Concern

This is part two. It ends kind of dangling there, because I haven’t figured out yet how to get the characters out of that situation, just after a bombshell gets dropped. So, this is a rough draft, still.

You should read part one first.

He of His Mind

2   Continuation

“Nice to see you up, Mr. Broderick,” the nurse says to him. It’s an ironic statement, since he can manage to sit up slightly, and not much more. She is heavyset, but with smooth, clear skin and wavy black hair. He relishes looking at her, seeing her move; movement feels alien and new, and it pleases him to experience it again.

“It’s getting easier,” he says. He surprised himself, there, with how clearly and loudly he could speak. It surprises and pleases her, too, he can tell.

“Oh, that’s great,” she says, “you’re doing really well. You’ll be up and about soon.”

There is one thing on his mind, now, that’s been with him for weeks.

“Can you tell me how long?” he asks her. “How long I’ve been gone?” he clarifies.

The nurse stiffens a little, her smile dropping away. It is common for people to be told this soon after they become conscious again, but for the support staff it is still an uncomfortable subject — to tell someone when they died.

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” she replies, seeming more troubled by not having the information, instead of not wanting to tell him. “The Doctor will be in to see you soon. He can tell you then,” she pauses, looking at him, “or I can go find out for you if you like.”

“No, don’t worry about it. I’ll wait for the Doc.”

“Okay,” she says as she reaches to set up a nutritional intravenous solution above his head. “I hope you’re hungry.”

“Hello, Daniel,” a man says, “if you’re awake enough I’d like to talk with you a bit.” He immediately hits on that the man standing expectantly by his bedside is a doctor — not the least of which because of his honest-to-goodness white lab coat — and clearly one with a friendly attitude. He is wearing two name tags: one declaring him as DR. EDWARD TAFT, in clinical sans-serif, and the other simply saying “Doc Ed.”, stamped out in friendly type meant to look hand-written. There’s an old sticker on the latter tag, a worn cartoon of a happy sun or a happy flower. Ed is thin, and short, but with a round face, and short, salt-and-pepper hair cut short and parted on the side. He smiles easily and honestly.

“No problem,” he says, “call me Dan.”

Doc Ed proceeds to ask a series of questions about how he feels. He sleeps most of the day, still; he is able to sit up for a while sometimes, and gets moderately dizzy after a while; he hasn’t felt hungry yet, but feels a kind of emptiness in himself. Doc Ed writes some notes down on a tablet, then pauses, looking him in the eye.

“You’d like to know how long it’s been since you were last recorded?” the doctor asks.

“Yes.”

Ed looks at his tablet, reading off the number: “Two thousand, forty-six days. A little over five years, seven months.”

Daniel looks up into the doctor’s eyes; he is shocked by the number: ordinarily, he kept a regimen of having himself recorded every six months, the guaranteed schedule for recording that the service promised. Five years and seven months meant he must not have had the procedure done for at least five years before his resurrection began, and he must have died not too long before then.

“It’s surprising, I know,” the doctor says. He reads some more from the tablet: “you went missing nearly a year ago, and the service declared you dead six months later, given the circumstances of your last known whereabouts and the failure of searches for you. At that point the service began the process of bringing you back.”

“But, that means I stopped having the procedure done.”

“Yes, you didn’t show up for, or you canceled, the appointments to have yourself recorded. I don’t have any information about why or what happened during those years, but the service may be able to provide more info, if you like.”

The office is gleaming, illuminated brightly by windows and skylights and the sun of a coming Spring. Lacquered wood, great expanses of it, sit between him — seated in a powered wheelchair, which he has transitioned to using for most of his movement around the facility — and a thin, older woman. She is reading off of a portable display screen.

“We don’t have any explanation for why you stopped showing up for your sessions,” she tells him, “you canceled your appointment for January, five years ago, citing personal reasons. ‘Personal commitments’ is a standard reply in our appointment system, and it is the default one, so there isn’t much to go on there.”

“Do you know where I was, though?”

She flicks the right side of the screen with her hand, the thin device curling, as though she were leafing through a stack of paper. She does this half a dozen times, advancing through the document, finally flicking backwards once with her left hand. “We place you in northern California at that time. We tracked you moving between various cities for brief stays; Los Angeles, Phoenix, Berkeley, Redding…”

“Friends,” he says, nodding to himself.

“Yes. For a time you seem to have spent visiting acquaintances, some of which I believe you had not been in contact with for some time.”

He nods.

She continues: “This went on for a year since your last procedure. The next three years after that you went global. We have you staying for various lengths of time — as short as a day and as long as four months — all over the globe. First through Mexico to South America, then Europe, northern Africa, then Asia. It was about three years ago when you arrived in China. After that your trail goes cold. We were able to wheedle some information about where you went from the Chinese, but there isn’t much of any interest.”

“That’s where it ends? In China?” He asks.

She looks into his eyes, trying to read what he is thinking, “Not quite. We have some sketchy reports — eyewitness reports, but no data — of you appearing in Siberia, apparently having gone through Mongolia. No trace after that, which was eight months before we began the revival.”

He scoffs suddenly; it hits him just how absurd what he is hearing is. He had never gone to any of the places she mentioned, nor had had any wish to. Latin America, last he remembered, was a sweltering jungle where water-borne disease would kill you if the loose armies of vagabonds didn’t. China was a polluted police state. Half of Europe was crumbling tundra. Africa had been bleached dead by the longest droughts ever witnessed. His trail would have brought him through many dangerous, crumbling parts of the world. Not to mention the friends he had visited; many of them he never wished to see again, some of them he had had a downright contempt for…

“The people I visited,” he says, the idea occurring to him suddenly, “did anything happen to them?”

“No, not as far as we can tell,” she says. After a beat, she understands where his mind had gone: “you did nothing except visit them all, from what we can tell, and you don’t seem to have gone on the run after.”

“Don’t seem to?”

“We don’t have any record of you doing anything illegal, either before or during your journey,” she says, sitting back. “That was, frankly, something we figured, at first, too. Escaping the law through death, but continuing to live through an earlier version of yourself, a version that had done nothing wrong, nor probably had even thought of doing anything wrong.”

He exhales at this, the blood drains from his face slightly. The thought is disturbing: that he, mere months after his last session, could devise something as heinous as committing crimes, then to die, yet live on, still innocent.

“We have no evidence that you did anything like that, however,” she says, reassuringly. “It’s honestly a mystery to all of us, what you were doing. You wrote nothing, that we can find, and the acquaintances of yours we interviewed said that the meetings with you were unexpected, but pleasant. They didn’t suspect anything, and some of them seemed to have enjoyed your visit, saying that you ended some very old conflicts.”