IDIOPOTENT

Chapter 5: Radiation Unit

Phin followed Dr. Kane into a buffer room. Inside, he spoke into a thin, rectangular tablet - "Cyprian Kane" - then passed the device over a locker. A beep sounded, and he aimed the edge of the tablet at Phin's badge.

"Now your badge will open your locker. Get dressed."

Inside the locker was a change of clothes. They were heavier than the typical thin cloth of hospital scrubs, pants and a shirt with a high neck and sleeves to the elbows. Under his white coat, Kane wore the same thing. "Lead-lined," said Kane. "Even with the gojira, you'll need it when you're working in the radiation unit. How many textbooks have you read? Everything assigned in your schooling? Diseases, treatments?"

"Yes." Plus more.

"What about foreign illnesses uncommon in the US?"

"Yes. My parents are medical missionaries, so I have hands-on experiences with many of those. Malaria, Chagas, EHF."

Kane leaned toward him; Phin found the man's cold, sharp features more than slightly intimidating. "None of it matters. Every case here is patient zero. Expect no precedent. You will find no algorithms here, no recommended courses of treatment, no expert consensus. Most of your readings will be case studies. All dressed? Go inside."

The hiss of escaping pressure sounded as the door opened into a single large room. Sleek patient bays lined three walls. When Phin was eleven, his family had stayed for a while in an apartment above an old bookstore, and the bays here reminded him of the sorts of sleek, clean-lined pods on the covers of the 1950s science fiction novels he'd read for hours. Only two of them were occupied.

Dominating the center of the room was a robust ivy inside a stone-bordered garden. Workstations with screens and monitors took up the rest of the space. Kane led them to the one where another man stood in the same garb as theirs.

"Reiniger," said Dr. Kane. "This is Cole. He's new and he's ours. Don't let him kill anyone." Clearly considering his duty toward Phin complete, the hawkish man walked away without a farewell.

"Dr. Cole," said the man in a pleasant Teutonic accent. "Marcus Reiniger. You start at a good time. The census is low. First question: how are you with botany? Horticulture?"

Phin's parents did the majority of their work in dense urban areas, slums and ghettos, grey and brown with few plants. For a moment, though, he thought back to a three-month stay at a durian farm. The farmers called it the "king of fruits," but Phin strongly felt the name was incongruous with its reek of rotten onions and spoiled meat.

As all this came to mind, Reiniger's face contorted. "Most people have pleasant scents when they think of plants, if they have any at all. Flowers. Apples. Yours is like turpentine and wet dog." He shook his head. "Did Dr. Kane explain things to you?"

"More or less," said Phin, leaning toward the latter. "He said each case would be unique."

"So, less, not more. How to put it, then. Think of a favorite piano piece. Do you know Beethoven? Für Elise?"

"I like Canon in D better," Phin answered.

"Good! Dam dah dah dam dah dah dam." Reiniger absently waved his hands in muted conductor's motions. "Then imagine a concert pianist who can play Canon to bring Pachelbel to tears. Is he a virtuoso? Yes. Perhaps he plays his own variations on the piece that seem effortless because he knows the music so well. Like him, the best physicians - the very best, in Boston or Cleveland or Paris or Houston - are like this, knowing all that came before, masters of their chosen instruments, able to perform at the highest level, in solo or in concert, by themselves or as a team." He locked his eyes on Phin's. "Here it is different. Here we must write the symphonies, every one unique, every one a masterpiece, sometimes on instruments no one before us has ever played."

Kane walked over. "Are you giving report, Reiniger? No? Then I will." He pointed his tablet at Phin's and tapped it with a thin finger. Phin's device lit up, screen filling with images and icons. "These patients are ours - his, mine, and yours. Learn everything about them. Your device will remain updated with the files of each patient on our census. It also accesses a database of every extant scholarly work since the 800s, medical or otherwise. If you don't know the physics of nuclear radiation, now is the time to learn. And I do mean now." Kane abruptly went to a workstation and began perusing a screen filled with waveforms unfamiliar to Phin.

"Go and read," said Reiniger. "You cannot help with what you do not understand." He smiled, and Phin's senses flooded in one second with the smells of garlic and ginger cooking in oil and the next with the scent of his grandfather's pipe tobacco. He gave the older physician a curious look, but Reiniger didn't notice it, or pretended not to.

"You will do fine," said Reiniger. "And if you do not, you will know of it." He nodded his head to Kane, his face illuminated in shifting shades of green and indigo by the screen at which he stared.

Phin nodded back, found a seat at an empty station, and began to read.

***

As promised, the two patients in the radiation unit were unique to Phin's experience, or anyone else's he knew of. The first was a fifteen-year-old, almost Phin's age, who had gone on a school field trip to a research laboratory and been bitten by an escaped spider that, as it turns out, had been experimentally irradiated. Phin, working with his parents, had cared for dozens of patients envenomated by various tarantula species - painful, but not fatal to humans - and he'd seen pictures of the kind of tissue breakdown brown recluse bites could cause: necrotic, nauseating to look at. None of that compared to this. What had started as a small, red wound on the wrist had eaten away skin, muscle, and bone with exponential rapidity. By the time the boy had been admitted to the Mission, his arm, for all intents and purposes, had rotted away to his elbow. The spread of the damage was being limited by treatment with injections of a tissue regeneration matrix, but the therapy was going slowly. A bizarre sticky, stringy discharge from the wound kept expelling the matrix, decreasing its efficacy; still, Reiniger and Kane were confident they could save the joint.

Since the treatment's course was long and the injections, per Kane, were extraordinarily painful, the boy was kept in a comatose state by a device Phin had never heard of called a neuroelectric pulse emitter. He had noted the lack of ICU equipment typically used for the purposes of maintaining a medically-induced coma - ventilator, endotracheal tubes, intravenous drugs - so Reiniger had pointed out the matte grey band on the patient's head. "The emitter works," he had explained, "by inducing the brain's electrical activity into a delta rhythm..."

"The waveform characteristic of deep sleep and anesthesia."

"Just so, Dr. Cole, allowing normal cardiovascular and respiratory functions to continue. Importantly for our setting, a neuroelectric pulse emitter can be radiation-shielded. At times our patients need sedation but remain...volatile. We cannot afford to have stray bursts melting plastics, shorting electrical systems, or boiling liquid medicines, can we?"

Phin had thought that was an excellent point. He was tempted to try an emitter on himself, just to see what would happen, but as that would likely necessitate adding someone else to the number people who knew about his condition, he discarded the notion.

The second patient was a middle-aged nuclear scientist who had been caught in an explosion. Whatever had happened - and apparently neither the doctors nor the man's colleagues could say exactly what - the dual results were nightmarish. The man was a mass of tumors, arising from every kind of tissue and metastasizing in no recognizable pattern except "everywhere." Obviously this would have proven quickly fatal if not for the second phenomenon: the man's cells wouldn't die. Reiniger had recited the various methods they'd tried on biopsied samples: asphyxiation, more irradiation, heat, cold, drugs that killed the oxygen transport chain or halted all protein synthesis or destroyed the cell wall. Somehow, every cell, of every type, simply survived and kept growing. When Phin first saw the patient, he was unrecognizable as a human being and was currently being treated with nothing more than debulking surgeries, else his body would simply grow too large for the bay. The procedures were done at bedside several times a day, by Phin as often as Kane and Reiniger, no great surgical skills required since no anatomy could be appreciated and no distinct identifiable organs remained.

"This man needs a miracle," Phin had said one morning.

"Yes, obviously," Kane had replied. "I'm looking for one."

He didn't give the impression he was speaking metaphorically.