Quinn awoke; and he found a robotic arm positioned over him, literally in his face. He blinked several times, and pried open his lips. (His mouth was dry and grotty, his tongue thick and furry.) He twisted his head, and saw at once from its cosmetic design that it was a med-bot. He cleared his throat and worked at getting his saliva flowing. To make the robot understand him, he'd have to speak clearly. "Where am I?" he said. He was dismayed to hear the words come out like mush. "And what am I doing here?"
"L. Quinn, you are sufficiently recovered to be discharged," the med-bot said in the tone of robot speech designated "friendly informational." The tone struck Quinn as infuriatingly, inappropriately casual.
"Discharged from what?" Quinn said, a little more clearly. A motor somewhere on the robot whined, and a thinner, shorter limb, which Quinn only now noticed, retracted from his forearm. The sudden lifting of pressure and the sensation of air brushing his skin made Quinn feel exposed and shivery. He realized that his shirt had been removed. He struggled into a sitting position and glanced down at his arm. The skin, he saw, had been bruised.
"This is the Indigent ER Unit," the robot said. One of its arms forked over his stinky, sweaty tee-shirt. "Your condition is stable. You cannot stay here."
Quinn pulled on the shirt. ER unit. Med-bot. Yeah, it was coming back to him. He'd been feeling under the weather all day, and by six, when he clocked out, really, really sick. He'd been drinking water like crazy, because of what he'd figured was a bladder infection. Then, jumping down out of the back of Eddie's van, he'd been hit with dizziness, cold sweats and bad shakes. Got so convinced he was going to vomit, he'd dropped to his knees to do it, right there on the site. And everything had gone black...
Quinn slid off the table, then -- seeing stars -- clutched at it. Man, he felt wrung out. Like he'd been doing Santa Clara for a week without coming down.
"Take the the printout, L. Quinn," the robot said.
Quinn looked at the thing and saw a narrow strip of flimsy spooling out of one of several different-sized slots that slashed the matte black finish of its "chest." Quinn had to work with robots; and because of the work he did with them, he felt suspicious of what this one was up to. And so his mouth and eyes scrunched as he tore the printout out of the slot, as though doing so was causing him pain.
The narrow strip of flimsy was about as crude as printouts got. L. Quinn. Male. Uninsured. Age: 36. Admitted by Seattle Downtown Merchants' Authority to ER Unit 04.10.37; 18:23:44, condition diabetic coma. Diagnosis: Diabetes Mellitus. Rx: Insulin pump or gene therapy. And that was it.
"Follow the orange stripe on the floor to the Bursar's Office," the med-bot said.
Quinn felt a plunging sensation in his belly. He looked from the limp strip of printout dangling from his fingers to the med-bot. Bursar's Office. Jesus! What was he going to do? Diabetes was one of those things you had to deal with, or it killed you! Oh man, and on $9000 a year max (when he was getting work every day and weekends, which he hadn't been, at least not for all of January and most of February)...
"Follow the orange stripe, L. Quinn," the med-bot said. Quinn stared down at the floor. There were four different stripes that began just this side of the opaque plastic curtain drawn over the cubicle's threshold. Red, green, blue and orange. Orange, he guessed, was for money. Or lack thereof. Ain't no free lunches in this country man. Like the man always says, entitlements are un-american, and almost came close to wrecking the country when people thought they had 'em. Quinn started walking.
Copyright © 1997 by L. Timmel Duchamp
)
