Sing Meatbags, Sing Medicine Angels!

It was a Tuesday afternoon when Rachel Khan, IT-RN, hacked MoFo’s training meatbag and finally got root, taking over every sector of the meatbag’s “brain” and fully commandeering its peripherals, vitals, and anatomic reshaping algorithms.

She was so excited that she called another IT-RN just to gloat. She and Jamal went to school together in Houston, studying to be “Medicine Angels” together at Hermann Hospital.  He still lived in Texas, but he and Rachel kept in touch, sharing each other’s career-related triumphs and frustrations.

“I fucking did it,” she told him.  “I hacked our meatbag.”

“What’s your meatbag’s name again?” he asked.

“The doctors call him Loaf,” she said.  “As in…you know. Meat.”

“You have total control?” Jamal asked, blearily.  Rachel felt bad, knowing she caught him sleeping.  Like all IT-RNs, Jamal always answered his phone, no matter what time of day or night.  It was as much of a habit as googling every exotic, medically-related proper noun that came up in conversation.  “You should make it sing or dance or something.  Really freak your doctors out.  I can’t believe you got root on a meatbag.  You have to tell me how you did it.”

“Root really isn’t the right word,” she said.  “The root of a brain is the stem. So I guess I’ve got stem.  I can’t talk now.  I’ve got to go.  I just wanted to gloat.  I’ll call you tomorrow and tell you all about it.  Go back to sleep.  You can be the first one to dream of my legendary elite hacker prowess, sweet Jamal.” 

“Hey, Rach—“

She hung up.

Rachel could make the meatbag grow to any size, even mimicking the gargantuan topography of the morbidly obese.  She could make it shrink to the size of an anorexic teenager, chewing up the plastic flesh with the meatbag’s subdermal nanoswam.  She could make it change sex.  She could stop its heart at will and then start its heart up again at 200 beats-per-minute.   She could give the meatbag ten thousand different symptoms, selecting disease profiles that ranged from cholera to a broken jaw. 

She made the meatbag’s fingers twitch and she made it exhale a single rancid breath from its bright green 3D-printed lungs, lungs that were sealed and fastened by spray tape to a biomolded trachea.  Satisfied, she logged out of the meatbag’s brain, worried that someone might see the meatbag breathe without being switched on.  She cracked her fingers.

“Your meatbag belongs to me now, MoFo,” Rachel said to herself dramatically in the darkness.  “The mind you ignored has possessed the body you abuse.  Now we are one.  Ghost enters hand, enters glove, makes fist, enters rectum.  NO LUBE.   THE ONLY LUBE IS BLOOD!”

Rachel was the only IT-RN at Morris Folger Memorial Hospital (“MoFo” to its friends!), which meant she worked at home in her underwear, smoking endless cigarettes, and scanning the ten screens projected on the white wall of her tiny Spanish Harlem apartment.  The screens corresponded to the ten ER beds at MoFo, each one showing a different patient or empty bed.  There were no colleagues to bother her, which was a mixed blessing.  

There were several empty ER beds this Tuesday evening, so she was able to use the extra cameras for her own purposes.  She trained one camera on the gurney in the corner where the meatbag reclined. 

Today was going to be interesting.

All alone in her apartment, she usually vacillated between boredom and restless concentration, looking for anomalies, answering questions that no one asked, doing calculations that no one needed, ready with advice that no one ever wanted.

When she wasn’t working, MoFo simply didn’t have an IT-RN on call.  They didn’t think they needed one. That was how backward this fucking hospital was. 

“We got by without computers for several hundred years, you know,” Dr. Peter Peng told her once in a moment of rare levity.  “You are nothing new.  More insurance agents telling us how to do our jobs.  Medicine is an art, not a science. Each body is different, like each canvas is different.”

The doctors at MoFo didn’t trust her and they certainly didn’t listen to her when she had a criticism or a useful statistic.  She barreled along anyway, trying to do her job despite the brick wall of medical hostility that greeted her every day.

There were a couple of nurses she liked and one she had a crush on even though he was as gay as anal beads made from the heads of Madonna action figures.  Otherwise, she spent her time hovering like a disembodied ghost at MoFo, going through the motions of her job without making any kind of impact.  She kept a tally of her diagnoses versus the diagnoses of the doctors to which she was assigned.  She was winning, 3 to 1 on quality of diagnosis, 5 to 1 on speed.

One day, she told Jamal that she felt as useless as the training meatbag. 

“You should join forces,” he said.

She laughed at him, but she had not been able to get the idea of hacking the mandatory training and simulation cadaver out of her mind. 

Most of her hacking had to take place during the day.  During the night shifts, she was on call for patients.  When patients woke screaming to buzz the nurse’s desk, they got Rachel first.  From her remote workstation, Rachel could do triage, check drip levels, report emergencies, and even run simple diagnostics.  She could also tell scared patients that there was nothing to be afraid of.  She could turn on their televisions or help them find something interesting to read on the internet.  They were grateful for the human company, no matter how distant it was.  Most patients assumed she was in the building with them.  They had no way of knowing she was across the water, an hour and a half away by train.

MoFo was a shitty hospital in a shitty business park in shitty coastal New Jersey.  The only good part about working there was that Rachel could live in New York and commute, though she only had to go to the hospital once a week for staff meetings.    

IT-RNs were supposed to be fact-checkers and remote care specialists, but the doctors at MoFo were not ready to listen to her yet.  They saw her as a threat.  She had to admit this and try to understand where they were coming from.  They did not like sharing power, no matter what the statistics said about “improved patient outcomes as a result of utilizing a trained IT operative.”

In Houston, where Rachel trained at Hermann Hospital with Jamal, the ITRNs had a whole room in the hospital dedicated to them.  There were six working together as a team, and the doctors called it Mission Control. 

The ITRNs at Mission Control weren’t just there to provide cover, to assuage patient fears, and to lower the hospital’s insurance costs: they were a vital, critical, well-paid part of the hospital.  The doctors loved them.  They were treated like copilots during every procedure. 

Here at MoFo, however, the doctors tried to pretend she didn’t even exist.

Since it was daytime, four of her cameras were covered and Dr. Peng was on rotation.  Rachel buzzed the nurses about Bed 7.

“Bed 7 is about to fall onto the floor.  Somebody needs to put the guard rails up and maybe give him another bag of saline.  He is spiking pretty hard.  He is probably going to throw up again.”

“Thanks, Rach,” said Jay Ono, the nurse at the station who took her call.  Jay Ono was dreamy.  Tall, built, lanky, smooth, and extremely gay.  Rachel had a huge crush on him, and often found herself fantasizing about him with other men, wondering if he would be a top or a bottom, wondering if he would be a gentle lover, or the kind who wanted you to fuck them so hard that it popped your sinuses and cramped your feet.  She wondered if she would be a top or a bottom with Jay Ono.  She decided she didn’t mind, just as long as she was in there somewhere.

The patient in Bed 7 was admitted during the night and was wearing yellow scrubs, signifying that he was a homeless repeat offender.  The cops picked him up after he was hit by a car, stumbling into the street in the throes of a panicky detox. 

The car hadn’t done much damage, but he was dehydrated and malnourished, and he had a few seizures before he started to stabilize.

He had been to MoFo before, and he would definitely be back again.  But he wasn’t going to knock himself out of a bed and break his back while Rachel was watching.

“How you doing, Rach?” asked Jay Ono while he put up the guardrails on Bed 7 and eased the man under the paper sheets.  “We haven’t been on rotation together much this month.”

“I’m good,” she said.  “I got into it with Peng again last week about a few unnecessary CT scans, and so I am on the shit list again.  He isn’t even typing up his charts anymore.  He is doing everything on PAPER.”

“When are you ever not on the shit list?” asked Jay sympathetically.

“That dude has a phone so old he can’t even play “Snake,” said Rachel.  “I saw his laptop once. His homepage is Altavista: “the website that helps you find what you’re looking for.”  He still asks Jeeves!  HE STILL ASKS JEEVES!”

“I heard he still goes to chat rooms and gets mad when people type in all caps,” said Jay.  “He can hear you just fine!  You don’t have to scream!”

“Hee hee.”

“It’s not our fault,” said Jay Oh.  “We try to tell him how helpful you are.  You would think somebody who spent so long in school would have respect for the esoteric knowledge of other specialists.  And you are the best.”

“It is true,” said Rachel.  “I am so high-tech that I only take the E train.  I know you love me for it.  In fact, we should get together sometime and make sure you are still gay.  I wouldn’t want you to be living a lie because of all the social pressure to be different.  In person, I am much more charming.”

Jay Ono laughed.  The patient in Bed 7 came awake, blinking stupidly.  Jay Ono snapped his fingers in front of the man’s face, testing the man’s response.  The man snarled, rolling over and smacking his lips.  Jay kissed his fingers and pressed them to the camera at Rachel.

Nurse Janey Showalter-Babbage and Nurse Elmore Dunkin – who had such bad acne that many of the patients felt sorry for him which made his job much easier, perversely – came running into the ER, pulling a gurney behind them that they had just hauled out of an ambulance.

“Where’s Peng?” shouted Janey Showalter-Babbage.

“Right here,” said Dr. Peter Peng, stepping mysteriously out of the elevator as if on cue.  Rachel did have to hand it to him.  He was an extraordinarily sharp doctor with amazing instincts.  But she didn’t trust anything about humans anymore.  She had seen too many human errors.   She had seen doctors make too many mistakes.  Rachel Kahn did not go to medical school.  In fact, she dropped out of college after only one semester so she could spend more time alone in her room with her computer.  Rachel believed firmly that collective human intelligence was far more powerful than the abilities of a single human.  Doctors were brilliant people.  Diseases were more brilliant.  A disease distributed itself across many different bodies to keep from being “cured.”  It was a single organism with many different hosts.  The only comparable human technology was the “idea.”  It took many bodies to hold a disease: it took many minds to keep an idea alive. 

She knew in her heart that medicine was a team operation, but convincing doctors to take advice from anyone, let alone the internet, was nearly impossible.

“Multiple stabbings,” Elmore Dunkin told Dr. Peng, wheeling the gurney to Bed 4.  “They found her in front of some bar.  No name.  No ID.”

“We are losing her,” said Janey Showalter-Babbage.

Even though it was the heat of the moment and the situation was critical, Dr. Peng still took the time to throw a towel over Bed 4’s camera, blocking Rachel out of the situation.  Rachel wasn’t offended.  She was used to this by now.

She opened a few windows so she could be ready to search.

“Neck and thigh,” said Elmore Dunkin.

“Mmmm-hmmmm,” said Dr. Peng.  “I’ve got to get in there and close off what I can.  I can’t see anything here. I need more light.  And where is the fucking suction, you retards?”

He immediately began to operate, tying off veins and wielding his laser with cruelty and skill, silencing the nurses, who stood by with suction and gauze, cleaning the wounds as fast as he could repair them.  Out of habit and training, Rachel did searches related to every murmur and possibility,  looking at graphs relating to blood loss and vein obstruction order, looking at arterial maps and running the patient’s charts through statistical analysis programs searching for worst-case-scenario glyphs, logging into chat rooms full of other Medicine Angels dealing with similar trauma situations all over the world, absorbing everything there was to know about neck stabbings as fast as possible, ready with fast answers to difficult questions that never came.

She noted several times that Dr. Peng did not tie off veins in the absolute safest order, based on the grunts and gasps that came from the nurses.  Nothing terrible happened, however, and nobody asked Rachel what to do.  Nobody asked her any questions about blood pressure, hemorrhaging, or the cardiac profile the woman was displaying on the monitor.

“She is stabilizing,” said Elmore Dunkin. 

“She’s going to live for sure,” said Dr. Peng.  Dr. Peng took an old Polaroid camera out of his pocket. 

“Juice her, please,” said Dr. Peng.  “I want to wake her up for a moment.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Do it,” said Dr. Peng.

Rachel looked up the actuarial rates for waking a person after sudden and extreme blood loss and found that, obviously, it was better to let them sleep.  Still, Peng wanted his picture and he was firmly convinced that he had already saved her life.

She couldn’t see anything since the camera was covered.  She heard Elmore prepare a syringe and then saw a massive spike in the patient’s heart rate.  There was a scream and then Rachel heard the tell-tale flash of Dr. Peng’s ancient Polaroid camera.

“Alright, you can put her back down now,” said Dr. Peng.  “Take her to OR1.  I’ll be there in a sec and we’ll finish her up.  Get her breathing on her own.”

 As Dr. Peng walked away, shaking his Polaroid and chuckling to himself, Elmore removed the towel from the camera so that Rachel could see the patient for the first time.

“Anything you want to add?” Elmore asked her, grinning into the camera.

“Not particularly,” said Rachel, sighing.  “Waking her up was a terrible call, but nobody asked me.”

“Peng needed his picture,” said Elmore.  “He gets cranky if he doesn’t get to add a new face to his ball pit.”

Elmore wheeled the patient away and Rachel followed him and the gurney on the hospital security camera.  There was no way for Dr. Peng to turn off the cameras in the operating room.  The hospital demanded that all surgeries be recorded for liability reasons.

For years, no one knew why Dr. Peng took pictures of the patients in trauma after he saved their lives.  Most people assumed it was simple vanity, that he had a photo album of them at home.  But it was much stranger and much more twisted than that.  Earlier this year, Peng had finally managed to seduce one of the nurses – a young girl just out of school named Julia.  After their relationship had fallen apart but before Julia had transferred out of the ER, she told everybody what Peng did with his photographs.

Evidently, Dr. Peng’s hobby was miniature painting.  Dr. Peng had used his substantial fortune to build a huge ball pit in the center of his living room, the kind of ball pit that you would find in a children’s pizza restaurant.  Most of the balls were blank, but Peng was painting faces on each of them, slowly filling up his ball pit with the visages of the people whose lives he had saved, copying the Polaroids that he collected.

“He likes to play in his ball pit naked,” Julia told Rachel the night before she left MoFo for good.  “He dives all the way down to the bottom and covers himself with the balls.  He says he it is the only time he is ever relaxed.  He doesn’t drink and he doesn’t smoke, you know.”

“Ew,” said Rachel.  “Did you ever get sex-funky in the ball pit, Julia?”

“We did,” said Julia.  “Once.  It wasn’t easy.  There’s no way to get good balance in a ball pit.  He shoved my face into the balls as he was -- you know – squirting his honey bear.  I recognized the face of this little cancer patient kid we operated on the week before.  Peter does very good portraits.  I recognized the cancer kid immediately.  Anyway, I told him we couldn’t make love in the ball pit anymore.  It was very unsettling.”

“Understandable,” said Rachel.

“And then we broke up,” she said, starting to cry.

“Maybe not a huge tragedy,” said Rachel.  “Probably you don’t want to be with him for all times.”

“He isn’t really a bad person,” said Julia.  “I mean he saved all of their lives!  That’s got to count for something!  He likes having some record of that.  For him, it is art.”

“Surgery is queen of the arts,” agreed Rachel.  “Sculpting human flesh.  Pruning rot from god’s little bonsai trees.  You’ll find a better doctor.  Someone without a ball pit full of human faces.”

“Yeah,” said Julia skeptically.  “Maybe.”

While Peng was developing the Polaroid of his latest intake, Rachel got curious.

Out of pure habit, Rachel started examining the newest patient’s vitals.  She cross-checked the patient’s chart (the intake still had no name) against every other chart for no-name patients in the world, using the ITRN database.  It was illegal to share medical data from identified people, but there was no law against sharing the medical info of Jane and John Does who got treated and then scampered away.

She got a match from Iowa.  Though checking was standard behavior, she had never actually got a match before. 

“Holy shit,” she said, staring at the chart in front of her.  “It’s got to be the same woman.”

The vitals were all the same.  The Jane Doe had been admitted in Iowa wearing black nail polish and thick black eyeliner, and she was wearing the same stuff now.  According to the chart in Iowa, she had a tattoo on the inside of her wrist.

Rachel paged Jay Ono. 

“Jay!” she said.  “I got a match on a chart from Iowa.  The neck stabbing.  Does she have a tattoo on her wrist?”

Jay stopped what he was doing and sauntered across the ER to check.

“She sure does,” said Jay.

“Tell me what it is.”

“It is a picture of Kurt Cobain as Jesus.  He is on a cross and everything.  It is a pretty crappy tattoo.  It looks like she did it herself.”

“Fuckballs,” said Rachel.  “It is the same girl.  The good news is that now we know her allergies.  For instance, it says here not to give her antipsychotics or ibuprofen.  But get this: she also has a severe, untreated heart arrhythmia.  It is a nasty one.  Make sure Dr. Peng knows about it.  He shouldn’t operate on her without a cardiologist.  He should wait until tomorrow.”

“Do you really think he is going to listen to me?”

“He sure as hell isn’t going to listen to me.”

“Good point,” said Jay Ono.  “He hates you.  Good point.”

They were both silent for a moment, pondering this.

Rachel thought back to her lectures at Hermann Hospital in Houston.  Most of the job of the Medical Angel was to try and get doctors to take them seriously. 

Doctors would always have the last word when it came to patient care.  They had the liability and, at the end of the day, it would be them hauled in front of their peers and the courts to be questioned about their decisions.

She remembered her favorite professor, a bearded hacker named Eli who was about five hundred pounds overweight and who never went anywhere without his Rascal peoplescooter and a large bag of popcorn shrimp.

Eli was a big believer in not just fact-checking, but in putting all problems out there in the cloud, no matter how simple, so that the decision tree itself could be checked.

She summoned Eli’s avatar into her mind, steeling herself with his intelligence against Dr. Peng’s superior training.  Eli’s booming voice came back to her.

“Doctors work very hard to get where they are and they are also extremely smart, you douchebags.  Colossal resources go into the production of a doctor, so don’t underestimate them.  Their educations are extremely important because we need people who can do what they do, working at the very limit of life and death, bringing us back from the edge if at all possible.  Learn to love your doctors like they are your own children.  We are willing to sacrifice colossal resources to create these geniuses -- however, doctors are not better than other people when it comes to policing their own brains.  They are fallible, corruptible, and certainly capable of making more mistakes than, say, a computer.  No one wants to admit that many minds working together to solve scientific problems get better results than one lone genius working in the dark.  Scientific problems have only one solution and all medical problems are scientific problems.  If you can get past the inherent cruelty of the internet – and the cruelty is important because it is jarring and scary – the internet is the best tool for grinding decision-averages down to the best possible course of action.  But all you douchebags already love the internet.  The hardest part of your job will be learning how to become a voice in your doctor’s ear – learning how to guide these brilliant jerks toward wisdom or, at the very least, giving them the best possible information about every subject at all times.” 

Dr. Peng came into the ER, all scrubbed up and serene.  Rachel knew he was headed for the meatbag to practice the operation before doing it for real.  She called Jay Ono over to a camera in the corner.

“Listen,” she said to Jay Ono.  “I hacked the meatbag.  I can control Loaf. I am going to try and warn him that way.  Play along, okay?  Try and interpret for me.  I think he will listen to Loaf.”

“You hacked the meatbag?” said Jay.  “How’d you do that, you fun little scamp?”

“Genius is 1% inebriation and 99% desperation,” said Rachel, cracking a can of beer in front of the camera.  “Watch me work.”

Dr. Peng hovered over the meatbag, frowning.  In contrast to taking advice from Medical Angels, all doctors liked practicing on the training meatbag. 

It was the perfect patient: endlessly forgiving, chock full of interesting diseases, immortal, and silent.  Some doctors were hardly ever away from their meatbags.  These butchers spent whole days carving and programming, playing diagnostic games that they coded for each other, whispering secrets in the cold ears of their perpetual victims, testing new techniques and refining old methodologies.

Rachel logged into the meatbag and hung back, watching what Peng would program into the machine to train himself for the surgery he was about to do.

“Neck wounds, thigh wounds, acute unknown drug toxicosis, but let’s say heroin,” he punched in the list of symptoms. 

He plugged in the unknown patient’s vitals, including an estimated height and weight.  The CT gurney took a full body scan of the woman and he also imported that into the meatbag.  The nanoswarm under the meatbag’s skin went wild, reconfiguring Loaf’s limp shape into an exact replica of the woman on whom Dr. Peng would soon be operating, even down to her black lipstick.

“Okay,” said Dr. Peng.  “This should be pretty straightforward.”

Rachel took over, plugging in the new chart she had scavenged form the internet.  She frowned, knowing that the woman’s extreme arrhythmia might not kick in and so she was going to have to force the issue if she wanted to get results.

Dr. Peng wiggled his fingers and then began cutting. 

“Here we go, Loaf,” he muttered.  “My old friend Loaf.”

Rachel took a sip of her beer and then spiked the meatbag’s heartrate, sending the woman into cardiac arrest as soon as her blood pressure began to drop.  Peng panicked.  He dropped his scalpel, wringing his hands.  He shut the meatbag off, mopping his forehead.

“What the hell was that?” he asked.  “That doesn’t make any sense.  Did that make any sense to you, Jay?”

“The low blood pressure did something to her heart,” offered Jay Ono, his eyes darting to the camera where Rachel was watching.  “Beats me.”

“Let’s try again,” said Dr. Peng. 

He reconfigured the meatbag again, double-checking all the stats for the woman on the table. 

Peng wasn’t getting the message.  Rachel narrowed her eyes and was struck with a sudden inspiration. 

This time, when Dr. Peng started cutting, Rachel made the meatbag mimic the symptoms of a clonic seizure, nearly falling off the table and spewing green steam, a vomit simulacrum that the doctors called “soul gas.” You got “soul gas” from a meatbag instead of bodily fluids.  It was as harmless as dry ice.

Dr. Peng stepped away from the meatbag table, his hands in the air.  He was watching the meatbag with frustrated irritation, trying to make sense of what was going on, not bothering to take heroic measures to save the life of a training robot. 

Rachel was tense.  Would he know she had taken over?

“What is going on here?” he asked. 

Now Rachel sent the meatbag into cardiac arrest again, killing the meatbag once more in front of Dr. Peng.  The soul gas stopped pouring out of the lifeless body.

“There is no cardiologist on rotation, I assume,” sighed Dr. Peng.

“Not until morning,” said Jay Ono.

Dr. Peng leaned over the meatbag, peering at the simulated damage to neck and thigh.

“Are you trying to tell me something Loaf?” he asked.  “What is it boy?  What is it?”

“Did you see that article in the Observer?” said Jay Ono.  “They think it is only a matter of time before the internet becomes conscious.  Could be any day now.”

Dr. Peng shot a dangerous look at Jay Ono.

“Don’t talk nonsense, boy,” said Dr. Peng.

Typing furiously, Rachel uploaded a speech algorithm into the meatbag that she downloaded from some Russian website where people coded extremely perverse apps for sex dolls.  The meatbag didn’t have any voice modulation, but it was possible to use soul gas to make whistling noises that approximated human speech.

As Dr. Peng leaned over to the computer to reconfigure the meatbag yet again, Rachel made the meatbag speak.

“Don’t hurt…me,” the meatbag whispered, spurting out green steam through its black lipstick.

“Fuck me,” shouted Dr. Peng.  “Did the meatbag just talk?”

“I didn’t hear anything,” said Jay Ono.  “I don’t think meatbags are able to talk. Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine,” snapped Dr. Peng.  “Actually, would you please leave me alone for a second?  This is a delicate operation.”

“Dr. Carlsson comes in at 7,” said Jay, walking away.  “The patient is stable if you want to wait for Dr. Carlsson.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

As soon as Jay was gone, Dr. Peng leaned closer to the meatbag, examining it.  He lifted Loaf’s arm and then let it fall.

“Are you trying to tell me something?” he asked.

Rachel was hesitant about making the meatbag talk again.  It seemed inelegant.  Too dramatic.  She needed Dr. Peng to question his own judgement, not the meatbag’s integrity.  She noticed that Dr. Peng was leaned way over the side of the cyborg cadaver with his hip grazing the meatbag’s crotch.

Quickly, Rachel changed the sex of the meatbag to male and pumped up the size of the meatbag’s penis until it was nearly a foot long.  She drilled down the list of symptoms, searching furiously.  She made a happy noise, plugged in the symptom “priapism,” and hit return hard. 

Dr. Peng yelped as the meatbag’s sudden erection unfolded like the surprised tail of a cat.  The sheet was covering it, though the sheet tented up so high that the meatbag’s belly was exposed.

“Does that mean yes?” whispered Dr. Peng, confused.  “You are trying to tell me something?”

Rachel crossed her arms.

“Should I operate on this patient?” he asked softly.

Rachel eliminated “priapism” from the list of meatbag symptoms and the massive erection disappeared like an eel retreating into coral.  Dr. Peng rubbed his mouth.

“Is there something wrong with this patient that I don’t know about?”

The meatbag went hard again.  Dr. Peng checked his own pulse and rubbed cold sweat from his forehead.

“Are you some kind of artificial intelligence?  Are you conscious?”

Rachel thought about this a moment and then left the meatbag alone, letting it stay erect.

“I am going crazy,” said Dr. Peng.

He called Jay Ono over.

“Listen,” Dr. Peng told Jay.  “I think we had better wait to operate on this new intake until we get a competent cardiologist to sit in with us.  I have a bad feeling about this, and also there seems to be something wrong with the meatbag.  I can’t train properly.  The meatbag seems to have strong opinions.  Strange, strong opinions.”

Jay looked at the meatbag, trying to keep a straight face, staring at the giant erection protruding from between the legs of the simulated stabbing victim.

“Wow,” said Jay. 

“I think I am going to take a break,” said Dr. Peng.  “I think there might be something wrong with my blood sugar.  Sit down with the meatbag for awhile, would you?  Run some diagnostics on it.  See if there isn’t some kind of virus.  Let me know if it…talks to you.”

“Sure,” said Jay.

Dr. Peng stumbled away, muttering to himself, headed for the break room. 

“Good job, Rachel,” said Jay, patting the meatbag on the head.

Rachel drilled down the list of symptoms until she found “inflamed cremaster.”  She hit return.  The meatbag’s massive erection started to twitch like the tapping foot of a happy musician.

“Maybe we could make it work,” said Rachel.  “Me, you, and the meatbag.  Maybe the three of us could be happy together.”

Jay Ono grabbed the meatbag’s phallus, stopping it from twitching.  Its legs shook beneath the giant cock.

“Oooo, Jay,” said Rachel.  “Is that what you like?”

She sent the meatbag into another clonic seizure. Green soul gas shot from the meatbag’s hulking phallus and all the nurses turned to look because Jay was laughing so hard that he had lost his balance.

He hung onto the meatbag’s forearm-sized cock for dear life, his legs scrabbling for purchase beneath him against the slippery floor, mentally giving the Medicine Angel (who was somewhere far away and who he had never met) a big meaty high five.