by Rayya Deeb
"Doro, you're awake!" The sound of Dom's voice made me feel safe even though I was thoroughly incapacitated. He pulled another beanbag up next to me, sat down in it and reached toward me with a cup of tea. "Drink this."
I weakly lifted my arm. It was heavy and limp as a pile of wet laundry. I moaned in discomfort.
"I got it." Dom put the red ceramic mug to my lips and tilted it as he warned, "It's hot."
I blew into it and sipped the most glorious peppermint rooibos that ever was. It streamed down the back of my throat, warming me up and washing out the sour taste in my mouth. The fog behind my eyes started to burn off.
"You were poisoned, sweetheart." Anika said lightly. "I've given you an antidote that should move through your system and have you back on your feet shortly."
"We made it, Doro." Dom's face lit up with the assurance that we were still on our path, just overcoming some heavy set-backs. "This is Anika, and Josie."
Anika got up and took a seat on the sofa next to her partner, Josie. I hadn't even seen Josie come in. I tried to smile to show my gratitude. It seemed to send a wave of good grace down my spine. I managed to take the tea from Dom. "I don't understand."
"Remember the mosquitos?"
Did I ever. I scrunched my lip and quivered in disgust with a little nod.
"S.O.I.L. They're fighting dirty."
"How? I thought I’d made us untraceable."
"I'm almost positive we were hunted down by a swarm programmed to find our blood. Seneca has our blood samples and the mosquitos were only attacking us but not the horse. It's a trick ripped right from the pages of the swarm warfare field manual."
Biological warfare. On me. Once again, I wasn’t surprised, but I was upset to be the brunt of such a disgusting attack.
"What sickness?"
"Your saliva tested positive for synthetic Novuleria." Anika didn't try to pad the truth for even a second. I hadn't heard of Novuleria before, but it didn't sound good.
"It's a man-made disease with a specific purpose. Disorient and kill." I was repulsed, but man, so fortunate that it hadn’t killed me. I've never been the vengeful type, but someone definitely just had claimed exclusive billing on my hit list.
"Gregory Zaffron. He's a demon."
"Truth."
I could almost feel the cleansing process working its way through my bloodstream, and replenishing cells with the fire to burn down the malevolent Gregory.
"You, Doro Campbell, just conquered a battle of biological warfare."
Thanks to Anika, I had. But things still didn't make complete sense. I mean, Dom was fine and I was a bloody mess. "How did you slide by?"
"Dumb luck. My blood deterrents to mosquitos were established when I was a little kid and my parents took us to Africa for six months. If I hadn’t been immune we would have been left in the woods for the raptors to feast on."
"On that note, let's eat." Josie chimed in. Josie was a unique-looking woman with mesmerizing features. Her sparkling lime eyes and caramel complexion glistened by the flames. I'm sure she looked younger than she actually was, which, if I had to guess, was about sixty. She had the same buzz cut as Dom, something we all joked about. She wore a white linen house dress, tan handmade moccasins and gold stud earrings. She told us about her interesting melting pot of genetic heritage: Native American, Irish, Korean, Russian, French, South African and East Indian. And those were just the ones she was aware of. Her vast culinary repertoire reflected just that. While we’d been talking we could smell something tremendous being "whipped up," as she put it, for dinner. I picked up notes of turmeric and cinnamon waltzing with the cozy scent of crackling wood. We didn't have fireplaces in LA since they’d been outlawed before I was even born, but good home cooking was something I’d had almost every night. My mom is a spice master and that was just another thing about her that I missed in my Senecan life. To have this heartwarming treat of a dinner after the unmerciful treachery we'd just experienced was almost more than I could stand. I decided to offload all the negativity and anger I'd accumulated, and soak up new energy from this beautiful home where we were being surrounded with nothing but love.
Dom helped me to the dining table on the other side of the room, made from a fallen tree on their land. It had been hand-carved and sanded, and I ran the tips of my fingers along its smooth but imperfect surface. Anika and Josie brought us curried sweet potato and black bean chili, slow cooked southern greens with roasted citrus beets, corn bread, honey butter and sweetened minty rose water. Everything Josie made came from the land they lived on. The glorious smell made me sit up straight and I almost felt like myself again.
"This is officially the hungriest I've ever been."
"It's not surprising that you're hungry. Your body just purged everything it had in it," Anika said.
As we reveled in the meal, my body began to align with my mind. Anika and Josie listened, their friendly faces sympathetic as Dom explained everything we had been through, and where we were headed. Anika became visibly concerned with our beyond-precarious objective. "You had me right up until the point where you said you want me to perform a potentially fatal procedure on you. You two are so young, you have so much life ahead of you to take such a huge risk."
I left the lobbying to Dom because he knew them better. "You're right, we are young. But the only chance we have ever to become old is if we go through with this. Otherwise we'll just live in hiding up here and they’ll eventually find us."
"I just don't know, Dommy." Anika was wavering. She wanted to help but feared the very real risk that what we wanted from her might end our lives.
"I understand it's asking a lot of you, but believe me, we've really thought this through. You're our only hope."
"And I understand that you think this is the way forward, but you two can't even begin to comprehend the magnitude of this."
"We can–"
"Dommy, it's not that simple. I promise you, it's not. I know it seems like it gives you superpowers, but you can't have a one track mind when it comes to this. A flexer implant is the ultimate of double-edged swords."
"We know. Don't we, Doro?"
"Absolutely. We are only in this for all the right reasons and none of the wrong ones."
"I promise, Anika. We'll be responsible." Dom pleaded.
Anika closed her eyes and lowered her chin to her chest. The fire's hypnotic crackle carried us through the next few moments. Dom got up and went to Anika. He crouched down to his knees and faced her. "If we don't go through with this, it will all be over. Doro and I won't have any chance at all. Please, Anika."
Anika took a deep breath. "Okay, but only after you two get a good night's sleep."
48
ANIKA LED US out through the back door of their little white house with navy blue shutters and a wrap-around porch. A swing sat just beyond a cute red barn. In the barnyard there were a few horses, goats, sheep, pigs, a regal old German Shepherd and a coop full of chickens. Their land must have encompassed at least forty acres.
We headed towards the chicken coop. There were three hens in there, plump as can be, and they were cluck, cluck, clucking away. "Oh be quiet, Pamela, these are our guests," Anika quipped at the biggest hen in the house. She moved aside some stacks of hay, took a broom and brushed away a section of the dusty remnants, revealing a hidden door made of plywood, flush to the ground. She lifted it up and signaled for us to follow her. "Please close it behind you. I would say we don't live on a farm, but, you know..." We smiled and I followed behind her, scaling down a creaky ladder. Dom pulled the door closed behind him.
Slivers of light shone through the slits in the hidden door and cut the cool darkness. I scrunched my nose and stifled a gag from the scent of moist chicken poop. When the waveguide ceiling lit up in a marshmallow white, illuminating everything in sight, my mind was too blown to register the foul odor. We were in a space of roughly a thousand square feet. Its white walls were coated in an inch of opaque swirling liquid inside which glowing sk
y blue graphs, charts and controls blinked into power. A hidden chamber of high-tech medicine was being hidden below a common chicken coop– incredible. In the center of the floor was a shiny silver plastic cylinder the size of a small flighter– a Biological Nanorobotic Fusion Chamber, otherwise known as a BioNan. Anika went to it and opened a small fist-size port in its side.
"I need the chip of whichever one of you is first."
Dom stepped forward.
"Are you sure?" I asked. This was my idea, so I didn't want him to have to go first in case anything went wrong.
Dom nodded resolutely.
"Requesting control," Anika addressed the BioNan.
A three foot wide, two foot tall, crystal control panel appeared in the air. She waved her hand over it, producing illuminated blue icons.
And just like that, a sweet little old lady morphed into a guru of technologically advanced medicine.
"Now, you're going to go down that hall to the bathroom. Shower real well and put on one of the robes you'll find in the closet."
Dom didn't hesitate. He had made up his mind and, once he did that, he never gave it a second thought. That was his style. I was scared for him, but the buzz of electronics was reassuring to me. Familiar. The flow of my blood and the electricity in these devices ran on the same wavelength.
Dom emerged wearing a robe. This was neither the time nor place to get all goo goo gaga, but, jeez, he looked good. And brave. Which made him painfully irresistible, if he wasn't already. Which he was. And that drove me crazy. The more I fell, the more I resisted. Like a rubber band, I was bound eventually to snap or sling forward. This was a massive game of tug-of-war, with my attraction to him pulling me from the inside, while the risky request we’d made of Anika pulling me from the outside. I was so scared for him, and yet I realized, if we didn't make it through this, we'd never have the chance to see what it could be like to be together— in Seneca or anywhere else.
"Okay, Dommy. You're going to swallow these sensors now and lie down." Anika handed him three tiny pills: yellow, aquamarine and violet. "They will dye your organs by the time you are situated inside the BioNan." Anika pointed him to the simple, stainless steel bench that extended from the wall of blue. Dom explained to me on our way here that Anika had been a professor at a nearby university which shut down her entire department when futurist medicine like the BioNan was outlawed. The university was set to destroy all of her equipment when a group of students pulled a heist just in the nick of time and brought it to Anika. It was probably this type of technology that had rebuilt G.W. after the crash.
"Just relax and let me take it from here." I appreciated that Anika was doing her best to send out the vibe of a fully confident expert.
Dom lay down on the bench.
A spinning whoosh sound powered up the BioNan. We all knew what could happen here, but nobody wanted to let their thoughts go there. The bench gradually disappeared into the BioNan, and sealed shut once Dom was inside. Anika moved to the front of her control panel and I moved behind her. I gulped and bit my thumb nail. My stomach turned.
Anika tapped at several of the blue icons on her control panel. A diagram of a body on a faint white grid scanned onto the wall. It was a rendering of Dom in yellow muscles, violet blood flow, and aquamarine organs. Anika moved her hands to form a sphere in the airspace in front of the control panel. An iridescent bubble appeared. She tapped twice on his aquamarine heart on the control panel, then pulled her hands back to the bubble, and a 3D heart appeared inside it. Right there, five feet in front of me, was Dom's precious beating heart. Different shades and textures showed the flow and pressure. Anika took her hands and revolved his heart on an axis, checking it over and entering numerical data from her observations back into the control panel. She then pushed the heart back to the diagram of his body with her palm. I was infinitely fascinated as she methodically pulled each organ out and did the same thing. I couldn’t get over the fact that this aging hippie farmer was really a master of revolutionary medicine.
She then lowered her chin to her chest and brought her hands in a prayer formation up to her heart. For one minute, she breathed in and out in a controlled pattern, inhaling through her nose and exhaling deeply from the back of her throat. Then she brought her hands down to the control panel, lifted her head, relaxed her shoulders and slowly opened her eyes. She pulled a virtual robotic arm from the panel and, with her other hand, typed in code. A foot-long, double-pronged needle appeared in the robot's arm. Thank goodness I had overcome my fear of needles in Dom’s lab, or I probably would have fainted watching this.
Anika pulled Dom's spinal column from his diagramed body and rotated it. Typed in more code. The BioNan emitted a vibration. I looked at her, hoping she'd reassure me that everything was going to be okay, but she didn't. Nothing existed other than what was in front of her. Dom's life... our future... was at stake. She tapped five buttons on the virtual robotic arm, and a series of clicks preceded a whirring sound inside the cylinder.
A screen that magnified an x-ray of Dom's spinal column appeared on the side of the BioNan. Anika moved down the control panel and zoomed in to magnify the area between two vertebrae that brightened up on the 3D image of his spine. She was exceptionally calm. I could easily recognize being in that sort of a zone. Everyone had his or her own version. Mine was energized. Hers was different. She seemed to purge all the crap that had no place in exactly what she was doing and bring herself down to a placid mindfulness. She pushed a command, and the whirr inside the BioNan crescendoed. I watched the virtual robotic arm move in and position the needle to inject into the lower third of the 3D image of Dom's spine. A muffled moan came from inside the cylinder. I turned, nervously, to look at Anika. Was he okay? Did it work? How long until we knew?
She ignored me completely, at one with that control panel. Next, she pulled up his eyes. More whirrs inside the machine. I watched the screen intently as a small robotic device held his eyelids open and electro-laminates were fitted to his eyes. A microscopic laser then embedded them onto the surface. This would allow us to see our computational activity inside our own eyes. Screens would no longer be necessary.
With that, the process was complete. Anika directed everything back into place. The sphere disappeared. The door on the BioNan opened. The bench started to come out. First I saw Dom's feet, then his legs... he wasn't moving. I rushed to his side. I couldn't stay back even if I wanted to.
"Give him a minute."
I nodded and waited impatiently as his body slowly emerged from the machine. I could see his chin, then lips, and finally his eyes. They were wide open and the glow above flooded his dilated pupils. He didn't blink. Anika came over to him, too. "Dommy, you just take it easy now." As if pulled by puppet strings, his lips slowly parted. His electrifying eyes shifted to mine and crinkled into a smile. My heart fluttered. He was okay.
49
I LAY FLAT on the cold bench as it pulled me into the BioNan. Although this was an intimidating process, Dom's going first eased a lot of my fear and doubt. We seemed to do that for one another. He picked me up when I was down and vice versa. He had let go of the need to be in control and accepted this radical plan of mine as if it were as inevitable as the sunrise. I had started to let go of my mistrust of people and drift off into a world of possibility when it came to Dom. And here I was, inside a machine that would connect my brain to my flexer. More than half of the previous attempts at this had resulted in death. That was why the whole movement toward this high technology approach to medicine had shifted underground, and why Anika’s lab had been dismantled.
The debate was legitimate. One side said that life was too precious and the outcomes too unpredictable to experiment with humans in this dangerous way. The other side believed that the potential for huge breakthroughs was too great not to attempt the creation of singularity between humans and technology. There were so many arguments. How would privacy be redefined? Would this allow us to live longer or shorten our lives? What wou
ld become of a world where information was wired straight into everyone's brain without the need to read and spend countless hours absorbing it? Ultimately, there were too many "what ifs?" The government jumped in to regulate these activities. Humans turning themselves into cyborgs was outlawed. But the people refused to be regulated. Which brought us to Dom and me– specifically me, laying flat in this BioNan.
As wide open as my eyes were, there was no light to let into them. I couldn’t even see the inside of the vessel that contained me. I felt vulnerable. My shoulders and chest were exposed, my bare back was against the bench. The whirr kicked in. Here we go. I took a deep breath. A blue light flooded the chamber. My blue light. My mind raced. What if the lights went out permanently? I’d never been scared of death because I’d never had to be. But I realized I could die right then and there. I was scared. If I had to go now, I'd go knowing I had lived and I had loved. I never said goodbye, but there might be no such thing as goodbye. It might just be something we say but not something we ever do. In some incarnation of energy along the road to infinity, would we meet again? Whenever I tried to visualize what came next I always ended up with an image of speeding blasts of static. What would become of me when my heart stopped beating? My blood stopped flowing? My breath became harder, shorter. I tried to tame it, right then, just to see if I could tell what it would feel like. Death.
I felt a numbing pressure on my spine. It lasted ten seconds and then my lower back became warm. I dared not move. Strangely, at the same moment, my thinking shifted from death to life. What was it going to be like? What would I be capable of now? I was filled with a sense of hope and I imagined my re-emergence into the world. It couldn’t come soon enough.
