Transformation: The Clandestine Saga Book 1 (17 page)

              Jamie felt a little surprised, and a bit awkward, since he happened to be holding a bouquet of flowers and certainly wasn’t expecting his boss to open the door.  “Okay,” he said almost as a question.

              “Oh, Jamie! Are those for me?” Cadence said stepping forward and taking the flowers he had outstretched.

              She heard Aaron mumble, “I can guarantee they’re not for me.”

              Jamie didn’t seem to know which remark to address first so he turned to Cadence and said, “Yes, I just thought they might make you feel better, since you were so nervous.”

              “Thank you, Jamie! You’re so sweet! Let me throw them in a vase really quickly.” 

              Aaron had been holding the door open but decided to close it behind Jamie when Cadence bounded into the kitchen.  “I guess I didn’t realize you were coming,” Jamie said to him as they both stood awkwardly waiting on Cadence.

              “I guess I didn’t realize this was a date,” Aaron retorted.

              “It’s not,” Jamie sighed. “I know that. I just thought she wouldn’t be so nervous if, you know . . .”

              “If she had something pretty to look at waiting in her apartment?”

              “Well, no, not exactly. I just wanted to set the tone, you know. This is going to be a fun, positive experience, and you’ll be happy you did it.”

              “Do you mean like a date?” Aaron asked as Cadence approached them.

              Jamie didn’t get a chance to answer out loud so he used the IAC instead.

              “
No, I know it’s not a date but you could have told me you were coming”.

              “She just came over and asked me to go.”

              “So? You could have told me instantaneously.”

             
“Hey, guys,” Cadence said as they stepped onto the elevator. “Thank you both for being so kind as to accompany me. Now, stop arguing through your little eye computers or I’m going to permanently remove both of them.”

              The short walk over to Christian’s lab in one of the office buildings was relatively quiet.  Cadence hadn’t realized that, by inviting both of them, she kind of did herself a disservice. She had intended to use Jamie for physical support and Aaron for emotional support, but now everything just seemed odd.

              Christian was working hard on something when they entered the room and he didn’t even hear them at first.  She wasn’t sure if he suddenly realized they were there or if someone popped him an eye message, but he looked up abruptly, setting down the tools he had been using and coming over to meet Cadence.

              “Hello, I’m Christian,” he said extending his hand.

              Cadence began to wonder what might be in the water around here. He was also an extremely attractive, well-built man with shaggy blond hair and mischievous brown eyes.  “It’s nice to meet you,” she said taking his hand. 

              “Likewise,” he said.  He seemed to be soaking her up a bit too long for Aaron’s liking so he cleared his throat beside her, jarring Christian back to the task at hand. “Right then,” he said crossing back over to his desk.  Cadence thought she detected a bit of a British accent but she wasn’t entirely sure.

              “Let’s get you in the chair over here,” he said gesturing towards something similar to a dentist’s chair.

              She took her coat off but wasn’t sure who to hand it to.  Aaron took it from her and Jamie walked with her over to the black leather chair in the corner of the room.  She was nervous already, and she was glad he was standing close-by.

              Christian was gathering his materials and the IAC he had created for Cadence. Once he had the items he needed, he sat down on a stool with wheels and rolled over to where she sat almost fully reclined. 

              Jamie was standing about a foot away against the wall behind her, waiting to see if she needed him or not, and Aaron was still hanging back by the door. Though she was glad they were both there, she tried to clear her mind of them so that she could just get through the task at hand.

              “Alright, Cadence,” Christian said, examining her eyes. “We are going to put the IAC into your right eye. Now, before I begin, let me tell you how this will work, okay? The IAC is a tiny little chip, so small in fact that I can hardly see it unless I look through this magnification lens.  I will use some eye drops to numb your eye and then I’ll make a tiny incision on the surface of your eye, on the edge of your cornea, so that the IAC will fit right in.  Then, I’ll put some antibiotic drops in your eye and you’ll be all done. I’ll also send some of the drops home with you so you can put a few drops in a couple of times a day for a week or so, to guard against infection and help that eye to heal up nicely. Okay? Do you have any questions about that?” he asked.

              Cadence shook her head.  It sounded like he knew what he was doing, and she was just hopeful that this was not the one time he made a mistake.

              “Good, now, after we’re all finished and the IAC is implanted, it will start doing what it needs to do to connect with your brain. I know it sounds weird and it is. I can remember being in your position not too awfully long ago thinking, ‘This guy is nuts! That’s not going to happen in my head!’ But it does. You’ll start off getting little bits of chatter, and then the next thing you know, Aaron’s waking you up in the middle of the night asking why you left one box blank on a report you filled out.” He laughed at himself, glancing over his shoulder in Aaron’s direction, and Cadence wondered if he told that joke when his boss wasn’t standing in the room.  Aaron didn’t seem to mind a little humor at his expense and Christian continued. “So, the whole thing will be up and operational in about three to five days, alright? Do you have any question about the IAC?”

              “I have lots of questions about the IAC,” she admitted.

              “Okay, that’s great.  What we will do is, once it starts to come on, we’ll get your mentor to go over it with you, kind of show you how it works, how to communicate, how to be sure you’ve stopped communicating before you mentally call the person you’ve been talking to a jackass, that sort of thing.  Alright?”

              “Mentor?” Cadence questioned. “I don’t think I have a mentor.”

              “I’m your mentor,” Aaron said from his position in the back of the room.

              Cadence was too nervous to catch the exchange of glances between Christian and Jamie. She had no idea that Aaron hadn’t taken on a mentee since he became the leader.

              “And really, it could be anyone who knows how to use it. We just usually ask mentors to take care of that sort of thing because it makes it easy to keep track of who is doing what.  So if Aaron is too busy to show you how to get it going . . .”

              “I’ll show you how to use it,” Aaron interrupted.

              “Well, there you go,” Christian said. He didn’t mean his previous comment to be offensive and he let Aaron know that through his own IAC. He could tell by Aaron’s delayed response that he must be working while he was attending this procedure, which wasn’t surprising since he was organizing a hunt for later that night.

              “Alright, Cadence, if you are ready, then I’ll go ahead and administer the numbing drops, alright?”

              She was as ready as she was ever going to be.  He pulled her eyelid open and placed a few drops in her eye.  “Alright, go ahead and blink several times.  We want to spread that around a little bit.  Good,” he said, watching the dye spread to where he needed it to be.  “We’re going to let that sit just a minute or two so your eye gets good and numb.  Go ahead and close your eyes, and I’m going to give you a clean cloth to press against that eye until it’s had time to set, alright? Just press this on there, lightly, don’t push your eyeball out of the back of your head or anything, and we’ll be ready in just a bit.”

              Cadence followed his directions. The room was excruciatingly quite, and she thought they all must be talking about her without her knowing it. In fact, Aaron was working, though he was extremely conscious of what was happening with Cadence.  Jamie and Christian were expressing their opinions as to why Aaron would take on Cadence as his mentee.

              After a couple of minutes, Christian finally indicated that it was time for Cadence to remove the towel.  “How does your eye feel?” he asked.

              Cadence blinked her eye rapidly. “It feels kind of weird,” she said. “And my vision is very blurry.”

              “Alright, good. I think we’re in business then,” he added. “Next comes the scariest part, but I assure you, I’ve done this hundreds, if not thousands, of times and I’ve never screwed it up yet, okay? You see, I don’t have to make a precision cut in a particular place. I just have to put it somewhere in your cornea and your brain and the chip will work the rest out.  If it starts to hurt, let me know immediately by raising your left hand and I’ll stop and, I assume that’s one of the reasons Jamie is here?” She nodded and he turned to get his scalpel.  “Okay just look straight ahead and hold perfectly still.”

              Cadence was terrified, watching that scalpel come directly at her eye. It was all she could do to keep from jerking away. But she didn’t. And it didn’t hurt either. 

              “There we go,” Christian said once the incision was made.  He turned back to the table to pick up the IAC with a pair of tweezers.  Attaching the magnifier to his eye, he clamped on to the chip, made sure it was facing the right direction and turned back to Cadence.  He held her eye open with his left hand as he dropped the chip in to the incision.

              Cadence jerked backward in the chair, almost causing him to poke her eye with the tweezers.  The second the chip hit her eye, she was suddenly flooded with streams of data, both voice and visual. It was as if she were suddenly trapped in the mainframe of a computer database.  She was instantly on information overload.

              Jamie didn’t know what had happened, but he immediately grabbed her head, causing the incision in her eye to heal over the second his hand touched her.  Aaron also hurried to her side and was quickly able to ascertain what the problem was. He could detect her IAC through his own.

              “What’s happening?” Jamie asked.

              “I don’t know,” Christian replied, shocked.  “I don’t think she’s in pain.”

              “Shut it off!” Cadence was yelling, unable to hear the volume of her own voice over the ones in her head. “Shut it off!”

              “I can’t,” Christian said looking at Aaron.

              “Then take it out!” she screamed.

              “I can’t do that either,” he admitted. He had watched the incision heal over the instant that Jamie touched her.

              “It’s okay, Cadence,” Aaron was saying in the most calm voice he could muster.

              “No, it’s not!” she screamed. “You’ve got to do something.  It’s too loud! I can’t stand it!”

              Aaron gestured for Christian to move and he sat down on the stool.  “Cadence, listen to me.  I can help you to learn how to control it so you can turn it off yourself, but you’ve got to calm down and listen to me. Alright? You’re panicking and that’s not going to get us anywhere.”

              She still couldn’t see out of her right eye very well, but she could see out of her left, and looking into his eyes was enough to make the panic start to subside.

              “Take some deep breaths,” he said. “Focus, just like you did in the gym. You’re going to use your brain just like it was a muscle in your body, and your going to turn the IAC off with your brain, alright?”

              Cadence suddenly realized she was hearing him through her mind, not through her ears.  His mouth wasn’t moving but he was talking to her. Even through all of the other cacophony, Aaron’s voice came through clearly and loudly.  She closed her eyes, trying to ignore the flood of images and just listened to the sound of his voice.

             
“The command to turn it completely off is simple.  It’s ‘IAC full off.’  That’s all you have to d;, send that signal through your brain to the chip and it will turn completely off."

             
She attempted to concentrate.  She tried repeating the phrase once, but nothing happened. Aaron heard her and reminded her that she needed to calm down or else her own brain wouldn’t understand the command. She tried it once more, and suddenly everything came to a screeching halt.  The noise, the pictures, everything was gone. She slumped her head to the side of the chair in relief.

              “Did you get it?” Jamie asked.

              “Yes,” Aaron confirmed.  “She got it."
              “But wait,” Christian said, “Why couldn’t you just turn it off for her?”

              “I can’t access the controls,” Aaron replied.

              “What? How’s that possible? I created her IAC just exactly the same way I’ve created the rest of them.  They’re all the same with the exception of yours. How could you possibly be unable to access it?”

              “I don’t know,” Aaron said, “but I can’t. I can’t turn it off, and I can’t turn it on. Which means, if she’s ever in a situation where she’s in danger and her IAC isn’t on, there’s no way that I can warn her.” He didn’t like that idea at all, but short of digging the chip out of her eye and replacing it, there wasn’t much he could do. He had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t actually the fault of the chip. Clearly, Cadence’s brain had reacted differently to the chip than anyone else’s ever had, and they were just going to have to work around these glitches.