| Volume 1, Issue 1, January 31, 2006 | |
© 2004 Michael Shevlin | Doctor Sam by David Redd |
I sank needle-tipped buckyfibers into the boy's naked chest, connecting the Steel Diagnostician to his metabolic system. Outside the transparent dome of my floater, fragmentary blue sky parted the storm-clouds that had forced my landing. Now that the turbulence had passed, I should resume my flight back to the city, but the boy's sickness demanded my attention. He had been brought to me pale and shivering, weak-muscled, although not flinching when I inserted the sensor needles. All he knew about me was that I was Doctor Sam; all I knew about him was that he was half-grown, and sick. His mother's anxious face peered into my small cockpit as the boy squatted within the fiber-net, and the black upright cylinder of the Steel Diagnostician clicked and flashed LCD colors to reassure me that it was busy. Why was I doing this, checking over a scrawny silent boy in a forest community not even on my list? On my tour, I had made little use of my own medical skills, merely serving the Steel Diagnostician as it assessed the villages. But here, in this unrecorded huddle of tree-dwellings discovered by accident, treating this sick boy was an act of my own free will. Read the entire story:Doctor Sam (pdf)
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