Part. 1, Chapter. 8 - “Awake”

  THUD.

  EJ awoke to the sudden shock of hitting the ground.

  “Nnngf,” she groaned, now lying face-down on the hardwood floor of the study.

  She was lucky that she hadn’t landed on her neck or arm, she reckoned. That would have been a much ruder awakening.

  With her good arm, EJ pushed herself off the floor, a thin string of drool trailing from one corner of her mouth. She took a second to gather her senses and re-familiarize herself with the small study room she had been napping in. She still wore the same tattered clothes from earlier in the day—stained with blood and sweat, the legs of her nice pants shredded in several places, and the fabric of her undershirt stretched to an uncomfortable looseness. Very carefully, she managed to roll onto her side without any pain.

  Wait a minute. That was odd. EJ didn’t feel any pain. Hell, she didn’t feel much of anything now that she was thinking about it. Despite how awake her mind was, her body still felt almost…detached, somehow. Like her senses were struggling to wake up.

  With some effort, EJ pulled herself into a sitting position on the floor and carelessly poked at her spray-cast arm and then her shoulder. Then, she reached back to her neck and carefully traced the ridged line over her electroreceptor where Wes had sewn her back together. In both cases, it didn’t hurt to prod at her injuries anymore. Even the areas where she had received burns from energy weapons were no longer fizzling with pain, although the skin in those areas was now cracked and flaking away in layers—the aftermath of bad burns trying to heal.

  No pain, she thought. Not much feeling at all, really. Am I really that worn out?

  EJ dismissed that thought quickly. No, she was resilient. The events of the prior day had been rough, but it wasn’t anything she couldn’t weather. Hell, these injuries were barely scratches compared to the time the old factory partially caved in on her, and she had walked away from that.

  Could this strange numbness be the side effects of what Wes had been talking about with electroreceptor injuries? He had made that sound significantly more severe than just a little bit of numbness. Something about equilibrium and organ failure? EJ was no medical expert, but she was pretty sure her organs weren’t failing just yet.

  That left only one last potential explanation for the strange sensation: Whatever it was that Wes had given her in that autosyringe had to have been pretty potent. It made sense. EJ hadn’t been this drugged up in a while, so a medical-grade substance was probably giving her system a bit of a shock.

  Well, it was a small price to pay for such thorough pain-numbing.

  EJ eyeballed the small medical device where it lay on the desk of the study as if it were a scrap-vendor she was trying to intimidate for a better deal. It was a palm-sized green tube of semi-translucent plastic, just see-through enough to showcase the wicked-long needle stowed away inside. One end of the tube—the “business” end—had a small hole in it for the needle to protrude from when activated. The other end of the tube contained the syringe’s automatic plunger and the cartridge of drugs, all wrapped up in a bright orange plastic casing that was covered in various warning labels and AM-Peer logos.

  EJ considered the autosyringe for a moment, then stashed it in a back pocket of her torn-up pants.

  The meds had also caused her to hallucinate a weirdly vivid dream, she recalled. The exact details were hazy, but the emotions inspired by the dream still lingered distantly. Dreams were strange like that. Although EJ didn’t pay it much attention, a small part of her felt some vague sense of leftover urgency from the dream, as if she were forgetting something deeply important.

  But never mind that. She needed to focus on the real urgency facing her: it was time to get out of here.

  Slowly, agonizingly, she steadied herself with her one good arm and crept quietly to the door. She felt as though her body was lagging, processing the inputs of her brain on a significant delay. She had to actively think about moving just to take a step. EJ gritted her teeth and tried to force her body to move more decisively, but it was no use. There was no brute-forcing her way through this. That was going to make her trip back across the city sector difficult.

  EJ suppressed another groan of frustration, though an annoyed pulse still leaked out of her amp. She caught herself pulsing half a second later and flinched hard, expecting another wave of nausea and pain from her injured electroreceptor. When nothing happened, she swore quietly to herself in relief and amazement. It seemed that the GCA had access to some seriously powerful drugs if a single dose from Wes's autosyringe was enough to fully suppress her pain. Ignoring a small stab of guilt, she made a quick mental note to raid Wes’s drug supply before leaving. This stuff was practically magic if it could fix her up in just a couple hours of sleep.

  EJ steadied herself on two numbed legs and reached to open the door with her good arm. Just as she did so, she became distantly aware of a faint pulse on the other side of the door. Was that a concerned frequency?

  Oh shit.

  EJ’s mind whipped into survival mode. Where was that pulse coming from? Had the All-Seers followed her back to Wes’s house? She was trapped in the small study, with only one way in or out of the room and no weapon at her disposal.

  Move, move, move! EJ urged herself mentally as the door began to slide open before her.

  She screamed at her body to jump out of the way of the door, expecting bullet holes to tear through the doorway and explode into the room at any second. But it was no use, her body was still sluggish and unresponsive. She ground her teeth together and braced for the worst…

  “You’re awake!” a surprised-looking Wes blurted on the other side of the door.

  EJ could feel his pulse shifting emotions rapidly. First surprise, then concern, then briefly confusion, then back to concern.

  The artificial light from the living room was dim, but EJ still found herself blinking to adjust her vision. She felt her own pulse spit out a mangled frequency that mixed confusion, embarrassment, and anxiety. She probably looked like an idiot right about now, standing in the doorway to the study, posed like she had been trying (and failing) to bolt away from the opening door.

  “I heard a noise, so I came to check on you. Everything alright?”

  EJ felt him continuing his pulse to a low frequency of concern. She made a concerted effort to relax her posture and breathing, but it probably looked more like her facial muscles were experiencing a stroke.

  “I’m fine,” came her response after a mentally belabored moment. EJ tried to adopt an assured and serious sounding voice, but the words cracked and popped through her dry throat, betraying her attempt to sound unphased. She felt like she hadn’t had anything to drink in days.

  Wes’s only response was a doubtful pulse.

  I really need to get going.

  “Look, Wes. I appreciate the help, but I’m fine now, honest,” EJ began. “I really need to—”

  “Yeah, well twenty-some hours of sleep sure is a lot of time to let your body recover,” Wes interjected. “We should change your spray-cast first.”

  EJ stopped.

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  “What did you just say?”

  “Spray-cast,” Wes repeated, proffering a slight smile and motioning towards EJ’s arm. His pulse had shifted into a content frequency now. “We should change it to keep the skin clean and we should check for any deep muscle bruising.”

  “Did you say twenty hours? Like, two-zero?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, a little over twenty hours, actually. But that’s pretty common after a serious injury. Once you finally get to sleep, your body’s natural repair processes will take over. You see, after the shock of injury to the electroreceptory system…” Wes trailed off.

  EJ just stared back at him, dumbfounded.

  Twenty hours. I was asleep for twenty whole hours?

  “Uh, EJ?”

  She could feel his pulse shift towards concern once more.

  “Why don’t you have a seat and let me check on your injuries.”

* * *

  Wes had EJ seated in his kitchen once more a moment later. He got her something to drink and pulled up the day's news board for her to see on a small display screen. She read over the screen and gulped down water greedily while Wes went about gathering his equipment. Outside, the sky was a dark navy field of clouds, and the report informed her that the rain was scheduled for the next ten hours or so.

  The longer rest had been nice, but she needed to start working on a new plan. The others were probably—

  “Now I want you to follow the tip of my finger with your eyes, alright?” Wes was explaining suddenly, holding a finger close to her face.

  EJ swatted sluggishly at his hand.

  “My eyesight’s fine,” she puffed. “Skip the boring shit and tell me if I’m okay or not.”

  “Uh, right, sorry,” he sputtered, turning to rifle through the medical supplies he had laid out on the counter for use. He quickly adjusted the settings on his hand-held medical scanner before turning back to face her.

  “You don’t seem like you’re in pain, and you were able to pulse at me earlier. How bad would you say the pain is right now?”

  “Not bad at all.” she responded honestly.

  Wes pulsed once to doubt.

  “EJ, I’m just trying to help. You don’t have to act tough, you’ve been seriously injured.”

  He had adopted his bullshit listen-to-me-I’m-an-expert tone of voice again, EJ noted. That was pretty typical for the GCA wannabe types like Wes and any other student of a company college. Static, she hated that about the more corpo city sectors like this one.

  The second-hand egomania of people adjacent to the GCA was sometimes so palpable that EJ could swear it became a visible cloud of sublimated asshole-ery floating around them. Made it easy to pick out the rich corpo types in a crowd. That wasn’t much of a challenge in the education districts, of course, where the population was practically 60% students. On the GCA students, the stench of corporate asshole-ery was more like an overpriced cologne worn by the unlucky hundreds who could only afford such a scent by excitedly selling their bodies and souls to the GCA one education contract at a time.

  EJ took a breath.

  She couldn’t afford to hate Wes on principle of his closeness to the GCA, at least not right now. She’d be a lot worse off without him electing to help her. For now, he was an ally. Perhaps her only ally.

  “No, really,” she pressed back. “I don’t feel a thing, Wes.”

  Saying this, she prodded at her neck with a finger as if to demonstrate.

  “Static. Whatever you gave me in that autosyringe was stronger than any meds I’ve gotten hopped up on before. And that’s saying something.”

  “But I didn’t give you any pain killers,” Wes responded in a steady tone.

  “What? But the autosyringe—” EJ began.

  “Yeah, I told you last night it was just growth enzyme,” he cut in. “It’s supposed to help your body repair itself quickly and lessen scarring. Injuries as severe as yours are frequently worse the following day because after a period of rest you run out of adrenaline from the shock of the initial injury. Plus, the injury can grow stiff from laying still for so long. That’s why I had you do those neck rotation exercises last night, same idea with your arm.”

  EJ furrowed her brow as he explained. She could feel the electroreceptors in her face growing hot as he leveled his perplexed expression at her. She knew he was just confused, but his tone still felt accusatory, as if he suspected she was somehow withholding the answers from him. She, of course, didn’t know anything about what was happening. Her best guess was that she was just stronger than the typical injured hospital person that Wes was used to treating. That made sense, right?

  “Well then you screwed something up, I don’t know. Aren’t you the medic? Here, take a look,” she said.

  With her good arm, EJ produced the autosyringe from her back pocket and pushed it towards Wes, as if this would somehow clear her name of any supposed medical crimes she had committed by recovering so quickly.

  Wes took the syringe absent-mindedly and continued talking, gesturing with the device without even giving it a look-over.

  “I absolutely did not get something wrong,” he insisted, pointing the syringe at EJ and pulsing to a defensive frequency. “I didn’t even open a filament for painkillers when I treated you last night because I didn’t have any that wouldn’t—”

  Wes stopped suddenly, his pulse shifting to confusion in an instant. EJ followed his gaze to the autosyringe in his hand.

  “EJ?” he asked quietly.

  “What?”

  “This autosyringe hasn’t been used.”

  “What? Of course it has!” EJ contested.

  Though, now that she thought about it, she couldn’t recall using the syringe after being stitched up. Still, she fought the idea, if only because it worried her. She didn’t like not knowing what was causing her to feel so…off.

  She willed herself to snatch the device from him and show him he was wrong, but her body was still seemingly uncooperative. The best she could manage was a shaky and slow reach towards the device, to which Wes obliged and handed it over.

  “I only loaded the syringe with two doses. I figured one for overnight and one for in the morning in case I needed to reopen the wound or change the stitching. But neither medication capsule has been discharged.”

  Wes set down his medical scanner, then deftly popped open the back end of the autosyringe while EJ was still holding it. From the back of the device he extracted two small, clear capsules of a cloudy liquid and proffered them for EJ to see in the palm of his hand.

  “Both doses are still here,” he continued. “Plus, the safety seal is still in place. You can’t even activate the syringe.”

  EJ looked to the capsules in Wes’s hand, then met his gaze. She could feel her face growing even hotter now as he stared down at her with a serious expression, though he was only able to look down on her at all because she was still seated.

  “But I feel drugged!” EJ contested, pulsing a mostly confused frequency. “Like it’s harder to move, I feel slow!”

  “Well that could be because you slept for so long, or because your muscles are stiff.” Wes responded.

  “No, not physically. Mentally!”

  Wes raised his eyebrows at her and pulsed awkwardly.

  “Oh! Well, there are a variety of conditions that affect the psyche. I mean... How do I say this. I myself am, uh… Well, I'm not really that kind of medic...” Wes let his words be drowned out by his uneasy pulse.

  “Static, not like that, you pulse-for-brains!” EJ groaned, pulsing to annoyance and pressing on her temples in exasperation.

  “Oh, sorry, sorry! I’m just not sure what you mean.”

  EJ took another concentrated breath and let it out through her teeth.

  “I feel like there’s a disconnect between my brain and my body. Like I can’t just move naturally, I have to really focus to be able to move.”

  “Hm, that sounds kind of like learning a new augment,” Wes thought out loud.

  “What?”

  “I do most of my work in the implants and augments division of the hospital. We do augment therapy for people adjusting to new functions,” Wes explained, a new, excited frequency completely replacing the confusion and concern that had been in his pulse just moments ago. “What you’re expressing is similar to how a lot of patients describe getting their first augment. Frequently they express that it feels like having a new limb they never learned how to move. Others say they have to think really hard to actively make use of an augment that replaces an appendage they used to move naturally without thought. That sounds similar to what you’re describing, right?”

  “Well, yeah,” EJ agreed. “But that doesn’t explain why I’m feeling this way.”

  “You're right, it doesn't,” Wes said, turning back to his equipment laid out on the counter and sorting through the various packages of medication and disposable medical tools. "I think I have a theories."

  He gathered a couple implements, opened up a new spray-cast, and then turned back to EJ with a flourish, medical scanner in hand once more.

  “But before I can confirm anything, I’ll need to take a look at those stitches.”

  EJ swallowed hard at this display of odd excitement out of him. After a moment, she pulsed her agreement, if only to stifle the anxious frequency that she could feel building in her amp.