Flash Fiction #2

"Her occupational evaluations looked fine," Dr. Bolten said, looking across his desk at the strange woman who held Choi's hand.

The strange woman, who Choi had learned was named Vasa, stared back at him, square jaw rippling. "Then your tests are bullshit," she ground out.

Choi sat as she'd been directed to, in the chair next to Vasa, watching the fan on the ceiling spin languidly in its wrought iron cage. She didn't understand why she had to sit next to the loud woman. She'd rather have been on Dr. Bolten's side of the desk. At least she knew who he was.

"I don't know what to tell you," Dr. Bolten said, looking put out. "She's clearly able to walk now, and she'll be able to handle any occupation just fine. I don't know what you want from me. This was, by all accounts, a successful operation."

"'Handle any occupation'? Fuck that," Vasa said, a hysterical edge to her voice. "Look at her."

Both Dr. Bolten and the loud woman fell silent for a moment. Growing bored of the fan itself, Choi's gaze fell to the shadow of the fan where it whirled on the wall, ethereal blades trying and failing to slice the embossed design pressed into the sheet metal wall. Choi wondered what the design depicted. It didn't quite make sense to her.

The loud woman turned to Choi. "Get up and stand in the corner, facing the wall."

Choi did so.

"What's this supposed to demonstrate?" Dr. Bolten said from behind, offended. "Bring her back."

Choi began to move back.

"No, stay there," Vasa said, clearly trying to be kind. "You'll see, Doctor."

Choi did so.

The conversation went on for a long time. Throughout it all, Choi stood, silently looking at the wall, wondering why she'd been put there.

Reality began to slowly intrude on Choi's mind, fragmentary like disjointed source code diffs. A nurse adjusting her bandages and swapping out a catheter bag. Someone accidentally bumping into the wrong room briefly, apologizing, and shutting the door gently behind them. Another nurse, bringing food. Reality began to grow ovestimulating quickly during each section of awareness, forcing her to doze off again, only to wake once more for a new small fragment.

Gradually the patches became longer, and eventually Choi began to notice the woman slouching in one of the waiting chairs by her bedside, quietly watching something in her personal augreal HUD. Choi stared at this strange woman, wondering who she was. She wasn't Dr. Bolten, or a nurse. What was her job at the hospital?

Eventually, the woman noticed her staring, and, banishing her HUD, rushed to Choi's bedside, eyes bright. "Choi! Hey, darling," she said softly. "Welcome back to the land of the not-braindead."

Choi grunted.

"Well, you technically weren't brain dead, that's true," she said, smiling. "But I'm glad to see you're awake again."

Choi tried to put the woman's hauntingly familiar face — a shock of black hair shaved on the sides, dark black eyes, a square jaw — to a name, but her mind threw a page fault, then another one. No matter how hard she thought, there was only a howling void and a feeling that the memory should be there, somewhere in L1 cache, ready to surface at any moment. Just before Choi began to fall back asleep from mental exhaustion, she saw horror begin to dawn on the strange woman's face.

Choi's reflection warped grotesquely in the bulbous, glassy obsidian surface of the doctor's VR headset.

"The scan's coming in nicely."

Doctor Bolten was narrating as he guided the pedipalps of the neurosurgical robot mounted in the headrest of the operating table with his slim, arm-length ridged black gloves.

"I'm just building a 3D scan of your brain and skull's physical structure. So far, it looks just as expected. This will go beautifully, Choi."

The soft, fluttering touch of the pedipalps tickled Choi's shaved head disconcertingly, so she focused on the breathing exercises Vasa had taught her. "That's good."

"Alright. Let's see…" a moment later, Bolten cast a slowly rotating 3D image into consensus AR so she could see it. "This is the expert system's surgical plan," he said. It was a transparent map of her skull in pale turquoise, crisscrossed with schematic lines. "The orange lines — here, here, here, and here — indicate incisions which will be made into your skull; these others are the ones that will be made to get past your brain's meninges. The green lines show where some propping and holding points will be, and the blue lines indicate where the soft nanomachine capsule will be injected. Once all that's done, we'll sew you back up, put some repairing gel on it, and you'll be good to go after a few weeks of recovery and an outpatient exam. You'll be up and ambulating in no time."

Choi felt slightly dizzy, but she shoved it down and nodded her understanding. She'd chosen this, and now was not the time to chicken out. "Got it, doc."

"Alright then. Let's get you anesthetized. I'll see you on the flip side, Miss. Skinner." The doctor smiled warmly, although his head pointed in the wrong direction to face her properly — probably at where he saw her through the VR headset.

The table slowly lowered until Choi was looking at the ceiling, where she could see the main body of the surgical robot — a dense ball of black manipulators which, in their neutral half-folded radial position, looked like the spines of a sea urchin. After a moment it glided smoothly down until it hung only a foot above her; once there, its body slowly inflated into an oval shape in an almost organic, breathing motion, spreading its manipulators out as if to welcome her into its embrace. Gently, one spine extruded toward her leg until it was only an inch away from her left thigh. She gritted her teeth. It jabbed out like a stinger, and blackness rushed up to meet her.

"I think I might get a promotion at work," Vasa said. She stood across the kitchen counter from Choi, muscular arms clutched to her sides, pointedly looking away. A shaft of pale greenish light snuck furtively through a crack in the pall of clouds between the pointed arches of the surrounding towers to lance through their low tenth story apartment's windows, painting her face a sickly shade. Like the Bride of Frankenstein, Choi thought.

Choi Skinner scratched her freshly shaved head, then ran her hands along the soothing smooth stainless steel of the countertop. "That's great to hear, honey. I think I might be able to get a job soon, too. Between the two of us, we might make it."

"The promotion could be enough for me to handle it alone…" Vasa trailed off, glancing at Choi out of the corner of her eyes.

Choi felt exhausted. Her bones and joints ached like she had arthritis at 28. "What'll you make after the promotion, if you get it?"

"Oh ye of little faith," Vasa scoffed, but there was a note of desperation in it. "I'll get it. 25 BlackburnCoin an hour."

Choi spun up her augreal HUD and updated their projections with a subvocalized command. "Our savings will still run dry in two months, three at best. Especially since a lot of that isn't broadly tradeable."

"You can find something else in that time!" Vasa ran a strong, veined hand through her thick shock of black hair, her mind clearly racing behind those beautiful black eyes. "This economy moves fast."

"That's exactly the problem." It moves fast enough to leave someone like me behind.

Struck suddenly by a need for human connection, Choi directed her wheelchair around the counter until she sat before Vasa. From this angle, Choi could see that Vasa's eyes were glistening.

"Come here, Vasa."

Almost fast enough to hurt herself, Vasa dropped to her knees so that they were at eye level, and looked deep into Choi's eyes.

"I love you, Choi."

Then she grabbed Choi's cheeks, calloused fingers pleasantly rough, and kissed her, deep and long.

After she pulled back, she looked at Choi for a long time. "Never change."

"Well, that might be hard," Choi said, trying to force a laugh. "But the one thing I can promise is that I'll never stop loving you."