Whole New Wavelength (Work in Progress)

We’d all learned about the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums of light when we were in school. That was tame stuff. What these scientists were claiming was the ability to tap into a whole other wave length. So far gone it was practically it’s own dimension. They tried to be smart about it, too. They installed it on a couple of drones, and a satellite. It made things very pretty, and it sort of opened up the landscape. Think of seeing blueprints of the house you grew up in and suddenly having it pointed out that there were all of these secret rooms that you had somehow overlooked. It was sort of like that.

And now, it was time for human testing.

I had nothing better to do with my next fifteen years other than stare at the walls of my cell, so I figured, what the heck. I’d volunteer for the medical testing that they’d been pushing. They needed someone with certain genetic markers -read, not modified- and of a certain IQ. I knew my DNA was clean, and I’d always scored pretty high on those mandatory tests, so I pressed my thumb to the PADD, signing me up for the preliminary testing.

The toy canary that my kid brother had sent me to mark the passage of my last birthday chose that moment to short out, with a fizzling pop. The guard taking my Print and I both looked at the faintly smoking bird and then at the Padd. I couldn’t help the adage which passed through my memory banks, of a canary in a coal mine. We shrugged simultaneously. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to shrug it off.

However, after five years in solitary in this latest facility, and an unknowable amount of time in MaxSec, previously, surrounded by only the most vicious of like minded, violent offenders, I had won my suit for reduced security, and therefore, human interaction. I was not about to let some passing omen prevent me from my dues. I laid back in my bunk as Lights Out aproached. I was very much looking forward to oh-eight-hundred to roll around.

***

The nurse who asked me to take off my shirt was a redhead who looked like she’d be more at home on a tennis court than in here, hobnobbing with science geeks. I managed to keep my hands to myself, aiming for the Model Applicant award. Maybe it would earn me a smile...

She took my vitals before asking me if I’d like her to do it for me. It occurred to me that too much time and conversation had passed for the ‘it’ to be taking off my shirt, despite wishful thinking. “Excuse me?” I asked, searching for clarification.

“If you’d rather do it yourself, that’s fine. But I assure you, I’m very good with this.” She held up a straight razor, and my lust slowed brain coughed up the tidbit that she had said she’d need to shave my head.

“Uh, no. That’s fine. You go right ahead, Nurse Daisy.” I braced myself with elbows on knees  in order to stay still to let her apply the lather, and focused on a point on the far wall while she scraped my head bare. It’s not like I’d really done much with it since they’d enforced regulation crew cut on me in MaxSec. Chrome-Dome was bound to be an improvement.

“How long have you known that you were pre-cognisant?” she asked.

“Hmm?” I wondered.

“My name. I didn’t give it. It’s not on my I.D., nor on any of the forms you’ve been filling out. But you knew it. No one on this ward calls me by my first name, so you couldn’t have overheard it,” she declares.

I fight the urge to shrug nonchalantly, preferring to keep my ears attached, and limit the likelihood of any additional scars to my already ugly mug. “Lucky guess. How come you don’t use a laser for this?” I ask, hoping to change the topic.

“They’re too easy to modify into something more destructive, and the razors are magnetic, so the BEAMS catch them,” she waved towards the glowing stripe of red around the doorway.

“How’d you get to be so good with such an old-school weapon?” I ask her, teasing, playing on my tough-guy reputation, despite the warmth in my voice.

“It was a tool long before it was a weapon,” she replies, shortly. But there is still a returning undertone of friendly warmth there. Her bedside manners deeply ingrained? Or perhaps it was my charm. “You haven’t answered my question.”

Sharp one. No pun intended. “Dunno. I’ve just always been like that with little things. It’s like there are these things floating around in the air, little factoids, like circling gnats, and I just sort of pick them up. It’s as natural as breathing, for me. For the longest time, I was worried I was actually breathing it in. It always seemed worse when I was scared. You know, panting?” I explained, recalling my adolescence. Spending the formative years of my life wondering if I were crazy. Afraid to tell anyone, but knowing I wasn’t quite right in the head. I ran away rather than tell my straight laced, exacting father that his child was a Reader.  “I was 17 before I figured it out.”

“And you ran away.” She said it blandly. I was having a hard time if she were asking, telling, or accusing.

“Let’s just say that Dear Old Dad wasn’t the sort to put up with a flaw like that in his bloodline.” I could remember the dinners. Listening to the old man declare how filthy ‘those creatures’ were, and how it was a good thing there wasn’t any of that ‘nonsense’ in his line. I would have made one hell of a thespian. I somehow managed to sit through these rants without so much as twitching an eyebrow.

Daisy sucked on her teeth, making a noncommittal sound in response. “There you go,” her voice snapping me from my reverie, and releasing me from my rigid posture. “Let me just wipe you down.” She steps to the sink, washing her hands and wiping the blade clean before tucking it back into it’s case and relocking it.

She returns with a warm rag and wipes my now smooth scalp clean of clinging hairs and the shaving residue. The sensations inspire a wave of gooseflesh down my neck and back, washing to the tips of my fingers. It’s all I can do to remain still, and not either shiver with shere delight at the touch of another human being in a form other than restraint or violence, nor to lean into the pleasant touch.

“Now for the sensors.” She attaches what feels like dozens of tiny sensors to my skin, seeming as though she were replacing the missing hairs with their attached wires. She was quiet now as she worked, leaving me to the uncomfortable memories of my father’s dinner time declarations.

“Next,” she steps away and fetches a PADD, “I’m going to ask you a series of questions and then show you a series of images. I want you to give me the first thing that leaps to your mind, even if it seems out of context. Go with your instincts, okay?” She was back to cheery Nurse Daisy.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Daisy will be fine, Danni.” And there was my smile.

***

Forty five minutes later, I was beginning to get the buzz of a headache in my ears, leaning forward rubbing my temples as Daisy carefully extracted the tendrils of the sensors.

“I’m sorry. It shouldn’t be so painful. I’ve never seen someone with these scores.” It was the third time she’d mentioned my scores since the results were spit out. “I’ll give you something for it once these are off,” she promised. I nodded in acknowledgement, just trying to keep the slop that passed for lunch in my stomach and not on her pretty feet.

It seemed to take forever for her to get all of the little wires off of my head, but I knew that it had taken her considerably less time than it might have a less practiced hand. She moved with a grace and fluidity which made me wonder what she had done before joining the Corp.  

And without meaning to, I was looking through her eyes as she looked at herself in the mirror, fully nude. Just after puberty, I’d guess, by the swelling curves and scrawny limbs. She was thinking she’d have to give up the ballet.

“I’m sorry.” I had the decency to blush, at least. She blushed in return, having felt my invasion. I hadn’t exactly been suave about it.

“It’s okay, Danni. You didn’t mean to.” She forgives me easily, which only serves to make me feel worse, but still looks a little embarrassed.

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you couldn’t be a ballerina.” My hand reached out, barely touching her wrist in an unconscious gesture, and suddenly I had two guns leveled at my newly shaven head.

“The prisoner will cease hostilities!” came the electronic command of the automated response system.

“Stand down, GARD,” she said, her voice resigned but tinged with irritation.

“He was only trying to protect you from the dangerous criminal, Nurse Daisy,” I explained with a smirk. It had taken my unconscious move of affection as an act of violence. And I was the crazy one? Sure.

“Here, try these.” She handed me a pair of capsules, and a paper cup of water with which to wash them down. “They’ll help with the pain and vertigo,” she promised, and went back to cleaning up her equipment, giving me her profile.

“When can I see you again?” I managed to infuse my voice with humour, despite the waves of nausea.

I was rewarded with a wry grin from my audience. “Same time tomorrow work for you?” she asked, as if I had a choice.

“I’ll have to rearrange a few things on my schedule, but I’m sure I can accommodate you.” My eyes are still filled with a sheen of tears from the intense pain behind my temples, but somehow, I was managing to flirt with the pretty nurse. Ya, I had been away from the general populace for too long...

She helped me out of my chair and walked me to the door, laying her hand on the panel to deactivate the red line, and letting go of me as I stumbled through the doorway into the waiting arms of two half-mech, orderlies.

I caught myself looking over my shoulder as they half helped, half dragged me down the hall, and I was mystified to find her still in the doorway, staring after me. What was it about this girl? I hadn’t felt a spark of anything for anyone in half a decade, and here I was, practically drawing hearts around her name in my binder? Was it a desperation born of opportunity? I made a note to think about it when the knives of pain had extracted themselves from my frontal lobe.

***

My face was covered in sweat, and I could taste the sourness of bile on my tongue. I couldn’t feel my fingertips, and the edges of my vision were getting dark. I knew three things: I had survived, I was going to pass out, and I was going to vomit. I was just hoping I puke before passing out, and that I’d manage to avoid the puddle on my way down.

I don’t remember hitting the floor. I was looking up into my saviour’s eyes, and she looked terrified. Wait, why was she terrified? She wasn’t the one that had just encountered…them…

“Danni! Can you hear me, Danni?” She was frantically patting my cheeks with one hand. I reached up and took her wrist in my hand.

“I hear ya, Nurse Daisy. I’m alright. I think…” I tried to sit up, but she pressed me back down.

“Lie still a minute. The Unit is trying to take your vitals.” Now that she mentioned it, I could see the soft green glow of the Doc Unit as it worked above me.  I could smell the sour smell of my own vomit and was relieved to discover that I had, in fact, missed the puddle. I was cautious now not to end up dipping myself in it.

“What happened!” a male’s voice demanded, and for a moment I was confused. There weren’t any males allowed on the compound. Then I remembered the trip in the back of the limo…

***

“You do realize how honoured you should feel?” She kept asking me similar questions, smoothing her non regulation shirt and blouse, even leaning forward to smooth my cowlick and pick near invisible lint from my shoulder.

“To be dressed up like a Barbie and stuffed in the back of a limo with a sweet smelling nurse decked out to match? I’m pretty sure honoured is not the name for this particular feeling,” I teased. Usually I tried to be a little more suave than that, but she’d worn perfume…It was making me crazy.

***

“What have you done!” he barked, shoving past Daisy and the Unit, hauling me up by the shoulders now that the Doc had finished it’s analysis. “If you’ve ruined it…” He left the threat hanging, his face red, his chest heaving.”

“Doctor Matzi! She’s still in shock!” Daisy’s voice was the tone of a mother scolding child that should know better, having been told the same thing a hundred times before.

He glances as the Unit’s readout. “Yes, I suppose she is,” he admits, grudgingly, and gently shifts his grip to support my limp body better. I think I hear Daisy cluck her tongue at him as she slips in behind me, Matzi lowering my torso until I am laying in her lap.

I look up at her with a goofy grin. “Just couldn’t wait to get close to me, eh, Nurse Daisy?”

She hushes me, stroking my face with a look that tells me it was a closer call than I’d like to think about. I close my eyes and turn my cheek so it brushes her thigh, waiting for my body to sort itself out, and the orderlies that are now swarming the room to administer what chemical interventions they see fit to dole out, no arguments from me for once.

***

She looked amazing. The jewellery was fine silver filigree, and  looked amazing against her skin. Made her seem somehow otherworldly.  And that perfume. I found myself reaching out to cup her cheek with one palm while she fussed with my hair, trying to get it to lay flat. But this is what you got when curly hair grew out from chrome-dome.

“Maybe we should have gotten you a hat or a headscarf.” Frown lines marred her face, but made cute wrinkles on the bridge of her nose. For a moment I thought she wasn’t even aware of the touch of my skin and I couldn’t decide if I was relieved, or hurt. But before I could make up my mind, she nuzzled into my palm, her eyes closing momentarily.  She gave me a look that said ‘If only’. Or at least, that’s how I chose to interpret it.

***

I just relaxed in her arms until the orderlies decreed me stable, then they lifted me off the floor and into a chair. “Danni, what happened?” she finally asked. For a moment, I just looked at her blankly, as I reached back for the memories of the event. Then I felt the blood drain from my face, and thought I might puke again.

***

“At first it had just been sort of like playing a video game. One of the older, Immersion types where you hooked on the head gear and the World was laid over your reality. But nothing was quite the same. Things were just a little different. I could still hear Daisy as she encouraged me to walk around and investigate.” I was sweating as I recounted the experience, already anticipating the moment everything went bad. Hearing my own scream echoing in my ears.

“I kept noticing these lights. At first, I thought it was just part of this other plane. But then I noticed a pattern. They seemed almost to be coming and going, like the people in the hallways. For a minute I got thinking maybe it was just some sort of spectral after image, and then I got thinking along the lines of ghosts. I tried to get closer, and tried talking to one…” I remembered the sudden flood of sensations. “It was like someone had poured a bucket of emotions over my head. I tried to block it out, or at least filter it down to a tolerable level. It felt sort of like if a room full of people all suddenly started screaming at once.” I swallowed thickly as I tried to express the situation to a room full of laymen. Daisy handed me a glass of water and I drank, gratefully.

“That was why you were clutching at your head?” Matzi asked, calmer now.

“Ya, I wasn’t digging at the implant,” I said in my defence.

“You were trying to block out a sound that plugging your ears wouldn’t have stifled,” Daisy offered.

“Exactly.”

“What happened towards the end?” Matzi pressed, seeming like he wasn’t entirely sure, now that he’d asked the question, that he wanted to hear the answer.

I took another swallow of the water, suddenly wishing it were Vodka. “They noticed me noticing them. They swarmed me. The noise, if you will, got worse. They seemed to understand that they were causing me some discomfort, and most of them backed off. Or so I thought. I think, now, that maybe they were just clearing the way for the bigger light. When it approached me, the others got quieter, but they were all nervous. That was one thing that I could feel from all of them, at that point. I think they’d been largely startled, and curious until that point.”

I could see the bigger light like an afterimage burned into my retinas, if I closed my eyes, but it was seared into my memory, not my ocular nerves. I’d never felt such fear…

I opened my eyes and continued. “He -and I can’t tell you where the gender assignment came from- bent over until what I assume was his face was right in mine. I got the feeling he was holding his breath, and then it felt like my mind exploded.” I swallowed bile again as I tried to explain. “Such animosity, such loathing and violence as I’ve ever felt. And I did my stint in the maximum security facility. This was so much...more than that...It was like suffering through a thousand thousand torture sessions all in just a few moments time. My whole body screamed under the duress and then, I guess, so did I.”

“I hit the kill switch when you started screaming,” Daisy explained,  her voice reflecting a shadow of the fear in my own.

***

The Flesh had never bothered the One in previous times. No living One held memory of such an interaction. Oris doubted the council could truly find fault with his actions. After all, it was his job to Protect.

This particular Flesh was obviously somehow special, different than the others.... but what if more became just as special? What if all of the Flesh could see all of the One? Even the slight disruption of this Flesh’s thoughts entering the Web had had lasting affects. Several of the young One that had been within projecting distance had screamed when the Flesh had screamed, had had violent reactions to the Fear, just as the Flesh had. Perhaps he shouldn’t have projected so strongly until he had tested the perception of the Flesh. But how was he to know that it was as sensitive as an adolescent One? Shields like tissue paper. Fragile creature...

That sector had now been cleared of all non essential One, in the event that the Flesh chose to Observe again. Oris had been ordered to report to the Council for debriefing. He was hopeful that he would then be reassigned to monitor this Observer-Flesh. Oris would very much like a chance back inside that Flesh’s mind...The violence...The pain... There was much he could learn from this one...

***

With the briefing finally over, Daisy and I were dismissed while the Powers That Be deliberated on how to proceed with the Project. They still had me in velcro shackles holding my arms at my sides, but Daisy had managed to convince them that the ankle manacles weren't needed, that I was entirely too unsteady on my feet to warrant a flight risk. Nonetheless, we were still flanked by a rank of armed escorts, guiding us back to my temporary cell on site.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to beg them to let Daisy stay. She ensconced herself on the edge of my bunk with an air that said ‘go ahead, try to remove me’, and waved them out, dismissively. Her slight frame was deceptive. When she wanted too, she exuded an authority that made even these overgrown GI Joe’s second guess themselves and their orders.

But the slight hesitation was just at, a hesitation. They removed the shackles and ducked out of the room, leaving us in relative privacy. For all of our society’s enlightenments on mixed gender relations, they still didn't know what to do about leaving two females in a room who obviously shared an attraction. Had we been opposite sexes, they would have left a chaperone. Not that I was complaining, I was more than happy to be left to our own devices. And in other circumstances, those devices may not have been virtuous in nature. But right now, I was still frazzled. I just wanted to be held.

I curled up on my side in the bunk, and she pulled my head into her lap, petting my fledgling curls, and humming under her breath. It was the song my mother had sung me as a child when the nightmares started.

*****

Daisy’s voice broke through the reverie. “What do you remember?”

My brows knit, trying to remember where we’d left off in conversation, looking for the context of the question.

“I’m sorry, context; When you came to us, you didn't remember much, and even your file was sparse, much of it classified way above anyone at the prison’s clearance, and yet, they let you out of MaxSec...” The thought trails off. “You don't think....” A horrified expression crossed her features.

“What?” I leant up on one elbow, looking down at where she still laid, hair spread over the pillow like a halo.

“That they transferred you just so you could take part in the Program?”

“That seems like a pretty long game to be playing, even for The Powers That Be,” I replied, sceptical. “But I can’t pretend the thought hasn’t occurred to me.” I sighed wiping and hand over my face, and laying back down, curling into the warmth of her body. “But to be honest, I remember plenty, just nothing useful. I remember the blood, the screams, the terror in their eyes. I remember the exhilaration, the excitement, the sheer need to keep going.”

My stomach turned and I paled in embarrassment, bracing myself for her to pull away. When she shifted, my eyes popped open in surprise. She wasn't pulling away she was holding me closer, pressing her lips to the top of my head, and humming the song again. I turned to face her, burying my face against her chest and clinging to her like a lifeline. I did something I didn't think i could do anymore, I cried.

It was the kind of crying that leaves your soul feeling follow and your head stuffed with cotton. Feeling like you've got glass shards in your eyes and a vice on the back of your neck. It also left the front of her coated it tears and snot, but we were both beyond caring. She just rocked me until I could loosen my grip, then she reached for a glass of water and sat me up, helping my unsteady hands grip the glass as I replenished the font of water I’d just loosed. I gulped it down, gratefully. She set the glass aside, and sat up enough to removed her overcoat, tossing it aside to dry, and pulled me close again.

It would be lights out any moment now. The thought tugged a smile from the corner of my mouth. She was staying. A wave of happiness and relief swept over me, and I felt calm, well and truly calm, for the first time in what felt like years.