Agrippa
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Wake-up Call – Chapter 96
🕑 Added 2023-09-13 05:32:41 +0000 UTC“I should melt your insides,” Amy says, arms crossed, her bulky robes doing a perfect job of not conveying her body language, her body shape, or anything at all other than poor fashion sense.
“Not on the first date,” I reflexively answer because, yes, I’m this much of a moron.
… Look, if there’s anything praiseworthy at all about New Wave’s no mask policy, it is that it makes it very straightforward to know when somebody is glaring hatefully at you rather than, I don’t know, contorting their eyes unnaturally to portray a smile hidden by a bandana.
Just a random example.
“I’m here to do something important, you bitch, so stand aside before I do something to you that I won’t regret,” she insists.
And I nervously lick my lips without an ounce of pretense and…
Amelia Dallon’s stress levels, guilt complex—
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
It just feels awful to dig even further than I already did, you know?
So I look down at the toe caps of my (very stylish, thank you very much) ankle-height boots, remembering my own tip about focusing on the present to boost one’s charisma that I hadn’t thought about in ages, seeing as I’m constantly pulling at things with a telephone and anonymity getting in the way of actual danger.
Of resentment.
Of… accountability, I guess.
… Damn, I wish I was wearing my mask.
“I know you don’t do bribes,” I start, still not meeting her eyes. Still looking at immaculate, gleaming tiles on a hospital corridor. “I would offer you anything you wanted if you did, but that’s the problem with heroes, isn’t it? It’s about doing the right thing, not about—”
“I can give you aphasia. It doesn’t even have to be permanent. Just long enough for me to get to work.”
I… swallow. Take a deep breath. Feel the soothing waves of golden light of my tenuous relaxation technique shatter.
And look up into the eyes of somebody who can kill me with a touch and who has been given ample reason to do so.
“Amy… Please,” I say, the begging not any less desperate than if I threw myself on my knees and clung to her robes.
It takes her a moment to look away in discomfort.
It’s all that I need to know that I have won.
***
Dragon
Hannah and I stand side by side.
Lisa isn’t here, out of the room to, allegedly, avoid aggravating Panacea.
More than she already has, going by the tense shoulders and rigid posture of the young woman on the other side of the bed.
Panacea.
Touching Colin.
At last.
And… it’s not like she’s our last hope, the only recourse we have before finally giving up. Not with my collaboration with Cranial, Dottore’s search for other healers, the possibility of inducing just enough self-awareness for Othala’s power to work…
But she’s our best hope.
And so…
So I feel the constant thrum of the nerves of my biological body. The underlying tension in everything that I have experienced since finally allowing myself to take this form, this greatest, most personal triumph marred by the circumstances in which it came to be.
I…
I need to check on the Dragonslayers. On Mags. I need to make sure that my country doesn’t decide to make an example out of them because of a misguided sense of revenge on my behalf. I need to prepare a speech to make them understand.
That the actions were cruel, the consequences terrible. That the world would already be a much better place if they had freed me as soon as they found Dad’s last message.
But that they didn’t know.
That they couldn’t know.
That, in the imperfect way most of us do… they were trying to do the right thing.
And failing.
Hannah’s fingers tighten around mine, and I force my mind back to the present even as a hundred other instances of Dragon keep dwelling on the past, the future, and how to steer the present to the better one that they can.
All of them keeping themselves busy with a thousand and one tasks that could wait a few minutes, that could easily be neglected. That should be neglected because I still need rest and time to process things.
Things such as Colin still lying dormant while Panacea keeps frowning and Hannah’s breath grows irregular.
So I…
I do what I couldn’t have done not that long ago and return the squeeze. The feeling of warm, yielding skin. Here and now. In the present that I need to steer.
And I pull my girlfriend into a hug.
“It’s going to be all right,” I whisper into hair that caresses my cheek and lips in ways that I could calculate, but not trivially. That blast my sensory cortex with the nearness of a person that I…
Love.
And that much isn’t new. Not really.
But the way my heart races, how my breathing shortens, how I find myself suddenly lost for words…
This is new.
And not unwelcome.
At all.
“Dragon…” she whispers, pulling away from me so she can look into my eyes, her hand on my cheek, calloused fingers delightfully harsh on the sensitive skin by the side of my left eye, her little finger reaching my earlobe and making me hold back a surprised gasp that would be terribly inappropriate.
“Hannah, I…”
“I can’t do it,” Panacea says.
And my breath stops. My chest clenches. My hand trembles.
I see Hannah. In front of me. As devastated, as lost as I am.
Her eyes… Saccadic response. Darting away and back to my own, pupils widening in sheer overstimulation of—
I hug her.
Her body. Against mine.
We match In height. By design.
I now wish I was taller. That I could engulf her body. That I could hold her and protect her from the world.
She clings to me, her hands clawing at the back of my blouse, arms straining and trembling with despairing strength.
I shudder.
And for a single, brief, traitorous moment, I wish I was code in a machine, away from all the ways in which a human body reacts to overwhelming emotion. To pain, grief, and sadness.
“What… Panacea, what is the problem?” I force myself to ask, my voice breaking at the start of the line.
She… The young girl looks uncomfortable. Unused to… to this.
I…
Colin is the first. The first time she’s come to the hospital to heal somebody with a brain injury. She… She must not be used to being powerless. To tell the patients the bad news.
She… I… I should…
She’s just a kid. She doesn’t deserve to go through…
“Patient confidentiality—” Doctor Rubens starts to say from the corner of the room in which he’d silently stayed, just taking notes on the monitoring equipment.
The monitoring equipment supplemented by Cranial and myself. One that has enough detail to make tomography superfluous. That makes it so Colin’s state can be seen in real-time.
Unchanged.
“No,” Amy says with a glare toward the severe man, who looks as distant as ever as he answers it with his own nod. “I can’t heal him because… there’s something missing.”
“What do you mean?” I say, latching onto the lacking explanation as if I may be able to glean something from it, solving the puzzle that Panacea can’t.
I have spent too much time with Lisa.
Or not enough.
“He’s…” she looks down at the immobile man she’s still touching, frustrated. Maybe resentful. “It’s like something was deleted. There’s… There are traces of memories—of what I think are memories—but the… I think it’s not that he survived the lightning but that Behemoth aimed it at his brain. Deleting him.”
Hannah’s hands bunch up the fabric of my blouse.
And then she lets go.
Her eyes are wet, but also… they shine with fury. With… With purpose.
And then she remembers that Behemoth is already defeated, and that spark dulls.
“Can’t you just… wake him up? Even… Even if he’s not all there, he could… He could just… It would be like amnesia, wouldn’t it? People live with amnesia. Some even recover—” my girlfriend says, and…
Stages of grief.
Bargaining.
I understand them. How futile they are. How senseless.
But I can’t help but join in.
“Yes. Waking him up. And… And we could try to see if Othala’s power could act on—”
“I can’t. The parts deleted are… Look, brains are not that easy. Everything is interconnected, and I think that I just… I don’t think there’s enough of him—”
A hundred instances drop their distractions.
The Birdcage, Ellisburg, Eagleton,… Everything can wait.
Everything can wait for a few minutes as I…
Synching up is still a struggle, the bonds of my personality straining as I focus the whole of my self on a single task, parallel threads of thought becoming a single, broader, deeper stream of seamless consciousness.
Part of me is connected to his monitors, permanently aware of him because I couldn’t help but add that functionality.
And that part tells me that I have been incredibly stupid.
It takes me a moment to focus back on my body, my mind still splintering back into my distinct yet melded selves, the barrage of information available through my senses momentarily overwhelming everything else as I take in every single wrinkle of Hannah’s palm on mine, the way my left cheek is heated by the sun coming in from the window beside us, the scent of disinfectant trying to fight against Hannah’s lingering perfume on the cooler side of my face.
I have just enough presence of mind to wonder if this is how Lisa sees the world when she unleashes her power. If this is what she has to constantly keep at bay from the relentlessly bombarded walls of her consciousness.
I don’t envy her.
But…
But the sheer detail of Hannah’s presence, her warmth, touch, scent…
It…
Yes. That could make it all worth it.
So I dedicate a single smile to those green eyes of hers, swimming with something unshed that stabs me through my chest. To my…
My anchor.
And turn back to Panacea.
“I have a solution to try.”
And then my body catches up to my thoughts, and my cheeks burn.
“A solution? What could you possibly—”
“A full brain scan of Colin.”
“We already have that?” the girl says, somewhat skeptical, pointing at the monitors.
But those are Cranial and mine.
And…
And there’s someone who makes much better scanners. Someone able to drill down to levels that would revolutionize our understanding of the world if he wasn’t so busy making sure the world keeps turning.
Someone who gave me access to his workshop, and those scanners, and I…
I bury my burning face in my hands.
Hannah lays a comforting hand on my back and makes everything so much worse.
“It’s… A scan I took a few weeks ago,” I say with the meekest tone I’ve employed since taking this body.
And I remember that day. The day I walked into my ship to fly here, to Brockton, and I forgot to take clothes with me.
I remember discovering what embarrassment felt like.
Deciding that I liked it.
My past self knew nothing.
“Dragon, I don’t want to discourage you, but no matter how detailed the scan, it would still be—” the most powerful biokinetic in the world says.
So I force myself to look up from my hands and to the other side of the bed where Colin waits for me to get to the damn point.
“It’s a perfect scan down to the neurotransmitters active on every axon. Down to the very synaptic currents being triggered at that very moment,” I say.
Panacea blinks.
“Why would you have something like that?”
I, despite myself, look at Hannah.
My cheeks burn hotter.
I despise feeling embarrassed.
“Colin has some magnificent scanning equipment. It was a special occasion. And I wanted to commemorate it,” I say, as dignified as I am able to.
Then Hannah makes the connection of what, precisely, would constitute a special occasion a few weeks ago, with me having access to Colin’s scanning equipment, and looks at me with wide eyes.
I nod.
She buries her face in her hands.
And, from the other side of the wall, on the allegedly unoccupied room fitted with a few screens regretfully linked to the cameras and sensors I’ve got in here, Lisa cackles maniacally.
***
“Okay…” Panacea says, looking at me askance before turning back to the big tank of glass that a few of my drones just assembled in Colin’s room. “Are you sure this is accurate?”
I look at her.
Then, at the recreation of Colin’s brain made out of bio-reactive materials that I’ve grown over the past hour at a ten-to-one scale, with consistent equivalencies between the peptic chains used and the actual recordings of brain activity made during my postcoital chat with Colin as Hannah slept in his arms.
Equivalencies that are there to allow Panacea to read the data stored in New Zealand without actually cloning Colin’s brain.
Which… I guess was an option all along.
…
I… Okay, it was an option, but… She isn’t just going to wipe his mind and install an earlier version. She’s about to repair what’s missing, and I don’t know how much he will retain of the days leading up to Behemoth’s attack, and every single one of those memories is precious, and I…
And he’s not a computer.
So I don’t know. I don’t know what it would have meant to just replace his brain with a new one. I don’t even know how to begin to know.
And I most definitely don’t want to argue with my girlfriend about the Ship of Theseus, of all things.
So…
So I nod at Panacea, and she dips her hand into the tank that uses my tech, Cranial’s, and a dash of Blasto’s confiscated inventions to synch my three-dimensional scan of Colin’s brain with the disquieting white glob of protein floating inside of it, kept stable by a laser array constantly targeting any and all points of deviation.
It’s… the first product of me focusing all of myself on a single task. On a single, desperately needed task.
And Panacea touches it, my latest invention.
And then frowns, and touches Colin.
***
Colin Wallis
Her skin is warm over my arm.
The other woman smiles at me from a monitor.
I love them both.
I… I don’t have their names. Not now, but I…
There’s just…
There’s so much that I feel, that I…
No. No, they have names. They are Hannah and Dragon. They are important. They are…
They make me smile.
Happy.
I don’t know why.
But the dream shifts, and I do know. I no longer feel all-encompassing warmth, but also all the reasons to hesitate in diving right into it.
I know it’s complicated. That we are complicated. That Dragon is hiding something from me and that Hannah may not want the same things I do. That Lisa knows something I don’t, and I pretend I don’t even suspect it.
Because Dragon doesn’t want me to. Because she hasn’t told me. Because it’s their secret, and…
No…
Something’s wrong.
I am in my workshop.
And not.
I… Flashes.
Just glimpses of the future. Of secret smiles between the three of us, of my apartment being repainted, of rage at the Empire, but I don’t know what one thing has to do with the other, except that it means I have to cook dinner for Hannah in a hurry with ingredients I haven’t bought, and…
And everything’s a mess. A mess of bundled memories that start turning into one another, bringing up chaotic detail that makes me doubt those that were clear moments before.
I try to focus past it. To concentrate. To push forward.
And I realize my eyes are closed.
So I… I swim. Up. Toward the light pushing through heavy eyelids. Toward the red that feels so different from the colors shifting across my blurred memories, the indistinct shapes that turn into a smile or an exasperated eye roll when I try to look for them, hidden inside the blurs of colors.
There are faces I’ve never seen, voices I’ve never heard, and all of them I know. All of them I’ve met.
Some of them last long enough for me to know them.
But… names… names are hard to keep a hold on, even if some are easier than others. Even if Dragon, Hannah, Lisa, Taylor…
Mom.
The pain shoots through my whole being, as familiar as ever, as distinct as it was when I first triggered.
And it helps me focus.
Swim.
So I reach the red pouring past my eyelids.
And, with a gasp, I open them.
Then… Then a woman lies a tender hand on my cheek, and it takes me a moment to understand how I know it’s a woman when my head is still so muddled and my eyes so blurry.
It’s because I know this touch.
This caress.
I take a shuddering breath and, through an uncooperative throat, I…
“Mom?” I ask, unable to…
Unable to bear an answer other than…
“It’s me, Colin. I’m all right,” she says.
And she remembers my name.
So I grab for the blurry shape and drag her down into my arms as we both burst into tears.
And a pain that never dulled…
Fades.
***
Lisa
I am alone in a hospital room.
Which may be the best way to be in a hospital room, other than not being in one at all.
And I’m looking at a spread of screens on a table that Dragon set up for me to monitor Panacea’s healing just in case there was anything wrong that I could catch before it was too late while also remaining out of the view of the healer who hates me.
On the screens, I see a dour doctor taking notes on a clipboard, a surly teenager who doesn’t know how to react to her latest miracle, two young women in love, hugging and kissing one another in celebration.
And a man clinging to his lost mother.
And a mother to her reclaimed son.
I smile.
Warm tears fall down my cheeks.
And, finally, as exhausted as I finally allow myself to feel, I fall back on a bed that a nurse will have to take care of after my rightfully earned nap.
I could get up.
I could walk in there and insert myself in the moment.
At some point, in the next few hours, I will.
But, for now…
“Just as planned,” I tell the hospital ceiling with a drained, tired, triumphant, shit-eating grin.
Lisa Wilbourn’s obsession with meme culture—
