Chapter 2 #2
“Doctor?” She sounded mildly alarmed while I spun back around and gripped my sink. “Are you all right?”
“You…already took off your shirt,” I stammered.
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?” she asked flatly.
“Oh, sure. Right. It’s just…I usually step out while my patients undress.” Ducking into a drawer, I pulled out a paper examination top.
When I turned around to hand it to her, she reached back to unclasp her bra, removing it in the same perfunctory manner I might use to kick off my shoes at the end of the day.
But instead of aching blue, webbed feet, her efforts revealed the most flawless pair of breasts I had ever seen.
One of my knuckles twitched, threatening to rise toward my mouth so I could bite on it.
I thrust the paper top toward her.
“What’s this?” she asked, holding the flimsy blue top out in front of her, a blessed barrier between her breasts and my eyeballs. Eyeballs that needed to get their professional game faces back on immediately.
“It’s for you. To put on.” I waved my hand uselessly in the air. “For modesty.” And while she stared at me like I’d just suggested she fish a moon jelly out of its tank and wear it as a hat, I wondered—and not for the first time—if I’d chosen the wrong career.
“You want me to be modest?” She didn’t sound offended or even amused. Only confused. “Is that normal for a doctor’s appointment? I’ve never done one of these before.”
I opened my mouth to say, well, no, but I thought you might feel more comfortable but decided not to bother when she opened the paper top, examined it for a moment, then placed it behind her on the table, obviously not intending to put it on.
Alrighty, then. Gluing my eyes to the safety of my ceiling, I watched the clouds on the digtiles float by, wishing silently that I was on one of them.
“They’re lopsided,” she stated, staring down at her chest, pulling my attention inexorably there too.
Lopsided? Was she blind?
“Come again?” I set my focus over her shoulder, at a spot on the wall above her head, at a digpic of some snowy Tranquisian mountain range in the corner.
Anywhere but at her breasts. Which was absurd.
I’d seen thousands of breasts in my career.
There was not a single known species hurtling through space whose breasts I hadn’t examined.
Why, then, did I believe that if I looked at hers for more than a fleeting glance, I’d end up behind bars in some dank prison cell, never to see the light of day again? Get a grip, man.
Regrouping, digging deep to pull myself together, I took a breath.
Reaching behind my back, I fumbled for the pen and pad of paper I kept on my counter.
I could use the autonotes feature of my viewChip.
It would be easier. But I always appreciated the steady feel of a pen gliding across paper.
Faced with a half-naked bionic on my table, I craved the familiar, grounding sensation of it now.
Clicking my pen, I said, “Let’s start over. At the beginning. First of all, what is your name?”
“Elanie,” she replied.
“And what generation are you?”
“Twenty-six. But what does this have to do with my breasts?”
Glancing up from my pad of paper, then right back down to it, I cracked my neck with efficiency and said, “Generation twenty-six bionics weren’t designed with built-in hormone functionality. So, obviously, you—”
“Upgraded,” she said.
“And when did you install?”
“Ninety-two days, thirteen hours, and twenty-two Standard minutes ago.”
“I see,” I said, jotting down those two exact words, I see, before scratching them out. “And how has that been going for you?” I hated that I didn’t already know the answer. I wished I could use my gift even a little, tiny, infinitesimal bit.
Her expression remained as flat as Captain Jones’s singing voice as she answered, “Not good.”
“Not good.” I jotted that down, leaving it. “Gotcha.”
“How long have you been a doctor?” She leaned forward a little while her brows slid together in what I thought might be a furrow of judgment.
Doing the mental math, I said, “Coming up on ten years.” Saints, that long. Then I asked, “Why do you believe your breasts are lopsided?”
“Because Blake, my boyfriend, said they were.”
Ahh. So it’s her boyfriend who’s blind.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
I raised my eyes until they met hers. “Like it?” I repeated through a tightening throat. Surely she hadn’t just asked me if I liked her breasts. Surely not—
“Being a doctor?”
I ruffled my hair a little roughly, trying to shake some sense into my head. “It’s a good career.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Who was examining who here? “Let’s get back to your breasts” was something I did not think I’d be saying to a bionic today. Yet here we were. “Your boyfriend said they were lopsided.”
“Yes. And they also hurt.”
“I see,” I said for the second time, still just as uselessly. “When did the soreness start?”
“Right after I installed the upgrade,” she told me.
“But it was much worse this morning. I think it’s because I let Blake touch them last night.
” She looked down at her breasts again. And again, I followed her.
“What’s wrong with them?” she asked while I fought every urge to say absolutely nothing.
“Sunny says it’s supposed to feel good when they’re touched.
” Sliding her fingers under the gentle curves of her breasts, she picked them up, gave them a tentative squeeze, winced, then let them go. “It doesn’t feel good at all.”
Sweat, for some reason, accumulated along my upper lip.
I faked a sniffle to wipe it off. “Elanie,” I said, employing my calmest, most soothing physician voice while I met her stare.
I could do this. I could doctor without empathy.
“I don’t think there is anything wrong with your breasts.
Some soreness during the hormonal changes of bionic puberty is to be expected.
And sometimes, especially when you’re first becoming intimate with a partner, it can take a while for you to learn what feels good and what doesn’t.
How long have you been seeing Blake?” Blake, Blake…
I didn’t like the name at all. It was a child’s name.
“We started dating right after I upgraded,” she said. “He works at the Starflux on deck nine. One day he bought me a whipped chai latte and said”—she dropped her voice—“‘Need to cool off? Cuz you’re kinda hot.’”
“Charming,” I muttered. Remembering the sensitivity of bionic hearing only when one of her eyebrows rose toward her hairline, I straightened and said, “He sounds charming. Do you feel comfortable talking about this with Blake?”
“Talking about what?”
“About your soreness? About what you like? What kinds of intimacy feel good to you and what kinds don’t?”
“No,” she said, the corners of her mouth sinking. “Why would I do that?”
This was going to be harder than I thought. You can do this, Semson. A decade of experience has prepared you for this moment. Be. A. Doctor.
I placed my pad and pen back on the counter.
“Sometimes, a being in the throes of puberty—including newly upgraded bionics—can jump headfirst into intimacy without taking any time to figure out who they are and what they want. This can cause stress. Insecurity. Dissatisfaction. Sometimes, it can be helpful to talk about these things with your partner. Sometimes, it can be helpful to take the time to—”
“Time?” Her lips compressed, forming a tighter line than I would have thought possible, considering how plump and full they were.
“Do you have any idea what time means to us? How vastly different our experiences of time are? Your brain processes a minute in seconds. Ours in nanoseconds. A minute to you is sixty billion nanoseconds to us. Literally. I could count them if I wanted to.”
I blinked, did it again, said, “Oh.” Then immediately wondered how long she’d had to wait for that staggeringly nuanced response. But she was right. I could barely wrap my non-bionic head around it. For instance: “So for you,” I said, “this visit has already lasted…”
In an apparently very long-suffering tone, she said, “Six hundred and fifty-five billion nanoseconds.”
“Saints,” I whispered, astonished. That was a long time to be stuck in a room with a bumbling, blue-skinned stranger. I needed to get a move on.
“Besides,” she continued, “I don’t need any time to figure out who I am.
I am a bionic. Generation-26 model EL-42xdZ.
I’ve known who I am and what I want since the day I was commissioned.
It’s built into my bio-genetic code. I want to eat, sleep, and work.
I want to be efficient, productive. I don’t want to have all these”—she threw her hands into the air, her voice breaking on the word—“feelings.”
I realized in that moment that I didn’t need my gift.
I didn’t need to read her to know that she was struggling.
If I wanted to help her, it would require a much longer conversation than we could have in a single visit.
But I could give her something, at least. I could give her peace of mind, even though I knew it wouldn’t be enough.
Puberty left no being’s self-confidence unscathed. Not even, evidently, a bionic’s.
Stepping forward, placing a tentative hand on her knee, I said, “The soreness is normal, Elanie. Everything you’re going through is completely normal. And your breasts are not lopsided.”
“How can you say that?” she demanded. “You haven’t even touched them yet.”
My hand slipped right off her knee. “You want me to”—I coughed into my fist—“touch them?” Bionics didn’t get cancer or infections, so there was no medical reason for them to need a breast exam. And I couldn’t say that I’d ever conducted a breast symmetry exam or even knew how to do one.
“I’m no doctor,” she stated, obviously annoyed.
“But I’m fairly certain that’s how medicine works.
You have to actually examine your patients.
” She pulled her shoulders back, making her perfectly pert breasts float up from her chest. “And I really don’t have another six hundred billion nanoseconds to spare. So can we please get this over with?”
In the sudden and utter silence of my clinic, the med bay, the entire rapidly expanding universe, only one word managed to form in my blown-fuse, static-filled rock of a head: fuck.