Nameless

Of all the entrances she picked, it had to be mine.

Drenched in rain and blood, she had a demented look. In her arms, a bundled mess: a loud, ugly,
unsightly mess of a child. A baby, I supposed, given it’s incessant wailing and pinched ruddy face.
I had never heard anything as irritating, I swear to you! That sound alone was enough to drive the
harshest man to lunacy– and truthfully, I am no harsh man. The woman wasn't pleasant to look at. Red-ridden
and hunching over like an old droid model– the ones that leaked oil. Pathetic lots came to the hospital each and
every day– none as pathetic as the tremor to her body, the way she clutched the infant in a desperate hold.
Desperate– that was the word. I had hoped she only sought shelter from the manic storm outside. But
as soon as I opened my bag, she spoke.
“Please save him! You’ve got to save him, please! He was– I was– we… there was this car…and the
storm… Oh! The droid outage… I was trying to get us out of the city! The driver must’ve been a druggie. Oh
god. Oh please. I–”
I grunted away the stiffness of my throat. “Slow down, lady.”
She whirled on me with frantically large eyes. She looked wild. I kept my gaze on the contents of my
bag, searching. Feeling her gaze roaming my position, my slouched shoulders in a too- small chair in the corner of
the dimly lit waiting room, I felt annoyed. Really annoyed.
As if things weren’t bad enough with the droids.
Over the continuous crying of the child, I heard Clarissa’s garbled voice cut through the air. “This is the
Chicago Joyridge Hospital Emergency Room Center for Traumatic Injuries, Sector 2A in district–”
“You…” the woman’s tone was deftly final. “What is this?.”
Clarissa smiled brokenly. The last of her power was dwindling; it wouldn’t be long before she became
stasised. Her voice was unbalanced and crackly, a jarring difference from her usual articulation.
“How can I help you?” She asked.
“A droid.” The woman backed away, shielding her child from the non- existent that surrounded
Clarissa. In a timbre mirroring a volcano before eruption: “Where’s the doctor?”
The baby continued to howl. I rummaged through my bag lazily.
 With the red crossed uniform, slicked hair, clean appearance– I don’t know why the woman didn’t just
trust Clarissa, even if the droid was halfway dead. Hell, I thought she was a human half the time. It would save
her a lot of trouble. And my headache.
“The doctor is preoccupied.”
“Preoccupied,” she repeated faintly. “They’re the doctor.”
Clarrisa stared. “I’m sorry. I don’t quite understand,” she said. Then the power left her metal eyes, and
Clarissa crumpled.
A pity. She had been the last remaining droid in the hospital after the storm destroyed the master
Chicago generator, the one thing that ran the droid’s entire population. It was the last thing they reported on
before the news cut out around two… maybe three hours ago? I wasn’t really sure. Clarissa, as the company’s
hospital’s leading droid, had a backup generator in her system, but it was gone. All the remaining energy had
been sapped from her functioning units, like a ticking time bomb. I was surprised she even lasted that long.
I groaned, shifting my joints in slight motion and blinked slowly. The hospital was as empty as usual,
tucked away in the filthier part of Chicago’s urban. After medi-droids became household items, hospitals closed
like so many corporations had years ago. Joyridge Hospital, a waning nook of a building along an abandoned
highway rarely saw an influx of patients. So while I was sure the world outside had spiraled into panic without
their beloved droids, nothing changed my peripheral; the waiting room was still eerily white, still and silent
except for the flickering lights and methodic rain.
Without the rude introduction this would’ve been a perfectly good night, and I’d just about waited
long enough. Placing my bag on my lap, I searched the next pocket indolently.
The woman’s baby cried louder. What was possibly in this woman’s blood to elicit whining as
hereditary. Poor child probably thought it was waxing poetry.
“You can’t leave me!” Her voice crackled like gunpowder, quick and loud in its release. Her knees met
the floor as the lights began to flicker. Shaking Clarissa in a violent throw, the woman shrieked, “You stupid
fucking droid! My son is dying! You can’t stasis right now; not now!”
The woman tore at Clarissa’s face. Some of the paint chipped away, revealing untouched steel. The
woman’s blood dripped onto the droid’s body, staining it. I let out an irritated puff. Clarissa was one of my
favorites– she never bothered me like some of the nurse-droid’s did.
The woman turned her head at the sound. Her wild eyes met mine.
I said, “Don’t bring me into this.”
 She jumped up, marching over with her annoying child. Visibly, I could see her clearer. Her stupidity
was apparent– with a red cascade down her left eye, clothes torn so she was almost bare, how did she reject the
help she so desperately needed? The baby, too, uglier than it would be, if possible; a bulb of torn skin where the
nose should be, and a myriad of swollen cuts. Both of them, a semblance alive, more bloody than human.
I pursed my lips and looked down towards my bag. I knew it was in here somewhere.
“Are you the doctor?” the woman breathed. I could scarcely hear her over the baby. When I didn’t
respond, she ripped the bag out of my hand and threw it on the ground. It skidded across the wet floor, the
contents strewn along its path.
I looked up. She glared down at me. Outside, the storm screamed.
“How heartless do you have to be,” she began, “to disregard a dying child? Have some empathy.”
“If that child is dying,” I said, “then why are you still here?”
“This is the hospital!”
“Do you see any medi-droids around?”
“Hospital law requires one human doctor to be present at every hospital,” said the woman. “I know.
I’m an officer.”
I groaned reflexively. “Even when the whole hospital is run by droids, droids who are smarter, more
efficient doctors than humans could ever be, the law still requires a doctor with flesh to be here.” I pinched my
skin and laughed. “You see this? This is why I’m here.”
The woman stared at me like I was crazy. “You’re a doctor. All the droids in the whole city are stasised
because of the storm.” She grabbed my scrubs with a wet hand, “Save my son, you piece of shit.”
“You better run to the nearest hospital if you want your son to live.”
“This is the nearest hospital!” The woman screamed in my face, spit spraying my face. “I don't
understand! You went to school to save lives! You swore an oath!”
My heart gave a thump. “And what good is school if a droid has infinite knowledge? What good is an
oath when droids have oaths written into their very being?”
The baby howled so loud I thought it was the winds. The lights continued to flicker. The droid- corpses
that littered the hallways beyond the waiting room flickering with them. On off on off…
“And what about that shitty droid,” the woman pointed to Clarissa’s prone form, revealed metal and
slicked with blood. “It can’t keep its programmed promise.” She spit the last word like acid on her tongue.
I looked on sadly. “Clarissa isn’t a shitty droid.”
 The woman’s hand tightened on my shirt. “It had a name?”
“No. But I got sick of calling it ‘droid 4560’. Clarissa sounds like a doctor’s name, don't you think?”
The woman’s eyes shrunk with every flicker of light, every second that passed as she realized the truth of
her situation. I wanted to help her, I really did, but it was impossible. Impossible. No longer wanting to stare at
her hapless eyes, I latched onto the spilled contents of my bag.
Ah, there it was. Right at my feet.
“You’re a doctor,” the woman finally croaked. Her voice had shot through from all the screaming. “You
save lives.”
I grabbed the bottle from the floor, twisting it open as she watched.
“If you think human doctors actually know how to do anything medical, you’re about 50 years too late.
I have no clue how to save your baby’s life. Let alone my own.”
She let go of my scrubs. A resigned snort escaped her throat, then a full belly laugh. It was a loud laugh,
but even with the blood dripping from a ruined eye, her torn clothes and half dead baby she seemed most sane in
that particular moment.
“You’re a druggie!” She wheezed, matching the thunder outside. “Oh, I should've known. I’m so
fucking stupid.”
I stated, “You should take some. For you and the baby. It’ll help with the pain. I think.”
She stumbled across the floor, slipping half-hazardly on the blood and muck. Her baby was tearing at
her hair, but the woman paid no mind, reaching out for the couch and falling onto it. I could see her form
against the bare white walls, all the on the other end of the waiting room, lights lingering on darkness more than
light.
“Are you going to arrest me now?” I asked.
She shifted her baby against her chest and shoulders. “If I had to arrest every druggie on the streets, we
humans wouldn’t live in the world we created. Droids would build prisons faster than they’re produced.”
“That’s pretty fast,” I commented.
She said nothing. Or maybe she did; I couldn’t hear much anyway, not with the baby and the storm and
the high pitched screech in my ears that didn’t seem to be leaving. It was driving me a bit crazy, you see, and
while I know I’m fucked, I don’t think I’m crazy. No, not crazy. Surviving. Right? The storm outside was crazy.
The baby’s lung capacity was crazy. But not me. If I remembered what I’d learned in fake medical school, where
all they talked about was how to assist surgeon-droids and nurse-droids and how to be a calming presence for the
patients but not to talk about procedures because no human was qualified to help with anything anymore, not
with droids and their databases and AI’s and knowledge beyond any human and their perfect–
“Do you think machines are capable of empathy?”
I glanced at the woman. “What?”
“I don’t think they are,” she said. “Maybe fake empathy, or something that mimics it. Not real empathy.
But you know what’s funny?” There was little visible with the lights barely flickering on–I knew her gaze was on
mine. “Empathy is the one thing droids lack that we have. Well now, we have nothing.”
The air was heavy; the words cast a tangible weight over the room. She sat sagged, like this weight was
breaking the bones in her back. She was curled up against the couch, cradling her baby and whispering softly.
The baby’s cries were less fierce now– a better description would be dismal. The cries were withering to nothing,
and the woman knew. She finally realized her baby would die.
I would let myself go, I decided, and deal with this all in the morning.
The lights flickered one last time. Darkness was comforting, in a way, nothing but the wind and rain,
the cries of both a baby and his mother, and my own heavy breathing as I swallowed the pills whole. There was
an ambivalent moment of something, maybe regret, of wishing things could be different– that I could reach
back and pluck some string of knowledge from my brain before hate and pity devoured every crevice; but it only
lasted a minute, before a sensation of relief clouded my brain, and my last coherent thought about Clarissa
needing a paint job faded to muddy gray.