Chapter 4: ...And I'll Come Back to You
James Morgan looked over at his wife staring at the door where they had wheeled their eldest son through several hours ago. Her normal, neutral expression marred by large bags hanging under her dead eyes and etched in deep-seated, weary sorrow. Under these harsh medical ward lights she looked almost as broken and hollow as their Daniel.
Not that James was doing much better. He’s pale enough he’s near see-through.
The doors swung open and James stumbled in his seat as Anastasia shot to her feet addressed the rail thin blonde man in the lab coat.
“Doctor Miles.” Ah, James recognised that frigid tone of hers. She didn’t like this man and he was skating on thin ice. It made sense though. She did mention a Doctor Miles and how they became acquainted to James a few nights ago.
“Good Morning, Mrs. Morgan.” The doctor seemed to remember his brush with death during their last interaction. If the way he was holding that clipboard in his wife’s direction was any indication. The doctor shot James a look and mumbled. “Good Morning to you too Mr. Morgan.”
Poor man. James thought. Not that he was feeling very sympathetic at the moment himself. This was his son on the line after all.
“Morning.” He drawled in what he attempted as a warm greeting, trying to thaw the icy and awkward air between the doctor and his wife. “I hope you have good news for us, Doc?”
Like flipping the switch Doctor Miles’ face brightened into a snaggletoothed (and slightly manic) grin. “Oh Yes Mr. Morgan! Your son is…” He trailed off, eyes flickering to an increasingly agitated Anastasia. “W-well, perhaps you two should see for y-yourself?”
James smiled, pleased. Good man. He does have some sense after all.
They flew down the hallway in the doctor’s wake. Or perhaps more accurately Anastasia constantly sped up, forcing the doctor to pick up his pace or risk reigniting the Ice Queen’s Ire. Normally James would reign his wintry spitfire of a wife in, but he was nearing the end of his own rope too. Anxiety and anticipation mixing into a nasty, potent cocktail in his gut.
The blasted hallway seemed to go on forever, until finally they came to a sudden stop and turned into a hall marked “Ward 13”. Flashing an ID card against a sensor Doctor Miles peeled the door open letting the couple through into a reception area, manned by a bored and slightly overweight security guard in a blue rent-a-cop uniform. Doctor Miles waved to the guard who shooed them back, his eyes glued to his computer.
Doctor Miles led them behind the reception desk and into a spacious circular atrium. The center of the room was dominated by severa flat screen TV’s hanging down from the ceiling. News reports and bits of company broadcasts flicked past each display.
James turned his attention away from the distracting TV’s and looked around the room. More hospital tile added a chill to the sterile interior, with eight automatic doors set into the round grey walls around them. Doctor Miles made a beeline for the closest one to their immediate right. The door slid open as they approached and the Doctor beckoned them inside.
The room was closed off, the walls padded with black soundproofing. A large screen dominated the far end of the room with a long desk and several comfortable chairs before it. Only one person, a ward technician James guessed, occupied one of the chairs as he and his wife entered, the young man’s attention on the display.
James looked to what was on the screen and felt his breath flee his lungs.
It was his son, awake, alive, sitting in a pitch plack room with another unfamiliar man in a strange ancient style white robe. Daniel’s withered body was dressed in plain white pants and shirt that James didn’t remember putting on him before they left home this morning.
What punched him in the gut though, was his smile.
Daniel was sitting up straight, proudly, under his own power, and smiling. A once familiar, knowing smirk that constantly pulled at the edge of his lips as he spoke with the stranger in that odd black void, seated side-by-side and chatting as if they were reclining on a front porch with cold beers in hand.
“Where is he?” The words flew from his mouth before he could truly believe what he was seeing. Icy sweat poured over shaking and clammy hands. His whole body was trembling as adrenaline (excitement, fear, anxiety, something else, something more-) surged through his veins, his heart racing.
“Physically?” Doctor Miles gestured to the wall. “The good Sergeant is in the next room. Resting in an immersion Pod.”
James saw Anastasia’s cold expression turn frigid and sharp. Doctor Miles held up a finger in supplication. “However! Mentally- Virtually-” The reedy scientist prodded a long knuckly digit in the large display’s direction, where Daniel and the stranger were deep in conversation (Smiling, awake, alive). “Your son is right there.”
Fingers snatched at his arm and James blinked, found himself slumped half in a chair, his legs had buckled, given way under him.
“Are you alright Mr. Morgan?” Doctor Miles asked, pale-faced. His thin arm struggled to hold the stockier man from sliding off the seat and onto the floor and drawing the ire of the man’s wife.
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“Ah,” James drew his arm from the Doctor’s bony fingers. “Yes? No. Kinda? I’m just… I need a moment.”
Anastasia poured herself gracefully into the seat next to him. Silently he reached over into her lap and they laced their fingers together, both seeking solace in each other. He may have been the one to collapse Anastasia was in no better a condition as him, judging from the way his knuckles are being gradually ground into dust.
“So, I gotta ask, ” A hauntingly familiar voice pulsed from the display’s speakers. A forgotten ghost from the past speaking out from beyond the veil. Daniel’s voice was both softer and rougher than Jame remembered. A brassy tenor with a jaded razor edge, a tone and tilt that was unmistakably Daniel.
“With everything and anything being possible here and all, why am I still an awkward bag of skin and bones? I want my two-week trial for your patented ‘Muscle Beach Calender Model’ or whatever.”
-as was his sardonic sense of morbid humor. How could James forget?
James heard Anastasia draw in a little choked gasp at hearing her baby speak after so long, unhindered by his injuries. James doubted either of them would forget again.
On screen the stranger in the white robe chuckled, the sound deep and low. “There’s a very good reason, Sergeant Daniel Morgan.”
“So having everything short of my usual excruciating phantom pains from limbs that, up until about ten minutes ago, I had been unable to feel let alone move is aaaallll for a good reason? I look like a pale, paper mache raisin stuccoed over a halloween decoration.”
A snort popped itself out of Jame’s nose, actually startling him. That’s my boy. He felt the cold heat from his wife’s glare and quickly schooled his features behind a mask of cool indifference. She pinched his thigh anyway. Devil woman. He’ll be sure to give her a good foot massage tonight.
Hm, maybe massages could be his next skill to acquire? He doubted Anastasia would complain in any case. (Just another productive distraction from the hell James is forced to watch his eldest go through every day, just existing. Just another way to deaden the pain.)
On the screen the bald stranger gave a grim sort of chuckle and added wearily, “It’s to avoid your mind going into a sort of culture shock and rejecting your virtual body all together.”
“Ah.” It jarred James hard to see the skeletal shadow of his son screw his sunken face into a familiar thoughtful expression. Like a painted portrait twisted and warped from its original form into a hideous mockery of what was once beautiful and handsome. The lump in James’ throat grew thorns and curled its hooks further into his flesh.
Daniel drew himself from the disturbing notion of his brain rejecting his own body in a vain attempt at suicidal self-preservation, his bony face relaxing into a faux calm with an easy smirk. “So no hottie beach body for me quite yet?”
“No,” The stranger chuckled. “Not yet. In time.”
“How long?” Daniel asked. Though he hid it well James heard to slight edge of anxiety tinge the loaded question.
“However long it takes, I’m afraid.” The stranger replied. To his credit he did look remorseful at the answer. He perked up right after and said, “Though that doesn’t mean you will have to go through this process alone.”
That got Daniel’s attention. His thin face snapped to the stranger so quickly a spark of panic erupted in James’ chest, half expecting his son to somehow snap his emaciated neck in the violent motion. He ignored his wife’s nails digging into the back of his hand and just rubbed soothing circles over her knuckles.
Daniel opened his mouth, then swallowed thickly, his razor sharp adam’s apple bobbing over his throat, and managed to choke out in a tiny, tiny voice, “My parents are here?”
The stranger went to reply but Daniel barreled right over him, “Can they- I-I mean are they. You know- watching, I mean seeing this- me- right now?”
James heard a tiny little sob from next to him. He tightened their interwoven fingers. The distress and panic in his little boy’s voice hurt. It scared him on a level that shook James to his core.
The stranger nodded and as softly as someone with a rumbling brass voice could manage said, “Yes. Both of your parents are watching right now.” He gestured towards the virtual camera and the sheer hope that Daniel directed at the screen broke James’ heart. His arms itched to wrap his son in a hug and never let go.
“I can’t see them!”
The stranger sighed and rubbed his caramel skinned head. “No, there is no camera in the room. They can hear and see us, but… well, we never thought to put equipment in there. It hadn’t mattered until now. We hadn’t had someone like you with your situation before.”
Daniel slumped in his chair and buried his head in his gnarled, skeletal hands the wind seeming sucked from his sails all at once. The former-quadraplegic pulled himself together with a huff and dragged his face free from his palms and asked in a level voice, “Can they hear me? See me, at least?”
The stranger nodded, “Yes.” he gestured the camera over and the display’s view zoomed closer, outlining the etched lines around Daniel’s sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. The young, emaciated man peered into the camera and at the audience on the other side.
“Hey Mom, Dad.”
James felt his wife’s nails press deeper into his hand.
Daniel’s face relaxed, the hard lines softened. An invisible tension that clung about his brow untwisted, suddenly making him seem years younger, almost like a man actually his age. The sight stuck with James, striking him with a hammerblow of memories of his son eight years younger, before the Army.
Daniel’s thin lips pulled into a bright, honest grin. “I have just been informed by a strange bald man in a weird white robe that I may get to see you soon.” He raised a bony hand and gave a little wave. “I can’t wait to hug the stuffing out of all of you. My idiot brother too, when I see him.” His voice grew thick. “I love you both, so, so much.”
Anastasia’s breath stuttered and she sucked in a shuddering sob, but her deathgrip on James’ hand relaxed, much to his relief. James could feel Doctor Miles’ eyes burning an obnoxious hole in the nape of his neck, but he pretended to be oblivious and chose to ignore him, too enraptured by his son on the screen.
James could see the conflict in Daniel’s expression, pain, and impatience lingered there too. Ultimately he tore himself away from the camera and forced his eyes back to his bald companion, of nothing else than to seek a distraction. “So just how is all of this possible? You know with fixing my mind and all.”
“I know for a fact I’m missing a good piece of my head by way of turbo-lobotomy from explosive fragmentation.” He added dryly, gesturing to the indent above his left eye.
James thought he heard Doctor Miles choke a little on his spit. He grinned as the bald stranger replied with a dry smirk of his own, “We didn’t.”
Daniel’s face went blank. “What?”
“We didn’t fix you, exactly.” The stranger explained. “What we are doing is artificially supporting the damaged portions of your brain by taking and re-routing the compromised neural pathways into a virtual construct.”
“English man. I’ve been drooling on myself for the past 2 and half years. Give me a chance to get used to thinking before you fry what’s left of my filetted gray matter.”
The stranger laughed, pleased that Daniel was bouncing back from his emotional address to his parents. “Of course Sergeant Daniel Morgan. In Layman’s terms we placed your mind into what is basically a digital prosthetic brain.”
Daniel’s eyebrows rose, as did James’. He looked over to his wife and found his own astonishment mirrored on her slightly raw face. A prosthetic brain? James flicked a glance at Doctor Miles and noted the poorly hidden smug smirk on the doctor’s sickly face.
Daniel settled back in his seat, digesting the new information. “So… What? Am I a part of some super-computer now? Can you even take me out?”
“Yes,” The stranger chuckled. “The rig that is supporting you is non-invasive. We can take you out at any time. In fact, we are counting on it. The whole point to this venture is to heal your body, after all.”
Daniel quirked a brow and James leaned forward, literally on the edge of his seat as his son asked, “And just how are you planning on doing that, Edris?”
“By teaching your brain how to make your body whole again.”
Daniel blinked and quipped, in his familiar sarcastic manner, “Mind over matter, right?”
To his surprise, Edris’ lips cracked into a wolfish grin, “Exactly.”