Chapter 187: This is the Technology

“You will want to answer that.”

What the fuck? Is this some AI controlled mind game after all?

“Where the hell did you take Paula? No one knows anything. All I was able to find out is that they poured her body onto a stretcher and then she vanished in a type of helicopter no one had seen before. It never showed up on radar,” Steve yelled frantically into the phone.

Where did I get such a commanding voice? I’m sure I could make Mother Superior do what she I told her.

I relayed what I saw in my goggles, “Shut up, get back onto the sidewalk and don’t move until told to do so. No questions.”

I don’t know if Steve did more than shutting up.

Less than five seconds later I heard someone saying, “What in the fucking hell is that and where did it come from?” followed by “You didn’t see anything. Nothing just landed, making no sound at all, to pick up the father of the girl driving. Aliens may exist, but you didn’t see a anything take off, with no air disturbance at all, and vanish right before your eyes. Understood?”

The mystery plane picked up Steve. Things are making more sense now.

“You need to come with me now. Please keep up,” a very pretty redhead said from beside me.

I knew she was one of the man-in-the-machine’s androids the second she took off running. Only a human being enhanced by converting energy, directly into their muscles, would be able to run this fast or this far without becoming winded.

We stopped in a room where I saw Jon and Jan wearing surgical gowns sitting on a stainless-steel table with their backs to each other for support. Both had pairs of the special man-in-the-machine goggles tapped directly in the place in heads. I expected to find the man-in-the-machine in my head too, but I didn’t.

Someone else was there though and a voice said, “I promised you that I would always be here in your brain with you whenever you needed me. Take their hands, close your eyes, and let go. All will become clear when the time is right David. Now is not that time.”

How? This shouldn’t be possible. This woman can’t have connected into my mind again. The place in my head would never let her.

As soon as I was holding each twin’s hand, they reached around to hold their twin’s hand as well. Once I allowed myself to relax, I could feel a lot of things going between the twins and I, with no control over it at all. Before I started to fight it, everything finished. They jumped up and hugged me. Some robots whisked them off to where they dressed in the fully-seal clean suits like the people on a TV special wore when making silicon wafers and disk drives. A backpack connected into tubes on the back of their suits.

“Each required the some of your shielding abilities to do what is needed of them. They aren’t as versatile, or strong, to keep them from being able to use their new abilities against you. Your synthetic friend has uploaded all the knowledge needed for them to be the world two best microscopic surgeons, even if they won’t perform surgery on Trudy or Annie directly. Go to your friend Paula. She has injuries only you can see. Not even Jon or Jan can gain those abilities. In places robots can’t repair I will be here to help you,” the voice told me.

I was suddenly very calm and relaxed.

Steve appeared in the room outside the one I was in currently and he was close to pulsing. The man-in-the-machine detected it as well. An android pushed a needle into his neck that none of his abilities could block from affecting him. They guided him into a wheelchair and replaced his light-blocking goggles with a pair like mine. A small electric shock from the android awakened him.

“We don’t have time to do this right now. Don’t try to fight the goggles connecting to the place in your head. There is single ghost in all these shells. Humans don’t have the technology. They can’t rebuild her,” I told explained. “He is the technology. I’m going to show him what he needs to fix what he can for Paula’s body. My special friends will guide me in fixing what technology can’t. When I connected Paula to a pair of these goggles, she wasn’t only learning information from the only authoritative source of that knowledge in the world. Each of her climaxes permitted my electrical friend to back up her brain, so to speak. He can explain. I don’t yet understand any of it. You will get that knowledge, voluntarily or via other means.”

A lot of information flashed through my brain in the blink of eye.

Annie and Paula were laying, limply, with all sorts of robotic, pencil-thick things pushed into their bodies. Jon and Jan were working their hardest on Annie to shield her body the way I had done for Crystal on the way here. Both were struggling to get the amount, and types, of energy they needed to power their shields.

Paula. Well Paula would be technically brain dead, if her brain wasn’t mostly goo. Electrical pulses forced each chamber of her heart to beat in the correct order and rate. Her breathing controlled by a ventilator. There wasn’t even any residual energy anywhere in her skull.

How can I think her having no brain is only no bigger of a deal than a scraped knee? It isn’t some minor injury.

If knowing her brain wasn’t enough, I saw her skull held in place by only skin and muscles. The impact of the crash demolished her top four vertebrae. She had four other places where she had broken her back. Five of those had severed her spinal cord there too.

Is Steve able to handle seeing this? Will he even see the full extent of her injuries?

Putting a hand on his shoulder I told him, “Jon and Jan are doing all they can to guide the robots into repairing the most critical of Annie and Trudy’s injuries. They are doing remarkably well trying to pull in all the energy types they need, but their bodies can’t sustain that for very long. Paula is brain dead. The accident knocked her skull off her spine, her brain is mush, and her spinal cord doesn’t even connect to anything in her head anymore. They are keeping her alive by thousands of wires inserted into her organs by the robots. Our digital friend knows what to do to keep her body alive. You, Anna, and Jane must ensure you feed them the energy they need. I can’t do anything to help them myself. I’ve done all I can. I don’t know if it will be hour, months, or possibly years, before you see me again. I won’t come out unless there is nothing left to try to help Paula. Right now, there is so much that I will do that you can’t even comprehend. I don’t consciously understand even a tiny part of it myself. Can you please call my parents to let them know I’m here with Paula and I won’t leave her side, even if that means I must create a fully synthetic human brain, at the atomic level, that contains every single bit of her as she was before the accident. Please don’t try to disturb me, others will be guiding me.”

“There’s someone in my head but it’s not me.”

“Relax David,” the man-in-the-machine said directly into my head. “We are transitioning your body back into a state like when you were in a coma. I have spared you the indignity of having a feeding tube inserted, your being catheterized, and having a fecal matter removal system placed in your anus. Unlike during your coma, I will control your nutrition and exercise regimen. I will maintain your body better than you are able to yourself. Your body will never have any nutritional deficiencies. You will not need use of your body for what you shall be doing. The triplets are in route. Their sister allowed me to use you as a conduit to return them to their full abilities, at least temporarily. I also reactivated some things within their sister’s mind.”

I felt him probing my brain for the exact locations to locate a physical connection into each triplet’s brain. Seems this will allow them to access the bonds between neurons in dead and damaged brain tissue, at least for a short period of time after the associated injury. My brain would get regular updates on Crystal, Annie, and Trudy while I focused on Paula.

When I was again able to open my eyes, I saw that I was having something put all over my body.

Is this what it looks like when the Borg assimilate someone? They seem to be fitting me with a full robotic exoskeleton.

I watched my arm lift, stretch out, and feel the strain on my muscles as I slowly curled my hand toward my face. That was all I got to see before a huge metal robot pushed me off as I sat on my metal throne, where all the tubes coming from my body connect.

Holy fucking hell! That is Paula? How is that possible?

The robots guided me into an operating room.

On one wall was the airlock, the other three walls were floor to ceiling windows. On the table was a big bloody meat sack. The best I could come up with to compare it to would be a life-sized Voodoo doll full of pins. All that kept me from busting through the windows, to get to her, were the large tubes carrying blood into her body via two stainless-steel tubes. At the far end of the table was a bottle connection to suction. Marks delineated liters, ounces, and pints. It only showed as having two units of blood in it right now and that looked like what they were putting back into her body.

Instead of taking me in, they wheeled me down a hallway.

Holy shit! I look like robot with all these metal bars, levels, joints, springs, and wires everywhere.

I never expected to find myself hoisted into the aid by the exoskeleton or lowered into something that looked like gelatin. The place in my head stopped my breathing and decreased my heart rate to five beats per minute while I was in the gel. Once the stuff they put me into set, they carefully pulled the gel stuff from my body.

Only once they ensured I didn’t have any for the gel on me anywhere, they put me into a big, round tank. Down around my feet I noticed a far ring with thousands of tiny nozzles facing into the center of the big ring. It began hissing before starting to filling the space under me with some sort of molten, rubbery, plastic-looking glop.

If not for my shield I would burn to a crisp.

The ring moved up faster than I thought. On the monitor across from me I saw the catheter tube relocated through various metal braces around my waist. Once secured, with a bit of slack, the ring moved up over my balls and dick. It continued moving up my body until it was below my armpits. Robots adjusted my exoskeleton to have my arms up and facing out in front of me. My eyes got a pair of bug-eye lens over then. They looked like the ones people use when using a tanning booth. They pulled my head back, pushed tubes in my nose and down my throat, which fit into special channels in the exoskeleton. I had a pair of earbuds pushed into my ears before it got to spraying into my ears.

Is that my hair burning away? How can I even be smelling it with this rubber stuff already up past my nose?

“Yes,” came the voice in my head. “ I am communicating with the man in all of the machines. Having a feeding tube in your side would pull free when exercising. We relocated it down your throat and into your stomach instead. You’re now intubated to give your ninety percent oxygen. The tubes within your nose are dual function. They keep your sinuses moistened and extract mucus.”

“Only the extensive tubing coming out of your external covering differentiates you from the other androids here. Extensive tubbing in the suit ensures that you are cleaned properly and removes any waste. Your hands are the only parts not covered in this material. They have a specially formulated latex polymer. They will be kept sterile at all times,” he told me.

“It may take a long time before her brain can process the sensation, but on a very primal level she will soon know that she is safe and you are here by her side,” a woman’s voice said in my head. “ it is the primal functions that we must first restore, before we can see what else remains.”

The main the machine told me, via the ear buds, “I will provide the remote hands, tool, and anything else you may need, if such a thing exists or can be quickly fabricated. We are, literally, the bleeding edge of medical science.”

I sent mom and dad pictures of Paula as she looked once they removed her clothes, as she was too injured for the automated machines used on Crystal. I sent another once the robots shaved, washed, and sterilized her skin with Betadine.

I can see why they said they poured her on to a stretcher.

No one had sent me any of the pictures from the car before the fire department extracted the girls. I saw them the first time as I was emailing them out. Whatever hit her car caved in the from the middle of the driver’s side passenger door to the front of her car. Annie’s door caved inward and pushed her through the back of her seat into the trunk.

If Paula’s car hadn’t been heavily reinforced to take more damage than a regular car, not of the girls would be alive.

“Please call the school to let them know I will be taking an extended leave of absence along with Crystal, Annie, and Trudy,” I quipped as I started the email to my parents. “I have no idea how long it will take, but I’m not leaving Paula’s side until nothing more can be done for her. This private hospital has the most advanced medical equipment, staff, and robotic surgeons in the known world. Trudy, Crystal, and Annie are here as well. All three are alive but kept unconscious while the hospital evaluates the extent of all their extensive injuries. I’ve not seen Annie, but they informed me that she was not as bad as Paula, but that is all I know at this time. The three of them are in the best hands anywhere on Earth. Paula’s hand is in mine. For the sake of his own sanity, Steve can’t get in to see Paula. They are keeping him busy helping with the others, where he can. Trudy’s mom is going to need a lot of support. If needed you can let her take my room. If Molly doesn’t yet know the full details of what has happened, please do not tell her. There is nothing she can do here for them. She best to stay home to help from there.”

My last picture to them was me encased in my rubber suite with tubes going into every inch of it. Someone had airbrushed my face onto the latex at some point. The picture showed me sitting on top of something which looked like a chair resting on top of a cart, with all the tubing connecting into the back of it. It was clear I was holding what remained of Paula’s left hand.

With that done I felt myself using the place in my head to scan ever hundredth of a millimeter of Paula’s body. I don’t know how long the scan took, but in my head, I saw every bit of damage from her broken bones all the way down to the blood cells from the burst capillaries under her small toe. The man in the machine also had this data.

“David we must begin the work to reattach her skull to her spine, so we can reconnect her brain to her spinal cord. I have enormous amounts of details regarding the most basic structures of the brain required to sustain life. These develop early while in utero. Differences in the areas, which we will repair first, are negligible across all races and ethnicities. I have excluded from the data those with tumors, injuries, diseases, or other unnatural maladies affecting these areas,” the man-in-the-machine told me. “Electrical stimulation and artificial regulated blood flow can only maintain her organs before they have damage which cannot be reversed. The brain does more than just provide electrical impulses. As you do what only you can in her brain, the robotic surgeons will be removing the top half of her skull as they attempt to staunch the bleeding in her brain.”

I watched as the robots used very finely focused lasers to make the incisions that would allow them to begin cataloging and then removing each piece of her crushed skull.

He told me that Annie’s brain was swelling up inside her skull. Micro incisions cut unfused the cranial structures to allow her skull to expand. His analysis indicated that she did not need a shunt installed to release the pressure. I would have to reconnect some of her neurons at some point.

Once again, I found myself guided by the triplet’s older sister. She used the place in my head to show me what I needed to do to start trying to fix Paula’s brain.

You need to being using whatever resources you can access to be creating her a synthetic brain in case I am unable to fix hers, I thought to the-man-in-the-machine.