Page 6 of Even Vampires Bleed
I’m obviously not efficient enough because Angie comes to my aid and together with Elhyor, we force Léandre to sit on a chair.
When the doctor approaches him, Léandre tips his head on the side, already knowing what is expected of him.
“Hmm,” the doctor says, “from a medical point of view, this thing should be removable. It will sting for sure, but I don’t see what would prevent the extraction medically speaking. I could be wrong; those little pieces of technology are above my pay grade.”
I wait with bated breath as the redhead approaches Léandre.
She sets her bag next to Léandre’s seat and turns on a purple halo scanner. When she gets it next to Léandre’s ear, it lights up in every direction. She clicks on a few buttons, zooms in, zooms out, and clicks again.
“We’re ready, Milton,” she says to herself. Or maybe it’s to the scanner?
“Sequence activated, Miss F,” the scanner replies “Three, two, one, live.”
The scanner lights up and a holographic, three-dimensional view of Léandre’s microchip appears under our eyes.
“The tendrils you can see around the bug,” the redhead starts as she points with a laser on said tendrils on the holo, “are what keeps it stuck inside. You could remove the skin over, and it’ll still stay stuck inside.” She pauses, frowns, and then asks her tablet, “Milton, run protocols for extraction.”
A loading bar appears next to the bug, on the girl’s side, and then disappears almost right after.
“There is a sixty-eight percent chance of successful surgical extraction of the bug. There is, however, a ninety-eight percent chance that doing so will discharge the energy from the main body into the tendrils. The holographic rendering of the device only shows what is in the immediate vicinity of the main body.”
Miss F curses and then asks “Milton, show the whole device.”
The holographic image grows and forces us to step back to see the whole image. I stay next to Léandre while Dad, Elhyor, and Angie move so we can see the full image.
It’s huge.
And it looks like the tendrils run over almost all of his brain.
Oh my gods.
That’s awful.
I don’t see how they could remove all of that.
I barely know Léandre, and once again, I feel like crying.
“What happens if the energy from the body is sent through the tendrils?” Angie’s question pulls me out of my horrified mind.
“Milton, answer the lady’s question,” the redhead asks.
”If the energy is sent through the tendrils, it’ll fry the end of the fail-safe tendrils,” the AI answers evenly.
“Milton, what are the fail-safe tendrils?” Miss F asks again.
A dozen tendrils over the hundred of them switch from the white blue of the global simulation to a flashing red. They all look like they’re going in the same direction—toward the center of the brain.
“Can you show the brain with your simulation, young girl?” The doctor asks, and Miss F complies and asks her AI—even if she does so begrudgingly.
There’s a quiet gasp when the image fully loads, but all I can see is the look of complete horror on the doctor’s face.
I can guess his next words even before he says them, and I shudder.
“It’ll erase who he is.”
“You’re correct,” the AI says. “There is an eighty-two percent chance that he’ll lose all memory prior to the energy discharge. There is also a ninety-seven percent chance that all that he learned during that time will still be intact.”
Léandre moves from the chair to the ground and sags next to me before clutching his head between his hands.
