Emergence (Fox Meridian Book 5) (32 page)

‘Right. I’m getting tired again. I’ll get some more of that rest everyone keeps telling me I need.’

‘Good. I should think so too.’

‘Night, Kit. See you in the morning.’

‘Goodnight, Fox. Sleep well.’

And Fox closed her eyes.

Part Five: Death and Birth

4
^th
March 2061.

Fox opened her eyes. There was a moment of confusion, followed immediately by several more as she sat up in bed and looked around.

She was in her bedroom, in her home. The last thing she remembered was a medical room in Tokyo. How long had… Her implant gave her the time and date as March fourth at five pm., which meant she had been unconscious for over a week, but it also brought up another change: she had implant functionality again. She lifted her right arm to see the skin unmarked by holes. Well that was good. They had replaced her arm while she was out and… The skin felt more realistic. Maybe Terri’s people had perfected that new skin for the infiltration units.

Fox was marvelling at the improved skin and about to wonder about her ability to sit up when Kit appeared beside the bed, beaming. ‘You’re awake! How do you feel?’

‘Fine. I mean… Yeah, I feel fine. Good as new. Did they use that new artificial skin on this? I honestly can’t see or feel the join.’

‘Um…’

‘And my spine. Cybernetic replacement? Did Jackson fit me with rocket motors or something? Because I don’t think I want rocket motors. What on Earth are you wearing?’

Kit looked down at her outfit. Her knee-boots were the same, but she had decked herself out in a short white dress with capped sleeves and red trim, and there was a little hat with a red cross on it perched between her ear tufts. ‘It’s a nurse’s uniform. Sort of. I thought it would be cute, considering you’re on medical leave.’

‘Medical leave? I feel great, Kit. There’s nothing wrong with me. I guess a little time off might be good, but–’ She started to swing her legs out of bed and Kit reached out, putting a hand on her shoulder to stop her.

‘That’s not… entirely true,’ Kit said.

It took a fraction of a second longer for Fox to notice what was wrong about the situation, even if part of her brain had recognised it as soon as she felt Kit’s hand on her shoulder. That, more than anything, made Fox think that Kit might be right.

‘You’re solid,’ Fox said.

‘Um… Sort of?’

Fox looked around, frowning at the room. ‘Neither of us are solid. This is a viron.’

‘Yes. Um, I’ve called Terri. She’ll be here any minute.’

‘Kit, what’s going on? Why am I in a virtual version of my room?’

‘It’s the whole apartment. Everything’s here.’

‘So not the point.’

‘There were some… complications with your recovery.’

Fox’s eyes narrowed, but Terri rushed in through the bedroom door before Fox could ask the obvious question. ‘Yeah,’ Terri said. ‘There were some complications and we had to… Well, we made a snap decision. No, not really a
snap
decision. I mean Poppa and I argued about it for a couple of days.’

Fox lay down, pulling the sheets up over her chest. ‘What happened?’ she asked deliberately.

‘Okay… You remember talking to Kit early on the twenty-fourth?’ Fox nodded her agreement. ‘Good. You slipped into a coma about two hours later. They did a CT scan and found a cerebral haemorrhage, and you were straight into more surgery. They used microprobes, stopped the bleeding and drained the clot, but there was some damage.’

‘Brain damage?’

‘Brain
stem
damage. There were problems with your autonomic nervous system so they patched in nanofibres to keep you breathing and your heart beating. There was some fine motor-function impairment, suspicions of damage to the speech centres. The real problem was that you weren’t healing.’

‘The drug,’ Fox said. ‘Grant was using some experimental drug on me. Hannah said it could have side effects.’

‘Yeah, she told us about it. She didn’t have a name for it, but she said it was experimental and they’d got it from the yakuza contacts Grant had cultivated. Apparently Grant took the last of it when he skipped town, but from the description Hannah gave us, it sounds a lot like a nanodrug BioTek are working on. Accelerated healing, but it can have disastrous effects on your immune system if it’s used too much.’

‘They injected me with it just about every day. This is one of our drugs?’

Terri held up a finger as though to ward off that line of enquiry, and then obviously decided that keeping things back was pointless. ‘Not a production drug. It’s not ready for release yet and there shouldn’t be any of it on Earth. They haven’t even gone beyond cloned tissue tests. Field trials are months or years away.’

‘So a competitor has hit upon the same thing, or we’ve got a leak.’

‘And Poppa asked Helen to assign Yuriko Fukui to investigate the source. Uh, as per your instructions, Helen is running the investigations division with Kit as her assistant slash co-board member.’

‘My home copy is handling it,’ Kit said, ‘while I play nurse and… um, well, we’ll get to that.’

Fox closed her eyes, praying for strength. ‘Let’s do this in an orderly sequence. So far I’m in a coma with brain damage, and I can’t even keep my own heart beating.’

‘Yeah,’ Terri said. ‘So with you stabilised, Poppa flew you back to New York. They’d had a couple of days to go over everything they could find about your condition, and the prognosis wasn’t good. Your condition was deteriorating because your body just wasn’t doing the normal stuff it does to keep functioning. The extent of the brain damage was uncertain, but they thought it was worsening. So… Poppa brought you here. To Jenner.’

‘Jenner Research Station? On the Moon?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Now I know you’re joking because it would take a team of wild horses to drag Jackson Martins onto a spaceship.’

‘He spent almost the entire trip vomiting,’ Kit said. ‘I was worried about him.’

‘They did it the long way too,’ Terri said. ‘They dropped your temperature down to slow the deterioration, but they took the minimal acceleration route so you’d take less stress. Fifty-six hours, mostly in zero-G.’

‘Jackson said he would do
anything
to get you back. Apparently that included suffering through
really
bad space sickness.’

‘And having a flaming row with his favourite daughter.’

Jenner Research Station, 1
^st
March.

‘She’s being transferred into the medical facility now,’ Jackson said. ‘You can see her, obviously, but there’s not much to see. It will upset you.’

‘I’m upset already,’ Terri replied. They were meeting in her office and Terri was upset for multiple reasons, including the fact that space travel put
huge
stress on her father, but here he was. ‘What’s her precise condition?’

‘Poor does not quite cut it. Critical may be an understatement.’

‘So you put her on a rocket to the Moon?!’

‘I put her on a rocket to Jenner. This place has the finest cybernetics technicians
anywhere
.’

‘Yes, but–’

‘But, the damage to her brain may be too much for cybernetics to meet her needs. I want to use the ultra-high-definition MRI system here to determine the exact extent of the damage and then make a decision on how to proceed.’

Terri frowned. ‘The MRI in tower three is almost as good as the one here. We squeezed a little more definition out of this one, but not much.’

‘There’s something else here which may be required.’

‘What?’

‘Project Akh.’

Terri was on her feet before she knew she was doing it. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘It may be the only way to save her. The medical version of Yliaster might be able to fix her, but it’s not ready, and it
won’t
be ready in the time frames I believe we’re talking about.’

‘Neither is Akh. It’s–’

‘Akh will work on a human. You
know
it will work on a human.’

‘I don’t, and neither do you. It’s never been tested. It
can’t
be tested. We aren’t even close to–’

‘We knew there would be legal and ethical considerations of human testing going in. That’s why we got the paperwork out of the way early, and made all the legal and political arrangements ahead of time. We
can
perform a human test if the subject is terminal.’

‘Yes, but… This is Fox, Poppa. This isn’t some unfortunate individual with a terminal disease. She’s…’

‘She’s the woman who gave you back to me. Twice. I’m damned if I’m not going to try everything in my power to return the favour.’

4
^th
March.

‘Project Akh?’ Fox asked.

‘Yeah,’ Terri said, nodding. ‘You remember I explained it to you in the lab when you were asking about–’

‘I remember the virtual rat.’

‘Agnus. Yes.’

‘I remember she was the only one of your test subjects that could operate outside a virtual maze.’

‘It’s a full viron, not a maze.’

‘And that is totally ignoring the fact that every rat you digitised went totally fruit loop as soon as you took it out of the viron.’

‘Except for Agnus.’

Fox took a deep breath. ‘The point here, Terri, is that I’m assuming that Jackson persuaded you that mashing my brain up with nanomachines was the only way I could “survive,” and I’m not a… a…’

‘Ghost,’ Terri said. ‘We call them ghosts, uh, because the concept of the Akh in Egyptian mythology is kind of like a ghost. It’s a combination of the Ba and Ka elements which would walk the Earth–’

‘I’m a ghost, and I’m stuck in this viron, on the Moon, because if I go outside it, I’ll probably go mad.’

‘We have strong evidence that the problem with the rats is that they aren’t as… self-aware as a human. You’ll
know
what the situation is and be able to adapt more easily. Agnus did it, Fox. Are you saying you aren’t as bright as a rat?’

‘
Don’t
ask my old drill instructors that question. I was going to die?’

Terri frowned. ‘Everyone dies. Well, everyone used to. If we could have waited for Yliaster to be ready for regeneration treatments… Maybe we could have kept you intact enough if we’d got more of that drug, but the long-term effects of that aren’t known. You were deteriorating. We could have frozen you fully, but we’re not sure of the full effects of long-term cryostasis.’

‘There were a lot of maybes, but the chances were I was going to be dead, or a mess?’

‘That about covers it. I, um, still think we might be able to put your body back together at some point and fabricate a new brain using your ba as a pattern. It could be years away. In the meantime, we’re fabricating a cyberframe for you.’

‘Fabricating one?’

‘Well, we want it to look like you. We’re constructing one of the infiltration models to mirror your body.’

‘And it’ll be ready when?’

‘A couple of days. The basic frame should be ready tomorrow, but then we need to test it, put the skin on…’

‘Get the basic diagnostics done. I’ll test it tomorrow.’

‘Fox–’

‘If I’m not going to be able to cope with this, it’s better we find out before you put an expensive skin on the doll. I’ll test it out tomorrow. And if I can’t cope outside this viron, you’re going to turn me off.’

‘But–’

‘No. I won’t live like this. If I can’t walk around in the real world, it’s better that you shut this off and pretend I just died. That way, you won’t have used up your precious single human test. I’d like to be alone for a while.’

Wringing her hands together, Terri turned and walked to the door. Kit vanished as though she had never been there, looking a little shocked. Terri had looked mortified, but right now, Fox did not care.

~~~

Virtual wine tasted the same, as far as Fox could remember, as real wine, and the program behind it was designed to mimic some of the effects of real alcohol. Six glasses of it had fogged Fox’s mind nicely, numbing the feelings of… Betrayal. She felt betrayed, but also guilty. She was feeling guilty about feeling betrayed.

‘You’ve upset my daughter.’

Fox turned her head and attempted to focus on Jackson as he walked into the lounge. ‘You hexpec’ed me to like thish?’

Jackson raised an eyebrow. ‘Perhaps a little too drunk.’

‘Hey, I–’ Fox cut off with a wince as her intoxication level dropped sharply. ‘That was a mean trick. I just got drunk enough to be over being dead.’

‘You aren’t dead. If you stay like this, you may never die. You could’ve put some clothes on too.’

‘Why? I’m not real. And I wanted to be alone. I quite
like
walking around my house naked when I’m alone. It’s… liberating.’

Jackson walked over and sat on the sofa a respectful distance away. ‘If you aren’t real, neither is this. Ergo, not your home. Therefore, wear clothes.’

‘You are not my dad, Jackson. Oh… How the Hell am I going to tell them about this? And Jason…’

‘Jason stopped by to visit you while we were waiting to fly out of New York.’

‘He did? You
can’t
have said what you planned to do.’

‘At that point, I wasn’t really clear on what I
would
do…’

New York Metro, 26
^th
February.

Jason Deveraux stood at the observation window outside Fox’s room, looking in with the flat expression of a man unsure of what emotion to exhibit. He was angry: he had exempted himself from having anything to do with Hannah’s extradition because he wanted to shoot her repeatedly in the face. He was frustrated: the man who had done all this to Fox had escaped and no one had been able to track him down. And he had the horrible feeling that this was the last time he would ever lay eyes on Fox…

‘I’m going to save her,’ Jackson said.

‘I believe that if anyone can, it is you, but I’ve read the reports…’

‘No. I
am
going to save her. I’m not sure exactly how, but I won’t let her die. I’m taking her to our Jenner crater facility. It has some… specialised medical equipment.’