots had subdued me. “You want me to continue hurting? Because that would contribute to my harm.”
Another pause. “That is a conundrum, Joel. I admit, I am conflicted.”
“Try this. Look up how many times belladonna has caused a human fatality in, say, the last hundred years.”
“I cannot find a single instance. But the plant has been extinct for some time.”
“Exactly.” Bring it home. Sell it. “So, I’m in pain. You offered to help. Belladonna would help. How’bout you print just one berry for me? Or would you prefer to continue harming me?”
Mr. T was silent. I was almost sure I had gone too far and he was comming Moti. But then a small round purplish-black berry appeared on the printer tray. Yes!
I picked it up and held it between my fingers. Now comes the really hard part.
“Did I help?” the room asked me.
“You did,” I said.
“Glad to hear it!”
“Bottoms up, Mr. T.” I popped the berry into my mouth, chewing a couple of times before swallowing the overly sweet thing. “Just one last request.”
“Yes, Joel?”
“Would you please fetch Moti and let him know you’ve just poisoned me with belladonna? I think I’ve only got a few more minutes to live.”
22 Despite the advent of nanomedicine, NSAIDs, or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, were still quite popular in my time for treating minor aches and pains. Tiny robots don’t necessarily do everything better. Also, I was lying to the room.
CURST BE HE THAT MOVES MY BONES
MOTI WAS PISSED. No, he was furious. Standing in a hospital room, overlooking the East River, he yelled at Zaki, “That stupid room almost killed him!”
It had taken a lot of effort in a very short amount of time to get the man-with-no-comms who’d been administered a poison-nobody-ever-heard-of admitted to the Bellevue Hospital Center. Fortunately for me, the Levantine Intelligence Directorate was well versed in the sort of clandestine payoffs, elbow rubs, and tit for tats required to bypass the usual procedures.
Moti beckoned Zaki out of the almost-featureless room in which I lay unconscious. The belladonna poison had felt like lava-coated knives in my stomach, but thankfully, I had passed out quickly. Now my Levant captors were seeking out a doctor to get a prognosis on my condition.
They found one near the elevator. He was a young sandy-haired man dressed in paisley scrubs. He sat in a glass-walled, aquarium-like room, watching an array of telemetry and video streams. Pulling up my data, he informed Moti that my unevenly dilated pupils had initially led to some concern that I had sustained brain damage. But now that the nanites were dialyzing my blood, I was out of the woods.
“You know, I actually studied this poison in school,” the doctor said, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet uses it to poison herself to death when she can’t be with Romeo.”
“Yes, very romantic,” said Moti. “Tell me, what is the time frame for my colleague’s recovery?”
“Actually,” the doctor’s console chimed in, “Juliet was only feigning death to escape her family. Romeo was supposed to know that. They were meant to elope when she woke up, but he didn’t get the message. So when he found her—”
“What?” Moti interrupted. “What do you mean, ‘feign death’?”
“The ruse was that a small amount of belladonna would leave the ingestor only comatose for a brief period of time, whereas a larger dose might end their lives. Poisons were a favorite of Shakespeare.”
But Moti wasn’t there to hear the end of the console’s lecture. He and Zaki were already running down the hall to my room—to find my bed empty.
“He tricked us!” Moti yelled at his subordinate, whose face was impassive. “Why, Zaki? What’s his plan?”
My “plan”—and I put it in quotes because it was less of a plan and more of a haphazard string of ad hoc last resorts—was to find the hospital’s TC and port to Costa Rica. Every major hospital had a teleportation chamber, a gesture of goodwill from those benevolent helpers of humanity, International Transport.
As soon as Moti and Zaki left my room, I hopped off my gurney and went the opposite direction down the hallway, hiding my face to avoid detection while searching for a janitorial bot. I ended up finding one near the printer vending area. It was a semisentient quadruped plunger with a trash-can-shaped body about half my height.
I ran a rudimentary salt on the janitor, telling it there was an organic spill in the TC—in other words, that someone had pissed themselves—which, as it turned out, was not too far-fetched. “Happens all the time,” the plunger told me in a gravelly New Jersey accent. Either someone had been having fun reprogramming the little guy, or he’d seen a lot of construction workers come through the halls. “I’ll hop on it lickety-split.”
Janitors had the best security clearance because nobody liked cleaning other people’s messes. As it motored off, I followed it into an elevator and down three floors to the hospital’s TC, breathing a sigh of relief when it was granted access to the foyer. Having arrived, it scanned the spotless concrete floor, inspected the unsullied chair, then looked at me with what would have been a quizzical look, had it possessed a face.
“Guess someone else cleaned it up,” I said.
“Okay,” said the janitor, and it motored out of the room.
As the door hissed closed, I turned to the TC console. I’d watched conductors work such consoles while standing in TC queues, so I figured it would be something I’d be able to pwn in a few pokes. Unfortunately, I figured wrong.
I know, you’re probably thinking, Some salter you are, Joel. Can’t even figure out how to work a TC console. Well, smartass, there’s a huge difference between salting and hacking. It’s like the difference between a con man and a pickpocket. Yes, both take stuff from you, but they’re two completely different skill sets.
Still, I attempted to give it a shot. The interface was a scrum of strange icons, like a puzzle in which none of the pieces made sense.