Tin Angel
by G. David Nordley & H. G. Stratmann
Illustration by Alan M. Clark
They both heard the sirens.
Angel’s eyes went wide. “Automobile accident, drunk driver uninjured in custody, man dead at the scene, pregnant woman, coming here, possible internal injuries, unconscious.”
Dr. C. Thornhart Benson looked sharply at his new protegee, momentarily surprised. She grinned and pointed a finger to her eyes. He smiled in spite of himself. Her eyes were infrared as well as optical receivers, and she was, of course, linked into every digital device in the hospital, including the comm net. He wouldn’t have to wait for the call. Too bad about whoever it was, but this was an opportunity to see what Angel could do.
“Let’s do it,” he said. They had been about to leave his stuffy, cluttered third-floor office at the medical center after a few minutes of paperwork and decompression following evening rounds on his patients. Instead, he put down his journal, Angel put down a half-finished stocking cap she was knitting, and they headed toward the emergency room.
He wanted to be there when the patient came in, not only to do what he could to help, but also to see how Angel would handle the situation. If the experiment called Angel was to work, she’d have to learn this side of the business.
The wail of sirens faded as the ambulance approached the hospital. Why, he wondered, did they still let people drive precybernetic cars? Inevitably, some of them did it drunk.
“That ambulance knows its business, Angel,” he remarked as they left the elevator for the first subfloor. “No need to wake everyone; the siren’s done its job once the ambulance hits the emergency room driveway.”
Angel nodded with such a human look of concern on her face that he had to remind himself that she wasn’t even alive in the usual sense. Her repertoire of appropriate verbal and nonverbal patterns of communication was extensive but, he knew, required only an insignificant part of the optical core memory stored in her chest.
Approximately where her heart would be, he realized.
They could “can” diagnostics, anatomy, and pharmacology in a database and drop it into her brain, but experience was something else; a collection of someone else’s anecdotes just wasn’t good enough; too much missing. So the Artificial Intelligence Consortium that made her decided she should have an internship just like any other doctor. Of course, one of his long-time patients was part of the consortium, and when they’d needed an advisor to teach their creation the human side of medicine, they’d talked him into it.
They’d made her bright, cheerful, tireless, and innocent. He was a childless widower. It had been pretty much a case of love at first sight. Hell, he thought, he’d fallen in love with cars, an airplane, even the great old oak desk his grandfather had left him. So, his attachment to Angel had been completely predictable.
They reached the entrance to the emergency room, and he held one of the heavy swinging doors open for her.
“Well, let’s go.”
“I’ll follow you, Dr. Benson.” She winked and tossed her head, sun-touched platinum polymer threads cascading around perfect shoulders. “Age before beauty.”
“Hrrmph!” He went through the door first, grinning in spite of himself.
He nodded to the ER physician, a moonlighting dermatology resident who’d been only too happy to let Benson take over a major trauma case as he and Angel charged into the prep room, stripped to shorts and T-shirts, and shrugged into scrub suits. Then it was out to the ambulance entrance to wait for the stretcher. The woman’s vitals were already displayed on the high-res overhead. Shock.
“Probably hypovolemic,” Angel said, her voice full of concern. “Nearly two liters of Ringer’s lactate in her… starting to stabilize.” She frowned. “Thorny, I’d better tell you this now. It’s Linda Coombs.”
“Oh, God!” Thorny winced and shut his eyes. He’d saved her life once before, twenty-five years ago, when she’d almost strangled on her own umbilical cord in one of the more difficult deliveries a G.P. ever got to do these days—by virtue of his being in her parents’ living room when she made her somewhat early entrance into this world. This meant Terry was dead, he realized. He’d been at their wedding just last year. Good kid, ran his own security service…
Angel’s hand was on his arm. “Are you…?”
“I’ll be fine. Thanks for telling me now. Better than recognizing her on the stretcher.”
As he spoke the doors slid open and things became a blur. He and Angel followed behind as the stretcher drove itself into the trauma room with its silent burden, and paramedics hovering around like ghostly bees around a red flower. Linda’s nose and mouth were covered by an oxygen mask, and a cervical collar encircled her neck. A blood-stained white sheet partially covered her limp body, which was connected at multiple puncture sites to bags of intravenous fluids hung on tall poles. The portable heart monitor, connected by multicolored wires to electrode patches stuck onto her exposed chest, beeped in a disturbingly fast and irregular rhythm. Thorny motioned to the scanning table, and they slid her onto it, tubes and poles following in an orderly ritual that only looked like mass confusion.
Thorny still found it hard to believe this was the same exuberant, vivacious young woman he’d last seen in his office not quite a week ago.
Forcing himself into objectivity, he watched Angel do a quick visual examination for external injuries. Linda’s chest was bruised, with some swelling above her left breast, and she had a golf-ball sized lump in the middle of her forehead.
“Beginning scan.” Angel said, and the bistatic resonance sensor head beneath the table glided to the top of Linda’s head and began to move slowly down the length of her body. As the imager started its examination, Angel resumed hers.
“Pupils equal, round, and reactive. No blood in the ears or nose.” She continued while one of the ER nurses—Sarah Miles, a robust, almost angrily competent black woman who Thorny knew slightly—drew blood for the analyzer.
“Type AB negative,” Angel announced. “The blood bank has it—it’s on its way.”
The nurse shot a quick look at Thorny as she prepared to do a twelve-lead electrocardiogram, and her eyes widened a bit when he nodded. “How the—?”
Thorny held up a hand. “Later. Let’s get those electrodes on.” He’d been assured that the medical center staff had been briefed about Angel, but seeing her in action was, it seemed, something else.
The imaging camera stopped abruptly at the level of Linda’s shoulders. “No fractures or bleeding,” Angel declared. “We can take off the collar.”
Now it was Thorny’s turn to stare. Angel smiled and the holoscreen monitor above the table snapped on. Thorny noted the image was blue tinged—probably the blue laser power setting, since the ultra-high res screen with the interference patterns was digital. The unit was a bargain when the center got it ten years ago, although it was bulky and hard to maintain by current standards, but it beat the hell out of what he’d had when he started in practice. In rapid sequence standard views of the skull and cervical spine appeared, rotated 360 degrees, and were replaced by images of the brain. Of course, he realized, Angel controlled its operation through her optical interface. For that matter, the images she showed would be strictly for the benefit of the human staff.
The imager resumed its slow path down Linda’s body and Angel moved her hands quickly over Linda’s pregnancy. The tiny sensors and transducers in her fingers and palms could, Thorny remembered, sense pressure through ultrasound and electrical fields through microwaves.
“No fractures or bleeding,” she repeated, “except—” Her hands caressed the abdomen once more. “The placenta has partially separated, and there’s some intrauterine bleeding. The size of the fetus is consistent with a gestation period of 34 weeks.” She paused, then looked at Thorny. “I’m sorry. No fetal heart beat or cerebral activity.”