The Escapement Mechanism, Prologue 1
Gerty took a detour through the medical tent on her way to the latest test of the escapement mechanism. The stretched canvas shelter was only about one-third full, and though it was a temporary building, to her it had become a permanent fixture of the base layout. As they were not in an active combat arena, the injuries being tended to inside were not serious: broken bones, a few convalescing from the flu that had hit the base hard and those unlucky few still in the tent even harder. Gerty herself had been on bed rest for nearly a week.
Only two patients were in any sort of critical condition, and Gerty walked past the first, through the neatly spaced gurneys until she came to the man at the far end of the building. Warrant Officer Vandermeer had a rolling curtain completely encircling his bed; Gerty pulled it back and took up a position next to him on a small stool. The air in the tent held the astringent smell of antiseptic, but this was tempered somewhat by the little alcove.
Officer Vandermeer's service had enabled the test that Gerty was running late to, but it had also left him as he was now. The crack of his head hitting the concrete floor of the high-performance computer lab wouldn't leave her; she heard it every time she pressed enter on her keyboard too hard. He had likely been comatose before hitting the floor, and his head was now wrapped to speed the healing of the fissure in his skull.
She knew he was irreparably damaged, but Officer Vandermeer had been the only volunteer that the device worked with. He alone had enabled the transfer of data to the computer, where the scientists and modellers were able to get the math to work, and where Gerty had created an interface for the program.
Officer Vandermeer had complained about a headache after the transfer, but no one had suspected the true cost of his role. The mental fatigue and fogginess had been attributed to the flu, as had his need for ten hours of sleep per day. Gerty now doubted that he had even been ill. The transfer of the final functional program back to the escapement mechanism had left him in his current state. It had been immediate. His hands slid off the keyboard like severed branches. He toppled sideways from his stool as if felled by some unseen digital saw activated by his last keypress.
"It's me. Gerty," she said, clasping his hand in her own. It was cold. His whole body was now continuously colder than it should have been. The doctors thought the unnatural state might actually be protective for his brain, but there had been no improvement in the weeks since the final transfer. No change at all. She gave his hand a squeeze. There was no response.
The device worked, but there was now no way they would be able to make any future modifications. No suitable vector, human or otherwise, had been identified outside of Officer Vandermeer. And now with the scrutiny of the safety office and the family asking questions, they were fortunate the program hadn't been shuttered entirely. If the results hadn't been so unbelievable, she was sure it would have been. A pang of regret that she was ashamed to admit hit her whenever she thought about how her first-pass interface design was now locked on the device for the foreseeable future. She was capable of much better work.
"Thanks for your---" she was going to say "sacrifice," but Officer Vandermeer wasn't a soldier. He hated conflict. The defense department had recruited him directly from university, based on his PhD work. He loved computers, and the computational power he had been offered, along with the classified problems he could apply it to meant his signature was just a formality on the contract he had been presented. Gerty settled on "mind."
"Thanks for your mind," she said, then exited the tent without pulling the curtain closed. She doubted he could tell the difference, and she was late for her next trial that his neural structure had enabled.