Day Care: A Sci-Fi Horror Thriller by John A. Russo

Author:John A. Russo [Russo, John A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781639777662
Publisher: Wolfpack Publishing
Published: 2023-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

18

Felicia was still in a coma.

The only good thing about that, Dr. Vincent Parkhurst told himself, was that, as long as she stayed comatose, she would be in no danger of having an epileptic seizure, even though the device he had implanted twelve years ago was no longer working. Somebody—or something—had blown its circuits. The CAT scan had ascertained that much. The device was still firmly anchored inside the skull, but it wasn’t emitting any signals.

The problem with the CAT scan was that it could only show Dr. Parkhurst still photos of Felicia’s brain in a series of anatomical cross sections, as if he were peering into layer after layer of the organ in wafer-thin slices; it couldn’t show the blood and fluids in motion, while they were performing. So he had next ordered a more sophisticated diagnostic procedure called a PETT scan. Positron-Emission Transaxial Tomography was still considered largely experimental and was not in use as a diagnostic tool in most hospitals. But Dr. Parkhurst had a PETT machine at Fairchild Hospital, even though it cost four million dollars, took up a space equal to two operating rooms, what with its accessories and computers, and required thirty physicians and technicians to operate it. In fact, it demanded so many operators that Felicia’s tests weren’t performed until Wednesday evening, when additional personnel from other hospitals could be brought over to help.

By that time, she had been unconscious for three days. Dr. Parkhurst was having a devil of a time calming down her family and stalling any definitive diagnosis.

Since he was the kind of man who had a tendency to be enraptured by any new technology that promised to magnify and enhance his own considerable expertise, the advantage of a PETT scan over a CAT scan made him positively ecstatic. Whereas CAT could give him only stationary, one-dimensional images at a rate of just one every five seconds, PETT registered and automatically reassembled 75,000 X-ray pictures of the brain every five seconds, and provided a full-color, three-dimensional panorama of the organ while it was working. The pulsations of blood, tissue and fluids were all recorded for delicate and minute analysis.

Dr. Parkhurst’s PETT installation was set up in such a way that results could be kept secret, if need be, from the people who had to help run the equipment. In Felicia’s case, Dr. Parkhurst made sure that he was the only one watching the scan-outs. They were piped onto a remote screen in a small windowless room, to which the other physicians and technicians were denied access, even though they had to have Top Secret clearances to be taking part in this at all. Dr. Parkhurst communicated with them electronically, coordinating and monitoring their separate functions by means of his remote screen. Thus, he alone actually observed what was inside Felicia’s skull. Outside the screening room, in the main part of the PETT laboratory, the unconscious girl’s head was encircled by the huge, revolving, computerized focusing maw of the X-ray scanner—an

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