Chapter 27 - The Doctor

Dr. Caera Han was exhausted.

The patients had streamed in and out of the emergency room in an unending flow for over fifteen hours To make matters worse, Dr. Shin had called in and begged her to cover her shift due to a family emergency. She had been on her feet for nearly the entire time, and the only thing she'd had to eat was a measly cube of cheese. If she had to see another patient for a non-emergency again, she would absolutely yell at them.

'Just one more hour,' she thought blankly as she stitched up the umpteenth abscess for her shift. 'Just one more hour before Dr. Shin can take over and I can go home and die on my bed. Just one more god damn hour.'

She tied the sutures neatly, hands steady despite her lack of sleep. She gave the patient instructions for care and sent him home.

The patient, notably, did not thank her. He cursed the long waiting times of the emergency room instead as he left.

Dr. Han ignored him as she wrapped up her patient records for the day on her Interface. Every bed in the room was occupied, and they were all waiting for test results to return. There was nothing she could do until the results came back, and by the time that happened she prayed she would be long gone.

The screen of her Interface was beginning to blur a little.

She was so tired. Perhaps just a five-minute nap? The nurses would wake her up if anything happened later. She laid her head on her folded arms and closed her eyes.

As her breathing evened out, darkness ripped through everything, and then everything was no more.

*********************

"...when I woke up, it was in the middle of the same hospital. The only thing was that there were many changes contrary to what I knew—none of them knew me, and I knew none of them. I had appeared out of nowhere, and they thought I had just used a malfunctioning retracing tool or something."

Dr. Han—now no longer a licensed doctor, now just Wizah—clenched her fists. "I went to my apartment, but it didn't belong to me. I had contact information, but none of them knew me. The only one who answered, scared out of his mind, was Io."

Uari listened to her with only the occasional nod or hum to indicate that he was following along, picking up pieces of information along the way. "That must have been difficult," he voiced. It was a tip he had picked up online after searching for information on how to handle mental breakdowns.

Wizah raised an eyebrow and nodded. "We met up after that, and then we realised that these changes had taken place with us. My teeth were now metal and I could eat a lot of other things. Io could make people stop in place.

"We made our way for a while just peddling quick cures for the poor. Luckily, a lot of the systems were the same, and our Interfaces still worked here. It was much later that Ghost found us."

"Does Ghost know why all of this is happening?"

Wizah shook her head. "I don't think so. She seemed just as lost as the rest of us. The Gravts gathered because we wanted to return to our old universe, to figure out what happened. Many of us left family, friends, lovers back home."

Uari took in all of this information well and sat back to think.

"It seems like a pretty harmless wish. To go back home."

"Mmhm."

"I feel uncomfortable every time I think about it. Why?"

"Do you think that maybe you've been wiped more than once?"

Wizah exhaled fiercely. "It could be. I can't know for sure."

"Do you know what kind of plan has been formulated to get the Gravts back home?"

"I don't know most of the details. It's too complicated even for me to understand. I think it was really only Ghost who understood everything that was happening, so we all just put our trust in her. What other choice did we have?"

Uari made a noncommittal sound. It was late now, and although the blinds by the windows had been drawn he could see no light seeping in through the slats. Pulling out two ready-made meals, he offered one to the excited-looking Wizah and then heated both up with a quick charge of lustre.

They ate in peace for a while, Wizah resting momentarily after the taxing tales she had told. After dinner, he offered her a leftover lemon candy from Iria's time with him, which Wizah scrunched her nose at before leaning back to pull open a drawer at the table.

"It's a good day for a ruler," she mumbled, before sticking a metal ruler in her mouth. It shattered. "Crispy. I should get more."

Uari shuddered and popped open a can of beans for his after-dinner dessert. Both sat in silence, snacking on their respectively-odd snacks.

They washed down the remnants of dinner with a can of Lightspeed each.

"Alright, what's next?"

"First is sleep," Wizah crawled under the covers like a particularly-convincing giant insect. "You can sleep on the floor."

"Rude. Can I at least have a blanket?"

"Haha, no."

He summoned his own sleeping bag from the subspace storage and settled down on the ground. She was right; they needed rest, and Wizah didn't seem too concerned about the Gravts catching up with them right then and there. He would trust their temporary alliance and rest too.

The subsequent days would be long and hard. He was torn between two courses of action: one, to take Iria and run. Wizah clearly knew how to take care of herself. They could escape into a different nation entirely, and hide from the Gravts, and live a good, long life.

Two, they could figure out how the Gravts were trying to return home. He was almost certain that Wizah had been wiped more than once because Temmy hadn't looked all that put-out when he questioned them about wiping her back when Temmy had shoved a gun against him. It was only a suspicion, but the fact that they had done it once already put the ball in his court. Wizah would no longer trust them.

Wizah was plenty unscrupulous. She had demanded a billion Geeglecoins from him at the start shamelessly, and continued to try and mislead him all the way, eventually notifying the Gravts of his arrival in their base.

With the information he had, he was roughly certain of one thing: if Wizah had been wiped, it was only because she had come across something that had violated her personal ethics.