I crossed at Windsor with a through-and-through GSW to the left shoulder. Shelf side, the nearest clinic was six hours out and I was losing blood. Someone — I don't remember who — said the Canadian hospitals were still running. I didn't believe it, but I also didn't have options. I crossed the border on my medical clearance and drove to the nearest hospital in Tecumseh, just east of Windsor.

The hospital was operating. I want to be precise about that: it was not abandoned, not derelict, not a ruin with some lights on. It was a functioning hospital. The exterior was maintained. The parking lot was plowed and lit. The emergency entrance doors opened as I approached. The interior was clean, warm, and fully equipped. I saw no human staff. I saw no patients. I saw machines — medical automatons moving through corridors with purpose, transporting supplies, calibrating equipment. The hospital was staffed entirely by machines and it was running a full shift.

I was triaged by a diagnostic system that scanned my wound, assessed blood loss, checked for bone and nerve damage, and assigned me a treatment priority within thirty seconds of my entering the building. A surgical automaton cleaned and closed the wound. An automated pharmacy dispensed antibiotics and analgesics. A recovery unit monitored my vitals for four hours while I slept — the first real sleep I'd had in three days. The care was competent. More than competent. The wound closure was better than anything I've seen from Shelf medics, and I include myself in that assessment.

When I was discharged, a printed form was waiting for me. It was addressed to 'Amara Johansson-Bello' — my full name, which I had not provided to any system at any point during my visit. My border crossing data, presumably. The form detailed my treatment, prescribed a follow-up regimen, and listed the medications I'd been given with dosage instructions in English and French. At the bottom, in a typeface slightly different from the rest of the document, was a single line: 'Healthcare is a right of all persons within Canadian territory.' The bill was Φ0.00.

I walked out of that hospital healthier than I'd been in months. The shoulder healed clean — no infection, no complications. I tell this story to people on the Shelf and they always ask the same thing: why don't we all just go to Canada? I don't have a good answer for that. I can only say that being treated by a hospital with no humans in it, being known by name by a system I never introduced myself to, and being healed for free by a government that may not contain a single living person — it was the most unsettling act of kindness I have ever experienced.