Observation
Nurses Chapel and Corby looked at each other across the patients hospital bed, well bed it hardly was more a floating life support and environmental platform. Alien in design the dam spiders had designed it for them as they said “quite low tech but it will suffice. Its purpose was supposed to be only for critically ill people while they healed but the company making them had found the shared dream making element built in for comatose patients adapted well as a virtual world interface and the sales of this gamer table had gone ballistic. All around the world people were jacking into these things to play games. Games in virtual worlds indistinguishable from the real world for the participants, Sadly more were ending up as patients or dead after they died or became ill because they spent to long in the virtual worlds, other went mad not being able to tell the difference after a few months off constant immersion.
Well thought Chapel at least this one is doing as designed the real McCoy as it were, looking a lot like an old star-trek medical set the person lying there the display proclaimed was one John Starch. Reading the output she said to Corby this looks good his reformed brain is working and he is engaging the simple world we have placed him into. Yes Corby commented its every mans wet dream world no wonder men do so well in recovery, much better than women with the same injuries. Yet commented Chapel the woman that pre choose this world to recover do so as well physically. Oh yes scowled, Chapel except they grow to be totally subservient to men. Whatever its not for us to judge said Corby. They both looked at the screen showing output from the neural sensors showing John walking down a quayside and ogling a cage full of naked girls while a slightly plump but tall female followed him as she had no option because of the chain attached to the collar around her neck and his belt.
Well Aquilah Johnson does seem to work well with these guys she has had nine full recoveries is she gets this one its ten out off ten. Thats her quota she wont be allowed to do any more. Like she needs to snorted Chapel, its $400,000 for each successful recovery she gets paid on top of her pay, then THEN every single guy has begged her to marry them. This guys a multi millionaire if he is her tenth success and he follows the pattern, he is going to want to marry her and there is no reason she shouldn't. Mark my words she is going to be very rich and happy she is basically programming these guys to adore her. Bitch, She spat! I mean look at her the fat little freak, they looked at the assistant therapist Aquilah Johnson` 39 years old, no legs and needed a wheel chair to move around in. Of course the new tech could re-grow her legs, lost in a freak motorcycle accident 20 years at the age off 19 ago when a bike had been hit by a car and knocked of the road at high speed and into the roadside bench she was sitting waiting for her boyfriend. The motorcycle had slammed into her and caught her legs between it and the bench all but tearing them off. The surgeons had amputated them a a few weeks later as gangrene had started to set in. The boyfriend she said never even came to see her he had been late that day had he been on time she would have been elsewhere at the time.
Her mother had blamed him and nearly ended up in jail after trying to run him down but it had settled eventually. Her mum had been too busy with her to worry about the very ex boyfriend. As she recovered she had made a good recovery and at first volunteered in the hospital and then, taken up training as a nurse specializing in trauma recovery for patients much like she herself had been, then her mother had gone down with cancer and the procedures and endless drugs had taken all their money, Aquilah had given up her job to look after her Mum but six years later she died from complications requiring a drug that they were not able to purchase as the money was all gone.
Returning to work she had found herself no longer qualified and only able to work as a nurses aid, then a doctor had asked to to become involved in a project with virtual worlds aim at combating clinical depression in patients as they stared at ceilings for months as they re-grew body parts in the tanks the alien tech healed the bodies but people suffered and went mad from depression and regressed into vegetative states as the bodies healed. The money was better and she found in the virtual world she was able to walk, dance and do all the things she had always wanted to do. The neural interface made it completely real and she immersed herself there, eventually the doctor pulled her from the program for her own sanity as she said.
Three weeks later a knock on her door and two army officers walked into her life with an offer to join the army as a full Lieutenant Colonel to do the same work for ten times the money. The catch a ten year minimum term off service and she had to be available to one patient at a time 24 hours a day, mission time they called it. The sweetener a army commission, ten missions and then she would go in the tank to re-grow her legs the army would then give her a new identity to hide who she was because of the highly classified nature of the work the operatives in the tanks were engaged in and reassignment to a training facility and promotion to a full Colonel.
No comments:
Post a Comment