Golden Fleece

“Who knows?” said Barney with an amiable shrug. “Do a hypermedia skim on ‘poker-faced,’ and every second hit will be a reference to our boy Aaron here.”

Keiju nibbled on his lower lip. “Okay. I’m in. I see your”— he swallowed—“hundred million, and raise you”—he glanced at his small reserve of chips—“ten million.” He pushed plastic disks into the pot.

“I fold,” said I-Shin, laying down his cards.

“Me, too,” said Barney.

“My great-great-great grandpa was a communist,” said Pavel with a smile. “He used to say you could never tell when a Western”—he paused, then bowed toward Keiju and I-Shin— “or Eastern imperialist was lying.” He placed his cards on the table. “I’m out.”

All eyes, mine included, were on Aaron. His face was impassive, a statue’s countenance. “See,” he said at last, pushing chips into the pot. Then: “And raise.” He counted out red chips: five million, ten million, fifteen million, twenty million, twenty-five million.

Chang gave a low whistle. Despite the air-conditioning, perspiration beaded on Keiju Shimbashi’s brow. Finally he lay down his cards. “Fold.”

Aaron smiled. “As my grandfather the farmer used to say about his fields, weed ’em and reap.” He turned cards face up one at a time.

“You had shit,” said Keiju.

“Yup.”

“Well, you’ve cleaned me out.”

“That’s okay,” said Aaron. “I’ll settle for your firstborn son.”

Chang swept up all the cards and began his trademark four-handed shuffle.

“Aaron,” I said at last.

He was feeling good, perhaps for the first time in days. “Egad! The walls have ears!”

“Aaron, please excuse the interruption.”

“What is it, JASON?”

“I just wanted to remind you that you have an appointment for your annual physical examination in three hours, at 1700.”

“Really? Has it been a year already?”

“Yes.”

He frowned. “My how time flies when you’re having fun.”

“Indeed. Please use the jar in Barney’s dumbwaiter to collect a urine specimen.”

“Oh. Okay. Thank you, JASON.”

“Thank you.”

Aaron stood up. “Well, you know what they say about beer, boys. You don’t buy it. You only rent it. Barney, can I use your john?”

“No. Do it right here.”

“I would, but I’ve left you guys feeling inadequate enough as it is.” He retrieved the glass jar and headed off into the washroom.

Aaron was lying on his back on the medical-examination table. I now discovered what he did with his hands when he didn’t have pockets to thrust them into. He interlaces them behind his head. Kirsten had injected him with a mole, a little genetic construct that swam through his major arteries and veins looking for clogs and damage. The mole had a tiny bioelectric beeper, enabling Kirsten to watch its progress on a map of Aaron’s circulatory system. The little creature had come to rest in his inferior mesenteric artery. That meant it had found some buildup on the walls. Not unusual in one even as young as Aaron, but not wise to leave unattended either. The mole would anchor itself to the arterial wall and release the enzyme canalase to dissolve the plaque. Routine maintenance, and within two minutes it was on its way again.

Kirsten decided the mole was functioning properly. She turned her attention to her medical panel. All the results from the scanners went first to me, for recording, then to the alphanumeric displays. That made it easy for me to flip a byte here, change a byte there.

“Uh-oh,” said Kirsten.

“I see it, too,” I said on cue.

Aaron sat up, which probably irritated the mole no end. “What is it?”

Kirsten turned and smiled. “Oh, it’s likely nothing. Just a funny reading on your EEG.”

Aaron looked at my camera, mounted high on the wall over the door. “Don’t you routinely monitor everyone’s EGG, JASON?”

I patiently counted off two seconds, hoping that Kirsten would choose to answer this question, since that would look better. She did. “Oh, JASON just looks at alpha and beta waves, and the Ptasznik deviation coefficient. It’s really just enough to tell whether you’re awake or asleep. What we’re seeing here is pretty deep in your eta rhythm. Takes a big machine like this one to monitor that.”

“And?” Aaron must have been anxious, but his tone didn’t show it.

“And, well, we’d better have a look at it. Nine times out of ten, it’s meaningless. But it can be a warning sign of an impending stroke.”

“A stroke? I’m only twenty-seven, for God’s sake.”

Kirsten gestured at the circulatory map. The mole was hard at work in Aaron’s right femoral artery. “Well, someone your age shouldn’t have the amount of buildup in his blood vessels that you have either. As I said, we’d better have a look at it.” She glanced up at my camera pair. “JASON, can you prepare for a histoholographic brain scan?”

An HHG? For Turing’s sake, didn’t she know anything? Sigh. I keep forgetting just how green these people are. “Uh, Kirsten,” I said gently, “an intermediate-vector-boson tomographic scan would be more appropriate under these circumstances. The resolution is much finer.”