What Dreams May Come Ch. 09 - Final

"Then, you're not in love with me?" I asked, disappointed. "I mean, I you showed me your underwear..." I said, not really knowing what I meant.

"I saw her underwear, too," Dean offered. "Nice," he said, nodding.

"Back off, Dean. I mean, thanks for saving me and all, but--" I began, when my watch, which was back on my wrist now, began playing my "Chaiyya Chaiyya" ringtone at top volume because Mr. Vaidya, as usual, was calling to harass me at exactly the wrong moment.

"What was that?" asked Dr. Lee, grabbing at my wrist as I slapped my hand over my watch.

"Nothing. Nobody. Uh... I like your pants," I said, stupidly trying to change the subject with the first thing I could think to say.

"You like my pants? Right. Nobody likes me in pants. Are you seeing any auras?" Dr. Lee said, leaning in and squinting at my eyes and snapping her fingers in my left ear.

"Cole Howard? Why do you think I would want to have grandchildren with such an undignified nose?" Mr. Vaidya's muffled voice said out of my wrist. "This is to say nothing of the unfortunate sickly pallor of your complexion--"

"Baba?" Dr. Leela Vaidya gasped, looking at my watch like a teenager caught making out with the wrong boy.

It was at this point that I realized my promise to Mr. Vaidya to keep our deal secret was in serious jeopardy, so that was when I blinked rapidly and said "Yeah, maybe I am seeing auras. Let me go check in the bathroom!" Then, I ran to the bathroom and locked the door. That was my great plan to outwit my gorgeous goddess of a brain surgeon.

Shortly after I reassured Mr. Vaidya about my absolute willingness to allow my future children to undergo plastic surgery and daily spray tans in a conversation where I worked in the phrases "nope, everything's fine" and "no auras" rather loudly, I ended the call and opened the bathroom door.

"That was my father, Cole. Why were you talking to my father?" Dr. Lee asked, her eyes narrowed until they were like gorgeous, hypnotic scalpels.

"Oh, was that your dad? How about that? What are the chances? I mean, Vaidya's a common name... especially with doctors. I mean doesn't it actually mean 'doctor' in Hindi? So, really, your name is like Doctor Doctor. I'm surprised you don't get patients giggling about it," I said, doing a really great job of proving my brain was alive and functioning well.

"Why were you talking to my father, Cole?"

"He's a... soccer fan?" I answered. "I'm trying to bring a team back to the Bay Area... fundraising... talking to all the important people. You know," I said.

"And my father is one of the major players in the Bay Area? Right... we're not done talking about this. Go get dressed," she said.

"Okay!" I said, glad the conversation had gone so inexplicably well. "Why am I getting dressed?"

"I'm leaving. I have a meeting with someone about a patient dispute. You're coming with because I want to keep an eye on you. You're acting weird," she said, holding my chin and looking at my eyes one at a time, and then both together. Then, she went up on her tiptoes and kissed me. "Plus, you're cute," she said, smirking and flashing me a completely non-clinical look.

"Holy shit..." I breathed. The beautiful woman that had picked garbage out of my brain and helped me after I pissed my pants in her office had kissed me. On purpose. On the lips. That's it. I was officially calling her Leela, now.

"Don't let my baba hear you say that," she snickered, shrugging into a jacket and tying her hair up in a bun.

Just then, my watch chirped again. "Uh... hey Dean, you want to come with us?" I asked, frowning at the screen.

"Uh, no. I'd rather take a nap where people aren't getting into turf wars every 10 minutes," he said, sitting down on my sofa with a smoothie he'd just made.

I looked down at my watch again, "Okay... it's just that my watch says 'Bring Dean,'" I mumbled.

"Oh. Well. Far be it from me to question the weird watch," Dean said standing and draining his smoothie before taking his glass to the sink, and rinsing it out.

*** *** ***

We entered the building where the meeting was to occur. From the outside, I was expecting it to be an office space, but instead it was more of a spacious apartment. Looking around at the modern white interiors, I had the weirdest feeling I'd been here before. "Dean, did you get the address right?" Leela asked in a whisper.

"I dunno, ask Cole's watch" Dean said, gesturing to our new source of all authority. "I feel like this place wants to clean me," he said, looking around leerily.

"Welcome Dr. Vaidya, Mr. Bates, and Mr. Howard," a disembodied voice echoed throughout the space. "I am Mantha, your user--"

"Mantha, call IT support," a voice said, and by the way Leela and Dean turned to look at me, I found out that the voice was mine. It didn't feel like I'd said it, though.

Nearby, a more embodied voice began chuckling and a tall, wiry guy walked into the entryway. He looked vaguely familiar, and I swear it kinda felt like he knew me, too. Unless he was the kind of person that just went around looking random people up and down and rolling his eyes dismissively. Who the hell was this guy, and how did he know I was so easily dismissed? Then, he disconnected a call that came to his phone.

"Whoa... you're Simon Ellison..." Dean said.

"I am," the guy named Simon said, walking forward and taking Dean's hand in both of his and shaking it, "And though you may find it hard to believe, I hold your work in even greater admiration, Mr. Bates. I have wanted to meet you for quite some while."

"My work..." Dean scoffed, looking at the floor. "I did some robotics when I first got out here, but... it's been a while. Lot of closed doors out there..."

Ellison's smile faded, "Doors that closed abruptly after you helped a woman escape a rather influential and predatory person in Trader Joe's, if I am not mistaken. In that, Mr. Bates, your work has superseded my own, in importance. I owe you more than you know. Thank you for coming, today." Dean straightened, looking Simon in the eye with bewildered pride and nodded.

Ellison greeted me next. Well, "greeted" in the sense of walking past Dean and pausing in front of me long enough to look me up and down, sigh, and shake his head in exasperated disappointment. Then, he moved on to Leela who was standing with her arms crossed and looking ready to fight a bear. "I haven't involved the authorities yet, Mr. Ellison, but I will if I have to. I know you had something to do with her disappearance. I know it. Take me to her, now--" Leela said.

"And as her electronic health record says, Dr. Vaidya, Ms. Andersen voluntarily discharged herself from your facility against medical advice," Ellison said, looking like he'd said something that amused him. "Surely, she was not being held involuntarily?"

"You did this! I know you did! All that time with you petitioning to take custody of her! Rose Andersen is in an irreversible coma! There was no way that she could consent to--"

"Mantha, where is Rose Anderson?" the voice that came out of me asked, for no reason that I was aware of. Both Dean and Leela turned looked at me like I was crazy, which I didn't feel was too unfair because I was asking random things, after all. I shrugged.

"Rose Anderson is in the--" the voice that greeted us came out of hidden speakers, only to be interrupted.

"I'm in the gym, Cowboy. Gimme a second. I thought you guys would be saying 'ooh' and 'ahh' longer. Isn't this place great? Hey, I made brownies! Did Simon offer you brownies, yet?" a woman's oddly familiar voice asked through the speakers.

"Would you care for some brownies?" Simon asked, smiling affably.

"No, we do not want brownies!" Leela snapped at the same time that Dean said, "Yeah, I'd take a brownie..."

Leela turned around and glared at Dean, and because I was completely in love with her, I glared at him too, even though I did kinda want a brownie. Dean shrugged. "What? If Simon Ellison offers you a brownie, you eat a brownie."

"Mr. Ellison, I don't know what you're playing at, but you need to take me to her, now. You are not prepared to manage the needs of someone in Rose's condition," Leela said, shutting down or delaying our prospects of getting brownies.

"In this, Dr. Vaidya, you will be surprised to hear that we are in complete agreement. Follow me." Ellison beckoned us with a nudge of his head and walked through the futuristic place, pointing out a pan of brownies to Dean as we passed through the kitchen.

Then, Ellison led us through a bathroom with a large tub. I don't know why, exactly, but I was compelled to stop and stare at it. Dean caught up to me with a massive brownie in his hand. The dude must have taken like a quarter of the pan. Dean stared at the tub with me, eating his unfairly portioned brownie. "Nice tub..." he said, through a mouthful of chewy chocolate.

"Don't... don't go in there, Dean. It's not nice. That's a bad-touch tub," I said.

"Of all possible things, that... that, is what he remembers..." Ellison's unamused voice called out of the other room where he had led Leela. Dean and I followed his voice, and a weird gibbering sound that sounded vaguely like Leela into another room where a woman I was pretty sure was Rose Andersen was running on a treadmill... kind of. She seemed to be suspended from the ceiling by what looked like bandages that connected to various parts of her body... even her eyelids. She looked a bit like a futuristic puppet suspended by strings.

"Mr. Ellison... what... what did you do? What have you done?" Leela gasped.

"Very little, actually..." Ellison responded, looking at the jogging body of Rose with a mix of adoration and exasperation, "other than being unavoidably delayed in rejoining a rather willful woman who discovered she had almost limitless power while I was away."

The sweaty body of Rose Andersen finished running, got off the treadmill and puppet-walked over to where we were. "Sorry... I'm a mess, but weight-bearing exercise is important to fending off pneumonia and osteoporosis... can't get that in a hospital bed," Rose's voice said through the speakers. "Cowboy! I've missed you!" she said, her body walking forward and putting her arms around me. When she had her arms draped on me, I felt something in the suit she was wearing flex her arm muscles and squeeze me in a warm hug.

"You're... you're that girl from Trader Joe's... with the cherries," Dean said, canting his head as he looked into her body's strangely vacant eyes.

Rose's body released me and turned to Dean. "Yeah. I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't helped me that day. Thank you, Dean. Thank you so much. I wanted to thank you sooner, but it took forever to find you. Luckily, you paused by that ATM long enough for the facial recognition to kick in..." she said, her body taking his hand in both of hers. "Can I get you another brownie?" she asked, looking down to where he rubbed brownie crumbs off his other hand.

"I... I don't know. Can you?" Dean asked, looking at Rose's violet eyes as they blinked randomly with the help of the ceiling straps.

"Of course, I can, silly!" Rose's musical voice laughed, her body slapping Dean's shoulder gently and walking out of the gym.

We all watched Rose's body walk out of the gym in silence. Leela was breathing pretty hard and only getting half-words out, so Dean picked her up and carried her out to the living room and put her down on the sofa. Ellison followed sitting down across from her. When she'd caught her breath, Leela took out her phone and started dialing 911, but a thing came down from the ceiling and took it away from her, "Yoink!" Rose's voice said, as her body put down a tray with brownies on the coffee table. "Sorry, Doctor, you can have that back when you're a little calmer. Besides, how would you explain this to emergency services without sounding like you're out of your mind? Eat something. You'll feel better," she urged.

"This... this isn't possible," Leela said, shaking her head. "Ellison, this is some obscene experiment, driven by grief. You have no right..." she whispered. She turned to me, her eyes frantic, "They were brought in together... Ellison and Rose. After a week or two, he recovered enough to be brought out of his coma, but instead of accepting his situation, he became obsessed. He demanded that I put him back on the propofol... back into the coma. He said she was awake and alive in the realm of the subconscious... that they all were," Leela said. Turning to Ellison she shook her head, "Eventually, he stopped his petitions and just disappeared. I thought he had accepted his loss, but... Mr. Ellison, you have to know that this is wrong. That may be Rose's body, but she is not--"

"It's not me, huh? How about I tell Cole what you said to him when you first rolled his body into my room?" Rose's voice asked.

"No!" Leela said at the same time I sat up and yelled "Yeah!"

"Oh, it was so sweet, Cole. She said she was so happy she got the chance to meet you, and that if you ever got better, she would--" Rose's voice said, pausing when Leela covered her face with her hands and groaned. "Shall I continue, Doctor? I could replay the phone conversation you had with your father after Cole left his house when your father asked you why in the hell Cole thought you were having an arranged marriage? I could replay the audio of the last five times you gasped Cole's name when you made yourself come... or maybe you could just suspend disbelief for a few minutes and listen to our story with a slightly open mind?"

With wide eyes, Leela pressed her lips together and glanced over at me and then rolled her eyes because I was grinning from ear to ear. She'd made up the whole thing just to make me work for it. Oh, I was going to have so much fun messing with Mr. Vaidya over this. As amazing as all the stuff going on in this place was, I almost wanted to call him right then.

So, then Ellison told us this story about how he built this whole weird automated house and then Rose came to help his research and they fell in love. I got the feeling he was glossing over a lot of stuff, especially when Rose made the ceiling things pantomime what looked like tentacle sex behind his head with the things that hung down from the ceiling. Then he started talking about sensors and connectivity and subconscious consciousness in comas and my mind started wandering, mostly to the empty brownie plate on the table. Dean asked a lot of technical questions, not even embarrassed that he had eaten most of the brownies.

"And, of course, when Mr. Howard proved utterly useless to our purposes in alleviating Rose's suffering, it became necessary for me to manage the affair myself," Ellison said, looking at me in annoyance. So, at one of my scheduled breaks--"

"You mean 'breaks' as in when you periodically came out of the coma that you put yourself into when I refused to do it for you? My God, Ellison, do you have any idea how dangerous that is?" Leela asked, holding a half-eaten brownie that I was pretty sure she wouldn't miss if it just disappeared.

Ellison continued, as if Leela had just agreed with him, "I returned to the habitat and re-programmed Mantha to cease demonstrating her newly found abilities to emulate fear and terror in Rose's mind. It was at that time that Rose became impatient with my absence and instinctively began attempting to use the interface I had implanted in her to communicate and take action, rather than just receive communications. The results of Rose's experimentation were most distracting to my efforts..." Ellison said, nodding toward a screen showing him hunched over a computer and a ceiling tendril began tapping him on the shoulder and then hiding when he turned around. "The discovery was groundbreaking. I knew that the habitat would be ideal in caring for Rose's body, so I began making preparations for bringing her here. The habitat, with the correct programming, could care for our bodies indefinitely and--"

"*Our* bodies? Ellison, you're not actually considering--" Leela said, getting to her feet and putting her half-eaten brownie down on the plate. Ellison didn't seem to like Leela questioning what he would consider, so he got up, too. He was a lot bigger than her, but Leela had a lower center of balance and had no problems causing me intense suffering in my rehabilitation therapies. I figured it was an even match if they got into it.

As exciting as it would be to have the two of them throw down, I didn't want to have to try to look like I'd be any help in a fight. So then, I cleared my throat. "Um, I would..." I said. Leela whirled around and looked at me like I'd grown another head. "Well, hear me out," I said, standing and eating a half-eaten brownie that I found somewhere. "When you find someone... when you find that person, and your life is with them... why waste time letting something like a coma or a different culture get in the way?" I said, taking her hand. "When you love someone, you do what you have to do. When he puts himself into a coma, they can be together. I'd... I'd do it for you," I said, giving her a half-smile. Leela bit her lips and looked away, hiding her face from me.

"I told you Cowboy would help..." Rose's voice said, softly.

"Hm. Yes. Apparently, smarmy Hallmark sentiments have their place. At any rate, Rose became impatient with my efforts at optimization and unfortunately, she also had all the capabilities of Mantha at her disposal. That was when she illegally penetrated your hospital's and several others' computer systems, discharged herself against medical advice, arranged for her own packaging, and had herself transferred to 'Cerebrotech General Hospital,'" Ellison said, gesturing to the room around us. "You can imagine my frustration when she arrived at my doorstep, unannounced."

"I thought it was brilliant. You should have seen your face," Rose's voice said, sounding smugly amused.

"YOU DID NOT EVEN REQUIRE A SIGNATURE FOR DELIVERY!" Ellison yelled at the ceiling, before collecting himself. "God knows how long you could have just sat out there on the doorstep..." he grumbled.

Leela raised her hands up in frustration, "Okay, let's say for a minute that I believe any of this. You invited me here, Ellison. Obviously, it's not because you're returning her to my care. So, what is this? Gloating? Why did you bring me here?" she asked.

Ellison sat back down and gestured for Leela to do so, as well. "I require... a service of you," he said, carefully.

"No, you don't. You're just being--" Rose's voice protested.

"I would ask for your assistance in implanting a device, as well as assistance in a few other matters, as I lack the requisite skills to do so myself," Ellison continued, ignoring her.

Rose's voice cut in, "Look, I said I wouldn't do it again, and it's not like you didn't enjoy yourself--"

"You see, when I am comatose, I am quite able to manage my Little One's impulses of the moment. However, when I am in this conscious state, it is somewhat less convenient to implement sufficient controls to moderate her..." Ellison said, stroking his chin with a slight smile.

Leela frowned, "I don't think I understand what you're getting at... and if Rose is not on board with this, I would never even consider implanting her with anything that--"

"Oh, it is not for Rose. The implant is for me. A failsafe for me to override certain of Rose's commands to Mantha, should they prove... ethically troublesome. Mantha, play the events of last Monday starting at 5:23am," Ellison ordered.

"Playing 'Bow-Chicka-Wow-Wow with Sir,'" Mantha responded.

Ellison pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed, "Rose, I have asked you to stop re-naming my files, have I not?" he said, as the room darkened and the screen illuminated again.