The heart monitor flatlined. Joe was left holding the soft, limp hand of the old woman called Jayda.
Just seconds before, the hand Joe held was trembling just slightly as he adjusted the woman’s Subdermal-UI. Violet, Joe’s mother, was on the other side of the hospital bed, reprogramming the levels of saline solution in the IV drip attached to Jayda’s other arm.
Joe was tinkering with the biotech on the inside of the woman’s wrist when he was startled out of his immersion by the woman’s voice.
“I think I’m about to die,” Jayda said.
The words, so softly spoken, felt discordant among the gentle whirr of medical equipment, monitors, and machines. This wasn’t the first time he’d heard a resident at the hospice utter those words. It wouldn’t be the last.
“Yes, Jayda,” Violet said, both herself and Joe going back to their quiet work. “I think you might be right.” Violet was looking at a readout on her tablet before adjusting the valve on the drip tube.
It didn't take long before the rhythmic, reassuring beeping of the heart monitor became a steady, oppressive tone.
Joe said nothing. He and Jayda weren’t friends. He had cared for her, sure, and it sucked that he’d never speak to her again, but now she was gone. She’d died alone, it had been years since she’d been outside the walls of her small room, and she’d only interacted with himself and the hospice staff since she’d been dropped. What regretful words, or mournful actions could Joe honestly offer besides, empty platitudes and comfort for a person who knew, intimately, of their own solitude and who had become resigned to the transient nature of their life. No, it would be neither productive, nor sincere and so Joe simply finished his job in silence.
Joe detached the wireless adapter gently from the old woman’s bio-tech. It was an older model UI, installed back when the technology was new and ‘non-invasive’ was still industry standard. But the demand for more features, better resolution, faster integration, and processing speeds quickly threw those notions out the windows. For what is caution in the face of progress? This was a sentiment with which Joe could agree.
Joe patted the woman’s unresponsive hand twice, gently, before he said. “You’ll be missed.” Nodded once, and turned to where his mother was waiting for him in the doorway of the now quiet room.
“I put out a notice to family. For what little good it will do. Vultures, all of them,” his mother said, as they walked down the pristine hallway. Wide enough for two gurneys to pass side by side, and lacking the familiar sterile coldness of the hospitals and morgues Joe frequented.
As a bio-mec med-tec – or biomechanichal medical technician – he was essentially contracted out by the hospital he interned at whenever he was needed. He was only 17, and recently at that, but he’d been taking advanced bio-tech courses for years now as he worked his way towards an engineering degree in biomechanical and biomedical technologies.
Joe shrugged at his mother, and made his way to the front desk to fill out a report, and file the necessary paperwork before he could collect the med-tech from Jayda. It would have been so much more convenient if he could simply have done the procedure while he was in the room, but sensibilities he couldn’t understand, and bureaucracy he didn't see the need for prevented him from doing so. Wasn’t this a Hospice centre. Why make the transition process from life to death more difficult for the people who survived it?
Joe had asked this question once, and only once to his mother, and the look that she gave him ensured he never asked again. Perhaps he would feel differently if it was his own mother lying soft and limp on a medical bed, but those kinds of thought experiments seemed unproductive to him. Better to deal with such horrifying prospects as they came, and not borrow grief from the future. He sat down at the front desk to do his work.
Joe had been working on a program protocol for a resident for over an hour when the door chime for the care centre caused him to glance up. He would have turned back to his work, if on the other side of the sliding glass doors he hadn't seen his best, and possibly only friend. Emily.
Joe nodded at her before he got back to tinkering with the code for the integration function the residents was having trouble with.
“Seriously?” Emily grinned at him. “I come to visit you and you can't even spare me a hello?”
Joe looked up from where he was working on work, that he was paid to work on. He stared at her, narrowed his eyes briefly, then went back to doing his work.
“Come on, Joe. Seriously, I've got big news and I have to tell you right away.”
“Link me,” Joe said, indicating that she send him a message to his personal Interlink, a sort of universal contact platform for anyone who used the neuro-ocular subdermal UI’s that had been popularised, and almost universally adopted in the past 5 years. Interlink, more colloquially determined ‘Link’ was the most popular digital communication platform of all time and was, on the most basic level, a mix between an email, text, and phone service.
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“No, I couldn't just link you. You wouldn't see it for so long.” Emily pouted. Joe pretty religiously checked his Link when he got off work. Her restlessness piqued his interest.
“Urgent?” Joe asked.
“Confidential,” she explained. “Kind of,” she continued much less clearly. “I need you to get the Veil Drive, you know the new implant New Horizon’s tech division is putting out?” Emily skipped around the reception desk he’d been working from, and sat directly in front of him, her body taking up the space where his work had been and preventing him from continuing to tinker on the project.
Unfazed, Joe grabbed Emily’s wrist and began doing a diagnostic of her own subdermal, tapping into her network through a backdoor she’d let him implant once he’d been officially certified and had access to the hospice equipment. Not that he hadn’t messed about with her hardware before. It was just more convenient this way.
“Seriously?” Emily shook her head but let him do his tests. “So, you gotta get the game?”
“What game?”
“The one New Horizon is putting out. Keep up.”
“You said implant, not game,” Joe said. Emily blinked at him, confused.
“Yeah, the implant… for the game?” She insisted.
“Emily.” Joe looked at her then, finally pulling his focus away from the data that was being projected into his vision through his own subdermal. Emily looked at him, truly surprised.
“The game, Joe. It's called Beyond the Veil. It's an Open-world sandbox VR MMORPG fantasy game. Think monsters and magic, quests, and crafting.” Emily grinned down at him, then frowned. “How don’t you know this; we’ve talked about the Veil Drive.”
“Yeah, the tech, not this game,” Joe said. Making no commitments.
“Come on, Joe-Joe” Emily pleaded, grabbing his shoulders, and calling him by the nickname she'd been using for him since they were children. “You have to join.” Seeing his unimpressed stare, Emily changed tactics. “The Veil Drive, well it’s supposed to give you, like, a full body immersive experience. Not only that, but with their new medical integrations, it apparently works as an internal monitoring system, diagnostic tool, and can even simulate the med-pods in a recovery centre. It’s supposed to kick-start a new medical revolution. As in, think healing magic, but IRL,” Emily stated, the lines sounding almost rehearsed.
Joe looked at his friend. His friend shoved his knee with the side of her calf, where it dangled from the desk. Joe waited.
“Okay, I may have gotten some of that information while poking around my father’s office - and yes by poking I mean using the access you gave me to blatantly pry, but honestly screw that guy, - and anyway that just makes it even better! The info is legit, Joe, come on.” Emily barely breathed as she tried to get Joe’s attention. Joe caved
“IRL healing magic? As in metabolic enhancers, or is this proprietary? And how do the neural-connectors function, what does the calibration process look like, and how invasive is it in order to render full VR capacity?” Joe asked, giving in to his innate curiosity. He’d read as much as he could about Veil Drive, that, and any new tech he could read up on, but depending on how it functioned it might be the breakthrough he needed.
Emily rolled her eyes at where his focus lay, why couldn’t he just agree to game with her? She smiled fondly, resigned to her friend's obsession.
“I didn't tell you any of this, but the tech is proprietary. Also, I’m pretty sure all the rest of the information is beyond even my father’s pay grade,” Emily said. “So, keep it all quiet, would you? My family could get in a lot of trouble.”
Joe wasn't worried, Emily’s father could buy their way out of trouble the same way his wife bought his way into the position that gave them access to insider information about the new drive. But regardless, he would keep his mouth shut. It wasn't like he couldn't tell anybody anyway. There was simply no one to tell. Except maybe his mother, and there was no way she would approve of the myriad plans, tests, and hypotheses that were now filtering through his head.
“How do I get it, the Drive?” Joe had heard of this game before. It was hard not to. New Horizon was essentially the premier virtual reality company in the world, they were pioneers with their revolutionary biotech, and they were a huge face in the entertainment market, with a stranglehold on most VR games and Virtual experiences. The announcement of their big, new game was no secret. Subscriptions to play had been sold out months in advance. But this new medical information, it could mean big, big things. Joe had a subscription, a 17th birthday present compliments of Emily, back in the early announcement days. But he had only ever planned to be a casual player, hopping in maybe a week or two after release so that he'd have all the starter information. Plus, while subscriptions were plentiful, the actual Drives were limited, selling out almost before they launched. It would be a staggered release so as not to overtax the servers, New Horizon had claimed, but Joe doubted these claims.
Now they were saying they had advanced the Drives to near technomagical degrees? Joe wanted to be on the cutting edge, the forefront with this new technology, it would help him advance his own hypotheses so much. Unfortunately, he only had a New Horizon’s VR helmet, and not even the newest version at that. It interfaced well enough with his subdermal, but… he'd need an actual Veil Drive to do any proper research, or to even begin to understand just what the technology was capable of.
Lost in his thoughts Joe missed Emily’s statement. It wasn’t till she nudged him that he tuned back in.
“Your eyes were doing that thing again,” Emily stated, indicating the way his eyes sometimes darted about quickly while he was thinking. “You’re doing that overclocking thing again, aren’t you?” Emily berated him. “You shouldn’t be doing that, you could fry your brain, literally.”
Joe nodded.
“You don’t really agree, do you? You’re gonna do it anyway, aren’t you.” Emily looked at him deadpan. Joe shook his head.
“I do agree,” he said. Emily’s eyebrows went up. “I will still do it.” He looked at the diminutive woman.
“Of course, you will.” She smiled at him. “Just be careful, please?” Joe’s mind was far away, thinking about how he could get a hold of the Veil drive immediately. He was ripped out of his thoughts by his mother’s voice.
“Be careful about what?” Violet appeared from around the corner as she walked towards them. Joe’s eye twitched, but otherwise he schooled his expression.
“Hi Ms. Kobi.” Emily grinned.
“Emily! How lovely of you to visit.” Violet pulled Emily into a hug that both women melted into. Joe turned back to the chart he was filling out through the hospice-tablet. He tuned out the conversation and began to work again until a hand blocked his vision pulling the data pad from his fingers.
Joe blinked a few times before tuning back into the ongoing conversation.
“What’s this about you overclocking your UI?” His mother asked. Joe frowned at Emily who just shrugged and smiled.