Chapter 4 – Something Few Ever Get
"What is it? What's going to happen?" Sonic demanded, grasping the unconscious fox's shoulders with both hands. "Come on, talk to me!" he shouted, shaking him.
"Sonic, that won't do any good!" Amy admonished, pushing him out of her way as she darted from machine to machine, frantically working the IV controls in an attempt to keep her patient alive. "He's passed out, he can't hear you."
"How do we help him, then?" Sonic retorted, uncharacteristic anger in his voice.
"Lift up his legs," she answered, but did not elaborate. When no one moved, she turned toward them. "Well, what are you waiting for?" She had taken on a familiar air of command, the one that added 'if you value your health' to the end of every sentence. They knew better than to question her reasons; Tails' medical equipment and her own experience had never yet failed them. While they did as she instructed, Amy continued to adjust the medicines flowing into the young fox's body. Despite her best efforts, his blood pressure continued to drop.
Before long, the EKG alerted Amy to another danger: the steady beeping wavered, slipping briefly out of its two-part tempo and settling into a different one. The heart's normal rhythm was becoming unstable.
"Out of the way!" Amy called, rushing around the foot of the bed and unhooking a latch on the front of the heart monitor. A small drawer sprang open, revealing a pair of gel-coated plastic pads – defibrillator electrodes, capable of delivering electric shocks with enough speed and precision to save lives. Amy grabbed both paddles with a rough yank, unwinding several feet of wire from the machine, and turned to face her patient again.
Bee-beep, bee-beep, bee-beep, bee-beep-beep-beebeebeebeebeebeebee...
Every other heartbeat in the room quickened at the noise – fast, panicked, and desperate, as if the machine itself were crying for help. A cold lump of dread fell into the pit of Amy's stomach as, for the first time outside the Typhoon's training simulations, she recognized the sound of fibrillation – a heart muscle shivering completely out of control.
"Move!" she ordered with renewed urgency, sidestepping around Cosmo and slapping the adhesive pads into place on opposite sides of the patient's torso. While the gel soaked into his fur to complete the circuit, Amy turned back to the machine and flipped a pair of switches next to the drawer she had just opened. "Clear the patient," she instructed, while the same words appeared over the EKG's graph.
In a single movement, all seven crewmembers stepped away from the bed and stood in a loose ring, watching anxiously. The EKG, now in control of the defibrillator, emitted a sharp warning tone; the unconscious fox twitched noticeably as the paddles sent a burst of current through his chest. For a fraction of a second, his heart rate dropped to nothing.
Beep, bee-eep, bee-beep – a slow, faltering rhythm. A brief moment of cardiac arrest had ended the uncoordinated muscle spasm, just as the defibrillator was designed to do, but the pulse was still dangerously irregular. Sonic started toward the bed again, but Tails threw out an arm to stop him. The EKG sounded another alarm; the patient's upper body tensed for several seconds as the next series of charges passed through.
The machine reset his heart four times, each with a new pattern of shocks tailored to its steadily worsening condition. Four times it slipped back into a faulty rhythm, stubbornly refusing to fight its own destruction. A fifth discharge, a fifth drop into stunned immobility... and nothing else.
The EKG removed the directions to "Clear the Patient" from its screen and replaced them with a single word: "Asystole." For the first time in the entire procedure, the machine fell utterly silent.
At once, Amy rushed to the bed, knocked both electrodes aside carelessly, and began the two-handed compressions which they all recognized as CPR – a last-resort method for moving blood to a patient's brain. Despite her persistence, they could sense she was driven by desperation rather than reason. She gave no instructions, almost as if she had completely forgotten the rest of the crew. Even the CPR itself seemed to be a forced, automatic effort; Amy always counted compressions out loud in practice, and now she was silent.
Wordlessly, Tails stepped in front of Knuckles and Chris, reached for the IV controls, and turned the center dial to its leftmost setting: a simple empty circle. Every one of the ten-or-so pumps and siphons uniformly came to a stop; their services were no longer necessary. The barely audible whir of the machines gave way to a new, louder silence that seemed to pierce Amy's single-minded concentration. She turned away from her patient in a blur of magenta and rounded on Tails, who recoiled half a step in surprise. "What was that!?" she demanded furiously, jabbing a finger at the control panel. "Turn it back on, now!"
Tails swallowed, trying to recover his voice.
"I mean it!" Amy barked, her quills bristling up and escaping from their normally well-kept hairstyle. Glaring at Tails with teeth bared, less than a foot away from his face (including four inches of height), the hedgehog was genuinely intimidating. To the fox's silent relief, Sonic chose that moment to put a steadying hand on her upper arm. Almost the instant she saw who it was, Amy's aggressive posture relaxed a little, and Tails' fear evaporated as quickly as it had come.
Still not saying a word, he pointed across the hospital bed at one of the many screens displaying the patient's vital signs. Amy followed his arm to a series of five horizontal lines, each apparently taking the same measurements at a different point. A bundle of wires sprouted from beside the screen, followed a bedpost downward, and branched out into a web of elastic bands and straps that fit snugly over the patient's head. It looked as if the machine had been put on standby, but vertical bars still swept across the display every second or so, updating the graph with the newest data. The monitor was working perfectly; the organ being monitored was not.
Amy stared at the screen for several seconds, one hand still gripping the bed's railing tightly. "When?" she finally asked, barely above a whisper; only the complete silence in the room let them hear her at all.
"It went flat as soon as he stopped talking," Sonic replied. "I thought you noticed."
Amy blinked once, and then her entire presence seemed to deflate, as if the realization had punctured her with an invisible needle. She hung her head; her shoulders slumped; her quills slowly fell back down, making her look half the size she had seemed before. Sonic changed his restraining hold into a reassuring arm-across-the shoulders, doing his best to say 'You did everything you could' without words. She lifted her head to face him and tried to force a smile – failed, but lifted her head all the same. She had never lost a patient before.
At the time, nobody except Tails and Amy understood exactly what had happened. The rest didn't know that the machine with five flat lines was called an EEG, or that it stood for "electroencephalography," a technique for measuring activity inside the brain. They were unaware that the bottom line on this particular EEG represented the brain stem, where controls for the most basic of bodily functions were housed. They had no idea that the heart, alone among organs, was not entirely dependent on the brain, but could actually function for a short time on nothing but its own circuitry. They had never considered the possibility of a dead person's heart continuing to beat.
They knew only that Tails had carefully researched the work his machines would need to perform, and that Amy had twice the medical skill anyone would expect from an amateur. The rest of the crew might not know, but they trusted Amy and Tails to know.
By unspoken agreement, all seven of them observed a brief moment of silence.
The ceremony began about half an hour later. It was nothing elaborate, just a small tribute to the mysterious young fox and his sacrifice. Sonic and Knuckles carefully returned his body to his ship – both products of the same event, whether exotic coincident or monumental decision. He looked just as he had when they first found him: not quite asleep, not really dead, just still. His hands, which were clasped on his lap, enclosed a small hard drive containing dozens of copies of the same message, written in every language the ship and her crew knew.
You have found the tomb of Miles Prower, captain of the vessel called "Blue Typhoon" and our great friend and colleague. By unknown means, he escaped from his role in future events, found his way to the Typhoon before his own departure, and warned us of a coming catastrophe. This was his final act. We intend to ensure that his sacrifice does not go to waste. If we succeed, many lives may be spared. If we fail, this may be the last record of our existence and our purpose. If you know nothing of our fate, know that we will never abandon our mission.
The words ran once again through Tails' mind as he stepped forward to stand in front of the tiny craft. He punched in his access code mechanically, sealing the inner compartment and blacking out the LCD layer. He turned and scanned the faces of his fellow crewmembers. Their emotions ranged from anxiety to uncertain half-grief and, in Amy's case, stoic unreadability. He faced the craft again and pushed the red locking handle downward; it sprang back to its original position, specifically engineered to make closing much easier than opening. The outer doors swung shut and pressurized with a hiss. The pod, previously moved to the station that normally held its counterpart, sank down through a hatch in the floor and vanished from sight. A moment later, the launching rig sent a tremor up through the deck, and the crew saw it streak off into the distance through the landing bay's long, narrow slot windows.
Tails turned once again toward his crew and hesitated. Say something! He cleared his throat. "Well, you all know why we're here." Not like that, moron! He had never enjoyed speeches. "We're here to honor Miles Prower, who gave his own life in order to save those of his friends." They all know that! Quit making small talk! "Now it's our turn. He's given us something few ever get: a real chance to avert disaster." There, was that so difficult? He kept going, and the words seemed to arrange themselves more willingly now. "He died so that we might survive, and that makes it doubly important to make the most of the advantage he gave us. He wouldn't want us to spend time mourning his death. I know this, because I agree with him. We should take what he told us and change the future, change his death. I don't know when or how we'll get a chance to do that, but there is a chance. We would be fools to ignore it." Aaaand... curtain.
A moment passed in silence. This was broken by Sonic with a call of, "Here, here!" igniting a babble of similar replies from everyone. "So, captain, what's the plan?"
Tails frowned, weighing his answer carefully. The situation had too many variables, and they knew too little about any of them, to even consider a specific plan of action. "I'm still working on it," he answered finally. "Chris, you have the helm. Everyone else, go about your business for now, but I want all of you on the bridge in half an hour to discuss our next move."