Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

Legion

Cyril Harper had little hope of ever seeing Amy Larsson again.

She had made her point quite clear the last time they had spoken. He had a suspicion that if she ever came back to New Elysium, she'd be in a dreadful state, asking him to fix her once more. This time, he swore to himself, he would not do it. Every time he fixed her, she just ended up breaking herself again. It was a futile effort to try and convince her to be more careful. The next time she broke an augment, he would remove it instead of replacing it. She was a waste of material and a waste of his time.

And yet he still found himself spending an unhealthy amount of his time on the feed from the tracker he had put into her. He let himself be mesmerized by those strange, uncharacteristic patterns of theta waves that her brain produced when she was sleeping and dreaming. He watched a glowing dot dance over the screen before him, drawing the jagged spikes of her cardiogram. He monitored the levels of neurotransmitters and neuropeptides in her brain, acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins. He read the status reports on her augments. Taken together, the monitoring algorithm told him more about her than she had ever told him herself.

He told himself that he was doing the right thing here. That a patient who was unwilling or unable to cooperate could be exempted from the rule of required consent for medical procedures. It was the same with unconscious emergency patients, or patients who were a danger to themselves. And as dangerous as Amy Larsson was to the rest of the world, her reckless behavior and insane plans made her the biggest danger to herself. Giving her the means to put herself in danger was not compatible with his conscience any longer.

With that thought in mind, he was fairly certain that the next time he would see her, she would come to him battered and beaten once again, augments fried beyond rescue, her life hanging by a thread. He looked forward to that day with equal parts dread and excited anticipation. And of course, he would fix her again – he would save her, but not replace her augments.

Consequently, his surprise was rather grand when he unexpectedly found her in the medical staff meeting room of the clinic when he went there for his weekly meeting.

He froze in the door way and stared blankly at the sight before him. She looked nothing like the state he had imagined her to be in at their next meeting. Dressed in tight black pants and a white tank top that matched her split hair, the only color about her was a soft, healthy blush to her cheeks, visible even in the dim light. There was a smile on her face, and the way she carried her body as she moved closer to him had an agility and grace that he had rarely seen about her. Probably because he usually saw her when she was badly hurt and in pain. Right now, she looked better than ever, not just in terms of her health. He found himself staring at her, his fascination drowning out his surprise completely.

"Ah, finally. I've already started without you. You can sit over there," she gestured to a chair.

That was when Cyril first took note of the other people in the room. Two pairs of organic eyes, one belonging to the boy genius Dex Drogon, and one to a strange, chimeric cat on the boy's lap, and an array of flickering face lights, belonging to two androids, were directed at him. But his attention was entirely captivated by the mismatched, half organic, half augmented gaze of Amy Larsson.

He followed her gesture to an empty seat next to one of the androids. Cyril had not issue with AIs, he actually liked Amy's mechanic, Higgs, but this was her Reaper unit, Heisenberg. Although it was unarmed now, the way it kept its face lights fixed on him was unsettling. Nonetheless, he was almost about to follow her instruction reflexively, when he remembered what he had come here for originally.

"Now wait. What are all of you doing in the medical staff meeting room?" he asked and stopped halfway between the door and the seat she had assigned him. "There's a staff meeting about to take place, you have to leave."