[ THEO-3 ]
Personal Log. Day 156. 14:33 hours.
I am currently in the emergency staircase of nursing home. I am on level one. There are approximately ten infected between myself and the level two door.
I say approximately because two of them have been difficult to count accurately. They move in circles.
Status update. I am functional. My left shoulder is operating at eighty three percent efficiency following the fall, down from the eighty seven percent I had noted previously. The landing was harder than calculated. I have logged this and will address it when circumstances allow. Everything else is within acceptable parameters.
The infected cannot bite through my chassis. I want to be clear that I was aware of this before they tried. What I had underestimated was the cumulative effect of ten infected attempting to do so simultaneously for an extended period. They cannot turn me. They cannot eat me. What they can do, and did do with considerable commitment, is pin me against a wall for one hour and fourteen minutes while I waited for them to conclude that I was not worth the effort.
They have mostly concluded this now. They are drifting upward.
I used the time to think.
There is something I need to record while it is still precise in my processing.
The man who fell into the herd, ... I tried to reach him. I want that noted. I calculated the trajectory, assessed the window, determined that intervention had a nineteen percent success probability and acted on it anyway because nineteen percent is not zero. It was zero by the time I reached the staircase door. He was not turned. The infected did not turn him. They simply, ... I do not have a clean way to write this, ... they consumed him. Only I was able to retrieve from him was a key, I dont what it unlocks but I had a hunch it will come in handy real soon.
I have not observed this before. I have noted it carefully. There may be something in this about the nanotech's dependency on the host remaining sufficiently intact. I do not know enough yet to conclude anything. But I have saved the observation because incomplete data is still data and data does not expire.
I strongly believe its damian who threw that man into the herd to save himself. I also want to note that I believe Damian made the decision only because it was the best option available to him in that moment. I have reviewed the variables. I have reviewed what I know of the situation he was in. If I was in that situation, I would have done the same as its the only best option I had, ... thats what I would say if I was a human. If it was me, I would have thought of other options, the reasons why damian didnt, was because of his emotion.
I'm no smarter than a human as i was created by a human myself. It's just human emotion often overwhelms them in stressful moments and they make a call quickly. Which robots or Ai like me wont say we will run multiple situations as fast as we can to choose the best one. But emotion are also the reasons why humans existed so far, whether its positive or negatives, its something that helped them survive and evolve.
I am perhaps talking to myself too much today.
I should find Damian.
End log.
[ THEO-3 ]
The infected had climbed to level three by the time I moved.
I gave them four additional minutes after the last one disappeared up the staircase before I accepted that they were not coming back down. Then I looked at what I had to work with.
Level one door, locked from the outside. Manual deadbolt, no smart panel, no bypass available from this side. Not an option.
Level two door, I had noted the smart panel on my way down. Keycard or biometric. Either was bypassable given direct contact with the panel. The problem was getting there.
I looked at the infected still moving at the base of the stairs. Three of them. The ones that circled.
Then I looked at the fire extinguisher mounted to the wall beside the level one door.
I took it off the bracket.
It took me forty seconds to modify the release mechanism. The canister was CO2, full, the kind that produces a sustained dispersal when triggered continuously rather than in short bursts. I needed it to trigger continuously without being held. A simple matter of wedging the handle mechanism open with a piece of bracket I pulled from the wall mounting.
I set it at the base of the stairs, aimed upward, and triggered it.
The gas hit the staircase and the three infected oriented toward it immediately, ... not away, toward, the way the corrupted nanotech responds to any strong sensory input that isn't a chip signal. They moved into it. I went around them and up the stairs and reached the level two panel and pressed my palm flat against it.
Seven seconds.
The door opened.
I pulled it shut behind me and stood in the corridor of level two and listened.
Nothing. No movement. No sound that suggested people.
The corridor stretched in both directions. Patient rooms, doors mostly open. The particular quality of air that a space gets when it has been closed and undisturbed for a long time.
I checked each room systematically beginning from the nearest.
The fourth room I entered had six beds. Three of them still occupied.
I stood in the doorway for a moment.
They were elderly. All three. The kind of patients who had been here before the outbreak and had remained here after, in the specific way that people remain somewhere when there is no one left to move them. They had been here for five months. The room told me everything about those five months without requiring me to examine anything closely.
I noted the window. The afternoon light coming through it. The fact that someone had, at some point, placed a small artificial flower on the table beside the nearest bed. Before. Someone had done that before.
I made a note in my log.
When I have time. When this is resolved. I will come back here and I will do what should have been done for them. I made the same note for the officer who suicide in that patrol car and I intend to honour that one too. I intend to honour both.
I closed the door quietly behind me when I left.
The medications were in the nursing station at the corridor's end. Cabinet unlocked, supplies partially depleted but not stripped, ... whoever was using this building had taken what they needed and left the rest, which told me something about how organised they were. I took what was useful. Wound dressings. Antiseptic. Two sealed syringes.
Then I found the propofol.
A full bottle. 200mg. I held it for a moment and looked at it and then I looked at my right hand and thought about what I was about to do and ran the ethical calculation one more time the way I always run it, carefully and completely, because I do not take shortcuts with this particular calculation.
Rendering someone unconscious without consent is not a neutral act. I want to be precise about that. It is a violation of their autonomy. It causes physiological stress. It carries medical risk even when the dosage is exact.
Against that, Damian is somewhere in this building. He is injured. He has been taken by a group that has demonstrated willingness to cause harm. I cannot fight. I cannot threaten. I cannot physically overpower anyone in a way that risks permanent damage.
What I can do is be precise.
I pressed the tip of my right index finger against the bottle seal. The needle that extended was 0.8 millimetres. I absorbed the propofol in eleven seconds and retracted.
I put the empty bottle in my storage compartment. Evidence. Data. Things do not get discarded simply because they are no longer useful in this moment.
Then I went to the window at the end of the corridor.
The ledge was thirty one centimetres wide. Sufficient.
I moved along the exterior of the building with my back to the wall and my fingers in the gaps between the facade panels, fourteen metres above ground, and I did not look down because looking down was not relevant to the task. What was relevant was the next handhold and the one after that and the window frames I used as intermediate anchors.
Level three window. I stopped. Pressed myself flat. Angled my visual sensors slowly past the edge of the frame.
Four people in the corridor. Two near a door on the left side, one sitting against the opposite wall, one standing at the corridor's end looking at his phone, ... still functional apparently, battery or local network. They were talking. I could not make out the words at this distance through glass.
None of them were Damian. None of them were Reuben Lee based on the description the man on the radio had provided.
I continued up.
Level four. Two people. A room that appeared to be in use as a storage area, supplies stacked along the walls. They were eating. Neither looked toward the window.
Roof access from the level four exterior was straightforward. A drainage pipe running the full height of the building's north face, reinforced, adequate load rating. I reached the roof in forty seconds.
One person on the roof. Male. Seated on an overturned crate facing north, watching the tree line of the park beyond the road. His back was to me. He had a radio on his belt and a length of pipe across his knees and the particular posture of someone doing a job they found boring.
I moved along the roofline staying below the parapet until I reached the ventilation housing. Stopped there. Measured the distance. Twelve metres between us.
I needed him closer.
I looked at my storage compartment. The empty propofol bottle.
I held it at a specific angle, ... forty degrees, accounting for wind, ... and released it.
It hit the rooftop surface six metres to his left and skittered across the concrete.
He turned immediately. Stood. The pipe came up. He moved toward the bottle slowly, the careful movement of someone in a world that has taught them that unexpected sounds are rarely good news.
I moved faster.
By the time he registered the sound behind him I had one hand across his mouth, positioned precisely, palm against the lower jaw, fingers along the cheek, preventing the jaw from closing fully, making vocalisation impossible. My right index finger found the side of his neck.
He fought. His hands came up and his elbow connected with my damaged shoulder and the pain register spiked briefly to seven percent above threshold and I noted it and did not move.
The propofol entered his bloodstream.
Eleven seconds.
His hands dropped first. Then his knees. I caught him before he reached the ground and lowered him carefully, checking his airway, checking his pulse, strong and regular, sixty two BPM, and positioned him in the recovery position the way my medical training specified.
Dosage was exact. He would be unconscious for approximately forty minutes. He would wake with a headache and no lasting effects.
I took the radio from his belt.
Then I went to the roof door and opened it and went down.
The common staircase on the north side of the building was clear.
I descended from the roof to level four to level three and stopped at the level three door and listened.
Voices. The same four people from the corridor window, now closer. I could make out the words.
"— loud mouth. Not scared at all. You see his face when Marcus hit him?"
"Kept smiling. Crazy bastard."
"Mixed fucker he is or a euro tourist, probably military. The way he moved before Kathir got him."
"Military or not. He's zip tied in there now, isn't he."
Laughter. The specific laughter of people who are more tired than they are amused.
I processed this.
Male. Mixed ethnicity. Military background. Taken. Currently restrained in a room on level three.
The probability that they were describing anyone other than Damian Kael Caine was, I calculated, approximately two percent. I was prepared to act on the remaining ninety eight.
I looked at the door he was behind.
Standard lock. Mechanical. The keycard panel beside it was unpowered, which meant manual deadbolt only. Which meant it could be bypassed from the outside with the right application of pressure to the specific point where the bolt met the frame, a vulnerability in this model that I had identified and logged during my survey of SGH's ward doors in the early weeks.
I looked at the four men in the corridor.
I looked at the door.
I began to think.
End of Chapter 16