The Dance, page 9
His office was old, still replete with wood and ancient Art Deco moulding. He loved the door to the huge space, and the beautifully hand painted lettering decorating the smoky glass window on the door: Dr. Maximilian Tundra, Director of Mental Health Services.
He sighed as he looked at the lettering. The gold figures moved a little and glowed with significance. MHS Director of Landon’s prestigious St. Dymphna’s Hospital. So respectable. His father would be proud. Goddammit!
He took off his leather jacket and traded it for his lab coat, worn over his signature Hawaiian shirt and ripped jeans. He pulled off his desert boots and put on the Birkenstocks he kept by his desk.
He pondered caffeine. It must be available in St. Dymphna’s, but where? He knew the machines were gone. But wasn’t there a coffee shop somewhere, named after a hockey player or something? A Canadian one? Shit, he should know this. He decided to ask his assistant if he wouldn’t mind getting him some java.
The breakfast milkshake really paid off in these moments, because his assistant Jens walked in at that very second. The thrill of gnosis!
“You’re supposed to be on duty in five minutes,” Jens said without any kind of small talk.
At first, Max had really disliked Jens. He was neat. He dressed very well. He was thin, handsome, and had all his hair. He was super competent. Max didn’t find these things threatening so much as annoying. He’d warmed to the young man despite this. Jens really cared about their patients. He understood his role.
“Jens, I’m so sorry. I had to see the dentist this morning and I forgot to put it in the calendar.”
“Or to tell me about it.”
“Yes, or to tell you about it so you could put it in the calendar. I’m sorry.”
Jens quivered with gratitude. Was that gratitude? Or some other emotion? No, it was gratitude, Max determined. “Well, that may be, but you have to get to emergency. They have a problem, and Dr. Belston has asked for you there.”
“Then I’m off,” Max said, even though he hadn’t had time to sit at his desk and psych himself up. “Oh, can you get me some coffee? I’m buying for both of us.”
Jens looked touched. “Of course. How do you take it?”
Max was confused.
“The coffee?” Jens prompted.
“Espresso?”
“They don’t have that!”
“Then, uh…black?”
“Naturally,” Jens said.
Max felt judged, but he didn’t reply. He shuffled to emerg.
STRAWBERRY
Max had clearly misjudged the caffeine.
As he crossed the street to St. Dymphna’s Hospital, he couldn’t ignore how his legs were shaking. It was too much. The espresso shouldn’t be potentiating the mescaline like this. But something was off. He hadn’t been well rested, so he had more caffeine than usual. Nine? Yes. It had been nine espressos—three triple Americanos, to be exact.
He liked the lower entrance to St. Dymphna’s, even though the York Street entrance was closer to the parking building. He’d left his Hymda Flyer in his usual spot, reserved for the Clinical Lead of Psychiatric Services. Just before he got to the entrance, Max could feel his insides turn in a way he hadn’t felt since, well, since his days in Mexico learning about peyote. He lunged into the cedar hedges by the entrance and vomited. Loudly. Furiously, almost.
It was humiliating. Even with nobody there to watch it, he felt shame.
What was worse? Well, the fact that now he had less mescaline in his system than usual. Max checked his watch: less than twenty minutes since he had his strawberry shake, so… well, shit. His morning was going to be different, that was for sure. Normally, in an hour or so he would feel the effects of the caffeine wear off and the mescaline kick in. He enjoyed seeing the auras around people and perceiving their thoughts, but he did understand that the drug hurt his powers of concentration.
That was why he needed Jens.
He walked into his office, an old Art Deco masterpiece, and Jens was waiting for him. He was wearing a sharp new ÜltraSuit in a deep, electric blue. Jens was an ambitious young man from one of the original fifty states, a well-to-do refugee from the southwestern desert, and he dressed in the latest fashions. Though Max felt shabby in his old Hawaiian shirt and ripped jeans compared to Jens, at least he was comfortable. He put on his lab coat.
“You have to get to the emerg! Dr. Belston is freaking out!”
CHOCOLATE
The milkshake was perfect, as it always was—exactly what Max had programmed. A lovely sweet flavour, but with just enough bitterness to the dark chocolate that he could never complain. He really couldn’t. The espresso was also perfect.
He walked to St. Dymphna’s as he did most mornings, and found his office as immaculate as ever. His datapad was already on, letting him know when his first appointment would be ready to talk to him. He’d have to go to the secure ward for that. Meanwhile, he had almost an hour before the drug would really kick in.
“Jens?” he shouted. “Jens, do I have anything else that needs doing right now?”
“No, Dr. Tundra,” Jens’s voice said. “You have an hour to catch up on the journals. Or perhaps you’d like to visit the emergency room? They have some strange cases that may require the wisdom of St. Dymphna’s eminent Psychological Health Designer.”
That Jens! Such a flattering Virtual Intelligence Assistant (VIA). There was nothing wrong with it, him…it, really. Just perfect.
The Framework
VANILLA
Max had never seen the emergency ward in such a state. He’d arrived through the hallway that led to imaging and the out-patient offices. He walked to the triage station where he could see through the kiosk glass into the waiting area.
There must have been a hundred people waiting. That wasn’t strange in itself; what was odd was that at least fifty of them were juggling.
Holy shit, had he badly miscalculated on the mescaline? They were juggling balls made of socks and weird assortments of items like staplers, tape dispensers and paperclip holders.
There were non-office types juggling bottles, brushes, and bingo dabbers. One of them was juggling confused puppies. Another, knives! The latter was covered with cuts, blood streaming from a dozen wounds, making him drop the knives, only to laugh manically and pick them up again.
A nurse unfamiliar to Max saw him watch this spectacle and said, “There’s worse in the bay, though I think if we don’t get to the knife guy soon he may bleed out.”
The bay was where all the emergency cases were treated. A large room separated into cubicles formed by curtains—a perfectly viable form of privacy—with the diagnostic machines, health care workers, and computers in the middle. Max walked in, wondering how he could possibly help with this epidemic of juggling.
“You’re here!” Dr. Belston shouted as they spotted him.
Belston was a grad of McGill, one of the best medical programs in Canada. They had purple hair, a winning smile, and a way with patients that was enviable. Max had always liked them, and even though they worked in different fields, their paths often crossed. They dealt with so many mental health issues in emergency.
“Hey, Chris,” Max said.
“Max. Can you figure out what the hell is going on? They’re all…they seem to be all juggling, but they also have some other common issues.”
“Like what?”
“The ones who came in first and were juggling are now talking about their plans.”
“Plans?” Max wondered. Belston’s purple hair suddenly strobed to blue and then a magenta colour. Shit. What a day to get his milkshake wrong!
“Business. Bits. Props. A framework, some of them are talking about. Do you know what that means?”
“A framework? Maybe if I could talk to one of them.”
“How about Budd McCalister? Budd when he came in, anyway. Now he wants to be called The Boundless Buddfo. He was the first one they brought in.”
“Okay, let’s talk to Mr. Buddfo.”
STRAWBERRY
Belston was, indeed, freaking out. An uncommon sight, as Dr. Chris Belston was one of the calmest, most unflappable doctors he’d ever met. She was the perfect mix of professional sang-froid and compassion. She understood that it was impossible to save everyone, and managed this stress with an unfailing kindness and humour that Max admired. He had a bit of a crush on her, actually, but he’d kept their relationship strictly professional.
“Thank god you’re here, Max,” she said. Underneath her lab coat she was wearing a skin-suit clearly worn for warmth, not modesty, though the smock was tastefully buttoned. Still, there was movement, and the lab coat was only a thin layer of cotton. Max knew this was unlike him, so he blamed it on throwing up his milkshake. Still, Dr. Belston had a fine figure…
He realized that he should have said something by now, and gulped, “What’s wrong?”
“The patients are all compulsively juggling, and I have no idea why.”
Max thought, Yeah, really bad day to throw up my milkshake.
CHOCOLATE
There was a higher ratio of androids-to-humans in emergency than usual. He really shouldn’t complain about the ratio because it only spiked like that when something serious was going down.
The lead physician, Dr. Chris Belston, was a slight man of indeterminate age. He was clearly getting rejuvenation treatments, but Max knew it would have been bad form to ask about it. Along with the doctor, the emergency room had two other human members of staff—both seasoned nurses who had done all their training before the Great Replacement. They were in the consultation rooms, talking with patients. Out in the waiting room, there were at least a hundred people. Half of them seemed to be… juggling? They were all being attended to by emergency androids—the kind that only came online during overflow at the ER. The system had one other backup: spiderbots that had been given medical programming, but Max had never seen them deployed.
Was there some kind of convention in town? Maybe an old-timey circus? Were there still circuses? Max wondered. Except for the Soleil variety, he couldn’t recall seeing any.
“Ah, Dr. Tundra,” Belston said as he noticed his colleague. “Please, join me in bay three here with Mr. McCalister.”
“I’m The Boundless Buddfo!” a crazy voice said. “Now stuff me into that medicine cabinet!”
The Boundless Buddfo
VANILLA
Things were really off, and it wasn’t just his milkshake. Budd McCalister was having a major psychotic break. Despite the fact that he was a bonded debt collector, he was convinced he was a clown.
“Why do you think you’re a clown, Buddfo?” Max asked.
“Because I am. The Boundless Buddfo. I’m a red clown. Pull down my pants!”
Max really didn’t want to pull Mr. McCalister’s trousers down.
“Okay fine,” the patient said. “How about a pie in the face?”
STRAWBERRY
“A pie in the face?” Dr. Belston asked. “That cra—”
“No, wait,” Max interrupted. “What kind of pie?”
“It should be a cream pie, but you can fake it. TheBoundless Buddfo can sell anything! Even shaving cream on a plate will work.”
“It says you’re a salesman, so that makes sense,” Max replied, checking the patient’s chart. “But why do you want us to hit you with a pie?”
“It’s part of the gag. Better juggle a bit while you get the pie.”
Buddfo started juggling a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a package of bandages, and Dr. Belston’s stethoscope, actually doing an admirable job of it.
“What do you think, Dr. Tundra?
“Well, if he’s having a psychotic break, it’s coming with an impressive skill set.”
“I should be doing this on a unicycle,” Buddfo said. “Get me a unicycle!”
CHOCOLATE
Buddfo pulled the android’s scrubs down and then made a big show of being shocked that the android had no genitals. Not that a medical android would ever have genitals—that kind of engineering was restricted to pleasure droids.
Max pulled the droid’s pants back up. It didn’t seem to care either way but Max was worried it might trip on them. Nobody wanted two hundred kilos of artificial intelligence falling on them.
“Why did you do that?” Max asked.
“It’s part of the framework!” Buddfo exclaimed. Max noted that the man’s ears were exceedingly red while the rest of his face was weirdly pale. Almost white.
“Dr. Belston,” Max said, “I don’t think we’re dealing with a purely psychiatric problem here.” But Belston wasn’t paying any attention to his colleague. He was juggling three tongue depressors, hand-to-mouth-to-hand-to-air in a circuit. The coordination was spectacular. It was a tad unprofessional; otherwise, Max couldn’t fault it at all.
Onset
VANILLA
Max really wished he’d got the milkshake right that morning. He’d had too big a dose. Either that, or it was really just an exceptionally non-Euclidian day.
The juggling had progressed. Groups of patients were gathering, pulling down one another’s pants, hitting one another with ersatz pies—bedpans were a favourite substitute—and generally acting like a bunch of clowns.
Dr. Belston was having trouble keeping a lid on the situation. They were running from case to case, sedating patients. Max had also taken up the syringe—something he hadn’t done since medical school—and was administering Haloperidol in fairly stiff doses. This, as it turns out, was a mistake. While it did calm the patients down somewhat, the medication interfered with controlling body movements, and none of the patients stopped their clowning.
Juggling became impossible, as did cartwheels, pratfalls, and any of the other dozen physical gags clowns liked to perform.
There was a precipitous increase in broken limbs and soft tissue damage. The emergency room was a gigantic mess as would-be clowns toppled, strewing the floor with medical trays, bedpans, and anything else they hit on the way down.
“Chris, I think we should try Aripiprazole instead,” Max said. They couldn’t hear him though, as they were now juggling, too. Their hair was back to purple, but it was now changing in tone, from dark to very light. Yeah. He really picked a bad day to get the microdose wrong. But he managed to get the remaining nurses organized, and the Aripiprazole seemed to do a better job of calming the patients down without impairing them too much. Max didn’t know what to do. He hadn’t done any emergency medicine in years.
STRAWBERRY
Max could feel the mescaline kick in at just about the time that Dr. Belston decided they would have to calm the patients down with pharmaceuticals if they were all as manic as The Boundless Buddfo. Given their mania, they decided on intramuscular injections of Aripiprazole. Max and the other nurses helped, and the patients did calm down.
His heart was racing. Definitely too much caffeine. And because he’d thrown up, the mescaline wasn’t doing it for him. So far, he was keeping it together, even though he didn’t have the feeling of connectedness with everyone that he usually had. Anxiety was building. He hadn’t practiced this kind of medicine since med school. Not only that, but Dr. Belston’s lab coat had become unbuttoned and her skinsuit shimmered like heat haze on the highway, drawing Max’s gaze. It was distracting. And unprofessional. And that’s when they brought in the President of the United States.
CHOCOLATE
Max had every reason to complain about Dr. Belston, as the rejuvenated doctor repeatedly attempted to pants him.
“Look, you have to get a hold of yourself, doc. This is very unprofessional.”
“Woo! Pie time!” Belston shouted at Buddfo, and proceeded to hurl his Handbook of Drug Interactions at the patient. The Boundless Buddfo took the heavy tome right in the face like a champ. Then dropped. Buddfo’s head hit the ground with a worryingly wet crunch.
Max wondered why Dr. Belston had something as antiquated as a book to begin with, but the damage had been done. Max told an android to get Buddfo in a stretcher and check his vitals.
“Okay, Dr. Belston. Chris. You have to put down those scalpels.”
The good doctor was clearly going to juggle them. “Call me Christo the Cutup!” he shouted, and let fly. Max was astounded when Belston managed to keep them in the air. For a second or two. One blade then clipped a nerve cluster in the emergency doctor’s right wrist, and he was unable to move his hand. “Such fun!” he cried.
Max decided to call it. He said to the Emergency Room Virtual Intelligence, “This is Dr. Maximilian Tundra. I am officially locking Dr. Belston out of the system, and taking command.”
“Understood, Dr. Tundra.” The VI’s voice was disembodied. “Your orders?”
“Unseal the ER robotic assistants and reinitialize any androids available for medical protocols. We’re going to need every hand… uh, servo… on deck!”
“Noted, Dr. Tundra.”
“And have an android restrain Dr. Belston immediately!” Max said. The emerg doctor was trying to pants him once again, without the use of his right hand. He was bleeding everywhere.
Max looked out at the waiting area; he saw that spider-like robots had emerged from the walls and were administering sedatives to the frenzied patients, all clowning now as though their lives depended on it.
The perfect microdose of mescaline manifested just then, and Max stood quietly for a moment as all the spiderbots turned to smile at him. Neither was normal, especially since the bots didn’t have faces, per se. Then, the moment was over. There was a slight aura around Dr. Belston and all the other human beings after the drug’s onset. That was normal, but this was the first time Max had ever noted the lack of aura around the androids and bots.
