A patient running away is a rare and unpleasant event for everyone involved. Most of all due to the life-threatening danger to he patient himself. In this case, he had leapt over not only a fence, but thirty or forty years as well. We didn't know what effect this collision with another reality would have. What’s more, the incident could eventually lead to an investigation and a closing of the community, to yet another round of arguments with the guild about the advisability of such therapy, whether we had the right to "synchronize" internal and external time, and so on.

When we go on EMS calls we likely need to fly folks off the island (there's no hospital here). When we do we work closely with our air assets, choppers, small planes, etc. and the incredibly skilled pilots and flight nurses inside them. Apparently, when they depart, each air asset needs to account for people on the plane (in the case they crash) and they do this by counting the number of souls aboard. They don't differentiate between crew and patient/s as each alive person is a soul aboard, dogs are not counted as a soul aboard, neither are cadavers or unborn children (which makes me think it's not a religious remnant).

"Just as the emergence of tree intelligence forever changed the planet, so the emergence of consciousness (which long predated humans) forever changed the nature of evolution. Cultural transmission is orders of magnitude faster than genetic transmission, and digital transmission has accelerated the speed of culture a hundredfold or more. We may soon seem, to our artificial intelligence offspring, as motionless and insentient as trees seem to us. And here we live, trying to make a home between our predecessors and our descendants."