“Well, great. You two should share notes about your post-migration phases. It’s always nice to have a friend who can relate.”
Even if Helen couldn’t relate to my dreams, Dr. Little made a good point.
“Vitals are looking good, Helen. Did you want to review your brain chart, or did you want to wait for Ryan to leave?”
I immediately felt like a burden.
“He’s fine. Let’s take a look.”
As the shaft in the ceiling opened up, I was relieved that the health disk wasn’t coming for me. Then we all turned our attention to Helen’s chart.
“See that nearly perfect circle?”
“Yes.”
“Your host’s brain is taking quite nicely to your mind. We’ll play it safe, but as long as things keep progressing, I’d say you’re looking at a shorter rehab than most. If you don’t have any questions, I’ll let you two get back to flirting.”
“Oh, we’re not—” Helen and I said in unison while blushing.
We all busted into laughter as Dr. Little left the room.
Alone again, I turned back to Helen. “I’m really happy for you, Helen. I thought I worked hard for my migration, but you really took it the extra kilometer, and it’s paying off. Thanks for being an inspiration even to another migrator.”
“That’s sweet, Ry. You can thank me in drinks when I get out of here. Fair?”
“Two Toms’ Tavern it is, then. I’ll let you get some rest, but if you need anything or just want to talk, hit me up on my netphone.”
“Oh, Ry. Don’t worry about me. Go explore the world with your new legs. Maybe go for a jog or something. I’ll see you later.”
“I will. Thanks! Bye!”
I couldn’t help but grin like an idiot as I walked out of her room. She was an amazing person, and I really valued our friendship, which was another reason we had never taken it to the next level. But it seemed like anything was possible moving forward since we would both be walking. Either way, it was time to leave ADG, and I couldn’t have been happier.
Strolling through the migration recovery area toward the exit, I saw the other poor souls who were struggling to walk post-migration. Then I waved at Mr. Personality at the front desk, who barely noticed me while he frantically typed. The motion-sensing doors detected me, and I went back down the hallway that had borne witness to my final ride with Auto. I had thought about him every time I sat in a manual wheelchair, but to my surprise, I didn’t really miss him. There was none of the separation anxiety I was certain I would have. I must have been realizing, at that moment, that all good things had to come to an end, and at least, Auto and my story had a happy ending. Well, for me, at least.
Looking farther down the hallway, I could see the many rooms that I’d wheeled into in preparation for my transition. Ironically, that side of the building looked foreign to me since the migration. No longer needing to virtually interface, I manually pressed the down arrow with my thumb as hard as I could when I reached the elevator. The wait for the world’s slowest elevator was actually calming that time around, and I just let my mind wander for the few moments it took.
With a ding, the doors opened. I stepped inside and was greeted by the familiar dry, old pop instrumental. Another ding, and I was walking through the hallway. With a steady gait, I strolled through the foyer, my heels clicking against the slate floor. Everything from the fountain to the vines on the walls seemed to have a new glow as if I was seeing them for the first time, and technically I was, with my new eyes. Chills ran down my fully functional spine as I peered up to see God’s finger transferring life into Adam. The reference finally made sense to me.
I meandered past the unnecessarily cold waiting room where future migrators were waiting anxiously for their procedures. There was Atlas holding the weight of the world on his shoulders. In contrast, I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders, and I could finally feel comfortable in my own skin. The aquarium in the wall was calm, but I was still able to quickly spot the disabled fish from afar. Part of me instantly identified with him while another part of me had already begun moving on to the mindset of a fully abled person, the goldfish.
The inner exit doors acknowledged my presence, and I felt like a rock star with each step I took through the vestibule. I was fully aware that, waiting for me on the other side, was the busy city I had navigated for years in an auto-chair. To that end, I tried to prepare myself to be underwhelmed. Still, I knew it would be different, and that feeling was confirmed as the outside doors opened the world to me.
My eyes adjusted as I tried to take it all in. The sun was bright, the sky was blue, and the air was crisp. Two steps onto the pavement, I stopped suddenly, almost against my will, and my mind and body were stunned by my surroundings. The cool breeze. The smell of the city. The zipping cars. The chirping birds. The intimidating buildings. The hustling masses.
The realization was instant. While I was familiar with everything, everything was not familiar with me. Meaning I was just another walker, and as awful as that might have sounded to some, it was glorious to me. All I had ever wanted was to fit in.
A kind fellow did his part to really cement the feeling. “Hey, buddy, get outta my way!”
For all of the unsaid things people did while I sat in Auto, no one ever really uttered words like that. It was assumed that I would be in the way, but standing like everyone else meant it was assumed that I would walk like everyone else. I quickly and quietly reveled in the moment, then let it fade so I could move on.
Making my way to the bullet-bus stop that last saw me a paraplegic, I waited in a standing position for the very first time in my life. There was only one bullet-bus that was auto-chair-accommodating, so I always had to tack on an extra thirty minutes or so to my travels just to wait for it.
The bullet-bus rapidly approached, and I prepared myself for its stairs. From one hundred twenty kilometers an hour, it came to a complete stop in an instant, and the doors flung open. I jumped on and put my thumb in the fare acceptor, and it chimed with approval as it always had. It appeared that they’d successfully migrated my fingerprints. Looking back in the bus, I would be standing up against strangers for the start of my trip, but having never really experienced that before, I looked forward to it in a weird but non-creepy way.
The bus took off with a burst of speed, and I struggled a bit to keep my balance. I gently bumped into the people behind me, but they didn’t seem to care. Otherwise, the ride was smooth. Eventually, seats opened up, but I passed every single one up to stay standing while holding onto the handrail above. The half-hour trip went by in the blink of an eye, and before I knew it, I was getting out at the bus stop near my childhood home—the home where I’d spent my entire life, but a home where I had never taken as much as a single step.
I walked the few blocks to my street, turned, and saw it sitting there: the house with the ramp that school kids made fun of. Moving forward, it would be the house that no longer needed a ramp. Instead, it would be the house with stairs that got twice the traffic!
Stopping in the front yard, I slowly peered up to the picture window I’d spent so many years looking through. I always wondered what it would be like to just walk down the street. Like a lot of the dreams I had, I would finally be able to actualize them. That was when the awe from being in a new body quickly waned, and I realized how much work was ahead of me. In fact, I had new life goals, new purpose, and of course, new challenges for the first time since…ever.
First, I had to have a difficult conversation with Mom. While it was a requirement to have assisted living for one month after a mind migration, that was as long as I wanted to stay at home. Mom had given me several thousand credits to celebrate the procedure, which was enough to get an apartment. Mom had taken care of me long enough, and I knew she would move on to the next phase in her life faster if I was out of the house.
Next, I
had to go back to ADG to see the Cameron Walsh speech. They’d performed my mind migration, the single greatest thing that had ever happened to me, and part of me would forever be grateful that such a procedure existed. But I having been gone for less than an hour, I quickly realized another part of me never wanted to go back—ever. Going back meant reliving the journey I had just completed, every painful moment, every doubtful second. It was something I would have to deal with eventually because I had to complete the final session with Tony. But the speech would be the week before that, and I was hoping Helen would accompany me for moral support.
Lastly, Tony’s advice to ignore my dreams had turned out to be good, if only in the short term. It allowed me to focus enough to finish my rehab and go home. But the dreams were still happening. I wanted to do some digging on my own to see if I could make sense of them. Who was Charlie? Why did I have first-person accounts of him that seemed so real? What had happened to him? I thought I might try the old family shrink to see if I could get a different perspective and possibly a new direction.
But at that moment, I just had one goal. I needed to walk into my house for the first time. Each step was one closer to the next phase of my life. Each stair was helping me move on from my disabilities. As I approached the top, I reached for the door, and it was like the final effort needed to turn the last page in a major chapter of my life. I opened the door, and the scent of home sweet home hit me in the face, causing my eyes to well up. And while still thinking about putting the past behind me, a voice popped into my head.
Let’s get this over with.
Chapter 13:
When Your Heart is Not in It
Let’s get this over with, I thought as I stepped around metal crates in the long hallways barely lit by the LEDs in the floor. It seemed fitting that my last job would be at the warehouse. The other jobs we’d done there had reminded me of my last major mission while I was enlisted—one I would never forget.
We had been deployed to the city of Quetta. Having completed a few missions early on, it had been a couple months since we’d seen any action. Then we finally intercepted communications that an enemy sect was using a “warehouse-like building” to store arms and other paraphernalia. The problem had been that there were around fifteen warehouses matching the description within the city limits, and none of the aerial scans narrowed the possibilities.
I was part of a reconnaissance team sent to investigate one of the buildings. Our intelligence stated that the warehouse we were assigned had been vacant since troops hit the ground some eighteen months earlier. There for information not a firefight, we had specific orders, should we encounter the enemy, not to in anyway engage unless we had no choice.
We rendezvoused on a weeknight after curfew so the locals would be off the street. The air had been dry, but it was exceptionally hot. Combined with fifty pounds of gear, it hadn’t taken long for me to work up a good lather, and judging by the dark spots on the fatigues of my squad mates, they hadn’t been exactly comfortable either. We were perched on top of an empty apartment complex across the street from the warehouse, surveilling through the roof windows.
Of our eight-person team, I was one of two chosen to enter the building for a more detailed sweep. I had finished the AIT stealth lessons with top honors, so it just made sense. I was partnered with Corporal Sierra Hotel, who was the only deployed marine that scored higher in stealth than me. So, while I outranked her, it only felt right that she gave the orders on our missions. Together, we were the best infiltrators the marines had, on paper. And while we’d had some success on previous missions, I never took anything for granted on foreign soil. No matter how quick, quiet, and covered we were, I always assumed there were eyes on us. The stress had made those types of jobs that much harder.
Sierra and I made our way down from the roof using the fire escape and quickly slid to the edge of the building. She gently peered around all corners to ensure no one was guarding the building or walking by and gave me the signal to contact the crew on the apartment roof for more clearance.
“Bravo Company, this is Coyote Royal. Are we clear for departure? Over.”
“Coyote Royal, you have clear skies, and you’re next in line. Safe travels. Over and out.”
We darted across the street and took cover in a shadowy inlet of the warehouse. Another check for signs of life down both ways of the street came up negative, so we made our way around the building to the loading docks. I placed a small ground scanning devices in front of each dock to analyze the driveways and determine if any vehicles had recently pulled up to the building. If we had gotten a hit, we would have kept that in mind while searching the building. We waited the few moments it took for the scan to complete.
“Beep!” was heard over all of our headsets.
“Coyote Royal, we have confirmation of turbulence. Please proceed with caution.”
We located the side entrance, and I drew my weapon. Sierra obtained the oil gun from her bag and applied it to the hinges and latch assembly. Almost silently, we opened the heavy door and slipped into the pitch-black building. We gently closed the door behind us and then lowered our night-vision goggles. Proceeding through the green rooms and hallways, our steps were silent and our breathing controlled.
After searching a few offices containing nothing of interest, we came to the main storage room and took a knee in a dark corner. Peering around, we determined that worn boxes on shelves, a few stacks of pallets here and there, and a rusty forklift near the loading dock were what had returned the positive results from the scan outside. I hit the button on my wrist unit to scan the room for large concentrations of metal—arms or ammunition. Sweat dripped down my forehead and off my nose while we waited the ten seconds for that result.
“Buzz!”
Other than the forklift and some random equipment, the scan turned up nothing.
I hit the button again to search for plastics because some groups had begun manufacturing weapons that could circumvent our metal scans. They weren’t typically as powerful as their metal counterparts, but the enemy was willing to do anything to move their agenda forward.
“Buzz!”
Again, nothing significant.
Thinking that the mission had been all for naught, I turned off my wrist unit but inadvertently changed it to scan for heartbeats instead. That setting had been next to useless for the last several months since the enemy was fitting their armies with pacemakers that would block or scramble the scan.
“Beep!”
A positive result. For heartbeats.
What the—
“Coyote Royal, we’re acknowledging your new flight path. Please proceed with caution.”
My partner and I looked at the results on my wrist unit, and both nearly fell over. Shuffling to keep our balance, slight noises echoed through the old building.
Thirty-six heartbeats detected.
It had to be a misread. In disbelief, I turned the unit off and on again. To not alarm Bravo Company, I turned off the results transmitter and rescanned the area for heartbeats.
“Beep!”
Still, thirty-six heartbeats detected. We were in a completely empty and silent warehouse where there were apparently thirty-six people.
I caught Sierra’s eye to express my disbelief, and she shrugged in response. My partner made the signal to move out of the corner to investigate. With backs together, we gently walked around each set of shelves and peered around every box. With each passing moment and no signs of a life, I began thinking my wrist unit must have been faulty. I made the signal for wrapping up the mission and returning to the team.
As we walked across the perimeter of the room toward the exit, we took a path that was obstructed by a stack of pallets. Sneaking closely around them, I felt the floor give ever so slightly with the faintest hollow noise under my last two steps. I stopped. Sierra had walked ahead until she noticed I wasn
’t following, then turned to me. I pointed down, and she doubled back to examine the ground. There was a ninety-degree cut in the ground leading under the pallets, so we came to the conclusion we should move the pallets. Pulling them aside, a three-by-three rectangle revealed itself on the floor. On one side, a much smaller rectangle was visible. I flung my rifle over my back and knelt down. Touching the small rectangle in the floor, I was able to remove the cover piece without much effort. Within the small hole, I found a handle to what had to be a door.
Looking at Sierra, I considered that we had specific orders not to engage the enemy. But we also needed to determine if there were any weapons stored there with the scans coming back odd, so we had to make a judgment call.
I gave a thumbs-up to her, and she returned it. We had to get that door open and see what was below. Sierra readied her rifle and aimed it downward. On the count of three, I gripped the door handle, pulled up as hard as I could, and then let it go while simultaneously swinging my weapon into my hands.
But we were only presented with green darkness. Not a soul was down there. Only a ladder leading down about six feet. Peering in, we saw three walls and a tunnel opening.
With cover from Sierra, I slid down the ladder first and immediately took aim down the tunnel. She quickly followed, and we oriented ourselves to maximize our shot zone. We crept down the tunnel to a metal door about thirty feet into the tunnel. While the door itself appeared to be heavy duty, there wasn’t any obvious locking mechanism. As we closed in, I furnished the listening cone from my gear and gently placed it up to the door. Like the morgue room we’d discovered in the factory, we had been again presented with a low hum from what must have been a generator.
I pointed at the hinges and latch assembly on the door, and she quickly oiled them up. I readied a smoke bomb from my pack and gripped the door handle with my other hand. Sierra aimed at the door as I yanked it open with all my might. The brightest light blinded us through our night-vision goggles, but I was able to pull the pin on the bomb and throw it in before anyone could approach us.
Between Two Minds: Awakening Page 15
