Ravana's Shadow (31)

Kit was on her back in the hospital bed, wearing only her underclothes. Even the suit’s inner layers would interfere with the procedure. Despite its name, the scan was far more than putting her through a machine to get a few readings.

She shifted nervously back and forth as Emma and Jay stood over her, removing a pair of sharp metal probes from their plastic wrap. Jay waved something over her torso, before stopping right over her chest. He made two marks on her pale skin, where her right lung would’ve been. “There. I know the probe looks scary, but it won’t hurt going in. We switch off your pain receptors for the whole thing.”

Kit tried to pull her tail up to her chest, but Emma caught it, pushing the fluff back to the side. “Not this time, Director. Hold the mouse if you need to hold something.”

She nodded and caught Jay’s arm before he could back away. There was a console nearby, with clear cables running to a machine suspended over the bed. They glowed faintly from within, and somehow moved on their own, undulating like a snake suspended from the ceiling.

“You’re a doctor too?” she asked, holding him as tight as she could. “I thought you did… photonics.”

He tugged away from her, at least for a second. “I need to—” He stopped, then gestured for a chair. “Guess I can be here while Emma gets the probes connected.”

The hospital room was familiar to her now—one of a dozen identical boxes, with glass walls that could tint fully opaque, or turn clear again. Most of the space was occupied by a heavy surgical robot. It could cut through her with incredible speed, carrying out whatever instructions Emma gave it. That robot was silent and folded now, opening the space over her bed for this much smaller apparatus. 

“You’re not just here to keep me company?” Kit said. “This is why you couldn’t come to look at the rocket with me. You were in here.”

Emma pushed a stool over for him, and Jay sat down. That brought him down to her eye level. He nodded. “I know more about uploads and backups than anyone in the Institute.”

“He invented it,” Emma supplied, approaching the bed from the other side. “Another version of him, anyway.”

“I don’t have to record very many these days,” he said, conversationally. “A backup captures everything—including ego coherence. Since there’s no physical danger, and not a lot of extra material to go around, we use Remedial instead of recovery from forks.”

He tapped her cheek, prompting Kit to turn towards him. “You’re really changing things. I’m glad I still remember.”

She felt something cold a second later, then a strange… shifting, moving in her chest. She glanced sideways and found one of the probes now running through her skin, with a few drops of blue blood smeared out around it. 

Emma held up the other probe, tipped with the same long needle as the first. “It’s easier if you don’t watch.” 

She whimpered, then turned away again. “You invented this?”

Jay nodded. “A long, long time ago, yeah.” He settled his other hand on hers, grip tightening.

Another second later, Kit felt another needle. No pain, just another strange coldness, and more moisture trickling down her chest.

“It wasn’t for the Pioneering Society. I think it existed, but—” He shrugged. “Medicine wasn’t as good back then. No telling if cryogenics would keep someone intact long enough to fix them when they woke up. But if you could back them up, they’d be safe as long as it took. Maybe forever.”

“Green on probes. Moving to interface with cognitive center,” Emma said. She backed away from the table, standing beside a little clear screen suspended from the ceiling. She held it over Kit, occasionally tapping at it.

“You’re looking at my insides?”

Emma nodded. “Sure are. I can confirm you’re 100% squirrel all the way through. Packed with as much hardware as the average rover.”

“As are you, Emma,” Forerunner said, from the speakers in the nearby surgical machine. “I will not risk the loss of a single member of the Ravana expedition. You will survive.”

Jay shifted in his seat, trying to stand—but Kit held on. “Wait. She’s not done.”

“She won’t be done until I start,” Jay said. He settled back into the seat, then touched her shoulder. “Then you wake up, and it’s over.”

“What if I don’t want a backup?” she asked, a little louder. “I’m not important like any of you. I didn’t invent… stuff. You don’t need to record me.” She was still the Director. If she told them to stop, wouldn’t they have to?

“Every human life is precious, Kit,” Forerunner said. “This recording replaces the archival data used to fabricate you. If the worst should happen, would you rather wake up surrounded by friends, comfortable in your new body? Or do you want to suffer through the confusion and adaptation all over again?”

Kit stiffened. She still hadn’t asked them to stop, and the probe was still moving. That needle cut through her, searching for—something. Maintenance access to her soul. “I don’t plan on waking up in a fabricator again. We’re going to succeed. The Neophyte will make it to Ravana and fly back to Mara. I don’t need a backup.”

Something clicked in Kit’s chest. It didn’t hurt, though some part of her thought it should. Her body shouldn’t be moved around like that from the inside. “You might not,” Jay said. He stood up, though stayed close enough that she could hold on. “But what about us? If something bad happens, we don’t wanna say goodbye forever. Can I make the backup, please? If nothing bad happens, it won’t matter that I took a scan. It will just sit in the database with all the others, and never get read.”

“I…” She whined, her ears pressing flat to her head. It would’ve been so much easier to say no upstairs in the Institute. But on her back in the hospital bed, with the other members of the expedition gathered just outside the room, could she say no? 

Yes, she could. “I don’t—” A wave of drowsiness slammed into her like a rover at full speed. Her vision got cloudy, darkening around the edges. Her fingers slipped limply from Jay’s wrist. She struggled to form the word, but the strength didn’t come. Drool slid weakly down her face. Kit flopped back against the hospital bed, and unconsciousness took her.

Kit was somewhere else.

She had been there before—that unreal not-place that came from the strange actions of her mechanical mind when she should've been unconscious.

"I'm going somewhere dangerous," she said to herself. Her vision frayed and split, somehow looking down and also directly at herself. She was in fabrication, in that locker room with its several benches, at different heights for each of the template sizes. 

One of those templates was her—a short, thin girl, with a huge red and brown tail behind her that made her look less tiny and pathetic than she really was.

Seeing that round face reflected back at her for a year made it easier to forget what should've been so clear to her. Acheron is right. Forerunner made me a child.

The girl shivered, dripping wet with the disgusting blue slime of the fabrication tank. This must be Emma's view when she first emerged from the fabricator, or soon afterwards.

Kit wrapped a towel around herself, then held her tight to stop the shivering. Somehow, she was normal here—no tail, no ears, and no view so uncomfortably close to the ground. She had to drop to one knee to comfort this child, holding her firmly despite the near-incoherent whimpering.

"You'll be okay," she whispered. "I know how confused you are, how awful everything is. It will make sense, eventually. You're the one who found the answers."

Huge gray eyes met hers, all the bigger in that small face. Her ears folded backward, and her tail curled damp around her legs. "You were brave, not me. You're normal. Make me normal too."

"I wasn't when I did any of those things."

Those tiny eyes turned bloodshot, focusing sharply on her. Red blood trickled down her face, dribbling out of her ears. It seemed to fall in slow motion, drop after drop onto the locker-room floor. Some soaked into the towel, staining it in streaks.

"They're so... loud," said the tiny her. Did she really sound so pathetic? How did anyone in the Institute take her seriously? "After all this time, it was quiet. Why did you have to start screaming?"

"I..." Kit released the child in her arms and slid away through the locker room. The ground was damp now, smearing her skin and jumpsuit with more red. Where was all that blood coming from? "I'm not screaming. Your friends aren't like that."

"Screaming," tiny her repeated. The towel slipped off her shoulders, but the body underneath was completely hidden with deep red, soaked in blood. It filled the air with harsh, metallic stink, nothing like the faintly chemical smell of artificial blood.

"One by one they stopped. In this system, in that one. But if you start again, it will be so loud!"

The child didn't look so much like Kit anymore. Nor was she smaller than Kit—the shape stretched and distorted, extending so high the ceiling had to curve to fit it. Kit slipped onto her back in the moisture, landing painfully against her tail. She'd been wrong: Kit wasn't normal sized after all.

"I don't know what's wrong," she said, still reaching towards the speaker. Even stretched and deformed, there were still faint suggestions of a person in that body. "If I could..."

"Shut up!" The scream filled the room as no voice ever could, slamming Kit backward against the wall. The impact couldn't break her metal bones, but it snapped through softer flesh and connective tissue, breaking her delicate components into fractured pieces.

Kit landed limply, her muscles spasming irregularly. A faint trickle of blue blood slid down her lips, splashing into the growing pool of red. "Help..." She reached weakly across the room towards the tiny her, no more than a vaguely humanoid outline now. 

It was made from jagged flesh, extending in sharp spines dripping red. "Quiet!" It lunged for her, crossing the locker room in a second. Deep red liquid splashed all around it, briefly blinding Kit. Then it had its spindly limbs around her neck, ready to rip her head from her shoulders. "Just stop!"

So, she stopped. Kit didn't have the strength left to keep fighting, anyway. But she could still move one arm, reaching out to wrap her fingers around the thing. She might die, but at least she wouldn't die alone.

"Kit!" Someone shook her.

She braced for more pain, except—it was over. Bright lights blasted into her face, even white filling the medical bay. She twitched, and her eyes focused on the person touching her. Emma, with a tube of something vaguely skin colored. She left a tiny patch over each of the little wounds on Kit's chest, then took a step back. "There. That wasn't so hard, was it?"

Kit jerked upright, clutching at her chest. Her heart wasn't in that spot anymore, nor did the two new organs beat the same way as her one old one. The instinct remained. "That was horrible."

"Horrible... how?" Jay was still there too, just stepping out from behind the screen. He held out her undershirt.

Kit snatched it, then recoiled from him to squirm into it, holding both arms against her chest. "Nightmare," she whispered. "I've never even... never seen anything like it."

Emma held up the scanner again, hovering it over Kit's body. She frowned, squinting at it. "I'm reading a stress response. Elevated heart rate and respiration, enlarged pupils..."

Jay picked up something leaning over a seat, offering it to her. A fresh uniform jumpsuit, complete with the little Neophyte pin over the collar. More comfortable to wear to the launch party than an EVA suit, anyway.

"There was a monster in there." Kit pointed at the probes, as Emma twisted the needles off each end and tossed them in a waiting bin. "I think it was trying to kill me."

"There's no one there," Jay said. He took another short step towards her. "Kit, that was just a scan. Your nanites reported their states and connections, we saved them into the mainframe, that's all."

She shook her head sharply, sharp enough that her tail slipped off the bed behind her and nearly took her with it. She might've slipped all the way onto the floor if Emma wasn't there to catch her. 

The doctor's template wasn't any bigger than hers anymore, but she was still fast and strong enough to keep a patient from slipping out of bed. "Careful, Squirrel. Your insides are still booting. Might not have upper and lower brain function synchronized with your body yet."

Kit held her arm for a few seconds. Her body twitched and spasmed, wracking sobs that washed over her and vanished almost as quickly as they came. "Am I bleeding?"

"Of course you're not." Emma wrapped her arm around Kit's shoulder. "Forerunner, are you seeing any indicators of ego decoherence? Did we somehow..."

"None," Forerunner said, almost instantly. He had probably been running some of the very same scans. "It's her interface implant, doctor. Perhaps it could be the result of some unexpected interaction between her cognitive center and signals received as she returned to consciousness?"

“Didn’t see any issues when I was taking Maddie’s backup,” Emma muttered. “Are you sure about that theory?”

“Maddie is a skilled operator. Kit is still learning to use her implant.”

Like any nightmare, the painful emotions were fading quickly. Once Kit was back in the waking world, the sharp physicality of sensation became diffuse and unfocused, blurring at the edges. Maybe it wasn't blood after all. It had looked like her at first.

"It talked to me," Kit said.

Jay approached her bed from the other side. He kept the jumpsuit over one arm but didn't offer it to her. "If you're not feeling well, we could... call off the launch. It would probably be better to keep you in Medical a few weeks for observation, just in case."

The launch—tomorrow! If they missed the window, they would need to wait months for another one. Garrick would certainly die, taking with him any chance of a Ravana salvage. Months and months of the Institute's effort, material, and hope would be ripped away.

"I'm fine." Kit reached for him, taking the jumpsuit from his arm. "Just give me another minute to catch my breath. I'm already feeling better."

The phantom pain was gone, but other parts of the dream pressed deeper into her mind. She could still see her own face, twisting and elongating into an inhuman, bleeding silhouette.

"Your decision," Emma said. "The physiological symptoms are leveling out."

Kit swung her legs over the side and stood. She unzipped the jumpsuit, and shrugged it on, turning the back towards Jay.

He sighed, bending down to tighten it over her tail. "Can't blame me for trying. Watching my friends leave like this, maybe never come back." The velcro settled into place, and he stood up again.

Kit zipped it up her chest, though she left the last few inches undone, the collar slightly open. “We’ve got a party to get to.”