by Jay Korza
As Daria watched the scene unfolding and moving from the front of the store to the rear, she noticed there were two marines in uniform who had been shopping in the store. They were giving each other slight hand signals and head nods. Daria knew that they were making a plan of some sort.
Before the two marines could act, one of the junkies started to have a seizure, an inevitable side effect of prolonged use of Track Star. As the gunman fell, his convulsions caused him to pull the trigger on his automatic machine pistol. Bullets sprayed, people screamed, blood spilled and one maniacal drug user laughed and danced among the chaos as his adrenal glands kicked in and added to his high.
Daria stood in place and felt a bullet pass so close to her face that it actually caused her long hair to billow out behind her and a small clump of it fell away from the rest. When the hair drifted to her wrist, she glanced down at the odd sensation; her eyes were then drawn to the figure of her father lying on the ground with a pool of blood building around his body.
Daria dropped her coveted raffle ticket and knelt next to her father. She was still holding her father's hand and used her other hand to try to stop the blood pouring from his chest. She had learned basic first aid in school and she remembered enough to know that her efforts were in vain.
Daria felt a gentle touch on her shoulder and heard a soft voice in her ear, “Hey sweetie, let me help you with that.” Daria looked and saw one of the marines kneeling beside her and slowly moved her aside so he could get to her father. Once she moved, he quickly went to work removing her father's shirt and examining the wound.
“Please help him.”
“I'll do my best, sweetie.”
“Daria.”
“Huh?”
“Daria. My name is Daria. I don't like to be called sweetie. My mom used to call me that and she's dead now. So no one gets to call me sweetie anymore.” Daria knew it was such a trivial thing to think of and complain about in this moment but she didn't know what else to say. “My mom is dead, so you have to help my father.”
The marine looked at her. “I'll do my best, Daria, I promise.” He turned back to her father and pulled out a pocketknife. “And my name is Bryce, but my friends call me Reaper.”
Reaper was probing the wound with his finger and even though her father was mostly unconscious, he still went rigid and moaned as the finger went into the wound. “Shit”, was all Reaper said as he pulled his finger out.
“What?”
“The bullet went into your father's heart; put a hole in the left ventricle.” A quizzical look from Daria had Reaper explaining, “I need to open his chest and plug that hole. I can't get to it well enough through the bullet hole. What I'm about to do to your father is going to look very horrible and it's going to hurt him a lot, but you have to trust me.”
While Reaper was talking, he was moving Daria's father into a different position up on his right side with his left arm over his head. He was pushing on her father's ribs and counting to himself. When he reached the number five, he held one finger in the depression between the ribs and brought the knife to her father's skin. Reaper looked at Daria and she nodded; she knew he was about to open her father's chest.
With one fluid motion, Reaper made what seemed to be a huge incision along the ribcage and almost immediately the white of the rib bones were exposed, along with muscle and fatty tissue. Without rib spreaders available, Reaper just reached in with both hands and started pulling the ribs away from each other. The muscle stretched and tore and gave way to the chest cavity they protected. With lung tissue exposed, Reaper reached in and started moving the organ out of his way to get to the heart.
Daria's father was fully unconscious now but he reflexively gripped her hand to the point that she thought it was going to break. That's when she heard the cold, cruel voice of the other junkie she had already forgotten about. “Get the fuck away from him. Let him die.”
Reaper turned to look at the assailant. “No.”
“Look, man, you're obviously a doctor or some shit.” The junkie nodded towards his still seizing friend. “Let this little bitch's dad die and help my buddy.”
“I'm not a doctor, I'm a corpsman. And even if I wanted to save your friend, I couldn't.” Reaper was still trying to slowly work on Daria's father as he spoke. “Your friend has been seizing for over a minute now. That means he's in the last stages of Track Star Delirium. He can't be saved by anyone, even if we were in the best hospital in the entire Coalition. He's going to die, end of story.”
Without hesitating, the junkie calmly said, “Then so will you.”
Daria heard the gun bark at least five times and she saw the front of Reaper's chest tear apart in more than one place. Reaper slumped next to Daria's father. At that moment, one of the citizen shoppers swung a trashcan at the junkie's head and the sound of a solid connection rang out. The junkie went down and immediately the citizen was kicking and stomping on the already subdued man.
“You killed my wife!” the man repeated again and again as he kicked and beat the man, turning the junkie's body to pulp.
Daria turned her attention back to her father. She knew, or at least thought she knew, what Reaper was going to do after he exposed the heart: plug the hole. Daria was trying to get herself over the mental hurdle of sticking her hand inside her father's chest when she saw Reaper's arm move.
Reaper didn't have enough strength to move his body but he could still make his arm function. He walked his fingers along the floor and up his patient's side until he found the surgical opening he had created. He then slid his fingers inside and found the hole and put two fingers in it.
Daria instantly saw the blood cease to pump from her father's body and saw just a tinge of color race up his carotid arteries and into his face. He had still lost a lot of blood so his color didn't change very much but she was sure that even a little change was a good sign.
Reaper's body went slack but his fingers never moved. Daria was sure he was dead but before she could check, a police officer scooped her up to take her out of the store and to a safe place. Daria struggled briefly until she realized the man holding her was one of the good guys.
Pointing to Reaper, she said, “Don't move him. His hand is saving my daddy's life.” And with that, all of the adrenaline that had kept her upright for the last several minutes left her body all at once. She went limp in the officer's arms, her winning ticket all but forgotten. A song played, distantly heard in the background...
~
Daria sat on the edge of the boardwalk, looking into the water. The rolling of the sea always made her feel better: The rhythmic crashing of the waves against the pillars of the pier. The creaking of the wood as it stands against one of the strongest forces in all of nature.
It had been twelve years since her father had been shot in the store, waiting in line to get Daria's telescope. Twelve years since Daria's life changed so drastically in just five short minutes. She still looked at the night sky but not in the same way and not with the telescope that she never claimed. Now she looked at the sky, wondering where the Marine Corps would send her.
After that day in the store, she became obsessed with medicine and studied it relentlessly. All of her teachers thought for sure she would be going to medical school after college, but not Daria. Daria knew she wasn't going to college, at least not a standard six-year college. She was sought after by many of the top schools in the Coalition but she only applied to one school her senior year. Daria applied to a vocational school to become a paramedic. Her teachers were all aghast at such a flagrant waste of intelligence and talent but Daria couldn't care less.
To become a paramedic on an all-human world, the class was only nine months long. But Daria wanted more than that. Daria was taking the multi-species course that usually took three years. With all of the studying Daria had done on her own, she was able to test out of most of the course work and focus on clinical rotations. Daria finished the school in just two years. Many of the doctors Daria worked
with had written her letters of recommendation for medical schools but she had her sights set on a different goal.
Daria felt a light touch on her shoulder and smelled the familiar scent that always made her smile. She looked up into the eyes of the man standing behind her. “Hi, Dad.”
“Hi, sweetie.” Daria's father sat next to her on the dock. “Are you ready?”
“More than you know.” No matter how old Daria got, she knew that holding her father's hand would always be the best feeling in the galaxy.
“Okay, we should probably get you to the transport then.” As they both stood, he added, “You know you don't have to go. Your contract isn't in effect until you scan-in on the shuttle.”
“I know, Dad, but I want to. I know you think I have some deep-seated need to go but that's not it.” As they stood, she looked up into his eyes and put one hand over the area on his chest where Reaper had opened him up so many years ago. “I'm not doing this because he sacrificed himself for YOU, I'm doing this because he sacrificed himself for another person. In that moment, I knew that I could do more than look at the galaxy—I could be an important part of it.”
“I know, sweetie. I'm just going to miss you.” As an unabashed tear rolled down his face, he led her towards their transport. “Just do me one huge favor, please.”
“What's that, Dad?”
“Please, for the love of all that is holy, get stationed somewhere with beaches and sand so I can visit and find myself a little honey to spend all of my retirement money on.”
“You got it, Dad.”
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Seth
Sometimes life was so fantastic that you just had to sit back and look at it to really see how great it was. That’s exactly what Seth was trying to do as he sat there with his friends and more importantly, his girlfriend. Seth wished he could float out of his body and just watch the evening as an outsider, a detached form hovering above and taking it all in.
For the first time in years, he was truly happy. Six years was a long time to be in college, especially if you were condensing an eight-year program into that time frame. Seth always was an eager person and he wanted to get on with his life and do something more than studying and working on graduate projects that would bring credit to his college first and foremost rather than the students working on them.
Not only did he want to start his career and feel like a real productive adult, but he hoped that when he was out of school, he would be able to unwrap the last tentacles his parents had on his life. No longer would they be able to say that they were paying for his school so they had a right to be intrusive and overbearing. Sure, they could now say they had paid for his school so they had a right to do whatever obtrusive and overbearing parental thing that they thought that gave them the privilege to do, but at least now he could hang up on them and not wonder whether his tuition would still be paid for or whether he’d still have a place to live come the next day.
Or at least it was almost “now” that he could do that. So very close to the “now” he was waiting for. That was the other thing Seth could be happy for tonight: he was offered a job today at the company he had been interning with for the last six months. Between the internship, his graduate project, thesis, and girlfriend, Seth thought he was going to slip into a coma any second now just so his mind and body could get some rest.
The time he spent with his friends was so very important to Seth that he stayed out much later than he knew he should’ve. It was a trade-off: stay out late and decompress mentally at the cost of being a little more tired tomorrow, or go home early and not decompress and still be tired with the added bonus of also being wound up the next day. As the old saying goes, “There will be plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead.“
So Seth stayed out as long as he could, making deals with himself along the way: If I stay out another thirty minutes, I’ll wake up a little later and just not shower. Another thirty minutes and I’ll just eat on the way to school. Another thirty minutes and I’ll just eat at lunch. And so on until he only got about three hours of sleep before he arrived at his lab the next day.
Usually Seth had a lot of patience for the undergrads who helped him with his project but today he couldn’t tolerate most of them. It almost seemed as though all of them were purposely trying to destroy their teleportation device. First, some coffee spilled near a very non-liquid-friendly component. Then someone tried to start the machine without first adding coolant to the tank.
And last, someone allowed a fly to enter the transport chamber before the initiation sequence. Not that the fly would cause a monster to be created, as had happened in the old Earth movie about a similar project, but the fly would be destroyed when the teleporter started and the chamber would have to be completely decontaminated before it could be used again. Decontaminating the chamber took almost a full day of work, something Seth was not in the mood for today.
Creating a functional energy/matter transporter had been a dream of scientists and engineers since the twentieth century. Early in the twenty-first century, scientists had been able to transport a single photon across large distances but that’s as far as anyone had been able to go with the technology. Seth’s working group was on the verge of changing that.
Seth always said that all of the technobabble that explained how they were solving the problem didn’t matter. The fact was, they were close to being able to transport as many photons as they wanted, to a relatively distant location of at least a few hundred kilometers.
Moving biological data any distance was still decades away from happening, if ever. Moving actual life-forms may never be possible based on current theories and information they had gathered during their experiments. But photons and inert matter were going to happen and soon.
The atmosphere in the lab got so emotional and heated that Seth finally called it a day and sent everyone home. Not long after the lab was empty, he put together a rambling apology to everyone and emailed it before taking a nap at his desk.
The three-hour nap was exactly what Seth needed. He woke up feeling refreshed and calm. When he reread his apology email, he hoped everyone had been able to decipher what he meant through the jumble of words he had tried to make thoughts out of.
Seth showered and shaved in preparation for going into the office tonight. His internship would end and his career would begin in just over a week. He really wanted to get the transporter working before he graduated and left the team. Neither his job or future depended on it but it still meant something to him.
A light bulb went off in his head, illuminating the entire latticework of the project. Seth stood still in the shower, with his fingers frozen in his hair as he had been working in the shampoo. His job and future weren’t dependent on each other, just as the primary focus beam and the reconstituting stream weren’t either.
But that was the problem: they had been working from the premise that they were in fact dependent on each other and the energy ratios were intertwined. Separate the equations and make the two parts completely independent and they would be able to function as intended.
Seth stood there for at least another five minutes while he went through the equations in his head and reworked some of the mechanical engineering aspects of the project. A few more stops and starts later, Seth had finally finished his shower and started dressing.
He sent a quick message to his team. “Sorry again about today, but I’ve got it. Tomorrow is the day!”
Seth finally made it to AeroTech and with only five minutes to spare. He was usually fifteen to twenty minutes early so although he felt late, he was the only one who noticed the time. Several hours later, he was already on his fifth coffee run of the day. He didn’t know why everyone was so wired and working so hard but it was obvious that something was up.
Seth was getting caught up in all the excitement and couldn’t wait until he was a part of the inner workings and not just the errand boy. Some of the guys in the office knew that Seth was way ahead
of the game and they tended to share things with him that they shouldn’t. Sometimes they even showed him things to get his opinion and his help on solving problems.
Today things were a little bit different. Even the guys who trusted Seth and used his help before were pretty tight-lipped about whatever was going on. He still got a few glimpses at some of the work floating around; it seemed like it was referencing one of the company’s fighters being involved in an accident that killed two marines, the pilot and gunner. Hopefully, once he was a full member of the team, Seth would be able to help prevent accidents like this.
As Seth was setting down one of the coffees, he caught a glimpse of some technical readouts from the flight recorder. When the engineer saw Seth looking at the data, he quickly covered the pad and thanked Seth for the coffee, obviously dismissing him.
Even in that slight glimpse, something struck Seth as wrong. His interest piqued now, he started looking at every piece of information he could put an eye on. As each new piece of data was absorbed, the puzzle was coming together and becoming clearer.
At one point, Seth was alone in the room with Jack, the lead project manager for the aircraft that had crashed. Jack was mulling over some of the information and seemed to be unaware that Seth was watching, waiting for the right moment to approach him and say something.
Finally, Seth made his move. “Um, Jack.”
“What?” Jack looked up and seemed mildly annoyed at being disturbed.
“I’m not trying to butt in here, but I was thinking that maybe I could help. I’ve caught a few glimpses of the data and I know that I could be useful.” Seth stepped back a half step when Jack glared at him.
“Just what data HAVE you been looking at, Seth?”
“Just bits and pieces as I’m bringing the guys coffee and stuff. I haven’t picked up or read through anything thoroughly. No one has given me anything, if that’s what you’re asking.” Seth didn’t want anyone to get in trouble because of his curiosity.