Author's Note: This is a sequel to Chapter 73 (Moonlight).
Tokka Week - Illness
"So, what do you suppose it is?" Sokka reached out to flick the object with a finger, sending it rotating in the miniature grav field that held it suspended in the center of the APPA-1's cockpit. "An oddly shaped memory core? An alien life form we can't comprehend? The results of a new kind of elemental reaction? Could even be a bomb, I guess." He flicked it again.
Aang and Katara jumped back, bumping up against the control board and nearly sending the starship stretching across the cosmos without a verified endpoint. Sokka glared at them. As if he wouldn't have verified that the thing wasn't an explosive before bringing it aboard. Sure, there had been that one time, but that was ages ago, and one exploding food locker was hardly grounds for a continuing relationship of distrust-
Katara ignored his look and said, "What's it made of?"
"Ah, good question. Nothing we have aboard the ship could determine that, but admittedly the APPA-1 is an Ether Harvester, so it's not really outfitted for this kind of analysis Toph's power over solids could probably tell us more."
Katara tapped her chin and nodded. "I can tell liquid methane from the seawater of Arinax Prime with just a touch. Toph can probably solve the mystery."
Aang pushed a palm against the grav field, bringing the object's movement to a halt. "It's so irregular. It can't be anything natural. At least, not unless it's something completely alien."
Sokka had to agree. The object might have started its life as a plain sphere, but those days were long past. Now, parts of it had corners and other parts had spikes, some bits were smooth as glass and others felt like old carpet, and the shininess of any given point on the surface seemed to depend on the angle from which it was viewed and the time of day according to the Galactic Baseline. Some points even felt hot or cold, like there was something inside transferring energy.
Katara nodded. "It's not really what you'd expect a courier drone to be carrying across Fire Empire space, is it? Speaking of which, we should release the drone and get out of here. We don't want a patrol picket to stumble across us while we're all staring at the weird thing."
"I shall take care of it now," came the ship's heavy, synthesized voice over the hidden speakers. Sokka heard a clanking sound resonate through the floor beneath is feet as the artificial intelligence that ran the APPA-1 disengaged the docking claw. A second later, the depowered courier drone drifted past the cockpit's viewport, looking for all its red paint and technological sophistication like a dried up dead bug. Aang looked over at one of the monitors on the control board, confirmed the stretch-coordinates with the push of a button, and a second later the APPA-1 had carried them light-years away.
"Hey, was that a stretch?" Toph ambled into the cockpit, the various sensors hanging from the arms and chest and legs of her jumpsuit flashing as they mapped out the full contents of the cockpit for her. "Sorry I took so long, but the lav-cube clunked out again and I had to do a full reset of «‡‡‡‡‡‡h.¸¸,.-~ æ`··._£˜`"°º×p - m˜`"°º×€¸¸.•*¨*•.¸¸¸_Š-"
And then Toph screamed something like no human sound Sokka had ever heard and fell to the ground, twitching like her nerves were on fire.
It had taken Sokka, Aang, Katara, and five M0-M0 drones to get Toph to the infirmary station, and it was the fiercest wrestling match of Sokka's life. Toph wouldn't stop moving, wouldn't stop flailing her limbs hard enough to break whatever she struck, wouldn't stop twitching her fingers and toes and eyelids and lips. Goosebumps were randomly raising and lowering across her exposed skin, for no reason that he could determine. Even after they got her onto the med-pad, she wouldn't stop thrashing, and he was beginning to wonder if they'd have to tie her down when there was a sound like a pop, and she abruptly went completely limp.
Then a new kind of terror started when they realized that Toph was no longer breathing.
Sokka could only stand by and watch. Katara went full medic and used a fiber-liner to shove oxygen tubes up Toph's nose, and then hooked her up to all the other sustaining equipment built into the med pad. That would keep Toph's body functionally alive, but the brain scan very clearly showed that her mind's activity was slow and drifting.
Sokka had asked, "What does that mean?"
Katara sighed before she could answered. "It means she's in a coma. All we can do is take care of her and wait for her to wake up."
Aang was fidgeting, his eyes never leaving Toph. "But we can talk to her, right? Try to help her out of it."
"That might help. She might be able to hear us on some level. And her cybernetics are probably still functional and feeding data to her brain, so who knows how much of that she's interpreting?"
"No." Sokka finally stepped forward, and motioned to the equipment on her jumpsuit. It was all as dead as she appeared to be. "It all shut down."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
It took a while before Sokka could make himself stop shaking enough to work the keys on his datapad.
The first thing he did was hack the lock on Toph's cabin in the APPA-1, and then the next thing he did was find her own datapad and hack that, too. It was made harder by the fact that her datapad's screen didn't work, since she used it by just plugging a scomp-link from her cybernetics directly into an interface, but Sokka was able to improvise a connection with his own datapad. After that, it was a simple matter to find the software and references for Toph's cyborg hardware.
It was a relief that there was documentation at all. Toph Bei Fong had cobbled together her equipment during her days on Gaoling 3, scrounging the parts in the Underside and trading favors to have it rebuilt and installed. By the time Sokka had met her, she was fully kitted out, although her parents hadn't been aware. In the Bei Fong technodrome, Toph wore nice clothes that covered her hardlinks, making do only with a visor that shifted light into a drumming level that her eyes could see better. Her parents had thought that she was content with a picture of the world like a malfunctioning visio-tube. To them, even being a rare flawed gene-spin was better than being a cyborg, but they weren't the ones who had been blind since birth. Even after Toph left, they were never able to understand why she preferred a stream of data fed directly into her brain, data that painted a reality more deep and detailed than eyesight could ever provide.
Sokka downloaded the administration software onto his own datapad, and then spent the next day carefully reading all the references.
That's when Katara arrived. "Here you are. It's time for your shift."
"Yeah, okay." Sokka shut down his datapad and stood up off the bunk. "Any change?"
"No. But give it time. I have hope."
"Of course you do."
Sokka relieved Aang at the infirmary station and took the seat beside the med pad. Toph was still laying there in the exact same position, although as Sokka watched, he saw an occasional blue glow over whatever part of her was being massaged and stimulated by the station's grav fields. If- when she woke up, her muscular atrophy would be minimal.
He held Toph's hand in silence, and then when he was sure that he wasn't going to be interrupted, plugged his datapad into the hardpoint at the back of her neck.
He used the administration software he had downloaded to connect to the little computer in her brain, the device that translated all the data from her cybernetics into something her brain could understand. The results were not sensations as Sokka knew them; the old cybernetic interfaces had done things like that, but the resulting synesthesia hadn't been particularly popular. It was only when someone had developed a way for the hardware to teach the brain how to handle raw data, and form new synaptic accommodations, that cybernetics had become more widespread, even for people with no disabilities.
The datapad blinked a confirmation that the module had been successfully rebooted, and Sokka began the process of hacking and curing Toph's brain.
It was a tough task- maybe impossible- but Sokka began the only way he knew how, by picking something to start with and just getting on with it. He started with the corrupted history logs, tracking down the last set of good data. Sure enough, it was just before the incident, and while there was nothing that specifically described the cause, Sokka noted that there seemed to be an unusually large amount of sensory data collected. From there, he went on to the diagnostic tools, and a scan quickly turned up several thousand places where there were supposedly bad connections between the brain-module and the brain itself.
Sokka brought up the first and took a closer look at the data.
It was a long job: reading, interpreting, switching settings, restoring from archives, and then doing an isolated retest. Sokka was able to eventually put together a vague timeline of what happened. Although the root cause was still a mystery, the trouble started when the module in Toph's brain began malfunctioning, feeding bad data that triggered a reflex sequence which humans normally didn't experience outside of having a seizure. That, in turn, set off a feedback loop, and eventually the module became overwhelmed and suffered a hard crash, the popping sound that Sokka had heard right before Toph went limp. Without the proper shut down sequence, her brain had been completely overwhelmed.
Sokka couldn't fix her brain, but he could sort the computer module that lived inside it.
He found himself having to manually relink all the data stores. The module couldn't know what to do without the proper instructions, and much of those had been lost in the crash. Sokka had to manually check each repository and compare it against backups in Toph's datapad, but so much was corrupted that it was a very frustrating task. As his shift wore on, an annoying little thought that the task might be impossible tried to slow him down, but he ignored and focused on his task merely be frustrating.
He could deal with frustrating; after all, he had a little sister.
He couldn't deal with impossible.
As his shift neared its end, he finished up his current task and disconnected everything from Toph's hardpoint. He leaned back on the stool beside the med-pad, and his back popped and creaked in protest. He hadn't realized how poorly he had been sitting, so wrapped was he in the work. He was stretching out the kinks when Katara came in to relieve him and said, "How's she doing?"
Sokka could only shrug.
So it went for the next few days. he would spend entire shifts trying to fix up Toph's cybernetics, always finding more that had to be cleaned up and restored.
He purposefully did not wonder if he was really accomplishing anything.
In that time, Aang was taking the APPA-1 in search of a Guru. They had to be careful, this deep in the Fire Empire, creeping across planetary shadows and then quickly making a stretch- elongating the ship into a one-dimensional line that could instantly link two points light years away before snapping back into three dimensions at the other end- when they were sure no one was monitoring. Aang estimated that they had a week of travel before they could make planetfall somewhere friendly.
That was, of course, assuming nothing went wrong.
It was in this quiet state of desperate worry that Sokka stumbled across the first memory file that mentioned him.
Naturally, Toph's cybernetics didn't have infinite capacity, so the computer running them had to make choices about what to focus on in any given situation. Toph herself had provided the criteria, and it seemed that she had designated everything involving Sokka as a high priority. Aang and Katara were up there, too, but Sokka was the one at the top of the list.
And so any memory file involving him- any archive through which Toph could perfectly relive the sensations originally recorded by her cybernetics- was massive in size. He was tempted to try copying and compressing one of the memories into a video he could display on his datapad, but quickly put the idea out of his mind. He had no business poking through what Toph chose to save in her mind; he was just a technician doing a job.
Besides, he had enough to keep him occupied. All the data stores were connected in one way or another, and being able to link up the memory files' construction helped him make another step forward in the restoration process.
Things began to go smoother after that, with the data connections becoming more readily identifiable, and the files containing less corruption that needed to be overwritten. His back was starting to hurt even when he wasn't doing a shift at the infirmary station, but Sokka was always so absorbed in his work that he couldn't stop himself from adopting the hunched 'on the job' posture for hours at a time. He even found himself talking out loud as he worked, speaking his thoughts in a kind of stream-of-conscious mumble.
It was almost strange how well the job going. There was a part of Sokka that was glad, but another part that wasn't pleased at all. After all, shouldn't there have been some effect on Toph by now, if he was really accomplishing anything?
Then, late in one of his shifts, Sokka was staring at the contents of one corrupted connection as he decided how best to tackle it, his thoughts a bit slow after hours of work, and figured he must be falling asleep, because how else could the contents of the framework be changing as he watched, because he certainly wasn't doing it, and who else could possibly be involved in this process, and hey wait a minute can you hear me?
As Sokka's mumbling trailed off, he realized what was going on, and reached out to take one of Toph's hands in his own.
She didn't visibly move, but he could feel her squeezing his hands.
At night, Sokka dreamed that he was still working, but instead of tapping away at his datapad, he was swimming in the sea of electronic impulses that was Toph's mind. Energy from both computer modules and organic synapses mixed together to try to drown him, but he could hear a voice calling to him, calling for help, and he would spend his last bit of strength to keep himself afloat so that he could answer.
The glowing seas swirled around him as he swam, his every stroke trying to push data back into its proper place, and the more he worked, the more Toph's face became visible in the currents of electricity. He needed to see her, in these dreams. He needed to speak to her.
But what would he say if- when she was back?
When he awoke every morning, he wondered at the answer.
With Toph's unconscious help, the work went faster than ever. He'd talk to her, sing songs from her home planet, make cynical jokes about the politics in the Nickeleo sector, and do whatever else he thought would help her brain work itself out as it sorted the cyborg linkage. Toph knew herself best, and now that Sokka had cleared the way, she was fixing herself up better than he ever could.
With the way clear, he was also able to do his own investigations, and finally found out what had hurt his friend in the first place.
He told Aang and Katara about it back in APPA-1's cockpit, where the object in question still floated in its own grav field. "It's a bomb," he said.
Aang blinked. "Um, it hasn't exploded. It's right there."
"Not a bomb in the traditional sense. But it sure did make Toph's brain explode."
This time, it was Katara who blinked. "Sokka, her brain is still in her head. She's alive. We just need to get her to a Guru sometime tomorrow and-"
"No, not physically explode. Look, see this thing?" He used a finger to flick the object so that it would rotate slowly. "We were wondering why it's so weird. But think, it's this very strange, but very precise shape. It's hot in some spots and cold in others. It's different textures. It might even be emitting sounds beyond the range of our hearing. This thing is like a playground for Toph's cybernetic sensors." He pressed a palm against the grav field to halt the device's movements. "Or rather, a trap. This exact combination of sensations actually delivered a computer virus right to the technology in Toph's brain."
Aang and Katara's jaws both dropped. Simultaneously.
Sokka nodded. "It's true. It exploited some faults in the programming for Toph's exact set of hardware and basically caused the software to start trashing itself. Eventually, it all just crashed, but by then Toph's brain had been beaten up a billion times a second by her own data feed. Whoever built this thing must have been have been targeting Toph specifically, and knew we were watching that courier lane. We were supposed to attack and steal from that drone."
"Azula," Aang said through gritted teeth.
Katara shuddered. "So what can we do?"
Sokka ran hands that might never stop shaking through his hair. "Well, I wrote a patch that should stop this from ever happening again. It's basically a more graceful way of handling an overwhelming data state. And I've restored all the software for her cybernetics. But Toph still won't wake up. It's not like the problem was with her software; that was just what originally hurt her. I've- I've fixed what I could, but I can't fix her."
Then the cockpit door slid open, and Toph said, "I can fix myself. But I appreciate the thought."
There was a long moment of shocked silence, and then everybody dived to throw their arms around her. Sokka got there first, and as a reward got Toph's cybernetic sensors poking him in the chest while Aang and Katara piled on top of him.
Still, he had Toph awake and in his arms, and that was the best possible thing.
Eventually, the group unknotted themselves and exchanged the expected professions of gladness. Sokka couldn't make himself let go of Toph's hand, and as Katara lectured on about how they would be visiting a Guru tomorrow just to make sure that everything was really okay, Toph leaned over and whispered in his ear, "Thanks."
He whispered back, "I had to."
And she said, "I know."
And that was all there really was to it.
END
