Launch: Chapter 29

  The next day Markus found himself at the expansive Vancouver Hospital complex.  Upon his arrival, his PAN immediately began interfacing with the facility’s servers which made it possible for him to ask his wrist scroll to direct him to his mother’s room via his Brainchip, and to have it promptly bring up a navigation display with clear directions.  He drove his roadpod up to the front door, then got out and ordered it released with his Brainchip.  The roadpod obediently drove off and out of sight, presumably to some large on site docking bay.  

  Markus walked through the front doors and followed his scroll through several areas of the hospital before coming to the right one.  At some point he came to a door he couldn’t open, and he turned to the reception desk inquisitively.  “I’m going to need you to check in before getting in there sir.”  The male receptionist politely demanded.

  Markus walked over to the counter and thought his basic identification at the transceiver the man was pointing to with a stylus.  “Alright, I see this is your first visit Mr. Bowland.  Through those doors you’ll find a series of glass walled rooms.  Your mother is… fourth from the door here.  If you want to go into the room with her, you’ll have to scrub down and suit up.  To do this you go behind her room through one of the doors between the glass rooms, and somebody back there will help you sterilize .”

  “Thank you.” Markus offered dispassionately.

  “Would you like me to fetch the doctor for you?” the man behind the counter warmly asked.

  “That shouldn’t be necessary, my brother’s in there and I’m sure he can fill me in,” Markus answered.  The younger man thought his credentials towards the secured door, and a light to the right of it flashed green at the same time a buzzer sound came from the door.  Markus approached it and the doors obediently slid open for him.  He walked through and passed the first room.  A few people were in the room with the patient, a couple more watching from outside the glass.  As he passed them, his brother noticed him approaching.

  “Markus!” his brother called over from his chair beside the glass room their mother’s bed was in.  The glass was a synthetic material which was thin but nearly impossible to penetrate by either biological agents or knife stabs, but usually not bullets.  The material was so thin and easy to see through that unless you touched it (and smudged it) it was difficult to tell that it was there at all.

  It ordinarily hung down flat like a curtain to allow some tactile contact across the loose material, but for cleaning and other reason, with a small electrical current the material could turn stiff and rigid like a pane of glass.  The most obvious giveaway that there was something between the visitor and the patient was the microphone and speaker system which had to be used since the barrier obscured any transmission of sound through it.

  Markus found out from Brakus when they spoke earlier that day that he had been there since this morning, and he was clearly very happy to see his brother.  After getting up to greet him with a big hug, the two sat down morosely.  His mother was apparently asleep, but Brakus nonetheless reached over and switched off the microphone so that if she woke up or was only half asleep, she wouldn’t be able to hear them talk.

  “They’ve got her in this clean room; they don’t really know what else to do.  They don’t have any treatment options… they just said that in cases like these, the longer you can avoid any kind of infection or anything…   Her immune system is just… it’s just gone.”

  “Completely?  I hadn’t thought she’d taken quite that much…”

  “Well not gone,” Brakus conceded, “but seriously damaged and not getting any better.”  He gritted his teeth while delivering the news.  “Oh this is terrible Markus,” he continued, “it wasn’t enough to kill her in a matter of hours or days, and it wasn’t little enough to just add to her cumulative lifetime exposure… it critically damaged her and now she’s condemned to a slow and painful death.”  The normally impeccably composed man was near tears.

  “How long?” Markus asked his brother.

  “Well,” he said, attempting to compose himself, “they say that if she stays in one of these isolation rooms and… and they do everything they can with medication and blood infusions and bone marrow implants… then she might last two or three months.  On the other hand she could come home tomorrow, and be dead in a week or two from what would in normal circumstances would otherwise be a common and minor infecting agent.”

  “What do we do?” Markus asked, unsure of what else to ask, and becoming somewhat self-conscious of his lack of emotional response in contrast with his brother.

  “Well… we let her pick.  So far she’s okay with being here, but in the end she may choose…”  Brakus looked down in a half-hearted attempt to hide his choking up at the thought, “she may choose to go home for the end.”

  The two sat in silence for a few moments.  “Look Markus,” Brakus began, “I know I may have come off… well, I know how I probably came off the other day.  I want you to know that I support you.  I don’t want you to go now more than ever, I don’t want you to leave mom in this condition… but the truth is I just don’t want you to go at all, and this is just one more huge reason.  I’m just really, really going to miss you… especially now…” he said, tearing up again and looking at their mother, and away from his brother.

  “I want you to stay,” he continued, “now more than ever, but I’ve always respected your choice to go… and I still do, especially since you came back…”  He sighed heavily.  “Thank you for coming back to say goodbye, it… it means a lot, to me and to her,” he said still looking at their mother.  “Thank you for making sure that that happened.”

  Markus got up and stood behind his brother, putting his hands on his shoulders while he sat and looked at their mother.  “Thank you, Brakus.”

  “Are you two talking about me?   Don’t mute the thing…” his mother uttered groggily as she woke up and then, as she realized the significance of seeing Markus there she excitedly exclaimed: “Markus!”

  “Hello, Mom,” he said with a half-hearted smile.  He didn’t know what else to say at this point.

  “It’s good to see you.  I take it Brakus told you everything?”

  Markus nodded, “that’s right,” he answered.

  “What would you do Markus?   Would you slug it out here for every last possible second?  Or at some point would you just want to go home for a shorter more comfortable end?”

  “I… I guess I’d want to go home at some point, but not until I was really ready.”

  “I agree,” she replied.  The three were silent for several moments.   It was an awkward silence.   “Brakus,” his mother finally said, “could you please give us a few minutes?”

  “Sure Mom,” he said, “I’m gonna go get a drink.”  He turned down the hall and walked out of the isolation ward.

  “Thank you for coming back, Markus.”

  “Of course,” he replied, “I’m glad there was time.”

  “I really wish you would stay.   Brakus will need your help at the company now more than ever and… well I know it’s selfish but I’d hate to not be able to see you ever again in the short time I have left now.”

  “Mom, I…” he sighed.  He was prepared to address those points, but he could tell that she wasn’t done so he instead just let her continue.

  “It’s not just that, though….”   It took some effort, and she seemed to wince a bit in response to some pain in the process, but she sat herself up.   “Earth, this Solar System… this is your home, son.  When you launch off in that ship, you’ll be gone, never to come back, just… disappeared from our story here on Earth.  I… I really hoped that eventually I’d get to see you fall in love and have some of your own children…  Now I wouldn’t get to see that even if you stayed though,” she remarked.   “Somehow you just… disappearing into the ether feels worse than you just not having a family here, you… you won’t be a part of Earth’s story at all anymore.”

  Markus sighed as he collected his thoughts.  “I will tell you this Mom, there’s something about that ship that makes me want a family up there more than I ever have down here.  There’s something about that mission that… that really speaks to me now, to something deep inside me,” he reassured her.  “More than that though… I won’t go missing from the story of Earth, Mom.  I’ll be riding a new branch of it.  I’ll be at the beginning of something… amazing!  I think that where I’m going there will be a new story, a new part of a larger narrative that includes the Earth.”  He paused to consider the role he would serve on the ship.  “I’ll be an ancestor,” he reflected, “part of the beginning of something… instead of part of an ending.”  He wasn’t quite sure why he’d added that last part or what he’d meant by it, but for some reason it resonated deeply within him.

  “In the end,” his mother’s normally boisterous voice grew quiet and Markus found himself having to turn up the volume control on the panel in front of him.  “In the end, the choice is of course yours.  Thank you for coming back again…  I’ll respect whatever choice you ultimately make, but Markus I want you to promise me something.”

  “Go ahead,” Markus answered, committing to nothing.

  “I want you to seriously reconsider if going on this mission is what you really what, if you don’t really want to strike out on a new venture here, maybe take a wife and start a family which can be close with Brakus’.  I want you to be absolutely certain that forever closing the door on all of that is what you really want to do.  In the end if you decide that it is, I will support you.”

  “Thank you,” Markus replied softly.  “I promise I will.”