Bher

Javan, in the absence of her body, was forced to live in the liminal space provided by Vadstalle's mind. She did not have a form here, and existed as a being of pure thought. That is why it was particularly troubling to wake up in a room.

It was a small room, not entirely unlike the basement hospital room where her robotic body still lay, getting its needed repairs by Vomisa and his team. She lay in a gurney, and it was surrounded by the translucent plastic curtain. 

She looked down at her hands. They were the familiar tones of her flesh, before being burnt off in the plant explosion. Wisps of her black hair fluttered in the periphery of her vision. She tried to access her calendar, but the ghostly blue grid would not come when she summoned it. Her vision remained clear and unobstructed by any of the visual overlays she had come to depend upon. She couldn't determine the day, and from that, couldn't determine if she was just disoriented because they had managed to fix her body and reupload her into it.

But she couldn't remember anything after the visit to the abandoned office of the company that may very well have purchased a chemical agent used as the murder weapon in a cold case. All she could remember was that frosted glass door with the words WHITE NOISE PROTOCOL.

The words seemed to float in her vision, not exactly like an overlay. It was more like the words were written in the air in the same vinyl letters that appeared on the door in that office.

She heard something beyond the curtain, something shuffling. Her skin tingled, and she looked down at her arms. Goosebumps. She didn't know she could do that. The rational part of her brain told her that it was just a simple technological advancement in artificial skin, able to simulate the pilomotor reflex.

She looked up toward the sound. A shape lingered beyond the curtain. She was able to move her arms and head around, glad that her servos had been restored. They felt new, without the sort of choppy feeling that might happen from an accumulation of grime in the gears. 

She tried her voice. "Hello?" she said. She felt the air move through her as she spoke this word.

The shuffling sound stopped, and the thing beyond the curtain shifted. She hoped that it was Vomisa just working late or early or whatever time it happened to be. It started moving toward the curtain.

Javan felt something pound in her chest. What sort of enhancements had they given her when they were rebuilding her? The feeling thrummed with a steady, yet heavy rhythm. As the shape drew closer to the curtain, the pounding started to speed up.

She involuntarily clutched at the sheets on the gurney. She could feel the starchy fabric along the palms of her hands. 

The figure reached out a hand and started pulling back the curtain. She looked at the hand that gripped the curtain's edge and gasped. It wasn't a human hand, or even a robot hand. It was a long-fingered hairy hand with claws. It slowly slid the curtain back, each metal ring dragging and clicking as it met its neighbor.

"I see you're awake," said a voice. It wasn't Vomisa. It wasn't any voice that she recognized.

That wasn't true. It was something she did recognize, but never thought she would ever hear in person. It was the voice of that raccoon cartoon character, the one whose figurine she'd kept on her desk.

"Arai-kun?" she said.

The hand, or was it a paw, pulled the curtain back the rest of they way. A large, hairy head with a long, pointed nose, and cartoonish furry bandit mask over the eyes, peeked around the curtain. It looked like Arai-kun, but as depicted by one of those hyper-realistic artists. "This is what Arai-kun would really look like!" He stepped inside the curtain. He wore a coat just like Vomisa's: white with the splatters of blue stains.

"I must be dreaming," she said to herself. And again, she was amazed at the enhancements they had given her.

Arai-kun looked at her and smiled, showing his white, pointed teeth. "I assure you, Detective Javan, you're not asleep. You're not dreaming."

Javan's words stuck in her throat.

"We've brought you here to give you a little upgrade, so to speak." The raccoon looked at the letters floating in the air. "I believe you've heard of the White Noise Protocol?"

Unable to do anything else, she nodded.

Arai-kun grinned. "Good. Well, this won't take long." He waved his paw at the floating letters, and they turned into insects and fluttered away. Javan tried to follow them with her eyes, but the more she looked directly at them, the more they managed to slip away. When they were gone, she felt something hop onto the gurney. She looked over, and saw Arai-kun, now the size of a normal raccoon, but still wearing the lab coat, was standing at the foot of the bed. 

He started walking toward her. She was paralyzed as he approached. As he crept closer to her face, he stared into her eyes. She was transfixed. The eyes went from the soft brown of a raccoon to the static white of a television tuned to a dead channel. Arai-kun opened his mouth, and the sound of a hiss came out. It wasn't the hiss of an angry animal. It was the soft hiss of white noise, like a rainstorm mixed with a snowstorm mixed with the sound of the ocean at high tide.

The raccoon crawled up to her face, so close that his nose touched hers. His eyes were a blizzard, his mouth the sea. She tried to close her eyes, but found she was unable to. Soon, all she saw was the fuzzy whites of the eyes, and all she heard what the torrent of static. The room around her disappeared into a mass of kinetic, frenetic whites.

And then it was all gone. There she sat, in the gurney once more. The curtain was back as it had been. There was no raccoon. She was there, all alone. She looked down at her hands. They were the bone-white metal she knew lay beneath her simulated flesh. She could not move them. She could not move her head. She could only move her eyes, so she swept them around the room.

Things seemed a little blurry, and her audio receptors seemed a little muted, as if everything was being seen and heard through a gauze--a soft, hissing gauze. She closed her eyes.

The next thing she heard was Vadstalle parking his bike. She heard him take off his helmet and toss it onto Old Mellie. She heard his boots click across the pavement of the precinct's garage. "We're back, Bher," he said. "You can open your eyes."

She did.