Part 1, Chapter. 9 - "Escape Pt. 1"

  Wes took a quick scan of EJ’s injured electroreceptor, then sprayed the area along her neck with an instant sterilizer. EJ’s skin prickled with the cold of the spray, but she kept otherwise still. With one hand she held her pitch-black hair out of the way at the base of her scalp, though she didn’t need to with how short it was.

  Even after the sterilizer spray, the stitches were crusted over with dried plasma and blood. That was good. It meant the skin was trying to reknit itself naturally. The nanofiber thread used for stitches was electroreceptive and would resonate to any of the patient’s pulses with a frequency that promoted healing. Most animals were capable of doing a similar process by using natural compounds in their saliva, and AM-Peer had mirrored that process in their design of the medical thread. Wes wasn’t sure how much regrowth it could promote on receptor tissue, but he had no reason to believe it wasn’t helping.

  Wes eyed the injury, using two gloved hands to poke and prod the skin around her neck. Oddly enough, EJ didn’t even flinch at this. Maybe she was really as numb as she had stated. Wes wasn’t sure if that was a good thing just yet. He worried that the entire receptor had failed somehow, though he kept this worry to himself.

  “Well?” EJ asked, impatient. “How’s it look?”

  Wes shushed her, and she huffed in annoyance.

  In the dim light of the kitchen, the injury seemed to take on a reflective, green shimmer that Wes could only make out as he moved his head and let light shine on the injury.

  “That’s odd…” he muttered to himself.

  EJ sat up a little straighter.

  “What? What’s odd?”

  Wes kept inspecting without offering a response.

  “Hello, Wes?” EJ called again. “Are you going to explain that weird comment, or…?”

  “Shush!” he insisted. “And stop moving so much.”

  EJ groaned louder and made a show of slumping into her seat, pulsing an annoyed frequency as she continued to proffer her neck.

  Wes lightly pulled on the skin surrounding the stitches. And there it was again! He could see it now, the cause of the green shimmer. A gossamer-thin film had formed over the top of the electroreceptor injury. In the light, it took on an opalescent gleam that seemed to ripple across the surface of the film.

  Wes furrowed his brow.

  It was like a thin layer of skin was trying to form over the receptor, except that this wasn’t what skin looked like at all and skin didn’t grow over receptor spots. It didn’t look like any kind of infection that he knew of either, and the receptor in EJ’s neck didn’t seem more agitated than it already was. Could an infection have taken hold that quickly? If that had been the case, the sterilizer spray should have reacted to the film, but it hadn’t.

  He pulled at the film from both sides gently, and it seemed to stretch.

  Ever since EJ had run into him it had been one weird anomaly after another. First digital, then biological. A little anxious piece of Wes’s brain latched onto that thought, but he shrugged it away.

  “You’ve got some kind of film forming over the injury,” Wes finally explained.

  “What, like a scab?” EJ asked.

  “I don’t think so. It’s forming over your receptor. It may be some kind of infected growth, but I’m not sure.”

  Wes opened a fresh disposable scalpel and a spare clean rag.

  “Tell me if this hurts, alright? I’m going to see if I can cut the film. It’s covering your stitches and I want to make sure they’re still tight.”

  EJ pulsed to confirmation. The frequency she put out felt almost…anxious? That caught Wes off-guard, and he paused for a moment. EJ did not read as anxious at all. If anything he had thought she was annoyed with the whole situation. He kind of assumed it was her default state if he was being honest. That, or frustrated.

  She stretched her neck a bit, seemingly with no pain or difficulty, then proffered it once more just as she had been doing.

  Wes moved the scalpel closer with a steady hand and used the tip of the blade to poke and pull at the film. Once more the film stretched easily as he manipulated it overtop the injured electroreceptor with the scalpel, though the point of the blade didn’t seem to penetrate. Sure enough, when he pulled the blade away, he saw no hole in the strange, biological film. Whatever it was made of was apparently more resilient than Wes had assumed. Odd.

  “No pain?” he checked.

  EJ pulsed in the negative.

  Alright, then it was time to open it up.

  Wes took a deep breath, then slid the scalpel across the surface of the film, careful to not apply too much pressure on the injured receptor beneath. As he did so, a neat incision opened up along the scalpel’s path and a shimmery, clear liquid began to leak out.

  Wes breathed out in relief, then quickly wiped away the fluid, which appeared to be some sort of neutral body fluid like plasma. Giving the fluid a quick sniff seemed to confirm that theory.

  “I think it was a blister of some kind,” Wes explained, reaching around to show EJ the clear liquid he had mopped up with the fresh rag. “I cut it open and this stuff came out.”

  “Weird,” said EJ flatly, testing the plasma with a finger before wiping it off on her pants. “I think I felt you cut into it, but I’m not sure.”

  “Really? That’s good. I was beginning to worry about how numb you were.”

  Wes cut away the rest of the film carefully and neatly laid it flat in a sterilized, metal tray on a sheet of gauze. He’d have to take a look at it later, perhaps under a microscope if he could get back to the college.

  He gingerly dabbed away the rest of the weirdly shimmering plasma from the stitches, then sprayed the area with sterilizer once more. This time, EJ fully shuddered as her skin came in contact with the cold spray. She seemed to be getting more feeling back, which was another good sign. Maybe the film had somehow been causing the numbness. He still couldn’t be sure.

  Once the sterilizer had completely evaporated away, Wes opened up a pair of disposable tweezers and began to check the stitches, tugging gently on each knot. After confirming that the stitches were all in order, he congratulated himself on a job well done.

  That’s when he noticed it again: a faint green shimmer along the surface of EJ’s electroreceptor spot.

  Wes grabbed a small light from his supplies and clicked it on, shining the light back and forth over the wounded receptor. Green lines glistened in the light, branching out from the stitches and tracing pathways across the darker flesh of EJ’s receptor.

  Wes backed up and cocked his head, then went in again for a closer look. Small green lines shimmered across the receptor like the lines of circuitry across a motherboard.

  “What is it?” he heard EJ ask, though he was too intrigued to formulate a response to her question.

  Too many puzzles, too few solutions.

  His brain was beginning to unfold, just as it did whenever he encountered a patient with a complex set of symptoms or a particularly tricky math problem. There was a solution to be found here, he just needed to test all the possible variables to find it.

  Ideas began presenting themselves left and right in his mind, and Wes considered each one in turn.

  Were the green lines tracing natural seams in the skin tissue of the receptor? Or maybe the lines traced small blood vessels beneath the surface of the skin. That was unlikely, as the lines were too straight to be blood vessels.

  Almost unnaturally straight, Wes thought. Patterned, even.

  He passed the small light back and forth across the skin once more, recreating that green gleam that had caught his eye.

  What had caused the pigmentation, and why was it somewhat photoluminescent? Was it something in EJ’s body, or was it an outside substance that had been injected somehow? Could the injury have been contaminated when it first occurred? That was possible, but Wes had made sure to clean the wound before stitching it.

  Maybe there had been an infectant introduced at the point of injury. Something like that would have had time to circulate in EJ’s system before Wes had been able to clean the wound. Where would the infectant have come from, though? The logical part of Wes’s brain suggested germs from a diseased animal’s claws or rust from scrapes against metal infrastructure. But the more imaginative—and less helpful—half of his mind conjured up visions of poison-coated daggers and toxic dart rifles.

  Static, is this poison?

  He entertained the thought longer than he’d care to admit.

  Surely not, right? EJ’s wound was caused by a bullet. Wes didn’t know much about firearms or ballistics, but he was pretty sure you couldn’t effectively coat bullets in toxins.

  Still, he’d witnessed stranger things happen in just the past day.

  Better to be safe, he reasoned.

  “Uh, bear with me here for a second, I need to test something,” Wes said, trying and failing to pulse in confidence.

  “Gotta be honest, I really hate the sound of that, Wes,” EJ responded.

  Wes retrieved an autosyringe and set the device to draw a small amount of fluid, then manually dialed in the needle depth. He steadied the syringe over one of the strange green lines in EJ’s receptor and pressed the trigger.

  The autosyringe fired immediately, pricking the receptor and withdrawing a tiny amount of fluid all in a fraction of a second. EJ jumped, pulsing the sharp frequency of pain.

  “Static! Maybe a heads up next time, genius?” she griped.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Wes apologized. He was already popping the syringe open to examine the fluid that had been withdrawn. When he saw that the fluid was red, and not green, he cocked his head once more.

  “Well, the good news is: I don’t think you were poisoned,” Wes said.

  EJ clapped a hand over her stitched up electroreceptor and turned around in her chair to give Wes a hard glare.

  “What? Why didn’t you tell me that was a possibility?” EJ demanded, pulsing to concern.

  “I wasn’t sure if it was!” Wes said, putting his hands up defensively. “There are these green markings on your receptor. You said you felt slow, so I wondered if this had something to do with it. If the green coloration was some kind of toxin in your skin, I should have been able to get a small extraction of it with the syringe. But look.”

  He proffered the opened autosyringe, showing her the blood it had withdrawn.

  “I wasn’t able to pull any green fluid out, so I think it may just be some strange skin pigmentation.”

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  “Green markings?” EJ asked, feeling at the bumps in her receptor where the wound had been stitched.

  If she had been one of his usual patients, he would have chastised her for messing with the still-healing injury. Instead, he retrieved the medical scanner from the counter and took an updated scan of her neck. The two of them sat for a moment, looking over the digital recreation of EJ’s neck.

  Wes could feel her pulse shift in thought.

  “I’ve seen something like this before,” EJ said calmly.

  Wes blinked, a calm and concentrated gesture that he hoped wouldn’t betray the explosion of activity happening in his mind and amp.

  “You have?” Intrigued frequencies singed the ends of his words.

  “Yeah. Edge of the 80th district there’s this swapper den. They mostly install mods for doing neurolectric drugs. Like spinal implants, y’know?”

  Wes had no idea what a neurolectric drug was, but it seemed pretty self explanatory. He nodded like he understood anyway and EJ continued.

  “It’s not very high-grade work. And when those cheapo implants wear out, it gets pretty nasty. Something about the implant and the drugs starts to get a little too wired into the system, I guess. I don’t really know. But after it’s removed it’ll leave markings that look like this.” She pointed to the screen of the scanner. “Whether it’s a rash or scarring of some kind, I don’t really know. Not my field.”

  When it seemed like she was done explaining, Wes scratched at the side of his face, thinking.

  “You’re unaugmented, right? I meant to ask the other night, but my scanner didn’t turn anything up so I just kind of assumed…” Wes trailed off.

  “I am,” EJ confirmed. “Why?”

  “Well if you were augmented, then I could maybe see something like this happening. I’ve never seen a rash like the ones you’re describing, but augment rashes are fairly common. Lots of people experience discoloration around augments that their bodies are still integrating, especially if they aren’t on any stabilizer medication. But you aren’t augmented, so I don’t know what’s causing this patterning in your skin.”

  EJ shrugged.

  “I mean, I could give you something to flush your system just in case it is some kind of poison,” Wes offered. “I don’t have a blood detoxer on hand though.”

  “Yeah, no thanks,” EJ said, twisting up her face and pulsing briefly to disgust at the thought of receiving a blood-cleanse. “Besides, poison isn’t really the All-Seers method of choice.”

  Wes raised both eyebrows and tried to strangle the curious pulse he was putting out.

  “It’s not?”

  “Yeah, they’re more direct when they have to get their hands dirty. Explosively direct. Tech brokers like the All-Seers hold onto all the high-end stuff for themselves. We’re talking the kind of fire power that just leaves behind innards or maybe ashes if you’re lucky,” EJ explained in a completely even tone, pulsing to consideration coolly.

  Wes chuckled nervously, feeling the blood drain from his face. She was grinning.

  “Oh.” He gulped comically hard. “I see.”

  Behind them, something thumped up against the kitchen table suddenly. EJ stood up and managed to whip around to face the sound, which was a faster reaction than Wes had seen her manage thus far. He had jumped too, though he calmed down half a second later as he turned to face the source of the sound.

  Crouched beside one leg of the simple, plastic-printed table, Plantboy swiveled its cameras away quickly, as if embarrassed to be caught listening in on the conversation.

  “What the static is that?” EJ demanded, once again taller than Wes now that she was standing.

  Wes chuckled.

  Despite being caught off-guard, EJ had positioned herself in front of him, as if she had leapt to defend him from the sudden sound.

  “This is Plantboy,” Wes said, pulsing towards the bot. “I assembled it while you were asleep.”

  Plantboy cautiously swiveled a single camera to face the two of them. EJ furrowed her brow at it in response.

  “You built this?”

  Wes felt her pulse shift from surprise to a mixed frequency that felt mostly like intrigue.

  “I think the term “assembled” is a little more accurate here. Plantboy was a courier before I cannibalized him for my own projects.”

  EJ gave Wes a blank look and pulsed a considering tone, mulling over the new information. Then, realization seemed to strike her suddenly.

  “Wait,” she chimed. “You were talking to this drone on the floor earlier!”

  Wes’s amp fluttered to an embarrassed frequency, and he could feel the pulse hot in his neck-receptors.

  “Uh, yeah,” he managed after a moment. “I was.”

  “HA!” EJ laughed, loud and hard in a single exhalation. Wes half expected her to slap her knee too or hoist a drink into the air. It was a merrier expression than he had expected out of her.

  Wes drew in an easy breath and allowed himself to chuckle a bit too at his own expense, pulsing to the same congenial frequency as EJ.

  She was already doing so much better. She had barely rested a day and already the damage to her electroreceptory system was practically nonexistent! Wes choked the part of his brain that demanded he dissect and analyze that medical anomaly, and instead just let himself feel content for a moment. EJ had been—understandably— abrasive and sour since he had first run into her. Something about seeing her laugh again gave Wes a sense of personal pride. It was the same kind of glee derived from a patient’s final recovery consultation or a plant fully flowering after a rainy day, a sort of we-did-this-together-ness that Wes had learned to cherish over the years.

  EJ watched the bot. Wes watched her.

  He could feel a familiar welling of thoughts in the back of his mind. He tried to distract himself by mentally going through each of Plantboy’s components in a list. He even tried to think of a new conversation to start with EJ, something to pull his brain away from its own thoughts. But it was no use. A flash in the back of Wes’s mind wiped away his thoughts suddenly. They were replaced by a rapid series of images. Sounds. A voice.

  “Hey, you still with me kid? You need to breathe…”

  The beat of footprints on street. A rusting bridge.

  Who is she? His thoughts swell again.

  Another flash. He feels a rising in his throat.

  Sirens. Shouting.

  “Patient not breathing, pinging med-drone. Please stand clear of the patient…”

* * *

  Crouched next to the strange, cobbled-together drone, EJ pushed the robot’s chassis playfully with one hand. The drone called Plantboy beeped back at her agitatedly.

  "So, uh. Whats it do?”

  Wes seemed to jump at the question. He straightened himself half-a-pulse later and cleared his throat before speaking.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “The drone,” EJ says again. “What does it do?”

  EJ felt his pulse buzz in thoughtful frequencies, like he was considering the question.

  “First of all, it’s a bot, not a drone. And I’m still trying to figure that part out. It was going to be my irrigation system, but I don’t know if that line of work will hold its attention anymore.”

  EJ moved to playfully nudge Plantboy once more, but found that the bot had dodged half a step backwards on its two, clunky robotic struts. Had it just preempted her? Domestic bots weren’t that smart. They could barely process tripping, let alone being pushed or shoved around.

  She could feel Plantboy’s internal components chugging along in her electrosenses. Something inside the machine’s core was pulling power into it like a heart beating in reverse. Between blinks, she could make out the white-static blur across its frame, flowing up its legs and pooling in segments along the mechanical joints and ankles.

  That doesn’t seem like a basic motor. She thought. Some kind of engine, maybe?

  Plantboy watched her cautiously with one of its side-mounted cameras. The other glanced about the room nonchalantly, as if feigning disinterest.

  “Please confirm your delivery!” it chimed in the standard courier voice, although it was tinged with the slightest layer of static, like the audio files had corroded. Despite its lack of any tone, EJ thought it almost sounded annoyed somehow.

  She chuckled to mask her curiosity, a habit she leaned on frequently when talking up nightclub patrons for intel.

  Something about the drone’s beeps felt different. The automated message didn’t deliver at the same frequency as the standard courier drone. In fact, EJ couldn’t feel the subtle frequency of the digital message at all, despite being able to audibly hear the static in the audio. As if it were silenced somehow…

  A low grumble from her gut interrupted her contemplation.

  “Static, when was the last time you ate? Let me make you something,” Wes said, already working to quickly pack up his medical gear and stow it in the proper wall compartment.

  EJ opened her mouth to object—unsure of what strange form of social politeness had suddenly possessed her to do so—but her aching stomach reached up and strangled her throat shut before any such protest could be made. The wave of intense hunger hit her suddenly, like whatever hidden battery had been keeping her running thus far had abruptly shut off, leaving her drained and empty.

  By the sixth I am starving.

  Beside her, Plantboy stirred suddenly. Both of its cameras swiveled onto Wes eagerly.

  “Delivery confirmed!” it cheered, flashing the diagnostic page for its own battery charge.

  Wes laughed and pulsed to contentment. It was a light and musical sound, like the jingling of spare bullet casings carried loosely in one palm. Something about it made EJ’s pulse pitch towards vaguely happy frequencies.

  “Yeah, bud, you’re exactly right. Eating,” he called back to the drone as he retrieved some dining ware from the sterilizer and set it out on the counter alongside the assortment of ingredients he had gathered.

  Plantboy spun in a small circle, one foot clunking after the other. EJ half expected the machine to trip over itself and topple to the floor, but its hefty metal feet kept it upright throughout the celebratory maneuver.

  She raised a questioning eyebrow and pointed an inquisitive pulse in Wes’s direction, as if to say, “what was that all about?”

  “It’s been learning,” Wes offered by way of an explanation, as if that cleared up anything at all about the strange drone that had sprung up overnight. “Meal time is a new concept for it.”

  EJ raised her eyebrows. Her mind automatically highlighted his words, tagging them as a potentially important detail and bookmarking them for later use. She wanted to pull for more information from that comment, but was struggling to muster the social deftness required for the prying maneuver.

  She was starving. All of her brain power was being siphoned off by the black hole that was her stomach.

  Something was already sizzling on the cooktop, and it smelled absolutely divine. EJ pulled herself up off the ground and took a seat at the simple, plasti-printed table Wes used for dining. She rested her head against a pillow of her own arms, and let her senses absorb as much of the kitchen aromas as she could take in. In doing so, she failed to stymie another grumble from her stomach.

  “It’s learning?” EJ murmured the question, distracted by the watering in her mouth. “Like it’s booting a new program, right?”

  Wes hesitated a fraction of a second before responding. It was an imperceptible pause, but it was enough for EJ. She was lucky her electrosenses were sharper than her hunger-addled brain.

  EJ closed her eyes and let the dining room slip away into an outline of white static.

  “Yeah, exactly. New program I just wrote the code for,” He said. “I’m scheduling its battery charge with my meals.”

  And she knew he was lying.

  More than the fact that what Wes had just told her didn’t make any sense, she could feel the frequency of his pulse hitch for just a single moment in the pause between “yeah” and “exactly.” It told her that Wes had begun manually expressing his pulses again.

  Most people didn’t pulse manually all the time. There was an unconscious rhythm to it, like breathing. Manually pulsing was helpful for when you needed to clarify an emotion, or maybe mask how you really felt.

  Which was exactly what Wes had done.

  His response had adopted a flat, explanatory tone. Like the kind she imagined teachers would use. Earlier, however, when he had spoken about the bot, Wes had used a pulse that mixed thoughtful and excited tones.

  Plantboy was clearly something he wanted to talk about.

  It didn’t take a genius to put it together, but it helped that EJ did happen to be a genius (at least, by her own accounts).

  “Neat,” she finally responded.

  She feigned disinterest, letting her pulse take on a mixture of hungry and bored frequencies. And she could feel Wes’s pulse become a little less forced at that.

  Despite her instincts screaming to abscond from Wes’s house at the first good opportunity, EJ had become intrigued. That was dangerous, and she knew it. But before she could be stupid any further (or perhaps scold herself a bit), a warm and fragrant plate set down just beside her head.

  EJ sat up and opened her eyes. Wes smiled at her warmly and set down a glass of water beside the dish. He hovered there, smiling and waiting for her to assess the meal like he was some kind of server drone.

  The kelp steak was a bright green-yellow hue, like the natural coloration of the plant glowed with some kind of radioactive photon emission. In the light, the rounded edges of the rectangularly-cut piece of plant fiber shown slightly translucent from being cooked. A citrusy smelling sauce of some kind puddled in the plate and seeped from the slab of kelp, which was obviously soaked through with the stuff.

  It smelled incredible.

  She hungrily pulled the dish closer to herself, drinking in the fragrant and tangy steam coming off of it. Her hands grasped automatically for the eating utensils Wes had provided, gripping them with more intensity and eagerness than she had ever gripped the handle of any firearm.

  EJ blinked at the delicious masterpiece before her, then looked up at Wes, hoping distantly that she wasn’t making a facial expression akin to that of a starving animal presented with a bowl of slop.

  “All yours,” he confirmed.

  She didn’t need to be told twice. EJ devoured her kelp steak.