James Axler - End Program

“The eye has capabilities,” Ryan told her. “It’ll take some getting used to.”

“There are counselors here in Progress,” Krysty said. “One of them will tell you how it functions, show you how best to use it.”

Ryan nodded uncertainly as he finished buttoning his shirt.

Krysty looked at him and smiled that dazzling, beautiful smile that would make any man’s heart melt. “It looks good, Ryan. If I wasn’t spoken for, I’d fall for you all over again right now.”

Chapter Seven

“The eye has many properties that you will find useful,” the gray-haired woman told Ryan.

Once he had dressed, Ryan and Krysty had been escorted to another room by Roma. Mildred and J.B. tagged along.

The new room was wide-open with white walls, a raised bed and a desk-type arrangement that pulled out from a recess in one of the walls, smoothly folding out in sections. A long window dominated the opposite wall of the room, looking out over the industrial center with its towering chimneys. Ryan could see that a river flowed fast and furious along the edge of the ville.

The woman stood before the desk. She was dressed in a long white robe with a high collar, and gloves molded into the sleeves. Her iron-gray hair was tied back in a neat ponytail. She acknowledged Ryan with a warm smile, introducing herself as Betty. Ryan’s companions had met Betty before, and she knew them all by name.

J.B. took one look at the examination room and stepped back through the door. “It’s going to get mighty cramped with all of us in there,” he said. “Krysty, why don’t you and me go to the lounge while the healer checks Ryan over?”

Krysty checked with Ryan before agreeing, and he assured her he would be fine. “Mildred’s here with me,” he said. “Finest shot in the Deathlands—she’ll look out for me.” He said that last statement as something of a couched warning, uncertain whether he should trust the whitecoat.

Roma led J.B. and Krysty from the room, the door whispering closed behind her. Once they were gone, Betty adjusted something on the desk and the long window assumed a tinted aspect, cutting the bright sunlight like sunglasses and casting the room in a grayish shadow. There was a machine in the room too, Ryan saw now—cylindrical and almost as tall as he was, the thing moved on hidden wheels, a bank of lights running across its metallic skin.

“You’re looking well, Mr. Cawdor,” Betty said, smiling. “Your recovery has been excellent.”

“He’s strong,” Mildred said, taking up a position to one side of the room so that Betty could examine Ryan.

“Now, you’re not going to start punching me, are you, Mr. Cawdor?” the woman in the white robe asked.

Ryan shook his head. “You heard about that, huh? I was a little disoriented when I woke up and I wasn’t getting answers.”

Betty nodded. “You were in recovery for a long time,” she said. “It’s understandable.”

Then she indicated the bed and Ryan lay down, unbuttoning his shirt. Betty checked him over with detached professionalism, assuring him—and herself—that his scars had almost healed. The cylindrical thing waited silently beside Betty, scanning Ryan with its emotionless camera eye.

“Krysty said I’d been placed in a bath of nutrients,” Ryan said. “Can you explain what happened?”

Betty nodded. “Yes, you must have a lot of questions. The nutrient bath that your companion spoke of was to assist in your healing. While there, nano-machinery—which performs surgery on a molecular level—was used to repair your wounds, including those sustained in surgery when glass and other material was removed from your body.”

“What other material?” Ryan asked.

Betty stepped over to the desk and brought up a report on the embedded screen. “Some plant matter, much of it toxic. Similar material was found in almost all of your colleagues when you arrived, but we successfully removed all of it.”

“We fought a plant,” Ryan said. “I remember.”

“Tough bitch of thing, too,” Mildred added grimly.

“The nutrient bath assisted in your body’s natural repair,” Betty continued, “after which you were placed in a regulated environment where your body temperature could be kept at the optimum for recovery and could be fed proteins to maximize your healing.”

“The coffin,” Ryan stated.

“What’s that?” Betty asked, turning her attention back from the comp.

“I woke up inside a sealed box,” Ryan said. “I figured someone was trying to bury me.”

“Quite the opposite,” Betty told him, flashing her teeth in an awkward smile. The teeth were good, strong-looking but yellowed with age. Ryan saw a sliver of metal there behind the upper right canine where a tooth had been removed and replaced. “Would you sit up for me?”

Nodding, Ryan shifted himself until he was sitting upright once more. Then, while he sat on the bed, Betty asked him to do a few tests with his new eye, reading the characters on a distant chart that was projected in the air by the cylindrical machine, identifying colors and observing movement through a spinning device in its trunk. Once she had confirmed the eye was functioning correctly, Betty told Ryan that the eye had extra properties.

“I think I stumbled on one,” Ryan admitted. “I focused my vision and a crosshairs target appeared.”

“Yes,” Betty confirmed. “You can also magnify the image in the left eye, like a longblaster scope. Are you right-or left-handed, Mr. Cawdor?”

“Right,” Ryan said, holding up his right hand.

“Tsk, that’s a shame.” Betty sighed “But it is not a huge loss. Obviously, the targeting facility would have been better in the same eye as your blaster hand but that can’t be helped now.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind the next time I lose an eye,” Ryan told her sarcastically.

The clinician acknowledged this with a snort before going back to her explanation. “The eye has other properties that feed directly into your optic nerve to be processed by your brain. You now have night vision, including an infrared functionality—which will also allow you to track the heat given off by a subject. You may access the former by blinking twice in quick succession while in darkness or semidarkness.”

Since the room was shaded, Ryan first tried the night vision, blinking rapidly twice. The feed from his left eye switched to a gray-green hue. The feed from the night vision was confused because Ryan also had his real eye open, creating a double image, one normal and one cast in gray-green.

“Whoa,” Ryan said, feeling a wave of nausea run through him.

“You may find it easier to process if you close your other eye,” Betty said.

Ryan did just that. Then he gazed around the room, saw the figures and details of the room picked out vividly in what seemed to be a murky gray fog. He saw Mildred smiling as he experimented, her eyes and teeth a brilliant white lined in neon green, while the bank of lights on the surface of the cylindrical machine seemed brilliant in the gloom. “That’s...working,” Ryan said, blinking again until the feed switched back to normal.

“The infrared requires pressure here.” Betty showed Ryan by touching the bottom left corner of her own eye.

He mimicked the woman’s gesture and, after a moment’s trial and error finding the pressure plate, he activated the infrared function. This time, he had the foresight to close his other eye, ensuring he saw only the feed. Suddenly, the room was cast in a dull gray through Ryan’s left eye, with the two human forms burning a brilliant red-orange as they watched him. The cylindrical machine glowed a faint orange, cold and lifeless despite its ability to move independently. Ryan moved his head, looking around the room at the spots of heat at the desk and, more dully, across the bank of windows.