“That’s easy!” the medics hear the robot say. When they look at the screen displaying what Lee is watching, they see the robot really close, almost as if it is looking at them. “Using the hospital's database, I connected to the internet and got all of that information.”
“Okay, Lee?” Nurse Fionna calls out for Lee’s attention. “Now we will need to do a more detailed scan of your brain. The chair will lean back, so just relax.”
Lee nods and feels the chair recline backwards. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath… then it starts. At first, it is like static coming from a speaker with voltage but no sound, then a faint sound of rippling water. Lee opens his eyes and a thought in English pops into his head: “What on earth have those kids done now?” Before he has time to move, he feels a jolt in his brain.
With the jolt, it is like the dam that held the memories breaks. Lee hears the tear of fabric, crushing glass, and lightning all at once. Random lights flicker in front of his eyes; he tries to close them, but it is useless. The lights keep flickering, then the lights turn into images, and with the images comes sound…
Lee is starting to panic, unable to make any sense of the images or sounds. The images seem to be projections coming from hundreds of sources into the same spot; the audio is of those one hundred sources all playing at once.
The images start to become transparent and slow to a regular pace. The sound becomes more coherent, but still all mixed together. As Lee looks around, he sees the medical crew moving in slow motion: one is running toward him—whom he recognises as Nurse Raxen—and another is lifting his watch, which is starting to project a floating image, like a hologram, of a call being connected.
From all of this chaos, one image and the sound of a name stand out. The image is of two Greek letters, a Zeta and a Delta; they are intertwined, the Z passing up and down over the triangle that makes the capital D. With that, the name Zurc D’antas emerges. In his subconscious, he knows that the name belonged to him—his given name from millennia ago.
Lee starts to feel heat on his scalp as the medical crew starts to move faster, then the sound of electric sparks crackles. Finally, he notices Nurse Raxen jumping and spinning in mid-air, her tail whipping down. It crashes into the helmet, breaking it, but her strength is so controlled that even though the helmet explodes on impact with the tail, Lee does not suffer any injury.
Lee’s head goes limp to the side, all energy gone from his body. Even so, he notices the helmet bits on fire and sparks coming out of it. Nurse Raxen kneels next to Lee. He gives her a smile and manages to say, “Thank you, Nurse Raxen.” Then his vision tilts even more before total darkness envelops him.
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“How did this happen?” asks the doctor, unplugging the helmet from the chair.
“I don’t know!” says the nurse who brought Lee into the room. “I double-checked, and everything was connected correctly.”
“Yes, it was,” says the doctor, examining the cables. “Also, if something wasn’t right, there would have been an error and no connection would have been possible.”
Nurse Fionna walks in with a hover stretcher. When she gets near the reclined chair with Lee’s limp body, the stretcher lowers down, and Raxen, with the help of one of the women, places Lee on it.
“You will have to examine this case thoroughly,” the other woman says. She then points to Lee. “If any harm comes to the child, there is no place left for you in the galaxies, let alone in this hospital.” She finishes with a threat.
The nurse who took Lee into the room looks confusedly between the woman and the now-pale doctor. “What is so special about the kid?” she asks. “He is just a child from a small village. And who are you to be making threats?”
“Me? No one. But the threats I’m making are on behalf of my boss,” the woman says. “The kid might be living in a small village, but that doesn’t mean that’s where he's from.”
“Beta, the computers didn’t make it,” informs the other woman, now standing on the other side of the glass wall, calling to the woman who issued the threat.
“What do you mean, Charlie?” asks Beta, confused. “These are no regular computers…”
“I know!” acknowledges Charlie. “But somehow, when the helmet went into a glitch and started malfunctioning, it short-circuited the memory hard drives too. It never even had time to upload any information to the internal system.” She finishes by approaching Beta and tapping on a holographic display from her watch.
Beta turns on her own holographic display, then closes it with a violent shake of her wrist. “Unbelievable. Even the image I was recording straight from my watch was corrupted.”
“It could have been the electromagnetic impulse,” says Raxen in Galactones, making the medics in the room look at her. “That’s why I looked at Lee before the electric sparks started. I felt them. It was a total of five or six impulses; it made my vision become a bit blurry.”
“It makes sense; that could also be why there were all those distorted flashing lights,” says the male doctor. “We will need to run another test to make sure he is properly fine.”
“Another?!” exclaims Beta. “If you wish to die, just say so.”
“Yes, we will have to,” the doctor says, his voice cracking with fear. “But as he seems to have a hyper-imagination, we will use a helmet designed for Brainiaxians. The final readings might be low, but that’ll be because they will be compared to a Brainiaxian.”
“Even so, no test will be done without one of us present,” orders Beta, indicating herself and Charlie.
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