Chapter 4. Blood Red
As I followed Enrique and the woman, I felt numb, like all my thoughts and feelings had turned to vapor and left my head.
The door opened onto a hallway lined with doctor’s examination rooms. They looked perfectly ordinary except for the large, multi-armed robot in the corner of each one. Those seemed like some kind of torture device. It occurred to me that I didn’t really know Enrique. If he worked for the corps and was about to harvest my organs now that I had proven my intentions were frankly illegal, then I had no way to stop him unless I turned 180 degrees and ran flat out.
I considered it, but I didn’t do that. Even though I was scared, part of me trusted him, and part of me was desperate for any way to find out anything about Freya. The woman in scrubs left us in a small exam room, complete with dark gray torture-robot. My only consolation was that it seemed to be powered down.
“What are we doing here?” I whispered to Enrique.
“If you’re going to jack in, we can’t have you using ancient tech. You’ll need a net port.”
“A net port?”
“Yeah. Like your friend.”
“What? Freya?” I thought about the image of me that he had shown her. “But that was a port for the delivery of medication. My grandma had that for her cancer.”
“I’m afraid not,” Enrique said. “That was a net port. Whatever she was part of, it involved jacking in. Now, I’ve heard of clinical trials that involved net therapy. And I’ve definitely heard of digital narcotics used as painkillers. So it’s possible that whatever happened was perfectly ordinary. But if you want to be sure, you’re going to have to go under the knife.”
I felt a dull pressure in my ears. I’d had a lifelong fear of doctors and hospitals, ever since the eye surgery when I was two years old. In fact, and I felt ashamed even to admit this to myself, but my fear of hospitals was part of what had kept me away from Freya, part of the reason I was only able to see her once before she was taken away.
The other part of the reason was that they took her so quickly, and without giving her much of a chance to talk to anyone. When I thought about that, I felt angry enough at whoever did that to her to push through my own fear.
And just in time, because the door opened and a young woman with long, dark hair stepped through. “I’m Rashida Qin,” she said brightly and full of confidence. “How are you?”
“Um, a bit scared,” I said.
“There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll be performing the operation today and I’ll make sure to take good care of you.”
“Whoa,” I said. “I’m not ready for an operation.”
“No? I thought you needed a net port for work.”
I looked at Enrique, who raised his eyebrows. Dr. Qin caught the look, and turned to me. “Would you like to speak to me in private?”
“I would.”
“Suit yourself, kid,” Enrique said, and stood up. “If you need me, I’ll be next door having a coffee.” He rested one chrome hand on my shoulder. That gesture was starting to seem controlling. “You’re in good hands, Rawls. I wouldn’t bring you here otherwise.”
I watched the door close behind Enrique, and then the doctor and I were alone. “Have you ever had an implant installed before?” she said.
“Just the usual trackers when I was kid, and my credit chip when I turned eighteen. But I had eye surgery a couple times when I was a toddler.”
She stepped to the white wall and took hold of a hidden handle. Sliding away what seemed to be a heavy door mounted on a rail, she exposed the space within, about the size of a shower stall and marked with a grid. “Step inside. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Do I need to take off my jacket?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
I left the jacket on the chair and stepped inside the booth. She slid the door shut and I heard a whirring noise that lasted for less than a second.
The door slid open again. “Come on out, and I’ll show you the results.” Dr. Qin swung a monitor mounted on a steel arm toward me.
Resonance Scan Results Rawls, Jasper 19 year-old male HOME SEC LOCATOR Serial *74 NC CHILD SRV MON Serial *22 FDWT NET OCULA L Serial *87 FDWT NET OCULA R Serial *10 PEGASUS BANK IND Serial *93 NO OTHER IMPLANTS FOUND
“That last one’s my credit chip,” I said. “And the first two are the government child-monitoring chips, right?”
“You got it. But it looks like you’ve had some other work done.”
“No, I haven’t.”
Rashida looked me in the eye. “Rawls, can I call you that?”
I nodded. She offered her hands, and I put one of mine in hers. They were cold and dry.
“Sorry,” she said. “I have to wash them about every five minutes.” Dr. Qin’s off-hand attitude, her friendliness, and her competence made me trust her. “Rawls, maybe you don’t remember, but you have some implants other than the trackers and your credit chip.”
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I felt like I knew what she was going to say. “You’re talking about my eyes, aren’t you?”
“They’re remarkable,” she said softly, looking deeply into my left eye and then my right. “I never would have known without the scan.”
When I was two years old, I suffered infections in both eyes. I remembered being put in a room like this, a doctor’s exam room, and then a man in surgical scrubs put a mask over my nose and mouth. It was connected to a hose. I remember fighting him, but I was only a toddler. I couldn’t keep the mask from descending over me.
Then I remembered the smell of artificial strawberries, and the next thing I knew, the sun was in my eyes and Dad was wheeling me on a gurney out to a rented van.
“What I remember most from the surgery was being scared,” I said to Dr. Qin. I was aware that I was speaking formally, the way we were taught in school, hiding my accent.
Dr. Qin patted my hand. “I’m so sorry you went through that. Your parents must have thought the surgery was necessary to save your vision.”
I thought about it. It would have been my dad’s decision. My mom left around that time—I barely remembered her. “Yeah, I guess. But no one ever told me I had implants.”
“I don’t want to apologize for them,” she said, “but maybe they didn’t want you to feel different.”
“I remember that I had to use these oily drops every day for years, and I was the first kid in my class to wear glasses.”
“But then?”
“At some point, I no longer needed the drops and I no longer needed glasses. My vision was sharper than anyone else’s. For a while I thought about being a fighter pilot.”
We laughed together.
“Have you ever felt different from other kids?” she said.
“There were times, like in art class or just laying down by the river with ... with my best friend, when I would remark on a color that I was seeing that no one else seemed to be able to see. Like dim red and bright purple.”
The mention of bright purple made me think of the words that had appeared to me at the riverbank:
COME FIND ME
Now that I thought of it, I hadn’t seen those words since I arrived in the city.
Dr. Qin said, “That’s good to know, about seeing colors. Mind if I make a note of that?”
I nodded.
Dr. Qin took the seat next to me. “There’s something I should tell you. These look like very expensive implants, possibly even priceless. The kind that only the children of executives or top-level professionals could have had installed. Was your family well-off?”
I had to laugh, and my country accent came back. “Hell no, doc. We was dirt poor. Especially after my mom left and it was just my dad and me.”
“How do you think he could have afforded those?”
“Beats me.”
She let go of my hands. “I’m sorry to say this, but you’ve got another decision to make.”
I looked at the monitor. “The net port?”
She nodded. “There’s a chance your eyes could connect to the net even without a port in your chest, but I don’t know enough to say for sure. It would take some research. I can do that, if you like.”
“I’d appreciate it if you would, doctor. Listen. I trust you, and I think I can trust Enrique. If he says I need a net port, then I want you to install a net port on me.”
She gave me a crisp nod and stood, then started washing her hands at the sink. Her reflection caught my eye in the mirror. “This will be a lot less scary,” she said. “I promise.”
I started to unbutton my shirt, and Dr. Qin moved over to the multi-armed torture robot. She made a gesture in front of it and it woke up, lights glowing on its arms and its motors silently moving through some kind of calibration pattern.
Suddenly I could feel my heart pounding and my chest getting tight. The world tilted ominously, as if my sense of balance had decided to quit all at once. “I think I’m having a panic attack,” I said.
“First time?” Dr. Qin said.
I remembered when I had attempted to go visit Freya in the Asheville hospital, how the moment I stepped off the BRUTE I felt so dizzy that I had to lay down on the sidewalk. A couple of uniformed police had called me a tweaker and threatened to arrest me, then put me back on the BRUTE and sent me home.
I shook my head. “I’ve had them before.”
“Do you need help?”
“I’m OK.”
I counted my breaths, the way Dad showed me. In for four seconds, hold for four seconds, out for four seconds, hold for four seconds.
I thought about Freya. I felt like I had let her down, let my fear of hospitals keep me from helping her. That wasn’t going to happen again, I promised silently.
Yesterday, I’d breached two separate corporate devices. If I was going to find Freya, I would be breaching more.
“You sure?” Dr. Qin said.
“Let’s do this. Just don’t let me see that robot thing move. Do I have to be put under?”
She shook her head and then carried a tray over to him. On it was a gleaming circular steel socket and a thin gold cable coiled in a figure-eight. “You can stay conscious if you want. I’ll numb part of your chest and also the base of your neck. Then I’ll make two cuts, through which I’ll install the socket and pull the wire. You’ll be able to use it starting tomorrow—or whenever it’s no longer bleeding through the bandage—but you won’t have full connectivity for two weeks while the wire adapts to your nervous system. For those two weeks, it’s important to exercise the connections everyday or you’ll lose the ability to jack in through this port. Got it?”
“I have to jack in every day for two weeks.”
“That’s right.”
“OK.”
“Hop up on this table, and lay on your stomach. You’ll be done before you know it.”
###
Carefully buttoning my shirt over the bandage on my chest, I thanked Dr. Qin. She reminded me that she was going to research my ocular implants, and asked me how she could find me. I was about to ask her to get a hold of Enrique but then I thought about it for a moment. I realized that Enrique didn’t know about the ocular implants. Perhaps it was better if he remained ignorant of them. He might attribute my success to those instead of my skill. I gave Dr. Qin my net address and shook her hand.
As I slipped down from the table, I noticed a spot of bright red blood on the floor. Somehow the operation hadn’t seemed real until that moment. I took a deep breath. It was OK. I was a runner now.
Next door to the clinic, Enrique sat at a gleaming wooden bar next to an empty demitasse. “Done already?” he said.
I hopped up next to him and the bartender, a young bearded man, placed a glass of water in front of me. “Guess I’m good at going under the knife.”
Enrique watched me carefully. “How did it feel?”
Telling him about the panic attack meant telling him about my eyes. I didn’t want to lie to him, so I told him something that was true enough. “It was like I was outside my body,” I said. “I just kind of checked out.”
“You just kind of checked out,” he said slowly. No way did he believe me.
The bartender brought him another espresso and he downed it in a sip.
“Can I have one of those?” I said to the bartender. But before he could move away, Enrique interrupted him. “I wouldn’t recommend it. You need sleep, young son, not coffee. Sleep and food. Bring this man a sandwich.”
“No espresso, then. Just a ham and cheese,” I said.
The bartender shrugged and moved down the bar, away from us, and put in the order. When I was sure he couldn’t hear, I said, “I don’t want to sleep. I want to make a run.”
The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store Manufacturer Take Your Pick Legal Status Legal, required to work in many industries Description A round chrome socket and a wire built to interface with the human nerve system, commonly implanted in chest, back, or neck. Cost From a couple thousand to the mid-five figures depending on how fancy you want to get. Function To connect the user brain-first into the net enabling them to disregard common safety protocols as well as common sense and common decency. Good times.