Cyber-bumming around
I’d had my surgery for my cyber bum – oh, all right, my prosthetic colono-rectal rediffusion filtration pack – and I was in isolation in the clinic. If you’ve ever been in post-surgical isolation, it was like that; if you haven’t, imagine being in solitary confinement in an uncomfortable bed, not allowed to move out of an uncomfortable position, well-fed whilst starving to death, because you are on a drip with nil by mouth, save water so sterile you could drink a toast with your compliments to the chemical factory. Add to this being kept ‘quiet,’ which is to say, no visitors or interactions with other inmates… uh, patients… whilst the frenetic hell which is hospital life broke like a wave around you. And no respite at night, because hospitals never sleep. Number 903 across the corridor from me was always receiving sudden visits of huge numbers of people with fancy machinery, or possibly huge numbers of machines with fancy people. I found out later he kept managing to undo his monitoring equipment in his sleep.
On the table, a box of homemade sweeties Bwephulp had made me sat, mournfully, until I was allowed them. And I was bored. And suffering data starvation.
So, I hacked into the hospital camera system.
Well, who wouldn’t?
I got my opportunity when the fellow in surgical gloves came into my cell… room… and looked around. He seemed unnerved that I was awake. I was unnerved by the gloves; I’m only too used to what that can mean. But I was thoroughly flushed out before all this began, and I swear they did it so high I could taste it. My insides were as clean and as scoured as a spaceship in the sandstorms of Shahara 4 left out a couple of years, and felt about as tissue thin. And it was why nil by mouth; they wanted the filters, rediffusers, additive centres, removal centres, mashers, grinders and pulverisers to settle in. I asked Jill, my proctologist, whether it would sound more like an industrial waste grinder or whether they would add circus music to cheer me up. She gave me one of those old-fashioned looks, and said, ‘James, it should not make any more noise than natural digestion.’ I locked onto those two little words, ‘should not.’ She told me off for looking cynical.
Don’t get me wrong. It could play Bootean rock music for all I care, so long as I can go out into less-than-fresh air and breathe in planetside newly minted pollution without starting to grow mould all over. Though that might limit my ability to pull.
Anyway, this chumski was looking at my notes.
“You might do me a favour and hand me my pocket box before you assault any part of me,” I said. I swear he jumped. But he handed me my box, which Jill had taken away from me, so now I was well away.
Did you know they have cameras in the surgical showers? I found out the times Jill was scheduled in surgery. That was a sight for bored eyes.
I started to eschew watching the medial staff off duty; some of them had some eclectic sexual habits, venues, sex toys, and games. I prefer participation to observation, not that I’ve had much chance since that fungal event. But there’s only so much perversion anyone can take. It would be a blackmailer’s dream… if I did not need surgical brain bleach.
Anyway, I started to see the chumski who had given me my pocket box, visiting other patients, regardless of their conditions. I knew a lot about their conditions. I also discovered that doctors add acronyms which are non-medical in nature to notes, like ‘WTM’ ‘will not take meds’; ‘DUN’ ‘double-up nutter,’ someone who thinks if one pill is good, forty is better; ‘MM’ ‘Moaning Murgatroyd’ – apparently a ‘Murgatroyd’ is a hypochondriac – along with some useful ones like ‘LPT’ or ‘Low Pain Threshold,’ and its counterpart, HPT which I imagine I don’t have to translate. There were noted by and for nurses, like ‘L8’ for ‘limbs, 8’, ie, wandering hand trouble, and ‘CB’ ‘Cheeky Bastard,’ which I found I had on mine. There’s some incomprehensible poem about having the gift to see ourselves as others see us. At least I wasn’t an ‘L8’ or worse ‘EW’, which as well as suggesting something nasty to start off with stands for ‘Effing wolf.’
Sorry, I got sidetracked there. But anyway, Chumski is wandering around, reading notes, and I am starting to wonder if he’s a blackmailer as he never goes to the doctors’ lounge or the nurse’s lounge, it being a small enough facility that they all know each other.
I decided to call Jill.
“James! What are you doing with your box?” she demanded. “You’re supposed to be resting!”
“I can’t rest when I’m so bored, it makes me want to scream,” I said. “I’m used to processing data at high speed, cross-correllating things, and it’s literally torture to have nothing to do. I’ve been able to sleep since that whatever-he-is gave me my box. Who is he, anyway? And why is he poking into everyone’s records?” I sent his picture to her.
Jill actually stopped telling me off and got very quiet.
“He came into your cube?” she asked, sharply.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’ll need to do a complete rundown of your antibodies, he is not in steriles,” she said. “And poking around other people? How do you know?”
“Oh, please, Jill! Surveillance is my business,” I said. “I love that cheeky mole of yours.”
“You are in so much trouble, Mister Beecher,” said Jill. “Why has nobody else mentioned this man?”
“Because he has an air of being where he is supposed to be,” I said. “He wears surgical gloves, so you won’t get any finger prints. I was afraid he was going to examine me. But I can see if I can use facial recognition on him.”
There was a long pause.
“Do it,” she said. “We’re being billed for drugs we haven’t bought, backed up by prescription number.”
Once I and my pocket box were cleared to search outside of the hospital, a lot of things started falling into place.
Kimmo ‘Chemo’ Asukeeraa was suspected of being a drugs dealer, but nobody had been able to trace down a source on him.
If I’m a cheeky bastard, what does it make the man who has his own mail pigeon hole in the hospital, who is having drugs mailed to him while the hospital is billed?
The cops became involved, and the hospital was very grateful to me.
Not grateful enough to prevent Jill from taking samples from me from everywhere.
And I mean everywhere.
I waited until I was discharged, which was after three long months, and I was allowed to do some work during the last month, as well as to eat and drink and duly discharge, all of which was bagged up, collected, and some lucky sod got to test it.
Anyway, I was walking out of there, and Jill saying goodbye.
“Which should be the last time I see you,” she said.
Did I imagine the regret there? She did not have to point this out.
The flowers I had ordered arrived then, the ones I would not have been allowed to be with in the same room before surgery.
“Jill, I know we’ve been intimate in a way which is not necessarily romantic, but will you go out with me?” I asked, rather diffidently, as the delivery robot thrust flowers at her.
“Do you want to go out with Jill, the person, or Jill with a good figure and cute mole?” she asked.
“I’ve been in love with you since you put me back together when my backups failed the first time, and in lust with you since I saw you in that tight black slinky jumpsuit when they shipped you out to my pod when I had my next emergency,” I said. “I want to go out with both, and stay in with both, and find out about the ins and outs of both.”
She squealed with delight.
“Right answer!” she said.
“I’m not rich,” I said. “I have a good scout pension with benefits I haven’t been able to take up before, but my salary is pretty good.”
“So’s mine,” said Jill. “The world is full of arseholes, but most people like theirs functional, and it pays well. You wouldn’t come over all Wiłanu and want me to stop working because I see other men’s nethers?”
“Sweetheart,” I said, “I don’t care what you do to other men’s bottoms, so long as you love me despite my bottom.”
“I do, James,” she said.
She said those two important little words again a couple of months later when we got married.
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