Uari continued to say nothing, trying not to think too hard about the knife and the pistol and what all of this was supposed to mean. He tried to think of an excuse, but there wasn't much he could come up with, really, without giving away how much (how little) he really knew. He needed more information.
Dr. Wizah seemed to get more impatient as time went by, and used the jabby end of the knife to press and prod him backwards, past the door she had come out of and against the wall on the other side of the room. The space was small and dim, and there was an Interface in it with the screen facing away from the door. A hefty pair of glasses were abandoned on the ground. He recognised it immediately as an older, grittier version of the Interface's Virtual Reality access glasses.
While society had mostly graduated from the bulky headsets of old, they still weren't affordable to the poor fools in the slums after all.
In short, here was what Uari knew about Dr. Wizah from a quick glance of the room:
1. Dr. Wizah was a slum doctor who might or might not be officially certified.
2. Dr. Wizah did not have high-end equipment.
3. Dr. Wizah needed the VR glasses and was likely working through them instead of seeing patients face to face.
That last point raised additional questions - was it because of safety? Anonymity? VR could scan patients - you could view their symptoms in real-time, and you could touch them and hear the patients, but you still couldn't smell much and older models ran the risk of mistakes. It would have been more effective to see patients face-to-face - if not in person then via a proxy. Besides, based on how Gaunt Man (Uari still didn't know his name) had essentially screamed her title for the world to hear, she hadn't been all that concerned about people knowing about what she did-
"Do you use the VR because you can blame any mistakes on the old model," he blurted without thinking, "instead of your own shitty skills?"
Whoops, he thought absently as the temperature in the room seemed to drop by a solid few degrees. "Dr." Wizah hustled him into a chair, knife still pressed against him roughly where his liver would be, and proceeded to magic up some handcuffs to cuff him to the chair with.
He tested one, then the other. They were some pretty high-quality cuffs. Wizah must have gotten them from someone else. He would play along for now.
"You're a little bitch, you know that?" She sat down on the seat of her Interface sideways, facing him. There was a bitterness in her eyes, a story untold. He must've hit some kind of sore spot regarding her skills, but he couldn't afford to care right now. He needed answers and the easiest way to get them was to rile her up.
"And you're a quack doctor," he says, almost regretting the words as they left his mouth. Wizah took several deep breaths and ignored his comment.
"Once again, let me ask you." She gritted the sentence out. "Why are you here?"
He tried something new. "The memory wipe failed, I guess."
"That's impossible. I did the wipe myself." She furrowed her brows, and her right leg began to bounce impatiently. She grabbed absently at a bowl she left on her Interface, missed, and took her eyes from him briefly to pick out a piece of candy, which she unwrapped and popped in her mouth. The hard candy cracked loudly as she chewed through the whole thing instead of sucking, like some kind of psychopath. Uari wanted to say something very badly but kept his mouth shut determinedly. It was a psychological trick he learned from...somewhere.
Wizah continued to chew on her candy and also continued to glare at him—either thoughtful or lost in thought, but he wouldn't risk it either way. This woman had the self-proclaimed skills to perform a memory wipe, and despite her lacklustre medical equipment had some pretty legitimate weapons. He didn't want to piss off whoever was behind her - not yet, anyway. Her skills were genuinely shit, though. If she were as defenceless as he truly thought she was, he could probably knock her and be out in under a minute.
Uari gave up on tracking his invasive, out-of-place thoughts and just let them run. They were clearly a part of him anyway, so they'd probably reconcile with his current self at some point.
Wizah finally swallowed the last of her candy, but then proceeded to stick a finger in and presumably attempt to pick at whatever pieces of hard candy were stuck between her teeth. She presumably succeeded, but then she picked an especially sharp instrument off her Interface and stuck that in her mouth as well.
She began to dig around, and Uari realised with a sharp shiver that the stare on him had doubled in intensity. She also wasn't digging around with the instrument, but chewing on it instead, and he saw—heard!—with some numb horror, and she was successfully chewing said metal implement like it was made of paper. The instrument bent in half like a toothpick, and she shoved the whole thing in her mouth.
The screech of metal on metal was grating his ears, and he watched in abject horror, mouth hanging open slightly, as she crunched and ate the tool.
She reached over and slapped him across the face.
"Well," she licked her lips. "I see how it is."
Uari did not see anything, but he did not want to be here any longer, so he stood up abruptly - chair, handcuffs, and all - and began to drag the entire ensemble over to the only door in the room. The brief encounter had given him much to think about - primarily, that the world was very scary. He would eat some hot curry from the VendoStor, go home and sleep, and then pray that the next day would turn out better.