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Chapter Twenty-Six: Conspiracy Theories
Prepped and ready to work, Henry waited for his assistants to ensure their patient was positioned properly, and that all the required tools were laid out for easy access. Today’s effort was going to be the simplest of Tom’s surgeries.
The doctor allowed his gaze stray to the parts lined along three sets of shelves on either side of the surgery table. There was one plate for each rib – twenty four in all, form fitted for the contours of Tom’s chest. A small strip of surgical taped was adhered to the shelves, marking the number of the rib the plate attached to. Each one would have to be installed in a specific order, beginning with those lowest on the chest and working up towards his shoulders. Tom’s upper arms had been completed in the previous surgery, as the newest round of plates would have to fare with them.
As the last of the preparation was being completed, Henry took one more tour around his colleague, observing for any signs that previous work was not taking as it should. To an untrained eye the pink almost burned tinge to Tom’s skin would raise red flags, but he was aware that it was only a by product of the stasis gel. The gel was designed to process organic waste materials, and, being that the uppermost layer of skin was really dead; the gel would then strip back the layers to the new skin underneath.
Henry recalled quite vividly how he had suspected tampering on Tom’s stas pod. The gel was easily adjusted to include all organics. It was how it was discovered in the first place, it was an alternative to dumping waste, allowing the combination of microorganisms to break down organic matter in minutes and reducing the impact the human race had on what was left of the Earth.
Researchers had worked for more than two decades to adjust the function of such a beneficial substance to lifesaving work. It also had an anesthetizing quality to it that prevented patient’s movement.
Stasis gel, later dubbed stasgel, proved to be a real lifesaver – in the literal sense of the term – for severe trauma patients in recovery. Beyond the small percentage, like Tom, who were aware in stasis, for most it was a pain free and stress free way to heal from the worst injuries survivable.
Henry refocused on what he was here to do, leaving behind the anxiety that had come from the notion that twice now, someone had tried to end Tom’s life. Drawing a heavy breath and sighing out his nose, the doctor went back to his assessment of his assistants’ work.
Tom’s arms had been positioned away from his body, supported by a special table extension so that surgeons and nurses could get at each piece of prosthesis in integrating the new plates. As Henry came even with that, he glanced over the sutures just to the insides of his arm, about a quarter inch below his elbow and three inches above. The one below his elbow was tiny, no more than one quarter inch long. The upper incision however, was nearly five inches long.
Prior to the emergency, Tom had told him that the actuators from humerus to radius were to be removed completely. They had been a nasty job, old school linear actuators with hydraulic tubing laced between the remaining muscle tissue in his upper arms and into the chest cavity. They had been installed, evidently, to give him greater than human strength in combat.
Still, despite Tom’s admission, Henry could not imagine him purposely killing others.
Removal of the actuator had been nothing short of tricky, because it required them to drain the hydraulic fluid without introducing any to Tom’s biological systems. Once those were sufficiently drained and flushed, they had to drag them back through the path through which they’d been laced. The actuators themselves proved to be almost as much of a problem. The muscle had to be moved aside to detach them from their pinnings in the titanium boning, and then pulled free. Between those two actions, Tom was going to be sore and weak in both arms. He was looking at a great deal of physical therapy on the other end of all of this.
The doctor continued on, watching the anesthesiologist monitor the Tom’s vitals. Seeing Henry there, he gave a thumb’s up. Henry nodded in return and then resumed his tour around the table.
When he returned to his position on the right of Tom’s bed, he carefully inspected each fusing bed along the artificial ribbing. The interns looked to have done a fine job of infusing each bed with enough material that the biochemical fusing would set properly and hold for decades. Of course he had chewed their hides for skimping when they had worked over Tom’s upper arms and they had to redo it. By this point, if they hadn’t learned their lesson, they were in need of being fired.
Henry refocused, pulling himself back past the professionalism required of being in charge of the surgery. Slipping on still human traits, he was given a very different perspective on the morbid scene before him. Many surgeries it had taken to get his chest reformed and the remaining muscle once more in place. Maroon tissue striated through with the off white artificial boning. There was that comparison in the back of his brain to zombie movies, where the skin had sloughed off the bones, leaving only rotting flesh behind. He was forced to suppress a shiver as it reminded him that this was a human being, his friend. It was easy sometimes as a doctor to compartmentalize the things he did day to day – to just not think of the human aspect that came with each procedure he performed.
“How’re we looking?”
“Ready, Henry.” His direct assistant, Tamara, glanced across the table at him with eyes of deep chocolate.
“Alright, let’s get started.”
For more than an hour they worked, in relative silence, with only the directions from Henry or Tamara, statements of progress, or the steady sine rhythm of Tom’s heart monitor breaking the busy silence.
The second hour ticked through while the team made good progress, Henry was halfway done on his side for the plating with Tamara only about half an installation behind on her side. Henry turned to take the next plate from his assistant, only to note something out of place as she swiveled back towards the half-reconstructed cybernetics. Shoving the plate back at the intern behind him, he lifted Tom’s hand from extension.
“He’s turning blue!” His gaze darted to the anesthesiologist. “What is going on?”
About that point the monitors began beeping and wailing.
The anesthesiologist looked as if he’d been startled from a daydream. His gaze went to his instrumentation. “He’s in respiratory arrest!”
“I figured that out from his skin color! Tell my why!”
The specialist moved closer to Tom’s head, and even Henry could see that somehow the block had come free from Tom’s mouth and he was biting the intubation tube. “Get him off that or we’re going to have more to worry about than oxygen deprivation!”
The anesthesiologist and a nurse both went to work on prying his jaw open.
“Sir once he passes out he’ll relax. It’s not like the pump will fail.” This was Tamara.
He glared at the girl, knowing she meant well, but she wasn’t completely up to speed on what she was speaking of. “If enough brain cells die due to oxygen deprivation the heart will stop, it’s still connected to his central nervous system, woman.” He turned to the two working on restoring Tom’s airway. “Well?”
“Working the block back in now, Dr. Gomez.”
“You’d better hurry.”
“Yes…there…done!” The monitors stopped blowing up almost at the same time. Looking them over and then the returning coloration of Tom’s skin, Henry finally breathed again.
“Tape it in place this time would you?”
“I don’t understand how he managed to get that loose.”
“Yeah, neither do I. If you had secured it in the first place, there’d be no question.”
A hard look slipped across the anesthesiologists face. Henry didn’t drop his own stare until the younger man backed down. Henry then stepped into the crook of Tom’s arm and chest and leaned down next to his ear. “Tom you do that to me again, and I’m going to let you heal just enough to where I can kick your ass.” He could feel the stares his talking to the anesthetized was eliciting, and he didn’t care. “Don’t make me waste all this effort on you.”
With a sigh, he straightened again, “Is he stable?”
“Oxygenation is back up to 92% and rising, sine looks good, he should be ready to continue.”
Henry took a few more moments to collect himself once again. “All right. Barring any further interruptions…”
He turned to his assistant and held out his hand for the next plate. Another two hours were spent placing and securing the remaining plates. Once each was positioned and bonded, he and Tamara integrated the front edges to the underlying sternum support and then installed the interlocking fairing that would keep the edges from popping loose. There was a neat illusion that the plates wrapped from his spine all the way around to the other side. That came from a carefully crafted set of seams and the inset way in which the sternum covered the front edges. There was to be nothing that could catch or be pulled loose once this was completed.
When the front had been secured the team rolled their patient onto his side and finished up along the spine, interlocking similar pieces which rose over the spinal column in the back. The set up reduced the possibility of spinal injury.
By the time the procedure was completed, five hours had passed.
“All right, let’s prep him for one more round of stasis.”
“How long do you figure it will be this time?” Tamara asked.
“No more than a week, week and a half.” Henry shrugged. “Just want to give those biochemical bonds time to set.”
“That’s it then?”
“That’s it. We’ll bring him out of stasis for good, and start his recovery process.” Henry realized how much he was looking forward to getting his friend back on his feet.
“I’ll make sure it goes smoothly.”
“Great. Thanks Tamara.”
“Dr. Henry Gomez, please pick up the white courtesy phone. Dr. Henry Gomez, white courtesy phone, thank you.”
Despite himself, a groan escaped him. Cutting through a small crowd of ambulatory patients, he came to a stop in front of one of the dreaded bat phones and lifted the receiver.
“Dr. Gomez.”
“Dr. Gomez, your presence is requested in Administrator Turner’s office.”
“Now? I can’t get a cup of coffee?”
“I would make it quick, doctor, he sounded as if it was important.”
Henry had been dreading this, could almost guess what it would be about. Swinging through the staff lounge, he poured himself a lukewarm cup of coffee, downed it quickly, and then headed up for the executive floor.
The man’s assistant rose from her seat as soon as he walked through her door, and motioned him to follow her. Not bothering to knock, she opened the door to Turner’s office and motioned him inside. Once Henry had cleared the doors, she shut it behind her and shut herself out.
Not dawdling, the doctor stepped across the open floor space of the man’s oversized office and sat down without invitation. “Good morning, Scott. You wanted to see me?”
“It’s afternoon, Henry.”
Henry looked at his watch. “Huh, so it is.”
The Administrator folded his hands across the top of his desk and leaned forward a bit. “Rough day in surgery I hear.”
Henry pursed his lips, thinking perhaps this wasn’t going where he thought. “A little, yes.”
“I’m being told you verbally reprimanded our top anesthesiologist.”
“If the man had been paying attention to his instrumentation, it wouldn’t have taken my patient’s skin color to announce his asphyxiation. Instead he was daydreaming.”
“The block came loose, it was a simple mistake.”
“One that a ‘top anesthesiologist’ shouldn’t make. Besides he had the sensitivity so low, the alarms didn’t go off until after the humans in the room noticed the problem. That should never have occurred!”
Scott Turner seemed to chew on that information for a while. “I want you to write a formal apology to him.”
“What?”
“He’s threatening to go to another hospital, and we need him. You’ll write a formal apology.”
“He’s the one who messed up, Scott.”
“You’re the one who overreacted, Henry.”
Henry set his jaw until his teeth squeaked, beginning to understand why Tom disliked Turner so much.
“In a surgery theater, I don’t have time for PC. A man’s life was at stake, and I wasn’t going to risk that for salving the ego of that idiot.”
“You still overreacted, and you’ll apologize for that overreaction in writing. End of story.”
“Fine, whatever.”
“Speaking of your patient – how did the rest of the surgery go?”
“Fine, the intubation issue was our only glitch. Everything went smoothly after that.”
“And how many more surgeries does Tom have?”
Henry tilted his head. “That was his last. We’ve reinstated him into stasis for the next week to ensure the biochem bonds set properly and then are going to bringing him up for good.”
“Hmmm,” Turner sifted through some of the papers on his desk. “That was exceptionally fast, considering you only got the supplies for his reconstruction five weeks ago.”
Henry had been wondering when he was going to get taken to task for this. He had his ducks in a row however, and was interested in seeing how Turner would react to it. “We had procured some surplus from another procedure. I sent the reallocation forms through channels. Didn’t you get them?”
That red tinge flushed under his pasty skin as Henry watched. “How long ago?”
“Would have been about eight weeks ago. The board approved it. I have the paperwork back in my office if you need to see it. With the way they fast-tracked his requisition, I thought they’d made you aware of the reallocation.”
By the look on his face they had bypassed him, or had told him after the fact that they were going to allow the materials to be redirected to get Tom back on his feet. He didn’t say as much.
“You have a recklessness about you lately – one that I would say has been heavily influenced by Dr. Martin. Be careful, Henry, Tom’s belligerent streak got him on the wrong side of the board.”
“Must be why they wanted him back on staff so badly,” Henry retorted.
That red in his face turned to puce. And Henry could see the internal struggle in the Administrator not to blow up.
Sure the board didn’t agree with Tom’s tactics at times, but they seemed to realize the man’s worth to the staff. Him turning out to be a cyborg didn’t seem to deter their drive to still have him. It made Henry leery that Turner still seemed so dead set on vilifying his friend. It reinforced what Tom had warned him regarding the Administrator.
“I want updates on his progress, Henry. I want to know where in the process he is at all times, got it?”
“You’ll get reports as I get news, Scott. I’ve got too much case load to give you daily updates. Tom’s not my only patient, just the one in the direst straights at the moment.” He leaned back, satisfied to see the Administrator squirm. Henry had always known that Scott didn’t like people standing up to him. “He’ll be out of stasis no later than next weekend, for your planning purposes. When he’s in better shape we will be scheduling passive and active therapy to get him back on his feet in the quickest manner possible.”
Henry hadn’t wanted to divulge that, especially not if Turner was involved with trying to murder Tom in the first place. But not telling him some progress, would tip the man off to the fact that Henry knew about Tom’s suspicions, and would add him to the list of potential “accidents.”
All he knew was that he was going to watch his own back a little more closely.
The doctor also realized he was going to have to put some contingencies into place in order to better ensure Tom’s survival through all this.
“Anything else, Mr. Turner?” Henry said, making his tone lighter than his mood currently was.
“I want that letter of apology on my desk no later than tomorrow morning, Henry. We need that guy, and I’ll not let you single-handedly risk his loss.”
“You’ll have it – before I go home tonight.”
That superior smiled appeared for the first time in the conversation.
“Good day, Scott.” Henry lifted himself from the leather-bound chair and left the office.
A/N: Sorry for the delay on this one...I realized I needed a transition between last chapter and the next chapter in order to make all this work. And then I got stumped on how I was going to do it. So I took a small blurb out of an older (and later) chapter, and revamped it into what you see above.
Not sure it's the finished, final product. But it's close.
Let me know what you think!
NEXT UP: Switched Off
Tom is out of stasis, but still heavily sedated.
