"I- I just need a moment alone with her."
"Of course. Let us know when you're ready."
The assorted doctors and nurses filed out of the room, leaving just her and the girl. She settled into the chair by the bed awkwardly, setting her broken right arm on the armrest before reaching out with her left to take the girl's small, cold hand in her own. The room was still, but not silent. The ventilator whooshed, the heart monitor beeped, and her daughter died, bit by bit. Panacea had confirmed the worst over a month ago: irreversible loss of brain stem function. Brain death was one of the few things even the miracle worker couldn't fix.
She brushed a stray strand of hair off the girl's face, tucking it behind her ear. Dark curls, so much like her own. On TV shows they always said that coma patients looked 'so peaceful'. But she didn't look peaceful lying like this; no, she looked empty. She lay there with unnatural stillness - she'd never been this still in life, not even while sleeping. Medical equipment surrounded her. Screens flashed with acronyms and numbers and wave functions, while tubes ran down her throat. All to keep this shell alive, while the girl was already gone.
"I'm so sorry baby," she whispered.
She reached into her purse to retrieve the device. She didn't have long. She was a bereaved mother saying goodbye to her child, but the doctors would be back before long to carry out her decision. Struggling with one functional hand, she placed the device across the girls forehead and then tried to lift her head to loop it behind. She almost screamed in frustration when the device slipped and fell onto the bed. She tried again and managed to get it in place. It was a silver circlet about half an inch wide, inset with LEDs. It encircled the girl's brow, pressing tight at the temples.
The scan was an unpredictable, destructive process - even as it attempted to digitized the neural web, the brain would die in its wake. The PRT wouldn't have allowed it. So she hadn't told them. If this succeeded, it would be new territory philosophically, psychologically, morally. It would have taken months of time and money she didn't have to fight the PRT and the FDA in court to be allowed to attempt it. Months in which the her daughter's already damaged brain would deteriorate further and further, until there was nothing left to recover.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered again, as she leaned down to kiss the top of her head. Straightening up, she grabbed the girl's hand in her own again, and then activated the device. Green lights flickered, and a shiver seemed to run through the prone body. She squeezed the hand tighter as it began to twitch and spasm as neurons fired in cellular panic. This was the last gasp of a dying brain. Tears tracked down her face, blurring her vision. She tried to stay silent, but a soft moan escaped her lips. It was over in less than a minute.
With a trembling hand, she lifted the circlet off and stowed it back in her purse. She shut her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to ground herself and failing utterly. Then she walked over to the door and pushed it open and nodded mutely to the doctors outside. As they filed back in, she took a seat by the bed again. Following the doctors and nurses was a girl in a hooded white robe that had a red greek cross emblazoned on the front and back.
"What's she doing here?"
Panacea flinched slightly. The sentence had come out harsher than Annette had intended. She knew the girl couldn't help, and didn't blame her. But if Panacea touched the body now, what she had just done might be discovered.
"Her body will start to shut down as soon as the life support is ended. I can ease the transition, so she can pass peacefully." She raised her head, meeting Annette's gaze. "Do I have your permission to use my power?"
Annette hesitated, turning numbly to look at the body in the bed. It looked so small, so fragile. She deserved peace, whatever little Annette could give. She nodded to Panacea, and then turned to the doctors. "I'm ready."
They began removing tubes, unhooking monitors, and turning off the machines one by one until all that was left was the heart monitor and a morphine drip. Panacea stepped forward and lay a hand on the girl's arm. Almost immediately, she stiffened and turned to looks at Annette, who looked back at her with desperate, pleading intensity. Don't say anything, please, please don't say anything.
To the others in the room it looked like she was begging for a last minute miracle, pleading for the impossible. They had seen that look a thousand times before. Only Panacea knew that something was amiss, and the she held the power here. Abruptly, she lifted her hand and backed away from the bed.
"I've done what I can," she said, keeping her voice level. "It shouldn't be too long now. I'm sorry for your loss." With that, she turned to leave.
"Thank you. Really."
The girl paused at the threshold of the door, a brief flash of curiosity playing across her face, before she nodded to Annette and left. One by one the doctors and nurses left as well, until she was alone. Fifteen minutes later the heart monitor fell silent, and Taylor died.
Annette stood up and collected her purse. She signed the requisite documents, then left the hospital. She stopped at a firearms store to pick up the Glock 19 she had purchased seven days ago, then headed back to her empty house.
A layer of dust covered everything in the house. The only places it had been disturbed was the path from the front door to the living room couch, and from the couch to the basement. The fridge was empty; she hadn't bothered to cook in weeks. Instead, the floor was littered with take-out containers. Some of them were starting to smell.
Annette waded through the debris, sending empty beer cans rattling across the floor. Descending into the basement, she hit a switch on the wall and fluorescent lights flickered to life. Like the hospital room, the air here was still, but not silent. It was hot, even with all the liquid cooling system she had rigged to run through the stacks. After the hours she had spent working down here, the noises didn't bother her anymore. The humming of the servers and gurgling of coolant flowing through the tubes had become almost comforting in a way, keeping her focused on her work.
There wasn't much floor space. A small table with a dual monitor setup on it was pushed against the far wall. Every other inch of space held stacks of high performance servers, routers, and other equipment, with multicoloured cat6a cables winding between them like the nerves of silicon creature. Some of the hardware looked commercially bought, but a lot of the devices had a more arcane quality to them. They looked home-brewed; strange components had been connected in inscrutable ways and shoved hastily into cardboard boxes before being hooked up to the greater web.
She made her way to the table, placing her purse on it before settling into the flimsy office chair. Resting her cast on the table, she used her left hand to type in her username and password. Even with just one working hand she could type with astonishing dexterity. With the same hand she then retrieved the circlet from her purse, and placed it into the cradle like interface she had built for it. Turning back to the keyboard, she opened the link.
wintermute$ sudo recover /media/circlet/taylor taylor connectome_sleeve_alpha: /
password: *********
extracting data…
successful
rewiring connectome map…
successful
writing to disk…
successful
conectome_sleeve_alpha:
id: taylor
status: inactive
size: 8.2 PB
synapses: 1242 T
neural cluster corruption analysis:
long-term memory: low
short-term memory: severe
motor function (redundant): severe
higher cognitive function : unknown (analysis failed)
wake connectome_sleeve_alpha "taylor" from stasis? [Y/n]
Annette's hand was steady as she hit the last key required to complete the process. She felt the systems react immediately. The hum of cooling fans kicked up into a high pitched whine. Around the room, embedded heatsinks reached threshold temperatures and sent cries for help to the monitoring system. The compressor beside her workstation began to pump coolant faster in response, but she could feel the temperature ticking upwards anyway. The lights began to flicker, like a scene from a bad horror movie. Beads of sweat appeared on her forehead, but she didn't brush them away. Her eyes remained fixed on a line of text on the screen in front of her.
connectome_sleeve_alpha status: active
A soft voice came from the speakers, barely discernible over the cacophony of the machines. A voice she had spent hours synthesizing, painstakingly piecing together snippets from old home videos, voicemails, and messy, unreliable memory.
"H-hello?"
The breath caught in her throat. She couldn't speak, so she typed.
"Taylor, baby, it's me. It's mom."
"Mom? Where… where am I?"
"How do you feel, Taylor? Can you tell me what you remember?" She had to know. She had to know if this was still her daughter.
"I- I can't… we were… I don't know! Where am I, I can't feel anything!" There was a rising note of panic in her voice. "Mom, what's going on? Where's Dad? I can't see! What happened to me!?"
"There was an accident, baby. You were hurt, badly. But it's going to be okay, I promise. I'm going to make it better." She was crying now. The tears streamed down her face and splashed onto the keys.
"How- I can't hear you, how are you talking to me? What's wrong with -"
The basement lights flickered again, then died. Red warning LEDS flared to life across the room. The main breaker had tripped; the system was running on emergency power now.
"Baby, I'm so sorry but you need to go to sleep now."
"What was that? What's going on?"
"I'll explain everything soon, I promise. I'm going to make it all better. I love you, more than anything in the world."
With a quick command, Annette sent the system back into stasis. Then she dashed up the stairs, ignoring the burning pain where her right arm slammed into the bannister. Skidding into the kitchen, she wrenched open the electrical panel and reset the circuit breakers before heading back to the basement. One by one the warning lights died. When she was finally certain that the systems were stable again, she collapsed to the floor.
Annette allowed herself fifteen minutes to process things. She spent them curled up on the floor, sobbing and laughing. Then she got up and got to work. There was so much to be done. She needed a better power source, drawing from the mains wasn't viable. The connectome system had to be improved - already ideas were flooding in that would make it orders of magnitude faster and more energy efficient. She had to write interface modules so that Taylor would be able to see through cameras, hear through microphones, and access the internet. And once she had done that, she had to get started on the mobile biotic system. Her little owl would walk again, she vowed it.
She spent the rest of the evening engrossed in the work. She was so startled when the doorbell rang that she dropped the soldering iron she was holding, sending hot drops of tin-lead alloy flying. They burnt holes in her sweater. Swearing under her breath, Annette made her way up the stairs to get the door. She wasn't expecting anyone; if it was some door to door salesman or god-botherer, she'd tell them to fuck right off.
She opened the door a crack, and raised an eyebrow in surprise. There was a girl standing on her doorstep. She looked a little older than Taylor had, but was shorter, with wavy brown hair and freckles.
"Mrs. Hebert?"
"Yes? Who are you?
"It's me, uh, Panacea."
Annette looked her up and down again, and sure enough it was her. The teen hero had never kept her identity a secret, but it was still easy to miss her when she wasn't wearing her costume.
"Why are you here?" she asked, with increasing trepidation.
"I have a few questions. I was there when your daughter was first brought in. And when I used my power on her again today, I noticed a… discrepancy."
"I don't know what you're talking about. I'd like you to leave, please. Now."
The girl hesitated for a moment, then met her eyes with a hard gaze of her own.
"Of course. My apologies. I'll be reporting what I sensed to the PRT, then, and they will conduct an investigation if necessary. I won't bother you again."
She turned to leave. She had taken two steps before she heard Annette call out behind her.
"Wait," she said with a sigh. "You'd better come inside."