Hi y'all!
I have returned from vacation intact, having survived the last several weeks in wilds of Northern Michigan. Have you guys been there? It's pretty super. Nice beaches.
I am pleased to present the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Ms. Goldstein. For those who are new to story, here is a brief explanation:
I wrote most of a novel several years ago, and it has been sitting, roiling around in my brain ever since. The novel was always intended to be published chapter by chapter online, constructed so that the story slowly unfolds for the reader of the course of a couple of months.
Having no idea what to do with a novel, and not having access to things like publishers or agents, I have decided to post the book - chapter by chapter - on my favorite website, working ahead to finish the last few chapters.
I've been banging the drum for any volunteers who might be interested in taking a crack at putting together some artwork, as I feel that the story and characters would lend themselves well to comic style illustrations. No takers yet, but if there's one thing I'm never short on, it's optimism. Please give me a holler if you are interested in the comments below.
Here is a sample, drawn up about a year ago:
(Illustration courtesy of Amanda Swift)
If anyone is interested in going back to read from the beginning, here are a few links to previous chapters:
http://www.gameinformer.com/blogs/members/b/freezedried72_blog/archive/2017/06/19/ms-goldstein.aspx
Thanks so much for taking a look at my little project. It's fun for me, and if even one person is enjoying it, then I'm happy.
Chapter Four - Seven Months Ago
Jessica locked her eyes with her father's, unwilling to move her head to look at whatever was laying on the table.
Larry took a step towards the table and rested his hand on her shoulder. "Go on, Jess, take a look. I promise I will explain everything today. I'm going to answer all of your questions, anything you can think to ask."
Jessica continued staring at her dad, focusing on all the miniscule details that she had never noticed before. She saw the tiny random freckle that was popping ever so slightly from his left earlobe. She noticed that his right eyebrow had 379 hairs in it, while his left had 422. Peering into his eyes, she saw that he had a touch too much pressure built up in them, which could lead to glaucoma, and possible damage to the optic nerve. How did she know that?
Gradually, she became aware that she had a question.
"Dad, why aren't I blinking?"
"Oh! Oh, wait a sec! I can fix that!" With a slightly hysterical and more than slightly demented laugh, he dashed over to one of the many workstations scattered around the room and began clattering on a keyboard. "You know, I thought a lot about it while I was working on this project. While you don't have any technological use for the act of blinking, per se, the act of being able to close your eyes and cut off visual stimulation for a moment is psychologically invaluable. I had a long talk with Bertie about it, and he didn't understand why I had to take the time to code the proper interface, but finally I just said to him, 'Bertie, can you imagine not being able to close your eyes?' and that pretty much shut him up right then and there." He clicked a few final buttons, and tapped the Enter key. "There, that ought to take care of it. Give it a shot."
Jessica attempted to close her eyes. Her vision ceased instantly with a tiny, barely audible click. She lay her head back down, taking a moment to gather her courage. In that moment, being perfectly still and silent seemed like the most blessed thing she could imagine. Seconds ticked away into minutes, and still she lay, completely motionless.
Finally she spoke.
"I'm not breathing, either."
"Well, actually you are breathing, just not here."
"Dad, I don't have a clue what that means."
"Okay, Jessica, listen. This is it. And I'm sorry if I babble, but I'm really nervous."
"It's cool," she said flatly, still lying perfectly still with her eyes closed. "Lay it on me. This is already the craziest thing ever."
"All right, here goes. After your accident, you weren't expected to live. Actually, the paramedics pronounced you dead on the way to the hospital. When you arrived, the doctor that they sent to finish the formalities noticed that you were still breathing, very lightly, and very slowly. You had such extensive damage to your body that the doctors said that it was more of a curse than a blessing that you were still alive. The hospital called me at the hotel at two AM, and I made it to the ER by two fifteen."
Jessica listened silently, feeling emotions welling up inside her. She felt her sinuses flooding and tears building behind her eyes. Was that possible?
"I don't want to go into details about everything that you were put through that night, but the doctors managed to pull you through. When I arrived at the hospital, they told me that you would never make it to see the morning, but somehow you did. It was the worst night of my life. You kept flat-lining, and they kept bringing you back. Each time, I thought it was the end, but then the monitor would start beeping and the whole thing would start over again." He stopped for a moment, overcome with emotion. She could hear him sniffling slightly. She didn't know what to say, so she didn't say anything. Finally he started again.
"Bertie and Scotch showed up at the hospital not long after I did, and Bertie was already making calls when he walked through the door. He was screaming into the phone, waking up the entire city, it seemed like. He brought in his own team of doctors, and had you transferred the next morning to a private facility. He flew in specialists from around the world, guys who worked with skin, pulmonary guys, nanotech guys, guys with specializations that even I had never heard of. There's even a hair guy."
"Wait, how did Bertie know I was in the hospital? Did you call him?"
"No, Jess, he was with you the night of your accident."
"What? Why?" She popped her head up to study her dad's face. He had pulled up a stool next to her and was sitting close by, stroking her head with his hand over and over again, as though to soothe her. She couldn't feel it.
"One thing at a time, Jess. Let's just focus on after the accident for now. We'll get to the rest in a bit."
"Okay." She lay her head back down and closed her eyes again.
"To make a very long story short, Bertie assembled a team of over eighty specialists to keep you going. They worked around the clock, holding staff meetings every four hours until they felt you were stabilized. You received the very finest care in the world. But eventually, it became obvious that there was only so much they could do for you.
"They managed to save most of your internal organs, but the damage was so severe that they were forced to keep you in a medically induced coma. There was simply no way to wake you up. The pain would be too great. It was going to take a really long time for you to recover to the point that they could safely bring you back to consciousness."
"Jesus, Dad, what was wrong with me?"
"I'm getting there. Just give me a minute. I'm trying to tell this so that it'll make sense to you without freaking you out too badly."
"Not working. Totally freaking out."
"Sorry. This is hard to talk about. Just bear with me.
"Bertie and I had a lot of discussions about your long term care, and I think we were both dancing around this idea for a few weeks before either of us got up the nerve to say it out loud. It was obvious that you were going to be unconscious while your body was healing for a long, long time. The real question was what we were going to do about your mind. We were keeping you in a medically induced coma for your body to heal, you see, but there was no brain injury to speak of. The problem was, the longer we kept you unconscious, the more likely it was that you would sustain damage to your mind.
"It's not like in the movies, Jess, just so you understand. People don't just wake up from comas and jump right back into their lives. People take months, even years to regain full awareness after being unconscious for so long. There's long term therapy, and people have to relearn how to walk, how to talk. Basic functions of the brain can be lost or damaged. Some people never come back out of it, and remain in a vegetative state for the rest of their lives. Bertie and I began working on a plan to ensure that this wouldn't happen to you.
"You see, your body is being repaired. And by repaired, I don't just mean that we are healing your wounds. I mean that we are rebuilding your body completely. We are reconstructing the damage done to you from the blueprint we have extracted from your genetic code. No one has ever attempted anything like it before, and there are a multitude of brand new, untested technologies at work on you even as we speak. We are completely off the grid here, operating so far out of the boundaries of the recognized medical community that we would all face jail time if what we are doing ever comes to light."
"Jesus, Dad," Jessica began. "I would have never asked you to do anything like this..."
Larry waved her off. "We aren't doing anything we weren't going to do eventually anyhow. We just bumped up the time table on about 30 different projects we were working on, and poured all of them into you. These guys are being well compensated for the risk involved, believe me. Bertie has become obsessed with this project, and has focused his attention on it almost exclusively."
"Project..."
"Oh, sorry. Poor choice of words. Believe me; he wouldn't be doing this if it were anyone else lying on a gurney in the hospital that night. He put all of his cards on the table to save you, so don't for one second think that you are just some science fair assignment that he adopted. What I should have said was that he is completely committed to doing whatever it takes to get you back on your feet again.
"Now here's where things get a little funky..."
"Here is where things get funky? They weren't already funky?"
"Funkier. Bertie and I had been working on this idea for a few years together, secretly emailing back and forth during the time that I was working overseas. Basically, the idea was to allow soldiers who were healing from overwhelming battle damage to be able to still contribute to the military while they were convalescing. We didn't envision them going into battle, but we thought that we might be able to have them do simple jobs, like warehousing or shipping, just things to occupy their minds while their bodies were healing."
"So, let me see if I've got this, Dad. I was hurt really bad in an accident, and it was going to take a long time to heal me, and you and Bertie were worried that I might become a veggie while I slept. So you took my broken body and shoved it into a robot? So, I'm in a metal machine that is just lugging my poor unconscious corpse around while, what? Nanites reconstruct me from my DNA? And I'm just in some iron lung that moves around?"
"What? No! No, not at all! I'm sorry; I didn't mean to give you the impression that are inside this construct. Your body is far too fragile to be bounced around like that. Your body is currently laying suspended in a tank of liquid nutrients, wearing a respirator and surrounded by a team of doctors and nurses. But, yes, nanobots and DNA. You got that part correct."
"But I don't understand. If I am in a coma in a tank with dudes all around, how are we having this conversation?"
"Jessica, I think it's time for you to open your eyes."
"Nope. Not gonna look yet." She shook her head adamantly.
"Fine. Let's talk a little more. Um...what was the question?"
"How are we talking if I'm in a fish tank?"
"Oh, yeah, right. So, you remember that YouTube video from a few years ago, where they were able to reconstruct the images that people were seeing by tracking their brain waves?"
"What? No."
Undeterred, he rambled on. "Well, it's like that, but a lot more complicated. Like, a lot more complicated. Basically, we are monitoring all of your brain activity on a really high level. Every command your brain gives, we are reading. We have a database that we have constructed over the last few months of your brain issuing commands, and we are streaming those commands into the construct."
"Streaming? Like Netflix?"
"Well...yeah, kind of. But you are taking up way more bandwidth than Netflix. Right now, here in the lab, we are running kind of a super amplified hotspot, but Bertie has assembled a network of satellites for when you are ready to go outside. They should be able to maintain your signal over most of the city."
"Wait. Wait-wait-wait-wait-wait. You are reading my thoughts? Is that how I'm talking? Satellites? Like in space? And what if I leave the city? What is this, Dad? What have you done to me?"
She opened her eyes and jumped up off the table. "Mirror! Mirror!"
"Over there," he said quietly, gesturing to the corner of the room. "I had them bring in a three-way mirror. I figured you would want angles."
She stalked awkwardly over to the mirror, feeling a bit like Frankenstein's monster, and peered with a mixture of horror and wonder at the creature that was looking back at her.
She must have been close to seven feet tall, standing up. Her body was some sort of gleaming metal, each appendage joined to the next by joints that consisted of pins and pistons. Paint was strategically applied to certain areas of her body to give the illusion of clothing. The face actually resembled her real face, but was metallic and stiff, with two glowing orbs set where the eyes should be. A tuft of what seemed to be hair protruded from the top of her head, short and punky. Better than bald, she supposed. In addition to the paint job, she was wearing a pair of low top sneakers and knee high athletic socks.
Her dad was quietly talking while she examined herself.
"No one can read your private thoughts. Those are still your own. We have tapped into your speech centers so you can communicate. When your brain sends the signal to your mouth, lungs and voice box, we translate that into sound that comes from a set of small, but very precise speakers."
"My lips don't move when I talk..." she said, touching them gently with her fingers.
"No, that was too complicated. This whole thing has been challenging enough without trying to engineer lips and a tongue."
She held up her hand in front of her face and watched the tiny pistons expand and contract as she wiggled her fingers.
"Your visual ability has been dramatically upgraded over what a normal person can see. You have all sorts of filters you will be able to use eventually. You can do some cool tricks. Even with the standard lenses, I imagine you are seeing details you might not have noticed before."
She was. She looked down at the shoes she was wearing, and was shocked when her eyes zoomed down into the knit of the fabric, then even closer still, until she could see each fiber woven into the thread.
"The shoes are just to keep the joints in your feet and ankles from getting too dirty. I know they aren't really your style, but they are sturdy. One of Bertie's team members engineered them, so they should hold up under pretty stressful circumstances."
"They're fine..." she murmured absently. She was swaying back and forth, twisting and turning to see herself from different perspectives.
"See...angles. I knew it."
"Shut up. Just trying to see my butt."
"It's metal."
"But is it cute?"
"I'm your father."
"So I hope you knew to make it cute."
"Moving on. We have sunglasses for your eyes, so you don't go around blinding people when you talk to them. We can, of course, change the color of your clothing, but I thought you might like the purple."
"It goes well with the, um, grey?"
"Almost a cobalt, I think."
"Yeah...cobalt. What's with the Mohawk?"
"You looked weird bald, but too much hair hung down in your eyes and melted. Bertie came up with it. It seemed like an elegant solution."
"Yeah, it's...whatever..." she shrugged.
"So, about the satellites. Bertie has eight of them lined up right now. A few of them he retired from his various telecommunications companies. I don't know where he got the rest. I think they may be military. I didn't ask. But he is working on getting more for you, to cast a wider net. The important part is that when you are ready to go outside, you need to understand that you have to stay in the city. If you go outside the range of the satellites, your signal will weaken, you'll begin to malfunction, and eventually you will just stop."
"Just...stop? Like, I would die?"
"No. Like, we would have to send dudes in trucks to pick you back up and bring you back into range. It would suck. You're really heavy."
"How heavy?"
"Really, really heavy."
"Great. Well...you have 82, 432 hairs on your head. That's below average, even for a redhead."
"Yeah...thanks. I'm old. What do you expect? As you might have noticed you have internet access built into your neural net. You can access all sorts of facts and information through your satellite uplink."
"So, I'm, like, the smartest person in the world?" That sounded pretty good. She liked the sound of that.
"No, you are still the same person. If you didn't know calculus before, you can't just upload calculus. You can access a website that knows calculus and ask it for an answer. But in the end, facts and information are not the same as knowledge and experience."
"Oh, bummer..."
"But you have killer built-in GPS."
"Oh, whoopee...I'm a walking search engine," she said sourly.
"Oh, I think when you start getting out there and bopping around, you'll see that you are far more than that."
"But what about my real body, Dad? When do I get to see that?"
"Not for a while, Jess. Some of the team think it might be too stressful. If you see your body while you are in this one, you might start to disassociate from it. Psychology stuff, you know? We need to take this slow. One step at a time."
"But how long until it's healed? How long am I going to be like this?"
"I don't know, Jess. We're working on it."
"And how long has it been since my accident? How long have you and Bertie been working on this...thing?"
"A while..."
"A while? How long, Dad?"
"Well...you aren't sixteen anymore..."