Katie’s day was off to a bad start already: she was awake, and there was some godawful radio in her ear chirping happily about how fabulously the war was going and wasn’t that peachy. She groaned, scratched herself in unspeakable places, found coffee, stared at the coffee, tried the coffee, discarded the coffee, put on a halfassed impression of a normal human being’s clothes, and went to work.
“Hey girl,” she asked as she got into the lab, still sleep-grimy with an uncleanness no sanitization protocol could fix, “how you doing?”
The frizeen said nothing. Not a mandible-click, not a thorax-chirr, not even a deep-abdomen pulse.
Katie’s own pulse lurched. “Oh come on,” she said. She pulled up diagnostics at the terminal. “Oh come on come on come ON fuck’s sake not AGAIN” and it was again.
All vital statistics were regular, even, and relaxed, and her patient was no longer present.
“Come ON!”
Sixty times. Sixty times in three months. At this rate she’d never get through a full vivisection.
***
Humanity and Frizeenity had gotten off to a bad start, but in an inevitable and blameless sort of way. Humans were humans, and the frizeen looked sort of like giant bugs with glowing eyes, and there were centuries of poorly-written novels that explained how that could only ever end one way.
So there was war, and bombardments, and tactics, and manoeuvering, and bold gambits, and lots and lots of money and time and effort being spent in odd places. One of those odd places was Katie, who was supposed to be a veterinarian and was now some sort of complicated auxiliary or draftee or something or other. Her knowledge was being used for the good of the many, and since a surgeryAI could put a higher primate back together nigh-flawlessly nowadays that good was principally dissection of the enemy, where nothing had ever quite been found that could replace the ingenuity of the human being.
Katie and her ingenuity did a desultory exploration of her patient, skipped the hard parts, washed herself clean of the odd purple jelly that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere within the average frizeen, and went to lunch for breakfast.
She wasn’t the only one. Table 40C was occupied by the only person in the building as annoyed as she was.
“Hey,” said Katie.
“Hey is for horses,” said Gloria, without looking up, “and if you ask for it too much you’ll start to whinny.”
“That’s stupid.”
“My grandmother told me that.”
“She was stupid. My job’s stupid. Everything’s stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid stupid stupid. Did they make eggs this morning?”
“Yes. Scrambled.”
“Fuck I want fried ugh damnit.”
Gloria still hadn’t looked up. She was apparently reading the future in her coffee.
“You looked like you’re reading the future in your coffee,” said Katie.
“God, I wish.”
“Morning that shit?”
“Completely. And you?”
“Yes.”
They shared a sigh and so much more.
“They just…slip off,” said Katie. “But nothing changes! Biologically speaking. Organs keep running, basic brain function’s there, but nobody’s home and everything stops reacting properly. And I can’t tell you what’s causing it. Not a hormone, not a protein, not a neural impulse, not an invisible goddamned unicorn. There’s no signal.”
“I can’t tell you what’s causing it either because I can’t tell you anything new and I haven’t told you anything new for the past six months,” said Gloria. “And you know it.”
“Yes,” said Katie. “That’s why I complain to you. You’re the only person here whose job is even more shit than mine.”
Gloria slowly and delicately flipped her the bird. The fingernail shone like a diamond in the orange light that peered through the cafeteria windows.
“So, how is it?” replied Katie to the finger.
“The what.”
“The more shit than mine.”
“Same as it is. I go over the texts, I get myself hopped up on false hope, I get in the interrogation room, I start asking the real tough questions, and they get all confused and then stop replying and then we break out the direct neural stimulation needle complex and then they turn off.”
“I thought you got a full library after Kepple Beta got seized. Nothing new in there for you guys?”
“Nothing new. Just the same old nonsense. Everything’s religious with these jerks – can’t go two paragraphs in the middle of a textbook on lichens without stating the oneness and immortality of all life in the universe – but there’s no angle in there. I’ve brought in forty kinds of religious thought and they just stare at me. They’re the least evangelical fundamentalists I’ve ever met, and I can’t believe I’m saying this but I HATE it.”
“Psych major, psych major, psych major,” sang Katie deliberately off-key.
“Dog-prodder,” said Gloria.
“I worked with cattle mostly.”
“Whatever.”
Breakfast or lunch or whatever arrived and Katie ate some of it but the real meat of what she’d needed had been someone else’s irritation. The day didn’t feel so bad anymore.
***
The scalpel slipped in, the inner lung-plating slipped aside, and the patient slipped away with a little sigh.
“PISS FUCK”
The day felt so bad anymore.
Katie’s hands were tired and her mouth was dry and her head was hurting and the assistants were wheeling in subject number sixty-two and something in her said ‘sure, why not.’
“Give me the gurney,” she said.
“Pardon?”
Katie took the gurney, and took it to the halls, and took it at a run.
***
General Gracie Goodman was old and tiny and shrivelled and lived by spite. She reminded Katie of her mother, her father, and possibly her aunts.
“This day’s a mess,” she complained bitterly. “I had a full half-hour extra for lunch before the physics department filled my line up with complaints and the finance department told me the entire Enormous Quark Splitter would have to be refurbished from scratch and the MPs hauled you in for vandalism and you yelled at everyone that you’d finally found something and just HAD to tell me about it right away. What was it?”
“It was more what we didn’t find,” said Katie.
Gracie gave her a look that communicated itself fully and entirely.
“So, my dissections never confirmed an agent behind the frizeen…. Shutting down. Nothing. No cause. And after this morning’s spontaneous test in the particle accelerator –”
“Which you will be docked pay for, for the next ten million years.”
“-we can confirm my lack of confirmation. Nonconformation. A living frizeen was bombarded with everything while our instruments measured anything as it underwent its alteration: there is nothing that causes this, no change in state of matter. It looks like their fundamental being and self are contained in a strictly nonphysical form independent of their bodies. In other words, or repeating my words, we have confirmed – or at least, confirmed through nonconformation – the existence of the immortal soul –”
“what”
“- in the frizeen,” finished Katie.
There was a long and brutal silence while the general chewed that over.
“By fuck,” she said at last. “Do you know what this means?”
Katie did not know what that meant.
“It means,” said the general with violent relish, “that I can ask the folks down in R&D to design weapons that annihilate souls. Shit in a mustard bottle, your job is a smashing success. Take the week off from the war and have some fun.”
***
Katie slept in, avoided coffee, and ate a lot of cupcakes. It helped more than it should’ve.