The administrator smiled. “You’re not the first person to tell me that. Most people expect to see some kind of white-tiled temple of healing, with doctors and nurses bustling about. There are still a few hospitals like that—but they’ll soon be as extinct as dodos. What you see here is the wave of the future!”
Jackson scratched his back. The coarse paper hospital gown the MU gave him when he arrived felt like it contained splinters. The machine had also made him remove every stitch of his own clothes—and no matter how he tried to secure it, the back of the gown kept popping open.
“By the way, where are your nurses? I haven’t seen any yet.” Especially Colette—.
“Oh, we don’t have any human doctors or nurses here anymore. You have no idea how much it cost to pay their salaries. Plus, being only human, they made mistakes. Doctors thought they were infallible, and never admitted it when they made an incorrect diagnosis or prescribed the wrong treatment. Besides, everybody knows they were more interested in their golf games than what happened to their patients.
“And nurses—they just sat at their stations gossiping or reading romance novels. When a patient tried to call one, like when they were dying, the nurse often wouldn’t answer because she was giving private anatomy lessons to some stud intern in a linen closet.”
The administrator shook his head. “No, our new system is much better.” He pointed to the MU guarding the door of the mini-ward. “Our Mobile Units are programmed to perform with cybernetic perfection all the functions human doctors, nurses, and medical technologists used to do haphazardly. You’ll be astounded by the way our MUs treat you. After our MUs are through with them, none of our patients ever complain about them again! We even have ‘specialists,’ like the one who’ll be doing your surgery.”
“You mean a machine is going to operate on me?”
The administrator chuckled. “It’s amazing how often I get that reaction from people. The neural nets in our MUs contain far more medical information than any poor human doctor’s brain could hold. Even the finest flesh and blood surgeon’s fingers are like baseball bats compared to the dexterity microservos and plastisteel joints give our MUs. Who would you rather have doing the operation—some ham-handed butcher, drowsy and hungover after partying at a country club last night? Or an indefatigable MU a thousand times more skilled?”
“Well, if you put it that way… But I was hoping to have a nurse take care of me. Like the one I saw—.”
The administrator grinned knowingly. “You mean Colette. Sorry to disappoint you, but she’s not a nurse.”
“Don’t tell me she’s such a holosim!”
“No, she’s a real person. An—‘actress’—who’s very good at playing a nurse. And she does work here. Perhaps you’ll see her in the hall.”
Jackson grunted. At least that was something to look forward to. He glanced up at the mattress hanging over him like the sword of Damocles. The thin wooden slats it rested on had buckled several more centimeters. “Do you have any private rooms?”
“Your present accommodations are covered by your health plan, and are free. For a nominal fee, however, you can get a private room. Only 250 new-dollars a day.”
“Two hundred fifty newdollars! I thought this was all supposed to be paid for—.” As his rotund bunkmate shifted in his sleep Jackson heard a cracking sound above him. “OK, I’ll pay it!”
The administrator glanced at the nearby MU. It said, “Authorization by William N. Jackson to pay additional fee recorded.”
Jackson said, “That’s William M. Jackson. Also—no offense, but the way your hospital’s laid out, it almost looks like a—prison.”
“Actually, that’s what St. Dismas was before it was converted into a hospital several years ago. The grounds look so much cheerier since we tore down the outside walls and guard towers, and removed all that unsightly barbed wire.”
The administrator beamed proudly. “In fact, I was the warden!”
“Isn’t this nicer?”
The administrator stood at the foot of the bed in Jackson’s new quarters. “You’re lucky this room was available. The previous occupant is, ah, no longer with us. In the old days we used it for solitary confinement. Or as part of our death row.”
Jackson grimaced, shifting uncomfortably on the bed’s lumpy rock-like mattress. Though the walk-in closet in his apartment was larger than this room, at least he didn’t have to worry anymore about being crushed.
An MU rolled into the cramped room. The administrator said, “With all the moving around you’ve been doing, you haven’t had your history and physical examination yet. That’s usually done by an experienced MU. However, none of them are available now. I hope you don’t mind if one of our student MUs does it.”
“A ‘student’?” Jackson glanced at the waiting machine. “Don’t all your units have the latest bidirectional neoadaptive logic subroutines in their AI’s, so they can understand and respond to a new situation nearly instantaneously?”
“No, the methods our MUs use to learn involve ‘reinforcement learning’ and ‘quasi-fuzzy logic.’ Those are fine, traditional methods—but require each unit to repeat the same or similar experience many times before it reaches maximum efficiency. Our ‘students’ must do hundreds of patient histories and physicals, and prescribe medications and perform surgery during a long training period under the supervision of senior MUs before they’re allowed to work independently.”
Jackson frowned. The man apparently wasn’t aware he was a programmer. “But nobody’s made AI’s using those methods for years! That means your MUs contain obsolete modules!”
“ ‘Obsolete’ is such a harsh word. ‘Classic’ sounds better. Even if these units aren’t the latest models, I’m fully confident of their reliability. Besides—I was able to buy them wholesale at an excellent close-out price.”
The administrator turned to the MU. “Show him how proficient you are.”
The MU said, “Hello, William N. Jackson. I am Mobile Unit ICD-9.”
“That’s William M. Jackson. M, as in Marvin.”
The student ignored him. “Would you please tell me what problem brought you to the hospital?”
“Hemorrhoids.”
The MU processed that datum. “Chief complaint: This patient’s a pain in the butt.”
The administrator shook his head. “No, that’s wrong. He has a pain in the butt.”
The MU scrutinized Jackson carefully, its optical sensor swiveling at the end of a long flexible metal rod extending from its body. “Looks to me like he’s a pain in the butt!”
“Hey, what’s wrong with this thing—!”
The administrator shrugged. “A slight glitch in its programming.”
The MU raised an appendage fitted with a hot bright light and shone it into Jackson’s blinking face. Then it grilled him with an incessant barrage of questions about his medical history.
“Where are your hemorrhoids located?”
“Where do you think!”
“What does the pain feel like?”
“It hurts!”
The MU’s interrogation became progressively more irritating. Why, Jackson wondered, was it important whether his great-aunt Minnie had constipation? He’d balked when the MU asked him to give detailed accounts of every sexual encounter he’d had in his entire life. The embarrassing thing was—there wasn’t much to tell. Eventually, persuaded by the administrator’s assurance such information was confidential and necessary to provide him with the best medical care, he relented.