“Unless we can figure out the cause," Aikins said. She suddenly did not seem quiet so bitchy, just very, very tired. "And even then, no guarantees. The longer he’s like this, less likely it is he’ll come out of it, and the less likely that he’ll be the man he was before he succumbed. The man is tank. Does he do steroids? Something black market?”
“No clue,” Guinevere lied through her teeth. A pro-bodybuilder. On steroids? Oh, how could such a thing ever be?
Manny held up his hands. “Don’t look at me. Unless it has Braille, I have no idea what it is. And besides, it’s not like I go through people’s medicine cabinet.”
“Well, that’s pretty much what we’ll have to do,” Dr. Aikins replied. “Because if we can’t figure out how he got this way, the only thing we can do is make him comfortable. His parents will have to decide what to do with him.” And with that, she left.
“Bitch,” Romeesha muttered.
Scepter rounded on the other two. “There. That second opinion change your mind?” It was always unnerving. He was blind, he could not see. But because he was a psychic, he knew exactly where everybody was.
Miss Gwen crossed her arms. “Are we at the ‘kill him’ thing again?”
“He’s already dead! He just doesn’t know it yet,” Scepter replied. “That ‘complete lack of chemical activity in the brain’ is the physical side-effect of Vagabond’s attack. His mind is in a permanent state of paralysis. Or a seizure. Whatever you want to call it, he’s in it, and he’s not coming out of it.”
“So hey! Let’s just hurry the process along!” Miss Gwen snapped back. “You talk as if resuscitation is guaranteed! 99% of the time, death is a one-way trip. You’re really placing bets on that magical 1%?” Miss Gwen then changed tactics. Holding her hands prayer-like to her mouth, she spoken levelly, with deliberation. “Manny, it’s just plain disturbing that you want to kill our friend. Didn’t you and he…?”
“Ahem. Yes. We did. And still do,” Manny replied coolly.
“Which makes it that much worse. In fact, you seem almost enthused about the whole thing. That you are a shrink makes it unthinkable. It’s wrong, you know it, and there has got to be some other way. Manny, you are talking about killing a man. Killing. Kit.”
That was an utterly fair assessment. “There is no other way,” he whispered through his teeth, grappling with his own ethics. God, if there were.
“Bullshit. You had an outlandish idea and are so desperate for a straw to grab at that you ran with it.”
Manny’s Buddha demeanor wore thin. “So, what would you do? Can you build a machine to undo psychic damage? Good luck. Can you build a machine to help him live? We have those already; we can put a tube into every orifice and keep him going for years. And that’s exactly what will happen, by the way. He’ll eat through a tube, piss through a tube. He’s loose that magnificent body of his. He’ll be rotated for bed sores and grow old and waste away and then more tubes will go into him. He may in fact, actually die but no one will know because the machines are doing all the work!” Manny then rounded on the unusually quiet ROM, “And you. Could you develop a code to read a mind—not a brain, a mind—like a computer and fix it? Even if you could, the brain-mind it is so complex it would take you years to do it to ‘read’ the entire thing, even if you were going at it 24/7. And you wouldn’t even know where to begin.” He put his hands to eyes. “Yes, what I am suggested could kill him. But they way he is now, he’s just as good as dead. This is classic Vagabond. Destroy them but not kill them.” He gazed at Kit quietly, the only sound in the room that goddam heart monitor beep. “Virtual death.”
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