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The Sapphire Subversion
by Melee
(cyberpunk, slightly twisted, a little dark, about Ryo)
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"This isn't normal. What happened? Why are his eyes like that?" A perplexed voice, smooth like birch bark and pale. Medical readouts beep and hum overhead. Ryo can only lay still and listen.
A new person, moving by the bed. The shifting of rough wool fabrics against a smooth medical coat. "I don't know. They brought him in an hour ago. He doesn't seem to be seeing us." This voice is deeper, male.
"No, I don't expect he does. He has a very creepy stare, doesn't he? Who brought him in? Did he just wake up like that or what?" Latex gloves snap. The doctor moves towards him where he lies on the bed.
"Dr. Monroe, I think... the machine says... I think he's awake. Just doesn't see us. Machine can't find anything wrong with his eyes, with the tissue. Just the burns." Ryo doesn't want to listen to them. He wants his eyes to stop hurting and then he wants to go to sleep.
"Does the machine know why he's here? Why doesn't anyone know that? He's only a child. Where are his parents?"
"I..." The nurse stops, waiting and listening to things the doctor doesn't hear from the speaker implanted in his ear. The doctor isn't connected to the network. She must be very old and stubborn.
Ryo doesn't know anything about the network. Doesn't notice or care, but there's someone inside his head telling him this. Not wanting to smear the doctor's reputation but feeling it is important that Ryo know this is very irregular. Ryo tries to stop crying because every tear feels like it eats at his skin.
The voice has been there for two days and since then Ryo hasn't been able to see. There is something wrong with his eyes.
Ryo will be moving up to junior high next month. His parents have little time for school supplies or for his birthday this week. His mother is one of the leading composers in the fad of neo-jazz operettas sweeping the high culture scene. She will be back in time for the first day of school, but now she must be in New Hokkaido for the opening of the season. Ryo's father follows her loyally. He used to photograph Japan's vanishing wildlife; now he photographs his wife for magazines.
Ryo spends the day before his birthday in the shops downtown with the money card in his pocket. His parents have told him how much he could spend on a birthday present for himself. He passes through the toys shops quickly. They don't have anything he hasn't seen before. In the antique shop, he sees some old furniture his mother would like, but he isn't interested in any of the old plates or dying toys until he sees the tiger.
It's not really a tiger, more a ferocious house cat. Old, decrepit piece of hardware the size of his grandmother's Pekinese, crouched on a redwood table. Ryo knows the machine is a left over from the cyber pet fad when his parents were growing up.
This must be one of the first of the fad because it is so obviously mechanical. The broken toy dog in his attic has soft faux fur and a wet tongue when the small water tank is filled. The black and white cat in the antique shop is cold and lifeless, a jeweled statue with marble skin and obsidian stripes, crouched on claws of pale jade.
Ryo's attention is held by its eyes, which even dead, catch the light as though the sapphires were really burning coals. Ryo sees the price tag pasted on a triangular ear and knows that the sapphires and the rest must have been grown in a crystal farm because the cat is too inexpensive for the wonder it seems to be.
"Ah, he's come out," someone says from behind and above him, delighted. Ryo jerks away from the cat, feeling out of place in a store his mother and her friends would love. The man is tall and a little beaky, staring down at Ryo over his long nose.
"It... it isn't broken?" Ryo manages, watching the old man's dark eyes catch the light the way the cat's do.
The man bobs his head in grudging contemplation. "Oh, sometimes. Then and now it wakes up." His mouth pulls away from itself, struggling into what is meant to be a friendly smile. Ryo thinks the man looks like a clown. His friendly storeowner nametag reads "Chaos."
He teases Ryo, "Maybe he woke up for you, eh?" Suddenly, it seems the man who owns the store is hiding something sinister. He is challenging Ryo and the cat is watching.
The price is not much. Ryo has enough left over to buy a new game for the console he'd been given last Christmas. The cat is lighter than he imagined and moves like a metal chain, sliding over and around itself so that when Ryo lifts it, the body bends like a real cat's.
The cat doesn't wake up. When he gets home he tries to replace the power, which doesn't work. He asks the house repair drone for help, but nothing he does changes anything. Ryo's parents, calling in on the two-way vid, are bemused, but do not know how to fix it.
When Ryo wakes up the next day, the cat has moved from the closet to the table beside his bed. Ryo prods it, but it has gone back to sleep, sapphire eyes open and bright.
Inside the hospital room, there is a small metallic jingle and a strangled cry. Something inside Ryo's head translates the sound for him. The nurse has jerked, surprised and afraid as the network of St. Jude's Medical Center whispers in his ear. The charms on a necklace under his shirt collided together as he jumped, causing a sound of metal on metal so soft that no one human should be able to hear. There: Ryo's brain tells him which part of the thick hospital smell is the nurse's fear.
"They want to quarantine!" the nurse's voice explodes into the quiet. He is shocked and panicked by his disbelief. "Something – Dr. Hayako and Dr. Savoy have collapsed – there's something wrong with his eyes!"
The doctor laughs softly, a smooth, fluid sound. "I know there is something wrong with his eyes," she says, unperturbed. She is small and aerodynamic so that the air moves only a very little bit when she comes towards the bed. Ryo starts when her gloved fingers touch his face. "Don't leave," she says to the nurse. "Talk to your toy; find out what they know."
The nurse is trembling by the door. Ryo doesn't understand why he can hear that, smell it and taste it in the air that brushes his skin. Someone inside his head soothes him, telling him that soon he will be able to hear a lot more. In no time at all he will be able to see again, more than he ever imagined.
The doctor notices his reaction, knows he's awake. "Hello," she says. Rich amusement lifts up her voice as she touches his face, "We'll soon know what's happened here, won't we?"
Ryo can't remember how to speak. Someone inside his head has made him forget. He twists against her touch, but he doesn't know where he could go. There is laughter in her voice. She does not seem to care what has happened to him.
Ryo wakes up, stumbling sleepy-eyed into the bathroom. In an hour he will have to take the new bus route to arrive at his junior high. He tells himself that he is not nervous, whispering it into steamy air as he runs the shower, but he is shaking. He stops in front of the mirror to stare at his reflection, at short dark hair and molasses eyes, knowing he is nothing special.
He is still standing there, brown eyes staring into identical brown eyes, when he hears something fall to the floor in his bedroom. Snatching the loose pants of his pajamas, Ryo leaps towards the door. He sees the cat, awake and prowling over his desk, a rich man's Pinocchio. The small soccer trophy from his first soccer tournament has fallen to the floor. The cat looks up, sapphires glinting. The gesture is unsettlingly fluid for a machine covered in marble.
Then the cat jumps to the floor and curls up again like it was in the shop, going dead. Irritated, Ryo picks up his soccer trophy, standing on tip toes to put it onto a high shelf. He goes to the cat, meaning to throw it back into the closet and lock the door.
As he reaches for it, the cat animates unexpectedly. It turns and thrusts its angular head into Ryo's face. The stone nose is cold against Ryo's. Then the sapphire eyes light from within, calling to him to watch, to stare.
Ryo does stare because he can see through the sapphire into the cat, into its machinery and then beyond. Ryo sees samurai clash behind luminous blue stone, doing battle in the wilderness that Japan doesn't have anymore. He sees children play outside in the dirt while soldiers stand watch. He sees a young woman in layers of Imperial robes command an army of dead men.
Then he sees the demons and the dragons behind her, crouching in shadow and glittering like flame. He doesn't remember anything after that.
When Ryo's mother comes upstairs to tell her son it's time to go, she finds him shaking on the floor of his room. He does not respond to her touch. He must have just fallen there; nothing in his room is out of place. The cat he bought for himself is on the table by the bed.
The shower is running. She turns it off before calling unsteadily to her husband. He shouts for the house phone to dial emergency services. When they try again to wake their son, Ryo opens his eyes, and his parents pull back in horror.
Last night Ryo had his father's warm brown eyes; today, as he shudders in his mother arms, his eyes are like gemstones, blue and transparent. He cries and the silver tears leave trails of burned skin on his cheeks. Ryo's mother does what she can to blot the hot acid tears from her son's face with a washcloth.
His father has gone downstairs to answer the door. He comes back into the room with the medical employees who lift Ryo onto a stretcher with professional calm. Sobbing, Mrs. Sanada tries to tell them about the tears, offering the washcloth in a panic. One of the medics takes it to comfort her; they are already applying bandages of their own.
One man stays behind to ask them questions and to offer one of them a place in the ambulance. Ryo's father says he will drive while Ryo's mother rushes downstairs to climb after Ryo into the truck with flashing lights.
Mrs. Sanada grips her son's hand as they stand in the white hospital room. Her husband is filling out insurance forms in the hallway. She watches the two doctors that are fussing over the weak boy on the bed. Ryo has finally stilled, but Mrs. Sanada knows it is because of the sedatives the doctors gave him. One of the two, a tall woman named Wendy Savoy, stops talking to her partner and turns to speak to Mrs. Sanada.
The doctor pauses, uncertain. "Has your son been missing? Come home late last night? Maybe you didn't see him at all?"
Mrs. Sanada is confused by the question. She is also upset because the question sounds almost like an accusation of neglect. "No," she says quickly, "We ate dinner together. Why? What is wrong with my son?"
She made the dinner herself, had banished the house drones from the kitchen because she had been out of town with work, feeling guilty for her absence. It is terrifying to think that her new success, her new happiness, might have caused this. That her music might have hurt her son.
Dr. Savoy's eyes hide a sadness that has reached even beyond profession shields. "This might be... there might have been... illegal experimentation. Contraband implants. I've never seen anything like this..." The doctor shifts, distracted. She stares out the door, lost in thought.
"But?" Mrs. Sanada prompts.
The doctor starts, fumbling to find her train of thought. "There is no disease that changes a patient's eye color," she says finally. "He hasn't caught something, Mrs. Sanada. Somebody had to do this."
Mrs. Sanada sinks into the seat beside the hospital bed, still gripping Ryo's hand. The lights of the readouts play across her face as she turns to the doctor, pleading, "On purpose? But why? How? Ryo didn't know anything was wrong. He had started to get ready for school; the shower was on!"
"I don't know," the doctor admits. "That is a matter for the police."
"There isn't anything else it could be?" Mrs. Sanada presses. She knows modern technology. People don't die of strange diseases anymore.
"Maybe," the doctor hedges. "It will be a day before we know what is in his tears. We cannot do much else now. If you'll just..." Dr. Savoy trails off again, watching dust motes in the air.
"Doctor Savoy?" Ryo's mother is becoming impatient and distrustful. "Doctor, please pay attention."
The doctor shakes her head and stares at Mrs. Sanada. "What? I'm sorry... Who?"
By the bed, the other doctor looks up. "Wendy?" he asks, worried. The woman sways and falls back against the bed. "Wendy!" The other doctor steadies her.
"Wendy, what's going on?" he demands. She leans against him, watching his face wonderingly. She speaks brokenly, slurring.
"Why are there dragons in his eyes, Hayako?" she murmurs. "I saw them." Dr. Hayako hesitates, shaken. Then he is calling for orderlies to take Dr. Savoy from him and to usher Mrs. Sanada out of the room.
No one will tell her anything, only that there has been a new 'development.' She grabs Dr. Hayako as he passes by, demanding that he tell her something.
He only glances past her with the same distraction Wendy Savoy had shown, muttering, "In his eyes... Something is wrong with his eyes." Then he is rushing past her as the hospital around her son's room dissolves into chaos.
When her husband comes to her, medical forms clutched in his hands, there is nothing she can tell him. "There is something wrong with Ryo's eyes," she says because she doesn't know anything else.
The nurse and his medical machines don't understand. What is wrong with Ryo's eyes is magic. Old magic that died a long time ago, when echoes of ancient superstitions had not yet faded.
Dr. Hayako and Dr. Savoy collapsed after they examined him, obviously hallucinating though no one knows why. The machine does not know that the doctors will wake up, lucid again, by the end of the day, unharmed and unchanged except for a new tendency to flights of fancy and romantic imaginings. The machine that lives in the nurse's ear and in the displays on the ceiling only knows that what is happening to the people that look into Ryo's eyes is nothing it can control.
Epidemics must be destroyed before they start. The nurse will do as the machine tells him to, but the doctor has no implants, no connection to the network. The machine does not know who the doctor is. The hospital network has no memory, no hint to her identity except for the out-dated photo id clipped to her coat pocket. "Monroe, Kayura."
The room is supposed to be quarantined. The rooms around Ryo's have been emptied of patients and most staff. The machine does not know how Dr. Monroe got into the room or where she found a nurse so unaware. The machine can find no reason in millennia of medical research to explain what is happening in the room of the boy with the sapphire eyes.
The network has several notes about Monroe, Kayura. There have been three doctors by that name over the last century and a half at the hospitals that are connected by the network. All of them would be more than seventy-five years old. Two of them really should be dead. Monroe, Kayura does not look old enough to be a 75 year old, but with false youth purchased at one of the many Beauty Clinics in the East Asian Coalition, the stubborn doctor with the smooth skin and grey streaked hair could be over 150.
Ryo's parents have been ushered out of the hospital wing. They are not alone; staff and patients flow by them, evacuated as they were. Mrs. Sanada knows that all this has something to do with her son. She waits for hours, through panic and a dozen useless explanations that the staff can give her.
"Don't worry. Don't worry," Mr. Sanada chants, a mantra to himself and to her. He grips the insurance forms that he has not been able to finish while she holds his arm in an absent gesture of comfort. She cannot think.
Suddenly, the lights on the ceiling and the hospital computers dim to nothing. Deep in the medical complex, everything for a short instant is blacker than midnight.
When the lights come back on, two nervous people are walking towards her, a doctor and a man in a suit. They take the Sanadas into an office, shushing their concerns but not answering them.
Once the door is shut, the doctor tells them that something has gone wrong with the medical machine that coordinates patients' care. He seems edgy and embarrassed. The man in the suit is a lawyer working for St. Jude's. He tries to break in, explaining the unlikelihood, the completely unbelievable thing that has happened. The doctor is upset but has to let the lawyer speak.
Two hours ago, the machine diagnosed the beginnings of an unknown epidemic in a child brought in for emergency treatment. It seems to have panicked, if machines can panic, because it was unable to justify the boy's condition, possibly due to malfunctioning data analysis systems.
The lawyer stops, embarrassed. After a moment of struggling with honesty, he continues.
The machine decided, he explains quietly, that it had to stop this epidemic at all costs; a few minutes ago it attempted to order the... termination of the child. Security programs and personnel detected this immediately, shutting down the A.I. system. "Your son," the doctor says forcefully, "was never in any danger."
The Sanadas leave the hospital with Ryo, awake now and healthy except for the deep azure of his eyes. The burns on his cheeks have been soothed with all that St. Jude's has to offer. They are nothing now more than rosy tear tracks.
Something happened back there that should have been impossible. The medical giant that is St. Jude's cannot afford the publicity. It will, in fact, give a great deal to purchase the Sanadas' departure and their good will.
Furious and frightened, the money is accepted because they do not know what else to do. In the next few weeks, private medical experts hired with St. Jude's money take turns examining Ryo, but no one can find anything wrong. His eyes have done him no harm, the burns have vanished, and yet no one can discover how it happened or how to undo it. The police investigation is eventually closed, and plain-clothes officers stop following Ryo to school.
Throughout all of this Ryo is silent. He never speaks to tell doctors or therapists or officers of the law anything that might help them understand.
"I don't remember anything," he whispers a few days after the incident to the detective that has taken him out of algebra. "May I go back to class please?" The detective lets him go.
Ryo remembers when the nurse tried to add the poison to his IV. Lying there terrified, he doesn't know what it is, though something in him smells it and knows what the nurse is doing. Ryo knows when the nurse hits the floor because he hears the crack of his skull on the tile. The only thing Ryo doesn't know is how the nurse was stopped. He heard nothing, smelled nothing, tasted nothing. The thing inside his head is nervous.
He sees the doctor next, with her gray hair surrounding an ageless face, the kind of face modern medicine can give for a price. She is not surprised to see his eyes focus on her, is not surprised at all that Ryo can suddenly see again though she hasn't done anything that Ryo or the thing inside his head understood.
"That is enough of that," she says. She isn't talking to Ryo.
His head hurts then, but when the pain passes, he can remember how to speak. "Sorry," he says though he isn't sure why he ought to apologize. He can still smell her and hear the quiet breathing of the man on the floor, but there is no longer anyone translating his senses for him. The thing in his head has fallen back at her touch.
"It's alright," she says, and Ryo feels something in his head grow angry at this woman's meddling. "It's perfectly all right."
Then she takes him to see his parents.
Ryo is home. The government and the doctors are leaving him alone. No one knows what happened and they have decided that they no longer care.
He is alone in bed when it speaks, weeks after the time at the hospital that his parents try to forget. A voice clear and distinct whispers up Ryo's spine and across his nerves, a stranger's caress. For the first time it's not just a feeling or a stray thought. There is, this time, a voice inside his head.
He thought, these past few weeks, that it was gone, that perhaps he had only imagined it. He hadn't pined for it when it was gone, but it still banishes a lurking fear to know it really exists, that it wasn't just Ryo's head all jumbled up. Its voice is Ryo's voice, but darker and hard.
I am Byakuen, it says, and I am not leaving. It bristles with indignation when Ryo remembers the small woman that tried to send it away.
Byakuen, Ryo thinks, not understanding. He curls into a bundle of boy and sheets on his bed, wishing for solitude for the first time in his life, but frightened that Byakuen will hear him. His mind is no longer his own. He doesn't know what Byakuen wants, but in later years he will find out.
Beside the bed, the cat robot shifts and purrs. Its eyes are made of thick and beautiful amber.
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o_0
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A challenge by Mirror and Image. "Say Ryo started out with brown eyes and White Blaze with blue: how'd they switch?"
This took about a week and I am not happy with it. I hope the twins will enjoy it.
At the moment, I am challenging myself to come up with the next chapter of Persuasion. I will however accept other suggestions for consideration.
Melee