Elysian Fields Read Free Page B

job tonight was to empty and wash all the bed pans, then remove the containers with bloody bandages and take them to the incinerator. After that she had to take the soiled hospital gowns and have them placed in the chutes to be recycled. More tasks of that nature would follow.
    From the janitorial closet she grabbed a pair of coveralls, shoe covers, nitrile gloves , and a hair net. She put them on and then attached a face mask over her mouth. The hospital maintained strict regulations so the Servers wouldn’t contaminate the hyper clean environment, including the expensive medical creams and powders. She also knew it was for her own protection. Most of those substances contained nanobots specialized in so many different ways that one never knew what they were going to do upon contact with the skin. Nanobots could enter her body through just a simple scratch.
    An hour or so into work, Emma, the floor head nurse, approached her. She was tall and willowy, bald headed, with green eyes matching her jumpsuit and goggles. “Julia, they need you in the OR now. Take the cleaning unit with you.”
    Sensing the note of urgency in Emma’s voice, Jules rushed with the cleaning cart via the closest elevator to the operating room. Once inside, she saw the bodies of two young men laid down on two operating cubes. They were identical, except that one was bruised and bloody, the other immaculately clean and beautiful like a marble sculpture. It’s the man from the ambulance. He didn’t make it. She felt a sudden sadness. The other one was surely his clone.
    Jules could see they both had headsets on, forming the pathway for memory transfer from one to the other. Magnetic nanobots in both brains, once activated, clustered and acted as an interface between their synapses.
    A nurse with a mask on was signaling her to approach. “Wipe the mess from the floor, then take the body from here to the incinerator as soon as I’m done with it and I move it to the stretcher. Hurry up, the father will be here any minute to see his son.”
    Obviously not his original son . She bit her tongue to stop herself from saying something she’d regret.
    She proceeded to clean the floor as fast as possible, her entire focus on the task at hand. She was careful and efficient, cleaning as thoroughly as possible to assure future jobs here. In the meantime, the man to be discarded was being transported to the stretcher by invisible hands, as if levitating. She stole a glance at him: he looked like a fallen angel, a slim, bruised body floating through the air.
    Once she finished with the floors, she put the cleaning unit away and wen t to the stretcher. The dead man was lying on his back, his dark locks falling over his bruised face, eyes closed as if asleep. He looked peaceful and handsome, Jules observed, tracing with her eyes his square jawline and dimpled chin, moving towards his full lips and straight-edged nose. What a pity! All his dreams shattered . Then she realized they were able to copy his memory onto the clone after all, given the nurse’s remarks.
    She began to wonder if the clone would just wake up and resume his existence like the original, as if nothing has changed at all. They say that’s true, but how can that be ? What happens to the soul? There was so much thinking and feeling inside her, she couldn’t imagine her essence being captured by a computer program.
    She placed a cover on the body and started pushing it out of the room. How many times have I done this? She counted six or seven. It never got any easier, no matter how many times she did it, seeing how Elites were disposed of so casually. Who else could afford to keep one or two bodies around, just in case? But are they sure it’s truly their own self coming back to life? No one had ever said any differently.
    The incinerator was in the basement. After exiting the maintenance elevator, she pushed the stretcher slowly, feeling like she could somehow delay the inevitable. Everything was