Fundamental Interaction, Pt. 2

Vomit was the first thing Thalia smelled upon waking. Actually, it was the first thing she sensed upon waking, and if she could have picked an initial sense, it certainly wouldn't have been smell. A few moments later the rest of her faculties kicked in. Blurry vision turned to a clearer picture of a dimly lit holding cell. She was alone. The only thing filling space in her cell was a latrine in one corner and the chair she was currently cuffed to by her wrists and ankles. Sounds were mostly distant, but they echoed off the polymer floor and walls and brought to Thalia's ears profane protests and maniacal ramblings from surrounding inmates. There was a drain in the middle of her cell and the floor sloped into it. Tiny streams formed from water dripping off her clothing and bare feet and trickled down to the drain. There was no window, so most of the poor lighting came from the thin plasma barrier between her cell and what appeared to be a corridor on the other side. Everything was some shade of dull, whether it was the drab olive of the walls or the nondescript gray of the floor, and she had nothing else to look at except for her spartan cell.

Her damp body ached and her head throbbed. There was at least a heater blowing warm air on her, so apparently no one wanted her to die of hypothermia while she was drenched in cold water and unconscious. Her face itched like crazy, too. She wanted desperately to scratch it, and it was almost as painful as her pounding headache and sore back that she couldn't reach her forehead to satisfy the itch.

Thalia found herself stuck sorting through all the thoughts in her head, trying to reconstruct the event that brought her here. She remembered cowering before the gendarmes and telling them that she had merely helped that boy from getting crushed by the taxi. The boy and his friends had already fled the scene (maybe his ankle wasn't so bad after all), and all anyone could utter was how Thalia brought down the magway. She shut off the magnets! She must be a former tech! A machine!

Machine!

Thalia closed her eyes as they welled with tears. The crowd's cries were the last thing she remembered, aside from the long, black boots of the gendarmes next to her head as she kept low to the ground. She didn't remember any violence against her, but her body told a different story. She was afraid of knowing what had happened to her since her blackout. Maybe she could go back to sleep... no, there was no way to overcome her current migraine.

Tech. Tech. The word started to sound odd in Thalia's head. If she were back in Herg, the untags would have accused her of witchcraft or divine powers, but in this city she was accused of being a tech. A cyborg. A former soldier designed to take on such tasks as single-handedly wrangling entire crowds into submission, stopping vehicles with the flick of a wrist and manipulating plasma weaponry just by thinking about it. Just like witches, though, former techs were feared by most people. Even if the military disabled all of their enhanced cybernetic components before discharging them from service, it didn't alleviate the public's paranoia over having cyborgs among them. It also didn't help that what Thalia supposedly did on the magway was eerily similar to what some techs could do at their full abilities.

She hung her head low and sobbed. Any position she held her head was as uncomfortable as the last, so Thalia succumbed to the shame she felt welling up in her and drooped. She didn't pick her head up when she heard a magnetic door open from far down the hallway, even though she half-hoped it might be someone to see her.

The sound of footsteps--several pairs by her best judgment--echoed down the corridor and drew closer. Eventually five figures appeared on the other side of the translucent, glowing wall. They stopped, turned to each other and nodded heads and gestured at Thalia. Seconds later the plasma barrier noiselessly fizzled away and there was nothing between Thalia and the quartet of government officials plus Alden.

Alden's presence came as the first bit of relief for Thalia. While everyone else wore a mask of indifference, Alden met her gaze with compassion. Thalia wished she could run into his arms and stay there until she was far, far away from this place. He mouthed a tender "it's okay" to her, which inadvertently caused Thalia to shed more tears. His expression changed to worry, and as he took a step forward to comfort Thalia, one of the three policeman blocked him and told him to stay where he was. Thalia saw Alden glower at the officer before her attention turned to the doctor among the group, recognizable by the medical insignia on her blue coat. She was standing in front of Thalia and tapping away on the holoscreen floating directly above the datapad she held in her left hand like a clipboard.

"Right, then," said the doctor, as if in the middle of a conversation. "Ms. Ravel?"

Thalia looked up at the doctor intently; her body shook with anticipation. The doctor proceeded to hold the datapad closer to Thalia, pausing for several seconds as her eyes read back whatever was displayed on the holoscreen. Thalia found her body mapped out in a light grid for a moment before the datapad emitted a strange noise. The doctor shook her head and sighed.

"I'm clearing you to leave this facility now," she said as she tucked the datapad into a pocket on her coat, leaned towards Thalia, and without asking, ripped away a few thin, flexible adhesive strips from Thalia's forehead. She didn't even know they were there! Thalia tried to get a good look at the strips; they were silver with luminescent red dots on them.

"What are those?" asked Thalia.

The doctor gave Thalia a tired glance out of the corner of her eye as she turned to speak to the gendarmes. "Diagnostics prove 100% negative for tech composition." She wearily rubbed her temples. "It's just another case of coincidence combined with crowd hysteria, and I've wasted enough of my day with this." She pulled a second device, her handheld, off her belt and typed out a short message. The police officer's own handhelds beeped the doctor's incoming message as the doctor put her handheld back. "That would be my official clearance for Ms. Ravel," she said as she left the cell.

The lead officer grunted and removed his handheld from his shoulder harness, looking at the screen with a frown. "Let her go," he told the other two gendarmes. They looked at each other once before approaching Thalia, but the third officer continued to keep Alden at a distance.

"This will be a lot easier if you don't move," one of them told Thalia. Why would she move around, anyway? She nodded back at them. The officers activated the lightkeys embedded in their black gloves and touched the tops Thalia's thick cuffs with their index and middle fingers. The cuffs emanated a loud thunk as they unlocked. Thalia obediently waited for more orders and kept her arms still in the loosened cuffs. The officers repeated the process on her ankles, then stood up and stared her down again.

"Your friend here has paid your ticket already," the officer blocking Alden said to Thalia, as the other two picked Thalia up by the upper arms and helped her to standing. She wobbled on her legs as she tried to establish firm footing, but realized almost too late that she did not have the proper strength to stand. As she continued to dangle like a rag doll between the officers, Alden finally pushed past the man blocking him and put his hands under Thalia's arms. The officers released Thalia, who willingly let herself crash into Alden.

"I'm sorry," she told him, throwing her arms around his neck. "Whatever I did, I'm so sorry."

Alden adjusted his grip on Thalia and calmly reassured her. "You didn't do anything." She heard him clear his throat. "She can't walk yet," said Alden to the officers, his voice barely polite. "Could you give us a minute?"

The lead officer replied by palming a sensor on the wall opposite from the chair Thalia had been cuffed to; a long bench slid out of the wall. The lighting inside the cell also increased. Alden pulled himself and Thalia to the seat and made sure she was sitting comfortably before letting go of her. He retrieved some tissues from one of his pockets and handed them to her.

"Don't take too long," said one of the officers, who gestured for his comrades to attend to other matters. He took a step outside the open cell before looking at Alden and pointing at the other end of the hallway. "You can exit that way and avoid going through the rest of the station. Which is probably best, considering everyone thinks she's..."

He didn't finish. Thalia watched Alden finally lose his cool. "Everyone thinks she's what?" he asked, standing up. "She rescued some idiot playing too closely to the magway then got stuck herself. That's all the report says, right?"

"Look," said the officer, his voice rising. "I don't care. I'm not from this hellhole district, and frankly you people have some odd ideas about techs. I'm only trying to help. March through the station on your way out and see what happens." He began to walk away. "Try to get her to stand as soon as possible," he called back to them from halfway down the corridor.

Alden exhaled as he sat down again, running his hands down his face in frustration. He finally looked over at Thalia and cracked a smile. "Besides your legs, how are you?"

"Everything hurts." She rubbed her forehead then moved to scratching it. It was the most relief she'd had since waking up, aside from having Alden with her. She noticed he had narrowed his eyes and was perusing her body peculiarly. "What are you doing?" she asked, leaning away from him slightly.

He reached for her shoulder and moved her hair aside, still looking at her like he was searching for something in particular. "Do you mind if I...?" He started lifting her hair up and feeling the back of her neck.

Thalia thought she realized what he might be doing. "Go ahead," she answered, positioning her back closer to him. "Do you know what they did?"

It took many moments and a pretty thorough feel of Thalia's back before Alden replied. He moved to her lower back, where he pushed up her tank top. "I have a pretty good idea," he replied, running his hands over a particularly sore spot. Thalia instinctively recoiled.

"They've been testing you, but to do a puncture like this means they were searching hard for something."

Thalia wanted to cry more, but she swallowed the feeling. "Because they thought... no... they knew I was a tech, but couldn't find what they were looking for."

Alden smoothed Thalia's top down gently over her back and tugged at her left hand, beckoning her to turn around. Just as she caught the first glimpse of him, something warm fell around her shoulders. It was his jacket. She wrapped it snug around her and thanked him. He looked away guiltily.

"Ty," he called Thalia by her nickname, "this is all my fault." She leaned forward, ready to argue his statement, but he interrupted her. "I'm the one who insisted you stay in Juand. I'm the one who offered you my home and let you work with me in my shop. It's like I..."

Thalia eagerly waited for the rest of what Alden had to say. Many breathless moments passed.

He finally uttered, "Now that I've put you through this, it all seems so selfish of me!"

Thalia was taken aback. "Selfish? What part of helping me was selfish?"

Alden said nothing. He turned away from Thalia, took something thin, shiny and rectangular--only slightly longer than an ID card--out of a pants pocket and stared at it, shaking his head. Whatever it was, it seemed to bother him dreadfully.

"End your misery already," Thalia said at last, driven by her own curiosity. Alden suddenly scooted closer to Thalia and put the object on the top of her thigh. She picked it up.

Alden darted his eyes around nervously. "The police were asking why you didn't have this with you. You, uh, left this at the apartment."

It was a handheld. Her very own handheld! Every citizen had one; they were government-issued, vital extensions of every legal person in il-Satol. They contained everything from medical records to criminal history to personal access to the Satolian network. Thalia wondered how Alden came across this one. Unlike ID cards, handhelds only worked for their individual owners through biorecognition. She'd never bothered to swipe a handheld from someone, because there was no possible way any of them would work for her. But this one... this would actually respond to her? She turned it over in her hands and studied it curiously, her excitement growing.

"You don't have to take it," he said. "If you leave Juand because of this, I would totally und-"

"Of course I want it!" exclaimed Thalia as she anxiously tried turning it on. Alden reached over and directed her index finger to the power button on the back. The front screen showed it was locked until she took the necessary steps to identify herself. Thalia decided to do that later, preferably in the comfort of Alden's apartment.

"Oh, Alden! Thank you! Now I'm truly a... uh, I mean, thank you for finding this." They both smiled at each other; Alden idly played with the strap of a small messenger bag around his shoulder. Thalia hadn't been aware of it before, but now she realized it was her bag.

"Oh," said Alden, removing the bag, "they gave me your stuff back, too." He helped her put the bag's strap over her head and under an arm. As he lifted up her hair, he took a moment to feel it. "We should get you out of here. If I'd known they were going to douse you, I'd have brought you a change of clothes."

Thalia patted the jacket Alden had given her. "You've done plenty. Thanks." She tucked her handheld into the bag, found her sandals among the bag's contents and slipped into them. She took one last sigh and tried rising to her feet. Alden stood up too, and held her around her middle for support. She took a few shaky steps before falling into him.

He kept her upright by tucking her into his right side. "Can you walk if you lean on me?"

"I think so," she replied, looking up at Alden. He seemed satisfied with her answer and began carefully inching them out of the cell and down the hallway, in the direction the officer suggested. Several gendarmes were patrolling the cells that lined the corridor, and every single one of them eyed Thalia skeptically as she passed them. She eventually turned away from their intimidating stares and kept her head down. Oddly, that terrible smell from her cell was still lingering somewhere around her. Was it her clothes? Maybe that's why they hosed her down...

She held her tank top up to her nose. "Did I vomit? Wait, do techs vomit?"

There was a brief pause before Alden responded. "Come on, Ty, you know you're not a tech, and let's not talk about vomit, OK?"

She agreed with a weak nod and leaned a little more heavily into Alden. As they walked out of the station and into the midnight streets, she felt Alden fold his arms around her. It was time to face the rest of Juand City again. Where she was once a nonentity, just another face in the crowd, she was now suspicious and conspicuous. She wondered how long it would take for people to forget who she was. Thalia buried her face into Alden's side; his hold on her tightened.

"Even if you were a tech," he said, "it wouldn't change the way I feel about you."