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Arc 1, Chapter 4 (Preparation: Companionship)
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Seven days.
It has taken me seven days to find a ... viable test subject. Even with the help of my Bobby and his furry minions. They were not entirely without merit; those seven extra days gave me time to incorporate additional data dumps from DPE, covering a vast range of topics. The guy has a serious pull; he even managed to swing a few DARPA data dumps because of their affiliation with RIT. Ten years out of date, sure, but still. I'm going to owe him pretty seriously.
My somnambulatory exercise regimen has been upgraded to somnambulatory combat training in light of the military theory and motion-capture feeds I gained from there. There's something perversely meta in the idea of your unconscious self shadow-boxing a simulated opponent and modulating motions for precision of technique through the use of realtime video feedback. All of this with an accelerated rate of muscle-memory adoption because of the CVI's enhancement of training-effect neural plasticity. With each new infodump I pull in from various fields of study I get new
ideas. Restraining myself from carrying through with building on any that require me to actually physically make something is getting harder and harder; I've moved the tower PC into the basement so that I can have it constantly running simulations, and they're getting increasingly diverse.
I'd also jury-rigged a series of trainer firearms that use the laser-pointer as a trigger-confirmation, and a battery-operated coil-spring and drawstring I wear on a harness on my chest or back to emulate the kick from the actual weapons, to start building up better trigger-discipline and aim. Every time I pull the trigger I get a perfect realtime replay of the moment Bobby rushed out to hold the other cat down. It didn't hit me then but three days later? It took me
three days to realize that I'd come close to losing the last living thing on the planet that I actually felt anything at all for. What the hell was any of what I was doing
for if it couldn't at least ensure I stopped losing everyone?
I don't care how little he likes it, I'm locking him up before going out tonight. I have dozens of Stray Patrol "members" now. A half-dozen sampling of them will do me just fine. Little fuzzy bastard took this opportunity to knock his forehead into my arm and made me mistype a message to my boss.
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There's no complimentary way to describe the process of discovering a dead body and surreptitiously relocating it to a pre-arranged abandoned storefront -- it turns out that picking locks is largely a process of feel, making it child's play for someone with absolute precision of senses -- especially when less than a month earlier you were a sedentary shut-in and now you're carrying said body in a fireman's carry while avoiding any notice in the absolute dead of the night. You can't call it grave-robbing; this was a man who died in his sleep and was still in the cardboard box he was using in lieu of a tent. He neither had nor would ever have a grave. In a moment of sour grapes I couldn't help but note the fact that the only reason I could smell the death on him was because I had the extra input from the Stray Patrol. To a regular person you probably could've been within five feet of him and not noticed the difference for several days.
I digress.
Strapping the subject down onto what was once a order-taking counter in a coffee-house that was owned by a couple whose last name was a tiny bit too polish-sounding to get the "regular" protection rates from the local representatives of the "Aryan Imperium", I re-checked the solution and injector. Without noticing what I was doing, I began going through the process of sanitizing the site of injection with a wipette of iodine I'd had a Stray pilfer from a local pharmacy. I couldn't help but chuckle; I was protecting
dead tissue from the risk of infection... the worst possible complication of which was -- yes, that's right, death. Apparently my efforts at subconsciously training myself based on the information dumps I'd been receiving was giving me more behavioral changes than I'd anticipated. The CVI's impact is far more pervasive than I'd quite realized.
At any rate; after preparing the injection sites -- this would take a series of injections of varying concentrations into no fewer than fourty seven precise locations -- I followed through with the process, operating almost purely off of proprioception, memory, and low-grade "echolocation" -- dead-reckoning of how far echoes I heard came from. I picked up the technique from behavioral studies of South American bats.
For six hours I sat, meditating and "digesting" the information I'd been processing, studying the physiological sensor data the CVIs now propagating through the subject's corpus was sending me. Six hours of seeing the occasional synaptic response, catching my breath, only to have nothing happen. There were a few twitching events as synaptic pathways misfired. And then, finally, like a flower blossoming, the CNS pathways began actuating.
I had already laid up tarp and cardboard to block the light out of the coffeeshop's windows; that made it relatively safe to turn on a kerosene lamp and get a better look at what was going on externally... and hopefully give my subject a chance to be able to see. Now at this point I
should go through a series of kinesthesiological examinations, but at a spur of the moment I decide to shoot for the moon; I tap him on the face.
Nothing happens.
That is -- nothing happens
visually. But the datastream from the CVIs in his brain tell a very, very different story. I don't have a perfect reckoning of what it's telling me but the comparisons to fMRI feeds of people waking from deep sleep are telling. I try again, whispering softly, "It's time to wake up..." He twitches, his eyes fluttering. There's no sign in his neurology that there's actual language processing. I have no idea how much of the informational structures of his brain are still intact -- I pre-loaded his injections with analogues to many of the structures of my brain with programmed behaviors to override the biological neurology with those patterns exclusively in the areas where the actual meat is too degraded to still function, just in case. Still, I have no idea if I'm about to fend off a teeth-to-the-skull scenario or not.
He groans, disrupting my inward attention on the datafeeds. I look up, and whisper, urgently; "Sshhh... try to stay still. I have you strapped down. You've had a serious incident. Once we confirm you're well enough we'll get you in more comfortable circumstances. Now. This is very critical. Can you tell me your name?"
"Uuuhhhnn..."
"Your name. Can you tell me your name?" I'm talking to him the way horse trainers are taught to with wilderness-caught stallions. Slow, steady, and encouraging.
"Whaaa?" He starts struggling at the straps. I can barely conceal my ecstatic desire to jump for joy;
this is a conscious reaction to circumstances. I have restored the functionality of at least basic consciousness in dead matter. To state this is a miracle is an insult to the principles involved.
"Your name. Try to stay still; we don't want you hurting yourself. Can you tell me your name?"
The subject blinks hesitantly, his eyes clearly in a panic. "Hardy, Sam. Navy, retired -- Able Seaman. That serial number thing is bullshit. What the fuck have you done to me?" The man's grizzled face is quivering, now. Keeping the joy off of my face is physically paining me at this point. In a corner of my mind I am replaying every scene of every Frankenstein movie I've ever watched, picturing myself in the outfits of the various Doctors Frankenstein. My mind is racing in a thousand directions; I really don't know how to brace this. I've been thinking of this message for a week.
He speaks up again, disrupting my inner-directed attention. "Yo! Freakjob! Why am I tied up! Why the hell does my head hurt like this?"
It's time for
the talk. "You've ... been injured. I found you afterwards. I am a parahuman. I ... helped you." His eyes go wider still -- how in the hell? -- and he freezes like a sparrow in the gaze of a serpent. "But you're not out of the woods. I have... well, at this point I have good news that's going to sound like bad news. And I have a promise for you. I need you to stay completely still. Can you do that for me? I'm... I'm worried you might've gotten some cognitive impairment before I found you. That's why the straps -- to keep you from injuring yourself while I worked on healing you."
He catches himself, beginning to nod before he sees something in my face that makes him freeze, his appearance becoming blatantly expectant. "Okay ... here's the promise, first. I'm not going to give up on you, okay? What I'm about to say ... it's gonna sound really bad. And I'm not gonna lie, it is. But it's also hope. I need you to focus on that."
I exhale, hard, before continuing. "Samuel, there's no easy way to put this. In the absolute best circumstances you've got about a week left before you're just gone. And not even Panacea can help you." He starts struggling again at this, a look on his face that even with all of the social analytics data I've gathered doesn't help me to understand. "Stay. Still." I drill into him with my eyes, still standing at a decent distance. "I lied a little just now. It's not that you have a week left to live. You don't. You're not alive. You died approximately eighteen hours ago. I found you twelve hours ago. For ten hours, you were a corpse. You. Still. Are. There is a serum in your body making your brain active. But it's not healing. Every tiny injury? It keeps. You will break down. You will decay. And then... nothing."
He's still frozen, now. But now I can see it's horror. The CVI colonies in his brain are showing activity that indicates he should be crying, if he had the bodily fluids to do it still. "I told you there's hope. In that week? I'm going to try to improve that ... serum. Get you a month. And in that month? Get you three. In those three? A year. In some circles they call this idea 'death escape velocity'."
"And I'm supposed to
believe this nonsense? You can't bring back the dead! This is nonsense! Let me out of here!"
I don't bother responding with words. There's no argument, no rationale, that could persuade a person of the impossible. Instead, I pull the proverbial trigger on a pre-planned bit of this conversation: I pull out a stethoscope from my pocket. This, at least, was an easy enough line of conversation to prepare for. I place the earbuds in his ears and place the chest piece over my own heart, letting him listen to my heartbeat and demonstrating it's real. I tap the chest piece again with my finger and he winces. I then place it over his heart... and he hears nothing. He breathes in, and as he does he hears the rattling.
"Okay. This... you're not kidding. I ... Oh god. Oh my god. I never even... I..."
I need to interrupt this meltdown before it goes past "despair event horizon".
"Hope. Comes in lots of forms. I need your help, Sam. I need it desperately. And in exchange, I'm going to help you. You are literally on borrowed time now, Sam. I may not succeed. But ... you were literally gone. It was all over. And now? Now you have
time. Time to say goodbye. Time to make one last meaningful contribution. Maybe another after that one. But first? First we focus on now. Is there anyone you should've said goodbye to? Anyone who needs a chance to see you one last time? Anything that's not been said? Anything you can't bear the thought of leaving undone, now that you don't have a limitless number of tomorrows?"
Sam's eyes harden. "Toe the line... fuck. No, I got nobody. Nobody gives two shits about me, kid. You think anybody would? I'm a middle-aged drunk hardass. They told me booze would kill me and I didn't mind. Had nothing to live for. Fucked it all up years ago. Wife gone. Kids spat in my face and told me to fuck off and die. In those words. What's the damned point?"
In a way, I'm relieved. This guy is just like Sarge; I can
work with that. Time to stop pussyfooting around and give it to him straight; he may have lost himself in the bottle but Sarge was always saying -- the uniform never quite leaves you. "Sam? You've got seven days. Time to cut the bullshit. You did fuck it all up. You screwed up and died. And now you've got one shot. Is there
anyone you could say something to, do something for, to make you have meant a damn? You can eat a bullet if you want -- I won't stop you. But you
will do this. Make being the first person to ever be brought back from actual honest-to-god death in the modern era something worth being. You don't have to walk on water, but you sure as fuck are going to get the job done."
He looks away from me, and closes his eyes. I wait. "Shit. There's no heat in here. I can feel the cold in my bones but it doesn't even matter. Fucking hell." At this point I assume he's just talking to himself, avoiding the topic. I mean, granted there's a week left in September, but the low was 55*F. Hardly 'freezing'. I let him ramble, drinking in the feed of data from the CVIs coursing through his system, preserving what little living biomatter is present, cannibalizing the necrotic compounds, preserving links in neurons. Muscle and connective tissues will take something more than I've got now.
"Hey. Kid. You never told me your name."
I start to tell him and then pause, my mouth open. My mind races. Names. Why did it have to be names. For humanity's sake. Huh. Humanitas. No, that's too... dry. What am I going to
do with this kind of power? Even if my Tinker ability never gives me another notion, I'm essentially a Ph.D. in thirty fields at this point -- and counting. What could I do with that?
I could teach. Teacher. No-- that's already taken. I've always been fascinated by the latin vernacular... and as I think of the latin phrases for "teacher" I realize that there's a perfect term. In that moment I have a transcendental realization... in part borrowed from the philosophy departments' -- multiple -- literature I've absorbed in order to have the necessary background to understand much of the more arcane physics I was aiming for originally. A lot of that information was ethical.
This world is
bleeding. We're so focused on the here-and-now of everything going on; the Endbringers, the total breakdown of civilization in Africa, the CUI. Villains tearing at each other and the PRT and police so focused on keeping the cars moving on the roads and the lights on that a man can die in what should've been a decent house and not be noticed for weeks. In just about every city in the nation. And then there's the "Madison Problem." Entire cities walled off and left to die. What does it benefit us to survive if that's all we do -- survive? We need to
be human. Better.
"Magister. You can call me, 'Magister'. It ... means a person who is permitted to teach the humanities. To help people know how to be better."
Sam gives me a winter eye. "Alright, kid. Magister. You want me to make amends with someone? You want me to help you make people better, not give up? Then there's only one person who matters left. Kids don't need me, can't fix that. But... there's someone who tried to help me well past I deserved any help, who never gave up on me even when I did. Untie me, kid. I need to go tell Danny Hebert that he's not alone, and that I'm sorry."
