The Accidental Time Traveller

3 - Curatio

Chris Allman wrote faster, trying to keep up with his thoughts. His thoughts came at him in fractured pieces, and it hurt to think, but he managed to focus on the one thought that remained constant through all of the grief and the pain of losing Sara.

"Kari..." he whispered as he wrote. "Kari can fix me."

The implant on the back of his neck glowed softly again, a soft pulse... pulse... pulse... that almost seemed as if it was communicating with something.

***

Samantha had already pulled up all of Chris Allman's data history and was in the middle of analyzing the lastest sync burst from his implant when Dr. Harold Osbourne made an appearance in her lab.

"You missed the morning meeting Samantha," Osbourne said in that condescending way of his. It was the tone he adopted whenever he wanted to play "the good guy" to remind Samantha that it was Osbourne who actually ran the research facility while she only worked there, technically for him.

Osbourne was about six-feet tall, slim and had a head of hair that was always perfectly done, much to Samantha's annoyance. He usually favoured suits even when in the lab, but this morning he had decided on wearing a lab coat. Maybe it was supposed to make him look like the photo they had used of him for Time magazine.

Anyone seeing the two of them together always knew who was in charge. Samantha's usual dress code of laboratory-goth, along with the pair of high-tech goggles she needed for some of her work, always made her look like she had strolled out of the pages of a comic-book and had taken up residence in the lab. The first impression was never that she was the most senior researcher, or that she was about to bite someone's head off for stepping uninvited into her lab.

Samantha didn't even look up at Osbourne.

"I'm busy," she said shortly, reaching up to move the high-tech goggles from her eyes to her forehead. Deep in thought, she peered at the scrolling data on the screen in front of her.

The holographic displays in the workshop were all lit up, ten screens in all, covered with Chris Allman's implant readings over the past year. One of the screens showed Kari Cheng's chart, but Samantha was not going to draw any attention to that. A detailed schematic of his X-11 implant floated in the air before Samantha; large numbers labelled SYNC CLOCK counted up to 00:05:55 as she watched. In the center of the screens, a diagnostic was running on the current X11 implant, the screens quickly cycling through operating processes.

"Samantha," Osbourne scolded, "we already talked about this. It's the one weekly meeting that you're actually expected to attend—"

Samantha broke in. She didn't have time for a lecture. Not right now. There was too much going on, and she was still trying to make sense of it all.

"At seven-twenty-three yesterday evening, one of the X-Eleven implants began showing erratic spikes in its data. It's returning larger than expected data packets, and the timecode is completely out of sync, meaning that it's either malfunctioning or it has been hacked. I've been running diagnostics and running a cross-check against other implants from that batch to make sure it's an isolated case. If it's a hack, then there's no telling what else is compromised or how far it can spread. "

Osbourne bristled visibly.

"I thought you said we couldn't be hacked."

"No, you said you wanted it unhackable. I pointed out that as long as we didn't cut any corners and designed everything inhouse, it would make it almost impossible to hack. Do you need me to remind you which corners you decided to cut? I have a list."