The Entanglement

5

(AN: I was originally going to make this a separate sort of sequel, but it just didn't make sense with the way it turned out. So here we go!)

The scan takes 8 minutes. Cira carefully sits back and watches the organic maze of a human brain take shape. Brakes snores behind her, his sleep chaperoned by the steady notes of his ICU. It sings every 20 seconds to signal all vitals are stable. The night lights are soft and yellow. Her pod sits open like a hatched egg.

A barely audible hum. The ICU scan is complete. A dense, sharply detailed hologram takes shape in the air. It looks like a picture taken of her, but it holds millions of overlapping images down to the cellular level. She looks strange. Pale blue-tinged skin. Prematurely white hair. A tall spindly build that implies a life spent in less than ideal gravity, but with hard muscles developed during military service. It makes her look coiled and unnerving. Nothing about her is quite the right proportion or color. Brakes and Gun's reaction makes far more sense.

The data covers roughly 13 hours of sleep. Her hologram self stays unusually still in a supine position. Even in lower gravities, people toss and turn to alleviate pressure points. It's only after five and a half hours that she stirs. Limb twitching and uncoordinated jerks that look like a seizure. Then she flops clumsily onto one side.

Cira pauses the image and focuses on her head, her brain, an unremarkable little patch on her frontal lobe. A diffuse blue glow fills the hologram. It becomes a smear long before she sees any cells so she goes back a few seconds. The blue light dims. At first, it looks like strawberry flesh with seeds strewn across a dull maroon background. But as she zooms in, the flesh becomes an intricate tangle of nerves. It then ceases to be a solid color and becomes a mesh of interwoven fibres that are dotted with sharp-edged cell bodies. Neurons. Billions of them glittering together. Darting lights. Thoughts flaring like meteor showers.

Except her's aren't glittering. She double checks the ICU scan. It's complete. Functionality should be color-coded. The diffuse blue glow persists, but every nerve is dark. Lifeless. Just shapes that block light. No action potential. No functionality at all. When she looks closer, they're broken or malformed. The weaving of capillaries around them are untouched. Platelets and red blood cells rush by in a tumbling current. That's normal and yet....

These aren't the images of a living person. They can't be. Cira checks the scan again. It's from the right pod. Right time and place. The hologram is her. She presses a fist against her lips. These look like scans from a beating heart cadaver. No cellular activity. No putrefaction, either. No signs of decomposition whatsoever.

Not possible.

Her own awareness feels unchanged. Aches and pains. Breaths. A pulse. What she sees and what she feels are irreconcilable. She blinks excess moisture away and manually changes the scan's settings to include wavelengths beyond visible light. It's something they do in cases of internal contamination when an idiot ingests radioactive materials or is scratched or skewered by some. This will be good practice with the likes of Brakes and Gun onboard.

Her hologram self reappears as a bright oversaturated silhouette. It's blinding. Cira squints and all but eliminates visible light from the picture. Another brief moment of darkness and then the hologram unfolds like soft blue smoke. Her body ceases to be a body. It looks like a planter that a plant has long outgrown. Roots fill every available space until it's just fibrous maze in the shape of its container. Cira swallows hard at that. It never occurred to her that she might be more thread than human. She returns to the same defunct neurons, but they're faint shadows surrounded by translucent fibers. These fibers are dwarfed by dead cells. It requires more zoom to see them in detail.

Fractals. Fractals like old rivers or lightning or newborn ferns. Infinitely complex at a scale that should prohibit it. Thin and slightly blue with tiny hooks that perforate the neuron's cell body, but not its dendrites or synapses. Instead, those are surrounded by densely branched crescents like a hand hovering inside the synaptic gap. She stares at that image for a long time. Part of her wants to cut every scrap of this thing out regardless of the consequences. A large part. But she takes a deep breath and lets the hologram resume playing.