54

Introductory Text

54th Post

Posted 15 May 2016 at 03:18:59 EDT

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> "A moment ago, one of your technicians placed a small pellet under the skin of my forearm. Within 10 minutes, the pellet's wax coating will melt and release a cardioplegic into my bloodstream, stopping my heart. You must cut it out."
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> Hearing this, I breathed a sigh of relief. There was something unsettling about her face that made me believe she would tell me something urgent and terrible. But this was typical occupant talk. Like many of them, she believed that she was still inside a feed narrative.
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> "You've been disconnected. This isn't a feed. There's no pellet in your arm. Your name is Karen Castillo. Do you remember--"
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> "Scan my right arm with the ER," she said in a bare, cracking whisper. "You'll find it."
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> "Karen, do you know why you're in this bed?"
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> "I've been disconnected."
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> This was a strangely lucid answer. It didn't make sense. If she had been force-disconnected, how did she know that--
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> "Hey, we got two more calls to get to," one of the techs reminded me.
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> "Yeah, OK, pull her," I said, stepping back.
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> A pair of techs hoisted her tiny, doll-like body from the hygiene bed onto our gurney and covered her with a sheet. "Please," she croaked. "Just scan my arm."
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> "What did she say?" asked Ricardo, the lead tech, as we rolled her out into the bed-rack apartment's narrow, almost lightless hallway.
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> "It's a feed dream," I explained. These guys were looking at me to be the expert, so I had to act like I knew exactly what was going on. It was best to go ahead and get to a medical center and address her physical needs before we started countering her delusions. Until then, all I needed to do was be reassuring. Under no circumstance could I encourage her delusions.
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> We rolled the gurney down the hallway to the elevators. Karen was making little croaking noises. Her voice was almost useless after 24 years of disuse. Her face seemed extremely disturbed.
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> Somebody was standing at the elevators, already waiting for one. It was just Elian, one of our techs. I hadn't noticed him leave before us. "I got an elevator coming," he said with a little smile.
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> Even though the apartment building was a 300-cube, it had old-style cable elevators, and they came with the frequency of subway trains. Thanks to Elian's thoughtfulness, one was arriving just now.
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> I gave Karen a friendly smile. "Don't worry. Nobody's going to hurt you. You're completely safe."
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> She managed to gasp a couple words, which I barely heard. "Elian... He..."
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> There. She had known another of our names. How was this possible? It was hard to sort through the implications. Did she have access to our records? Maybe dispatch was wrong about how she got disconnected.
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> The elevator let out a ding and the doors opened. There was barely enough room inside for the gurney, me and the three techs. Elian stood on the other side of the gurney from me. I looked him over as the doors closed and elevator began to descend. Was she saying that this guy put a poison pellet in her? It was strange that he would be a part of her narrative. Very strange.
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> I didn't know much about the guy beyond his name, but I had worked with him a few times. He was just one of the rotating techs, young guy, military hair and goatee, skinny but pretty fit. I wondered how he would be in a fight. These younger guys had so much supplementing, it was hard to tell.
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> Elian caught me looking at him and gave me a bit of a surly look. For some reason, this irritated me. "So, friend, you trying to get out of here before the rest of us? You got a date or something?" I asked, needling him.
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> "I was just getting the elevator," he said quietly. He didn't seem to like the banter. Well, whatever.
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> I looked down at Karen and noticed something: a small red spot on the white sheet that covered her arm. Blood. It must have been from where they took her blood. Who took it? Elian? The spot was really was too low on the arm for that. Odd. I thought of taking a look at it, but one of the most important protocols when dealing with occupants was to not act like your believe their delusions, even for a moment. You must insist on the reality of reality.
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> I realized that Elian was watching me. I casually looked over to the elevator panel to see what floor we were on. 238. Man, this fucking thing was slow. What was the deal with that spot? It wouldn't be out of place for me to wonder about some patient bleeding. I lifted the sheet and took a look. There was a small puncture wound a few inches above her wrist.
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> "How'd she get that?" I asked. One of the techs just muttered about not knowing. Elian didn't even look at the spot. His face was blank, unreadable. I touched the her arm and felt a small nodule under the skin about an inch from the wound. Huh. Interesting.
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> I stood there trying to process this, caught between two realities. Was I in an elevator on a routine call with stable client and a few techs who were just ordinary acquaintances? Or was I in an elevator with murderer and a woman on the brink of death? There was really no way to split the difference on this one, no course of action that would work for both cases.
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> Fuck. What was I even asking myself? There was no way. Simply no way. Stuff like that never happens in real life, but it happens in the feeds all the time. It's a 100% typical spy narrative bullshit. How could I let myself get caught up in some feed fantasy so easily. But still-- a nodule under the skin? There was no good explanation for that.
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> Elian turned to me. We looked at each other for a long, silent moment. I couldn't read the expression on his face. It wasn't chummy goodwill, whatever it was. I felt a twinge in my stomach and my body began flooding with adrenaline. I could feel it radiating out into my limbs. Fuck.
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> My time in the Marines had taught me many things, many of them useless in the normal world, many of them useless outside of a bar or cathouse, but one of the more useful ones was that I should trust my adrenal gland. It meant that my paranoid lizard-brain understood something that my snotty intellect was too busy to notice. It happened when things were too quiet, when a certain car kept following the convoy, when somebody was acting funny.
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> There in the elevator, I almost reached for the grip of my rifle. I wasn't wearing a rifle, of course, so I just scratched my chest, trying to keep my fingers loose. Elian put his hand to his hip. Just like that I was leaping across the gurney. I grabbed his wrist with both hands, but it was an awkward angle, with me splayed over the gurney, and I had no control. A silver pistol came out of his pants, still halfway in its holster.
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> "Help! Get him!" I shouted as I slid off the other side of the gurney towards Elian's feet, holding on to that wrist for dear life. I heard shouting everywhere, but nobody helped me and nobody got him. Now I was on the floor, wrestling with Elian. There was lot of awful, terrified fumbling. Four hands were grabbing and clawing for the pistol. Somehow my head was jammed between Elian's shoulder and the wall, and I couldn't even see the gun. I could just feel the metal.
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> There was a shot, painfully loud. Elian shouted. Was I hit? Now the gun was wet. I managed to wiggle my fingers around the grip. With one huge twisting jerk, I put the muzzle again Elian's face. "No!" I pulled the trigger, a shot, and his head kicked back against the wall, the mouth popping open. Everything went still. His hands were still holding mine.
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