No clocks in the infirmary, and no internal clock, and it may have been ten minutes or five hours. I was catheterized, but I didn’t know it until urgent necessity made the discovery for me.
When the doc came back, he held a small device that I instantly recognized: a HERF gun.
Oh, it wasn’t the same model I’d used on the Hall of Presidents. This one was smaller, and better made, with the precise engineering of a surgical tool. The doc raised his eyebrows at me. “You know what this is,” he said, flatly. A dim corner of my mind gibbered, he knows, he knows, the Hall of Presidents. But he didn’t know. That episode was locked in my mind, invulnerable to backup.
“I know,” I said.
“This one is high-powered in the extreme. It will penetrate the interface’s shielding and fuse it. It probably won’t turn you into a vegetable. That’s the best I can do. If this fails, we will restore you from your last backup. You have to sign the consent before I use it.” He’d dropped all kindly pretense from his voice, not bothering to disguise his disgust. I was pitching out the miracle of the Bitchun Society, the thing that had all but obsoleted the medical profession: why bother with surgery when you can grow a clone, take a backup, and refresh the new body? Some people swapped corpuses just to get rid of a cold.
I signed. The doc wheeled my gurney into the crash and hum of the utilidors and then put it on a freight tram that ran to the Imagineering compound, and thence to a heavy, exposed Faraday cage. Of course: using the HERF on me would kill any electronics in the neighborhood. They had to shield me before they pulled the trigger.
The doc placed the gun on my chest and loosened my restraints. He sealed the cage and retreated to the lab’s door. He pulled a heavy apron and helmet with faceguard from a hook beside the door.
“Once I am outside the door, point it at your head and pull the trigger. I’ll come back in five minutes. Once I am in the room, place the gun on the floor and do not touch it. It is only good for a single usage, but I have no desire to find out I’m wrong.”
He closed the door. I took the pistol in my hand. It was heavy, dense with its stored energy, the tip a parabolic hollow to better focus its cone.
I lifted the gun to my temple and let it rest there. My thumb found the trigger-stud.