As they wheeled out of the room Sally saw what she expected, initially. The wall facing the door was also painted hospital green. Things got weird, though, when they actually entered the hallway.
The green paint on the hallway walls ended a short distance past where it could be seen from inside the room. After this, the walls appeared to be a white plastic, with beams of wood running near the ceiling and floor. The hallway continued into the distance in both directions. The oddest thing was that there were no light fixtures, instead, the walls and ceiling glowed. Sally had never seen or heard of anything like that, but then, she was from a small town.
She looked around for the nurses’ station. There wasn’t one, but when she glanced to the left, beside her room door, there was a box that was making the sounds of a hospital! She tried to process what she saw, but it made no sense. What she had thought were people outside her room was simply some sort of recording being played over a speaker! Sally stared at it.
What was going on? Some sort of sick joke?
Sally slumped in the chair. She was tired, weak, thirsty, effectively naked, and even she could tell her thinking was very slow.
To top it off. her bladder was complaining. She started as a disconcerting thought drifted through her mind, prompting her to call over her shoulder. “Kid! Come here!”
She pointed in front of her.
He walked to where she’d indicated. Sally was fairly sure she wouldn’t like the answer, but she had to ask. “Umm,” she started, then went on, “Did you, I mean, umm, well…”
This was difficult. She had to know, though.
She started again. “Uh… those tubes. They were for more than just feeding me.”
She looked at him. He looked back. It was very likely what she feared.
She had a hard time saying it, after some false attempts she squeezed out, “Uh, did you, um… did you... did you take the tubes out of me?”
“Yes.”
Sally was mortified, and at a loss for anything to say. She simply stared at the boy.
The boy just stared back at her. Sally was starting to think he didn’t have many social skills. It appeared she had to ask specific questions to get answers. Best deal with the immediate issue, or rather, the most immediate one.
“Do you know where there’s a bathroom?”
“There are no bathrooms that correspond to the type you are used to in mid-twentieth century America. There are a number of alternatives that I can propose that would be sufficient, assuming you do not want to urinate on yourself.”
Sally couldn’t help herself, she snickered. “No, I would rather not.”
She paused, and then continued, “You don’t talk like a little boy.”
Nothing.
“Oh yeah,” Sally muttered.
She tried, “How old are you?”
A direct question would probably be something he would answer.
“In your terms, referenced to your estimated time frame, approximately 537 years. I do not have an accurate date for when I started running an internal chronometer, so I have rounded off the accuracy. If you want the time to more precision I can refine the estimate and state the assumptions I have made.”
This was so far away from what Sally had expected that she didn’t really have a way to process it.
She slumped even further. "I… I… I don’t know what to say about that.”
She paused, then changed the subject, "Maybe we should find one of those bathroom thingies that you mentioned.”
The boy walked back into her room and returned shortly, pushing the IV stand, which he tied to the back of the chair with some of the tubing. He also retrieved the blankets and pillow from the bed and put them on her lap. When he was done, he started pushing the chair down the hallway, past the box that was still sounding like a hospital ward.
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Sally was going to ask why he brought the IV stand when something flew past the chair near the floor, making her jump. Whatever it was, continued down the hallway to the limit of what she could see, and then started strobing different lights and making various sounds as it flittered about. There was no particular pattern she could pick out.
“Hey kid!” she threw over her shoulder.
No answer.
“Uh, kid, did you see that thing? The thing that flew past us?”
“No.”
“How could you miss it? Something just flew past us, and I can sort of see it ahead, up there.”
Nothing. Maybe she’d asked the wrong question.
“Uh, kid, do you know what just flew past?”
“Yes, it is a remote sensor.”
“A remote sensor?”
Nothing.
“Ok kid, although you may not be a kid, well, whatever you are, do you know who sent the thing, the sensor? Uh, and…” she thought for a second, then added, "and do you know anything about what it’s for?”
Instead of directly answering the boy asked “Do you want a detailed explanation or a summary? The detailed version, in itself, needs to be broken down by complexity, but the total duration will be 637.35 hours, using this audio transfer medium and limiting it to details pertaining to the technology involved, the analysis of the optimization process for construction, how it is meant to be deployed, and other ancillary information.”
The absurdity of the answer forced a laugh out of Sally. She kept laughing, and couldn’t stop as tears ran down her face. She started hiccupping. Eventually, she wound down and gathered herself, although one final giggle forced its way out.
It appeared that she would have to be more specific.
“Give me the information in a short, less than one minute, summary.”
She felt she was getting the hang of communicating with the boy.
The boy answered "I constructed the sensor drone based on pertinent information available from the request I posited for minimizing events that could cause disruptions. I also control it to sweep the passages in front of me, now us, in case there are conditions about which I would like to have advance warning. The collection and analysis of the data have been optimized as a compromise for speed and detail, as recommended in various studies and analyses of data processing techniques for hazardous environments.”
Sally was taken aback. Even the summary was hard to comprehend.
“Uh-huh,” she said, and then paused. She added, “Where was it when you were in the room? I didn’t see it when we got into the hallway, and you didn’t seem to be carrying anything.”
The boy put his arm over the seat back beside her head. For a moment Sally didn’t see anything out of the ordinary until…
“Oh My God! Your hand is missing!” Sally screamed and jerked away. The boy didn’t remove his arm. Sally took a quick glance back at it. The hand was still missing. She reached up and held his arm at the elbow.
She bent forward, expecting a bloody stump, or something similar but what she saw amazed her. His arm appeared to have been cleanly sliced and capped with something like plastic. It looked like what you’d see if you took the hand off of a store dummy.
Sally was repulsed and intrigued, in spite of herself.
“Boy,” she said sternly, “stop pushing and come around here.”
He did so.
Sally looked at his face and was jolted. The boy had his eyes closed, but the metal plate in his forehead was gone, replaced by a clear window revealing lenses, gears, lights, bubbles, and belts moving up, down, across, and around inside of his head.
Sally felt her mental processes crash. She just sat and stared. She had nothing to say.
The boy walked back and resumed pushing.
Sally had reached her limit. She started to shiver and her vision tunneled. All that she could see was what was right in front of her.
Somehow the boy understood that she was in distress. He stopped pushing the chair, came around to the front of the chair, pulled a blanket from the pile and tucked it around her. Sally noted, in passing, that his stump had extruded a tentacle to make up for the missing hand. Her emotions had shut down, and she found herself thinking that she didn’t care, and couldn’t even care that she didn’t care.
It slowly dawned on her that she was going into shock. She had heard of that happening to people but never knew what that really meant, until now.
She tried to kick herself out of this funk but found her body had taken over and she had no say. She just rode in the chair as the boy started pushing it again, and tried to stay conscious. It was a strange feeling to be out of control.
After several minutes of simply staring at the small patch of floor in front of her, she became aware that the hallway was starting to get brighter. It took a major effort to raise her head and see what was happening. They had reached the end of the hallway and were emerging into a much larger room that looked like an unkempt garden.
The boy pushed her up to a raised section next to a window. As they approached Sally could see that it was actually a trough with water flowing through it. He stopped the chair, put the brake on, and came around to face her. As effortlessly as before he lifted her over to the edge of the trough and sat her on it. Fortunately, the side was fairly wide and not uncomfortable to sit on, even with her butt over the water. She teetered a bit but managed to stay upright. She looked at him. Everything was an effort.
“Pee,” he said.
Sally was so disconnected she had no problems carrying out his orders. When she finished he lifted her back to the chair, sat her on it, and rolled the chair back toward the hallway, stopping by a patch of grass. The boy fiddled with the IV stand and handed her a tube.
“Drink!” he ordered.
Sally did so. She idly noted the fluid had no taste but was oddly satisfying. When she had taken in a little he took back the tube and looped it on the stand. He used a blanket and the pillow to make an impromptu bed on the grass, lifted her over to it and tucked her in.
She passed out immediately.