Of all of the feelings that Louise has experienced in her life, having the hook-ups for an Oracle spliced into her spinal cord might be the most uniquely unpleasant. Even with the anesthetic halfway paralyzing her neck and upper back, she feels the cold rush of adrenaline through every inch of her body as the synthetic neurons are wired into her own by the tank’s medical systems. The paralytics going through her system prevent her from acting on the rush of awful sensations, except to bite down hard on the rubber guard preventing her from grinding her teeth together, tearing into it savagely as if it were the thing threading needles through her nervous system.
“You’re nearly done, Specialist. Just a few more moments, then we’re going to try to boot up the system.”
The needles threading the artificial neurons through her spinal cord retract all too slowly, but when they leave her skin she’s filled with relief. The pulses of cold discomfort continue for several long moments after, like tactile hallucinations from a bad high. Delilah’s voice comes through the bone conduction system, again.
“Good work. That splice was above-average in terms of total contact. How do you feel?”
A soft beeping noise tells her that Denilah has opened her comms channel, again. Her response comes out as more of a growl than proper words.
“How do you think?”
There’s a pause before the woman responds. Louise imagines her paging through a document that highlights how to respond to every possible thing that she could say.
“I think that you’re feeling overwhelmed, and that you’re in pain. I’m sorry to tell you that that’s not going to stop any time soon.”
-
After all the dayglow lamps in the housing shell flick off for the night, Louise sneaks out the door of her unit and down the halls of the enormous housing structure. Although there is technically no law against leaving one’s unit after dark, it tends not to go well for people who don’t have somewhere very specific to be. Luckily for Louise, this is a skill that she’s spent her entire working life nurturing. She’s dressed in her rust-black jumpsuit and tinted goggles that she wore while working her prior job as private security, and carrying a pack full of entirely normal items for everyday carry: her assigned datapad, some food and water, and a few other things. If she looks like she’s on her way to a job, most people will simply take it for granted that she is.
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She just has to hope that she doesn’t run into any security personnel, who will realize that she looks an awful lot like hired muscle but doesn’t have a weapon. She’s never had the money to spare to purchase one of her own, not one that would really be worth having, anyway.
She wanders down the labyrinthine, infinitely self-similar halls of the housing structure. The walls, floor, and ceiling are all made of the same generic white polymer, coated with cream-colored paint on the walls. The comparatively dim light of the nightglow lamps makes the place feel empty and dead, instead of empty and alive, like it feels during the day. The place is nearly silent, save for the almost imperceptible hall of electricity in the walls and the occasional, distant sound of the internal monorails that shepherd the more wealthy residents of the housing shell from place to place within it. Louise despises the place, and she very often gets the feeling that the housing shell likes her even less than she likes it. It takes fifteen minutes for her to walk all the way to the other side of the facility, where she takes a stairway down to the lowest publicly accessible floor.
The lower floors of the facility are locked off by heavily reinforced doors that will only open for somebody with the right biometrics. Louise, however, happens to be aware of the fact that this particular door has been compromised. She places her hand into the opening beside the door, and a series of uncomfortable sensations go through her hand as it runs her fingerprints, palm prints, scars, fingernail growth patterns, and DNA through its databanks. She doesn’t have the appropriate credentials, but that doesn’t actually matter, as the door opens for her, anyway.
She descends three more flights of stairs before the building bottoms out into a sub-basement that is nearly identical to all of the floors above it, save for the fact that the rooms were built to store generators, databanks, plumbing, water tanks, and maintenance equipment rather than humans. The place is absolutely riddled with cameras and sensors that should be informing a myriad of people that she is not where she belongs, except that they aren’t. With another few minutes of walking, she arrives at the door that she came all this way for, and knocks. It opens nearly immediately, revealing a man.
Declan is short and serious looking, unkempt in the way that academics often are, especially the ones that live in sub-basements. He meets her eyes only briefly, without smile or comment, and steps aside to let her in.
The room that Declan has claimed is small, cramped, and immaculately organized. An elevated bed, neatly made, is crammed into one corner with a desk and terminal set up beneath it. In the opposite corner, a bare metal surgical table has been set up, and a variety of strange and exotic medical instruments are crowded around it. Every other square inch of wall space is filled with dozens of shelves, each packed tightly with labeled boxes. There is a large drain in the center of the bare concrete floor.
He closes the door behind her, locks it, and then walks over to his terminal. He presses a few buttons and then rises again, looking toward her. His voice is soft and raspy with disuse.
“Well? Are we gonna do this, or what?”