She pulled back the sheet.
Mara flinched.
Bohannon’s eyes widened. “Lord have mercy. What is it?”
On the gurney lay the faceless body of a young black man. Apart from the circuitry and filaments nested in the open skull, the body appeared to be that of a college-bound man. A series of rips and gouges wrapped around the left side of his torso, but the skin looked more like crumpled Mylar than human skin. There was no bruising, no blood or meaty puckering, just damage that looked antiseptic, inorganic. A broken machine after a fender bender. One particularly deep gouge beneath the left nipple exposed a metallic rib. His hips and legs lay at an unnatural angle, slightly off-kilter from the rest of his frame.
Jazz shrugged. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was a robot of some kind.”
“Where’ s his face?” Mara asked without taking her eyes off the gurney.
“Oh, it’s down here.” Jazz reached under the sheet at the foot of the gurney and pulled out what looked like a mask.
Mara reached for it. “Is it all right if I look at it?”
“Be my guest.” Jazz walked around the gurney and handed it to her. She turned to Bohannon and said, “I have to get back to the ER. You guys are welcome to stay down here as long as you like. But I think what the front office guys really want you to do is roll this thing out of here, if that’s at all possible.”
“I understand that this is a very strange situation, but I’m not sure I understand the level of anxiety your administrators feel about this. Obviously this is some kind of mechanical device that got damaged in traffic. What’s the big deal?” Bohannon asked.
“Hospital administrators live in constant fear of lawsuits. Anything out of the ordinary sets off all kinds of alarm bells around here.” Jazz stopped next to the door and hit her head with the heel of her hand. “Oh, I almost forgot.” She reached into the front pocket of her scrubs and pulled out a wallet. “The robot was carrying this wallet. He has a driver’s license, several credit cards and a college ID in there. The photos look like that face Mara’s holding in her hands. His name was Cameron Lee.”
“So you’re saying this is a person?” Mara asked, while slowly turning the mask in her hands.
Jazz shook her head. “No, I didn’t say that. I said it was a robot with a wallet. For all I know, the cards and ID are as artificial as it is. If it were a person, it would be in the morgue right now.”
CHAPTER 18
The inside of the mask—the face of the young man who lay on the gurney—appeared scored with thousands, perhaps millions, of fine lines configured in an intricate web that covered its surface. Running a thumb over them, Mara could not detect any ridges; they were that fine. Not something easily manufactured, without the use of sophisticated lasers and software, or maybe something even more advanced. Turning it over, she looked at the face. The detail was amazing. The light brown skin had pores, follicles of fine hair on the upper cheeks, thicker dark stubble as it approached the jawline. Its eyelids were closed. She grazed the eyelashes with a finger. They felt real. So did the thick brows.
She flipped the faceplate over again and looked at the inside of its eyelids. Turning back toward the gurney, she peered into the jumble of exposed filaments and components in its head. “There doesn’t appear to be any obvious mechanism for the eyes, like a camera or a light sensor of some type that would align behind these eyelids,” she said.
Bohannon was examining the contents of Cameron Lee’s wallet and looked up. “Hold on a minute.” The detective grabbed his phone and scrolled on the screen with a thumb. “I want to check to see if this guy is on the passenger list.”
“He is. I remember the name.” Mara held up the mask and pointed to the faceless body. “There are no real eyes in his head. How can he see?”
“You are trying to figure out how it works?”
“Just curious. This technology is decades beyond anything we have, maybe even centuries ahead, especially if you consider that he is probably more than a mere robot. I mean, he might be a real person.”
“What are you talking about, a real person?”
“This robot had a counterpart in our realm, a real living human being