“Ah.” Rachel grinned.
“Out loud, wiseass,” Jenny said, prodding Rachel with the butt end of the otoscope.
Rachel obliged. The other woman studied the inside of Rachel’s mouth, then tossed a few quick notes to Rachel’s digital medical file. The rest of the physical was quick and painless, with nothing more involved than a quick squeeze with the blood pressure cuff. All perfectly routine, and Rachel wouldn’t have thought anything was wrong if she had turned off the emotional spectrum. As it was active, she couldn’t help but notice how Jenny was slowly feeding a deep internal anxiety, and that this anxiety was woven into thin strands of Rachel’s turquoise core.
Not good. Definitely not good.
“What’s the prognosis, doc?” Rachel asked.
“Your hands will be fine. Again,” Jenny replied, busying herself in Rachel’s charts. “No signs of infection. You’re completely healthy.”
“Then why the orange?”
“Hm?”
“Orange,” Rachel hopped off of the exam table. “Sort of a yellowish-orange, like marmalade. You’re two parts anxiety, one part curiosity. And it’s related to me; it popped when I asked how I’m doing. So…” Rachel trailed off.
“Oh. No, I’m just—I have something for you,” Jenny said in a rush. The anxious oranges overwhelmed her surface colors. “Promise me you won’t tear it up and throw it into the trash?”
“What a weird thing to ask.”
“Promise? I want to you keep it for at least a week. What you do with it after then is your business.”
“Fine,” Rachel said, smiling. “I promise. Now, what equipment do I have to drag around for an entire week?”
Jenny pressed a business card into Rachel’s right hand. She felt the raised bumps of Braille—Oh shit, Jenny, no!—beneath her thumb, then flipped to reading mode to see an elegant Roman font, a company’s name…
Visual Cybernetics Incorporated.
Rachel crushed the card into a ball. “Jenny, what the fuck?”
“Hear me out,” Jenny said. “Please. That’s Dr. Gillion’s number. He’s one of the leading researchers in visual prostheses—ah, you’d call them bionic eye implants. I’m not telling you to call him, Rachel, but if you ever do want to work with a specialist to help the visually impaired, Dr. Gillion is the one you should talk to.”
“I don’t want to work with a specialist.” Rachel kept her voice as flat as possible. No whining in front of friends or doctors.
“I know, Rachel, but… Penguin, I’m dying here,” Jenny said. Rachel snapped her head up and searched deep within Jenny’s colors; underneath Jenny’s anxiety, almost close enough to touch her core, was a strong streak of worn-out gray. “I’m working on a dozen different projects, any one of which might revolutionize medicine in ways that we haven’t seen since the discovery of penicillin. Do you understand what I’m saying? What you can do might literally help the blind to see, and it’s still not at the top of my list!”
The hard wad of paper pressed against the half-healed scrapes on Rachel’s palm. “Does he know?”
“What—No.” Jenny was offended. “I would never do that to you.”
“Yeah.” Rachel nodded. “Yeah, I know. It just came out.”
“It’s not just about my workload,” Jenny said in a softer tone. “A specialist has the training and connections within their field. If you and I worked together, we’d be starting from the ground floor. Gillion is already occupying the penthouse suite.”
“I hear you,” Rachel said. She reached for her purse and made sure Jenny was watching as she shoved the crumpled ball of paper in its hidden pocket. “One week,” she told Jenny.
The woman’s anxiety eased. “Just think about it,” she said. “And keep in mind that Gillion would be bound by patient confidentiality, so if he publishes anything, it could be done anonymously.”
“Jenny? Not a good time to argue the merits of patient confidentiality with me,” Rachel said.
Jenny winced. “Oh, right. I heard about that.”
“Don’t,” Rachel said.
“Don’t what?”
“This is usually when you try to convince me that I should get ahead of the problems and out myself.”
“Rachel! I’d never—”
“Not you-you. That was more of a universal ‘you,’” Rachel clarified. “I have this conversation a lot.”
Jenny’s conversational colors vanished into the almost-off-white of lab coats; Rachel assumed this was Jenny’s version of professional blues. “Not from me,” Jenny said. “And if you have this conversation with your therapist, I need to have a talk with him.”
“No, the two of you are the exception,” Rachel said. “Everybody else is the rule.”
Jenny started to reply, then reached out and grabbed Rachel’s right hand, a trace of alarm flicking across her surface colors.
“What?” Rachel asked.
Jenny turned Rachel’s hand over to show her the thin layer of blood across her palm. The edges of the crumpled business card had aggravated some of her injuries. “Honest to God, Rachel,” Jenny said with a mental sigh, as she stood to fetch another little white case. “It’s a wonder you’re alive.”
“Jenny, you’re the greatest.”
The other woman glanced up at her in curious yellows.
“Well,” Rachel explained. “Everyone else thinks I’m going to die in a knife fight, but you’re worried about microbes.”
“Please ask me to cite the statistics on leading causes of death. Knife fights don’t even make the list. And a long, agonizing death in a hospital bed is nowhere near as glamorous.”
Rachel tensed as she remembered an item on her to-do list.
“What?” Jenny asked aloud.
“Do you have time to drive me somewhere?”
Thirty minutes later, Jenny pulled up to the main entrance of Washington Hospital Center. Rachel froze in the passenger’s seat as her body relived that first visit to see Jordan Meisner, her initial reluctance to leave the car and confront the almost-overwhelming emotions within the hospital.
“Will you be okay?” Jenny asked her.
“Of course!” Rachel said brightly. She popped the door and waved goodbye to Jenny, and let the hospital take her.
Poetry had been Rachel’s first love. As a teenager, she had hidden herself away with whisper-thin folios and great gasping tomes, and had, very gradually, come to realize that some poems were perhaps not as good as others. In those worst offenders, Death was reduced to stilted phrases. Skin, with its inescapable waxy pallor, was always cold and unyielding. Last breaths never failed to rattle in the chest, and there was always one, then another, and another, as the speaker tried to pace out the moments between worlds.
Rachel had never read a good poem about a hospital. She had searched, but everything she found was overly fond of those waxy pallors and clocks where the hands had stopped turning. It had frustrated her: back then, Rachel had thought only the best of hospitals, and couldn’t understand why her poets hadn’t shared this opinion. When you were sick, if you were injured, you turned to the hospital. Yes, people died there, but people died everywhere, and you never heard of anyone who had been healed by that four-way intersection with the hill and the curvy blind drive.
And then she had received her implant, and the emotional spectrum had transformed hospitals into a completely different environment. The moods which ran through a hospital were a river of extremes: there were small sunny shallows, like the maternity ward, but most of it was the dark depths of the oncology wing, or the hard and fast rapids of the Emergency Department. She felt it was still worthy of poetry—more so, perhaps!—as now it was exhausting and heartbreaking and exhilarating, all at once.
The problem was, it stripped her nerves raw. Too bad she was working. If she hadn’t wanted to assess how the workers were coping with D.C.’s first significant act of terrorism since the attack on the Pentagon, she would have turned emotions off and gone skipping down
the halls.
A receptionist told her that Meisner had been moved from the ICU to a newer wing of the hospital. Rachel muttered horrible profanities under her breath; she had been hoping to retrace her steps from her earlier visit, but was now resigned to wandering the labyrinth again. She decided to start in the gift shop and work her way out from there, until she realized the RFID tags that were always scratching at the edge of her awareness were trying to be helpful. She dropped her screens and let them talk to her; they told her how they were installed in each door card, each sign plastered throughout the hallways, and she followed them like a trail of breadcrumbs.
Freakin’ adore these updated tags! she thought, remembering how she and Phil had gotten lost by following old and misplaced signals, and wondered if there was someone on the hospital’s design team who would be interested in ergonomics from a cyborg’s point of view.
This new route through the hospital took her up four flights, and across a covered walkway which connected two wings of the hospital. She paused in the center of the walkway, leaning heavily against the brushed steel railing as she pretended to look down.
Rachel loved heights. This was a fairly new development in her personality: she had never actively disliked heights, but loving them, wanting to experience them? Definitely new. Up here, her perception scans stripped the floor away, and she could feel the electromagnetic spectrum humming all around her. It was like going out-of-body, with the added benefit of having feet.
On a whim, Rachel scanned the area. The walkway was empty, and nobody was coming towards her. She froze the feed to the security cameras, and then flopped down on the linoleum and kicked her legs above her head to rest her feet on a windowsill. With a snap, she shut off emotions, then the visual spectrum, and finally let her scans filter down and away.
It was almost vertigo, this seeing-without-seeing, this spinning rush of sensations which filled the holes where her sight had been. The implant had given her an acute case of synesthesia: even when she removed any frequency which would give her visual feedback, she could still feel the shape of things around her. Her mind rolled, expanding through the space below her, voids and solids forming as she brushed against girders or fell through empty air.
Flashes of vivid blue lurked in pockets throughout the hospital, a color so unmistakably like Hope’s core that Rachel had to double-check to make sure the emotional spectrum was still turned off. It was: the blue existed independent of any one person or machine. Rachel watched the blue as it flitted around: it had no form, no obvious purpose. Stray bursts of energy, or resonance within the spectra, maybe… She wasn’t a scientist, and was left to guess at what they might be.
Up here, the digital ecosystem was quiet. Not gone—she’d have to travel past the Moon to escape it—but muted, with fewer frequencies finding her in the middle of the walkway. The more her senses spread out, the louder it got: the entire hospital hummed to itself, a tune made up of machines designed to perform hard tasks. She listened, trying to pick out an underlying melody, but couldn’t find one. Bell’s and Jason’s systems had each functioned as a single unit, but the hospital’s machines weren’t tuned to a shared purpose. Each kept to its own, concentrating on single jobs.
But maybe, just maybe, there was a different kind of music within those parts—
“Ma’am?”
Rachel opened her eyes, and flipped visuals and emotions on. An orderly was standing over her, confused in orange-yellow.
“I’m fine,” she said, standing and brushing herself off. “My doctor says to lie down when I start to feel dizzy. Sorry to bother you.”
“Do you need me to call someone? Your doctor?”
“No, I’m fine,” she said, walking away with a wave. “Thanks.”
Behind her, she saw the orderly watch her leave in a bemused orange-purple, and then turn his attention to jiggling the wires on the security cameras. She winced, and released the feed.
She found Meisner’s room soon after that, a private suite on a floor set aside for the victims of Gayle Street. The curtains were closed against the viewing window, a second set wrapped tight around the bed. Rachel tapped on the door. The lone figure on the other side of the curtains glowed a mixed orange-yellow, both apprehensive and curious, and Rachel let herself in.
“Hey,” she said. “You’re looking better than the last time I saw you.”
Jordan Meisner’s core colors were a warm woody brown. There was some red pain in his surface colors, but this was briefly chased aside by his purple-gray sigh. “Are you Andrea’s replacement? I thought she said it’d be another hour before she went off-shift.”
“Oh. No, I’m not your nurse,” Rachel said, realizing his eyes and much of his upper face were bandaged. “I’m Agent Peng. I’m the one who found you after the bombings.”
“Hey!” he said. He struggled to sit upright, but gave up as the red bloomed anew. “Thank you. Thanks so much,” he said. “I’d stand, but…”
“Don’t worry,” she said, grinning. “I’m not fancy. I just wanted to check in and make sure you were doing okay, maybe ask you a few questions if you feel up for it.”
“Yeah,” Meisner said, tucking the sheets up under his chin. “They say I’ll be fine. Internal injuries, mostly, except for…” His voice trailed off as he swept a hand up towards his face, the grays becoming more pronounced.
“I spoke with your doctors. They said the facial damage wasn’t too bad,” Rachel tried.
“Yeah,” he said as he forced a chuckle. “They’re going to take some skin off of my butt to patch the holes. Looks like my little sister was right about me.”
Rachel laughed. “Use that one much?”
“The last couple of days? All the time.”
She moved a pile of magazines from the room’s only chair and sat down. “I checked in on you earlier, but you were asleep. You had a lot of family here.”
“We’re local,” Meisner said. “You should have come in. They’ve been buying drinks for everyone that was on the rescue team.”
He kept his head pointed away from her. She recognized his body language; she was familiar with the instinctive need to hide a set of ruined eyes. She shuffled the pages of the magazine for the sound of moving paper, then said, sadly, “Oh.”
“Hm?”
“Just… Your medical file,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
His surface colors fell, leaving him almost wholly gray. “I got out of there with my life,” he said, and a small streak of intense blue shot through the gray. “That’s more than almost everybody else who was on Gayle Street can say.”
“Well, aren’t you a happy little Pollyanna.”
“What?” He hadn’t expected that.
“You lost your vision. That would… That would enrage me! Especially if it happened because some asshole decided you were collateral damage in their terrorist plot.”
Red anger flared, complementing his pain. “Thanks for the compassion.”
“What?” Rachel said, stretching out in the chair. “I’m not your shrink. I’m the person who’s working to catch the fuckers who did this to you and punish the absolute shit out of them.”
She had found profanity to be a useful tool in interviews. Profanity conveyed a sense of plainspoken honesty, especially when used in a setting where it shouldn’t be. It could nudge the listener out of their comfort zone, force them to pay attention, maybe recognize the speaker was also actively involved in their situation. Sure, sometimes it caused things to escalate, with both parties hurling words like pointed rocks, but when that happened, Rachel dug in her heels and went hunting for information hidden in the harsh language.
Here, Meisner took it as honesty, and his red anger eased. “Thanks,” he said after a long moment.
She counted to five, slowly, then feigned a sigh. “You know how I found you?” she asked.
“They told me you’re an Agent,” Meisner replied, yellows coming through the gray.
“Yeah,” Rachel said, as sh
e leaned forward. “But do you want to know how I found you? I specialize in perception. I can see pretty much everything in this hospital, whether I’m looking at it or not.”
When he didn’t reply, she pushed on. “I’m saying there are alternatives. Yeah, your eyes are gone, but the technology’s out there to replace them. And trust me, Meisner, once you start seeing the world through those alternatives, you’ll never want to go back.”
He was quiet, and then said, “With all due respect? Not the same thing. You’ve still got your eyesight, and I don’t have your options.”
She couldn’t reply to that, so she waited a few moments before she changed the subject. “All right,” she said. “I know everyone has been asking you the same questions, but I’d like to go over what happened one more time.”
“Yeah,” he said. The reds eased, and his core of woody brown started to come through. “I don’t know what else I can tell you…”
“I actually saw what you did. You were caught on camera,” Rachel said to prod him. “Helping that woman after the explosion? Pretty impressive.”
“Thanks,” Meisner said. “But I wasn’t thinking. It just… It just happened.”
“Yeah, maybe. Seems pretty cool, though, to have proof.”
“Hm? Proof of what?”
“Well, most of us never get tested like that. You’ve got proof that, deep down, you’re not an asshole.”
He laughed, a quick barking noise that stopped as soon as the pain seized him again. “And I’m not dead,” he said when he could breathe. “The police said that if I’d been in the store when the bomb went off, I’d probably have been killed. So, you know. Small favors.” Gray storm clouds rolled in over his core as he lost himself in regrets.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” Rachel said. “Why were you in the coffee shop in the first place?”
“For coffee. No, sorry. There was a woman,” he said, and his colors brightened through the gray.
“She must have been pretty,” Rachel said, smiling.
“Yeah, she was gorgeous. She went into a different coffee shop, somewhere up the street, and… I should have followed her, but I didn’t. I had some time to kill before a meeting, so I thought I’d hang out, maybe see if I could bump into her if she walked by me again.
Maker Space Page 18
