my head toward him.
“I’m sorry, I should have said something. The boot up here can affect your sensory networks. I didn’t mean to startle you. Again, sorry!”
At the same time, the door flung open, and two men burst in. The first man was a tall, lanky, skinny-type old guy, and the other was a younger black guy. Both wore lab coats. Tall and skinny stepped up to the foot of my bed. He had a hook nose and stared down at me. He had long white hair pulled back into a ponytail. I thought to myself, I’m sorry, old guys with white hair should act their age. They don’t look cool with a ponytail. I suppose he had a motorcycle parked outside that he bought during his latest midlife crisis.
Ponytail guy spoke right up, “Well, we’re all here, good. Let us begin.” And looking straight at me, he asked, “And how are we this morning?”
I looked right back at him. “We? I have no idea how you feel, but I feel like shit!” Both Jane and the black guy lowered their heads and smiled.
“Yes, quite. I see.” Without missing a beat, ponytail guy continued, “Let me introduce myself and everyone else present. My name is Dr. Philippe, Marcel Philippe. I am chief of medicine and director of medical research here at White Willow Medical Center. I am your lead physician. Beside me here is Dr. Jeffrey Davis; he is head of med surge at this center, and he is your chief surgeon.” The black guy looked up and smiled. “Sitting beside you on the bed is Dr. Jane Dietrich, head of psychiatry.”
I thought to myself, Oh, great! She’s a fucking shrink.
“At the computer table is Mike Berry. He is our bio IT technician and is an expert in alternate technology linkages. You will get to understand what that means as we work more with you over the next little while.” I couldn’t believe how arrogant this character was. “I understand you have already met Chris and Zoe. They are both medical practitioners and will attend you as well. In short, we are your medical team.”
Besides having a ponytail, he had a large hook nose. “To begin, Chris told me you asked about the elapsed time of your treatment. The ship you were traveling on was attacked, and all hands were lost, but then a medical ship found you along with your damaged DNA sequencer. Unfortunately, they could not revive you. Your sequencer, or SCARAB, was damaged beyond field use, and you could not survive over three or four minutes at a time. As a result, reviving you was pointless. As a consequence, they pronounced you dead.
“As luck would have it though, the chief physician on that medical ship was relentless. He would not stop trying to save you, and what’s more, he knew of my work here and contacted me. I immediately saw a marvelous opportunity to add to our research and to test a process that could save your life. The fact that we’re all here now proves that we succeeded.” There it was! He didn’t care about me; he only cared about the applause he’d get later.
Then looking at the doctor beside him, ponytail guy started, “Let’s begin by explaining how we treated our patient. Dr. Davis, if you would be so kind?”
“Okay, miss…” Dr. Davis seemed shy when he spoke, “It was not possible to restore some organs, and that was the main reason that the previous resuscitation attempts failed. Revive terminals could not restore your heart, liver, or your pancreas. So we have provided you with replacement biotechnical organs. These are digitally engineered biomechanical nanobots programmed to perform like the organ they replace.”
He must have seen the look on my face. The one that said, “What the fuck did you just say?”
He spit out, “These artificial parts act like the real organs.”
What he said shocked me. “My heart! Wow! Will I be restricted? Will I have to be careful?”
Dr. Davis answered, “No, quite the opposite. You will soon be in better shape than I am, and believe me, I am perfectly fit. He finished with, “Mr. Berry can explain the patient’s prosthetics.”
“All right.” Mike began, “Your left arm and your left leg are bioengineered prostheses. They respond to your brain like your real arm and leg. The difference is that the artificial parts use a battery that is also located in your new leg. Now this battery is remarkable. It is subatomic driven, which is not dangerous and may not need a recharge for twenty years. Also, your arm and leg are computer driven, and you will have sensory response, touch, and feel, like your real hand. What’s more, you will be as gentle or as firm or strong as you may desire.”
Mike looked at Dr. Philippe who was pretending not to be paying attention by fiddling with a monitoring machine up behind me on the wall. Probably the one that would chime whenever I woke up. Dr. Philippe seemed like a phony. Mike asked, “Dr. Philippe, should I continue?”
“Yes, but let me inject a comment first.” Dr. Ponytail was standing over me, looking straight down at my head. Or was he trying to look down my shirt? Pervert. “Please understand, miss, you also had extensive head injuries. We had to rebuild the right side of your skull and forehead, and these included the nerve ganglia for your eye.”
Mike continued, “Well, yes, you have sensors to process visual and nonvisual information. This is not like anything science has done before. In effect, this improves your optics. You have sensors that will give you information about whether a person is beyond your vision and if they have weapons. It will even tell you if a hostile creature is behind you.
“A bonus is you have a sat nav system to locate yourself or find destinations on a map much like a GPS. Finally, you also have a complete communication system, both transmission and reception. You can receive transmissions or communicate on many frequencies. You can send messages or texts while keeping your hands free to do other activities. I’ll stop here for now. This is a lot of information, and I’ll work with you for as long as it takes to explain it all.”
At that point, Dr. Phillippe cut back in, “Thank you, Mike. I’ll explain the last part.” He stayed standing beside the bed. “Our last improvement repairs the serious brain damage that you suffered. Similar to the mechanized organ replacements that Dr. Davis referred to, we placed a NeoPsion Mind Force Implant in your head. It almost is a replacement for your skull and comprises three synaptic sensor strips each about an inch wide that join at your frontal lobe and reconnect at the base of your skull.
“This implant is quite a remarkable invention because it makes you telepathic. With proper training, that we will help you with, you should be able to move objects by only thinking about it. We don’t know the full extent of the implant’s capabilities, but you should be able to communicate with others with only your mind. No speech will be necessary.”
To wrap up, Dr. Philippe added, “In conclusion, miss, please understand that the laws of space are quite explicit regarding the donation of body parts for science research. As you were pronounced dead, we went ahead with our plans for you. Most people tend to only own one SCARAB, but even if you had a copy back on your home planet, no one would ever be able to retrieve it in time to save you. So, regardless of your identity, we went ahead with our work.”
Now he was giving me legal jargon and brushing off things he didn’t want to talk about. I stopped him. “Wait a minute. What do you mean, ‘regardless of my identity’?”
Dr. Ponytail was unstoppable. “While some damage to your SCARAB prevented the doctors from reviving all your body parts, some damage also erased parts of the identity sector. We replaced body parts that were no longer serviceable, but we can’t fill in the gaps in your memory. You will have to do that yourself.”
I looked at Jane. “But did you try to look for me, for my identity? Did you try to figure out if I signed an organ use permission somewhere, or if I had a ‘do not revive’ request somewhere? Did you look for copies of the ship’s records, for a girl passenger?” She looked away. I pulled my hand away from hers.
The motor mouth wouldn’t stop. “Please understand the question is moot. Once revived, as you are now, you can fill in the blanks yourself, fill in your own unknowns, as it were. We can do that right now in one simple question: Who are you?”
It suddenly hit me that there was a lot of very high-priced