Two Years' Past: Truths

He let go of her hands, got up, and came back with his briefcase. He set it on the exam table, and opened it up, pulling out a pile of folders several inches thick. He thumbed through them and pulled one out from near the bottom of the stack and handed it to Kailey.

“What’s this?” she asked. The folder didn’t have any kind of filing notation on it, just a number: 5.

“Kailey, I don’t want to scare you. But there are some truths that they didn’t tell you that I think it is very important that you know. Remember, when I said that the goal here is to get you on your feet?”

She nodded.

“Well, that is one of the truths. And in order to get there, we had to do some things to you. I say ‘we’ and lump myself into the group, so if you are going to be angry, then you have to be angry with me, too. And I accept full responsibility for my part in this.”

“Okay, now you’re starting to scare me,” she said, her voice wavering a bit.

“You have questions. Ask them, at any time, and I will answer them, to the best of my ability. The best hope for all of this work to amount to anything is for all of us to be very honest with you. After all, this is your life we’re dealing with here. Some of the doctors, and scientists, I think, forget that there is a person on the end result of their work.”

“When you said you — they — had to do things to me, what did that mean?”

The Wizard sat back. “When the I-beam came down, it hit you in the lower back. Fortunately, you were on your knees at the time, and your falling with the beam after that point is probably what kept the damage from being more extensive than it could have been. Other debris was able to cascade into the gap and keep that beam from completely crushing you. Those fractions of a second were critical to your survival.”

“I… sort of remember when it fell. I was trying to get away, to crawl across the floor towards the door. I cut up my knees, but then I couldn’t feel them. I guess that was when my back broke.”

“It wasn’t a clean break. There was crushing damage, and your spinal cord wasn’t severed completely. But enough bone fragments were lodged in it to cause permanent damage.”

“Now you sound like a doctor,” Kailey said.

“They didn’t fly you to a normal hospital. You came straight to the facility where I was working at the time, and as your helicopter was landing, I got the call, that they had another candidate for the research project I’d been working on.”

“‘Another?’ Like, I’m not the first?” She glanced down at the folder. “I’m number five?”

The Wizard nodded.

“What happened to one through four?”

“They died.”

Something of the light in the Wizard’s eyes dimmed, then, and his jaw clenched, just the slightest bit.

“Oh,” Kailey said. Then she leaned forward, putting her hand on the man’s knee. “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.”

“No,” he said, taking a deep breath. “That’s just it. It was. I pushed too hard, lost sight of the end result of the project. I forgot that there were people on the other end of my research. I shelved it. Stopped the work, shut everything down.

“Number four, Donald Brown, 32, My age, at the time, too. Construction worker. He fell, several stories, was paralyzed, like you are, from the waist down. I spent two years with him, in rehabilitation. Watched him take his first few steps. But he wanted to run before he could walk. And it killed him. Heart failure. That was eight years ago, last February.”

“If it’s so dangerous, then… why… Is it going to kill me, too?”

“No!” he said, and Kailey jumped.

“Sorry,” he said, taking a deep breath. “In the eight years, a lot of work has been done with the kinds of systems I was working with. Medical knowledge has progressed. And, I’m sorry, but you are a lot tougher than Don, and Kyle, and Vincent and Xavier.”

Kailey didn’t miss the slight hesitation between the last two names.

“Were you related to Xavier?” she asked.

“You don’t miss much, do you?”

Kailey shrugged. “Well, I have been seeing shrinks for the past six months.”

The Wizard smiled. “Xavier was my younger brother. Bit of a daredevil. Motorcycle accident.”

“I’m sorry,” Kailey said.

“So am I,” the Wizard said.

They sat in silence for several minutes, and then the Wizard cleared his throat.

“So, what the doctors and scientists did to you is very delicate, very intensive work. The fact that you survived that phase — phase zero — is a very, very good sign.”

“Phase zero, as in ‘might be over before it even starts.’”

The Wizard nodded. “Wow, talk about hitting the nail on the head.”

“So it was the operations to fix my back? And legs?”

“Yes, and then some. Your left leg was broken in several places, and they couldn’t pin the pieces together. So they regrew a new femur, around a titanium latticework. We did that for all your major skeletal bones — Oh, they didn’t pull them all out and replace them, that would be messy. It was non invasive procedure, injections that flowed through the bones while under special magnetic fields.”

Kailey stared at her hands. “I’m not going to grow claws, am I?”

The Wizard laughed. “No, and no yellow spandex. No fighting crime, no leaping tall buildings.”

“But… metal doesn’t radiate electro magnetic waves.”

“No. The superconducting wiring laced through your muscles is doing that.”

“Wires?”

“Well, thinner than wires. Filaments, really. Even thinner than fiber optics. It’s an artificial nervous system. Works just like it, bouncing impulses back and forth to the computers inside you. Eventually, those will get you up and walking again.”

“It’s a really good thing I’m already sitting down,” Kailey said.

“Bit much to take in, I know.”

“I know they make computers really small, but…”

“Three in your head, three in your spine.”

“They opened up my head?”

“Dr. Harris did, yes. He laid down the neural latticework and placed the primary processors in the back of your skull, and wired the filament system into it.”

“You make it sound like it’s something he does every day.”

“Well, he is a brain surgeon. The very best in his field. Every single doctor involved in this — in you — is the very best in their field. We are all working for you, Kailey. For you, not on you, like you’re some kind of car that just needs a tune up.”

“But… why?”

“You don’t ask very simple questions,” the Wizard said, with a sigh.