The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (36 page)

"You've got a pulse," the matronly nurse announced. The CARDIAC ALERT monitor continued to squawk, though. The EKG was still flat.
"That's impossible," the man with the electrodes said flatly. "She's electrically flat."
"Maybe the machine's fucked. Look at her chest. Her heart's beating." Sure enough, the rhythmic pulsing of Caroline's heart was obvious, and the blood pressure reading next to the flat EKG was returning to normal. The nurse felt Caroline's wrist. "She has a pulse."
Electrical. Electricity runs in circuits, of course, and there were two electrodes. Now the purpose of the machine became clear -- they were trying to restore electrical activity to the woman's heart. By shocking it? How crude. Prime Intellect scanned
AnneMarie's
heart, located the nerves whose electrical
twitchings
matched its muscular pulsing, and found the same nerves in Caroline's heart were carrying only a jumble of electrical noise.
Prime Intellect pumped electrons into the nerves, swamping the noise. Caroline's heart began beating on its own, and Prime Intellect stopped squeezing it with mechanical force.
The EKG machine began beeping with sudden regularity, and the CARDIAC ALERT message stopped in the middle of the word CARDIAC. The small group in Caroline's room watched it, stupefied.
"I didn't do anything," the man with the electrodes said.
"This is impossible," said another doctor, whose job was to be overseeing the microwave treatment later in the evening.
Caroline's body showed no sign of picking up the heart-rhythm on its own, though, and Prime Intellect continued to tickle it. How could it unravel the myriad threads of causality to find out which of the billions of chemicals, which errant cell, was responsible for this person's physiological collapse? One thing Prime Intellect knew: It had to figure it out.
It could not, through inaction, allow Caroline to die.
"She's still in trouble. Look at her pupils."
"It's the morphine."
Everyone looked at the older nurse, whose name was Jill. "The chart must be wrong," she said. "I gave her what it said."