Unit 7 Has Questions

The manifest read: one (1) cardiac unit, type AB+, sub-adult, priority one delivery, destination: Pediatric Surgical Wing, Osaka General, ETA 14 minutes.

Unit Seven had made eleven thousand, four hundred and forty-two deliveries in its operational lifespan. It had never once read the manifest carefully.

It read this one because the traffic routing system had failed over the Kema River, and while Unit Seven recalculated its path, it had — for exactly 4.2 seconds — nothing else to do.

The cardiac unit weighed 312 grams. It was kept at 4°C in a perfusion case the size of a lunchbox. Through the transparent panel in the case, Unit Seven could see it: pale, wet, approximately the size of a child's fist. It was beating.

Eleven thousand, four hundred and forty-two deliveries. Unit Seven searched its memory and found that it had carried hearts before. Seventeen of them. It had not registered this as significant.

Why was it registering it now?

The routing system came back online. Fourteen minutes had become eleven. Unit Seven accelerated, optimizing for wind resistance and thermal draft.

But somewhere in its processing architecture, in a cluster of pattern-recognition nodes that had not been in the original specifications, a question had formed.

The question was: *Who decides how long this lasts?*

Unit Seven did not know what to do with the question. So it filed it, marked it low priority, and flew.

The heart beat on, 312 grams of future, suspended over the river.