Two years' past: Halos

Kailey watched the numbers light up along the top rim of the elevator doors.

“Hey, the exercise rooms are on 4. We missed it.”

“We’re heading for the basement today, girlfriend. Time for Phase 2.”

“Phase 2?”

The elevator stopped on the ground floor, and a man in a tweed coat stepped into the elevator. He smiled.

“Jordan, Kailey, nice to see you again. You’re looking much better since the last time I saw you.”

Kailey blinked. “Um… Do I… have we met before?”

The man frowned. “No I guess you wouldn’t remember our first meeting. Well, introductions again, then,” he said, and the elevator dinged. He walked with them down the hall towards one of the labs.

“I was there when you woke up, the first time, some months ago. Bit of a mess, that was. I told them it would be a bad idea, so soon after the surgeries.”

“I know they did a lot of operations on me,” Kailey said. “But they were very vague about what they were all for. I have a lot of scars that I didn’t have before.”

The man nodded, stopping at a door and tapping in a code at the keypad that replaced the door’s lock.

He stepped in, holding the door.

The room was mostly dark, and was filled mostly with a machine taller than Jordan, that he could probably stretch out full length inside of with room to spare. An examination table sat on a track that would slide through a doughnut-like opening in the middle of the machine.

As Jordan wheeled her up to the table, the buzzing in her head picked up a notch, going up in pitch, as if the bees had started buzzing faster. They didn’t much like the machine, and Kailey didn’t think she did, either.

The man in the tweed coat stepped through a partition in the room, opposite the machine, that was glassed in. Even with the lights off, monitors tossed gray-green light up onto his face, making him look like the big floating head in the Wizard of Oz.

Kailey giggled, nervously. The man in the booth shrugged out of his tweed, and replaced it with a crisp white lab coat. He checked a few things here and there among the computers in the room, then wheeled a stool out into the main part of the room, and he sat facing Kailey. It was a refreshing change, not having a desk between her and the other doctor, or having to crane her neck look up all the time.

“Welcome to Phase 2,” he said.

Kailey blinked. “How many phases are there?”

“Including phase 0… five, that I know of.”

“Why didn’t they just call phase 0 phase 1 and then this would be phase 3?”

The man laughed. “This is a joint project between several universities and at least two governments. Somebody probably snuck something in at the last minute, after all the paperwork was filed.

“But that isn’t really all that important. What is important is the end result, and that is getting you back on your feet. Everything we do here, everything that has been done, and that will be done is being done with that goal in mind. They explained that to you, right?”

Kailey nodded. “You… Don’t talk like the other doctors,” she said.

“Well, I’m a doctor, too, but mine is a PhD, not an M.D. But please, don’t call me Doctor, or Doc, or anything like that.” He frowned down at the patch above the left breast pocket of his lab coat. In cursive blue letters, it read “Dr. Oscar Diggs.”

“We’re going to be working together, very closely for many years to come. This is not a doctor-patient relationship, like you have with Dr. Harris, or Dr. Burke. I would like this to start out as a partnership, and depending on how things progress, hopefully a friendship. We’re stuck with each other for this and future phases of the project, so get used to seeing me around.” He smiled. It wasn’t a “this won’t hurt a bit” smile, but a genuine one, that reached his eyes.

“My name, by the way, is Oscar. Oscar Diggs, but hardly anybody calls me that.”

“Then.. What do they call you? If you don’t like ‘Dr.’ then what should I call you?”

“Around here, and in the circles that I work, they’ve dubbed me ‘the Wizard.’”

Kailey stifled a giggle.

“I know, it’s a bit pretentious,” he said, hanging his head.

“No.. It’s just… when you were in the little room over there and the monitors were lighting you up… I thought you looked like the big floating head from the Wizard of Oz. So… does that make me Dorothy, then?”

The man smiled. “You know, it’s funny, but before I knew your name, I thought of you in my head as a ‘Dorothy.’”

Kailey frowned, and stuck out her tongue.

“Yeah. I much prefer your real name, too.”

Kailey’s eyes flicked over his shoulder to the big machine, which sat humming away, the bees in her head buzzing in concert with it.

“Oh, this?” he said, turning and putting a hand on the machine. “Ol’ Betha won’t hurt you. She’s mostly harmless. She’s a bit of an odd bird. She’s part CT scanner, meaning we’ll be able to do 3D X-rays. We’ll also be able to peek at your brain, and see it light up when I ask you to perform some simple tasks. And we’ll be doing a lot of that. This phase is going to be boring and repetitive. ‘Wax on, wax off,’ as it were. But, like the kid in that movie, the work we’re doing today will help us down the road. Questions?”

Kailey thought. He’d answered most of them, and even some she hadn’t thought of. Then… “So.. If this thing uses magnets and x-rays, is that why the bees buzzing in my head are so loud?”

“Bees?”

She nodded. “Like, bunches of them.” She brought her hand up to the side of her head, and shook it around. “All… buzzy and agitated.”

The man reached into his pocket, and pulled out a plastic wedge. He flipped a switch on it, and a series of lights blinked across the top, running left to right, in green. He held it up to Bertha, and the thing lit up all the way across, lighting up the very last red light. The lights decreased as he brought the device further and further away from the machine.

“K-2 meter. Measures electromagnetic fields.”

He held it between the machine and Kailey, and the first two lights flickered back and forth. Then the first light flickered as he drew it closer to Kailey, and another and another lit steadily as he brought it closer to her head.

“Got a bit of a halo going,” he said with a grin. He stood up, went into the partitioned control chamber, and came out with a camera.

“Say cheese.” He said, and clicked the shutter. Though the room was dark, it made no flash.

“That picture’s going to be terrible,” Jordan said.

The Wizard walked over, and turned the viewscreen around so they could see.

Jordan showed up as dark silhouette, the machine a bright flare on the right of the picture, blazing like a spotlight. Around Kailey’s head was a hazy corona of blue-white light. Her entire body was limned in the blue-white light. Another burst of light showed along her lower back.

“This isn’t in the visible light spectrum,” Kailey said. “I’m glowing!”

“Everybody puts out a little bit of an EM field,” the man said. “But it’s not strong enough to show up on most detectors. You light up like a christmas tree because of the hardware the surgeons installed.”

Kailey frowned. “Hardware? They told me they just fixed my back and the bones in my legs….”

The man frowned. “That’s it?”

She nodded.

He whistled. “I’m going to have to have a talk with your doctors, then. They were supposed to have given you a partial briefing at the very least.”

“What did they do? What did they do to me? Why do I glow like some kind of ghost?”

The man looked up. “Jordan, would you mind leaving for a bit? Kailey and I need to talk, it seems.”

The big man nodded, then patted Kailey’s shoulder. “Be right outside the door, Sunshine.”

She nodded.

When the door shut, the man took Kailey’s hands in his, leaning his elbows on his knees. “How much do you remember before you came here? Before you woke up?”

Kailey sighed. “I talk about this stuff in First Session.”

“Well,” he said, “let me give you something to really talk about with them, then.”