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** A Place That Don't Know My Name**

By Doran Eirok

May-July 2021

Foreword

In September 2018 I suffered an ischemic stroke. This event had the particular discourtesy of happening while I was attending a three day workshop for early career scientists in Shanghai, China. It happened one night with no prior warning, and with me having none of the usual risk factors associated with strokes and being unusually young for such an occurrence. The cause of the stroke remains unknown.

I've been incredibly lucky on many fronts. The stroke happened deep in the night and I was only discovered and taken to hospital the next morning when I hadn't reported to the workshop by the mid-morning coffee break, leaving me untreated for something like eight hours. Despite this, I've emerged with only a relatively mild case of epilepsy as the most noteworthy lasting effect. I deal with periodic seizures that are a persistent but mild annoyance, but also mean I am no longer able to drive. Unlike many less-fortunate stroke survivors, I've retained full operability of both halves of my body, only experiencing some slightly degraded sense of touch and balance and am more easily fatigued and stressed than I used to be.

It also must absolutely be said that I have been fortunate beyond words to have my life filled with so many supportive loved ones both family and friend, who have done all they can to see me through the initial experience itself and then my personal journey of adapting to the new realities of life after the incident. I ache to know that it was in all probability more traumatic for them, who had to fight through obstructive international lines of communication and bureaucracy and wait for news of what state I was in, than it was for me, who was conveniently unconscious for (or at least have no memory of) the most frightening parts. I went to sleep happily in a hotel bed, and next woke up somewhat dazedly in a hospital bed in the Neurological Intensive Care unit of the 10th People's Hospital of Shanghai, wondering vaguely what I'd missed.

It's impossible for me to overstate how grateful I am to still be alive at all, let alone in as remarkably good condition as I am all things considered, and to have the support of so many amazing people in my life that have helped see me through. Nevertheless, the experience has left its own definite scars all the same. A lot has changed for me, and even now, over two years later, I'm still working to come to terms with what those changes are and how I feel about them. Art, be it visual or written, is a powerful tool for self-expression and exploration, and I've used it several times already to try and sort out my feelings about where I've been left by this. With this story I wanted to do something similar, but a little new. I've taken my lived experience, in some cases almost exact events and in others more exaggerated and fictionalised, but in most cases faithfully conveying the underlying emotions that I've carried with me. I've transposed the whole tale into a cyberpunk future setting only slightly more dystopian than our current reality, to better enable me to communicate the full emotional depth of what it's like being wrapped up in the middle of all this and trying to assemble some sort of meaning out of the pieces. I hope that the end result will make for a good story - if not, then this may just come across as a bit of rambling and whining about how life is hard, though even in that case it will have had some therapeutic value to me. If I've been more successful, on the other hand, then perhaps it will be an interesting read while communicating some of the challenges of living with an 'invisible' disability in today's world.

Finally, I feel that I must acknowledge the inspiration that the writings of legendary science fiction author Philip K. Dick have had on what I'm attempting to do here. In similar ways, he wrote about what he knew and had experienced, particularly in darker periods of his life, but transposed and distorted his lived experiences into speculative and cerebral settings that enabled those experiences and their implications to resonate more powerfully with the reader. I will not suggest that my writing talent or personal experiences are particularly analogous to his, but I feel it is important to pay credit to the inspiration where it is due.

-- Doran

Content warning: medical trauma and hospital experience, facing mortality, impacts of life with an 'invisible' disability, some crude language.

To Wayward Plane, for showing me how to face the end with courage and style

And to my loves, for giving me every reason to say, 'not yet.'

"There's no secret to livin'

Just keep on walkin'

There's no secret to dyin'

Just keep on flyin'...

I'm gonna die in a place that don't know my name...

I'm gonna cry in a space that don't hold my fame..."

-- 'Lonely Soul,' UNKLE feat. Richard Ashcroft

"Never sing a blues that isn't from personal experience. Something you lived through."

-- Samuel John "Lightnin'" Hopkins, quoted by Joel Mabus

To a casual inspection, the blue dragon staring back at me from the mirror looked perfectly familiar. The same face I'd known all my life. It had changed slightly with age, and I'd ceded more of the area to the feathered fluff that made up a growing beard, crest and whiskers in recent years, but it had always been me. It was only when I looked closely that some of the newer features stood out, a bit strange and alien as I hadn't yet grown fully used to them.

In my left temple was an unobtrusive metal port. It was there to accommodate either a wire for data transfer and maintenance, or the small nozzle of my new medication delivery system. Somehow the embedded contraption was engineered cleverly enough to tell the difference.

The entirety of my right eye was synthetic as well, but you had to really squint to spot the subtle tells there. Cybernetic eyes had been around long enough now that the engineer-artists were pretty good at them.

Of course if I looked down a little, the synthetic nature of my right forearm and hand were considerably more obvious. The metals and plastics had been anodised and colour-matched to that of my natural scales and hide as well as they reasonably could be at my budget, and the fabricators had done a solid job on the proportions and measurements. When I'd first awoken to find it replaced, the cognitive dissonance between my former organic arm, that my brain told me should be there, and the synthetic replacement that was there now was relatively minimal.

/ / /

I should probably start at the beginning, otherwise this won't make a lot of sense. Honestly it doesn't make a lot of sense anyway, so I guess you deserve all the help I can offer.

Hi, I'm Doran Eirok. Blue western dragon and planetary systems scientist. Nice to meet you.

When this little episode all went down, I was partway through a fixed-term research contract but still had a good year or so left. I was starting to put some feelers out for my next role but not panicking yet. And this opportunity came along. Not an opportunity for an actual job, but to travel and present research and work with colleagues somewhere far away and exotic enough that it felt like it could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity on a personal level if nothing else. Maybe even more, maybe opening doors to future work possibilities if I got lucky. One never knows.

I'm a western dragon for the most part, not just physically but culturally. I was born in America and later moved to England to share a home with my family of three other dragons; committed life partners, though legally recognised as just a pair of marriages since polyamory's equal rights movement still hasn't really gained any appreciable political traction despite its growing low-key commonality. I've spent my life only ever really knowing English-speaking culture, even with the steady rise of China and other Asian cultures over the past several decades and all they'd accomplished on the international stage. Western economists and politicians were incapable of stopping themselves from constantly fretting, if not being outright racist and terrified, about the way China was ascending while western states continued to teeter on the edge of collapse under the weight of their own short-sightedness and outdated self-importance. Those like myself, on the other hand, had more interest in actually learning about the cultures we shared our world with, in the hopes that peace and cooperation might emerge from that understanding.

So when I saw the news of a planetary system science research workshop to be hosted in Shanghai, with the aim of building bridges between the research communities of China and western universities, I was quick to apply. My boss shared my enthusiasm for it, seeing the obvious professional benefits to it, and helped support my application with a brief of the research I'd aim to present there. Upon hearing of my acceptance, I gleefully scrambled to book travel and arrange a visa.

Personally, attending the workshop would be a unique and exciting experience, and a chance to immerse myself, however briefly, in a culture that fascinated me and to which I owed a tiny bit of my heritage to. I was most visibly a western dragon, but I had a little bit of eastern in my blood too, marked mainly by the muzzle whiskers and cheek feathers that had steadily grown in prominence in recent years. Professionally, it would of course be a noteworthy accomplishment to have participated in an international research venture such as this.

Stepping off a plane to find myself in Shanghai was amazing, regardless of how jetlagged I was. During the air shuttle flight to our hotel my nose stayed pressed against the window as I took in everything I could, fascinated at the immense scale of the residential towers that stretched to every horizon, at least as far as was visible. Air quality in major cities was something that China famously continued to struggle with, though it wasn't as though the West really had any moral high ground there anymore.

The hotel they put us up in was beautiful, very artfully designed to impress international visitors like ourselves. The first couple days of the workshop were great too, and really did give us westerners a chance to share our research and build bridges with those from more local institutions, comparing what we were working on and how we might collaborate for mutual benefit.

I found myself somewhat hungrily drawn to the research that our Chinese colleagues had to share from their country's settlement on Mars. Space enthusiast that I've always been, I held on to this dream that maybe I could integrate my Earth-focused background with some of their research to conduct some truly interplanetary studies, and maybe even get a chance to travel off-world myself someday... that was definitely a long-time personal dream, but after a couple days comparing research with these fellow scientists it no longer seemed that far-fetched. If we were able to set up some kind of collaborative project here, perhaps I'd really have a chance to push my career in a direction that would allow me to study multiple unique worlds and travel between them. Collaboration with China was the only way that would ever really happen; they had the only 'real' settlement on Mars after all. The West's scientific contributions to the Martian surface began and ended with a proud legacy of un-crewed landers and rovers, but as western space exploration had become increasingly privately funded, and then controlled, the only western settlement of sorts was a strange duality of aggressive mining and billionaire tourism. English-speaking Martians tended to thus be either disgustingly rich or alarmingly poor, the latter working for a company that literally owned the air and water that kept them alive whether they were on the clock or not. There wasn't much room for scientists there, and it was very much not the exploration of Mars that the dreamers of the 20th century had foreseen. It was China that had quietly emerged to take up the torch of establishing an actual residential and scientific settlement, rather than just a hyper-expensive mine and hotel.

The main focus of our presence at the workshop was obviously professional, sharing research projects and findings and seeking opportunities for collaborative projects. However, the organisers knew we'd be excited for a little bit of tourism as well, so the first evening we were shown around a nearby area of surviving ancient city, veined with canals and stone bridges and gift shops and traditional musicians. Since then I've never stopped finding the sound of the ehru haunting and beautiful, and the evening was a charming reminder of the immense history of the land and its culture. The second evening we were treated to dinner and a river cruise in the rather more modern heart of the city as the sun fell and the skyline illuminated in every colour imaginable. I've lived in or near larger cites plenty, but I guess my quiet midwestern upbringing had never completely gone away because I was suitably in awe, just gazing around at the forest of rainbow light all around me and staring up at the glowing financial centres and arcologies that towered above either side of the river and vanished into the clouds. I spent the evening leaning against the railing of our river boat adorned with carved golden dragons, gazing endlessly upward, unable to take the scale and beauty of it all in but trying to nonetheless.

When we got back to our hotel that night I flopped tiredly into bed, delighted with the magical evening I'd experienced, the fantastic time I was having, and full of excitement and anticipation for what the next and final day of the workshop would bring.

/ / /

I awoke in a hospital. I was dazed and presumably drugged, just easing slowly into consciousness. Probably back out of it a number of times too. I was able to process, somewhat distantly, that I shouldn't really be in a hospital, that something about this was kind of wrong, same with the IV tube stuck into my right wrist and the odd entanglement of less identifiable wires and hoses stuck into various ports along my right forearm that I didn't remember having. My arm felt strange somehow too, like there was a dull, throbbing pain, except rather than pain it was more a sort of tingling numbness. But I was mercifully spared the panic that probably should have accompanied these realisations. That was probably the work of the drugs, mostly.

When I blinked, something seemed off, too. My vision seemed strangely lacking in depth. It took a few minutes for my brain to lazily process possible reasons for this, before I tried closing one eye and then the other. When I closed my left eye, my vision went completely black. When I tried to close just my right eye, nothing changed. Hmm.

My fumbling explorations were interrupted by someone entering the room. A red panda woman, dressed in green nurse's scrubs, and looking over a clipboard. She came to the edge of my bed and looked up, then started to see me looking up at her. She blinked at me once then rattled off something in what I assume was Mandarin before scurrying off.

Some time passed but I don't know how much, again I just felt like I was kind of drifting through events as they happened, nothing more than a passive and very distant observer rather than an active participant in my own life. I vaguely returned to myself when the nurse returned with another, some mixed canine breed I thought, and a green eastern dragon doctor, recognisable by the iconic white lab coat. What came next was a flurry of statements and questions in lightly accented English, which I tried to answer as best I could. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I watched and listened to myself try to answer, because that was so much more what it felt like.

"Try to stay calm."

"How are you feeling?"

"Don't try to move yet."

"What's the last thing you remember?"

"Do you know what happened to you?"

"Can you tell me your full name and birthdate?"

I think I might have vaguely answered that the last thing I remembered was falling asleep in my hotel, and telling them my name because I knew that and remembered who I was perfectly clearly. I guess that was good news, nothing seemed to be missing there. Everything stayed pretty fuzzy for me though in terms of what was happening here and now. It was all a distant blur, and I can only remember trying to be as cooperative as possible.

/ / /

Things gradually grew a little clearer, but I didn't know if it was over a period of hours or days or weeks. At some point I woke from a rest and finally felt reasonably lucid, enough so that I could properly take in my surroundings and think about them more.

I was in a hospital room, shared with one other patient far away to my right. He had a mask strapped to his face and his body was covered in a mess of hoses and tubes that would jerk and crackle when the man periodically erupted in wet, unhealthy-sounding coughs. I could hardly see the man himself under the plastic tubing so I had no idea how much of his original makeup was still there; I had a sense that whatever his condition was, it involved a heavy amount of cybernetic engineering and replacement parts, but I didn't want to stare. It'd remain just one more vaguely uncomfortable mystery. Beyond him was a small window that allowed a view of a clear sky, and if I leaned over a little I could barely make out the sun glinting off some of the very same glass towers I had seen lit up the previous night. Well, what to my memory was the previous night. Who knew how much time had actually passed since then.

For my own part I was laying in a bed, a stack of some sort of computers on a stand beside me that were hooked up to an IV tree, presumably regulating my intake of different types of medication. Small tubes joined together into a single line that flowed into my right wrist.

I'd never exactly loved needles but I'd never been massively phobic of them either, I could deal with them if need be. Injections were always over pretty quickly anyway. Somehow though, the idea of having this one persistently stuck inside my hand, and the accompanying mental images of it tearing loose or causing various types of damage if I moved my hand the wrong way, was enough to send me into an abrupt panic. I was lucid enough to know that panic would do me no good so I shut my eyes and focused on just breathing for a few moments, trying to get myself under control and not think about the IV. When I felt like I could manage facing reality again, I opened my eyes and continued investigating my right arm.

I'd seen enough TV to identify the IV for what it was, but the second computer cart and its associated wires and small tubes that were connected higher up my arm were beyond my ability to guess. I had no idea what any of that was about. Come to think of it, patches of the entire forearm looked... wrong somehow. The colour wasn't quite right, and instead of hide and scales, large areas looked almost metallic. For my actual body, my chest seemed to be covered in a loose, backless tunic and it didn't feel like I was wearing anything below the waist at all, just a sheet draped over me.

What the fuck had happened to me...?

/ / /

There's remarkably little stimulation when you're laying on a hospital bed in a plain white room and only the occasional wracking coughs of your roommate to mark the time by. In what I'm sure is a great disappointment to every action movie hero ever, I did not tear out my IV and other connections, leap out of the bed, and storm half-naked into the corridor demanding the return of my personal items and a cigarette and a hard whisky. I rather more sensibly opted to remain where I was until the next time a nurse came around to check on me. I was feeling more lucid now, but not really enough to challenge the idea that I belonged anywhere other than in bed.

The nurse offered more Mandarin I couldn't understand, but a gentle smile as well, before moving off. This time when the dragon doctor returned I felt able to have a bit more of a meaningful exchange with him.

He introduced himself as Doctor Tao, and said that he was a neurologist. He told me that I was in the neurology intensive care department of the Tenth People's Hospital of Shanghai. He told me that I had suffered an ischemic stroke in the left half of my brain and been brought here for treatment. He asked if I had a history of smoking, excessive drinking, high cholesterol or heart disease in my family, anything that might lead to a heightened risk of stroke and explain why it happened. To all, the answer was no, and at 38 years of age I was abnormally young for a stroke as well.

He explained that they'd keep me here for recovery and some testing to see if they could determine the underlying cause of the stroke. I agreed that this seemed sensible, but mostly felt overwhelmed, confused, and out of my depth.

I was still in something of a daze but I tried to ask about my condition. Why couldn't I seem to see out of my right eye? What was the deal with my right arm, and what were those wires and hoses attached to it? In response the doctor would only say, 'we still need to run tests.'

My lucidity was enough that I began to be capable of thinking about my loved ones back home, even the other members of the workshop I'd been with, wanting people to at least be informed that I was alive and awake. Part of me had hoped that one of the workshop organisers had perhaps altered their plans and hung around to keep an eye on me and act as an advocate or go-between or something, and make sure that my boss back on the other side of the world at least knew what was going on and could pass information along. I didn't get any clear answers on that from the doctor though, just a sort of evasive confusion.

The reason for that, if it can be called as much, became a little clearer what I think was later that day, but might have been one or two later for all I knew. A rabbit came into my room some hours later, dressed in a suit, and introduced himself in refreshingly clear and American English as an officer with the local American embassy. He looked, in a word, harried. As he sat beside my bed and quickly opened his briefcase to take out an important-looking form with a signature line at the bottom, he explained that he'd been fighting against various bureaucratic barriers to get the hospital and the Chinese government to allow the release of my medical information - in short, official legal permission had to be given for the hospital to inform my boss, partners, parents, and other loved ones back on the far side of the world that I was not in fact dead or a vegetable. And I was the only one who could legally sign the document to give this permission, so fuck only knew how I was supposed to do that if I hadn't miraculously come out of my coma.

I began to appreciate what this poor fellow had been fighting with all the time I'd been unconscious, and perhaps even conscious but still in the hospital but with no one officially listed who was allowed to come into the hospital to see me or... something. The situation was particularly awkward because I was a UK resident and employee, but still a US citizen, and my obvious emergency contact and next of kin was my legal husband in the UK, except that China even now refused to recognise same-sex relationships so that just... didn't count apparently. I didn't learn the full depth of most of this until later, but what I was able to process right then was that there was some kind of insane administrative web that had been keeping my loved ones from learning anything about my condition, possibly if I was even still alive for all I knew, and the first I was learning about it was right now, from this embassy officer.

I probably damn near tore straight through the paper signing the document that would clearly start to unravel all of this bullshit.

/ / /

It was the start of things getting better. The embassy fellow left looking relieved, which seemed like a good sign. The hospital became willing to give me access to my personal belongings, and of chief interest was my phone and charger which I was able to plug in beside my bed. Even then I still faced challenges in the simple act of informing people that I was alive and awake. China continued to operate under its own walled-off world of digital information, with most western tech companies barred from access. Only state-approved social media and communications systems were permitted on the networks. I found myself unable to connect with my personal email account, my work email account, or any of the chat or social media accounts I generally use. Finally, I lucked out with a very old and nearly-forgotten email account that I had made as a backup years ago and almost never used. Still a western company but one that time and market share seemed to have forgotten so completely that even China's Great Information Wall didn't feel it was worth the trouble to block.

Information began to flow. I was able to tap out updates to everyone, which were in turn distributed to others, and the relieved well-wishes poured back. People knew I was okay.

Exactly how okay remained to be seen. There was a barrage of tests to conduct, mostly blood tests and brain scans for more exact imagery of the damage and my heart to see if any problems could be seen there that might have allowed a blood clot to move through and cause the problem. The external scans were fine enough, though I wouldn't wish the need to swallow a camera on my greatest enemy. Nor any involvement with a urinary catheter, for that matter. Fuck.

There was a strange effect almost any time I closed my eyes, that I didn't think very much about at the time, still being in a bit of a daze through everything. You know how when you shut your eyes, your vision mostly just goes black, except for maybe some vague faint splashes of colour? Presumably your brain trying to process any image it can out of the darkness, maybe influenced a little by the afterimage of whatever you last saw. Mostly it looks like a sort of random, extremely faint static, at least for me. Now though, when I closed my eyes, I'd see regular patterns. Like a grid of exactly regular dots in a vivid green, or a field of evenly repeating zigzag orange lines or something. Perfectly geometric and repetitive. Even through the haze of healing brain damage, and presumably quite a few drugs, it struck me as something unusual. Given my inability to communicate with my hosts very well, though, it felt like I had more pressing concerns so it wasn't something I thought to ask about.

I have images of my own brain showing the dead tissue that's caused all this trouble for me. That's kind of surreal. As for my heart or anything else related to what actually might have caused this trouble in the first place, nothing was found. The best guess anyone could come away with was that something had gone catastrophically wrong with the data reader and storage implant I'd had embedded into the side of my skull years before, and it had caused something like a cascade failure in my actual brain, resulting in physical damage. It had the feel of cop-out helpless shrug of an answer and I think Doctor Tao and everyone else knew it, but no better explanation was forthcoming. Digging deeper into the 'why' would be a question for the UK doctors as soon as I could just get out of here and get sent back home.

That was a particularly odd-feeling encounter, the time that Doctor Tao stood over me told me that I didn't belong here and that it was important to get me out of the hospital and put into more appropriate care as soon as it was possible. He gestured to the coughing mass of hoses and tubes and breathing assistance machines on the far side of my room, presumably with a person (or part of one) buried under it somewhere, and told me I didn't want to be among people with conditions like this. I was confused. Among my discarded potential responses were 'no shit' and 'surely that's more up to you than me?' but I ended up just going with a soft passive nod of agreement. More than anything I wanted to get the hell out of here and get back to my loved ones, or at least transferred to care in the UK where there would be fewer information barriers and less confusion, as soon as it was deemed safe to do so by somebody who actually understood anything about what the hell was happening to me. Which was emphatically not me.

The task of getting me sent back home was thankfully being worked on by a jackal who showed up at my bedside one day and introduced himself as Simon, who was with the insurance company that my university worked with whenever international travel was involved. He became the person who felt the most like a consistent 'friend' and local advocate during the experience, checking in with me frequently and arranging to have me brought home once it was safe, being in contact with my loved ones back home to keep them informed, and explaining to me what the current state of everything was without any sort of language or culture barrier being in the way.

What it all left me with now was the reality of what needed to happen, what treatment I needed in Shanghai before it was safe to transport me. My recovery had me moving away from the need for an IV anymore, thankfully, and the nurses began to feed me bland but actual food again. One of the relative highlights of the experience was my interaction with the pair of nurses who looked after me; they did not speak English nor I Mandarin, save for the few potentially useful phrases I'd memorised before travelling in the interest of politeness, and now the only one I could remember was xiè xiè - 'thank you.' I must have thanked them for pretty much everything they did, and when I did they giggled. Perhaps it was because my pronunciation was terrible, but I like to think I was just amusing them by being 'that westerner who says thank you for absolutely everything.' There are worse things to be known for than courtesy, I figure. For anything beyond 'thank you,' we made use of apps on our phones to translate bits of text between languages, and it worked well enough, even feeling like a sort of charming bit of technology enabling communication across barriers.

On the less pleasant side was the result of the damage wrought by the stroke. Nobody knew how, but something had gone very wrong. Even a purely 'normal' stroke wasn't something I should've been expected to have at that age, but the way it had caused my data implant to partially fry itself, or vice versa, was something no one could begin to explain. Implants like that were dead common these days, especially among anyone like myself who did a lot of research and data analysis for a living. They had incredibly low failure rates, and cascading into larger issues like this was pretty much unheard of. More than that, the physical brain damage resulting from the entire incident had destroyed a lot of neural connections. Since it all went down in the left side of my brain, it was the right side of my body that suffered. My ability to control muscles and feel sensation in my right hand, arm, face and eye were all impacted to varying degrees, despite limited actual tissue damage occurring there as far as I knew. Perhaps the most frustrating for me in those early days in the Shanghai hospital was that, be it through legitimate unknowns in my case or just communication barriers, no one was able to tell me anything about how bad it ultimately might be. I could still feel much of the right half of my body, but my face had a lot of numbness to where eating and drinking without drooling were frustratingly difficult, and my right hand and eye remained worryingly numb and unresponsive. And no one was willing or able to tell me why this was or what if any of it might get better with time. Or what those metallic plates and ports in my right arm were about - only not to pull on them.

/ / /

The day the seizures began marked a notable change. It probably wasn't even a specific day so much as a gradual thing, but the fuss arose the first time one of them happened when a nurse was around to see and called Doctor Tao in. Out of nowhere the right side of my face just started to twitch and spasm uncontrollably, going numb while the muscles there went into a mad dance that I had no control over. One of the few quite vivid memories of my time there was the odd feeling of that moment.

Picture having peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth, or a small bit of loose skin as the result of burning yourself on a spoonful of too-hot soup, at an awkward place that's just a little too far back to easily reach with your tongue. But you're trying. You want to clean your mouth out and get rid of every bit of the offending material. Doing so becomes the most important thing in that moment, to where your muscles grow frustrated with the useless attempts of your brain and take control on their own, flailing and twitching, working your jaw and tongue quickly and desperately, but they just can't seem to get what they're after.

That's what that first seizure in the hospital felt like anyway. It wasn't painful, so at least there was that, just a strange feeling of losing all control over those particular muscles. The doctor was leaning over my bed and looking into my eyes and telling me repeatedly and firmly to stop and hold my face still, I assume to try and determine if I had any choice in the matter at all. I did not. The seizure lasted a few minutes before leaving me 'normal' again, whatever that meant now, and apart from being left rather exhausted and dazed, I seemed fine. The doctor frowned, spoke quietly in Mandarin to the nurses, and walked out.

Again, probably due to cultural and linguistic barriers, no one ever sat beside my bed and held my hand and told me gently that I had epilepsy now, and that seizures like that were something I was going to have to deal with now. No one looked me in the eyes and told me I was going to be okay. This was all just one more thing that silently clicked into place, and my troubled, lonely brain had no choice but to understand, come to terms with, and accept as part of my new reality.

/ / /

At some point, what felt like around two weeks after the incident, I was finally discharged from the hospital and into the care of Simon, who escorted me directly to the airport in a hired car. I felt like I was probably okay to walk, but to keep it on the safe side we used a wheelchair to get me around the terminal. The insurance company put me in first class for the flight back to the UK which was a nice perk. Maybe it was just because I finally had someone from my own culture and language who knew things and could explain situations to me for the first time in weeks, but this friendly jackal Simon felt like my goddamn hero. He wasn't able to tell me a lot of medical details, not being a specialist himself nor able to translate my medical records that he was carrying to give to my UK doctors, so a lot of the answers would have to wait until I got home. He was however able to fill in some of the holes.

I'd had a stroke sometime during the night, and after I hadn't turned up to the workshop the next morning by the time of the first coffee break at half past ten they'd sent people to check on me and gotten a hotel employee to open the door to my room. I'd been found on the floor of the room, bruised and in the middle of a seizure. My pillow was covered in blood from where I'd perhaps bit my lip. Obviously people called the emergency services. I was taken to a hospital, then when a stroke was determined to be the issue I was taken on to a different hospital with a more specialised neurological intensive care unit, where I later awoke. I'd found this much out from some of my colleagues on the workshop who I'd been able to get in touch with over email, wanting to let them know I was alive and find out from their perspective what had happened to me in equal measure. They were also able to apologetically explain to me that they'd have liked to leave somebody at the hospital to watch over me and manage communications about my condition, but the bureaucracy had, as I'd been coming to appreciate, very strict rules, not just about information sharing but about travel as well. Everyone from western institutions who'd flown over like me had very strict terms on their visas that made it absolutely imperative that they leave the country on their original booked flights, and this was not to be deviated from (apparently having a major stroke and falling into a coma was one of the very few exceptions to this, lucky me). The researchers and hosts from Chinese institutions, in similar fashion, had stricter rules than I'd realised governing their ability to travel even within their own country, and they too had been forced to get on their booked planes or trains and return home. Staying to look after me simply hadn't been a viable option for anyone - abandoning me to obscurity and dumb luck had been a legal demand of the Chinese government, apparently.

It might have been somewhere around the time of that realisation that I began to feel mildly less warm and fuzzy about this entire international bridge-building thing.

Anyway, what I'd suffered was an ischemic stroke, meaning a blood vessel in my brain had been blocked by a clot and cells in my brain had been starved of blood and oxygen, dying off in the affected area. My data reader implant had experienced some sort of power surge and damaged itself. Presumably these two things were connected, though nobody knew how exactly how they could be or which might have caused the other. Any number of possibilities could have accounted for it theoretically, but there was no real precedent to draw from and no ability to confirm anything.

The damage to my brain was causing me seizures. So far they seemed to be relatively mild ones in the grand scheme of things, but I'd have to wait for the British doctors to determine the full condition.

The right half of my body was a bit numb and weak and lacking in total muscle control. This was pretty common for stroke survivors.

Survivor, though. That seemed like an awfully good word to cling to. I was alive.

/ / /

I was distantly surprised to be taken directly home rather than to a UK hospital, but at the time I didn't much care - being delivered by Simon into the arms of my relieved and sobbing partners was all I could have wanted. It was the first time it started to really sink in to me that, in ways, everyone else had had it so much worse than I had. I'd been damaged and stuck in a hospital, but they'd all been stuck on the far side of the world and left with so much uncertainty about my condition. Right then I was exhausted and just happy beyond words to be home, but there were a lot of layers to all the varied emotions held by everyone, and it would take years to unravel them all, completely irrespective of my own medical consequences of the incident.

/ / /

My first appointment with the medical establishment at home took place quickly, as doctors and specialists were eager to get me into the system and make their own assessments on what had happened to me, and what the Chinese doctors had done to me. I was again surprised to not even have an overnight stay, but I guess I was stable enough by this point. I leaned back in a barely-comfortable hospital chair and held the hand of one of my partners who'd been able to accompany me, while a few doctors and specialists scurried around between offices, seeking each others' counsel and poring over the imagery of my brain I'd brought back from Shanghai. All we could do was wait while they did their jobs, but I started to wonder with a growing sense of trepidation the longer it took, the more frequently one of them might dart back into the office we waited in to grab another couple pages of my file and run out of the room with them again to confer with someone else. Apparently my situation was turning out to be pretty awkward and complicated.

Finally a badger doctor came back into the room at a slower pace and sat down at the desk, his face unreadable. Maybe I was being pessimistic, but it looked to me like the kind of expression you put on your face when you're about to drop a lot of bad news on someone.

"So, Doran... I'm just going to start by going through the timeline of more or less everything, and if there are things you know that I don't have in my notes here, you can correct me and I'll add them. I know you've been a bit confused, and you've been dealing with a language barrier, so going through everything together seems like a good way to get us all on the same page. Okay?"

I nodded, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. It just stayed there.

"So... sometime between two and three a.m. on the morning of September fifth, you were in your hotel room in Shanghai and suffered an ischemic stroke in the left central area of your brain, which in turn triggered seizures. We got that from your implant's biomonitor telemetry, because that's about the time your heart rate goes way up and stays there." He swivelled his computer monitor toward us so we could see a line graph showing this, with time of day along the bottom axis and beats per minute on the vertical. The abrupt rise from somewhere around 50 bpm while I was sleeping to over 100, peaking at nearly 150, was plain to see. "We don't know everything obviously, but from what you've told us about the state you were found in, cross-referenced with your telemetry, the seizures continued until you were taken to the hospital. We don't know many details about exactly when you were moved from the first hospital to where you ended up, or what they did to treat you, but you may have been given an anti-epileptic medication at some point to try and counteract the seizures. We honestly don't know, but most of the medical focus on you would have been on the stroke, being the most immediate life-threatening issue, so they would've treated you with anticoagulants to help remove blockages and prevent further ones.

"You are recorded as being in a coma for ten hours before regaining consciousness. You were kept in the neuro-ICU for a total of nine days, at first supported by medicated intravenous fluids before being approved for solid food later on. Various scans were run on your brain and heart to determine the nature and extent of the damage, and any probable causes of the stroke. The damage is fairly well mapped, but nothing conclusive was determined as to the cause."

I jumped in here, nodding softly. "Everything sounds consistent with my understanding so far, though I feel like there was some talk around the possibility of my implant being at fault somehow."

The doctor nodded. "Yes, I was about to get to that - it's mentioned, and they had some engineers look over your implant. It did indeed sustain damage and the timing makes it seem likely that the damage is linked somehow to the stroke, but there's no established pathway for how one should be able to affect the other. I should also note that the implant didn't suffer an absolute failure; it's still operational in a minimal capacity even now. There's a lot of data corruption in its onboard digital memory but it kept recording biomonitor data all along, and when it detected whatever fault it suffered it shut down most of the connections to your brain as a failsafe mechanism. Theoretically, a catastrophic failure of some sort in the implant might be capable of releasing an electrical discharge into your brain that could have cascading effects, possibly even including some types of impacts on blood flow which could result in a stroke... but we don't see any solid evidence of that, not enough to be able to confirm that that's what happened. And the failsafe procedures exist to prevent anything like that from happening. These types of implants are rigorously tested and incredibly common and safe, there's just no real history of issues with them. Honestly all we can do is guess, and run a few more tests on you now that you're back home to see if anything else presents itself. Basically, there's an exact correlation between your brain suffering a stroke and your implant suffering a failure at the same time, but no additional evidence to link them in any sort of causal way."

I sighed softly, but nodded. "So... we just have no idea why any of this happened to me. Okay. What's my actual condition then? I've had a stroke, but...?"

The doctor nodded and continued. "The actual physical damage is mostly in your brain tissue. The records I have from the Tenth People's Hospital say that you may have some impaired vision in your right eye as well as numbness and tissue degradation in your right arm and hand. Most of that isn't because of any actual damage in those areas, but the parts of your brain that 'speak to' those parts of your body have been damaged."

"Okay, I can get that, but... well, several things. The vision in my right eye is not 'impaired', it's completely gone. My right arm and hand isn't a little numb, I can't feel it or move it at all. And what are these tech ports in it? Every time I tried to ask about any of this in Shanghai, people just stared at me in awkward silence, like I'd asked some sort of question I wasn't allowed to or was being rude and belligerent to be asking at all. The right side of my face gets a bit numb and droopy sometimes, which is more what I'd expect of a stroke, but my right leg mostly seems alright. Wing too. I'm really hoping you can bring me up to speed on what's actually going on with my eye and arm in particular, and if it's something that will get better."

The doctor blinked at me, surprised. The office was silent for a couple breaths. "You mean, no one's...? Sorry, no one's been over this with you...?"

Shit. "Been over what with me."

He swallowed. "Well... as I said, most of the actual tissue damage was restricted to your brain, but in the case of your arm, some sort of... 'surge' seems to have cascaded down that branch of your nervous system, that's our best working hypothesis from the available data, and did actually cause tissue damage to a large number of nerve endings. The muscle and skin tissue and circulatory system is all fine, but the nervous system that sends signals between it and your brain has suffered traumatic damage, something like a power surge running through a computer and damaging circuit pathways. The artificial infrastructure that's been implanted in your arm is there to monitor and try to stimulate tissue regrowth, encouraging the nervous structure to heal itself if possible. Did the doctors in Shanghai really not explain any of this to you...?"

I leaned back in my chair, gazing to one side and swallowing, getting a sinking feeling about where this was going. Beside me, my partner gave my left hand a squeeze, which I returned. "No. Communication was... poor."

The doctor gave a quiet sigh. "Well... there isn't an easy way to put this. If the healing process was working, we would expect that you'd have noticed improvement by now. At least the ability to have some movement control and some feeling returning. If you have nothing at all by now, it... well, we'll run some more tests and get you booked in for some physiotherapy. Obviously we don't want to leap to any judgments until we're absolutely sure, but... it may be that the nervous structure of your arm has gone completely dead and is unrecoverable. If that's the case... a prosthetic replacement is probably going to be your best bet. I know that sounds drastic, but such methods are very sound these days. It may take a little while to get used to a replacement limb, but you'll be able to feel with it and it shouldn't take you too much therapy to grow used to using it. Are you erm, right-handed?" He glanced down at my right arm, which had suddenly come to feel like so much dead weight resting in my lap, some lifeless bit of meat that wasn't really even a part of me. Maybe that was my brain's way of starting to try and adjust, to let go.

I shook my head. "Left."

"Well, that's good news at least, it'll make adjustment even easier."

At this point everything felt numb, like I was watching myself from the corner of the room, outside my own body and not really in control of anything. I heard myself ask, "What about the eye?"

"The records show that the tissue is all perfectly fine, but... sort of in a similar state to your arm - if all the nerves that connect your eye to your brain are effectively dead, we don't have any way to really reconnect them besides fitting you with a new synthetic eye. Again, it sounds more drastic than it is. That technology is mature and reliable, and it's easy enough to match shape and colour that it'll be almost impossible for anyone to know the difference unless they really know what to look for and are right up in your face."

I nodded softly, not really sure what to say.

"Look, Doran, I know this is a lot to take in, and I'm really sorry. I'm going to schedule you in for appointments with a variety of specialists, and we'll start by basically redoing almost every test they did in Shanghai just so we can make the most informed judgments possible on everything, and not only be relying on medical records from a different system and country. From what you've said about your experiences, I can definitely promise that things will be communicated to you much more clearly from here forward." He looked back at his computer, then at his notes, advancing in the records a little. "I see here that you were observed having seizures in the hospital there as well?"

"Yeah. It seemed to be kind of periodic or random, and limited to my right side. Strongest in my face, but varying in intensity. Some have just been a brief tingling sensation in my head, others have lasted longer and made the muscles in my face and right arm and wing spasm and twitch in ways I couldn't control. Those maybe lasted a few minutes or so at most."

The doctor took a few notes. "We'll see what we can do about that. It's very possible that the stroke has given you epilepsy, but that's a condition defined by its symptoms rather than a clear root cause, so we'll need to observe how you get on with that and start you on medication for it accordingly. What would be really helpful is if you can start keeping a log, and every time you have a seizure write down when it was and how long it lasted, as well as any other notes that seem important to you, such as anything you think might have possibly triggered it. Fatigue, stress, flashing lights, that sort of thing. Once we have a bit of data to work from we'll know a little more. For now, have your partners keep an eye on you, just make sure you aren't left alone for very long, just to be safe in case you have an unusually bad or long seizure or you fall. Just until we have a better picture of it all."

I nodded. "I've had... not quite full disorientation, but definite feelings off and on of being a bit wobbly on my paws, like I'm struggling with my balance a little."

"That's understandable. If nothing else you took a bad blow to the head, presumably falling out of your bed when this all started, so that may get better with time. Mostly just take it easy, don't push yourself too hard at anything, and we'll get busy letting various specialists look you over."

I allowed myself a small half-smile. "Can't wait."

/ / /

So that began. I lost track of how many different appointments I had with how many different departments and specialists. There were blood tests, brain scans, intensive tissue scans and responsiveness tests of my afflicted eye and arm, and slowly it just solidified the whole picture more and more. Unfortunately, what the doctor had told me about my eye and arm was true. They stuck with the tests until they were absolutely certain, as lopping off a patient's arm is kind of a one-way trip, but it seemed to be the only option. Same for the eye. I was going to be a cyborg, whee. I couldn't help but be a little bit amused at how this had all played out; before all of this, among my partners I'd been the 'healthy' one. Everyone else in our family polycule struggled with clinical anxieties of one form or another or respiratory issues, not that either were particularly uncommon these days, the world being what it was.

I was impressed at what a brief and straightforward operation it was. I was only in the hospital for a few hours, they put me fully under anaesthesia, and when I woke up again... I could feel my right hand again, and I could see out of my right eye again. As I've already said, they made their measurements well enough that the hand felt pretty natural. It was alarming, almost panic-inducing the first few times to hold it up and see where my own natural scales stopped just below the elbow to be replaced the synthetic arm and hand, finished with a rubbery material that simulated skin and scales to the touch and nearly matched my colour. But if I tried to avoid thinking about it too much and just moved my fingers, it felt okay, and the more I did that the more my mind started to come to terms with it. They'd been able to connect this synthetic arm to the undamaged nerves higher up, and thus re-establish its connection with my brain. That couldn't fix the damage that was in my brain for sending and receiving signals, so the arm was still at the mercy of the loss of control I experienced during my worse seizures, which felt a little unfair to be honest, but the damage in my brain was too deep and complex to really do anything about via surgery.

The eye also felt remarkably natural. There were occasional image artefacts or small glitches that also tended to get worse when I had a seizure; again, no matter how good the eye was and how expertly its connection to my brain was, it was still at the mercy of the condition of brain itself. But the doctor had been right. Medical science was pretty good with eyes these days, and the signals it transmitted to my brain were nearly a perfect match for my other, still-organic eye.

The small data reader implant I'd had before all of this saw major repairs and replacement of damaged components while I was out too, but that didn't result in any new feelings. All the old data even got transferred over into a shiny new drive.

/ / /

One of my least favourite and yet most memorable appointments was with a neurologist whose job it was to make sense of the medications I'd been sent home from China with, assess them and translate them to whatever was in the UK system that he felt would be most appropriate given their developing knowledge of my condition. He was a rather excitable rockhopper penguin, with dramatic and constantly furious-looking yellow eyebrows would've made his irate pacing downright comical in another situation.

"What the fuck is this bullshit? Seriously what even is this? Okay these two medications I can somewhat understand, at least if they were the most sophisticated options available... but this? What fucking moron prescribes this, in this day and age especially? I'm astonished they didn't send you home with some fucking leeches. Maybe an ear candle or two for good measure. And these last three? What the absolute fuck? I've never even heard of these." He stopped pacing for just long enough to stab angrily at his computer keyboard, presumably searching their medication database, or a general internet search engine for all I knew, for the medications in question. "Some traditional bush medicine that isn't even in our system. Well those are obviously right out. And this, fuck this, we can give you something much better. And these two are ridiculous and vague. Like yes, we know the patient needs an anticoagulant but hell I don't know, let's just grab these two random catch-alls off the shelf and fling them at him, I'm sure that will be just fine. Fuck."

I felt frustrated and defensive. I wanted to explain to him that I hadn't selected any of these medications myself, and that in fact I really hadn't had any sort of decision-making role in any of this, but I was too intimidated by his fury to dare. Instead I just flinched as he turned his mad eyes on me and thrust a piece of paper into my hand that was covered in indecipherable scribbles. I took the paper timidly, overwhelmed by the rage-fuelled doctor. "Wh...?"

"Take this to the reception desk. The nurse will send it to your GP who will send it on to your registered pharmacy. Now get out. I'm behind schedule."

I didn't wait around to find out how much more impassioned he'd get if he had to tell me a second time.

/ / /

As uncomfortable as the appointment was, the end result was good. I was to finish the supply of the prescriptions that the Chinese had sent me home with before transitioning onto the new 'UK-approved' meds. One of the ones I'd been prescribed in Shanghai that I'd be finishing up and not continuing was a daily stomach injection. I can't remember if it was a general anticoagulant or meant to help with the seizures, but it was bloody unpleasant. Every day when the time came one of my partners helped me with it carefully, and I did my best to just steel myself, telling myself that if it needed doing than it needed doing. Swallowing down how fucking terrifying it was only seemed like it would work for so long though, so I felt like throwing myself a party when the last of those damned needles was used up to be replaced with just one more pill.

I returned to the hospital for a number of follow-up tests, though none of them too bad thankfully. I was grateful that no one needed me to go through the endoscopy again. I was a little amused when I turned up to get blood drawn for a battery of tests, and the nurse checking me in went to bring up my file in the computer system to see just how much blood she needed to draw and for how many different tests. "Now how much exactly do we need to-- ...oh goodness."

The next appointment where things really progressed in a substantive manner though was when I met with an epilepsy nurse to find out as much as I could about that particular new aspect of my life. She was friendly and easy to talk with, definitely better than the neurologist in charge of my medication had been. We spent a while talking through my file and what I'd been through, and what symptoms I'd been experiencing so far. I told her about the early seizures in the Shanghai hospital, the way my sense of balance often went a bit off, and the strange visual hallucinations I still had periodically when I closed my eyes. She couldn't offer anything about that, just a shrug and a suggestion that it was probably an odd effect of my brain making new connections to replace the broken ones, possibly something to do with connections to my newly-repaired implant given the regular nature of the images, and that it would probably improve with time. There were still test results we were awaiting too, of course.

There were a host of other strange small issues I'd noticed lately as well, all stemming from either the stroke or the epilepsy. Some of them felt like personal quirks that had just been amplified, like social anxieties, difficulty finding the right word for something even when I could formulate the concept perfectly well in my mind, and feeling like my 'internal thermostat' was broken. To this day it remains difficult to feel perfectly comfortable; I'm often either too hot or too cold, and usually vastly out of sync with other people or what actual thermometers suggest about the ambient temperature. I also get fatigued more quickly and easily than I used to, though that one's hardly a surprise with people who have survived a stroke. Trying to explain to people that this was a legitimate issue for me, without just getting cut off and told that yes everyone is 'getting older' did not take long to grow wearisome. I even had a weird relationship with smells, where occasionally my nose would lock onto a single unpleasant one like dog poo or a food somebody was eating that I didn't like or second hand smoke, and seemingly amplify it to where it was overpowering and I couldn't seem to get away from it no matter what I did.

The appointment finally came around to some of the major issues I'd be facing in terms of living with my seizures. I spent a while detailing to the nurse what they were like and how frequent they were, and shared with her the log I'd been keeping. She advised me to continue keeping it as it was good data to have, but she looked a little concerned as the conversation went on.

"Doran, it seems like you've been awfully lucky in most ways to come out of this as well as you have. Your case of epilepsy is relatively mild, and we'll start working with you trying different medications to control the seizures as well as we can. However, the fact that you're having regular seizures, even if they're fairly mild, is something that the Powered Vehicle Authority takes seriously. You'll want to read over their guidance to be certain and then get in touch with them, but it's possible that they may bar you from driving on medical grounds."

"You mean... I won't be able to drive anymore? Even ground cars?"

"That's what you'll need to check with them about, but I'm afraid it's likely." She looked a little pained, like she knew the hard impact of the news she was delivering. "With your balance issues as well, but mostly again because of the seizures... the International Personal Aviation Administration may place restrictions on your flight, too."

I blinked, my wings twitching unconsciously. I mean... my right wing did suffer from some of that numbness that my arm did, but I hadn't thought about it in such drastic terms. It made sense though, if I suffered a bad seizure in mid-flight and lost control and fell, that could pose a danger to both myself and others. This wasn't news I'd thought to brace for though.

The nurse was a friendly rat. She wasn't a dragon or a bird, so maybe she'd never quite understand the full personal depth of exactly what she was telling me, but her eyes were full of empathy all the same. "Just as with the PVA, you'll want to check their regulations and inquire, and they'll let you know if you need to send in your license or whatever other steps are required. There's a chance that in time we may learn to control your seizures well enough with medication that you'll be able to get your licences back, but I don't want to risk giving you false hope. That's uncertain and long term. Doran, I'm very sorry. I know this isn't good news, and I wish I could offer something better."

I swallowed and nodded, thanking her for everything she could do and had been doing. She sent me the relevant links for me to follow up on all of this, and sure enough both governing bodies responded quickly and unequivocally to mail in my driving and personal flying licences immediately, and that I was henceforth banned from both. Instead of driving, I'd have to be a passenger or rely on public transport. Instead of flying, I'd be walking. The wings that remained stuck to my back, such a source of pride and freedom for any dragon, felt almost like an insult now, a constant reminder of what I could no longer do.

Technically I could still fly, it was just under very carefully controlled restrictions. I could not fly anywhere in an urban area, I could not fly on or within so many metres of any legally established flight corridor, and I could not fly anywhere higher than 5 metres. So if I was over some country field in the middle of nowhere and didn't mind nearly skimming the ground, I could still feel the wind under my wings from time to time. I could understand the reasoning for all of it, but it still hurt on a deep a personal level.

One final stab of misery occurred to me after I'd emptied my wallet of both licences and dropped them in a post box along with the necessary forms. It didn't take more than a quick search to confirm. Given the medical history I now had, of both epilepsy and the stroke, I would never, ever be allowed to go to space.

/ / /

So, here I was. Gazing at my somewhat damaged self in a hotel mirror, slightly shinier new cyborg parts and all, and getting used to the idea that this was what I looked like now. Like I've said, they did a pretty good job with all the new parts and it was remarkably easy to make the adjustment to thinking of this new appearance as 'me'. I wasn't sure if I should find that ease of transition comforting or alarming.

Sometimes I had plenty of warning, or a clear reason. Other times, like now, they came out of nowhere and only offered a few seconds' warning. That damned tingling numbness began, as it always did, what felt like somewhere in the centre of my head, and radiated outward. It only affected my right half of course, leaving my left side completely unaffected; the asymmetry was always a strange feeling. The feeling worked its way out over the right half of my face, robbing me of the ability to really control it at all, before spilling down my arm and wing. I braced myself with both hands on the sink. I'd never yet had a seizure bad enough that it threatened to make me lose my balance and fall over entirely, but I liked to play it safe, so I leaned my weight onto my arms, especially the trustworthy one.

Damn, this was being one of the bad ones. I closed my eyes as I felt muscle spasms start to take control of my face, clenching my jaw in ways I wasn't telling it to. I made a small noise of dismay as I turned, deciding this one was getting bad enough that I'd prefer to be sat down for it, just to be safe. There was a chair not too far away outside the bathroom, and I made my way there by keeping my left hand braced against a wall.

I just sat and tried to focus on breathing. Opening my eyes again really brought out the sense of disjoint between how the two halves of my mind seemed to be attempting to perceive things. Looking ahead, my eyes were unable to focus on the same point, as though the parts of my brain that enabled my two eyes to cooperate and sync with one another was temporarily out of commission. Even the feel of my own body was the same, especially in my mouth and jaw, where the two halves of my face felt as though they were fighting to make sense of conflicting information about what was exactly where and how things were supposed to line up. The muscles spasms felt like the result of this disjoint, as though my jaw was jerking back and forth between two different sets of coordinates that it was being told were supposed to be the same, but my brain was insisting were different.

The whole thing lasted maybe five minutes. That's about as long as any of them ever lasted at their worst. I knew there were a lot of people with epilepsy who dealt with far worse than I did, but I still felt miserable and exhausted enough as the episode faded out and my body realigned its perception with reality that I felt justified complaining a little. Looking down, I saw that the loss of facial control had allowed me to drool down my chin and shirt. I wrinkled my nose, at that, not liking so complete a loss of control, but it was what it was. I'd change into a new shirt before going out; I'd packed a couple spares after all.

/ / /

The university I worked at, at least for the remaining months before my contract ended, was in the heart of the City. It could take two to four hours to actually get there from where I lived outside the City, depending on how the infrastructure and transport spirits were feeling on any given day, but my research was mostly computer-based so I tended to split my time between working from home and commuting in to stay overnight in the City for a few days at a time, usually if there was a meeting or event I needed to be there in person for. It was a system that worked out pretty well for me, and made easing back into work as I recovered a fairly smooth process. My boss and colleagues were understandably happy to see me when I made my first return to the office, and it felt good to me to be back in the world again. I loved my family and was grateful for the working pattern that allowed me to spend that much more time with them, but there was something nice about these little flashes of urban solitude and independence when I travelled into the City for work like this too, getting to take everything at my own pace and take my meals at whichever of the numerous restaurants and cafes took my fancy.

An additional benefit was the chance to see my friend Lucas, a wolf who lived full time in the City, so my occasional commutes gave me the chance to meet up with him for a meal and a catch up. I'd known him for years, we'd met online and then later in person at conventions and meet-ups. It was a comfortable friendship, with a feeling that we knew each other quite well and could confide just about anything in one another. It didn't involve any sort of intimacy that might've upset my relationship with my family, and it struck the right sort of balance between closeness and distance that meant we could safely complain to one another about more or less anything when needed. In short, he was kind of the perfect friend to have right now.

"Jesus," he muttered quietly, responding after a few thoughtful moments as I finished telling him about everything I'd been through. We'd been in touch online since my return to the country and during my recovery of course, so he knew the gist, but this was our first chance to meet up in person since it at all happened. We were sat together at a booth in a diner just off Eldon Street, waiting on a pair of chilli dogs. The place had long been a favourite of mine for those times when I just wanted some delicious comfort food and wasn't fussed about its nutritional value. Lucas and I agreed that after what I'd been through it was warranted.

The wolf sat across from me, taking it all in with a look of sympathy, not sure what to say. Like many wolves I've known, he appreciated the value of thoughtful silence and was kind enough to just let me ramble at him for a while until I'd kind of talked myself out, taking him through more or less the entire adventure. Even having filled him in online already, there were still enough details that it kept me talking until the chilli dogs arrived, at which point we grinned at each other and wordlessly agreed that they should take precedence.

The combination of chilli dogs and root beer had been a long time favourite comfort food of mine, and this place did both to perfection. I'd begun the meeting with Lucas with this kind of desperation to fill him in on everything I could possibly remember, like I just needed to tell my story, even though I'd already told as much to others, written it down and paired it with the photos I took during the trip. Somehow it just never stopped feeling important to me to just get it out, to share all I'd been through. Maybe in the hope that the next time I told it all to someone it would finally start to make more sense to me, or the realities of it would sink it more firmly, or I'd have more success understanding my own emotions around the entire event. I didn't know. For the moment though, that urgency was satisfied, and then set aside with the arrival of food. As we finished our last bites, it became more of a two-way conversation with a more relaxed feel to it.

"How are you doing, Doran, really? Underneath all the hard realities and medical facts and such," Lucas asked me.

I sipped my drink, having to think about that for a few moments. "I'm okay. Mostly. It's still hard to make sense of everything, and obviously there are a lot of changes to adjust to. Some of them really hurt when I think too much about them. But then I think 'yeah but I'm alive, and even in remarkably good shape all things considered' and I feel like I should be happy with that. And I am, don't get me wrong. It's not lost on me that it's kind of a miracle that I'm still here at all."

"You're still allowed to hurt though. You've been through a personal little hell and that matters, and it's going to leave a mark. So please, feel free to complain away all you need to."

I nodded softly, sitting quietly for a little while, trying to order my thoughts a little. "Thank you. That... actually means an awful lot, Lucas. It just keeps feeling important to me to be able to talk about all of this and go through it with someone. Even though I've already been through it plenty of times. And even though my mates are amazing and have been doing everything possible to help me through this, they're always there for me and always ready to listen about anything I need to talk about." I paused for a moment, trying to figure out how to explain the next part. "But... I feel like a horrible person putting any kind of 'but' after that. I love my mates and they've been incredible, and it physically hurts to even think of saying something that might come out like I'm speaking ill of them. I'm absolutely not. It's just... it's hard to explain, but I can't always... complain to them about absolutely anything and everything, it feels like. Not because they wouldn't be willing to hear and help me, but because they're 'too close' to all of this. They went through trauma too, with all of this. Not the exact same trauma as I did, in some ways they had it easier, not waking up in a foreign hospital and having to have limbs lopped off and freedoms taken away and all, but in some ways they had it way worse. I was just laying there in a coma while they were stuck huddled around a phone waiting, hoping for any news at all, wondering what had happened, not knowing if I was alive or paralysed or what. So in that sense, both they and I are right at the heart of this entire thing, and for everything that I'm struggling with right now, they're struggling with things too. We're all helping each other through it, but it means that there's kind of a limit on exactly how much and what kinds of things I really feel like I can whine to them about, since they're largely in the same place. We've all got only so much energy and resilience to go around. So... being able to complain to you is a way to sort of spin some of that out of the inner circle so to speak, and give it a way to really vent off. Or something."

I looked up at Lucas a little helplessly, knowing that my explanation had been kind of a mess and not sure it had made any sense at all. He smiled though, nodding to convey that he understood. "I get it. Sort of like... I had a friend who died in an aircar collision a few years back, maybe you remember me talking about it a little, but we'd only just met then I think. Anyway, it hurt and I was struggling with it, but it's like, I wasn't exactly going to go to the parents of this friend of mine and complain to them about how broken up I was that he was gone. Even other close friends of his. We share grief, we mourn together, but when it comes to complaining, in that sort of personal and selfish way about how much harder your own life is now that this trauma has happened, you sort of need to find people who are removed from living with that same trauma themselves to vent it to."

I nodded. "Yeah... that's it basically."

Lucas dipped a French fry in some cheese sauce and munched on it, gazing across the table at me. "So? What've you got? What are the really selfish complaints that you feel like you can tell me but not other people? My ears are yours." On cue, said ears gave a little wiggle. I smiled.

"Well... hm. Even that doesn't have an easy or simple answer. But I guess... one thing I feel like I've noticed, which I guess is completely natural, is that everyone has their own way of dealing with things. Not just my mates I mean, but everyone, friends, family, colleagues. Different ways of dealing with the trauma of all this having happened, and with me directly now that I'm back and okay. Obviously everyone's delighted that I'm home safe, everyone's sympathetic of what I've been through. Relieved, when they thought for a while I might never come home. But now it's at this odd point of... what now? How do we all treat Doran now that he's back home and seems generally okay, mostly like his old self even, but we know he went through something intense? And I know that nobody means anything bad or whatnot, it's just people being uncertain how to cope and relate. So some seem dead-set on downplaying the whole thing, like if they act like nothing's happened hard enough it'll just magically undo all of it. And in plenty of ways that's good, I mean, I'm still me and I don't want everyone to treat me like some sort of totally different person who's utterly incapable of anything, but at the same time I have been through something big and it has changed me, and I don't want all of that to just be ignored, or like I don't need help with some things now. Or at least maybe a little more consideration than I used to. I don't know. Others, maybe in a similar sort of denial, keep trying to tell me that it'll all get better. My brain will heal, or between medical science and cybernetic engineering they'll be able to fix all of it within a few years, and before I know it I'll be able to drive and fly and go to space again like nothing ever happened. I get that it's trying to give me hope and be positive, but when I know with near-absolute certainty that none of that is true, that my problems are deeper and more permanent than that, it's just false hope and it can be really frustrating. Even though I know it's well meant. A few other people were hurt and frightened enough by it that the whole thing just feels like it's left them... angry. They really want all of this to be somebody's fault, to have someone to blame, something to be furious at that this was allowed to happen. And sure, I have my own frustrations at certain institutions and structures that made this whole thing worse than it should've been, but... I guess I'm also able to accept that it happened, that it wasn't done to me by some malicious party, it's just... people have strokes, we don't always know why apparently, and it's damned awful, and maybe we toss a few more donations toward the charities and research groups that deal with strokes and epilepsy if we're itching for something to do, but... that fury and rage from people, even knowing that it's coming from a sense of love and protectiveness toward me, doesn't really help make things any easier for me. It's just scary and uncomfortable and makes me wish I'd never brought the subject up at all."

Lucas nodded. "Like you say, different ways of coping. The important thing is that they're all coming from people who love you and are so emotionally invested in you that having this happen really scared them. And they're all wanting to do the best they can for you. It's just hard to know what that is."

I smiled softly. "Yeah. I know. And that really isn't lost on me, and it remains the most important thing to me. Knowing that that love is there, from so many different places... it keeps me going." I drained the last of my root beer. "I guess the last of it is kind of... my brain's always in a bit of a muddle now, just a little, and it's more of a struggle than it used to be to come up with the right words at the right time. My mind feels like a library that's been hit by an earthquake. Not a major one, not enough to damage the building, but enough to knock books off shelves and... topple the card catalogue. Okay so it's an old library. But what I mean is, all of the information is there, but it isn't all where it's supposed to be and the librarians have to go rummaging through piles of fallen, de-shelved books to find the right information sometimes rather than having it right on the shelf where it's supposed to be, so it all takes a bit longer. People ask me how I'm feeling, what I want, what help I need, and it's a huge struggle to answer those questions, so much more than it feels like it should be. I don't know how to enunciate to people how I feel, because half the time I don't even know how I feel and I'm struggling to figure it out. If I did know, it feels like that knowledge would be a vague concept rather than clear words, and it would take me a long time to actually find the right words to describe it. The right words might not even exist. And even if they did exist I'd go through this slow, flailing process of trying to put them together to describe it all correctly. And then it would just be up to a mad hope that what I was trying to say made even the tiniest bit of sense to the other person."

I could see Lucas nodding. He was trying to understand, even though I felt like my thoughts and words were a complete mess. He seemed like I was conveying it reasonably enough, which reassured me somewhat. And then that damned tingling started in my head again and I winced, waiting to see how bad this seizure was going to be.

It ended up only being a short one, thankfully. Maybe twenty seconds. Lingering numbness in the face and hand. No drool. I was happy to not be giving Lucas that particular full tour. His brow was furrowed in sympathy when I looked up at him again though. "Was that... one of your seizures?"

I nodded softly, looking annoyed. "Yeah. Not too bad of one at least."

"Talking through all of that seemed to get you a little worked up... does stress make them more likely, do you think?"

"It's kind of early to know for sure, they're still trying me on different meds for them and all, but I sort of think so. There's clearly a random element to them so it's not all about being triggered by certain things, but... yeah, if I get anxious or worn out, they seem to get more likely." I reached out to help Lucas finish off the fries. They were starting to cool, but still tasted pretty good.

"I guess that's good in a way, that they're still working on trying different meds I mean. I don't want to sound like one of those people peddling false hope, but if things are still in flux, then you don't know yet how much better things might get. Maybe they won't improve, but maybe they will find a better combination. No way to know but to keep trying and see."

I nodded my agreement. It was a hopeful thought. In the middle of chewing one of the fries I jerked a bit and winced. "Fuck. Ow. Fuck."

"What happened, you alright?"

"Yeah, just bit my cheek. It's incredible how much easier it is to do that when the damned thing is half-numb so much of the time now. Tongue too." I wrinkled my nose. "Numb enough that it's easy to bite them by accident all the time, but still with enough feeling to hurt like heck whenever I do. Kind of a shit deal."

Lucas frowned. "That's just unfair."

With the fries almost gone, the rest of our conversation turned toward lighter topics, or at least ones less directly concerned with my own health. Lucas couldn't resist motioning at one point toward my new arm. "At least you've got a badass cyborg arm out of all this. I know it wasn't what you would've chosen, but... you can try to see it as a positive."

I chuckled and nodded. "I tried to get them to install lasers or rave lights in the claws or something but they gave me some rubbish about it being outside of medical necessity. Lame."

"So are you like unbeatable at arm wrestling now?"

"No," I said sadly. "I'm left-handed." I almost got him to snort his root beer but my timing was just off. Damn. "That and it's synthetic from here, below the elbow. So my hand is fully robotic, but the muscles you use in arm wrestling are mostly up here in the shoulder, and those are still organic. The strength rating of all the robotics is only so high, too - higher than a normal organic hand, sure, but not by a massive amount. It's mostly there to provide a safety margin. It's not a big beefy piece of industrial equipment that can crush steel beams or something, and even if it were, it's still attached to my original arm. So suppose I had a mega-strong hand; I could squeeze things really hard with my hand, but I wouldn't be able to lift impossibly heavy things because it's all still anchored to all this weak fleshbag stuff."

"Mmm. So only really the hand. I guess that still leaves you with thumb wrestling?"

"Oh yeah, I'd kick your butt in a thumb war."

We chuckled, paid our tab and walked out. This was a quieter part of the City, if there was such a thing. Mostly it just wasn't in one of the major tourism or night life hubs, and while there were various businesses in the nearby area it wasn't close enough to any of the major universities or financial hubs to be packed. We were able to walk along the sidewalk and enjoy the cool spring evening as our conversation began to drift through an aimless flow of varied topics.

Existential dread was never very far from any topic of conversation in the world we lived in now, but finding things that were a little less personal still felt like an odd sort of relief. We walked together for a while, bringing each other up to speed on some of the latest horrors our society had been inflicting on itself and the world. I already knew well from my own research how climate shifts were continuing to drive extreme disasters. A massive chunk of Greenland's ice sheet had finally collapsed into the North Atlantic, and the sudden influx of so much fresh water was threatening to completely collapse the Gulf Stream. If that happened, all of Europe would get significantly colder. Not enough to bring on a new ice age, despite the hyperbolic straw-man arguments of the science deniers, but enough to seriously threaten food production over most of the continent. As if we needed one more resource to fight over right now. The situation was developing slowly but ominously, and the science was still split over which of the prevailing planetary system models would win out - one suggested we'd have a few turbulent decades but then the global ocean currents would naturally recover to something similar to what we'd known, while the other had more grim and chaotic predictions about how the currents that acted as a sort of global circulatory system for heat and nutrients would fare. The research group I was with felt that the best science supported the less-optimistic models, and we really wished it didn't.

In Europe and elsewhere, some places faced unprecedented droughts while others lost entire towns to seemingly endless flooding. Hurricanes and typhoons just seemed to be an almost casual affair of one after another anymore, and the accompanying storm surge of one of the last really big ones in the Indian Ocean had finally wiped the Maldives off the map entirely. Not by the redrawing of political boundaries, but by the physical erasure of the entire island nation from existence. The population hadn't exactly been massive but it became just one more surge of refugees that no other country wanted to deal with, too eager to hoard their own dwindling food and water and wealth, to ensure that they only went to the truly deserving and obviously better people of their own country. It was sickening but familiar to the point of numbness how often that narrative was playing out again and again all across the world. Rich countries could afford sea walls and coastal defences for cities like New York, London and Tokyo, but poorer lands like Bangladesh and now the Maldives had no such ability to defend themselves against such a long-term and society-wide destructive force as industrial consumption. Desperate people displaced by the careless greed of previous generations, closing borders, us versus them, our special and enlightened and deserving tribe versus their dirty and untrustworthy one. Manifest destiny, but now instead of being about genocide through colonialism it was about clinging to what you had, building your walls ever higher, and keeping everyone else outside while you pretended not to hear their dying pleas for help. Right-wing governments promised a return to some imagined imperial greatness while widening the wealth gap and stripping whatever rights and protections they could from marginalised people, while what passed for left-wing governments enacted lukewarm centrist policies, when they could work past their own nervous hand-wringing and funder pandering to accomplish anything at all. Geopolitical tensions were abound but no one seemed to have the energy for actual war, just locking up tight so they could ignore their neighbours and focus on the internal oppression of the scapegoat of the week, whatever race or religion or social minority seemed most convenient at the time.

Against a background of all this, maybe it isn't so hard to see why an idealistic scientist dragon might have once leapt at the opportunity to conduct collaborative international research that was supposedly about building bridges rather than walls. I still wanted to believe in the possibility of such efforts, but I wasn't sure I'd really be playing much of a role in any of them. My enthusiasm for travelling to exotic corners of the world was no longer what it once was. And more broadly, as much as I wanted to believe that my research and career path were on the right side of history, faced with the impossible scale of so many convergent grim realities it was awfully hard not to feel like I and every other environmentalist were doing little more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

It wasn't even that the situation was hopeless. That was the worst part, actually, there was hope. For the best part of half a century now, maybe even more, we'd all known exactly what we needed to do to confront most of the global crises we were now faced with; climate, ecological, social... take your pick. The solutions were all right there. So what made everything so depressing wasn't that there weren't any solutions, it was that there were. Knowing that we were perfectly capable of fixing all of it, but we just... wouldn't. Every opportunity our society had been presented with to do better, we'd just wilfully refused to.

So yeah, I tried to avoid following the news in too much detail. Staying informed continued to feel important, I always voted and petitioned, but it was hard to feel like anyone really made a difference, and reading the news on a daily basis was an exercise in self-torture for anyone with empathy. The world didn't feel like it was in a great place, nor did society's current trajectory feel particularly hopeful. Like most of my friends I just plodded on, trying to make a positive difference where I could, while trying not to think too much about the dread and hopelessness that was always there threatening from within if you thought about it too much.

We tried to stay on happy topics, but with the whole world feeling like it was in a slow downward spiral, every attempt that began with 'so how've you been,' 'seen any good new shows lately,' or 'how's work going' found ways to creep back on to the broader state of things. There wasn't much way to get away from it.

/ / /

Meeting with Lucas was good despite the state of the world, and we were able to focus on just being two good friends for a while longer before I needed to start home. The journey involved a tram ride, then several stops on the local light rail, then finally the main part of the trip was a few hours on a cross-city express train. It got me into my home station late that night, and home was only a few blocks' walk farther.

Days turned to weeks and my time with the doctors continued. I kept having those strange visual hallucinations, the odd regular patterns that made no sense for an organic brain to be producing, along with that inability to escape strong smells occasionally. In both cases, the doctors continued to have no explanation. Again I was just told that it was probably just something to do with the brain forming new pathways, maybe adjusting to the new eye and the repaired implant. The results of my tests and scans came back one by one, and none of them showed anything of worth. Yes my brain was damaged, but we knew that. No, nothing gave any indication of what had caused the stroke in the first place, or the damage to my implant. There were only so many tests and scans they could do, and we'd done them, and been left with no answers. So that seemed to be that.

The nurses were good, all very friendly and helpful. We slowly worked away at trying new mixes of medications to see if any were more effective against my seizures, which got a little less bad with time. They were always there, but the really bad ones became a bit less frequent, and the mild ones weren't too bad to live with as I grew used to them.

I hopped around seeing a few different specialists and engineers too, mostly for them to look after my implant and cybernetic parts, making small adjustments and fine-tuning the settings, just keeping everything well-oiled and communicating with my brain properly, which it all seemed to. It was annoying how the seizures always made the arm go a bit funny, but I was reminded again that that was more to do with my brain connections than anything in the technology itself. They reassured me that everything was working correctly, that this was all good, reliable tech and as long as I had periodic check-ups it shouldn't ever go wrong on me. But the engineers working on my implant didn't have any idea why the stroke or damage had happened in the first place either.

I asked the engineers about the visual hallucinations, too. They were faint enough that they weren't causing any real problems or distraction, it was just... odd, enough that their persistence was starting to unsettle me. Green dots, orange zigzags, sometimes repeating shapes or patterns in blue or purple, but always extremely regular and organised. The medical specialists either had no explanation or insisted it must just be random neurons firing as my brain worked on trying to make new connections. My argument was that there seemed to be nothing random about them. The patterns were perfectly regular, like they'd been generated by a computer or mathematical function. When the doctors and nurses had no answer, this line of reasoning made me start to bother the technicians and engineers instead with the same questions. But they too just shrugged, having nothing to offer. The implant shouldn't have anything to do with visual signals; it was little more than a data port, a compact memory drive and a sophisticated but reliable connection to my brain that allowed me to access it as a sort of memory aid. I asked them if there were any way visual signals could be coming across from it through the connection usually meant to only handle memory - after all, one could remember and dream images, so could some sort of garbled code or malfunctioning process be inadvertently transmitting these images to my conscious brain without my control? They just looked at me like I'd been binge-reading way too much psychedelic sci-fi and calmly told me that no, it didn't work like that. Fine, what about the replacement eye? Again though, the engineers shook their heads. It dealt with what I saw obviously, but like any organic eye, was mostly a passive receiver of external photons. The only active components were some optical systems to deal with focusing and light level adjustment when needed, and a tiny display I could engage in the upper corner of my vision to read the current time or check messages on my phone if I wished to. Other than the display, though, it was incapable of generating any visual imagery on its own. It was just a camera that relayed signals to my brain, nothing more. And it checked out perfectly fine on every diagnostic test, even when I insisted they re-run the one on the display system.

/ / /

When I first returned to work after the stroke I'd still had a bit over half a year left on my contract. I had a couple good months of easing back into things, even giving a presentation at a national conference that mostly went okay - I only had a seizure cut me off after I'd finished the main presentation, and it got me out of having to take too many questions, which I suppose could be seen as a positive. It wasn't too long after that though before a new pandemic started to make the rounds. We'd been lucky; it had been almost four years since the last one and it had been relatively light as they go.

The City of course had to keep churning however it could, but people like me who could safely switch to home working fully did so. The lockdown lasted longer than the remaining months on my contract, so my employment, as much as I'd loved it, ended with a bit of a whimper. No goodbyes except over email or through a video screen, no farewell party meals out. With my boss's blessing and support I'd been searching for my next role for several months already, and she'd been happy enough with my research that she'd named me specifically on a grant proposal she submitted that would've given me several more years of work if approved, but the funders turned it down. The strongest hope was thus to find another similar research role, or perhaps take the step upward to try and lead a small-scale research project of my own if I could find a compatible opening. Failing that, I was applying for analyst positions with private companies and local governments as well, effectively trying anywhere that my skill set might possibly be even remotely useful as unemployment loomed. I'd always been passionate about my research career and wasn't in any hurry to abandon it, but... after the stroke and all the associated limitations it has subsequently placed upon my life, I was finding my ambitions lacking somewhat. With the stars having retreated firmly out of reach, all the energy I'd once been so eager to expend on trying to claw my way toward them felt like it had just evaporated. If I could find a role that allowed me to continue my research career it would still be my first choice, but I was getting tired of the temporary nature of academic roles and really wanted to find something more secure. Unfortunately I'd been unlucky enough to have my job end in the middle of a pandemic, which never set one up very well.

The job market was crap. Even as the lockdown started to finally ease with the latest vaccinations developed, tested and distributed, the market always took a frustratingly long time to recover. I'd been without a job for nearly half a year by now and was still scrambling at anything I could possibly get. I managed some occasional interviews, but nothing was going as far as an offer. With how competitive (a damned polite term for 'fucking desperate' if I've ever heard one) the market was for potential employees, and with how narrow a field my research experience had slotted me into, there was just always somebody better for any role I tried for. The good news was that my family wasn't at risk of starvation or eviction or anything; two of my partners had more solid and permanent jobs than I'd had, with one of them in the private sector earning well more than I'd ever hope to. That, and even for all the wretched faults that our modern dystopian society was slowly collapsing under, at least it had finally figured out the obvious sense in providing a universal basic income to its citizens. It's funny how much better a society functions when it doesn't leave all its citizens just a couple paycheques away from starving to death in the gutters.

Even so, being unable to find work has a way of making you not feel great about yourself the longer it goes on, and I was grateful when this latest pandemic was finally on the way out due to the latest vaccines coupled with the stringent lockdown protocols that we'd generally gotten used to each time a new pandemic took off. Being able to leave the house and travel was always good in its own right, but for me it also meant a trip into the City to clear out the few things I'd left in my desk over half a year before and, more importantly, meet up with Lucas again for a meal and a catch-up.

This time we went for a Chinese restaurant on Union Street called the Dragon Temple. It was my idea actually, Lucas asked if I was sure good with the idea but I assured him that it sounded fun. I was kind of curious to compare the foods I'd actually had in China with what you might find in a usual British Chinese place like this.

Lucas met me at the nearest tram stop and we started talking on the walk there. I told him about my job situation, how my last role had ended and I'd been searching for a new one with no luck yet. As time had gone on I'd slowly been discovering more and more subtle ways in which the stroke and epilepsy had left their mark, not changing my life in any way as drastic or obvious as making me dependent on a wheelchair to get around, but impacting my ability to live what passed for a 'normal life' in small ways. Individually these seemed insignificant, especially it seemed to most other people, but collectively were capable of leaving me exhausted and frustrated enough that it was hard for me to cope with day-to-day things that most people took for granted.

As always, my wolf friend was sympathetic. "I'm sorry, Doran. It's a damned awful time to be trying to find work no matter what situation you're in."

I nodded. "I'm working hard at it, I've send out a lot of applications, even gotten a few interviews, but... I feel like there are multiple challenges. I'm in a pretty specialised scientific field, so research contracts that would really be a great fit for me just don't come along that frequently. If I'm willing to just throw aside all of my actual interests and research experience, I can take my raw technical skills and try them in analysis roles in the private sector or local government, but I've had no luck there, and around two thirds of those jobs have just ghosted me completely. At least universities have the courtesy to still send a 'thank for your application, unfortunately on this occasion...' email. On top of all that, living outside the city as we do means there are only so many viable places to apply. Most of the action is in here, and obviously I'm willing to travel in for the odd meeting but I can't make a daily commute to somewhere three or four hours away. And when you can't drive and are entirely dependent on an overstressed and underfunded public transit network, just about everywhere ends up being at least three or four hours away. If I could find another arrangement like my last job, that's happy to sort out a flexible solution and let me work from home with occasional office travel, that would be fine, but that still isn't a given. When you apply for a role you never really know if it's an organisation that would be open to that sort of thing, or if it'll be one of those anachronistic fossils of a company that still insists all its employees spend all day every day physically in its offices."

"There are laws in place though, aren't there? To help make sure there isn't any discrimination against people with any sort of disability?"

"Oh yeah, definitely. But in practice the 'reasonable adjustments' that employers are required to make mostly tend to be about making sure they provide wheelchair ramps, legacy dataports, maybe adaptive working schedules to deal with fatigue or social anxieties if you're lucky. My case is awkward. My disability means I can't drive, which limits my effective commuting and thus job seeking distance, and makes it impossible to work for anyone with an office in the middle of nowhere with no public transport connection, but as far as the employer is concerned in the eyes of the law, they can just shrug and say 'so move closer.' And my unwillingness to do that isn't about disability so much as the fact that there are two other people in my family who also have jobs. Jobs which are frankly higher paying and more stable than anything I'm likely to get anyway. Despite the fact that I'm the one who spent six years of my life and a lot of stress and hard work getting a PhD on the promise that it would someday actually be worth something. Yeah, there's some bitterness there, but none of it's toward my mates, just this whole system and the fact that academia, as it turns out, has no path toward any sort of career stability at all if you aren't ridiculously ambitious and competitive. Nobody really puts that on the brochures. I'm just glad for the safety net the others provide, glad I'm not desperate. Not sure what I'd do if I was, because it's not like I could take up some lower-paying retail or warehousing job - my own physical limitations aside, having a PhD is like a black mark, nobody will touch you because you're 'overqualified.' They know you don't want to be in a job like that and have the ability to be in something better, and will walk the first chance you get. Jobs like that only want desperate, helpless people that they know they can control. It's not even like they're actually 'unskilled', those are hard jobs. I know that I couldn't do them, physically or emotionally. My PhD doesn't make me 'too good' for jobs like that, they require skills and knowhow and resilience that I absolutely don't have anyway. But it all just means that for me, I'm only able to consider a very narrow range of jobs over a pretty small geographic area, with the occasional application for a job that might be really far away just on the off chance they might allow part-time remote working, but mostly I'll never know until I bring the question up in an interview or something, if they like me well enough to get that far."

Lucas patted my shoulder gently, recognising that I just needed to get my latest rant out. I sighed, then looked over at him sheepishly. "I'm sorry. I'm really happy to see you Lucas, but it feels like every time we meet up I just spend the whole time whining at you."

"Doran, it's fine. You need someone to vent at, some avenue to let this all out. I'm here to listen. Get it out, get it off your mind, then let's enjoy some food." He nodded toward a sign. "This the place?"

We'd arrived at the Dragon Temple. It looked like almost every other Chinese takeaway in the country, though this one had tables to dine in as well. Just as well, as the overcast sky was starting to send some drizzle our way. Thankfully dining in was legal and relatively safe again by now too. We pulled off our masks as we entered - they weren't mandatory anymore, especially outdoors, but between the urban air quality and the lingering infection risk most people had adopted them as an obvious and easy precaution. Virtually all restaurants had long since installed air filters that once would've been considered hospital grade as well, carefully channelling and cleaning their air flow to meet the latest government regulations and allow them to serve customers indoors at least under lower lockdown phases, eager to keep their businesses open as much as they could. Lucas and I found a table for two against one of the windows looking out on Union Street's ground traffic and picked up menus to browse.

We'd been at it for a few minutes when something just kind of... snapped in me. I'm not really sure why, but this surge of frustration just broke through me like a wave crashing on the beach and I dropped my menu on the table. "Menus for Chinese places always seem to be like this. Just... what does any of this really mean? What actually is half of this stuff?"

Lucas tilted his head and leaned over to look at my menu. "What's the matter?"

"So much of it just... really isn't descriptive at all. It'll just say something like 'chicken and mushrooms' or 'prawns with peppers' and, maybe it's just my brain being fussy but there's a lot that doesn't answer to my satisfaction. What kind of peppers? Is it generally a dry dish or is it all deep in some sort of sauce? If so, what kind of sauce? Does it have vegetables or is it literally just prawns and peppers? Is it spicy? How big is the dish, is it intended as a main dish all on its own, or is it really intended for you to order some rice along with it and eat them together?" I felt like my brain was kind of short-circuiting on this and in a detached way I knew I was starting to sound a little hysterical, but somehow I couldn't stop myself now that I'd gotten going. I pointed to another item on the menu. "Here's a classic conundrum: 'sweet and sour chicken.' Does it mean the kind where it's several deep-fried spheroids of chicken served with a cup of sweet and sour sauce? Or the completely different dish that usually involves pieces of chicken, not deep-fried, along with mixed vegetables all served in a single container with a sweet and sour-based sauce? They're very different things but places always call them exactly the same thing, but never provide a photo or a description beyond the name, so how does one know?"

Lucas frowned, looking a little pained and reaching across the table to rest a hand on my left forearm. The organic one. "Doran, hey... take a few breaths, okay? I get that you're frustrated, but this isn't that big a deal, we're right here in the restaurant, we can ask one of the staff about this if needed. Or if this place is just causing you too much stress we can go somewhere else. It's fixable."

I sighed, closing my eyes tightly and taking a few breaths, just trying to get myself under control. It was like the sensible, objective part of my brain had just been disconnected from the part of me in charge of acting and speaking and feeling, the latter left free to just go nuts without my control. I worked to bring it back. "Yeah... it's okay, I'm okay... Damn, Lucas, I'm sorry. I still feel like even now things sometimes just happen and I don't really have control, like I can just be on a really short fuse, and I think I'm doing fine but then the stupidest, smallest thing will just set me off and I'll just lose my ability to cope. Emotion takes over and I just drown in it and can't reach the surface. And that emotion is usually frustration or panic or anxiety, because... I dunno, life isn't fair I guess."

Lucas gave my arm a gentle squeeze. "Do you want to go someplace else?"

"No, I'm good... I just... there. Singapore chow mien. I know I like it from having it at other places, pretty sure it generally means the same thing everywhere. Worst that happens is it's a bit spicier than I'm used to. Maybe some prawn toasts too."

"How about you just sit here and take it easy for a sec, I'll go order for us at the counter. Drink?"

"Oh, uh... red. Fruity... pop thing." I gestured vaguely at the drinks cooler behind the ordering counter where I could see what I wanted, but even though I was looking right at the label my brain just wouldn't find the right word the speak aloud.

Lucas knew what I meant though and nodded. "I'll be right back." I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes, taking a few more deep breaths and feeling like an idiot. Sometimes I felt almost normal, other times I felt like I could just lose control over my own brain, and my entire interface with reality, but in the silliest ways.

Lucas wasn't long, setting our drinks on the table and sitting down. "There, all set, they should have our food out to us before too long."

"Thanks Lucas." I set my menu back in the holder on the table and frowned at it a little. "It's weird. Obviously poorly-described menus strike a bit of a nerve I guess, but in a way it's sort of like... it's almost like an analogue or a metaphor for what living my life feels like, maybe. Being surrounded by things I know should make sense, words that I know, put together in ways I know I'm supposed to understand, but there's always some key element of context missing, just enough to really screw me up. Just enough so that everything in the world and my life feels like it almost_makes sense, and _almost feels right, but just not quite. It's always just a little off. And I know the problem isn't with the world, and it isn't even with my actual mind, in terms of my underlying sanity and ability to think clearly, but it's always with the interface between reality and thought. Everything on that menu is real and makes perfect sense to the cooks back in the kitchen. And in my own head, I can picture all sorts of food dishes I've eaten and enjoyed at past restaurants. But it's in trying to connect my own understanding to that reality where the problem happens. Even when I'm trying to tell you what I want to drink, and I can see the damned thing in the case over there, and I can read the words on the label and process them and make sense of them in my brain just fine, but I can't for the life of me just spit those same words back out to answer you coherently without grinding away for several moments. So instead I just flail my hands in the air and say 'red fruit fizzy thing' or whatever it was I said."

Lucas nodded. "I get it. I know you, Doran, and I knew you well enough before all this to recognise all of you in there now. I'm sure it's the same with your mates. You haven't slowed down any, your brain is just as sharp and capable as ever, it's just... like you say, the 'interface', the input/output part is just a little... muddled?" I nodded. "You used that library-after-an-earthquake metaphor last time, I felt like that made pretty good sense to me."

"I'm glad. I just... struggle to find the right words for things. I still have the same vocabulary I did before, even the big silly scientific words nobody uses outside of journal papers, but now somebody will ask me a question and I'll strain and struggle to find the right words to answer with. I'll know they're in there but they just won't come to the surface. So my sentences start coming out in these stilted, fumbling bits and pieces with awkward pauses in the middle while I stop and try to find the right words to continue. And at that point, people start either assuming I'm done talking or just get tired of waiting for me to stumble to the end of whatever I was trying to say and cut me off. Sometimes they get what I was trying to say, sometimes they leap to an assumption that was entirely not what I was working toward at all. And either way it just leaves it really damned hard for me to feel like I can finish a thought and really say things without being interrupted. And every time that happens it of course takes a chunk out of my confidence and desire to try and say anything in the first place at all." I paused to take a drink, but Lucas, ever the exception to my complaints, figured I had more I needed to say and kept silent. "I know nobody means it. No one's being malicious or deliberately ignoring me or trying to send a message that my words and thoughts don't matter. But it still kind of wears away at you over time, just as sure as it does with any shy child. It gets really hard to communicate, to tell people what I need and when something's important to me. Everybody's dealing with their own stuff all the time, naturally, we're coming out of the latest pandemic so everybody's worn down to the bone with cabin fever and work stress and boredom and exhaustion and all the various and sundry medical and life issues that come along with being in our thirties and forties and watching the weeks and months and years fall away, losing friends and loved ones more and more to diseases we once only associated with our grandparents' or parents' generations. So everybody's on understandably short fuses for any number of reasons. So when I finally feel like I've figured something out about my own limitations and try to communicate it to other people so maybe they'll understand what sort of help and consideration I need in trying to manage my own stamina and anxiety, maybe I'll only make it a third of the way through the sentence before pausing to fumble for the right word, and just get interrupted once again to have somebody tell me what amounts to 'yes, we get it, everybody's getting older and we're all dealing with shit too, quit complaining.' Quit being lazy, too. When you're unemployed and trying to find work your brain always hears that over and over, no matter what people actually say to you and how much they try to reassure you. Heh, and when I try to express how it feels being unemployed and trying to find a job, and feeling like this career I worked so hard for has died on the vine, I get people chuckling and telling me they're jealous. 'Gosh it must be nice having all this free time and living such a carefree life, ha ha ha.' And if it all eats at me too much, I get too tired of being interrupted and not allowed to speak and the backhanded insults and the unwillingness to ever hear what I'm trying to express, and maybe I snap a little or otherwise express a little frustration at all of it... well, I've always been a pretty gentle person and tried really damned hard not to snap or get angry at people I care about, so it's something new and uncharacteristic of me now, and people get judgemental and disapproving and tell me they feel like they don't know me anymore."

I sighed, looking up almost pleadingly into Lucas' eyes. I could feel the sting of tears welling up in my own now. "It fucking hurts. Maybe in part because there's so much about myself I feel like even I don't know anymore. And again, I know among the people I deal with and talk to, I know none of it is ever meant maliciously or harshly, but at the end of the day it doesn't take very much to just... hurt_and make you want to crawl into a hole, deliberate or not. The things I struggle with, the ones that I feel are unique to me and my situation, are _really bloody hard for me to understand myself and then explain to other people, and when I start feeling like my faltering efforts just get swept aside or go unheard, it just feels like all this personal crap I'm fighting with and trying to understand how to live with, everything from this fake robot hand to the bizarre hallucinations I have every other time I close my eyes that no doctor seems interested in even trying to explain to me or understand, to this mass of dead tissue at the core of my brain that makes half my fucking body glitch out whenever it wants... it all feels like to me it's the hardest and most terrifying thing I have ever faced in my life, while to everybody else it's just completely invisible."

It was so much like the last time we'd met up over chilli dogs. Lucas just silently watching me and letting me bare my soul, though this time holding my hand and looking even more pained. By now I'd had longer to live with all of it. Last time, I'd been unloading the fear and sorrow on Lucas of the initial stroke, my time in the Shanghai hospital, the sinking realisation of how many things I was about to lose from my life. This time I was unloading the frustration of having lived the resulting reality for over a year. I bit my lip a little and squeezed his hand in return, feeling awful now for again dumping on him so much, wanting to be a better friend to him than this. Again though, my emotions had worked their way loose and there were tears streaming down my muzzle.

And it kept pouring out. "It's been over a year since it happened, and... God. It's funny. You'd expect me to have nightmares about the ICU, or IV's sticking out of my everywhere or catheters or endoscopes or seizures or being lost and abandoned in foreign countries where I can't talk to anyone, or waking up to find my body broken and missing limbs, but I've never really had that. But what I do have, aside from all the obvious medical and practical stuff like the seizures and jobs I can't apply for and wings that are meaningless dead weight on my back, is this period of utter mystery and confusion to me when I was in a coma or still really drugged, about which I'm still being told things I never knew, even now. Apparently when I was pretty freshly woken up and still really drugged up, I was very insistent on wanting to talk to my legal husband or at least make sure he was aware of my condition, where I was and that I was awake and more or less okay. Who'd've thought anyone in that situation would want nonsense like that, huh? But since China doesn't recognise that sort of thing, I am told that I was very nearly committed to a psychiatric ward on the grounds of being temporarily insane. Well gosh that's a fun little detail of the whole nightmare nobody had ever told me about, until a few days ago, when apparently it was deemed hilarious and worthy of ridicule. There goes Dorey again, coming out a coma that probably should have killed him, brain damaged and higher than the bloody New Jinmao Arcology Tower on goodness-knows-what, completely fucking alone on the far side of the world, and making actually remarkably reasonable but politically inconvenient personal demands. Let's all have a laugh around the table at how stupid and innocent he is."

That was about as far as I could get. Tears were flowing freely now. I was only distantly aware of a server coming over to our table with our food and looking incredibly awkward, and Lucas giving them an apologetic look and nodding to please just leave the food on the table.

I was shaking a bit. "I know that everyone around me loves me and supports me and has my back all through everything. The very worst complaint I could ever possibly come up with is that sometimes people are dealing with their own stress and don't have the energy to coddle me or deal with me falling apart. And I absolutely get that, and it's fair. But there are these little small things too, like that probably-misguided feeling of being mocked for that time I almost fucking died, and none of them should actually matter at all, but they can hit just wrong sometimes, and they all build up over time and eat away at me, at my ability to cope. I know beyond any doubt that nobody's out to sabotage me or make me feel stupid or incompetent or incapable, but all these tiny accidental cuts just add up, they find the weaknesses in the grain, they worry away at the damaged parts of my mind until I feel like... I don't even know. Like my own mind is gaslighting itself. Like the layer between what I feel and what's real is so opaque that I don't know what's real or what I can trust. Like I don't know what things I'm really justified in being upset about, and what's just my brain glitching out and overlaying meanings and intentions that aren't there, and feeding me emotions that I have no right to be feeling."

It was pretty much right on cue and easy enough to see coming with how emotional I'd gotten. That tingling numbness again, having already started in my head and face while I was talking, now starting to spread down my arm and out over more of my face. There was that extra twinge that was almost-but-not-quite pain that told me it would probably be a bad one, too. I couldn't really be surprised. Strong emotion and anxiety didn't always bring a seizure, but there was a reasonably sound correlation. I knew. I was a scientist. I'd been keeping a spreadsheet. It had colour-coded charts of seizure duration per event and per day and everything.

My cheek and lips started to twitch. So did my cybernetic right hand. Nngh. Those almost-pain twinges were getting worse and more numerous. This was going to be a bad one, I shouldn't have let myself get so upset. Not that I'd really had that much choice. I could still feel Lucas' hand there, holding my good hand, and I squeezed it gratefully even as I tilted my head back a little. If this seizure started making me drool, maybe I could catch it in my own mouth rather than letting it spill down all over my front. Sometimes it worked. I was just as glad it was my organic hand Lucas was holding as the cybernetic one started to twitch more desperately. I wasn't sure how much squeezing strength it might have when I was in the middle of a bad seizure and didn't really have control, and the last thing I wanted was to hurt Lucas.

This one was messing with me something bad, worse than usual. I felt that numb feeling moving down my leg and out over my right wing now; that didn't happen very often. It was starting to actually, genuinely hurt now too. Not on the scale of anything truly painful, but when combined with the helplessness and that buzzing feeling like a low-voltage electrical current running very specifically through only half of my body, it was just unnerving and uncomfortable as all hell.

I blinked a few times as my eyes went out of focus, my right one drifting and losing its ability to coordinate and form a matched reference point with my left. I saw that orange zigzag pattern that had become so strangely familiar. Blink. Now the grid of green dots. Blink. Now thin violet lines in parallel.

The restaurant was filled with the appealing scents of so many varied items from the menu. Fried rice, sweet and sour sauce, various spices, the hoisin sauce from somebody's crispy duck meal (that would have been a safe menu option I'd have enjoyed too, in hindsight...) but despite all this, just outside the restaurant door some edgy shitbag had just lit up an oldschool cigarette and was merrily puffing away, right into the faces of everyone trying to get in and out of the Dragon Temple, and right into the place itself. Somehow, over all the food scents I'd have rather smelled, over the high-grade air filtration and real-time flow modelling that the place employed, just enough of the cigarette smoke reached my nose that I could smell it, and my brain decided to latch onto it like a drowning man to a life preserver, overriding every other smell. My brain reacted as though the guy was right in front of me and blowing it right into my face; my nose clogged up, my eyes watered, and I started coughing uncontrollably.

My chow mien dinner was right in front of me but I couldn't smell it; I could only smell cigarette smoke. I knew Lucas was sat right across from me, but I couldn't see him; I could only see flashes of restaurant between flashes of those hallucinated shapes and patterns. With the irritation in my eyes I couldn't stop blinking now, sending my perception of the world into a sort of strobe light vision. Stolen glimpses between those odd patterns that had to be artificial somehow. I tried to keep hold of Lucas' hand, tried to still see him there, as if his existence, and more to the point my ability to perceive his existence, was some kind of critical lifeline, the only thing anchoring me to reality around this seizure.

What made me panic was when I blinked between patterns and didn't see Lucas. The restaurant was there, complete with other people enjoying their meals, servers scampering around to bus tables or deliver food. But for just an instant, the image burned into my mind of an empty chair across from me. No Lucas. No meal, only my own and a single drink. As though I'd come here alone and had carried on this entire conversation with no one but myself.

I made a small whimper of alarm, the only noise I could really manage while my jaw was spasming, still in the throes of the seizure. I tried to squeeze with my left hand to feel Lucas', but my mind was just being too frazzled by everything to really be sure if it felt anything there or not.

It was only a moment before my eyes clenched shut again against the smoke, another strange pattern flashing up before me, but the image of that empty table before me was haunting. I couldn't help but think back to the things I'd just told Lucas. Or thought I'd told him. That uncertainty around what was real. That fog separating my inner mind from the actual world, through the tattered shreds of my broken ability to reliably perceive anything.

What if Lucas, oh God oh God what if Lucas wasn't even real, what if I was just sat here on my own at an empty table muttering and crying to myself, just as alone as I'd been every day in that hospital, what if this warm and caring wolf I told myself I'd known for years and could tell anything to was just some broken-off part of myself, detached enough to try and give my struggling mind a way to cope, somebody to talk to and complain to and confide in, what if this solitude that I found deep in the heart of the City was more real and absolute than I'd ever imagined? What if I had lost myself so much more completely than I thought somewhere along the way? What if something had broken in me so completely that it couldn't be repaired or replaced or worked around or mitigated with a bunch of pills?

What if I was, in truth, every bit as alone as I so often felt?

I don't know how it was that I sat there, riding out one of the worst seizures I'd had in months. Maybe I'd missed my morning dose somehow. It took a long time to fade, but it did fade, slowly. The spasms slowed and eased, the stench of cigarette smoke drifted away, mercifully replaced by the warm aromas of varied dinners. The puffiness around my nose and eyes began to ease, but I had to bring an arm up to wipe my sleeve against my eyes to try and remove the water that had pooled there before I could see anything. I felt a slight resistance before my hand came free, enough to make me gasp slightly. And I heard a familiar, comforting voice.

"It's okay Doran. Just take it easy. Slow breaths. I'm right here. I'm right here."

I managed to wipe the tears away from my eyes enough that I could finally open them, and there was Lucas sat across the table from me, same as before. He looked kind of freaked out and had his phone out on the table. He was also leaning across the table and holding a napkin up to the right side of my mouth to catch it when I had started drooling, which I carefully took from him and used to dab around my lips and chin. I didn't know how long it had all lasted, but probably several minutes... well longer than usual, and long enough that Lucas must have been starting to consider phoning the emergency services.

"Lucas...?" I could hear that my voice was still slurring a bit. Muscle control always took a little while to fully come back.

"Yeah Doran? Are you okay? That... that looked awful."

"I'm okay... it's passed now... just... probably still going to slur for a few minutes. Bad one. Thanks for the napkin..."

"That looks like an understatement. And you're welcome. That was definitely worse and longer than the one I saw you have before, and worse than what you've described as the norm."

"Yeah... they aren't usually anything like that. I... well obviously I got worked up again, God I'm sorry..."

"Hey. Quit apologising or I'm bringing a spray bottle to our next meeting."

I couldn't help but smile at that. "Lucas... just... do me a favour?"

"Anything."

"...Tell me you're real?"

He blinked at that, obviously not expecting it and looking a little alarmed. But then he clasped my hand firmly and looked into my eyes. "Doran, I'm real. I'm right here and I am very real and I care about you very much. I'll use a spray bottle to prove that too if I have to, you silly dragon."

I chuckled weakly and nodded, convinced. With the last remnants of the seizure passing it felt silly that I'd worried about something like that at all now. It had felt so desperately uncertain at the time. I glanced down at the plate of chow mien, still waiting for me off to one side of the table. Lucas looked like he'd gone for beef in black bean sauce, and there was a small plate of sesame prawn toast waiting for both of us, along with a pair of fortune cookies. "I wonder how cold the food's gotten during... all that."

"I'm sure it'll still taste good. Come on... let's eat, if you're feeling ready to. It usually makes you feel better," he said with a grin, which I returned.

"Yes alright, I enjoy food, deal with it." I pulled my bowl over and started in on my noodles, just using a fork. I could use chopsticks sometimes but especially after what I'd just been through I felt like I could justify easy mode. The prawn toasts had bled off most of their heat and were mostly room temperature now, alas, but as Lucas predicted they still tasted good. I took it slowly, not wanting to bite my cheek if I could avoid it.

Most of the meal went by in silence. Both of us were kind of exhausted from the seizure in our own ways; me from physically going through it, Lucas through worrying about me. Eating gave us a chance to just recover.

At the end, Lucas reached for one of the fortune cookies, and smirked at the message when he opened it. "Apparently, my lucky number is '4S'."

"What, you mean fourty-five?"

"No, it says 'four-ess.' That's how it's printed." He held up the paper to show me and I smirked.

"You sunk my battleship...?"

That got a laugh from him. He then nodded at the other cookie. "Go on, do yours. Maybe you'll take out my submarine or something."

I chuckled and reached for the cookie, breaking it open and pulling out the slender slip of paper. I read the message, then hesitated and read it again more slowly.

Lucas tilted his head curiously. "Well?"

I turned the slip of paper to show him. It read, 'Life isn't about weathering the storm. It's about learning to dance in the rain.'

"Huh. That's... quite good actually. Especially for a fortune cookie. You might have a keeper there."

I nodded, tucking the slip of paper into my wallet. "Yeah. I think I kind of like that one."

/ / /

Life kept moving. I kept looking for work everywhere I could. I had a few more interviews, which at least was enough to help convince me I wasn't a horrible failure, that the job market was just flooded right now and potential employers could always afford to hold out for the candidate that was an absolute perfect fit for the role, and so far that hadn't yet been me. Everyone assured me that one of these times it would be if I just kept at it. Most days I managed to do well enough, searching potential roles and applying for the ones I thought I could do. Some days it really did just get me too down to be able to accomplish much - everything from the job search to my physical condition to the overall state of the world was enough to sap any real ability to function. But I kept trying.

That really bad seizure at the Dragon Temple had freaked me out a bit. Just the way my sight had gone funny and Lucas had disappeared from my vision for a moment, and how that had made me feel. I was mostly back to convincing myself Lucas was real and my overall perception was more or less accurate, but that fear I'd had at the time had left me shaken. And the way those damned visual pattern hallucinations had been interwoven with the experience stayed with me, giving me this irrational but inescapable feeling that there was something somehow sinister about the images and the way they remained so stubbornly stuck in my mind and out of my control.

I knew it made no sense and that it would be by far the most sensible course of action if I could just let it go, quit worrying about the images and accept them as one more unexplainable but mostly harmless oddity that was a part of my life now. But I just couldn't manage it, not when every time one flashed up again it put me back to that fear that something deep inside me was broken, or otherwise somehow wrong in a way that no one had yet dug deep enough to find. I'd bothered the doctors and engineers all I could though, so left with little else I searched the web. I browsed search results and message boards for stroke survivors and people with epilepsy and trauma victims in general, and found no mention of visual hallucinations like mine. After that I tried posting in said message boards, first trying to describe what I experienced, later trying to draw images similar to my hallucinations and show them off as examples. But there was still nothing; no one had anything remotely similar, no one had ever heard of or read about anything like it, and no one had any possible explanations.

/ / /

In the period of relative normality between any major crises like a new disease outbreak or some other quasi-natural disaster, or the latest social uprising or government crackdown, potential employers still preferred to do their interviews in person where possible. It meant more travel and more expenditure of money and energy for me than a video conference, but I could understand it. You 'met' a person a lot more effectively in person, no matter how far our telecommunications tech had come along. So it was that I found myself in the City again a few months later, several nights booked in an inexpensive hotel and an interview scheduled for my first full day there with some big consulting company that was looking for a new environmental system scientist.

I felt pretty good about how it went. I never enjoyed interviews, especially in-person ones, but at least I was getting pretty used to them and how they tended to flow. The people I spoke to were all friendly and personable and I could see myself working with them, and the company at least talked a good talk on all the PR stuff. We're not evil, honest, we value diversity and we're trying to save the world rather than destroy it more because our shareholders want money. You never really knew with companies how true it all was anymore, but even if it was a lie, just recognising that there was value in pretending to care demonstrated at least some moral standing. I didn't like being so cynical, so I hoped for some actual sincerity in all of it. First and foremost though, I just hoped that they'd hire me. I could always look for something else later if needed, but for right now I just wanted a job at all.

After the interview I had a few days to kill. It seemed sensible in case they wanted me back for a second interview or an informal chat within a short time frame, plus Lucas and I had arranged another meet-up at the end of the week. That was a few days away yet though, so the evening after the interview I found myself alone in my hotel room, staring out the window as the streetlights came on amidst glowing halos of drizzle, and I munched away on a couple tacos I'd had delivered. I watched cars and people move along the streets, and I let my mind wander.

In some ways I was starting to do better than when I'd last unloaded my frustrations on Lucas over Chinese food. Some things were getting easier, some things I was just getting more used to. There were still plenty to struggle with too, though. There were still so many changes I was trying to deal with, everything felt scary, and I continued to feel crippled and disabled in ways that were easy for everyone around me to ignore or just fail to recognise. To this day, though, I'm always trying hard to stay focused on the things I know objectively. A lot of people love me and support me despite my frustrations and difficulties communicating and coping. I'm also insanely lucky and I know it full well. By rights I probably shouldn't even be alive, let alone in such relatively good condition. Wild luck is the best and only explanation I can come up with for it. If I'd followed the statistics, I ought to have died alone on the far side of the world in a country that, as I'd discovered, was pathologically disinterested in sharing information with anyone no matter the circumstance.

Everybody has to die sooner or later. Somehow, somewhere. I liked to think that I was on reasonable terms with this knowledge even before Shanghai happened to me, as much as anyone really can be at least. Of course, I had my own hopes and aspirations about how it might happen. Ideally, not for a good long while yet. But after experiencing the desperate loneliness of a Chinese ICU, I'd add a new caveat to hope for. When my time does come, I'd like it to be somewhere familiar. Close to my loved ones, obviously, but also in a more general geographic sense. I didn't want to pass away in the obscurity of some strange and unfamiliar place, where no one knew my name. When the day comes, I'd like to be close to somewhere that feels like home. Someplace where whatever happens to be left of me, if there is anything, won't feel so damned lost and isolated as I did in that Shanghai hospital room. And that some small part of me I think has ever since.

It's funny, the strange things that come to feel important to you as you weave your way through life. The concept of 'home' is an odd one for me. I suppose for everybody it's an idea that changes as we live. Is home the place you were born, or grew up, or are otherwise 'from'? Or is it where you choose to plant your paws and decide to build a life for yourself, maybe with the people you love? Does it even have to be a physical place or is it just about the people you choose to stand with?

Being an expatriate blows the question open a bit wider than usual. I'm 'from' America, but my life now is very much embedded in England. Having such a big difference between the two places, though, means that both shores both do and don't feel like 'home' in their own way. Being an expat means you're always missing somewhere. I'd made my choices and built a home here in England with the people I wanted to spend my life with, no question or regrets, but there was always just a little tickle in the back of my mind that I wasn't really of this land.

Honestly, it isn't something that bothered too much or too often, having the people that I did, but it was just enough to complicate the question any time I tried to define for myself what 'home' meant. Either way, when my time did come, hopefully someday very, very distant from this one, I'd rather die here among people and air and Earth that knew me, than in Shanghai where nothing did.

/ / /

On the surface of the desk before me, beside the empty cup and a couple crumpled up taco wrappers, my phone buzzed. It jolted me out of my pensive self-absorption and I grabbed for it. I wasn't expecting to hear any news about the job interview I'd just done this soon, but I was going to be eagerly watching my phone for news all week regardless.

It was a text. I furrowed my eyeridges in confusion as I read it: 'Union and 43rd. 10 pm. Come alone.'

That seemed mysterious and strange. It only read as 'unknown number.' I was close to dismissing it as a wrong number, when something further came through from the same source. This time it was an image.

It was a simple pattern of orange, zigzagging lines against a black background. Nothing more. But it made me stop dead and stare at it, a chill running through me. It was one of the exact patterns I was so used to seeing when those hallucinations hit me when I closed my eyes.

I sent a response text of 'who is this???' but it just gave me an error message and didn't let my text go through. I hadn't really expected it would, but I thought I should try.

Well, they had my attention, whoever this sender could be. I tried to think rationally about things, but my blood was running cold. I'd told the doctors about the hallucinations, and Lucas and my family and a couple other friends... and I'd finally babbled all over half the internet about them in my search for answers. I hadn't exactly kept it a secret, so presumably there were a handful of people who would've been able to create an image like this to try and get my attention or freak me out or something. But somehow... the image looked perfect. This was exactly the pattern I saw behind my eyelids, the exact shade of orange, the right angles, the right spacing between the lines... subtle details that it didn't feel like someone else would've gotten right unless they somehow actually knew exactly what I saw. I reminded myself that I'd even tried to draw pictures of what the images looked like and posted them online, but... this was better than those. The image on my phone right now honestly looked more perfectly accurate to my hallucinations than my own attempts to draw them.

And I couldn't possibly guess how that could be. Unless this mysterious sender did truly know something about those patterns that I didn't, something all the doctors I'd spoken with had only been able to shrug helplessly about. And apparently, if I wanted an answer to this damnable mystery, I'd have to show up to the corner of Union Street and 43rd Street at 10 pm. About two hours from now. It wasn't too far, about half an hour by tram with a bit of walking.

Needless to say, alarm bells were going off. This felt dangerous and worrying. But at the same time... it was tantalising. Could I just ignore it? Was I even capable of doing so, or was the need to grasp at any answers I could possibly get too strong? The hallucinations weren't exactly ruining my life, but not knowing what caused them, and having no idea what had caused all this to happen to me in the first place, were never going to stop bothering me. And if I had a chance to find something out here... if someone knew... besides, Union and 43rdwas a fairly major intersection, not exactly some lightless dockyard warehouse.

That last bit was my mind reaching for lame justifications and I knew it. But with that, I also realised that I'd already made up my mind. I had to see this through. I had to know and understand as much as I could about what had happened to me, because every other attempt to learn seemed to have hit a dead end.

I spent the next hour and a half pacing nervously and trying to convince myself that I was thinking it over. Somehow the thought never even occurred to me to send a message to my partners or Lucas about this strange text I'd gotten, and to tell them that I was going to go check it out. Thinking back on it later it seemed uncharacteristic and foolish of me not to, and I can't explain why I didn't. Maybe my brain was simply too muddled and obsessed with chasing answers that it drove out other considerations that should normally be there. Regardless, a little after nine came and went I threw on a leather coat and cap against the drizzle and set off toward the nearest tram stop.

/ / /

I hadn't realised it until I got there, but the corner of Union and 43rd was about where the Dragon Temple was located. It didn't seem likely that that was a coincidence; maybe the sender of the strange message had actually been following or spying on me. The corner was moderately busy with people scurrying up and down the sidewalks and a few ground cars moving up and down the roads, but I'd seen it busier. It wasn't main rush hour, but enough people were on their way to night shifts or heading home after dinner or long days at the office to keep the streets alive. As for myself, I made it to the street corner and leaned against a bare wall, checking my watch and then looking around. I had a few minutes to spare, but I couldn't help but wonder if any of the people I saw might be the sender, or what I might expect them to look like. Maybe a trenchcoat and a fedora. Maybe a large, shadowy hood. Truth was, I had no idea at all. It didn't particularly seem like it would be the rabbit jogger who looked underdressed for the rain, or either of the dragonesses across the road under a store awning chatting to each other, but how could I know? I wasn't an investigator or an intelligence officer, and I had no idea what I was looking for or expecting.

As such, I guess it shouldn't have been that surprising that I nearly jumped out of my skin when a firm voice just to my side grunted, "Doran." It wasn't spoken like a question, they knew who I was.

The speaker was a vixen with dark silvery fur that had a sort of mottled or 'dirty' appearance to it. Maybe an arctic fox in her summer coat, but she had the air of a sort of mix to her, maybe there was some coyote in there too or something. She was wearing heavy boots, a red leather jacket, baggy cargo trousers that had a distinctly 'military surplus' look to them, and carrying an umbrella. Her left eye had a slight discolouration to it and there were some metal implants around the edge of the socket. No telling what she'd been through but at least we seemed to have replacement eyes in common. I tried to swallow my trepidation and nodded in answer. "Yeah. Who are you, what's this about?"

"Walk with me," she just said, then immediately turned and started down Union Street. She didn't even wait to see if I was following, but... well, I followed her, because what else was I going to do at this point? I'd already shown up in response to her message after all. I was a little annoyed at having my questions blown off but I hoped the answers would come soon.

The drizzle mostly stayed as just drizzle, pretty light, but the breeze came and went in gentle gusts that made the water hit in sheets. I could feel it dripping off my beard and whiskers before long. The fox woman just kept walking down the sidewalk, crossing the next side street down. I started to feel a bit silly just following her with no information. "Hey," I tried again. "I came here for some answers."

"Be patient."

I wrinkled my nose, wishing I felt like I was being taken a bit more seriously, but I knew she had all the control here. Nothing stopped me from turning around and walking off, but if I did that I wouldn't learn a thing. So both of us seemed to know I was just going to keep following her regardless.

We got to somewhere past 45th and the sidewalks were a little quieter; Union Street was still a somewhat major road but we'd gotten away from the local retail hub around 43rd so there wasn't much foot traffic anymore. About the time my uncertainty with this whole thing was rising, the woman stopped in front of a narrow alleyway that disappeared into the gloom between buildings. She nodded toward the alley and just said, "In here."

I only gave the alley a cursory glance to confirm that it looked every bit as foreboding and creepy as I'd suspected. It did. I'd had enough. "Alright, come on. I came here to meet with you and find out what this was all about, not follow a total stranger into a dark alley. This is ridiculous. I'm not going in there. How about you just cut the mysterious crap and start explaining things, now."

I really wasn't much of a tough guy and I figured that was pretty obvious, but I made the best show of it that I could. I was completely caught off guard though when a massive, scaly hand clamped down on my shoulder from behind and gave a painful squeeze, and a gravelly voice from behind and, alarmingly, somewhat above me, suggested, "How about you get your scrawny little tail in the alley like the nice lady says. I think you'll prefer it to being smeared all over the front bumper of the next bus to come up the street. I think the 202 is due in about a minute."

It was a pretty effective threat, to be fair. I looked over my shoulder as much as his grip would allow. He looked like some sort of monitor lizard, heavily muscled and standing at least a head taller than me. He was wearing what looked like a black rubber trenchcoat against the rain and despite his bulk had somehow slipped up behind me without a sound. His grip was tight enough to hurt a little, but loose enough to clearly convey that he could squeeze a lot more painfully if he decided to. This guy could probably pick me up and snap me over his knee, to be honest.

I really didn't fancy becoming an improvised paint job for a bus or any other large commercial vehicles. So I guess this guy was the 'muscle' and the vixen was... what? The shot-caller? The smart one? I wasn't up on my underworld lingo, but either way she'd pulled me away from the crowds, and now I seemed pretty well stuck between either agreeably coming along with them into a dark alley, or pitting my average-sized, frightened, epileptic self against Godzilla here. This was not the sort of situation I'd hoped to find myself in. My ears drooped, telegraphing my surrender before I could squeak out any verbal response.

"Good choice," growled the lizard with a chuckle, wrenching me sideways and steering me into the alley by the shoulder. Even without any attempt to struggle against him, he was practically carrying me. The fox followed him in, and the two pushed me along until coming to a half-rusted doorway, some kind of back entrance that time had forgotten. The vixen kicked aside some soggy debris that had probably once been an empty cardboard box or two, then produced a key and used it to unlock the door. It pushed open easier than I'd expected it too given its appearance.

Despite the previous threats, I did resist a bit when the lizard started pushing me into the dark doorway. It was instinctive. I was terrified now, I had no idea what they intended to do to me and what this was all about. It seemed like more than a simple mugging; if they'd just wanted my wallet or phone they could've taken that in the alley and been out of sight. And they knew about the hallucinations... I just couldn't imagine what this was about at this point. My captor just gave a small snort at my struggles, seeming amused at how pathetic he found them, then casually slammed me into the edge of the doorway before propelling me into the darkness.

The fox had found a light switch on the wall nearby and turned it on. We seemed to be in a backroom of some empty retail space. It looked like it had once been some sort of small shop and we were in what would have been its rear office, but the place had been gutted of everything long ago so it was just a pair of empty rooms and boarded up windows. There was only one working overhead light in the room we'd entered.

"Where do you want him, Heth?" asked the big guy. The fox gestured vaguely toward a far corner of the room. "Just hold him up against the wall, Tej," she replied, closing the alley door. I was only partway through processing the exchange before the lizard, Tej I guess, span me around to face him, transferred his firm grip to my throat and then slammed my back against the wall. It knocked the wind out of me in a panicked whine, and his grip around my neck didn't help me any in catching my breath.

The vixen, Heth, wandered over to me then, bits of old unidentifiable debris crunching under her boots as she pulled some sort of electronic device out of her shoulder bag. It looked fairly heavy-duty, like some sort of scanning device but made to military or heavy construction spec. She next pulled out a data cable and plugged one end into the device. Needless to say my panic was immense by this point, but against Tej's iron grip all I could do was squirm. I couldn't even speak. "Steady him," Heth ordered. Tej interpreted this by doing two things; lifting me up off the floor until my paws were kicking uselessly against the wall, and by clamping his free hand tightly around my muzzle in a way that held my entire head still. "Data port," Heth then said. Tej forced my head to one side, exposing the small socket at my left temple. Heth then shoved the other end of her data cable into it and powered up the device she was holding.

Fire and lightning raced through my head abruptly, and almost immediately I felt the familiar feelings I associated with my nastier seizures, but without the several seconds' warning I usually got. I twitched and choked out some pained and alarmed noises into Tej's grip, but now there was even less I could actually do than before. Whatever Heth was doing to me, it was triggering a seizure or something similar, and it wasn't being particularly gentle about it. I had the vague suspicion that her device wasn't really intended for use on sentients.

When I was in the middle of a bad seizure it got hard for me to focus, but my actual hearing wasn't affected. So even as Tej held me half-strangled against the wall and Heth did something invasive in my brain, I could still hear them conversing.

"What's taking so long?" That was Tej's low growl.

"It's in here somewhere, it has to be. It's just not showing up at the right memory address. Those damn doctors and engineers probably moved it all around when they repaired him."

"I kept telling you, if we'd have just cracked into his medical records we'd know--"

"And I told you the risks weren't worth it. Besides it doesn't matter, this stupid fuck put practically everything that happened to him up on his public blog anyway, whining to his friends about his awful and life-changing experience. Doesn't matter. Ah, wait, I think..."

And then my vision suddenly exploded with those patterns. The colours, the shapes, the zigzags, the grids, the dots... only this time the images had an intensity and vividness to them that surpassed anything I'd experienced before. A sharp pain shot down my face and right arm and I gasped.

"Got it," I heard Heth say. Then she was silent for a few moments. "...Shit. I was afraid of this. It's corrupted. Fuck! The entire package is corrupted. The Shanghai team must've fucked up the transfer. I guess that would explain all of it. Something glitched or they botched the job and it triggered the whole thing. Made his implant bitch out, it surged, caused the stroke... the package is still in here but it's been corrupted to all fuck. I'm transferring it now, but... 43 percent. That's it. That's all the data we fucking have. That's just fucking wonderful. Everything else is lost, either removed completely when they repaired his implant or just lost as unrecoverable noise that'll get overwritten eventually. I'll extract what's here, maybe it'll be enough for a partial payment, but... sure as shit ain't what we agreed to deliver. Fuck."

"What about the others? Did their deliveries all go smoothly or were there other glitches like this one?"

"Fuck knows. That ain't our paygrade. Our only job is receipt and recovery, and it's supposed to be a lot less awkward than this. Shanghai botched their end of the job and that ain't on us. That's what I'll be telling the client. You just be ready for action if they don't like hearing it."

"Always am. How's the transfer coming?"

"...Done. That's everything this poor bastard has. Transferred over and deleted from the source. Nothing left to trace to us or anyone else. Do your thing and let's get out of here."

I was still twitching. Maybe drooling all over Tej's hand too, that would serve the asshole right. The entire conversation was kind of a blur to me and I struggled to keep track of it, but it felt like bits and pieces of it were coming together to form a picture. I couldn't assemble it in my current state, but I hoped I could remember enough of it... and that Tej's 'thing' wasn't as drastic as just killing me and leaving my carcass in the back of this abandoned building...

He released the grip on my muzzle. I tried to gasp for breath, but his hand almost immediately returned in the form of a fist, striking me hard across the side of my face. I was in the middle of choking out a pained cry when he punched me again, this time in the stomach. He then tossed me aside like a rag doll, leaving me dazed and gasping against the base of a wall.

Through all of this I was still dealing with the close aftermath of the seizure as well, so everything was pretty scrambled. I looked up at him from the floor and wished I hadn't - the expression on his face suggested he'd really love to continue pounding the crap out of me if he didn't have other places to be. Looking reluctant about it, he turned and followed Heth out the door, flipping off the lights as he did so, leaving me in darkness apart from the faint street light filtering in from the alley.

It was several minutes before I was really able to get up and move. I wanted to get out of there, but I had a feeling that the real danger had passed. Needless to say I hurt, the lingering effects of the seizure were still rattling me, and almost worst of all I just felt... humiliated. It wasn't quite clear to me what all had happened, but it was apparent that I'd been used somehow as a disposable thing, and from the sound of it, this is what had resulted in my stroke.

Maybe. It was hard for me to piece it all together right now in the state I was in. While the experience was fresh in my mind I made a point of logging everything I could remember of the conversation to a note file of sorts in my implant's memory, so I could better revisit it all when my head was clearer.

Right now I just wanted to get back to my hotel room and hide and be glad that I was still alive, despite my stupidity. If it even was that, for all I knew some compulsion beyond my ability to control had forced this meeting.

I exited into the alleyway and made my way back out to the street, finding that Tej's gut punch had left me limping slightly. I peered out into the street fearfully, but the pair had vanished and were nowhere to be found. It was a long few blocks to the nearest tram station, but once there it became an easier trip back to my hotel.

/ / /

When I made it back to my hotel room I locked the door behind me, collapsed in a corner and just shook for a little while. Somehow I'd stumbled into something that was way outside of what I was prepared to deal with.

I thought back over what I'd overheard the two of them say. Data transfers. Glitches. The Shanghai team. A client of some sort. It all sounded like some crazy international conspiracy that I'd gotten myself wrapped up in, through no fault of my own I was pretty sure.

I phoned the police. Whatever this was, it needed to involve the proper authorities. This wasn't something for an out of work postdoctoral scientist to figure out on his own.

I got a receptionist and started to explain that I needed to report an assault, but they put me on hold before I could finish saying even that much. I blinked. It seemed odd. I spent the best part of half an hour being repeatedly told by a recording how important my call was to the Greater Metropolitan Police Department before someone picked up and asked me what I was calling about. I again started to explain that I'd been assaulted, this time to be cut off with "Why the hell are you calling this department? I'll transfer you." Click. This time it was only five minutes or so before I was picked up again. This person actually seemed at least half interested in hearing me out. I stuck to the facts of the assault and avoided my broader speculations about international conspiracies. The officer mostly just grunted here and there, and I could hear some typing to suggest that they were at least taking notes. Or posting on social media, who knew.

When I finished, they asked for a mobile contact number, then grunted again. "Okay. Are you currently in need of any medical attention?"

"No, I don't think so... kind of badly bruised but I think that's it..."

"Okay, stay in your hotel room and an officer or two will come by in the morning to take your statement."

"...Sorry, in the morning? Isn't this somewhat more urgent than-?"

Click.

Well alright then.

/ / /

They came about half past eleven the next day. Two of them. I invited them into the hotel room and offered them such seats as I could, though both remained standing.

I gave them the story, more completely than I'd told over the phone, sticking to the facts but including the dialogue between Heth and Tej that I'd committed to implant memory. This necessitated that I then go on to tell them my abbreviated history of the work trip to Shanghai, the stroke and the time in the hospital there.

I was expecting a degree of scepticism, and assumed I'd have to go through things a few times. It was actually more unnerving the way both of them just listened without expression, at least to begin with. Once I'd been through the previous night's attack and was trying to explain the broader context that I believed was relevant, they began to interrupt with various questions while taking notes.

"So Mister... Eirok, was it... how much had you had to drink last night before this incident?"

"Can you tell us what medications you're currently taking? Have you missed any regular doses for these recently?"

"Have you taken any recreational or illegal drugs lately?"

"You describe the incident as an 'assault', but you can tell us what specifically they did to you?"

"From your story it sounds as though you entered this dark alley willingly with two complete strangers. What compelled you to do that, were either of them armed? Was your life being clearly threatened at gunpoint?"

Given the circumstances I was willing to let the 'mister' pass, though I was about to correct the way the one had horribly butchered the pronunciation of my surname. Under the barrage of questions though, my confidence increasingly started to crumble. Nothing was wrong with my story. No I hadn't been drinking, I'm pretty sure my current medications are protected medical information but I didn't want to be difficult, yes I've been taking all of them appropriately, no I hadn't been taking anything recreational or illegal, they weren't armed but one was huge and muscular and bodily forced me down the alley against my will... they just kept battering me with these questions that seemed designed to undermine my credibility and express doubt in every detail of what I was saying, and hitting me with new ones before I had a chance to finish my answers.

I tried to stay cool and professional and just convey the information. I couldn't forever, against all that, but when I started to let a hint of indignation or defensiveness creep into my voice they grew colder and stiffer, somehow, and told me they were just trying to establish the facts and were here to help. Somehow they seemed to have specialist training in how to make this explanation sound as condescending as possible.

They offered more or less nothing in terms of what they were thinking about anything I had to say, but they didn't convey a sense of having any interest in my experience in Shanghai as relevant context. They seemed to only be focused on last night's assault itself, which I suppose I could understand in a way. The longer the meeting went on, though, the more the feeling started to creep in that this was a massive waste of time and I'd made a mistake in looking to these people for help.

There was nothing left to say, not really. The meeting continued for another ten minutes or so while I answered more of their questions, described the assailants, talked through a few parts of the story again, but the demeanour of the officers as they lazily scribbled a final few notes made their disinterest clear.

Finally they pocketed their notepads and moved toward the door. "Well Mister Eirok, thank you for the information. We have your contact information on file, so we'll look into the matter and be in touch."

I smiled politely and thanked them for their time, thinking with absolute certainty, 'no you won't.'

I closed the door after them as they left, knowing that that was it; I'd found all the information I was ever going to about this little personal mystery. And I vaguely tried to decide if it was the assault by Heth and Tej, or the police interrogation, that had been the worse and more belittling experience.

/ / /

I felt bleak. It was like getting really swept up in reading a mystery novel only to reach the end and find out that somebody had torn out the last chapter from your copy. And of course with me being the one living all of it, that missing hole was in the middle of my own life.

I had more information than I might, I suppose. As unpleasant as meeting Heth and Tej had been, it had at least given me some things to speculate on. Even if speculation was the most I'd ever have.

I remembered something they'd said, then. Tej had asked about 'the others.' If there had been other 'glitches' like me. Heth hadn't known or cared, said it wasn't their problem, just that in my case something must have gone wrong on the part of the Shanghai team. I had to wonder, was I a case that had gone wrong out of something that had been done not only to me, but other colleagues of mine at the workshop? Should I contact them and warn them? How would that conversation possibly go that wouldn't just make me sound like I was completely off my nut?

I didn't need to think about it for long. So what if I sounded crazy to them? They all knew I'd had a stroke and been through a traumatic experience, particularly one that involved physical injury to my brain. If anybody thought I sounded crazy they could just chalk it up to that. But if any of my colleagues might be in danger, they deserved to be warned about it.

I sent out emails to everyone who had been on the workshop with me. Initially just catching up and asking how they were, but then moving on to ask if anybody had experienced strange visual hallucinations like mine, or if they thought they'd been contacted or followed by anyone suspicious, or any other sort of strange occurrence. Without going into every detail, I explained my vague worries that some of us might have been targeted as part of some kind of attack while we were in Shanghai, presumably to try and smuggle data or software across international borders using our implants without our knowledge, and in my case something had gone wrong.

When I read back over the email draft I wrinkled my nose. It sounded absolutely insane and like the ravings of a traumatised, slightly damaged dragon who was clawing senselessly at anything to make sense of what he'd lived through.

Then I decided yeah, that sounded about accurate, and clicked 'send.'

/ / /

I got responses from most of my workshop colleagues. To their credit, no one insulted or belittled me for what I'd written; people were unanimously empathic and concerned, and several suggested I might do well to look into speaking with a therapist. All of it was well-meant, and I was appreciative of it. Nobody said anything about seeing strange hallucinations or suspicious people following them or anything, though. Nothing odd that had happened while they were in Shanghai, apart from me having my stroke which kind of derailed the rest of the workshop. So maybe it was all just me, or maybe I was the only one who had encountered a problem while others had been 'used' the same way I had but their processes had gone smoothly enough that no damage had been caused, and they'd all had their 'packages' implanted and collected smoothly and with them being none the wiser. None of us would probably ever know.

/ / /

I spent much of the next day just sitting in my hotel room with all my thoughts spinning around in my mind. Trying to figure out if I'd missed something, if there was some other avenue I could pursue or something else I ought to be doing. But I couldn't come up with anything at all. I had dinner with Lucas to look forward to, and that was always good. Tonight we were meeting up at one of the few places we'd discovered that had made the effort to bring Chicago-style deep dish pizza to this country, and I was definitely looking forward to that. It wasn't too far from my hotel, which I was just as happy for as well, having had about enough of the City for a little while.

We met up, hugged, and wandered inside for a table. The place was pretty busy, being a Friday night, but we were able to get a table before long, just with an apology from the server that it might be a short while before they could get our order started, which was fine. Lucas was frowning at me in concern by the time we sat down, though, having detected that something was off.

I sighed, and launched into telling him about my experience with the strange text, and Heth and Tej and everything I'd overheard them say. And my failed attempt to get any sort of help from the police, and what I'd heard back from my colleagues. Lucas was no doubt getting pretty used to having me dump my problems and complaints on him by now, but even so he looked pretty shocked by all of it.

"Good God... Doran, I'm glad you're okay. That's insane. I know the message told you to come alone, but even so... why didn't you call me or your family or something? Just going without even telling anyone..."

"Yeah, I know. It was stupid and dangerous, and... I still can't really explain it. I could suppose I was just too obsessed by my need for answers that I wasn't thinking straight, but it kind of felt like more than that. Like there was almost some sort of compulsion, maybe some bit of programming as part of whatever it was they were recovering, that pushed me to just go and not tell anyone. I have no idea. I just know it doesn't really make sense, and as much of a doofus as I can be, it still seems out of character for me, thinking back on it."

"I'm just really glad you're okay. I mean... I don't know what this all is but they could've done a lot worse than just beat you up and leave you there."

"Yeah... I'm aware. Sort of why calling the police seemed like a sensible thing to try once I got out of there and thought I had my wits about me again."

Lucas made a disgusted grunt and visibly bit back some unkind words as to the degree of service and protection I'd been afforded by the City's alleged finest. I just nodded my agreement, too tired to launch into a rant where we'd both agree fully with each other anyway.

"I guess I've maybe learned a little bit, coming out of all this, just from what those two were talking about. It isn't much to go on, but... hell. Strokes just happen to people without clear reasoning, and I'd pretty much accepted that being the case with me, but there was so much that didn't really track, with the damage to my implant and all and not knowing which caused what. From what I heard them say, though..."

"It sounds like you were being used as a mule. A completely unwitting one." I tilted my head curiously at Lucas, as he explained. "I saw an article a few months back that theorised about things like this... the world, from a data and information perspective, is so globally connected now that it effectively operates as a single giant computer network. Or at least it would make reasonable sense if it did. Individual companies and organisations obviously put up barriers to protect their secrets, but a handful of countries, of which China remains the largest, are still determined to try and control all the data that flows over their international borders. You found out about that in the hospital, but it extends to larger things than emails and text messages and social media posts. There's a lot of software expertise both inside and outside of the 'Great Wall' as some call it, and as such, a lot of economic pressure to move data, information and software across that boundary. The Chinese government wants to carefully regulate every transfer it can, though, implementing what's effectively a hard customs border for information."

I nodded softly. "They warned us about that if we were bringing laptops or phones with us. I made a point of clearing my phone's drive of all but the basics before I travelled just to avoid any complications in the airport."

Lucas nodded. "Yeah, they can check mobile devices and computers and such when you come through. You know what they _don't_check, though?"

I blinked at him and sat up a little straighter as his meaning fell into place. "...Implants."

"Yep. Too personal, there's no way they could force people to submit to having their neural implants scanned going through customs that wouldn't violate international sentient rights agreements. So there's nothing that's been really solidly confirmed, at least not that I've read about, but some people are theorising that people themselves could be used as mules of a sort. Where once upon a time travellers might smuggle illegal drugs or weapons across international boundaries, now the hot economy is in data. Maybe fancy new software programs for who knows what. Maybe the latest data about upcoming economic policies that someone else could stand to gain from. And if you put it in somebody's implant customs won't check it. Especially if it's somebody like western business travellers who the Chinese are still keen to put in a good appearance with to keep the global economic wheels greased. So you've got to follow the rules, but are unlikely to get singled out and harassed too much going through customs."

"And if it's in a person's implant... the 'mule' as you say might not even be aware it's there? How could that work, how could they not know?"

"If the data package or whatever is programmed like a computer virus and can sort of 'bury' itself out of awareness, until it receives the right activation signal to make itself known and allows itself to be downloaded from the mule's implant."

I rested my chin in my hands, sighing thoughtfully. "I mean, I don't remember anybody like... stabbing a data cable into my skull and uploading anything while I was in Shanghai... they did say something about 'the Shanghai team' though. Could somebody have implanted something like this without my knowing about it?"

Lucas shrugged. "All we can do is speculate, but... if they had somebody working at the hotel you were staying at, they could have gotten into your room while you were sleeping, done something to keep you unconscious..."

I shivered a little. "...then if something had gone wrong with the process... they screwed up, or some of the data got corrupted during transfer... if something went wrong in exactly the right way at exactly the right time... could it have damaged the implant, do you suppose? Caused a stroke?"

Lucas sighed, and could only shrug again. "Who can say? Medical science is still trying to better understand the full workings of the brain, and the causes of strokes are still a mystery a lot of the time even when they aren't tangled up with malfunctioning technology like in your case. But I guess that scenario fits the facts. You said the message Heth sent you had pictures of those patterns you were always seeing. Those hallucinations must have somehow been part of this illicit data package they were after, in order for her to know what they'd look like?"

"Yeah, that's all I can figure. She complained that the package was all corrupted, but said that she was extracting it all and deleting it from the 'source'... my implant, I guess... so you know what's interesting, it's only been a few days since then, but... I haven't had those hallucinations since then. I'm not seeing those patterns anymore."

Lucas perked up hopefully. "Oh? What about the seizures?"

I frowned a little. "I've still had a few of those. So I don't seem to be magically cured or anything. The actual damage to my brain is there to stay. I guess time will tell, maybe having that corrupted code gone, if we're assuming this whole crazy scenario is what happened, will help me have fewer of the really bad ones, but I don't know. I'll just have to wait and see, and live with whatever I've got."

"Shame, that would've been a nice perk at least."

"Heh, yeah. It would be nice to have it all magically over, and everything back to how it once was... but this is me now. It happened, and it's a part of me now. It will be forever. But it doesn't define me. That much is still up to me."

Lucas smiled at that, raising his glass a little to the thought.

I took a sip from my own drink, then gazed out the window as the city's neon began to light up. "I do still have to wonder, was it just me, or were others attending the workshop, maybe even all of us attending from western countries, used this way, just that it didn't glitch on them, and whatever they were carrying has long since been downloaded without their knowledge. No way to know that either... but I guess it's good if none of them had it go all sideways and give them strokes like it did me."

Lucas nodded. "I don't think either of us are exactly supporting the use of people as unwitting international data mules whether the process goes smoothly or not, but yeah... you can only do so much. You tried with the police and your colleagues, but all we've really got is speculation. Nothing you could try to take up at some higher level, I don't think."

I shook my head. I felt my phone buzz in my pocket before I could respond further, and fished it out to glance at the reason. There was a new email waiting, and it was from the company I'd interviewed with a few days earlier, asking if I'd mind having a casual follow-up chat with them on Monday to discuss a few more details of the role and my experience. I smiled and relayed the news to Lucas while typing back a quick affirmative response. It sounded potentially hopeful, and worth tacking on a couple more days to my hotel stay for.

A server came around then and apologised profusely for the delay, but we really weren't fussed, having needed the time to catch up and talk about everything. We put in our orders, a personal-sized deep dish each so we could get our own preference in toppings, and let the conversation drift a little while we waited and sipped our drinks.

When the pizza came we dug into it eagerly, and Lucas chuckled at my particularly happy noises. Deep dish pizza had always been a favourite of mine.

Halfway through the pizza I sighed, staring down at what was left of it, delighted with what I'd eaten so far and happily anticipating the remainder. "I really am lucky."

Lucas glanced up at me and smiled, tilting his head attentively.

I smiled. "I've been through a hell of a ride. Stroke, epilepsy, possible bungled exploitation by an international data smuggling operation, apparently. I may never drive again, or fly again. I've got some weird and uncomfortable crap I'll have to live with for the rest of my life. But Lucas, I am still here. I'm still breathing, and that's what matters. I've got people loving and supporting me through all of it. I could complain about things if I wanted to focus on that. But... you know what, Lucas?"

He grinned. "Mmm?"

I grinned right back at him, picking up my fork. "This pizza is absolutely fantastic."