Doctors (2) » Dr. A

EXODUS (3) » SANDRA

After stopping in Tulsa and Pittsburgh — I only have ten hours to go. The thirty predicted hours became only twenty-four with a little motivation and a lot of luck. I combined that with about four hours of sleep at each stop. It is sixty hours since my last dialysis session ended on Friday. Over a weekend, sixty-four is the norm for me, but adding an extra day or so will just make me a bit tired. I have done as many as four days before when I was relocated, especially the San Diego to Redding move took a long time to pack, drive, and unpack.

It is summer, dark for most of the trip, and the route I am taking takes me north of Manhattan, so the last ten hours take only eight. I did lose a total of three hours to time zone changes, so my sixtyeight hours looks like seventy-one on the clock. I have a few hours to sleep before Trade Joe’s opens.

The wine section is somewhat large — but I am guessing I should be looking in the “Two-buck Chuck” portion. There is no cohort number, but all of the bottles of red wine (hah) say “Get your cape and join the 52 hunters on the other side of the stone gate”. Obscure, tiny, and written in heavily diluted blood. I may be too tired to decipher this one.

- 141 -

- 142 -

REQUESTS » DR. A.

“Mark, you said «We win or they die?» — You and I ‘win’ in some way or everyone else dies?”

“Yes”

“I wish you would say a little more than that.” I am getting pretty frustrated by his terseness. It is not like him to be this terse.

“Yes, either we work out a reasonable solution for the thirty five thousand homeless so they are safe, warm, dry, watered, and fed going into their future, or we don’t. If we don’t, then those homeless will die or live miserable lives. Lives you and most dialysis patients would not pick if given a choice. Lives people would not consider fair if society did not do its best to prevent… and those people ended up with that life because of a coin toss.

So, if we don’t work out a solution for them, I will not work out a solution for the thirty five thousand dialysis patients that are now at risk due to a ‘resource shortage’.”

“There is not a resource shortage related to dialysis. We have been building up infrastructure for decades. There are thousands of clinics and hundreds of thousands of workers, machines, and patients.”

“And how many vampires?”

“Tens of thousands. We discussed this months ago.”

“And which of these ‘clinics’, ‘workers’, ‘patients’, ‘machines’, and ‘vampires’ is the limiting quantity?”

“Vampires are clearly the most limiting, although it takes a while

- 143 -

to train workers.”

“So tens of thousands of vampires are doing dialysis for hundreds of thousands of patients. Say ten patients per vampire. What would happen if ten thousand vampires stopped showing up for dialysis”

“They would cease to be. ”

“OK… they would cease to be. But what else would happen?”

“A hundred thousand patients would need to be reallocated to other vampires and clinics.”

“Would that actually work? Have you tried increasing patientper-vampire ratios that high? You would be asking a vampire to spend additional time in dialysis that they don’t need to survive. My guess is that it also does not work: if you could have had fewer supervampires enslaved for 24 hours every day, I suspect you would have gone that route. It would enable one vampire to support hundreds of patient, so you could have had much fewer vampires, more redundancy, more secrecy, and other benefits. It would not be morally very nice, but I recall you saying «Undead don’t have many rights, including the right to complain».”

“Yes, I am not aware that increasing patient-to-vampire works. It could have been tried but that is above my pay grade. So assuming it does not work, there are thirty five thousand — ”

“A hundred thousand in the current scenario”

“Right. There are a hundred thousand patients no longer getting dialysis. In a few weeks after dialysis is no longer viable for them they will die — ”

“Or a bit longer if they share dialysis with other patients, but that

- 144 -