Pain

That was the first thing she felt as her heart re-started pumping blood round her body.

Pain just below her chest, forming a sort of band, separating her aching and agonising upper body from her numb and dead like lower body.

The second thing she felt was worry. She had departed her life, for what she had felt was the final time, mid kiss with her lover. She knew very well how he deeply cared for her, she how much it would have broken him for her to leave him like that.

Trinity knew, without her, Neo had little reason to live, and that worried her the most. If he accomplished his task, ending the war, he would, literally, have nothing to live for.

She was so deep in thought and pain it took a while to realise that something was not right with her. She then looked down, and what she saw could have made her heart stop again of shock. There were ant-like metallic shimmers running round her chest and arm, especially her wounds.

Before she had time to worry further, she then felt her head being tilted forwards, and a spike enter her neural plug.

~*~

Lara removed the metal probes from the woman's chest, which she had used to restart her heart, and felt a wave of relief wash over her that the woman had been revived successfully. At least that's one problem out of the way.

She had already sent most of her micro-daughters out to stop the internal bleeding. They would form a layer around the metal pipes inside her, so when those pipes were removed, there would be little or no blood loss. The micro-daughters were fine, 1 mm long machines that could join together to form a wall, and so stop bleeding and help blood to clot. Her brother had already came back with the much-needed blood a while ago, and the infusions had begun as quickly as possible.

Lara saw the woman was now conscious, and in obvious pain like she had been before, so Lara raised her head, and slid her jack into the woman's neural plug. She was loaded up into Lara's Construct, an essential tool that all human catering doctor machines had built into them. In Lara's Construct program, the woman wouldn't feel the pain her real body was feeling, and so she could just rest there till she was ready to return to her real body. Lara could talk to her and explain the injuries and how they were being treated in a much kinder environment than in the 'real world'. Also it was found to be easier to talk with patients, as they feel less threatened by a human looking representation of the doctor, rather than what is obviously a machine. Most of the patients had been taught on instinct to fear Lara's kind as emotionless killers, which was very prejudice, but it was true with some of the machines. It also caused the problems of panic in the patients, which resulted in them trying to escape, reacting badly to treatment, or even rejecting treatment all together. Increased heart rate and high amounts of adrenaline in a human system dramatically increases the probability of failure of any treatment.

She requested to her brother that he take charge of working on the woman, while Lara went into the cyber world to talk to the patient in a one to one form, as she could only work in one form of reality at a time, not two or more.

The reason that Lara cared for human patients and felt emotions for them was that her earliest version had been created by the humans. A lot of love, care and emotion had gone into her when she was programmed, and so, she had retained that in her programming. She thought in a very similar way to how humans do, and so she understood both perspectives. It was like her nephew says, emotions are just words to describe the feeling, the feeling itself is what matters, it is not restricted to just humans. She had understood the emotions, and used them to her advantage to carry out her purpose, and so her later self-updated editions had kept that emotion, as she felt it was an important part of who she was. She even had humour in her system. Why else was she and her brother named after characters from the old TV series, Casualty?

She entered the Construct, and prepared to do a bit of explaining.