(Damn but it was good to see her, if only from a distance)
—and appeared to be making adjustments to the auto-surgeon. He knew it was the auto-surgeon because he’d seen pictures of it: practically everyone in the damn hospital had, what with all the publicity.
“Dr. Montgomery, do you think it’s really safe? Entrusting people’s operations to machines?” he heard a woman ask as he inched around the back of the group, hunting for a gap so he could see the video screen. Mindful of his size, he didn’t want to block other people’s views. He settled on a reasonably good position behind everyone else, where his height afforded him a decent angle. But he couldn’t see Rita from here. He wanted to see Rita.
“Absolutely, Ms. Grant,” Montgomery replied. “And I’d like to make one thing absolutely, crystal clear here: the surgeon—the human surgeon—is always in charge. Always. We’ve even designed a fail-safe mechanism to ensure that.”
Montgomery used a laser pointer to draw attention to a large red button mounted prominently on the side of a silver cylinder Spencer recognized as the main component of the robot. It looked like a fire-alarm knob mounted on a wall, the kind you needed to break glass to access, and about the same size.
“That’s Delores’s emergency stop button,” Montgomery said. “The fail-safe. Pushing it immediately shuts Delores down, allowing the human team to take over. I’d call it the kill switch, but we don’t like words like kill in the operating room.”
Montgomery paused so as not to step on his own punch line. There were a few polite chuckles. Otherwise, stone-cold silence.
Montgomery cleared his throat.
“So. The fail-safe instantaneously shuts Delores down.”
With the laser pointer, Montgomery indicated another red button—much like the one on the robot—mounted on the side of a printer-sized object sitting on a table near the patient’s head. Spencer saw Hank Chow and a younger anesthesiologist he didn’t know standing next to it.
“We’ve also incorporated a fail-safe into Morpheus,” Montgomery said. “It shuts off the infusion of anesthetic gases and injects paralytic-reversal drugs to wake the patient up.”
Right, Spencer thought. Morpheus. The automated anesthesia machine. Hank had been bragging about it in the OR break room the other day. A lot of the other anesthesiologists, Spencer knew, thought it was total bullshit.
He pursed his lips and frowned, uneasy, taking it all in, trying to process the calmness of the scene with his unnerving conversation with Wendy.
Everything seems okay …
He wanted a closer look at the robots, and at Rita. He spotted another location nearer Rita, from which he judged he would have a better view without disturbing anyone else. He slipped to one side of the audience and took up a position there, much closer to the operating table.
Better.
Rita’s hands were wrapped around a slender, silver cylinder about the length of a seven iron. She was slowly pushing it forward through one of the laparoscopic ports.
Probably one of the robot’s operating arms. From where he was standing, everything seemed to be going fine.
Maybe Wendy had gotten her story wrong. Maybe the naked surgeon hadn’t been Rita.
He inched a little closer.
RITA
“Yes,” Finney said to her. “I’m very interested to see how Delores performs. I think—”
Rita winced as a high-pitched whistle sounded in her ear, replacing Finney’s voice. It lasted for a few seconds.
And then silence.
Rita froze. She shook her head and listened for him.
Nothing.
She waited for Finney to finish whatever it was he’d been telling her.
He didn’t.
Which was … weird.
As was the silence inside her head.
FINNEY
Finney frowned and tapped the side of his tablet with a single slender finger.
That’s odd.
The precise, elliptical patterns that had been dancing across his screen a moment earlier, the ones that had indicated a strong connection between his control tablet and Dr. Wu’s implant, were gone, replaced by a fitful series of jagged peaks and valleys.
“What was that?” he said aloud.
He tapped the side of the tablet again.
“Boss,” Sebastian whispered over their link, “I think we have a problem.”
“Well that’s—huh. Strange. Strange. Um. I believe I just lost contact with Dr. Wu.”
“Interference. Something’s blocking your transmission, boss. We’ve seen this before. During the tests.”
“Yes,” Finney said, drumming the fingers of his right hand on the desk, a cheap, lightweight type found in office cubicles. The man had an infuriating talent for stating the obvious. The pertinent issue was: What was causing the interference? And the runner-up: How do we fix it?
Finney placed his hands on the desk, interlaced his fingers, and stared at the ugly interference patterns, squeezing. His knuckles turned red. Then white. His hands shook. They knocked loudly on the desktop.
No.