White Space

11

 Everything was perfect. The sample was immaculate. In fact, Yin's blood was so healthy it should have been cause for concern. Accacia knew the girl was physically fit. She'd liked to display it as often as she'd got the chance to do so. She'd also been a huge health-freak, even on the station, where most of the food was just pre-packaged plastic for lack of a better comparison.

 Accacia often wondered how a girl, so young and yet already so accomplished, a being of pure focus and discipline, could fall in with a train wreck of a person like Colin. She was bound to have a spectacular career as she was constantly planning her next move and was always on the lookout for ways to improve upon herself. Yet she was with a junkie who was on a one-way trip to a failed career. But then again, she was a rebellious one. Just like all those strange Accacia knew as a university student. The geniuses. They were always so peculiar, so... deranged?

 So, it was no surprise to her that all the samples Doc Comtois took were up to all the scrutiny, but the woman had been lost for days, for crying out loud. She was probably even starving for half that time. The blood samples alone should carry all kinds of signs of inflammation, dehydration and God knows what else. Her muscle tissue should be in terrible shape, her fat content should... Well, it shouldn't be freaking perfect. And yet it was. It looked like the samples were taken from a fake body designed to show how a human being should look like in ideal conditions. Then... why wasn't she walking and talking?

 The sudden chime of her device almost made her jump. She was always very immersed in her work. Whatever she was working on, it had to take top priority in her mind or else it just wouldn't work. That was part of the reason she was spooked. The rest of it was that she had no idea where the device was or why it wasn't set to "Do Not Disturb". She stood up and looked around, realizing that she'd left it on the other desk. Maybe she'd already realized it and looked because of it. The main thing was, she found it. She took it and answered the call with a sigh that was shouting sheer annoyance. "Yes, I'm here."

 "You should come and see this. Yin is walking and talking." She heard Doc on the other side.

 She gathered her things and rushed into the med-bay, where she found Doc laboring away on something at her desk while Yin was casually sitting at the edge of her sickbed, a simple hospital gown thrown onto her perfectly lean, naked body. She had a sort of strange, resigned attribute about her that Accacia couldn't quite place.

 "What's this?"

 "I... I'm not sure." The Doc glanced worriedly to Yin. "She woke up and started... talking. Sort of. Well, it's just kind of gibberish, really, she's just throwing words after one another."

"Did she do anything else?" Accacia stepped closer to the girl whose mouth was in constant, subtle motion, but her words were all but unintelligible.

Doc reached into a cupboard above her desk. "I... Excuse me, I need to give this to Colin."

"Why?"

"He's been... restrained. He says that there's something wrong with Yin. Something about her eyes."

"They seem fine to me." Accacia didn't take her eyes off Yin's face. She hated how perfect she looked still now. Also, it was absolutely incomprehensible how she looked like an advertisement for some new health craze product.

 Doc took a box of drugs and an automatic syringe from the cabinet and left in a hurry, leaving Accacia alone with her prodigious subordinate once again. Just like old times. The two of them used to spend days locked in the lab together. They'd had nothing to talk about. Maybe it was because of a lack of common interests. Aside from research, of course. But even that... they quickly had to learn it the hard way how incompatible they were as people. Or maybe Yin had just picked up on the fact that Accacia hated her. It started out with regular envy, but it gave way to full-blown hatred after a few months. She could not stop seeing in Yin a version that she could have been in her life had she been allowed to do what she wanted with it.