“Mrs. Williams.” Dr. DuBois looked at her now. “I assure you, Jordan is in good hands with me.”
“Justin.” The name came out of her mouth with a trace of horror. What was she doing with these people?
“Yes, of course.” The doctor looked only vaguely discomfited. “Justin.” He climbed into the ambulance.
“Mrs. Williams.” A young man stood next to her. “Senator, good to see you again. Would you like to come in the ambulance?”
“Yes,” Mary and Tad said together. They couldn’t leave Justin. Not now.
“Right this way, then.” The young man helped her up and moved to the front seat. The doors swung closed and the ambulance lurched into motion.
There were no sirens or lights. The ambulance, painted a deep red and black, slid through the city almost silently, which meant that Jacob was acutely aware of the way his heart pounded.
He tried not to look at Justin’s parents, but the ambulance was set up with a series of mirrors to allow the driver to see into the rear and so it was easy for Jacob, in the passenger seat, to make use of them. They did not interfere with the paramedics or Dr. DuBois, nor did they touch their son—the doctors at the hospital must have told them how fragile his condition was right now.
They murmured to each other, he thought before he saw that their lips moved at the same time. They were praying, their gazes fixed on their son, and he thought it was more a way to give one another comfort than to comfort themselves. For a moment, he could only envy them. When he had been in the hospital the previous week, he had been alone.
To give them privacy, he looked away and watched the shops slide past. It was after midnight and only a few were open—a couple of bars and a café or two. There weren’t many cars on the road, either.
Which was why the one behind them caught his attention before too long. He craned his neck to look in the side mirror and frowned. It was a nondescript vehicle and he couldn’t see much about it.
The senator must have noticed his interest because he looked out the back windows. They were one-way so nothing on the inside of the ambulance would be visible, and that allowed Tad Williams to stand and put his face close to the glass.
There was a flash, which Jacob thought might have been the car behind them going over a tiny bump, but the senator drew back from the window sharply.
“That was a camera,” he said.
“Do you want me to get away from them?” the driver asked. He looked at the hospital bed.
Jacob didn’t want to make this decision. He knew what could go wrong and he wasn’t ready to have that on his conscience. Rather than respond, he turned to wait for Justin’s parents, who shared a single look.
“Step on it,” the senator said. He sat hastily and swallowed hard.
The young engineer leaned back in his seat as the ambulance accelerated and the lights and sirens activated. Ahead of them, the few cars on the road pulled over sharply but the pursuing car didn’t waver. It seemed to speed up as well. His heart pounded. Amber’s throwaway threat about being offed by Big Pharma had been funny when she’d said it. They all knew she’d meant their careers might be stopped dead in the water and their company might be sunk.
But right now, with a car following an ambulance and people taking pictures of a boy in a coma, that idea had begun to seem far more literal.
“Get away from them,” Jacob said in an undertone. “I don’t like this.”
“I don’t like it, either.” The driver increased his speed. “Come on, come on—”
The light he muttered to turned green at the last second and the ambulance rocketed through the intersection and made a slight turn at the end to merge onto a highway on-ramp. The car, which had increased speed, couldn’t turn in time and went past with a screech of tires.
On the highway, the driver turned the lights and sirens off, took the immediate exit, and traversed the four-leaf clover in a tight, controlled turn that made Jacob clutch his armrest.
Behind them, an explosion of beeping erupted and paramedics began to call to one another. Jacob unbuckled his seatbelt and scrambled around, holding onto the seats to balance himself.
“What’s going on?”
“The equipment’s gone haywire,” one of them said distractedly. She shoved past Jacob. “Move.”
The young engineer stood aside, his gaze fixed on Justin’s parents. Their faces had gone gray.
“Don’t worry,” DuBois said and swung into action. He snatched a pair of scissors from one of the paramedics and made a single, practiced cut down the front of Justin’s gown. The monitors were wildly erratic with respiration and heart rate off the charts, and Jacob clutched the back of the seats in consternation.
If Justin was truly deteriorating in condition, it brought all kinds of ramifications.
“Aha,” the doctor said with satisfaction. He yanked a patch off Justin’s chest and replaced it, wiggled one of the wires at its connection point, and held a button on one of the machines down. “You, turn that off.” He gestured at a large set of machines but the paramedic seemed to know exactly what he meant.
A moment later, the set of beeps and whistles settled into their former, familiar rhythm. DuBois sat again, perfectly contented as if there hadn’t been a crisis at all, although after a moment, he did lean forward to pull Justin’s hospital robe closed again.
“Stop up there,” he told the driver.
“Why?” The man risked a look back over his shoulder.
“I want to run into the drug store,” the doctor said, “and get some popcorn.”
In the silence that followed, the others stared at him open-mouthed.
“Does anyone else want anything?” DuBois asked as if this might be the reason for their looks.
Mary Williams drew in a breath, no doubt getting ready to rip him an entire series of new assholes, and Jacob intervened before the situation could degenerate.
“Our first priority is to get him hooked up,” he told the man and put as much authority as he could into the words.
DuBois looked disappointed but subsided, and so did Mary.
Jacob took a deep breath and tried to calm his racing heart. That had been a close call in more ways than one.
The ambulance driver had done his job well and the car didn’t catch up with them again. When they pulled into the lot at PIVOT’s rented offices, there was no one else around at all and Tad breathed a sigh of relief. Jacob and the driver swung the doors open, and Tad and Mary were ushered professionally to one side as the paramedics began unloading Justin with far more speed than they’d used at the hospital.
Everyone, it seemed, had been unnerved by being followed.
Still, he was glad to see they were as professional as they had been before. They maneuvered the hospital bed out of the vehicle and toward the double doors that led into the interior.
This was the moment he had dreaded. When Dr. Goli had refused to oversee a transfer from a hospital bed to a more usual gurney, he had quietly promised himself he’d do anything he needed to do to keep Justin safe. If she wouldn’t oversee it, they’d do it there, at the labs.
Now, he was rethinking that decision—especially when he saw the lobby of the building. He told himself that it was rented and the other tenants might be why the trash overflowed the bin and the stairs looked grimy.
But it wasn’t exactly inspiring.
The transfer took all the paramedics, including those waiting inside with the gurney, and he had to expend his entire measure of self-control not to wince as they did so. At his side, Jacob Zachary stood rigidly with his hands locked behind his back. He suspected that the engineer tried to keep himself from looking worried.
That wasn’t inspiring either.
The elevators took them up one floor before the paramedics wheeled the gurney down a long hallway. One of the fluorescent lights was out and another flickered like something from a horror movie.
At the end of the hallway, Jacob held the door open for them to
wheel Justin through a kitchenette—with a rusted table and chairs pushed to one side to provide a clear path—and into a dimly-lit space that was half-lab and half-offices.
Mary’s mouth opened in shock and she grasped Tad’s hand tightly.
“This?” she whispered. Her voice quavered. “This is where they’ll have him?”
Her whisper was barely audible to him, and none of the others heard it at all. In the corner of the lab section, two other PIVOT employees waited—Nick Ryan, who Tad had met earlier that day, and a woman with dark hair and long-lashed black eyes, dressed in black jeans under her lab coat.
The second transfer began immediately. Wires were switched while the machines shrieked and sank into their calm rhythm by turns, and the woman lifted Justin’s arm with surprising care to slide one blood pressure cuff off and another on. Her fingers were gentle as she placed electronic pads on his ribs, but even she stood back to let DuBois take over when it came time to place the brain wave sensors.
“I can’t watch,” Mary whispered. “I can’t.” She hid her face in Tad’s jacket. “The bruising, it’s—”
“Mrs. Williams.” Jacob stepped forward to hold his hand out and stood considerately between her and the activity in the lab. “May I get you some tea? I can explain all the steps that are taking place if you’d like, but you won’t have to see it.”
It was a kind offer and one Tad appreciated more than he could say. He squeezed Mary’s hand as she left with the young man and drifted closer to the bed. She couldn’t watch but he couldn’t look away.
Gloves were fitted to Justin’s hands, each containing a dozen or more white pads attached to wires. Output had begun to feed onto a machine he remembered was an EEG, and a monitor showed a static scan that must have come from an earlier MRI. He averted his eyes from that one. While he might not know which colors meant blood inside the brain, looking at his son’s internal injuries was too much for him.
“Why haven’t you transferred him into the pod yet?” he asked. His voice seemed too loud in the stillness.
The woman answered him as she pushed a syringe of something into Justin’s IV hookup. “It’s important to make sure the sensors are reading,” she said. Her gaze flicked from his hand to the output on the machines and she stood aside to let DuBois adjust one of the pads. “If the sensors are able to integrate his scan data and begin tracking, it will make sense to move him. If not, the risk will not be worth it.”
Tad swallowed hard.
DuBois, however, did not seem even slightly worried. “He’s stable,” he said and studied the output on the monitors. “It looks stronger than it was in the base scans, which is good. We should transfer him.”
“Doctor.” The woman immediately looked nervous. “We haven’t given the drug time to—”
“There’s no benefit to waiting,” the doctor said briskly. “You two, begin the transfer. One of you, get the headset prepped.”
“What drug?” Tad asked as the paramedics began to move his son’s still body. He thought he would be sick. They hadn’t said anything about drugs.
“It’s a prototype I developed in my work,” DuBois said. “The comatose brain can’t process stimuli in the same way as a conscious brain. This prepares a patient for the audiovisual feeds. Of course, I didn’t have a game quite like this one. Also, I added a paralytic agent. I don’t want your son to attempt to move and possibly injure himself.” Far from being worried, he seemed only intrigued. “You, careful with his legs. Simply because they’re not broken doesn’t mean you can drop them like that. Yes, very good. Now, get that IV hooked up.”
“What’s in the IV?” Tad asked. He couldn’t stop himself.
“This is only saline,” Nick told him soothingly. “The same as he had at the hospital. Since he’s not eating or drinking, we want to make sure he’s hydrated.” He pointed to the feeding tube, which had been inserted before Justin left the hospital. “We’ve been thoroughly briefed on the exact mixture he should get and how often.” He came to stand beside him and offered the same, comforting presence Jacob had shown for Mary. “You see how the machines are reading even while the lid is open? We’ll be able to open it to move him, change him, bathe him, all of that. He’ll receive the same care he had in the ICU, sir, I promise you.”
Tad nodded, a single jerk of his head.
The woman and Dr. DuBois lowered a headset over Justin’s forehead. It had been modified at the last minute with two long pieces of metal that would hold it up at the sides of his head so it would apply no pressure to his bruises. They threaded the wires for his patches through holes in the device and plugged them in, and the feed on the monitors flickered before it resumed.
“That’s Amber Garcia,” Nick told him in an undertone. “She was the one who made most of our breakthroughs on this headset. She knows more than anyone about how it interacts with the brain’s feeds. Between her and Dr. DuBois, you have the best minds in the country in this room.”
Tad did not reply. He watched Amber’s face as she looked at the doctor. At his nod, she squared her shoulders and walked to one of the monitors. She closed her eyes briefly before she pressed one of the buttons.
Justin’s body shivered. It was a tiny movement, but Tad saw it and he took a step forward without even being aware of it.
“What was that?”
“A mild shock,” Amber said, her voice level. “It jump-starts the process. Your son’s heart has not suffered any damage and we were cleared by Dr. Goli to apply up to four times as much electricity if we needed to.”
“We don’t need to,” DuBois added unnecessarily. He folded his arms.
With a sudden wail, the machines burst into a frantic storm of beeping.
“What is it? What’s going on?” Tad’s voice was rising. “Turn it off! Turn it all off!”
“This is expected,” the doctor called in response. “Normal,” he corrected himself. “Wait a moment.”
Nick’s hand was around Tad’s arm to hold him back, and before he could shake himself free, the machines subsided into their usual pattern of beeps. A new monitor booted up above the pod and words were displayed.
PLAYER_009
Across the room, Amber edged closer to Dr. DuBois.
“Player 9?” she said under her breath.
The man looked vaguely guilty. He gestured toward the senator, who looked like he wanted to break the pod apart with his bare hands. “We don’t want him to think we haven’t done this before.”
“We haven’t done this before,” she all but hissed in reply.
“He doesn’t need to know that,” DuBois whispered. He looked at the series of monitors one by one and smiled with satisfaction. “Well, we’re into the boot sequence. It’ll be a while before we know how things are going.”
“Very comforting,” she told him. She resisted the urge to bury her head in her hands.
“So what now?” the senator asked.
“Now,” the doctor said, “I’m going to get popcorn.”
Chapter Ten
Instead of black, the sudden wash of blues and greens and a series of boot-up chimes were vaguely familiar enough that Justin found them immensely soothing.
WELCOME TO PIVOT, words on the screen announced.
He blinked, tried to adjust his body, and realized he must have been seated in one place too long—everything hurt. Perhaps he fell asleep while waiting for a VR game to load, he thought and had the sudden worry that one of his parents might have walked past his room and peeked in.
They didn’t know how much more he made than the rent he paid, and they definitely wouldn’t approve of him spending it like this. That was why he hadn’t told them he bought a VR headset.
As he was about to remove the headset, an image of him flashed up on the screen.
Justin’s jaw dropped. It was pixelated but it was definitely him. The character had the same lean height, the same incongruously broad shoulders, and the same arch in his nose. In fact, it was a little more pronounce
d than he remembered it being. What kind of photos did they use to build this model?
Also, he could not for the life of him remember buying this game. Had someone offered him a demo?
“Character creation activated,” a pleasant voice told him. It sounded somewhat mischievous, not at all like the usual flat, computerized AI voices he was used to. It sounded almost like he imagined a pixie. “You may choose your starting class.”
Three icons appeared on the side of the screen, each highlighted in shimmering metallics. The top one was the outline of a sword, the second was two crossed daggers, and the third was the quintessential druid staff, the knobbly wood curled into a spiral at the top.
Well, that was an easy choice. Justin tapped the image of the sword icon. The game didn’t respond quite how it should but after a few attempts, he managed to make it work.
“Time to smash things,” he said. Or, at least, he thought he said it. His voice didn’t sound like it normally did.
Oh, hell, he wasn’t on a stream, was he?
He hoped not.
His character spun, the view tipped crazily, and he whirled through a computer-generated starfield. He gave a low whistle. This kind of thing was pretty on a monitor but it was on a whole different level when you wore a VR headset. It was beautiful, but he had to fight the urge to give in to motion sickness.
“In ages past,” a sad voice whispered, “the universe was in harmony—”
“Ugh,” Justin said succinctly. He noticed a dull, chrome-colored button in the corner of the screen that read SKIP and pressed it. It was easier this time, although he still had some difficulty getting the set to respond to his hand motions. He’d have to remember to note that in his review.
Now, he was suspended in the star field and text appeared to scroll like the beginning of a Star Wars film.
WELCOME TO ALT REAL. YOU ARE ONE OF THE FIRST TO EXPERIENCE THIS UNIQUE, FULL-BODY VIRTUAL REALITY EXPERIENCE.
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