You and Amanda got swept out.You and Amanda got swept out. The breach was pretty big. We launched SDisk Coordinate Trackers that grabbed you and teleported you to the SDisk in the exosickbay. We treated you both there." "How's Amanda?" "Well, you kept her from going blind, holding her face against your stomach. And your training kept you pretty healthy. You were only in vacuum for eight seconds. You've lost one eardrum, both eyes, and a little of your toes from vacuum frostbite. Amanda's a little worse in that respect. She's not blind, but she is deaf. And I'm afraid that her GI tract was not treated kindly. But we've already got that fixed, and her urinal tract survived pretty well. Yours, on the other hand, tried to turn itself inside out." "Joy." I paused. "So, what's next?" "You go in for surgery. A little cyborging to support the repair mechanisms, and you'll be ready to get out of bed." "Queen bee module?" "You got it. Ready?" "Yes." Ah, out of bed at last. I'm being led around by my seeing eye robot, Voll. I feel kind of queasy, and my high-sugar diet is making me regularly light-headed. But I've got a QBM inside me now to fix my eyes, and it runs on raw glucose. The Queen Bee module is a supercomputer and nanotech assembler system. Normal cells repair themselves, so small wounds are healed by mechanisms local to the wound. The Queen Bee system is different; it's the housing for a healing mechanism that travels through the body to repair sites, then returns to the housing. It's called the Queen Bee by analogy; a beehive suffers when its drones die, but those drones are replaced, and the hive is 'healed' as a whole, by the queen bee. I walked through the a very different 'Elen from the one I was used to visiting. I was blind, and I now relied upon Voll and Liffip. Smells and Sounds reached me. I was only fifteen days away from having the bandages taken off, but in the meantime, I was blind, and darkness was again my friend. |