The Punch Escrow by Tal Klein

Author:Tal Klein [Klein, Tal]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Inkshares
Published: 2017-07-25T05:00:00+00:00

22 Despite the advent of nanomedicine, NSAIDs, or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, were still quite popular in my time for treating minor aches and pains. Tiny robots don’t necessarily do everything better. Also, I was lying to the room.

CURST BE HE THAT MOVES MY BONES

MOTI WAS PISSED. No, he was furious. Standing in a hospital room, overlooking the East River, he yelled at Zaki, “That stupid room almost killed him!”

It had taken a lot of effort in a very short amount of time to get the man-with-no-comms who’d been administered a poison-nobody-ever-heard-of admitted to the Bellevue Hospital Center. Fortunately for me, the Levantine Intelligence Directorate was well versed in the sort of clandestine payoffs, elbow rubs, and tit for tats required to bypass the usual procedures.

Moti beckoned Zaki out of the almost-featureless room in which I lay unconscious. The belladonna poison had felt like lava-coated knives in my stomach, but thankfully, I had passed out quickly. Now my Levant captors were seeking out a doctor to get a prognosis on my condition.

They found one near the elevator. He was a young sandy-haired man dressed in paisley scrubs. He sat in a glass-walled, aquarium-like room, watching an array of telemetry and video streams. Pulling up my data, he informed Moti that my unevenly dilated pupils had initially led to some concern that I had sustained brain damage. But now that the nanites were dialyzing my blood, I was out of the woods.

“You know, I actually studied this poison in school,” the doctor said, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet uses it to poison herself to death when she can’t be with Romeo.”

“Yes, very romantic,” said Moti. “Tell me, what is the time frame for my colleague’s recovery?”

“Actually,” the doctor’s console chimed in, “Juliet was only feigning death to escape her family. Romeo was supposed to know that. They were meant to elope when she woke up, but he didn’t get the message. So when he found her—”

“What?” Moti interrupted. “What do you mean, ‘feign death’?”

“The ruse was that a small amount of belladonna would leave the ingestor only comatose for a brief period of time, whereas a larger dose might end their lives. Poisons were a favorite of Shakespeare.”

But Moti wasn’t there to hear the end of the console’s lecture. He and Zaki were already running down the hall to my room—to find my bed empty.

“He tricked us!” Moti yelled at his subordinate, whose face was impassive. “Why, Zaki? What’s his plan?”

My “plan”—and I put it in quotes because it was less of a plan and more of a haphazard string of ad hoc last resorts—was to find the hospital’s TC and port to Costa Rica. Every major hospital had a teleportation chamber, a gesture of goodwill from those benevolent helpers of humanity, International Transport.

As soon as Moti and Zaki left my room, I hopped off my gurney and went the opposite direction down the hallway, hiding my face to avoid detection while searching for a janitorial bot.

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