Under the Knife(64)

“Initiating laparoscopic cholecystectomy protocol for Swiss Army number one.” An affable gyration of gears.

“Hear that spinning sound?” Montgomery said. “That means Delores has activated the first Swiss Army and is ready to use it.”

“For almost a year now, I’ve monitored your progress keenly,” Finney said.

Oh, God.

“You could say I’ve been a silent partner of yours. I’m most interested to see how things turn out with Delores this morning.”

“Oh, God,” Rita breathed.

“Did you say something, Dr. Wu?” Lisa whispered.

“No, nothing, Lisa,” Rita whispered back.

She reached out and grasped Swiss Army number two.





SPENCER


His operation over, and his insides knotted with worry over Rita, Spencer slipped a mask over his face and padded into OR 10, right behind one of the cardiac-surgery guys, who held the door ajar for him. It seemed that he and the cardiac guy weren’t the only ones interested: The room was packed, almost to the door. Spencer had been in OR 10 many times, but had never seen it this crowded.

He saw Montgomery holding court next to the main video screen. Rita was scrubbed—

(Damn but it was good to see her, if only from a distance)

—and appeared to be making adjustments to the auto-surgeon. He knew it was the auto-surgeon because he’d seen pictures of it: practically everyone in the damn hospital had, what with all the publicity.

“Dr. Montgomery, do you think it’s really safe? Entrusting people’s operations to machines?” he heard a woman ask as he inched around the back of the group, hunting for a gap so he could see the video screen. Mindful of his size, he didn’t want to block other people’s views. He settled on a reasonably good position behind everyone else, where his height afforded him a decent angle. But he couldn’t see Rita from here. He wanted to see Rita.

“Absolutely, Ms. Grant,” Montgomery replied. “And I’d like to make one thing absolutely, crystal clear here: the surgeon—the human surgeon—is always in charge. Always. We’ve even designed a fail-safe mechanism to ensure that.”

Montgomery used a laser pointer to draw attention to a large red button mounted prominently on the side of a silver cylinder Spencer recognized as the main component of the robot. It looked like a fire-alarm knob mounted on a wall, the kind you needed to break glass to access, and about the same size.

“That’s Delores’s emergency stop button,” Montgomery said. “The fail-safe. Pushing it immediately shuts Delores down, allowing the human team to take over. I’d call it the kill switch, but we don’t like words like kill in the operating room.”

Montgomery paused so as not to step on his own punch line. There were a few polite chuckles. Otherwise, stone-cold silence.

Montgomery cleared his throat.

“So. The fail-safe instantaneously shuts Delores down.”

With the laser pointer, Montgomery indicated another red button—much like the one on the robot—mounted on the side of a printer-sized object sitting on a table near the patient’s head. Spencer saw Hank Chow and a younger anesthesiologist he didn’t know standing next to it.

“We’ve also incorporated a fail-safe into Morpheus,” Montgomery said. “It shuts off the infusion of anesthetic gases and injects paralytic-reversal drugs to wake the patient up.”

Right, Spencer thought. Morpheus. The automated anesthesia machine. Hank had been bragging about it in the OR break room the other day. A lot of the other anesthesiologists, Spencer knew, thought it was total bullshit.

He pursed his lips and frowned, uneasy, taking it all in, trying to process the calmness of the scene with his unnerving conversation with Wendy.

Everything seems okay …

He wanted a closer look at the robots, and at Rita. He spotted another location nearer Rita, from which he judged he would have a better view without disturbing anyone else. He slipped to one side of the audience and took up a position there, much closer to the operating table.

Better.

Rita’s hands were wrapped around a slender, silver cylinder about the length of a seven iron. She was slowly pushing it forward through one of the laparoscopic ports.

Probably one of the robot’s operating arms. From where he was standing, everything seemed to be going fine.

Maybe Wendy had gotten her story wrong. Maybe the naked surgeon hadn’t been Rita.

He inched a little closer.





RITA


“Yes,” Finney said to her. “I’m very interested to see how Delores performs. I think—”

Rita winced as a high-pitched whistle sounded in her ear, replacing Finney’s voice. It lasted for a few seconds.

And then silence.

Rita froze. She shook her head and listened for him.

Nothing.

She waited for Finney to finish whatever it was he’d been telling her.

He didn’t.

Which was … weird.

As was the silence inside her head.





FINNEY


Finney frowned and tapped the side of his tablet with a single slender finger.

That’s odd.

The precise, elliptical patterns that had been dancing across his screen a moment earlier, the ones that had indicated a strong connection between his control tablet and Dr. Wu’s implant, were gone, replaced by a fitful series of jagged peaks and valleys.