Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (6 page)

But why hadn’t I checked for a second bomb? Or had I? That was part of the protocol. With my Pilot I could usually get the lay of the land before running in.

“You were lucky,” the nurse at the hospital tells me. The first one I remember after the chin-faced medic. “Twenty-one people killed, almost a hundred injured.”

She’s the one who reads my charts to me at my request. I’ve been evacuated to Germany, and the sun shining through the window is a gentle German sun. She has to raise her voice because my ears haven’t yet stopped ringing.

“Will I be able to go back?” I ask.

She gives me a confused look, and I repeat the sentence in a drill sergeant bark. Before she gets offended, I add, “Speech impediment. Shouting helps.”

She knows I mean back to my deployment. “I don’t know. They’re sending you home first.”

“What? Why?”

“You heard me say ‘ruptured spleen,’ right? Look at yourself. That was no laparoscopic surgery. You’ve got weeks of recovery ahead.”

She’s right, of course. I wouldn’t be any good to anybody in this shape.

Something else nags at me. “You didn’t mention my implant.” I touch my temple, the reassuring nub of the LED.

She nods. “I haven’t gotten to the implant yet, but there isn’t much here about it.”

“I was part of a test group.”

“It says that much.” She waves the tablet at me. “It says our doctors consulted with Walter Reed and Balkenhol Neural Labs and determined that your implant didn’t need to be removed or deactivated despite the concussion. Continue to monitor, etcetera, etcetera.”

One of the memory fragments tugs at me. I point at my head again. “The light. Is it flashing?”

“No.”

I exhale, relieved.

“But it was, when you first came in. It’s off now.”

“Off? It can’t be off. I thought you said it didn’t need to be removed or deactivated. You said that!”

“We didn’t do anything to it. Wait a sec.” She swipes at the tablet a couple of times until she finds what she was looking for. “One of the doctors asked about the flashing, and got a response from Balkenhol Neural Labs that flashing meant it was coming to the end of its battery life.

“It says it won’t do any harm staying in your head, and you can get it replaced back in the US.” She looks back up at me, all smiles. “See, there’s another reason to go home before going back to your deployment.”

I fake a smile. As soon as she leaves, I reach for the tablet with my charts on it. Pain erupts from my abdomen, the protests of muscles torn by surgery. I grab the tablet, then fall back onto the pillow, panting. I want to read what the nurse was reading, but it asks for a password. I click it off again, then tilt it until I can see the side of my face in its reflective surface. It’s a vague reflection, brown skin in black glass, but good enough to confirm: no light. She wouldn’t have lied, but I still had to see it for myself.

It’s been six years since I had to live in my pre-Pilot head, with its wandering attention and fizzling connections. I’m fuzzy now, but I can’t tell where the concussion ends and the dead Pilot begins. The old me. I don’t want her back.

“What do you think you are, a superhero?” asks the private who sits next to me on the plane back to the US. “Let them give you a medical discharge. Don’t complain. Get out while you’ve still got two legs.” He’s lost both of his just below the knees.

I shake my head. Gently, since it’s still a little delicate. It’s loud in here, so my shouting doesn’t sound out of place. “It’s my job. I don’t want to think about looking for another one.”

“But you said you’re a medic? You can work anywhere. Ambulance, ER. You can have all the excitement without the bombs.”

“It won’t make you a superhero,” the Balkenhol Neural Lab doctor had said, back before any of this. My school principal had arranged the meeting, but she didn’t explain what it was about until we were all in her office: Principal Ramos, behind her desk; Major Adderly, who introduced herself as an Army doctor, and Dr. Roffman from BNL, in folding chairs that were comically too small for both; me in the actual good armchair. I couldn’t figure out why I merited this attention, or what I had done wrong, or even why I got the comfortable chair.

“So it’ll help me in school?” I worked on enunciating.

“No. All it does is stimulate your attention. Lets you make use of a little more of it.”

Principal Ramos cleared her throat. “Acacia, you failed chemistry twice, but you’re taking it a third time. Why?”

“I want to be a doctor.”

“And you’ve told your teachers you want to join the Army when you graduate. Why?”

“To pay for med school.”

The Army doctor, Major Adderly, leaned forward in her tiny chair. “What if we said that if you volunteered for this Pilot program you would have a good chance of passing chemistry the next time around? Then after graduation, we’d work to get you qualified as an Army medic?”

“I’d ask, ‘why me?’”

Dr. Roffman smiled. He had a mustache like a push-broom. “BNL needs young, healthy volunteers. The studies in other primates have been hugely successful.” His mustache twitched when he talked.

I forced myself to pay attention, to concentrate on making connections they weren’t speaking. “And I fit the bill because I’m old enough to sign for myself and I don’t have any family to talk me out of it?”

Principal Ramos shook her head. “You fit the bill because I’ve seen how hard you work. I think this could genuinely help you cope better with some of your learning disabilities. I’m not in the business of selling experiments to my students, but I think you’ll benefit each other tremendously. They’ve shown me the studies, and I don’t think it’s dangerous.”

I didn’t have anybody left at home to run it by. I knew there was probably a whole book of fine print somewhere, knew there was more to it than they were saying. At the same time, I was twenty, aging out of high school, and no closer to my goals than I had been at eighteen. If I ended up with a certificate of completion instead of a diploma I’d never be able to get into college or the military.

After school, I walked to the nursing home to tell my grandfather about the meeting. Head up, purposeful, no earbuds, just like Granddad had taught me. Know your surroundings, he had said, when he was still taking care of me instead of the other way around. I tried to be aware, but I was still surprised by a whistle from one of the corner boys. I glanced over to see if it was somebody I knew, Arin or Jay or one of the others who used to be in my class, but I didn’t recognize this guy. I ignored him and picked up my pace, glancing out of the corner of my eye to make sure he didn’t follow.

Granddad was already in the dining room.

“This food is why I married you,” he told me, waving a spoonful of mashed potatoes.

“I’m not your wife. I’m Acacia. Your granddaughter.”

“Oh! Is Acacia here? What restaurant is this?” He looked around. He had gotten way worse in the year he’d been here.

“Let’s start again, Granddad. I’m going to let some scientists put something in my head. It’s a good idea, right?”

“A good idea. Right, right. Where did Teenie go? Did she leave without me?” He stuck his tongue out in frustration.

I signed. I let them test me and poke me and snake the implant into my left temporoparietal junction and test me some more. Count backwards from one hundred while putting together a puzzle. Listen to a chem lecture while watching a movie, then answer questions about it. They were right that it didn’t make me any smarter, but it improved my focus. The dysgraphia was still bad, but I was allowed to do most exams orally anyway, and my teachers were mostly patient with my speech. I got a C in chemistry, graduated with an actual diploma before I aged out, not a certificate. Granddad couldn’t go to graduation, so I didn’t bother going either.

My new home is a furnished apartment near Fort Meade. Everything I own is in storage in San Antonio, but there’s a couch and a bed and some random kitchenware. I could fall asleep now, after the long flight, but I’m antsy and wired. My stitches hurt. I can hear the neighbors talking through the wall.

I eat takeout chicken and read a medical journal, trying not to contemplate being jobless. My memories from before the Army are like my pre-Pilot memories: hazy. A feeling like things are just out of my grasp. Some people would argue the pre-Pilot me is the real me, original flavor. But me with my Pilot is me awake and alive. Not cured, just helped. Enhanced, maybe, but enhancement only brings out what’s already there. The bettered me is the real me. Like that amnesia case. “Today I am truly awake for the first time.” I know how he felt, only I’m in a better position to appreciate it.

I have no memories of the bombs that hit me, so instead my dreams piece together other incidents. Adopt other traumas as my own. There’s one in which I’m both the medic and the soldier on the ground, my own bloody hands in my own bloody wound. There’s one in which I’m painstakingly putting adhesive bandages over the neck of a soldier whose head has been severed. Bandage after bandage, with cartoon characters on them. “You’re going to be fine,” I tell him. “Lie still.”

I know I should tell somebody, but the VA says it’ll be weeks or months until I can get an appointment, so I keep the dreams to myself. I read a study that says dreams are our attempts to apply lessons we have learned from previous experience to new experiences. That makes a certain amount of sense.

Balkenhol reaches out to me before I can get a VA appointment. They send a car the day after my flight. I’m ushered into a cramped conference room with three BNL technicians. The air conditioning is pushed up too high, and it’s rattling the vents near the ceiling. I walk halfway around the room rather than taking the closest seat, so I can have my back to the wall instead of the door. I wait for introductions, but none come.

“Describe how you feel the Pilot helps you as a combat medic,” one of them says, as if we were already mid-conversation. She has an air of seniority. I have the urge to call her sir.

“I can’t,” I say. “I’ve never been a medic without the Pilot. I don’t know how it helps me because it’s part of me.”

They take notes.

“It’s part of me,” I say again, suddenly terrified that they’re going to rip it from my head. “I can see everything. Some of the other medics get nervous because when they’re bent over somebody there’s a chance they’re gonna get taken out. But the Pilot lets me treat my patient and stay aware of my surroundings. It’s like—it’s like being able to absorb multiple inputs. Watch multiple channels at once. Ask anybody I’ve worked with. I did great in the blood labs and on the ground. Everybody wants me on their team. Don’t take this away from me. Please.”

The same technician says, “The Army tells us they’re very pleased with your success in the field.”

“You’re going to take it.” Defeat tugs at me. I want to run from the room, to hop a freight train. I’d do anything to keep it, but it’s theirs to take. I haven’t paid for it. I can look into whether they can force me into surgery against my will, but I’m guessing I’ve already signed something to that effect.

I try to think of anything to delay them, and seize upon something. “The concussion.”

“I’m sorry?”

I wonder if the other people in the room are just extras, and direct my plea at the only one who talks. “The implants were initially developed as part of a deep brain stimulation project, right? For epilepsy?”

“Yes.”

“But it didn’t work.”

“No.”

“And you found another use, and since then you’ve been testing them on healthyish volunteers like me, right? No epilepsy, no brain injuries, no disabilities based on structural defects.”

“Right.”

“So sooner or later, you’re going to need to know what happens when an implant is put into a healthy volunteer who then gets a brain injury, even a minor one. That’s me, in front of you. Right here, right now. Why would you take it out when this would tell you so much more? You probably have twenty other people you can test the other scenario on, but you can’t manufacture my condition.”

I keep the triumphant note from my voice, but I can already see their gears turning. I’m right.

“We’ll take that back to the project director,” one of the silent techs says at last, “but you misunderstand. We’re not going to take it out. We simply don’t have any reason to continue studying you.”

That wasn’t what I was expecting. They’re not taking it out, but they’re not turning it back on either. Though she did say she’d take it to the project director. Under the circumstances, that’s the best I can hope for.

They send me back to my apartment to stew. I sit on the lumpy couch and go over a new protocol for surgical cricothyrotomy. I read out loud, following my finger. Practice the procedure in my head, let my hands go through the movements. After ten minutes, I quiz myself; again after thirty. I read the protocol again with a movie on, purpose-fully distracting myself, then type summaries of both what I’d read and the movie. I’m testing myself on the new knowledge, but also on my limits with the dormant Pilot. So far, it doesn’t feel all that different.

I look online for a grocery store and locate one within walking distance. As I walk, I scan for snipers on the roofs and windows of apartment buildings. There are six other people in my line of sight: a couple at a bus stop, the others walking. I watch to see if anyone has a hand inside a jacket. Ingrained habits, habits that have saved my life more than once, even if they’re not necessary here. Still, it’s reassuring how much I can take in even without my Pilot working.

The store isn’t high end, but the produce looks fresh enough, and the floors are clean. One of the speakers piping smooth jazz overhead has a whine on the high end. It makes my whole body tense, makes me yawn to pop my ears even though they’re fine. There had been a sound like that after the bomb took me out, I’m pretty sure. I can’t ignore it, not entirely, but I roll my shoulders back and concentrate on shopping. I fill a basket with apples, sweet potatoes, onions, cooking oil, tin foil, frozen chicken, cereal. As it gets heavier, I start to feel my stitches. In the dairy aisle, I reach for eggs, then glance to my right and drop the carton.