Hofstadter

A harried physician walked up to Jakob. He didn’t stop, though, just gave a ‘follow me’ gesture and kept walking. Jakob had to trot a couple of steps to catch up to this moving affront to his stature.

“I was summoned to this hospital?” Jakob knew the call couldn’t be about Sarabeth or Sloane, yet the hospital’s director had approved the physician’s request for a consultation with Jakob.

“I need to talk to you about your patient.” It took Jakob a moment to grasp whom the doctor meant.

“He’s not mine.” Jakob said, perhaps louder than he intended. Detective Siccona, who’d been keeping a respectful distance behind Jakob, moved in to better observe.

“I understand.” The physician sounded agitated, lacking patience for semantics. He continued, unabated, down the corridor towards the isolation ward. “But maybe he is yours after all.” The doctor stopped abruptly, turned to face Jakob, forcing him to jolt into stillness. “You remember Hofstadter?”

Jakob, momentarily confused by the non-sequitur, nodded.

Everyone remembered Hofstadter. He’d tried hard to prove that humans didn’t need prayer to overcome illness. His death had been slow and painful. Jakob had been the Speaker of the Synod at the time, but Hofstadter was a Gemmite, and Jakob had no pull with Gemmer. He’d begged on the floor of the Synod for Gemmer to spare, or at least be merciful to, Hofstadter.

Right near the end of his painfully consumptive cognitive illness, Hofstadter had died in a fiery car crash, one last slap in the face to a human who dared defy the Gods.

Jakob’s faith had been shaken, not his faith in Alsun, but his faith in the benevolence of the collective Gods. He wasn’t alone in that feeling. The Anti-Thiest League forming later that year was no coincidence. Some even speculated that Hofstadter’s widow funded it.

“What does Hofstadter have to do with our nameless man?”

“He has extra elements in his blood. Originally I thought they were contaminants, possibly contagious, but they fit the profile of Hofstadter’s artificial anti-bacterial thesis. We double checked. Then checked again.” Perhaps seeing the concern on Jakob’s face that the doctor was nearing Hofstadter’s blasphemy, the doctor added, “Then we destroyed the samples, the test results and all the files, just to be safe.”