You know about the one when your mouth writes a check your ass can't cash?

Well, I hope I didn’t write one when I told Elizabeth that her sister would be fine. (Note to self: Never try to reassure distressed people with promises you are not sure that can be fulfilled; for some strange reason they tend to hold you to your word.)

In my defense, Michael left me alone with the girl who was crying. I do not do tears; it is something that got us into so much trouble over our entire life. (In fact, it’s embarrassing how much we are susceptible to them.)

As soon as some chick turns on the waterworks, we are putty in her hands. That is not an easy thing to admit, but who am I to fight evolutionary and societal conditioning.

We talked for most of the day; after all, crying takes so much out of you, and eventually, you need to stop. Elizabeth summoned me while sitting by her unconscious sister; the quiet was getting to her and I guess she needed someone to talk to.

At first, I mostly listened while she spoke about their life. How their parents died in a plane crash while they were returning home from a business trip, and how she raised her little sister while barely out of childhood herself.

Who knew, I guess I also needed someone to talk to. Before I knew it, I was telling her mine and Michael’s life story, and how this new digital existence has been for me.

It is strange how we all need that sometimes, for someone to listen, as a strange acknowledgment that we exist and that we matter. Someone that will take a part of our worries on themselves, just by hearing what is troubling us.

During our conversation, I may have unthinkingly blabbered that her sister will be fine, as an attempt to ease her worry. Immediately I could see her latch on to that, as a drowning man would latch onto a piece of flotsam, holding for dear life. I saw the subtle relaxation of her shoulder and that trusting look that only a lunatic would dare to disappoint. She believed with every cell in her being that I would save her sister… damn.

No wonder doctors have classes on what to say to the loved ones, and especially what not to say. Ok, most of them are doing it so they avoid lawsuits if they don’t deliver on a promise, but still.

I hope I did not set myself up for a disastrous fall.

While we were talking, the AutoDoc was fixing Anna’s body. Now, her condition was far worse than I let on, and there was a good chance she would have had serious consequences from her ordeal. Those drugs did immense damage to her, and fixing almost every affected organ was no small feat, even for this alien medicinal machine. Some of her tissue was going through necrosis, which means it was actually dying within her. No wonder the doctors didn’t even want to operate, there was too much damage for any procedure they could perform to do any good. For Christ’s sake, even her heart and veins were on the verge of collapsing.

Can you imagine the sheer amount of evil one needed to possess to inflict this much pain on a young innocent girl? Elizabeth told Michael and me the entire story, but I used my digital talents to dig deeper into official reports and there were so many more sordid details, which she didn’t know about, or simply didn’t want to mention.

Those Albanian thugs were beasts in a human form, despicable refuse undeserving of breathing the same air as ordinary people. The fact that their dead bodies burned inside that warehouse brought only a small amount of appeasement to my anger. Part of me wanted to go medieval on their asses, with racks, burning coals, and all the works. I’ll admit, that may be a bit unhealthy, and certainly not politically correct, but I am not really a forgiving person, and evening the score has a certain poetic symmetry that appeals to my digital nature. Forget eye for an eye, if you take my eye, I am going to take your entire freaking skull, with the spine attached. (There is that one scene from The Predator movie that perfectly describes my feelings.) It is not crazy, Machiavelli said it himself, ‘never do any enemy a small injury’.

OK, I am done channeling Torquemada, so let us return to the matter at hand.

The AutoDoc managed to do wonders for Anna’s body, unfortunately, there was one thing that machine would not do by itself… extensively mess with the brain. And her brain was a mess like you wouldn’t believe. The trouble was that she had a series of strokes, caused by blood clots that stopped blood flow in certain parts of her organic processor. Luckily, the damage was contained to her cerebellum, the area responsible for motor control of voluntary muscles, balance, speech, and a few other things. That was a stroke of luck (pun intended); if the parts that store memory or thinking were affected, there would be little I could do, that is even beyond my extraordinary skills.

If the damage wasn’t successfully fixed, she would have been imprisoned inside of her own body, and there is a lot to be desired to such existence.

So, how to restore part of the brain that is all but mush? I do not have a clue. You must understand that the brain is the most complex piece of matter on this entire planet, everything else pales in comparison. So, what did I do? I cheated my ass off.

I couldn’t rebuild all of it, some areas were OK, but more than 50% of her cerebellum was unsalvageable, like a puzzle without middle pieces. I did the only thing I could think of—copy/paste.

Yup, that’s right, I copied the hell out of it.

I had detailed scans of Michael and Elizabeth’s brains, and that gave me a molecular map of what goes where. The catch was that every brain is unique, as much as your fingerprints, so some artistic liberties were used.

For this entire procedure, I used time dilation to its utmost potential. Forget that one to forty-eight normal difference, my AI-core was imitating a room heater considering how much power it was using for processing. By the time I was done, false modesty aside, I was in all likelihood the foremost expert on the human brain there ever was. I hacked that shit up to a molecular level.

Essentially, most of those rebuild regions were copied from her sister's cerebellum, and it was not a small feat to connect all pathways where they needed to go. I would have liked in advance to know the percentages or predictions about the success of that technique, but I couldn’t because I simply didn’t know. This was beyond mere experimental, this was in the realm of Dr. Frankenstein, and no medical ethical committee would have ever agreed to it. Let’s not talk about the health insurance agencies, they wouldn’t touch something like this with a long pole. (It’s a good thing all of those people were not a deciding factor, or Anna would have had one sorry excuse for existence.)

Eventually, all physical things were done, and Anna’s body was 100% functional. Now the only thing that remained was for her to wake up… and that took a while. OK, I was still stretching time, so for me, it took way too long; in reality, she opened her eyes only a few minutes after her body was chemically stimulated.

Then came the real test, and I was holding my digital fingers crossed, hoping for the best and dreading the worst. A brain has incredible plasticity, a way to adapt to various changes, but was all I did… too much? I counted the milliseconds, and monitored the firing of her neurons, waiting for that spark of consciousness to assert itself.

And do you know what—it worked, like a charm.

After initial wooziness (which can be explained by a prolonged state of coma), she walked and talked without any problem. I wanted to dance a jig from the overwhelming sense of happiness and achievement. This was a true medical miracle, performed by the little old me.

Her exuberance at meeting me, an AI with a holographic body, was infectious. Moreover, I was amazed that someone who went through such an ordeal could still see the world with a positive sense of openness and wonder.

In the end, I did not tell them what I needed to do to make Anna well again. Why make them anxious about something they had no control over, and could not influence in any way. I will continue to monitor Anna for any signs of trouble, but for now, the operation was a success.

I patted myself on the back and went to wrestle with the next problem (there is no shortage of those).