H'ard Starts: The Early Waldrop by Howard Waldrop

Author:Howard Waldrop
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64524-117-1
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2023-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

Unsleeping Beauty and the Beast

In the year 2431, Gini-in-the-machine appeared at the center of the old bomb room with a flash of thunder and light.

The machine appeared when no one was nearby. It sent a small, wheeled robot to find people and bring them to her. The robot rolled down a hallway and found a nurse. It tugged her tights and announced in a loud voice, in slurred World English, “Hey!”

The nurse jumped.

“I’ve got something to show you,” said the robot. “A human is in danger.”

The wheeled robot turned. The nurse followed it hesitantly, waved for an orderly to accompany her. The robot was strange. It had no clear parts to its eye membranes. It was without legs, squat, not anthropomorphic.

They followed it through several subbasements to the open door of the long-unused room. At the center was a polished machine with many parts, and lying on a table in the center, a girl dressed in white: still, sleeping.

They found through tapes and with the help of the robot that this was Gini, that she was sent from four hundred years in the future, that she was suffering from an incurable disease. Incurable not from lack of technology, but from lack of people. She had been one of the last on Earth. Her uncle had sent her back. The crash of thunder throughout the building before the robot appeared had been her uncle.

He was coming back with Gini to the past, to prepare them for her, to enlist the aid of the Station. He was unsuccessful. He had been dying when he entered the machine. His atoms must have been scattered across several minutes or hours each side of the time at which he meant to stop.

She was pale. She was dying. She was Gini-in the-machine.

Bobby-from-the-freezer sat up in bed. He was disoriented. He thought he remembered being revived a day or two before: he had vague impressions of an operating room, of people, of machines. These were his first thoughts in four hundred years.

He had actually been awakened over a period of months while technicians watched him along the way, checking the functions of his organs, his systems, his body’s adjustment to the long waking process. If anything had gone wrong, they would have stopped the wake-up, kept him in a suspended state. The operation he remembered, the floating faces, the lights; this was the last step in his awakening and the cure for the disease. To him, the last days seemed only a few seconds.

They were talking of Gini-in-the-machine, the girl from the future who had appeared at the hospital two weeks before. Of her robot servant, her sleep-death, and the tapes and tools for learning of her time, her illness, her predicament.

It was not easy to hear her name: the patients were restricted to certain areas, particular rehabilitation programs, narrow channels of communication to the outside. But as long as humans have to carry out such orders, the barriers will be circumvented. By rumors, soft-spoken words in the wrong places, wrong times.

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