“You mean the malnutrition warnings?” I asked. “I’ve had a lot of those for as long as I can remember. The orphanage served a vegetarian diet, and then in the jungle I had to make do with whatever I could find. Um, what’s an ‘MGE feedstock’, anyway?”
“They didn’t teach you much at this orphanage of yours, did they? It stands for Medical Grade Electronics, and it’s a food supplement for morphs and techs that are designed to grow onboard computers. Honestly, girl, you have so many warnings I’m surprised you can function.”
I shrugged. “I guess mom paid for good engineering. Um, I don’t suppose the ship could maybe spare a little of that stuff?”
“Good heavens, girl, do you think we’d take you in and then starve you? What kind of monsters do you think we are? No, never mind, you were raised by savages. Of course you don’t know any better.”
“She came aboard with no possessions at all,” Naoko put in. “Even her clothes came out of the shuttle’s fabber.”
“Barbarians,” the doctor sniffed. “You’ll find things are different here, Alice. Now, I’m putting you on a special recovery diet until those malnutrition warnings are dealt with. I want you eating three meals a day, and you’ll get a large glass of nutrient shake with every meal. Those will have a blend of supplements in them to match what your systems need, so try to finish them no matter what.”
“Yes, sir!” I said happily. “Does that mean I get to eat more, too?”
He smiled, and patted me on the head. “Yes, Alice. Eat as much as you can. According to this you should be getting at least six thousand calories a day, and you’ve been subsisting on a fraction of that. Normally I’d be telling you to ease into such a large dietary change, but your digestive system has some adaptability mods that should make than unnecessary. Just listen to your diagnostics, and eat whenever you’re hungry.”
Something else in the invisible display caught his attention, and he frowned angrily. “What were those terraformers thinking? I’m seeing traces of no less than six parasitic organisms from that swamp. If you girls didn’t have top of the line medical packages you’d both be seriously ill. Naoko, you’ll need to take a quick dip in a treatment tank to make sure none of that fungus is clinging to your skin. Have your armor go through an internal decontamination as well, before you put it back on.”
“I will, Doctor. Ugh, that place was so disgusting! What about Alice?”
Doctor Misra studied his invisible display for a minute.
“It seems young Alice has military-grade combat nanites backing up her immune system,” he observed. “I’m picking up external contaminants consistent with a long stay in a toxic environment, but internally there’s nothing but stray protein fragments. Remind me never to take a blood sample from you, Alice. Your nanites would probably eat the equipment.”
Darn right they would, some instinct in the back of my head agreed. No one gets to take me apart to see how I work.
Huh.
“Is there a way to get a manual for all my enhancements?” I asked. “It seems like I never know about these things until they come up, and it’s getting kind of old.”
“I expect that will clear up once your electronics grow in properly. You’re suffering from a severe case of stunted development at the moment, but I’d prefer not to poke at your systems until you’re properly in control of them all. Your parents were apparently either military or survivalists, and either way you’re likely to have active defenses waiting to be triggered. Now, let’s get you both decontaminated.”
The medical decontamination involved a shower stall, which sprayed me down with weird purple goop that crawled across my skin like it was alive. I had to close my eyes and hold my breath for a minute while microbots scrubbed every trace of dirt and contaminants off my skin. Then the shower switched to a clear solution that felt more like water, and a bunch of robotic arms scrubbed me down to make sure none of the goop stuck. When I was done there was a fresh set of clothes waiting for me, still warm from the fabber.
Naoko took a few minutes longer than I did, probably because she had to take care of her armor. While we waited the doctor walked me through how to connect properly to the ship’s network, which was kind of cool. There was a com system, of course, but also a whole bunch of data feeds for things like news, announcements and the ship’s calendar. The ER system Naoko had mentioned was some kind of data mining tool, that constantly dug through everything looking for tidbits I might be interested in. Of course, the way it wanted to show me that information was crazy.
“Interesting,” the doctor said when I asked about it. “A baseline human would perceive enhanced reality tags as a set of glowing labels floating in the air.”
“I can’t imagine letting some outside software overwrite what I see like that,” I complained.
“Yes, that’s the traditional objection of the survivalists. Most people find the system too useful to simply ignore, however.”
“Oh, I’m not ignoring it,” I told him. “I’m reading the messages it sends me now, I’m just not letting it mess with my senses.”
“I see. It sounds as if you have some multiplexing in your sensory processing.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you can watch more than one data stream at the same time. Sensory multiplexing is normally used for controlling drone swarms or supervising bots, but it’s considered a radical enhancement. No one on this ship would think anything of it, but there are colonies where you wouldn’t be considered human. You should be careful who you mention that to, little Alice.”
“I always am, Doctor,” I assured him.
Naoko reappeared then, wearing a thin jumpsuit and slippers instead of her armor.
“Am I safe now, Doctor? No more creepy crawlies?”
He gave her a thin smile. “You have a clean bill of health, Naoko.”
“Wonderful! Oh, but what about Alice’s poor arm?”
“It’s just a scrape, Naoko. It’s not a big deal.”
“I’m afraid it would be hazardous to attempt a skin reconstruction when her nanotech may not recognize my equipment as friendly,” Doctor Misra said. “But in this case it hardly matters. Eat something before you go to bed, Alice, and I expect it will be fully regenerated by morning.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right. Don’t fuss, Naoko, I’m fine.”
“If you say so, Alice. Well then, let me find you a room. You must be exhausted after staying up all night. I know I am.”
I was, actually. Maybe the stress of my long flight across Felicity’s jungles was catching up to me, but I felt like I could sleep for a week.
Naoko led me on another trek across the ship, back up the lift and down a hall to an area that was marked ‘Passenger Quarters’ in the maps that I now had access to.