Coagulopath

Melissa opened the door to the OB/GYN’s clinic. She’d started seeing Dr Sabinsky at the six week mark, and their meetings had already taken on a brisk predictability.

How are you feeling? Any food cravings? No pica? Good, good. Go to the community clinic for an ultrasound. Take some more folic acid. Bulk-billing is available. Good-bye.

This time, she had a sunken face, and shadows under her eyes.

When Dr Sabinsky said hello, she didn’t respond.

She shuffled into the clinic, and sat down in the chair opposite his.

“It’s kicking,” was all she said.

“That’s great,” Sabinsky’s PR smile lit up the room. “You must be so excited.”

Melissa shook her head.

Didn’t look excited. Not even a little bit.

“I don’t know what’s happening, or what I’ve done wrong.” She said, slowly. It was as if speaking cost her dearly. “I don’t even know if there’s a point in coming to you. The baby’s kicking.”

Sabinsky’s smile widened, and then he was off and running, reciting one of the dozen canned speeches that he gave over and over to women in this clinic. “So you’re feeling confused? Not sure what to make of all this? Don’t worry, that’s absolutely normal. Your hormones are on a rollercoaster, but all your metrics are right on point – this has just about been a model pregnancy. What we’ll do next is book you in for a multiple marker test, just to make one hundred percent sure everything’s going to plan in there…”

Melissa shook her head.

“…and I’ve got some more supplements for you to take, and we’ll also get you started on some Kegel exercises. Never too early to start strengthening up your pelvic floor. And then we’ll…”

“I miscarried.” She blurted out.

He stared at her. “What?”

“Last week. I lost the baby.” The words left her mouth like vomit. “My husband and I woke up, and the bed was just a lake of blood.”

“Ah.”

“So why do I still feel it kicking?” Her voice rose, containing a shrill note of panic. She pulled up the hem of her maternity skirt, exposing her swollen belly. “Can you answer that, doc? What do I have inside me?“

He was the doctor. He had an answer for everything.

But when he put his hands on her gravid stomach, and felt something stirring within, he found that he didn’t, and couldn’t.

Dalip Prajeet was arguing with his supervisor at the call center.

“I tell you, the phone in my bay’s not ringing,” he said. “Nobody’s called in two hours. Normally I get one every few minutes.”

“Well, the phone’s definitely working,” his supervisor said. “I traced the lines and everything.”

“So what’s happening?”

“Beats me. Maybe the software that diverts the calls doesn’t like you.”

“Can I have another bay?”

“The center’s at maximum capacity. Look, sorry, you’ll just have to sit there and hope whatever’s wrong fixes itself. Conversation’s over, pal. I have a floor to run.”

Then the supervisor disappeared, leaving Dalip fuming. This was going to screw up his metrics for the day.

He tried to clear up his desk, so that at least he was doing something on company time.

Among the scattered papers, he found a 3.5” floppy disk.

On it were two words. STRANGE LOOP.

He couldn’t recall bringing this in to work.

Had the supervisor put the disk there, and he hadn’t noticed? Why would a supervisor at a major telecom company put anything on a floppy in 2016?

Bored and irritable, he inserted it into his computer.

Immediately, a batch file started to execute, running a program called STRANGELOOP.EXE

His screen flashed and was replaced with a computer-rendered image. A moment of panic, then he remembered that his cubicle was in the corner of the building – nobody could see what was on his screen unless they entered his bay.

He looked at the image more closely.

It looked like a computer game from the pre-CD era. The resolution was 320×240. The graphics were 16-color CGA. The neon hues almost burned his eyes.

It was a crude, pixelated image of a man sitting at a desk in front of a computer, with his back to the viewer.

At the bottom was an RPG-style inventory of items. It only had one thing in it: a floppy disk.

He had cursor input, and could move a disembodied hand around the screen with his mouse.

Curious, he clicked on the floppy disk item in the inventory.

The hand picked it up.

He dragged the cursor over to the desk, and clicked again. The floppy disk appeared on the desk.

The pixelated man looked across, saw the floppy disk, picked it up, and after a minute, put it into his computer.

Spellbound, Dalip tried to see what was happening on the computer inside the game. The screen was too small and the resolution too low. A line of text flashed in the empty inventory: PRESS + TO ZOOM.

He zoomed in, saw that the computer inside the game was running a batch file, and that it was launching a file called STRANGELOOP.EXE…

On the man’s screen there was now a digital image of another man sitting at a desk, in front of another computer, with another floppy disk.

The man inside the game started to play.

They’re like little Russian dolls… Dalip thought, zooming in even further to see what was on the screen.

He continued “playing” for the some time, going down iteration after iteration, watching game after game get installed on computer after computer, each one contained within the last.

Eventually, he was at least twenty levels deep, watching another man insert a floppy disk, run a game, use his cursor to place a floppy on a digital desk…

Are they really like Russian dolls? He thought. If I go down far enough, will I reach a final one? Or does it continue forever?

A buzzer beeped beside his head, shocking him back to earth like cold water to the face. He realised he was now at clock-off time.

And his phone still hadn’t rung once.

He no longer thought this was a coincidence.

He gathered his things together, and remembered that company policy forbid the installation of third party programs on the office computers.

Whatever STRANGELOOP.EXE was, he’d get in trouble if it was discovered.

He was about to hit ESC to close the game and then erase it from his system, when something new happened on the screen.

The man at the desk was turning around to look at him.

Hairs stood up on Dalip’s neck as he saw an expression of alarm and confusion resolve amongst the pixels.

He pressed the – key.

Started zooming out.

Another face, looking at him.

Then another.

He started reassembling the Russian doll, flying backwards through the generations.

In all of the games, the man had turned around and was looking towards the screen, as if staring his own creator. The faces stared outwards, like the endless reflections of two mirrors.

Finally, there were no more games-within-a-game, and Dalip was at the original one.

Or is that really true?

Am I really the first? How can I know?

Each of those digital copies thought he was the first, the original, the only.

And each of them were wrong.

Suddenly, Dalip felt a sensation that he did not like at all, the sensation of being watched.

It was on his back like the hand of a ghost. His nerve endings tingled.

He turned around to see what was behind him.

The mortuary has eight chambers. They branch out from a hallway like arms on a spider. Inside these chambers, a maximum of thirty-two cadavers are stored at temperatures not exceeding -2 degrees Celsius.

The corpses stay for hours, or days, and then go to funeral parlors, forensic facilities, and, occasionally, pathology labs. The dead come from many paths to the mortuary, and they leave on many paths.

The mortuary hired me to install the security cameras.

I worked quickly in the chilly light, my fingers going numb in the cold. I made mistakes. I kept forgetting the task in front of me, my brain wandering like a lost and scared dog to the bodies on the slabs. Eyes that were open, but not to see. Mouths that were open, but not to talk. That horrible feeling of being totally alone while in a room full of people.

These weren’t regular cameras.

The mortuary forbids CCTV video feeds in the chambers. There was an embarrassing incident, years ago. A former employee sold photos of an OD’d starlet to the press.

The video coming from these cameras are distorted and garbled. You can’t actually see anything on them.

Instead, the cameras track motion.

Every twentieth frame or so is referenced and compared against the previous frame. If there’s any difference – defined as a pixel that has changed color – then it puts a flag in the camera’s software, stored on a web server.

“One flag is okay – sometimes the software screws up,” the mortuary security chief told me. “Two flags in a row is a suspicious screw-up. Anything more than that, get in your truck and come down here at the double, because there’s been a break-in.”

“Who breaks into a mortuary?” I asked.

“Organ thieves. People who want to be with a loved one, one last time. Frat boys pledging for Alpha Kappa Dumbfuck. It doesn’t matter, you just get down there as fast as you can.”

I’ve been monitoring the motion cameras for the past three months.

Usually, the cameras generate between ten and twenty flags a day. False positives. Sometimes I get two flags coming in within seconds of each other, and hair stands up on my neck for a moment, and after nothing else happens after a minute I go back to reading Deadspin on the office computers.

Once, I had forty flags come from chamber 7. I drove down there, expecting the worst…

…and found a cockroach crawling across a camera lens.

Another time, I got a single flag from all the rooms, simultaneously. A fuse had blown, knocking out the power. I replaced it before any of the cadavers had a chance to warm. Got a nice pay bonus for that.

The job was boring. Losing focus was just a matter of time. I went from checking the flags every few minutes to checking it every half hour, then to every hour, then to…

Today, I was on my phone, arguing with some nimrod online about Brett Favre’s passing stats, when my inner conscience spoke.

How long since you checked the mortuary flags?

Shit. Two hours? Longer?

I logged in to the web server.

37,440 flags.

Oh no.

I got in my truck, and sped down to the mortuary. I sat my phone on the passenger seat and flicked an eye to it from time to time.

More flags kept coming in. Several a second.

Someone had broken into the mortuary, and they were still there.

And the flags were coming in from multiple cold chambers. There was more than one person.

What was I suppose to do here? Tough talk a bunch of drunken frat boys with crowbars and hammers?

I parked outside the mortuary, the truck slewing sideways in a spray of gravel. I got out, ran to the front door, and tried to open it.

It was still locked.

I stared stupidly at the doorknob, as if reality wasn’t letting me in on some kind of joke.

I looked around, noticing details I hadn’t seen before. Like how there were no other cars in the parking lot, other than me. And no footprints in the gravel, other than mine.

Then, I went on a slow and steady walk around the mortuary.

No broken windows.

No forced-open doors.

No way in whatsoever.

I let that same slow and steady walk take me from the building back to my truck, where I sat in the cabin, phone in my lap.

The number of disturbances inside the building was now at 40,528, and climbing.

I watched more and more flags come through on my phone, wondering how long it would take before I turned on the ignition, picked a direction, and just kept driving forever.