Through a break in the steam clouds, I catch a glimpse of two stick-figure humans staring back at me.
I squeeze my eyes shut, but now all I can see is the stylized view coming through my ocular. I must be catching a feed from one of the pylons, maybe? I shake my head and take a half step back. My left snowshoe catches, and I feel myself start to fall. In the view from my ocular, one of the stick figures drops its cartoon rifle and staggers backward as the other turns its balloon head to stare back at me. I’m flailing now and toppling, but my point of view doesn’t shift as the disarmed stick figure disappears into the pixelated snow. The other raises its weapon and fires again and again, each shot producing an explosion in the mid-distance between it and me.
I can hear voices, but I can’t separate the shouting over the comm from Cat’s bellowing rage from something else, something calmer and quieter but not quite understandable. The remaining stick figure raises its aim point, and its line-drawing rifle shrinks down to a dot …
* * *
“HE’S COMING AROUND.”
The voice is unfamiliar. It takes me a long moment to realize that it’s referring to me.
“Can he hear us?”
That’s Cat. I open my eyes to find myself flat on my back in an exam cube somewhere in Medical. Cat is leaning over me. She looks worried.
“Hey,” she says. “You in there?”
It takes me a few seconds to scare up enough saliva to speak.
“Yeah,” I say finally. “I’m in here. What happened?”
Cat straightens, and I try to sit up. Hands grasp my shoulders from behind, though, and gently press me back down.
“Easy, Barnes. Let’s make sure you’re functioning before we try moving too much.”
I look back, and find myself gazing up into the white-haired nostrils of a middle-aged, balding medico named Burke.
I don’t find his presence all that reassuring. He’s killed me several times.
“Sorry,” I say. “Is there something wrong with me?”
“Don’t know,” Burke says. “I can’t find any sign of physical trauma, and your EEG looks normal at the moment. From what Chen tells me, though, you dropped like a sack of flour for no obvious reason out there. That’s generally not a great sign from a medical standpoint.”
“Why aren’t we dead? The creepers were coming for us, weren’t they?”
“They were,” Cat says. “I don’t know why they stopped.”
“The pylons,” I say. “They were firing, right?”
“Yeah,” Cat says. “The burners on the pylons are a lot more powerful than the man-portable ones. There weren’t any dead creepers lying around when the steam cleared, but maybe they forced them to ground?”
“Maybe,” I say. For some reason, though, I don’t think so.
“Or,” Cat says, “maybe I got the boss creeper.”
I shrug out from under Burke’s hands and sit up. “What?”
“After the pylons kicked in, I couldn’t see what was happening in front of us. Too much steam, you know? So I looked up, and a bit up the hillside there was this gigantic creeper reared up out of the snow.”
That gets my attention. “How gigantic?”
She shrugs. “Hard to say. It was at least a hundred meters off. Maybe twice the size of the other ones? Maybe more? Anyway, it was the only target I could actually get a bead on, so I popped it. A few seconds later, the pylons shut down, and the creepers were gone.”
I swing my legs over the side of the table. “How many mandibles did it have?”
Cat’s eyebrows come together at the bridge of her nose. “None, after I popped it. Before that? I didn’t stop to count.”
I get to my feet. The world swims briefly, then comes back into focus.
“You should stick around for a while,” Burke says. “Neurological events like this are no joke, Barnes. I’d like to get some imaging done. You might have a tumor.”
I shoot him a look, then shake my head and pick up my shirt from the swivel chair where someone apparently tossed it when they brought me in.
“I don’t have a tumor,” I mutter.
“You don’t know that,” Burke says.
“We’ve had this conversation before,” I say. “Don’t you remember? Tumors take a long time to grow, and I’ve only been alive for a day and a half.”
He winces. I guess he does remember.
“Fine,” he says. “It’s not a tumor. Let me check one more thing, though.”
He turns to rummage in a drawer, and pulls out a slim wand with what looks like a suction cup on one end and a readout on the other. He comes over to me as I’m pulling my shirt on over my head and puts one hand on my shoulder.
“Hold still,” he says, “and look up at the ceiling.”
I let my breath out in a put-upon sigh and roll my eyes up as far as they’ll go. Burke cups the back of my head with one hand, and presses the tip of the wand against my left eye.
“Ouch.”
“Oh, don’t be a baby. This will only take a second.”
The wand beeps, and he pulls it away. “Huh,” he says.
Cat steps forward and peers over his shoulder at the readout. “What does that mean?”
He turns to look at her. “Looks like there’s been a power surge in his ocular sometime in the past hour. You should get that checked, Barnes. Those things have a direct connection to your brain, you know. A fritzing ocular is dangerous.”
“Okay,” I say. “Can you check it?”
He shakes his head. “I only handle wetware. You need someone from Bioelectronics.”
Of course.
“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll be sure to get right on that.”
* * *
“SO,” CAT SAYS. “What actually happened to you out there, Mickey?”
We’re in the first-level main corridor now, near the cycler. I understand why that and Medical are co-located, but it still gives me the creeps as we walk past the entrance.
“No idea,” I say. “I just blacked out.”
Did I, though? The memory of seeing cartoon-me and cartoon-Cat is starting to feel more and more like the sort of thing an electroshocked brain would come up with just before shutting down, but …
“I would say you should see a doctor,” Cat says, “but I guess you just did, huh? Are you going to try to get in to see somebody about your ocular, like Burke said?”
“Maybe,” I say. “I’ve got some stuff I need to take care of this afternoon, but I’ll see if I can get an appointment with somebody tomorrow if I have a chance.”
“Sounds like something you might want to get looked at sooner than later, but I guess it’s your call.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll give it some thought.”
This is a lie. I’ve already done all the thinking I need to do on this topic. Like Burke said, ocular implants are interwoven with our optic nerves, and they interface with our brains in a half dozen other places. You can’t just snap one out and snap another one in. Anybody else with a glitching ocular would be in for a long, tricky microsurgery to install a replacement unit.
Somehow, I don’t think they’d spare that kind of effort for me. Easier to just give me a trip to the tank.
We’ve reached the central stairs. I take one step up, then turn to look back. Cat isn’t following.