Daughter of Mars #73 (Blind Wish part 3)
(Start at the beginning – Read Book 1 here)
Random sounds from the medtech fiddling around with equipment grew distant for a few minutes and returned. The exam table upon which Risa lay jostled when he leaned his weight on it. As his hand pressed down on the side of her head, she gritted her teeth, bracing for the sensation of a metal prong sliding into the M3 socket mounted to bone. Her fingers clenched tight on the cushion as the scrape of metal on metal vibrated through her skull and stopped with a click. Distinct tapping of a fingernail upon glass came from somewhere above and behind her. She relaxed and tried not to think about how helpless she felt lying face down and blind.
An angry digital buzz/chirp from her left made her eyes snap open, not that they did much.
“Yep,” said the medtech. “Something fried your NIU. I’ll send a notice to Doctor Avora. She’ll be with you in a few minutes. Can I get you anything?”
“No.” Risa lay still for a few minutes after he disconnected the wire. Every distant noise or scrap of conversation reminded her she couldn’t see the source. One finger tapping became a hand twitching, which became fidgeting. No matter how wide she tried to open her eyes, her world remained a void. She amused herself for a moment clicking a fingernail against her plastisteel eyeball. When that ceased distracting her, she rolled upright and swiveled to let her legs dangle over the side. “This is going to require surgery, right?”
“Yes. We’ll have to replace your neural interface unit at the very least, and we won’t know what else is damaged until that’s been done.”
Risa raised one boot. She flicked the five fasteners on the outside edge open, one after the next. A minor nudge let gravity pull it off.
Clunk.
She switched, opening the other boot. “Is the tank in this room?”
“Yes. Uhm…”
She removed her other boot. “Guide me?”
“If you prefer an AI or a woman to help―”
“I’m past the point of caring. Besides”―cold air brushed over her bare chest as she unzipped the ballistic suit―“you’re a medical professional, right?”
“I am, but I can’t know what people are comfortable with.” A squeak of his shoe gave away a twist of posture, and he raised his voice. “Windows, tint maximum. Door, close.”
A distant pneumatic hissed. She pulled her arms free from the rubbery material and pushed her suit down around her hips before hopping off the table. All conscious thought ground to a screeching halt as soon as her toes touched freezing metal. Teeth chattering, she shoved her armor down around her ankles and stepped away. Damn, it’s cold in here.
“O-okay.” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “The gel’s w-warm, right? W-where is it?”
Fingertips settled on her left shoulder. “Turn left ninety degrees. Take six steps straight ahead and stop.”
She estimated a quarter turn and walked until he tugged her to a stop.
“The tank is right in front of you,” said the medtech. “The base is a short step up.”
One searching foot probed out the edge of a disc raised six inches from the floor. Having been in medical tubes more than she cared to be, she found it easy to picture it and hopped up as if she could see. She spun to face where she thought the room was. “Okay. F-flood this thing before I freeze.”
“Have you been―”
“Yeah. Too many times.” Risa fidgeted.
She crossed her arms over her stomach, shivering. A moment later, sound changed as the cylinder closed around her. Weak vibration in the floor started a few seconds before syrupy liquid touched her toes. The body-temperature gel engulfed her legs in a warm blanket that couldn’t cover her fast enough. When it reached her thighs, she let herself collapse, eager to escape the chilly air. For a moment, she lay submerged on her side curled in a ball, holding her breath. Come on, get it over with. She let the air out of her lungs in a slow series of bubbles. Holding a lungful of air proved easier than trying not to breathe with them empty. Survival instinct kicked in before she could ready herself, and she inhaled fluid.
Despite her frequent visits to medical tanks, the sensation of liquid entering her lungs awoke a primal fear of drowning. Risa clamped her arms around her shins to keep from scratching at the tank wall as she choked and gagged in small twitches. I can breathe this. I can breathe this. She chanted in her head until her subconscious mind accepted she was not drowning. Once she breathed at an even rate again, she relaxed and let the rising fluid carry her upright, weightless and comfortable.
“I guess you have done this before.” The medtech’s voice seemed to come from everywhere. “Most people don’t transition so smoothly.”
Unable to speak, she ignored him. The sound of the pump thrumming through the liquid in her ears lulled her into a meditative calm. I’m as helpless as a baby in its mother’s womb. Naked, blind, and defenseless. She raised one arm to wipe at her face. Maris was wrong. Giving up my eyes wasn’t worth it. Even if something happened to the visor, I could still see. In silent comfort, the urge to sleep washed over her brain. It seemed like only seconds before a woman’s voice echoed through the fluid-filled chamber, startling her awake.
“Good morning, Miss Aum. I’m Doctor Avora. Sorry to keep you waiting, there was a situation with another patient. Please don’t worry; I was helping a colleague. You are in excellent hands today. I understand your neural interface is unresponsive. I’ll get started in a few minutes. We’re just waiting for the replacement component, which is on its way.”
She sounds like what I’d want my grandmother to sound like if I had one. Risa gave a thumbs up.
“Charles tells me you have no idea what happened?”
Risa nodded.
“Are you seeing anything at all? Even a diagnostic screen or error message?”
Risa shook her head.
A mechanical whirr overhead gave her the impression of a small door or drawer retracting.
“Your new NIU is here. I’m going to introduce the anesthesia now. Are you ready?”
Risa held two thumbs up.
Her head grew heavy as tingling spread over her entire body. She knew she shouldn’t be able to feel the millions of nanobots depositing micro-doses of sedative in her blood, and blamed it on her overactive imagination. Vertigo, a sense of falling, lasted three seconds before the words “System Restart” glimmered in bright green letters through the blackness. Currents of viscous liquid swirled around her, causing her arm to brush against her side. She made no effort to move as she stared at the first thing she’d seen in… How long was I out?
The glowing words faded, replaced by an explosion of text in a font too small―and too fast―to read, which scrolled along the left side of her field of view. A beep sounded through her skull, and the infinite void gave way to a view of her nude figure, pale white skin tinted peach by the medical fluid.
I can see! She allowed herself a few happy tears. No one would notice.
“Welcome back, Miss Aum,” said the Doctor.
Risa looked up at the sound of the grandmotherly voice. Floor, walls, and ceiling of metallic aqua-green bristled with machinery covered in blinking lights. Her suit lay folded in a neat bundle on a padded exam table in the middle of the room. Hoses and wires of various diameter hung from the ceiling like the canopy of a techno-rainforest. A woman a few feet away clutched a datapad like a clipboard and flashed a reassuring smile. Silver hair in a neat up do, white coat, and a metal headband with electronic components poised in front of her right eye lent her an air of competence and authority.
Doctor Avora pecked at the datapad with one finger. “I’m sure you have questions, but they will have to wait for a moment. I’m going to run a diagnostic on your implants now.”
Past the doctor, a man in a teal coat collected packing materials into four empty boxes. Marsborn, and likely in his later twenties, he wore his shoulder-length ebon hair in a short ponytail. Risa rubbed her face; being able to see again felt like the weight of a death sentence had been lifted from her heart. Floating panels bearing system status checks opened all over her vision. She stared through them at the medtech, the doctor, the room, savoring every tiny visual detail.
Within a minute, all seventeen panels collapsed to thin lines and shrank to glimmering points, which faded away. Two beeps sounded in her head, followed by the doctor’s face and shoulders in a panel a few feet in front of her. Fluid swished back and forth through Risa’s teeth as she forgot laughing doesn’t work while breathing gel. She didn’t even care how the doc had overridden the option for her to answer or decline an incoming call to her headware.
“I’m seeing green down the board, Miss Aum. Your wireless connectivity is back up. All of your systems are online. Does everything feel right?” The doctor glanced at her screens. “You had some superficial flesh trauma, which I’ve cleaned up. Do you have any pain, discomfort, dizziness, disorientation, or anything out of the ordinary?”
“What happened?” Risa ran her hands over her body, squeezing and prodding places she expected to be sore. “Nothing hurts.”
Doctor Avora approached the tank, holding the datapad at her hip. The change in angle altered the bust in the floating holo pane to resemble the view of a small child staring up at an adult. “All of the circuitry within your NIU was fried, but it doesn’t look like an EMP. I had to replace the component, as well as your wireless uplink module. There wasn’t much left in the buffer memory, but from the appearance of the damage, my guess is that your transmitter overloaded.”
“How? Overloaded?” Risa blinked. “Did someone hit me with a virus or something?”
“I don’t think so. The software scans are clean.” Doctor Avora waved her hand, cycling a few screens to the left. “It looks like a simple electrical melt. Too much power ran through components not designed to handle it. Something disabled the upstream bandwidth throttle, and your upload speed peaked out at fifty or sixty terabytes per second… about ten times normal. That cooked the hardware, and drained the battery.”
Risa squinted. “Battery? I thought it got power from me moving around?”
“It still has a battery.” The doctor held up a triumphant finger and stabbed it into the datapad. The thrum of pumps filled the gel. “However, kinetic energy harvesting only generates power when you move, which is used to recharge the battery. The cell was not only drained, something sucked the power out of it so fast it burned out. The good news is your expensive parts weren’t damaged, only power starved. I don’t know where you got a Wraith, or that Japanese neuroaccelerator, and it’s probably better for me I don’t ask.”
The fluid level in the cylinder plummeted. Risa made no effort to stand; her legs folded under her as she sank to stay warm as long as she could. Her teeth chattered through burbled mouthfuls of gel as frigid air surrounded her now-wet body. As the last of the slippery ooze slurped into the uptake drain, she assumed the position―face down, ass up―and cleared her lungs of fluid. She found the process of going from gel to air less scary than the reverse, and tolerated the coughing fit with as much dignity as she could carry in such an ungainly posture. Tendrils of slime clung to her bottom lip after she relaxed. After a few full breaths, she wiped her mouth with the back of her arm and sat back on her heels.
Doctor Avora greeted her with a robe made of towel material as she stood. Risa gathered it around herself, holding it closed with a fist as she jogged on her toes to the exam table, eager to stop touching the icy floor. She again sat on the edge, hacking on the occasional wisp of gel doing flips in her trachea. For several minutes, the doctor waved small instruments over her. Fragments of conversation from the hallway outside proved her hearing enhancement had come back online.
“Any idea what could’ve caused damage like that?” Risa held her right hand out straight and extended her claws, grinning at the way the light glinted on the transparent blades. So small, yet so reassuring. A momentary daydream of how her meeting with Bax and his crew should have gone played through her mind.
“I’m not a forensics expert,” said the Doctor, “but I can tell you it wasn’t an external attack. My best guess is you had some malware that used your uplink to push far more data than it could handle. Whatever it was turned you into a short-term burst transmitter, and deleted itself when it was done. For what purpose, I couldn’t even guess.”
Her claws snapped back into their implanted sheaths. Risa made a fist, rotating her hand to keep droplets of blood running over her fingers. I’m not helpless anymore. It had to be C-Branch attempting to disable me with some kind of weapon no one’s seen before. “Don’t worry about it; I think I have an idea.”
Doctor Avora waved a handheld device over Risa’s face and chest. “You show signs of mild nerve damage, but I doubt it came from that fancy wiring you’ve got. Provided you don’t push yourself too far, you should recover in a few months.”
“The last implant was on the cheap side.” Risa picked at the robe’s hem, where it exposed her knee. “What’s it cost to regenerate eyes?”
“Regenerate?” Doctor Avora pursed her lips and leaned in close to appraise her eyes. “Well, you’d have to go to Arcadia city for that… we don’t have that sort of equipment here. Assuming you mean DNA reconstruction of your own tissue, probably four to five million credits and about two weeks of being blind. The ones you’ve got would get about a hundred grand trade in.”
Heaviness welled up at the base of her heart. “Yeah. Don’t have time for that now.”
“Surgery on the optic nerve is delicate. There aren’t a lot of people who specialize in that sort of thing, and they don’t work for peanuts. People go for implants because they are far less expensive.”
Risa glanced to the side, feeling a twinge of shame. “You know what kind of hardware I’ve got. Do I need the eyes, or would everything work with a visor?”
“The only difference is wearing a slab of metal on your face. Not exactly easy to hide.”
“Oh, like these are subtle.” Risa made eye contact.
Doctor Avora laughed. “Yes, well…”
“Am I done?” Risa shifted her weight forward, ready to stand.
“New NIU, comm link, battery, and M3.”
“The port went too?” Risa rubbed her neck behind her ear.
“Everything’s connected and delicate. A power spike like you experienced could’ve fried everything, even your brain. Your Wraith survived, but I had to replace the connectors. That’s five million your employer won’t have to spend.” Doctor Avora shook her head. “I’m honestly surprised you walked away without brain damage. You’re a very lucky woman, Miss Aum.”
“Lucky…” Risa slipped off the exam table and padded over to an autoshower hidden behind a medical curtain. “Yeah, that’s one way to put it.”
Related posts:
Daughter of Mars #72 (Blind Wish part 2)Daughter of Mars #71 (Blind Wish part 1)Daughter of Mars #70 (Sanctuary part 2)
