80 POPULAR SCIENCE
LABRATSWHEN I WAKE UP I DON’T ASK“WHERE AM I?”
because it’s obvious I’m in hospital, and also there’s a
tube down my throat. After a bunch of spluttering and
convulsing, and beeping, and nurses rushing around,
and doctors explaining things that I don’t understand
or, in my analgesically- bluntened state, care about,
everything eventually falls into place.
One of the good things about a “medically-
induced” coma is that no matter what anyone says, it’s
fundamentally not your fault. Sure, whatever you did
that meant the doctors had to put you into a medically-
induced coma might be your fault, but the coma itself is
not. It is, as they say, medically-induced.
I lie in the hospital and think about this. Then I think
about how much my throat hurts, you know, from the
tube. Then I think about how hospitals have to feed you,
like, several times a day and I feel pretty happy.
When you’re an itinerate scientiic test subject
working for $125 (ish) a weak, the constant barrage
of allergenic chemicals, random toxins, and the
occasional barcore tattoo, make it very hard to augment
your meagre income, in any way. So you have to make
adjustments. Like adjusting to the idea that not everyone
can afford more than one meal a day.
Eventually after just the right amount of anticipation,
a nurse brings me a tray fullof coloured materials that
don’t resemble any food I can remember, but after a
year in a medically-induced coma, everything tastes
absolutely amazing.
The nurse seems somewhat surprised when she
returns four and a half minutes later and see my tray is
completely empty. I reach out to grab her arm and she
flinches away. She raises an admonishing inger.
“Please,” I say. “Why was my coma medically-
induced?” She puts the inger away, looks aside, seems
embarrassed or ashamed or something. She opens her
mouth, closes it again, opens it, seems to reconsider,
opens it, and with the swiftness of years of practice,
suddenly injects me with a powerful sedative.
When I wake up again, my agent Curt “Deinitely
a C” Blockade is sitting on my bed and looking at all
the life support equipment in a way that suggests he’s
trying to igure out how much he could get for it at Cash
Converters. He notices me twitch.
“Maaaate!” he says, in the way he does. “What’s going
on mate? Here you are all sitting up like jacky, and it’s
only March mate. What’s the story?”
“Well irst,” I rasp, “that expression is actually racist.
And second, what are you talking about?”
Blockade looks confused, a subtly different
expression from the look of bafflement that sits on his
dough-like face at all other times. “Mate?” he asks. “I’m
talking about the deal mate, the plan. The agreement.
The ‘experiment’, you know?” He puts air quotes
around “experiment” in a way that’s either ominously
conspiratorial, or an indication that he doesn’t really
know what the word means.
“I uh...” I say and Blockade grins with relief. “That’s
right mate,” he says. “Eier Labs, the Big Egg, the Whole
Omelette, the Fry-up from Hell, the -” He trails off,
seemingly transixed by the CTG monitor next to my
bedside. Then he blinks. “Anyway, good job, keep it up.
Having a break mate, I get it, having a break is good.
Here, the goodies so far,” he hands me an envelope.
“Minus my cut, of course.” Then he climbs out the
window, but that’s nothing especially unusual.
I look at the envelope. It has a vaguely egg-shaped
logo in the corner, with EIER LABS written underneath.
The envelope contains approximately four thousand
dollars. As far as I can tell anyway, I’m not really used to
counting that much money.
“What the f--” I begin, and then a clipped German
voice from the other side of the bed says: “We trust the
retainer is still to your satisfaction?”
“Blargh!” I say and flinch away while turning to see
who it is, which gets my cords tangled up. Things are
starting to fade to black until I realise a man in a dark
suit is tut-tutting and untangling them. The cords I
mean. The world comes back. “You really must take
more care,” the man is saying. “You are a considerable
investment. Well, not considerable, but an investment.
Well, not an investment but we at Eier Labs cannot abide
waste.” He has very short blonde hair, very bright blue
eyes, and a very thin mouth.
“Okay,” I say, and then the nurse who’d injected me
with the sedative bursts into the room with a panicky-
looking doctor. “Oh NO!” cries the doctor, then covers
his mouth, then looks at the nurse who is shaking her
head. She pulls an ampoule out of her pocket, looks at
it, then claps her hand to her forehead and shows the
ampoule to the doctor. He glares at her and winds up like
he’s going to punch her out, but then they both freeze,
turn and look at the German guy, look at each other,
and then run for it. As they go, another nurse comes in
wheeling a gurney and whistling.
“Alright!” he says, smiling. “Just here to pick up the
body, isn’t it?” He stops, sees me staring at him wild-
eyed, and the German guy staring at him with a raised
eyebrow. Then he smoothly wheels the gurney out
again. I hear him go whistling up the corridor.
The German guy blinks. “Clearly, our protocols have
developed an unfortunate permeability,” he says. He
snatches the envelope from my hand, peels off what
looks depressingly like $125, and drops it in my lap.
“Good luck with...” he waves one manicured hand.
“Whatever it is that will next happen, to you.”
Then he leaves and I’m left wondering which one of
these machines can put me back into that coma.In Defence of the Coma
“She opens
her mouth,
closes it
again, opens
it, seems to
reconsider,
opens it,
and with the
swiftness
of years of
practice,
suddenly
injects
me with a
powerful
sedative.”BY
SUBJECT
ZEROThere are worse ways to get a year off, all expenses paid