Anna In The Garden

8

8

There was no gentleness in the way Kontessa shoved and pulled Ken's head from side-to-side, up and down, twisting from one side to the other. When the needle penetrated right into the bone of her skull, Ken had had just about enough. Once Kontessa removed the needle, Ken slapped her away, rolling off the examination table and rubbing her head where she found a small puncture wound.

"Damn it, Kont! No need!" She moved to the nearby mirror, lifting her short hair to reveal the puncture mark and, above that the old scars.

"Don't call me that! I know why you're saying it. Just don't. You don't need to be vulgar to piss me off." Kontessa, taller than Ken, older by around seven years and carrying a little more weight, came behind Ken, running a finger over the scars, "So, you've not only broken the software, you've also wet modded the hardware. How are you even still functioning?"

"I'm doing fine. Mostly fine." Ken slipped away from her sister, pretending to look around the laboratory. "Can you fix it? That's all I need to know and then I'll be gone."

"Gone? You turn up after five years, expect me to work on your implant and then just let you disappear again?" Not appreciating the screwing up of the face and nonchalant nod from Ken, Kontessa exhaled in exasperation. "Ten years old. You were ten when you disappeared. I only knew you weren't dead because you accessed your insurance every so often. Backcombed it, so no-one could find you, but your bio tagged, so we knew it was you."

"I needed to get away. After ... you know. After." A certificate upon the wall proclaimed Kontessa as Valedictorian of her class. Ken tapped the glass with a fingernail. "Not bad for the second smartest person in the family. You got off the drugs and alcohol kick, huh?"

"I cleaned up because of you! My little sister goes missing and I only find out after a three day binge? Yeah. That kind of thing changes you." Kontessa grabbed Ken's arm, swinging her around and back to the examination table. "Sit down. Shut up. There's no more needles, just scans. Put the headset on."

"So, you should be thanking me, really. If I hadn't done a runner, you'd still be strung out in some shitty dumpster somewhere." She jumped back onto table, lifting the headset from the attached arm, swinging the cable behind her and securing it upon her head.

Kontessa didn't reply to that. With a slate hooked in her elbow, leaning on her forearm, she swiped fingers across the surface, tapped spots, scowled at the slate, then swiped and tapped some more. Laying the slate aside, Kontessa removed a pen light from her breast pocket and flashed it into Ken's eyes. More tapping and swiping occurred on the slate.

Over the next few minutes, Kontessa took blood, gave Ken a blood pressure test, ECG and tested Ken's reflexes with a small hammer. All the while, she'd screw up her forehead and chew upon her thumbnail as she looked at the data cascading over the slate's screen.

Again, Ken found her head pushed to the side as her sister examined the scars under her short hair. She had to admit, Kontessa did appear to take all this seriously and giving Ken's problem the full treatment. Ken had worked with a number of modders, over the years, but never in such a clean environment.

In fact, it was all a little too clean, for Ken. The artificial sunlight, streaming through the self-cleaning windows, was far too bright for Ken's liking. The air smelled too fresh, filtered too well, unlike Goodfellow Sector, where the filters clogged up every other day, or so. This room, her sister's examination room, smelled of clean. Looked too clean. So clean, Ken wondered if she could lick the floor and get no more bugs on her tongue than when she drank the crappy whiskey down in her own District.

"When was the last time you re-figged your implant?" Her sister flashed a device towards her that recorded her temperature and blink rate.

"Umm, that would be never. I have it just the way I like it." Ken leaned forward after more pushing from her sister. Kontessa lifted Ken's t-shirt and listened to her lungs. "Look, I don't need that shit. All I want is to find out what the feck is wrong with this media transfer. I know it's there! I'm rewatching it, right now. It's there!"

"Listen. I can't do what you want until I do what you need, okay? Right now, there's no sign of this media on any scan. None at all. I need to re-fig your implant to make certain it's not blocked by one of your mods zoning out, okay? I know what I'm doing." Picking up Ken's leather jacket, Kontessa tossed it into Ken's hands. "But you're not going to let me do it, so you might as well go. It's what you want. The human brain makes millions, billions of neural connections throughout your life. At fifteen, you haven't even stopped growing yet, and that includes your brain. You need to re-fig every so often for the implant to work with the new connections. If you don't, then get ready, 'cos first the implant'll die and then you will. But, no, please. Feck off. I don't want to see my baby sister at all, anyway."

Ken fiddled with one of the many pointless straps on her leather jacket. None of them had a purpose. Didn't change the fit. Didn't secure anything. Useless ornamentations that reflected her attitude. Kontessa had turned away and Ken knew she was crying. It never occurred to Ken how much of a strain seeing her alive would put on Kontessa. As always, Ken wanted what she wanted and anybody else's feelings were not her problem.

"Look, Tessa." She hadn't called Kontessa that since before their parents and Karlo had died. "I'm sorry, alright? I shouldn't have just turned up like this. I didn't think. I never do. How much of this exam did you need to do before you learned I needed a re-fig."

"All of it." She saw a hand move to Kontessa's face, wiping at her eyes. "Most of it. Some. I just ... I just wanted you to stay a bit longer before you disappeared again."

"This isn't my world anymore, Tessa. I don't know if it ever was." She spun the jacket around and, in one movement, pulled it over her arms. "So, how long does the re-fig take?"

"Twenty-four hours. If you'd looked after it from the beginning, five minutes once a year would be fine. You've fecked up that implant so much, it needs a complete shut down for it to map itself back to your brain." The tears gone, now, Kontessa turned back to Ken, leaning over and picking the slate back up, ignoring the silent groan from Ken.

"Then you'll be able to find that media?" Ken groaned again, falling back onto the examination table, hands over her face as she saw the shake of Kontessa's head. "Why? I'm not lying. I can see it, right there, in my head. I know it's real. I know it's not a busted implant giving me hallucinations. It's not even worth anything. I just want to prove I saw it."

"And I'm not lying, either. There's no media like you described anywhere in there." Kontessa turned the slate around, showing Ken all the downloaded data. "The only things that I can't access are direct memories. Even modded implants restrict your real memories from passing on to others. It's a privacy protocol hardwired in. It can't be broken. Unless you actually experienced this media, not fell in to someone else's Thought-Scape?"

Ken didn't reply, she was too busy flipping through the data on the slate. Even with her skills and intelligence, she couldn't find the media and, she had to admit, her brain and storage was all messed up beyond recognition. She made a silent, positive appraisal of Kontessa's work. She was good and thorough. And she was right. No-one could throw their own experiences to anyone else.

A few years before, Ken had tried breaking the privacy protocols herself. She'd spent months working on an algorithm to bypass the safeties, thought she'd cracked it, only for all the media she tried to throw turned into nothing but black and grey static. She still worked on it, even now, and could not find a break to expose.

"What if I did experience it?" Ken pulled on her bottom lip as she looked over the data. She expanded one section, then brought up the meta-data for that section. "Look here. On the date and time that I fell into that fairytale, my brain registered me as being wide awake."

"And you're sure you were Scaping?" Kontessa leaned a hand on Ken's shoulder, tapping on the slate, cross-referencing similar indicators. "I see. Yes, consistent with normal waking brain activity. Well, normal for someone who's modded the shit out of their implant. Delta waves flatten when Scaping. Like the sleep centres of your brain become overridden."

"So, if I wasn't dreaming and I wasn't Scaping and I wasn't walking around, fully awake. What the hell did I experience?" She let the slate fall into her lap as she tried to make sense of that.

Before she knew what was happening, she found herself in a tight embrace. Kontessa leaned her head against Ken's shoulder. If Kontessa tightened her grip much more, Ken worried her sister might break her. It felt good, though. For the first time in five years, she allowed someone to touch her. And, after a fashion, she quite enjoyed her sister's hug.