Chapter 4

Tetsuo opened the doors to the medical facility to find Todd Callaway and Dr. Kobayashi standing in the hallway yelling at each other. Several people were standing around listening but tried to look like they were working.

"You have no idea what that will do to her!" Dr Kobayashi yelled. "You can't just cut her off without testing it first!"

"So how the hell do you suggest I test it," Todd yelled back. "You have another person I can try it on?"

Tetsuo stepped up to the two men and said, "Gentlemen, please." The two of them looked at Tetsuo and paused for a moment. "Can we go somewhere a little more private?" he said, indicating Todd's office down the hall.

The two men silently followed Tetsuo into the office before starting all over again. "I will not allow you to experiment on a person like that!" the doctor started.

"I'm trying to save her life!" Todd replied. "Or have you forgotten that this is killing her?"

"What is going on?" Tetsuo said loud enough to get their attention. "I got a call that I should come down here and this is what I have to deal with?" The two men looked at him and both attempted to explain at the same time. Tetsuo just held up his hand to stop them before looking at Dr. Kobayashi, saying, "Please explain."

"He wants to cut off the flow of energy to her," he simply stated.

Tetsuo looked at Todd in surprise, "You have figured out how to do that?"

"Yes, but he won't let me set up the equipment to do it!" As he said this he pointed to the doctor, using all four fingers. He had heard that this was some sort of insult in Japanese culture. By the reaction that he got, he must have gotten it right. Dr Kobayashi turned red and stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind himself.

Tetsuo suspected that Todd had done that on purpose, but since he was American, he wasn't sure and decided to ignore it. Instead he wanted to know about Alice. "Are you able to stop the energy transfer without harming her?" he asked.

"That I don't know yet," Todd explained. "We've been able to determine how she's getting the energy. It similar to the portals she's generating. There seems to be a permanent portal between her and the singularity she's pulling energy through."

"So what will happen when she is no longer able to draw energy?" Tetsuo asked.

"What I suspect will happen is that she will be able to wake up on her own, without opening any more portals," Todd explained. "The only issue I see, is that we don't know if the energy is doing anything else to her, or if she has become dependent on it somehow."

"So what is the worst case for her?" Tetsuo asked.

"Worst case would be that she dies," he said bluntly. "But she's dying anyway. Every day she's a little bit weaker, even with your bio elementals repairing the damage that's been caused. I'm afraid that she'll open a portal one of these days and it'll kill her."

There was an awkward silence in the room for a moment before Tetsuo finally said, "Get your equipment ready. I'll have a talk with Dr. Kobayashi and inform him of my decision."

Todd looked a bit guilty as he said, "Sarah is already putting it in place. I was attempting to ... distract the doctor." Seeing the expression on Tetsuo's face he quickly added, "We would never have turned it on without talking with you first."

"I had better go find him then," Tetsuo said as he left the office.

Sarah, Tetsuo and Dr. Kobayashi watched through the observation room window as Todd made a few final adjustments to the field generator in the corner of the room,. It was a crude device sitting on a small tripod with no case and the electronic boards exposed. It looked a little like an old style video camera with a large gold colored lens. Instead of an optical lens the working end of the device was coated with gold. Todd finally plugged in the large power cable of the field generator and left the room. A moment later he came into the observation room with a remote control unit and an eCom in his hand.

"Okay, we're about to turn on the field," he said into the eCom. "I want you to tell me if the power output level changes, and by how much." Then he hit a button on the unit to turn on the speaker phone option and placed it on one of the benches. He then asked the people in the room, "Is everyone ready?" After getting a nod from each person he said, "Okay, let's do this."

"Power output is currently at 73%. Only slightly higher than normal for this time of day," the voice said from the eCom.

"In 3... 2... 1 ... GO!" At the instant Todd said go, he hit the button on the remote. Several lights on the field generator in the room came on and started to flash. A pale blue bubble started to form in the room and surrounded the bed and most of the monitoring equipment in the room.

"Okay, levels are dropping. We're at 72.5%... 72.0... 71.5... 71.0 ... leveling off at 70.7%," the voice on the eCom said.

"Great, does that match the power usage on the city grid?" Todd asked.

"Power usage is reading to within .01% of expected output. That could be power loss in conversion, or a calibration error," the voice answered.

"Perfect. Let me know if that changes," Todd said before hitting the button to disconnect the call. "It looks like you did it again, Sarah." She just smiled and checked the readings on her tablet.

"What do we do now?" asked Tetsuo

"We wait," answered Todd. "There's not much more we can do at the moment."

Dr. Kobayashi was looking at his own tablet, checking the read out from the monitoring equipment. "We have a problem," he said. Just as he was about to show the readout to the rest of them, an alarm started sounding in the room.

"Room one, code blue. Room one, code blue," came from an overhead speaker. Dr. Kobayashi burst out of the observation room and ran through the hall to the room next door. He entered the room almost the same time as the crash team. They all stopped at the edge of the force field and looked through the window at the three in the observation room.

"Go ahead, you can just step through it," Todd almost yelled into the intercom. The doctor was the first to move and stepped through the force field without any noticeable effect. The rest of the team was only a half a step behind him. One placed a mask over Alice's face and started to force air into her lungs, while another started CPR.

Another member of the crash team appeared to be a bio elemental. She looked at Dr. Kobayashi and said, "Her bio energy is all messed up and I can't get her heart started."

Dr Kobayashi looked directly at Todd and yelled, "Turn it off, NOW!" Todd looked at Tetsuo who just nodded. He hit the button on the remote and the pale blue field faded out. The eCom on the bench started to ring and Todd hit the talk button. An excited voice on the other end could be heard as he held it to his ear.

"Yeah, I know. We had to turn off the field generator," he explained. "We'll have to try again later." He hung up before the person on the other end could ask any more questions. Todd looked at the people in the room working on Alice and said quietly to himself, "Please, work!"

The elemental put her hand on the shoulder of the person doing CPR to get him to stop. "It's okay, her heart is beating on its own now." They all stopped working and stepped back for a moment. The alarms had all turned off and the readings on the monitors slowly started to go back to normal. Todd finally let out the breath he didn't realize he had been holding.