King of All I Survey-Chapter 153: Inside the Health First Hospital

In Chilpancingo, soldiers pushed wheelchairs toward the front door of the Health First Hospital, passing through an open corridor between rows of other soldiers. Some children walked under their own power, clutching their mothers’ hands. Some mothers, refusing to let the soldiers get close to their children, followed along at a little distance. Maribel and Susan had both been released. The commanding officer apologized to both of them sincerely, as he had been ordered to do. Then strode to meet the incoming group to apologize to them as well. freёnovelkiss-com

As soon as she saw that her sister was unhurt, Maribel rushed back to the people she had gathered at a regular hospital and reassured them that this was a misunderstanding. The soldiers were afraid that criminals were inside the hospital and didn’t want the children to be hurt. They would be safe and would all receive the very best modern care, she promised. She told them that she and her sister would stay here in this hospital with them as long as even one of them remained here. As they thanked her, a few called her "Santa Maribel." She seemed unhappy each time she was addressed that way, so they stopped using her name at all when speaking to her, but when they talked of her among themselves, she was "Santa Maribel" more often than not.

A few moments later they were at the doors and entering the hospital. Susan stood beside the door. Her gaze was enough to stop any of the Mexican soldiers from trying to pass through the door. Instead, they handed control of the wheelchairs back to the children’s mothers and stepped back, turning to resume their spot within the larger formation still facing the hospital. The vehicles with heavy guns had driven away and had taken up positions far to the rear of the foot soldiers. Those with shoulder-fired weapons had loaded them into the backs of the vehicles and pulled back as well.

The Coronel in charge of the force stood by the hospital door as the last of the new patients went inside. "If there is anything we can do, please do not hesitate to ask, Senoras," he said to the two women his troops had detained earlier, "if it is within our power, we will see it done."

Susan and Maribel eyed him fiercely but nodded. "Please keep your men away from the building," Susan told him. "We don’t want the children any more frightened than they already are."

"Perhaps, then, it was unwise to invite them here at this particular moment," he said curtly.

Susan opened her mouth to scold him, but Maribel answered first, "Perhaps, but of all the people arriving here today, I cannot say their presence was the most unwise. Good day, sir." She put a hand on Susan’s arm and turned to go inside, ushering her sister ahead of her to prevent her from verbally assaulting the Coronel.

After the doors closed behind them, he stood and stared blankly at the doors for brief moment, before turning and walking back to the area he had set up as his command center. It wasn’t for him to decide whether the orders he received to come here and surround the building were wise or unwise. As long as the orders he received were lawfully given, their wisdom, or lack of it, was entirely irrelevant, he thought as he walked.

A few moments later, a faint noise from the south resolved itself into the sound of a helicopter which flew toward the hospital at a height of perhaps a hundred yards above the ground. The small, corporate helicopter was painted white, with the words "Universal Earth Concord" visible in royal blue on its fuselage as it passed overhead.

It landed delicately on the roof of the hospital. Its rotors remained spinning as a side door opened and a man hopped nimbly out and hurried toward the rooftop door, that was opened and held for him by another man from inside the building. By then, the army Coronel was back at his position. He watched with a pair a field glasses, frowning as he saw how young the man leaving the helicopter looked.

As soon as the hospital door closed behind the new arrival, the helicopter lifted itself back into the air spun around precisely on its axis and flew back the way it had come. The Coronel waited until it disappeared in the distance before he lowered his binoculars.

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I activated my android body’s internal Local Interdimensional Transport system and disappeared from the Status Room of my treehouse in Massachusetts. Suddenly, I was landing on the roof of the hospital from a height of about two feet. Behind me the visual illusion of a helicopter was being created by the complex control of a shielding field emanating from a small invisible drone. The near-deafening sound of a helicopter roared from the normally silent little flying machine. I looked at the illusion over my shoulder, then hurried toward the open doorway thirty feet in front of me. Even from this close, it looked and sounded absolutely real. The down-rush of air from the non-existent rotors was very real as the field pulled the air molecules from above and expelled them again downward at high speed.

The outside of the hospital building was plain. We had repurposed an old brick warehouse which had an adobe covering on the brick. We had painted it white using a paint formula Joe provided that would coat the adobe permanently and protect it from ever being affected by weather or chemicals in the air or rain. It would retain its new crisp white color forever. Our shield generators also encased it in protective, adaptive shields shaped by the carbon nanotube matrix lining the inside of the walls. Despite this, the building’s basic design made it look, well, ordinary. It looked like an older building with a fresh coat of paint. Inside, however, it gave off a different feeling altogether. Every inch, from the rooftop stairwell where I entered, to the lowest basement corner, had an air of modernity, state of the art technology, pristine cleanliness without that chemical sanitizer smell you often found in hospitals. Indeed, it smelled faintly of vanilla. According to Joe’s research, this smell tended to cause humans to feel more relaxed and at home. He had modified the molecule to make sure that it still retained the odor or vanilla, but would float in the air almost indefinitely without settling to the surface. Furthermore, it did not trigger any adverse reaction even for those with compromised lungs, asthma, or chemical sensitivities.

The surfaces inside the building, instead of being a crisp white color like the outside of the hospital were awash in color. Every wall had a colorful mural depicting mainly outdoor scenes. A tropical beach, a deciduous forest with autumn coloring found in the northern United States, a lush green rainforest. Friendly looking animals peered out from tree branches, or pools of water, and a myriad of other places in the natural settings. Other murals showed happy children at play, some had leg braces, crutches or other medical accoutrements one might find on kids in a hospital setting, showing them as participated normally in children’s activities with everyone else. All smiling and happy. Some murals showed family scenes, enjoying a picnic in a green field, gathered around a campfire listening to a storyteller, wearing traditional attire and performing ancestral dances in a village square. There were even a couple showing the inside of a school room, with children seated at neatly lined up desks watching intently as a teacher stood at a lab table with a digital microscope. The image of a tiny single-celled creature magnified by the microscope showed on the wall behind her as she pointed to an organelle inside it. Each child in the classroom had a small tablet, exactly like the one I had delivered to President De La Huerta, sitting on their desktops in front of them.

Every painted wall showed a brightly lit, very colorful scene of happy human interaction or beautiful natural settings. Each mural was designed to draw interest, stimulate the senses, and divert people’s thoughts away from the idea of medical procedures or whatever illness or injury brought them to the hospital. Even individual patient’s room was decorated the same way. The floors looked like footpaths through whatever scenes were depicted on the walls. The ceilings and the tops of the walls showed blue sky with a sprinkling of fluffy white clouds. Light seemed to emanate from the sky without visible light fixtures. It was almost like being outdoors.

On the floor reserved for children, patient rooms were part of a suite, with a separate room for a parent or other family members to stay as long as they wished while young patients were undergoing treatment. There were even a few suites like that on the floor reserved for adult patients. It was Health First’s position that the presence of family was a positive and important part of healing.

Joe implanted details of the hospital’s design and advanced medical capabilities as I walked down toward the lecture hall on the ground floor. It was there that the reporters, now that the action outside the windows had wound down, would be briefed on the current state of affairs with the Mexican government and the soldiers stationed outside. We would also give them additional information about our overall organization and our commitment to making the world a better place for everyone. As the name of our charitable subsidiaries suggested, we were focused on Food First, Health First, and then on expanding and improving infrastructure and other broader projects that had a direct impact on the everyday quality of life. For now, we would not be mentioning my goal of world conquest or anything at all about extraterrestrial beings or technologies from other planets. We would give credit for the technical advancements we were introducing to our own well-funded, dedicated research facilities.

I walked into the lecture hall and walked to the front where I found Maribel and Mom. I greeted them both warmly, but professionally in this setting with the journalists already seated in the semicircular amphitheater. "Are we all ready for this?" I asked.

They both smiled and nodded. I took a deep breath and got ready to put a little more pressure on President De La Huerta to make the right decision about the Universal Earth Concord.

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