Sweet Harmony by Claire North

Author:Claire North [North, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2020-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

The doctors were quite excited when Harmony Meads nearly died.

They were obviously very worried, very concerned; it is a terrible thing that has happened to her, a really terrible . . . but very interesting thing that has happened.

Medical programmers from the Royal London and the Whittington rushed down to join the dissection of faulty and clashing code, to trawl through her logged nano history and poke at her control panel interface. They even got in a couple of ancient old surgeons, with their knives and saws and squelchy old-fashioned ways, just in case they needed to cut her open and do something horrendously, enthrallingly, bloodily analogue. Students flocked to her bed to marvel at her temperature, peer into her vacant, gummy eyes and bicker about the error messages flooding their screens as they prodded and poked at her skin, her bones, her nanos.

She only vaguely knew some of this. Shapes moved and sounds were made, but they were forms without meaning, syllables in the air. When she was awake, it seemed to her that she had never before seen white as white as the lights in the ceiling, or felt the touch of fabric against her skin before, an explosion of contact, nerves roaring a response from ankle to throat, clamouring to be heard. Then she slept, and the darkness was an infinite falling, full of feelings that language could not name, and sights that exceeded colour.

She thought that the machines were dreaming, the nanos in her blood.

She thought that perhaps some part of her had died, and in the place where thought might have been, there were only the nanos, learning to think, live, becoming a part of a new creature’s soul.

For three days she lay, breathing through a pipe shoved down her throat, peeing into a bag, while junior doctors with their tablets live-downloading her nano data leaned over to drain fluid from her spine every eight hours, and tutted when she had a fever, and gossiped with the nurses whenever they thought she couldn’t hear them speak.

They sedated her at the end of the fourth day after they realised the extent of the problem. Even through the mist of drugs, she lay awake in the darkness, her mouth open and screaming, screaming, screaming, though no one seemed to hear, her ears roaring with the thump, thump, thump of the sea, her skin dead and numb, her mouth dry no matter how much they gave her to drink, a pinprick of woman trapped in a black hole and screaming, still screaming, until at last they put her into a chemically induced coma after a nurse pointed out that they had drugs for that sort of thing for when the Wi-Fi failed.

Jiannis sat by her side, holding her hand.

Karen arrived on the fifth day, having only just been informed by, of all people, Jazzy from work, who just assumed that Karen knew anyway and wanted to make sure she wasn’t coming up to visit by Waterloo, because there were works at Clapham Junction and she’d be better going by Paddington.

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