“That was close!” he said to the patient, a smile of relief across his face. He moved the bed closer to the patient in the bed next to her and transferred the monitor wires over to him. The heart beat was lost for only half a second before it continued at a steady rhythm.
Jason exhaled and ran his hands through his hair. He moved to empty the needle into the drip when Core’s words rang through him. He felt his body grow cold as he realized how close he had come to killing the woman.
“Idiot! Slow down,” he reprimanded himself, taking a couple of deep breaths.
He had almost injected the liquid into her arm, instead of directly into her heart. Core said that if the heart and brain were converted first, everything after would be mere formality.
Jason jiggled his shoulders and closed his eyes, lifting his head to the ceiling. He looked down at the woman and his mind brought up a three dimensional model of the woman, which hovered half a meter above the bed. It showed her vitals, stats and internal organs. He could watch as her heart pumped, her chest expanding and contracting as she breathed. Then he inserted the needle slightly past the sternum of the real body, into the bottom edge of the patient’s chest, and emptied the contents of the syringe into her heart.
Immediately her body went into convulsions—the heart on the model glowed and pulsed red. Jason suddenly realized what his body had gone through to change. A horrified look came over his face. What would it feel like to be conscious through that? He felt glad that the woman was brain-dead.
He searched around the head of the convulsing body for a place to insert the second syringe. He decided to do it through the mouth, like Core had with the mouse.
He forced the woman’s mouth open and pressed the needle through the soft part at the back. He felt the needle hit bone. He pulled it out and stuck it in again, this time angling the needle a bit more towards the roof of her mouth. The syringe pushed in all the way to the base, and he depressed the plunger to empty the liquid into the base of her brain.
The brain in the model now also glowed with pulsating red light.
That should do it, he thought. Now he would just have to wait for the transformation. He watched the model above the bed and saw as the serum spread throughout her body. Wherever it flowed, the model started glowing red. Only seven hours and fifty-nine minutes to go....
He pushed the beds back to where he had found them and made sure her body was securely fastened on the bed, pulling the sheet over her to hide the restraints from view. He opened the curtains, leaving enough for one edge to obscure the patient’s body from any passers-by. He then sat back down and watched.
An hour later, the woman’s body began to relax from its violent convulsions. The patient had a reddish foam around her mouth, and blood ran out of her eyes, ears and nose. He wiped it away with a disinfecting wipe he had found in the supply closet.
When the wall clock read 2:30 a.m., there were still five and a half hours to go before the process was complete. But he knew that the hospital would be swarming with doctors on their daily rounds well before then.
He decided to check the duty roster on the hospital server.
He thought about making a connection to the hospital server and felt the familiar tinge, but nothing happened. He tried it again—he felt the tinge, but he could not access the server. A frown clouded his face. Why couldn’t he connect?
It must be protected by a firewall, he realized. A dreary feeling came over him—he could even smell and taste his disappointment, over the rank odour of disinfectant.
He wondered what Core would do...she would have hacked the server and gained access in a mere second. But Jason did not know how to hack—not using his body, anyway. But he tried. He formed a mental image of the server and made it the size of a building, protected by a wall of fire and guards. He looked at the scene, and then placed a virtual avatar to stand outside the firewall. He made the avatar attack the wall of fire first by spraying it with fire-retardant foam. The fire flared up again whenever he stifled it, and he could only get parts to temporarily stop burning before they flared up again. He continued to spray the foam retardant onto the fire source. The wall stayed up, but patches of fire were put out. It might be enough for him to get through.
Jason dressed his avatar in a fire suit and opened the foam sprayer wide; the flames flickered and died in a patch. He dashed through at full speed. Once inside the firewall he stopped, and the guards started attacking him with guns—bullets whizzed past his head. He dropped the fire suit and imagined his avatar clothed in black. He wore a long coat, just like the character in the movie The Matrix. A smile broke over his face. Even if this didn’t work, he had just found the best game simulation ever. He took out his nine millimetre machine gun, running and firing at the same time. Hundreds of guards descended on him. The path he was running on exploded all around him as the guards fired their rounds.
He saw everything happen in slow motion as the bullets flew past his head and body. The men ran towards him at the speed of slugs.... He opened fire and they dropped like rag dolls and rolled on the ground. Then he jumped into the air, slowly making a three hundred and sixty degree turn while he floated there. His guns spat bullets at an alarming rate, and he mowed the guards down like a lawnmower cuts grass.
When Jason touched down, a path of destruction lay behind him. Pulverized guards lay scattered around him. The guns were red-hot, with smoke slowly rising off the barrels. He walked to the building-sized server, opened the door and felt the tinge in the back of his head as the hospital server responded to his queries. Jason threw his hands into the air and fell back on the bed he sat on, kicking the air.
“Yes...awesome!” He bounced around in joy, feeling the adrenaline pump through him from having hacking his first server...Core’s way. Then he sobered up and pulled the duty roster for today. Doctor Betty Summers had the day off. He sat back on the bed, relieved.
He kept the door to the ward locked—it would be a close shave, but he might make it. He realized that the woman’s conversion might not take the same amount of time that his did. He was 95 kg and very tall, after all. The female on the bed weighed only 55 kg and was a lot shorter than he was. If the serum worked by linear progression, it should take only four hours and thirty-eight minutes more for her to complete the transformation. Then he would have another ten minutes to upload Core, if he could figure out how to connect and get her transferred. He might have some time to spare.
A knock on the door brought him back to reality.
“Hello, is there someone in here? Why is this door locked?” a voice said. Jason looked up and saw a nurse standing at the window. Crap! It was not time yet—they couldn’t come in now! It was still way too early.... Adrenaline sped through his system and a cold numbness filled his joints. The knocking stopped and he heard her walk away—no doubt she was fetching a key to the door.
Jason saw no alternative. The body’s heart and brain had already converted, so it would be capable of maintaining organ function at this point. He quickly took her off the ventilator and other life support equipment. He watched as the body stopped breathing for a couple of seconds, and then the cerebellum took control and she inhaled with a shuddering gasp. Jason breathed a sigh of relief and quickly unfastened the patient from the bed, picked the shaking and convulsing body up, and slung her over his shoulder. He grabbed a couple of blankets and the restraints.
An emergency exit stairwell was located at the back of this ward. He ran towards door and flung it open. The stairwell was silent; each movement reverberated through the emptiness. He walked up one flight and quickly wrapped the patient in the blankets he had grabbed before fastening her to the railings to keep her safe from hurting herself. He returned to the room and unlocked the door that opened from the ward to the hallway.
A pair of footsteps clopped briskly towards him down the hall. At super speed, Jason cleared all signs of his presence from the room and corrected the mess in the storage room. He shifted into the sh
ape of the female patient, taking her monitor wires, which he had affixed to the patient neighbouring her, and attaching them to his own body. He also attached the life support equipment that had kept the patient’s body alive. He lay still as he heard a key in the door.
The monitors beeped a steady, soft rhythm in the background as Jason assumed his position. He directed his heart beat and lungs to perform as slowly as a brain-dead person’s should. Then he closed his eyes and opened his senses, building the room in his mind. Two nurses entered the room, looking around suspiciously.
“Lord! I must be going crazy—this door was locked!” he heard the first nurse say in surprise. She was very thin and had a purple smell of soap and flowers.
“It must have caught on something. It only felt like it was locked,” said the other, who was larger and smelled of oranges.
Still, they walked around the room, checking the charts and monitors.
“Everything is normal,” said the skinny nurse. “Doctor Swanson said they are taking this young lady to the ventilators this morning at ten. The court order came through yesterday.” She had her hand on his. “It is so sad. I can’t get used to it—a whole family taken out by a drunk trucky!”
“I know! They were so young...it makes you want to cry,” the large nurse said, anger in her voice.
They left the room. The large nurse made sure that the door was working normally by opening and closing it a couple of times.
“I swear, it felt like it was locked!” the skinny nurse complained. The larger one started to laugh at her.
Their footsteps disappeared down the ward.
He sat up and put the monitors back on the gentlemen in the next bed before running to retrieve the brain-dead female from the stairwell. When he arrived, the body was motionless. His brain immediately scanned for life signs, and the virtual image of her body appeared in his vision. It showed him that her heartbeat was steady and her blood pressure normal. Her brain glowed orange and showed minor activity, but not enough to tell whether she had awoken from the dead.
The transformation was complete, and it had taken far less time than he expected it to. The transformation difference by size was not a linear curve, therefore—it was exponential. A smile spread on Jason’s face. Finally, a bit of luck, he thought. He took the patient back to the room and lay her down on the bed. He felt butterflies in his stomach as he sat next to her.
Jason breathed steadily and made a connection to her brain. He felt the touch as he linked to her, but did not feel a presence on the other side like he had with Core. It felt like opening a door to a dark and empty void. He breathed a little easier, glad to find that uploading Core would not “kill” the brain-dead woman. There was no “person” left in her.
He thought about Core, bringing up the data associated with her program. Then, he pushed her into the body. The upload started, the counter in his mind counting down from ten minutes. Only minutes now.... Jason was filled with glee and terror all at once. What if it didn’t work? What if it did!
He could not stay still. Maintaining the connection with the woman, he paced up and down the room, nervously watching the seconds tick by.
After ten minutes, the download counter disappeared, and Jason gasped. He turned towards the woman with wide eyes. She should be waking up any second now. He held his breath as he watched for any sign of her waking.
Her brain was not empty anymore—he felt the presence of information.... But she did not open her eyes. He checked her pulse. It was normal. A cold weakness radiated from his heart. What if he did it wrong? Maybe he should try again—just clear her mind, and do the upload again.
When you install a computer, you have to make the main drive bootable. Else it was just an expensive doorstop. Maybe it was something as simple as that. Jason took a deep, disappointed breath, and let it out slowly. His face became emotionless as he cleared the woman’s brain of information and returned it to the empty state. After twenty seconds, her side of the connection was just an empty room once more.
This time, Jason thought about her brain and saw Core occupying the new body, booting into the body. He felt stupid for thinking of her as a computer, but this was all new to him.
The ten minutes felt like a lifetime. It ticked by slowly, a second at a time...six hundred seconds. He paced up and down the room, fumbling with his hands, waiting for the timer to reach zero. He adjusted all the monitors to the same angle and tidied the bed spreads around the brain-dead victims. The woman’s brain again filled with Core’s presence.
The timer reached zero and Jason held his breath, looking for a sign of life...but nothing came. The woman remained motionless, and devoid of presence.
He bashed the bed with both fists. “Shit!” he cried. Fear and panic built up inside him. He wanted to rip the walls off the building. He probably could, but it would do him more harm than good. His worst fears were being realized. The download had not been complete...Core was lost. They shut her down before he could save all of her....
He threw a pillow into the wall with such force that it left a dent in the plaster. This can’t be it! he thought. I must have made a mistake. He sat down and worked through the process once more. His mind showed him a three-dimensional playback of the process of the woman’s conversion. He had injected her. The convulsions began. He skipped forward to the part where he put her back on the bed, after the nurses left and the conversion was complete. He played around with this for a second, reversing and forwarding the scene. He could move the viewpoint, and watched it from every possible angle. For a moment, he was so delighted with this discovery that he almost forgot to feel miserable. For a moment, he just played with his memories. And then he remembered.
He recalled every bit of the conversation he’d had when Core told him they were shutting her down. She said that he needed to download a copy of her into his mind...she created a snapshot of herself for him to download. The memory hit him so hard that he fell backwards onto the bed, hitting his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Idiot!” he said aloud. The snapshot would still be available, even if Core had been deactivated. It would be in her memory. The ticking of the clock on the wall made him look up. It was close to six o’clock. In less than an hour, this ward would be visited by doctors on their rounds. No time to do it from the hospital, he thought. If he could get back to the facility and somehow start Core’s system, then he would be able to get the snapshot she made and download it again, or...a smile slowly spread across his face as he sat upright. Maybe he could get Core online for long enough to download her consciousness directly into the body. A flicker of hope flared up, and he felt the gloom drop from his shoulders.
Infiltration
Jason recalled the hospital map, seeking the fastest way out of this ward. The stairwell he had stored the woman’s body in went all the way down to the basement car park. It was part of the emergency exit plan that Core had told him about during his first escape. Of course, the staircase he had used was on the other side of the hospital...but the principle was the same. Jason picked up the patient and threw her body over his shoulder. To him, she weighed about as much as a pillow. Jason turned and made for the exit, when he heard the nurses walking towards the ward. They must have heard the pillow he’d thrown against the wall. Jason felt a tinge of regret, followed by a surge of adrenaline as he raced into the stairwell, descending the stairs four at a time. When he reached the bottom of the stairwell, the door opened into a gloomy, dimly-lit underground car park.
The floor was already starting to fill with water from the downpour outside. The sewer system was full, and the drains were overflowing into the lot. Jason tried to remember if he’d ever seen a storm like this one, before...almost in answer to his thoughts, he heard thunder rolling outside. How poetic....
Jason walked through ankle-deep water towards the onramp. He shifted into the shape of a small car the size of a Mini Cooper. The patient lay across the front seats. He extruded arms from the roof of the tiny car and used t
hem to pull the woman upright and fasten her seatbelt. A series of very thin—almost invisible—straps lashed over her thighs and neck to keep her in a natural, upright position. A small arm grew from the neck rest and wrapped around her head, then morphed into a pair of sunglasses. The dangling arms from the roof lifted her hands to the steering wheel—gloves melted out from the wheel and locked her fingers in place. Then the roof arms melted away.
Someone looking into the car would not notice a motionless body in it—they would see a woman sitting behind the steering wheel. Jason drove out the parking lot into the waterfall of rain and turned right, heading towards the Pacific motorway.
The roads were empty, especially with all the rain. Jason passed only a few cars—those just coming off the graveyard shift and those heading in to relieve them. The fog had lifted, but darkness engulfed the city in its wake. He headed south on the Pacific highway, keeping to the speed limit. The last thing he needed was to be pulled over by the cops. He did not want to explain why an unconscious woman was driving a tiny car down the highway...in fact, he could not. A talking car would not go down well with the local police force. Jason sped in the direction of Sydney, battered by rain. When he reached the Logan fly-off, he followed it until it connected with the Logan going west. Twenty minutes later, he reached the Stapleton turnoff and watched the streams flowing next to the road. They turned to rivers as pools of water turned to lakes.
Jason slowed onto the off ramp, turned left at the roundabout and pulled off the road a couple of hundred meters later.
He needed a plan of action before he could continue. He could not exactly just show up at the front gate of the facility and ask politely if he could power up Core. They were still looking for him, and no doubt the facility would be crawling with military personnel. Jason finally had an opportunity to slow down and strategize his next move—he resolved to take advantage of it.
Becoming (Core Series Book 1) Page 22