(Uri)
The following day, we made our way to the so called city. A refugee's fortune shelter for a while apparently.
We found many signs along the way it had been made as such.
We enter a commercial centre that turned to a graveyard, on another outskirt of the city. We're feeling uncomfortable fast. There aren't corpses lying around, but everything else hints heavily at riots, chaos, and a violent massacre. There were movements of panic.
The stains of brown iron oxides... There are caput mortuum traces and dust everywhere, along shredded clothing, bullet impacts and traces of fire.
This is the sanctum of an unspeakable tragedy.
We were lucky not being there at the time.
A second wave of terror apparently washed over the people that had gathered there after the white day.
Looking at how the shops had been converted to camping sites for families, it really had become a crisis shelter for a while. And then, something awful eventually happened.
Maybe when it couldn't continue being temporary. National or supranational help never arrived.
M - What should we look for?
U - Hm... Anyone alive I guess. I expected a little better. Then we'll just load up and move on.
We expected to find a village of survivors like we had before. No such luck this time. We won't linger.
First we go around looking for hints of survivors still living around who might know a little more.
There's burnt rubbish everywhere.
The building would have entirely burnt and crumbled down if it hadn't been so well designed, with these sharp arches. Everything around looks grim however.
I pull up a computer out from a pile of wreck. It's broken. I break it further to extract the hard drive.
We find some food. Not much.
I see signs for a clinic. I head there. It's barricaded from the outside, somewhat. I think someone died blocking the doors shut. Mushio recovers a ring in the middle of the morbid stain. It's gold looking, but with grown veins and tiny hexagonal crystalline spikes.
M - It looks a little like yours, doesn't it?
I pull my weird stone out. It does.
U - What kind of gold alloys can turn translucent?
M - It's less about the composition and more about the crystalline structure. Like diamond to graphite. But even then... Not for metals? Some kind of aerogel perhaps?
I throw it in the air and let it land in the palm of my hand. I get an idea of the specific gravity. It is light. It would float.
U - I wonder what processes can do that here and now, outside of a materials laboratory. Yeast?
I pocket back my weird prize and Mushio his. Until we can find a working electron beam microscope to look at their crystallography more closely.
We enter the clinic after moving a few heavy stuff around. We struggle a little more opening the doors as it was barricaded from inside too. Odd.
It's still nasty inside.
I find a self diagnosis tool. I check the electrical connections. I can make this work. I return to the car to pull the cables. I want to check myself. Meanwhile, I left Mushio on his own.
Not long. He just had time to have a look around the other rooms of this small side shop from the complex.
He opened every room, looking without thinking. And he would tell me later he noticed faint clues, and had an intuition.
When I returned, unrolling the electrical cables, I found him doing first aid on an infant's body with weird colours.
He had lied the child down on one hospital bed that was there in the examination room.
M - I think she's alive.
He extends his hand toward me. I understand and give him my bottle of water. I come closer to have a look with him.
The tiny child is maybe three years old, but hard to say. She's not scrawny, she's skeletal. There are deep marks of malnourishment over her weirdly coloured skin. Downright starvation...
The skin has a weird glaze to it, with sparkles or metallic gleams. Her eyes sclera are yellow, jaundiced. The kidneys and liver are inflamed, hurting her to the lightest touch. Mushio hydrates her gently.
U - She's not looking good...
I plug the machines. More light comes in.
I remove her necklace which harbours another of these weird rings attached to it. I don't take the time to think about it. I connect the medical machine and put it in contact with her collarbones more cleanly so it can work.
I return to the car to get some food. Mushio meanwhile operates the medical tools to assess and provide emergency care.
We don't carry much medical tools or supplies ourselves, but I also bring back everything we have in the car. I have a fair guess the clinic and its machines are out of stock with everything useful by now.
~
We sit beside the child still unconscious, resting for a moment. We've spent a good while trying to save her life. We're looking like two worried dads or uncles now.
Intravenous medications slowly drip. Electrodes help her heart and lungs work. Pipes in her throat help her breathe.
We're looking a little downtrodden my friend and I.
U - It's the first time we had the chance to help someone...
M - Yeah... She was hidden here I think by her parents, when things really turned bad.
How long was she locked alone in here? I don't really want to know.
And why does she look so weird?
Mushio stand up and shows me the screen. Apparently she has a genetic disease that reduces her metabolic aptitude to expel copper?
But the readings are weird.
M - Her patient files have been updated and the change is odd. She came with that disease, then...
U - Oh... Intriguing... Very interesting.
Today's diagnosis is far less conclusive. The analytics without proper maintenance is likely not reliable. But...
U - Do you think she received her gene therapy and marrow transplant in this very clinic, after the white day?
M - I wouldn't bet on it. But the symptoms on this underlying disease have changed and the diagnosis evolved. Now it's inconclusive.
U - It's probably due to her starvation... But interesting... Darn. I wish we had a biologist along.
My friend watches over her with more parental instinct than I for now.
We have not planned for this at all, but we will take her along obviously. At least until we find a good place for her in another town of survivors.
I read her patient's details out of curiosity.
Mushio nods hearing her name. At least she'll have the one her parents chose. I fear what two childless physicists like us would have otherwise thought of.
I can't imagine how they must have felt in the end.
Mushio had found another transforming ring in a patient's room. It's a tradition I had heard of. A ring for each married parent and one for the child. The three rings, now turned bigger and crystalline, still appeared to match.
The one on the child's necklace had grown differently though.
I removed the diagnosis machine from her now that she was acceptably stabilised. I removed my shirt and strapped the tool onto me.
U - You think she'll survive?
M - She has her chances now. What about you?
U - Let's find out.
I click start. The machine prickles me and begins checking me.
U - The wonders of microfluidics and nanotechnologies now...
It doesn't take too long for the first rougher estimates.
B and T deficiencies and neutropenia.
U - What the hell is neutropenia...
I click for details and extended diagnosis.
I don't like what I find. It's not looking good.
U - I think... I'm going to be the opposite of her.
~