Chapter 32: Congratulations on Your Coma (Part I)

“What happened?” Emily asked. She turned back to the place behind the stage, now hidden by the floor and scaffolding. “Is he already gone?”

Elaine furrowed her brow. Hadaly aided Howie in lifting and carrying Roger through the minefield of fallen students. Frog and Andrew followed close behind them. She couldn’t tell how long they might stay unconscious; a matter which might become problematic with the potential for sunburns and heatstroke, but hopefully it wouldn’t last. Also, she considered that it depended largely on all the subjects of the nam-shub clustering themselves into the Hayden courtyard. From what she could see, everyone within visual range suffered the effect all the way back down to the MU and around the Hayden Stacks.

“You won’t find his projection there any longer,” Elaine said; “we’ve sealed him back in his own mind again and with that all the effects on the campus.”

“What did you do?”

“Your brother, Chance, has been insidiously networking himself through the population of ASU. Part of his reprogramming touched a deep-brain structure that controls memory and label assignation, but like any program it had exploitable routines and I exploited one.” Elaine turned to Emily, her spectacles reflected sunlight like momentary flares. An apt, highly technical explanation jumped to mind including her genius use of the gremlin as network protocol, but in her emotional state, all would be lost on Emily.  “They’ve been rebooted.”

“Why haven’t I?”

“Your case happens to be more delicate,” she said. “You’ll have to overcome your indoctrination on your own, but I don’t think you’ll have any problem doing that. Your mental fortitude isn’t exactly minuscule.”

As Frog and the others mounted the front steps, moans elicited from the crowd in front of the stage. Here and there, figures sat up rubbing shoulders, heads, moved limbs away from one another. Elaine scanned the crowd, the reset protocol seemed to have a rather brutal effect, but its efficiency couldn’t be denied. Only a tenth of those fallen currently began to rise, but already a larger segment began to show signs of awakening. Bumps and bruises seemed to be the most probably issue arising from the sudden lost of consciousness—and a concussion or two seemed statistically probable from the sheer number of students involved. They would have to wait for the crowd to become mostly awake before they could get away from the stage and back across the campus.

“Should I meet you at the hospital?” Zane asked through the Enoch.

“Yes. I’ll see you there in about ten minutes,” Elaine said. “I’ve got a few things to wrap up here and

“Hospital?” Emily asked then she paused. Her eyes wandered over the fallen crowd, not seeing but thinking. After a few seconds of evaluation she set her lips together into a thin line and nodded. “Yes. We should go see Chance—and Tom. He should know.”

Frog lead the small ragtag group up onto the stage, Hadaly had taken over for Howie in bearing Roger up the steps—although he did look adequately bemused that a girl, appearing much smaller than himself, managed to lift and carry his friend with no apparent discomfort. Elaine watched the four draw near and considered this a good after-mod assessment of Hadaly’s android frame capabilities. Insofar, also, nobody had quite taken a close enough look at her to notice the uncanny affect of her skin and facial features.

“You’re dismissed,” Elaine said to her. “We can go over mission briefing later tonight. You did extremely well.”

“Thanks boss!” the android girl said cheerily. Hadaly let Roger back onto his feet and he staggered groggily, Frog caught him before he teetered dangerously close to the edge of the stage. “I’ll just park myself back at the old garage and rest a while. If anyone needs me, you have my digits. Toodles.”

“Did I actually do that?” Roger asked Frog as he stumbled into her.

“Oh, yes you did,” she said and winked at him. She casually patted him on the chest. “You should know that I wouldn’t hit you—unless I really had to. We didn’t walk into this without knowing what we were doing. You okay? You hit the ground hard when the reset switch got it.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Head hurts.”

“You and almost everyone else,” Frog said. She glanced over at Elaine. “You did expect that to happen, right?”

Elaine rolled her shoulders to describe a half-shrug for the benefit of everyone else. “I couldn’t be certain what a limbic reset would do to the crowd. All I knew for certain is that it would blow away the hijack indoctrination of the nam-shub on all subjects. I’d say this outcome is satisfactory and casualties appear to be minimal. Don’t you concur?”

Frog swept her gaze over the assembled crowd; most of them had made it to their feet. Confusion through the ranks caused a bit of a churn to the mob but people had begun to trickle out as they began to disperse.

“Yeah, I have to agree,” she said. “Next time, though, I expect to get a better run-down on what to expect. Having everyone fall at my feet didn’t exactly inspire confidence in the whole job… For a moment there, I thought it might have been the dosage of my perfume that did it.”

“Your perfume inspires arousal,” Elaine said. “That’s the diametric opposite of limbic shutdown. To expect that outcome, you would have to ask if any of your partners has ever suddenly fallen asleep on you.”

“Uh, right.”

Elaine found Emily staring at her with a stoic expression. “I don’t know if I should pay you or hate you,” her client said. Ever the politician she kept her tone stable, dropping the inflections of her accent, as she absentmindedly brushed at her sleeve as if to make her statement feel casual. Frog tensed at her side and Elaine lifted her hand slightly to warn her off. “You’ve done an exemplary job addressing my case, and to that I am honor bound to my original terms. However, I must say that you have all the subtlety of a jackhammer at dawn.”

“Your brother, Chance, brought this on himself and you,” Elaine said. “Possibly by no conscious fault of his own, but what’s done is done. I couldn’t let this keep going on, at its projected contagiousness it could have taken over the city within the next week. I did what I had to.”

“You’re right, what’s done is done.” Emily reached up to her lapel and unhooked her VOTE EARLY button. It fell from her fingertips and bounced with a clatter on the stage. “I’m going to forgive you for giving me my brother and then ripping him away.”

“He’s not gone,” Elaine said. “He’s back still a coma, but there’s nothing we can do about that. He reached out to you once before. Together, you and Tom might be able to contact him again. If you’ve learned anything from this experience, you seem to have a lot more going on than meets the eye.”

“That’s our next stop, isn’t it?”

“With all the confusion caused by the limbic reset event, I expect it’ll be easy for us to slip into the hospital,” Elaine said. “If everyone is ready, I believe the crowd is now thin enough for us to proceed there.”

“I’ll meet you there,” Frog said. “Someone needs to go save Zach. He’s still all kinky-fantasy handcuffed a pipe.”