Chapter 27:
Doctor's appointments. Daphne always hated them. They were the worst part of being pregnant.
The only good thing about them was that CCC policy said that employees must be paid for time taken off for the sake of an appointment with a physician, so if she was kept in the waiting room for who knew how long, she could just sit and read and still be getting paid for it. Of course, it wasn't like there was usually much to read in the waiting room, at least not much to read that she was sure she hadn't read maybe three or four years ago, but still.
Just as Daphne had gotten comfortable on the green sofa, though, she thought she heard a very faint series of whispers coming from... could it really be from across the building? Daphne had never really mentioned this to anyone, because whenever she thought she was sure about it it would go away again. She had noticed ever since she had been examined following the Veq's break-in she had felt a very perceptive sense of hearing from time to time. The best explanation she could think of was that if the equipment used to check for head injuries was programmed to automatically fix any simpler problems, and if it was designed by a species with superior hearing to that of humans, perhaps it saw her average hearing as a problem and "fixed" it. She wasn't sure, come to think of it, why her head had been checked (maybe they thought the possibility of a Veq intrusion sounded far-fetched and crazy?); neither was she sure why, if her hearing really had automatically received an upgrade, they didn't even have the technology to repair her broken skin on the spot, but she was pretty sure that if this new hearing ability was anything, that was where it had started.
At any rate, the voices she was hearing certainly were not registering with anyone else in the waiting room. Bored of the magazines, she listened in:
"It is ready, is it not?" Boring. Some lab test, probably.
"Of course, within a matter of days..." Okay, so most tests probably wouldn't take that long to register. But as Daphne hadn't tuned in soon enough to hear the whole conversation, it could have been something profoundly obscure.
Something rubber kept smacking the floor. Somebody was pacing. "You know I have little time to wait."
"As do I. There are patients sitting outside by the truckload, and I need to get back to them."
More pacing. "Just remember... the sooner it arrives, the sooner you can stop having to pay such heavy electrical prices. That will drive down costs here at the clinic."
Dull as vanilla ice cream. They were talking about some power-saving device. Probably they had ordered it from some catalogue that had free shipping but took ten-to-twelve weeks for delivery.
Her heart skipped, though, at the next line.
"This is not to say you should forget that the bulk of it will be mine. Do not forget your station."
Something about that sounded very ominous and frightening. Were they really talking about a power-saving device at all? Now Daphne was inclined to doubt it. However, just as she was listening for more, her new hearing capabilities began to wear down again.
"Mrs. Daphne Jones?" Hearing that favorite new name of hers, Daphne stood up, forgetting everything about that previous conversation, and followed the nurse down the hall.