When I got back among the living the next time I was vaguely aware of what happened. My head still felt as if several somebodies were digging out of it with old-fashioned pickaxes but compared to before it was tolerable. A dumb pulsing ache came from my arm, and my throat was still burning. Thankfully my hip seemed to be quiet at the moment.

The first thing I noticed was that all my sensory implants seemed to be offline, as neither the light filtering through my lids nor the sound should be this intense. The attempt to display the diagnostics showed that apparently, all my neural implants were dead at the moment.

I opened my eyes a bit and immediately regretted it, as bright light burned in my retinas. I heard a scratching moan and realized that this came from me.

Almost immediately I heard a male voice. “Welcome back to the living.”

I forced my eyes to open a small slit and after a few seconds it became tolerable. Damn, I missed my flash protectors. After what seemed to be an eternity, I had my eyes open enough to see the room I was in. It was a typical hospital room, with white walls, a white-tiled ceiling and I would guess a tiled ground, but I could not see it. I slowly looked around, and in a chair in the corner I found the source of the voice.

One of Walker's bodyguards was sitting there and had a tablet in his hand.

When he saw me looking at him he continued.

“I call the Doc. Just wait one moment.” He tapped something on the tablet while I wanted to ask him what happened, but the only thing I got out was a miserable croak. That got his attention again.

“Don’t try to speak. The Doc will be here in a few minutes.” So I did the only thing I could at that moment. I closed my eyes again and tried to ignore the pain. When I heard the door I opened them again. Doc Schaeffer had entered the room and moved directly beside my bed.

“Good morning Veronica.” He held a small plastic bottle with a straw in his hand.

“Here, drink something. That will make it easier for you to talk.” When he shoved the straw between my lips I realized how parched my mouth and throat felt, and the liquid he gently forced inside felt heavenly.

“OK, that should be enough for the first. Now, try to talk please.”

“W… what…” Oh wow, not good, not good at all. My voice was a grating rasp, barely understandable, but worse, it hurt.

After a few seconds, I tried again.

“H… hurts!” He had a sad expression.

“Yes, I can believe that. Oleg nearly crushed your throat. We still don’t get why he did it. How are you feeling?”

What a fine, friendly man… not. I just told him it hurts me to talk and he asks me questions. Well, maybe if I could communicate my pain he would give me a painkiller or something.

“Pa… pain.” Hell, that was cumbersome.

He looked a bit surprised. “I have given you enough painkillers that you should float, and I controlled your blood, you don’t break them down any faster than any other human I met.”

Aw shit. Most likely an opiate and nobody here knew that these are worthless for a Pure.

“Op… i… a…” he interrupted me. “You are already on opiates. I can’t give you more.”

“Don… ‘t wo…” I had to take a pause, but understanding dawned on his face.

“Opiates don’t work for you?” I nodded, already exhausted. “Shit, that is… what the hell can I give you? No, that is… not strong enough… opiate again…” He talked to himself in broken sentences, before focusing on me again. “Can I use Epzitecan?” Whew, he had the stuff we Pures developed to replace opiates for us. I nodded as eagerly as my head allowed.

“This is expensive stuff, so we mostly don’t use it but…” he let the sentence taper off. Then he rummaged at the drip I just noticed this moment, while calling for a nurse to bring a dose of Epzitecan. Then he offered me the bottle again. A few minutes later that were akin to hours for me, a nurse brought another drip bag, with which the Doc replaced one of the bags there. Meanwhile, I had problems keeping my eyes open, and the only thing keeping me awake was the pain. Then the agony slowly numbed down to a dull roar. I tried to smile at the Doc, but I was not sure I managed it. Then I drifted off.

When I came back to it was dark outside, and only a nightlight illuminated the room. Another of Walker's guards was sitting in the chair, dozing. My pain was reduced to a dull ache, and except for a nagging thirst and hunger, I felt relatively fine. As I looked around the room I noticed a call button beside my left hand as well that my right arm was in a cast from the elbow to the fingers. After observing the nightly activities in my room for a few minutes, and deciding that nothing was the appropriate description I pressed the call button.

Not long after that, a middle-aged nurse entered, startling the guard by opening the door, and looked enquiring at me.

“Oh, you are awake. What can I do for you, sweetie?”

I tried to speak once again, and to my relief, while it still ached and was hoarse, it worked.

“Water, please.” She looked at me a moment further and then, with an “Of course, one moment please” she walked out again. The guard was looking sheepishly at me.

“Damn, I have to have dozed off. Sorry about that.” I had to smile at that.

“Won’t tell.” Then I tried again to activate my implants, again without success. Then I remembered the safety feature I designed into them. Before I implanted myself I researched extensively what could go wrong, and build in as many safeguards as I could. One of the risks of cranial implants was that in case of head trauma, any neurological damage could be massively aggravated by active neural implants. Ergo the trauma switch, in case of any situation where head trauma is probable my implants shut down. I would have to reboot them before I could assess the actual damage. I also began to think that it was too aggressive. Maybe I should reprogram it to reboot automatically after a few days.

I was contemplating the options when the nurse returned, with a bottle.

“Here you are, sweetie.” I winced at the sweetie, but I eagerly accepted the bottle. After a mouthful of the nectar of the gods, aka water, I addressed the nurse again.

“I need…” my voice faltered a bit, and I took another sip, but still I was a bit less hoarse now.

“Sorry. I need a tablet and an OPB cable please.” The nurse, whose name I now noticed was apparently Carter frowned at that.

“Sorry, sweetie, but the Doctor ordered rest for you. No playing or reading the whole night. You can talk to Doctor Schaeffer in the morning.” Hu, what age did she think I was. I was taking a deep breath to tell her what I thought about the whole situation when the guard interceded.

“Save yourself the trouble. She won’t budge.” I looked at him a bit confused.

“Sorry Kitten, but sometimes you have to choose the battles you can win. This is not one of them.”

I took a deep breath and tried to relax, closing my eyes for a moment. Then I felt movement at the tube in my left arm, and opened my eyes again, to see Nurse Carter withdrawing a syringe from the drip.

“So, sweetie, that will help you sleep.” What the frick?!? She just drugged me? I wanted to rip her a new one, but sudden drowsiness came over me. Great, did this imbecile not understand that I had work to do? Alas, it was to no avail, and I drifted off again.

I came to hate waking up in this room. It was day again, and the first guard was again in the chair. At least the pain had taken another turn down. This time a bottle with liquid was in reach of my left hand. The guard jumped up when I reached for the bottle. That, in turn, startled me and I nearly pushed the bottle over. He looked at me and relaxed back into the chair.

“Sorry, I did not mean to frighten you.” In the meantime I had managed to take a mouthful of liquid. Not water this time but something with flavor. After I satisfied my immediate thirst I looked at the guard again.

“No problem. You just startled me. Is there a way to get a tablet and an OPB cable for me?”

He snorted. “How should I know that? I am only here to make sure nobody kills you in your sleep. The hired help better keeps out of any real decision.” Ouch, it seemed that somebody had made it clear to the guards that their opinion is unwanted, hard.

With a sigh, I pressed the call button again. When the nurse, not Nurse Carter this time to my relief, entered, she appeared annoyed.

“What do you want?”

Well, I was annoyed as well.

“What I already asked the night nurse, when she instead drugged me. I want a tablet and an OPB cable.”

Her expression became arrogant. “Do I look like I have time to bring you toys? If you want entertainment then get a book.” What the hell is wrong with the nurses in this clinic?

“If that is your opinion, can you then please call the doctor? Immediately?”

“The doctors here are way too busy to come running when a little girl has a whim.” With that, she turned around and stormed out of the room.

I took a few minutes to calm down and then turned my attention to the guard again.

“I assume you have been on the receiving end of those idiots?” He nodded slowly.

“Do you have an OPB cable?” He nodded again.

“Would it be possible to borrow your tablet and your cable for a few minutes?” He sighed but got the cable out of the bag back that was beside his chair. Then he offered both the cable and his tablet to me.

“Thank you. Sorry, but I never got told your name, so until anybody remedies that, I have to refer to you as hey you.” That got him to laugh. “Yeah, I can see that, but we have too many hey you’s already. My name is Wallace. Ryan Wallace.”

I offered him my left hand.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Wallace, I am Veronica Sinclair.”

He shook my hand and answered me. “Also known as Kitten, I know.”

Damn, the name obviously stuck.

“This name will follow me around, right?” Even in my ears, I sound dejected.

“Yeah, sorry, but if the boss gives you a nickname, you keep it, whatever may come.”

“It seems like it. Well, there are worse names.”

With that, I took the cable and then fumbled to get to the skull jack. I certainly regretted placing the only jack capable to reboot my implants behind my right ear, but after a bit of swearing, I managed to jack the cable in. The connection to the tablet proved to be a harder issue. Finally I resorted to stabilizing it with my right hand, despite the ache this caused in my arm. The loading of the boot manager to the tablet took only seconds. It came without any descriptions, just a rather big text box. Entering the startup code was cumbersome, and I silently cursed myself for choosing a 1024 character long Unicode string. Sure, it was incredibly secure, but it was the first time I had to type it, and with one hand, and even only using the private use area the string used way more characters than the standard keyboard of the tablet offered. After quite a few uncomfortable minutes, and while my arm began to hurt quite a bit I finally had the code entered completely. I looked it over once more to make sure that I had made no typo, and then tabbed the OK button. A few seconds later my HUD came on, with the counter-question.

When I chose yes, a rapid sequence of messages ran over my vision only to vanish almost immediately, with the last being the exception and the one I hoped for.

Again, I thought yes. After a few seconds, my vision dimmed a tiny bit as my implants took over the control of how much light reached my retinas. At once the muscles in my eyes relaxed and I felt the tension threatening to aggravate my headache vanish. Then a series of small pops and my hearing was dampened down to more acceptable levels.

Finally, my HUD came back online, but it was rather bare. The clock was nowhere to see, the navigation system showed only undefined, the net was down and I had only peripheral access to my files. Two things that stood out were the two messages in the left upper corner.

That looked anything but good. With a deep breath I steeled myself for the bad messages and opened the error queue. The first error was a bit surprising.

I resisted the strong urge to slap my face. Of course, everything was on the fritz. I had designed my implants to use the time as a system variable for many functions. Mostly encryption, but many other security functions as well, but when I designed it, I neglected to provide for the case that I had no secured access to a Stratum zero system. The last time I booted my implants up I was in my relative secure lab in Seattle and had a synchronized nuclear clock there. The next secure source for an NTP sync was my board in the fortress. Until I got there I had to make do with a severely crippled cranium board. Then I remembered that I had deleted the board, and began silently to curse. I was contemplating how I would get a secure NTP signal when I remembered the Q-link. Unlike WiFi and optical networks, the Q-link as I had designed it was equal to a cable connection. It should… yes it did work. Of course the cluster was reluctant to give me access, as I had only the basic authentification available, but I got enough through passwords to get it to give me an NTP.

Over the next seconds my HUD built up to my normal configuration. As soon as my date/time field showed up I learned that I had spent two days in the clinic so far.

The counters on errors and warnings fell down until there were only three errors and five warnings left.

When I looked into the error messages this time I learned that the boot sequencer had failed. Three programs that have to be started in sequence to avoid conflicts were started simultaneously, and conflicts ensued. That was solved quite easily by manually stopping all three and starting them in sequence, but I would have to look into the issue later, and the error count fell to zero before vanishing. The warnings were reduced to three.

Two of them were about the unexpected shutdown, and the last was a warning that the automatic file system maintenance had been missed. Now that my implants were in working order again I called up the diagnostics, and this time I was rewarded with an overview. My implants all showed green, while my biologicals showed varied shades from yellowish-green on my left side over yellow in my head and orange on my right hip up to red in my throat and right arm. When I looked at the nanite count I was shocked that I lost nearly 35%. Considering that I had an extensive depot network I should have lost no more than five percent over the last week. I found some 3rd gen nanites knitting at my arm, apparently, Doc Schaeffer had tried his new nano fab on me, and so I diverted my remaining 12th gen to enhance the remaining problem areas. I was happy to note that the emergency controller I had implanted near my stomach had already sent nanites to repair the damage the concussion did and was responsible for the fact that I could speak relatively easily again.

When I looked into the backlog I found that the damage to my larynx was actually crippling. Without nanites I would have never spoken again.

Then I decided a lesson in courtesy was in order.

I removed the OPB jack and held out the tablet to Wallace.

“Thank you for the use. It made quite the difference. Say, are there any nurses here that are actually courteous?” He looked at me for a moment, before he took his tablet, and then grinned.

“Yeah, a handful, but they are more or less sidelined by the dragons. Doc Schaeffer is a nice enough man, but he has not enough time and delegates most of the administration to a total suck-up tinpot dictator.”

I did not even try to suppress my evil grin.

“So it would be… let’s say, beneficial if something riled up the nursing staff a bit?”

His grin joined mine, and he had to actually suppress a burst of evil laughter, while he gave me a thump up.

I activated the restored WLAN and connected it to the network of the clinic. The security was… adequate. Nothing to write home about but also not something one could simply ignore. Unfortunately for our friendly nurse, adequate was not enough to keep me out, especially as I was already in a part of the network thanks to being inside of the building.

When I found the overworked and time-impaired nurse in the security system she was sitting in a comfortable chair, reading something on a tablet and munching some candy. No time, for real! I then activated the call signal for a room at the end of her area. She looked annoyed at the signal, placed the tablet on the table, and walked toward the room I designated. Meanwhile I was reprogramming the call system to activate for random rooms at three-minute intervals. Then I connected to her tablet and looked at what she was reading. Urgh, some trashy pseudo-historic romance of all kinds. What drove people to such garbage? I infected the file with an improvised virus that would show it was responsible for the chaos in the computer system before I shuffled the paragraphs of the refuse randomly. Have fun reading it.

After that, I looked around in other areas of the clinic. The reception and the waiting area were bursting, and the nurses on duty there were harried to the extreme. Other areas were less stressed, and I saw a whole gaggle of apparent doctors stand around the nano fab, and if I could identify it correctly, playing with the nanites. They had the nanites dissolve something. From what I could see it was once a rat. Doctor Schaeffer was not in the building. Then I looked into the administration. It took me less than a minute to unearth proof that the administrator was defrauding the clinic, and his memos were… tinpot dictator was a very accurate description of this man.

I decided that I had to do something. A bit of graft and corruption may be unavoidable, but this was going far beyond that. First I locked the door to the room with the nano fab, launched an alert from the fab, and then cut the power there. It was quite funny how the doctors tried to get out of the room. Then I had the computer of the administrator send the proof I found, along with whatever else I found in the hidden folders, to every mail account in the admin’s address book. That included among others Doc. Schaeffer, Mr. Walker, and a few other high-ranking members of the mob here. I followed that by messing with his computer, switching the mouse axis, making part of his icons melt, letting it emit random noises, and such fun.

Meanwhile, the nurse was running around from call to call. When the randomizer led her to my room I feigned surprise.

“Yes? Do you have a tablet for me now?” She was red in the face and visibly angry now.

“WHAT? Why did you call me?” I looked at the call button that showed no signs of activation, and back at her.

“I did not call you. Are you sure you are all right? I mean, if you hallucinate about calls, maybe you should go and get a check-up.”

She let out a growl and jumped towards me, only to be intercepted by Wallace.

Then she lid into him. “What do you think you are doing? You’re nothing more than a hired goon. Get out of my way.”

Wallace on the other hand grabbed her hands and twisted them behind her.

“I may only be a hired goon, but I was tasked by Mr. Walker, you know Mr. Walker the man who pays for this clinic and for your salary, to make sure nobody threatens this girl. What you just did. So I am sorry, but I have to restrain you.” He grinned with that. “Oh, sorry, I am wrong. I am not sorry.”

From somewhere he got some plastic cuffs and cuffed her hands behind her. Then he forced her into one of the chairs, before taking out his phone and making a call.

“Hey, Nick, Ryan here.”… “We have a little problem.”… “No, not that serious. Listen, Nick, one of the nurses here jumped at the Sinclair girl.”… “Yes, Kitten, but I don’t think she likes the name very much.” Wow, he was perceptive, who would have guessed that? Still, he continued. “Of course, I’ve stopped it, but I now have the rabid nurse here and can’t leave the room.”… “Just send someone to get the nurse out of here, and notify the Doc that this floor needs a new nurse.”… “Thank you.”

With that, he put the phone away and then spoke to the nurse.

“Somebody will come to get you. You are in luck. It is unlikely that the boss will decide what to do with you himself.” The nurse looked at him shocked and then began to whimper.

Meanwhile I was watching the doctors desperately trying to open the door. I may not have ever seen the movies, but I would guess that the demi idiots in white made a splendid rendition of the Keystone Cops. When one of the orderlies noticed the commotion and moved to look into it I unlocked the door. I couldn’t tell who was more surprised, the doctors that the door was open or the orderly when he saw the chaos. I would incline towards a draw.

Then I noticed that the admin was desperately trying to get his computer under control. I couldn’t suppress a chuckle when he applied engineering method # one and rapped the monitor. Then I upped the ante, and let his phone ring.

Sadly, my fun ended, when he shut the whole shebang down, including the webcam. Nothing left to entertain me, too bad.

I decided to look into what I missed over the last few days.

The backdoors into the commonwealth R&D laboratories wielded no new information, as expected. My normal messages were not exemplary interesting either. A few offered missions for Spectre that I declined citing time issues, and a few posts in academic discussions I partook in. I would read them later. I had let everybody know that I would be out of contact for a few days, so no harm was done.

With the mundane activities finished I connected to the cluster again, this time with full access, and used one of the cutout bridges to enter the Abyss. Here I trawled the bulletins for something interesting. I found another few job offers for Spectre on the private bulletin, but as every broker was informed that there would be no jobs taken for a while I guessed that they just were being paid to post the offers anyway. I marked all of them with the message that Spectre was taking a time out, and anybody wanting these jobs were free to poach before moving them to the general board. It would not take more than five minutes before the offers would trickle through the brokers of the other hackers here. I would have to send the other brokers a serious message about that, but no harm done. Spectre would take care of this if it would become a problem. Unlike me, they did not incorporate Q-links in their proxy chain so finding them was much more trivial. I looked over a few boards to get the newest trends, but nothing interesting here also.

So I got back into the UWS servers, looking at what I might like to study next. Gravitics looked interesting, as did fusion technology and on a whim, I downloaded everything from both. I found a new treatise on quantum computing, but that was still not going anywhere useful. Another paper on the creation of carbon allotropes, interesting but nothing really earth-shattering.

Bored I chose to visit the black labs. Darkvault had made an incremental improvement to its NADA project. I looked it over, and the new features would work well with my approach, but they still had not solved the resolution issue. Too bad for them, but I would not ruin their fun for them by telling them how to do it. Eclipse had built a new gravity scanner that had nearly 25% better resolution. With an inward smile I copied the design, it would serve me well. I found a new attempt to cure Sanderson’s Folly in Desolation Point, but that was a bit outside my experience. When I looked into Talon Station I found the same thing I found every other time I looked into their research. The top research facility of the AFS military was roughly 20 years behind what was deployed frontline equipment of the NWC. I don’t think anybody not in the NWC realized that the war is not a stalemate, but that the NWC simply choose to not crush the AFS. Yet, I have to say, as the new administration of the NWC seemed to tire rapidly of the permanent war.

All that took me approximately six minutes, and when a group of Walker's guards entered the room, I closed the connection. The nurse was protesting her treatment, but the guards were not quite willing to listen to her. When she was dragged out of the room by two of the guards the third had a quiet exchange with Wallace and then turned to me.

“Well, Miss Sinclair, Ryan here tells me that she jumped at you for no reason.”

I let my little evil smile come up.

“Well, not entirely without reason. I confess to suggesting to her that she should have her mental health examined. Apparently, she did not like that.”

He nodded, and walked out again, leaving me with Wallace alone.

He had an equally evil grin on his face.

“I assume that you are somehow responsible for our friendly nurse getting her hackles up?”

I chuckled.

“It could have to do something with the call signal going off every three minutes at random rooms.”

He guffawed a bit at that and sat back down in his chair.

“You managed all that with my little tablet? I didn’t know it was capable of that.”

“Hu? No, I just used your tablet to reboot my implants.”

For some reason he did not seem to like that.

“Ugh, shit. You were supposed to avoid anything even resembling work. Damn, I hope you did no damage to yourself.”

“Please, give me some credit. I know what I am doing. I needed the implants to check up on my status. The damage was… extensive, but I got my nanites to repair it. Only after I have made sure that I will not damage myself further have I used my other options to shake the joint here up a bit.”

I snorted.

“I think good Mr. Reyes will not be the administrator here for much longer. I fear we will hear of his unfortunate demise in the not-so-distant future.”

His eyes tightened and his whole demeanor changed from happy-go-lucky to predator going for the kill in one blink of an eye.

“What did you do to him?” His voice had become very, very cold.

“I? Not much. I just send the proof that he embezzled a bit over $11 Million from the clinic over the last few years to Doc Schaeffer, Mr. Walker, and a few others that he probably did not want to know about that and in the process played a bit with his computer, but nothing major.”

That changed Wallace’s expression to utter shock.

“He did WHAT?”

I was thankful that my audio filters were working again.

“He stole Mr. Walker’s money if what you said that he finances this clinic is true.”

He nodded thoughtfully.

“Yes, I think you are right. The poor Mr. Reyes is not long for this world.”