Dead Souls (Hospital) by Han Song

Author:Han Song [Song, Han]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Published: 2025-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

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MEMORIES OF A CORPSE

You remove the fluid sacs from the Hospital President’s brain in an attempt to retrieve the memories concealed within. You will need proper machine assistance to carry out this procedure, but most of the medical equipment has already been destroyed by the rioting patients. You finally find a barely usable three-phase disposal tank. You insert the fluid sacs into tubes for analysis and begin the procedure. A series of nanobots begins the work of extracting and reading the information contained within. As if coming alive, the fluid sacs begin to tremble gently. Is this his soul responding?

“Perhaps his consciousness is still intact, and he still knows what we are doing to him?” you offer with trepidation. “He is simply unable to communicate directly with us.”

However, once the fluid sacs are removed from the body, the Hospital President begins to decline rapidly. Since the consciousness-detection machine was also destroyed by the patients, there is no way to check his current state, so you and Summer Stream insert another electrode to stimulate the sacs. As the electricity pulses through, a black liquid fills the sacs from the inside. You gather them together and use a display card to read the series of numbers appearing on the screen, but it is hard to interpret their meaning.

“There may be critical information contained within these numbers,” Summer Stream mumbles.

“Is it possible that the algorithm is still running this system?” You’re not entirely sure if you should support what she says.

Amid the remnants of broken medical equipment, you find an old computer. After carrying out some repairs, you use it to decode the data extracted from the brain. You see a partial representation of the Hospital President’s thoughts, presented in numerical data. The fluid sacs serve as backup memory storage, likely prepared in the event of an accident. But you are uncertain whether the Hospital President arranged for these same memories to be uploaded to a computer somewhere too. Perhaps not. He probably decided not to pursue that route after predicting that the patients would destroy all the medical equipment. At the same time, he knew that the destruction of his physical body would be a tall order for most ordinary patients.

You think back to when you first arrived at the hospital. The patient Bai Dai took you up to the hospital rooftop, where you looked down upon the entire city and realized the whole thing was one massive hospital. You were within it, yet unable to interact with it. You finally realize that this is the Age of Medicine, but it won’t be long before the Medicinal War breaks out, followed by the rise of the Medicinal Empire. But you have only fragmented memories of these events, and there is no way to understand how they relate to the situation unfolding. At the same time, you know that these are simply memories, and if you don’t find a way to preserve them, they will have no real value.

From your splintered

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