The sun presided proudly over the Carlile Medical Complex, shining gently amid whipped-cream-dollop clouds and an earth-scented breeze. Dr. Brandie stood in the hospital portico immersed in her own personal storm cloud, arms crossed and foot tapping. Behind her, six members of medical staff shuffled and chatted idly.

‘Any time, doc’ my ass, Dr. Brandie thought, eyes glued to the road. She squirmed, shook her head, and checked her watch again.

“Any later and we might have to call the whole thing off… later day appointments can’t be canceled as well. To expedite, I want the lot of you to go upstairs and start prepping now. If you don’t have the patient in ten minutes, you can start to pack it back up. Oh and scratch the KSE conductance test; there’s no longer time. We’ll keep the fMRI, full nerve assessment, cognitive tests, and Nexus software checksum. Get to it.”

Dr. Brandie watched her team file away toward the elevator lobby. Once alone, she turned back to the road with a tapping foot. After four more minutes of waiting, Alexandra Harmon’s minivan puttered its way into the medical complex lot.

Dr. Brandie met them at the handicapped spot with clasped hands. “Unfortunately, due to scheduling constraints, we no longer have time for one of the tests—still, if you two will follow me, we’ll be able to do the rest of the work-up right away.”

“It was a battle convincing him to come,” Alexandra said, shaking her head. “Once he found out where we were going this morning, he was adamant about staying home.”

Don’t like hospitals, Brett signed. Don’t like here.

Dr. Brandie felt a stirring of sympathy. “The Carlile Medical Complex is likely host to plenty of bad memories for Brett… beyond that floor-to-ceiling view of the woods, there’s likely little he could remember fondly—excepting your persistent company, of course.”

By now, Alexandra had retrieved her walking cane, and the trio set off towards the hospital entrance. As they walked to match the older woman’s slower pace, Dr. Brandie turned to appraise Brett’s gait and bearing… the two locked eyes, and Dr. Brandie could see pleading in that look, enough to set out ripples of goosebumps.

Don’t let my mom take away this gift, that look seemed to say. Don’t let her send me back to the bed.

She tried her best to offer a reassuring smile. Her fingers clumsily signed all will work out OK.

The doors slid open in greeting. Alexandra’s cane clicked loudly against the solid linoleum floors, echoing down the empty hallways over the softly playing lobby music that droned from tinny speakers. Dr. Brandie summoned the elevator, and, in seconds, it beeped as its doors slid lazily open.

In moments, the carriage lurched upwards, spiriting the trio deeper into the complex. As the elevator hummed, Alexandra Harmon looked gravely to Dr. Brandie.

“If anything is amiss with these tests—if there’s anything wrong with my Brett—can it be reversed?”

“…reversed?” Dr. Brandie asked, not quite sure if she’d heard properly.

“Can you take it back out?” she asked. Dr. Brandie opened her mouth, shut it again. Such an idea was preposterous to her… who would want to re-cripple the handicapped?

“Brett, would you want to take the KSE back out?” Dr. Brandie asked, which set off an immediate, emphatic head-shaking from Brett. No, the gesture said, loud and clear. A single tear slid down Brett’s cheek. Just the thought of returning to paralysis terrorizes him, Dr. Brandie thought, and understandably so.

The elevator shuddered and lurched to a painful stop as Alexandra pulled the emergency stop toggle.

“I said: can it be undone?” Alexandra asked, her intense gaze boring into Dr. Brandie like sunlight to ice. Dr. Brandie felt compelled to shift on her feet.

“No—well, yes, but you saw yourself: Brett doesn’t want it undone.”

“The state appointed me medical decisionmaker for Brett, a right I still hold. It’s my decision, not yours.”

Dr. Brandie was flabbergasted. “You would send him back to paralysis—to confinement—for what? Paranoia? I won’t let you—I’ll argue in favor of Brett’s competence. Submit a report with the state board to have his rights reinstated.”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“You do that and I’ll go to the press,” Alexandra said, stabbing the elevator’s floor with the head of her cane. Her own face was streaked with tears to match Brett’s now. “No more games, no more maneuvering my boy like he’s some game piece on a board to play against Nobel committees and project funders. He’s a person, God damn it, and he may not be in control of his own body. He may be suffering! Does that mean nothing to you?”

“A person suffering from paralysis means everything to me,” Dr. Brandie cracked. It was mom all over again… here was a young man who would be reduced to immobility, and it felt more and more like there was nothing she could do to stop it.

But then to her mind came the one thing she could say to defuse this woman’s fears. She could stake her confidence in the KSE, humoring Ms. Harmon’s fears and ensuring Brett’s mobility all at once:

“We’ll do the tests,” she said, knowing that they would all come back clear with the same certainty that she knew her own name, “and if anything’s amiss, we’ll take out the KSE. You have my word. If I renege, go to the press, tell them everything. On the flip side, if everything checks out as it’s supposed to, the KSE stays, and Brett keeps his quality of life. Agreed?”

Dr. Brandie reached out her hand for Alexandra to shake, but the old woman merely reached for the elevator stop switch and pressed it back in, setting the carriage back in motion. “Agreed.”

Dr. Brandie turned towards Brett, noting the fresh series of tears that trailed down his cheeks… his was a look of relief.

Relieved that he won’t be losing his mobility so soon after regaining it, Dr. Brandie thought. Relieved that his mother won’t take this gift away.

The elevator dinged its arrival to the selected floor, and the doors began their slide open on squeaking tracks.

“Down this hall,” Dr. Brandie began, “we’ll find the fMRI room. A quick scan there should get us deep insight to Brett’s state of mind, making crystal clear that he feels the way he says he—”

Dr. Brandie was nearly knocked from her feet as a scrambling Brett took to the hall in a frenetic blur.

“Hey!” Alexandra Harmon called, but Brett’s mad sprint never slowed.

“You threaten to take the boys legs away, and of course he would run!” Dr. Brandie admonished, setting out in a pursuit.

Down the hall, doctors threw themselves out of the way of the mad runner; one lost a stack of medical reports as Brett shouldered past, the stack flitting in the breeze he left behind.

“Brett, stop before you hurt yourself!” Dr. Brandie called, remembering the boy’s running on the treadmill… this was surely far faster, far more desperate, as though he were running from a collapsing building. “Brett, please, we won’t take away the KSE,” Dr. Brandie called, but Brett still never slowed.

The boy vanished around a corner; when Dr. Brandie finally arrived, she peered around that corner, seeing Brett standing silhouetted before a floor-to-ceiling window at the end of the hall. Beyond that window was the serene forest Brett had stared at every day in his paralysis, a reminder of the life that was permanently just out of reach.

Between Dr. Brandie and Brett, empty hospital rooms sat with doors open: dead ends with no means of escape. If Brett had been seeking stairs, a means of flight, he’d chosen poorly—now four orderlies made their way to where Dr. Brandie stood, gathering at her back, forming a wall. Brett was cornered, and would be apprehended, sedated, and tested. This was no ordinary reaction, she thought. Perhaps the mother was right; perhaps there was something wrong with Brett’s emotional regulation. Maybe it’s a matter of—

Dr. Brandie and the orderlies gasped as Brett set himself into frantic motion once again. This run, and not the first, elicited that gasp for two reasons: there first was the way he ran, an uncoordinated, sloppy thing, his head dragging behind his body as though it did not want to follow his muscles’ commands; the second reason was the direction of the sprint, for while his first run had been scrambling for escape, this second took him bearing towards the window at the far end of the hall… and he ran with far too much determined speed to slow in time.

“No,” Dr. Brandie merely gasped, and then Brett’s full-tilt sprint met window in a crunching, shattering cascade of lacerating glass and pinwheeling limbs. In a second, he was gone, and all the loose tumbling shards had vanished with him.

Dr. Brandie crept forwards on numbed feet, ears ringing too loud to hear the shouts of alarm and panic from the staff behind her. She felt the warm gentle breeze of the outside invade the cool, sterile air of the hospital, and as she drew nearer to that broken portal of glass, she heard the twittering songbirds and the rumble of the distant lawnmower. She braced herself against the wall, and then, despite knowing it would traumatize her, she peered over the edge… she simply had to know.

It took three full seconds for what she was seeing to register. With a sob that shook her whole body, she pulled herself back, fell to the floor, and drew herself tightly into a ball. There hadn’t been a body splayed out on the ground sixteen stories below… for down on the sunny lawns of the Carlile Medical Complex was something far worse.

It shambled and stumbled with a gait as ruined as Alexandra Harmon’s. Its snapped neck held a head that bobbed and lobbed loosely as it walked, lifeless eyes staring at the sun, the sclera already blooming deep red with broken blood vessels. Its lacerated arms dangled limply, and blood glistened on the thing like condensation on a glass. Despite all the ruin of a sixteen-story fall, and despite the fact that a dead human host could send no signals to the Nexus, still the KSE marched its way forward, taking the upright corpse toward the forest, perhaps the only place that it thought itself safe from surgical removal.

And whether it was the shock of her life’s work falling apart or the onset of the long-dreaded nerve condition that took her mother, when Dr. Brandie finally managed to wrench the phone from her bag, she found her fingers too clumsy to even dial for the help that was already far too late.