Mardock Scramble

body down gently, as if he were treating a burn victim, peeling off the rest of her clothes as he went along.

“Excellent. Her skin isn’t sticking to her clothing. No signs of peeling or hemostasis either. She really is developing most impressively. I wonder if some of the fibers have moved into her blood cells and are absorbing all the iron there…”

Before long, the towel that the Doctor used to wipe Balot’s body was covered in silvery powder. He discarded the towel on the floor and prepared the next one. He used this to wipe down Balot’s brow, the back of her neck, her armpits, and all the major joints. Finally, he cried out in joy, like a prospector finding gold.

“Wonderful! She started perspiring again! There I was worried that she was just turning into a lump of metal!”

All the while, Oeufcoque had finished turning. He was now an all-purpose medical pod, the pinnacle of human technological and engineering prowess. Turning into a gun was child’s play compared to this. The Doctor lifted Balot up off the table with surprising strength—the situation required it, so he just did it unblinkingly—and placed her gently into the pod.

“The preventative measure that the girl needs most of all right now is to eliminate excess stimuli. Wrap her up in a hermetic seal.”

The pod responded immediately to the Doctor’s instructions and started filling up with white bubbles to envelop Balot’s body.

The Doctor quickly double-checked that Balot’s airway was connected to the respirator and covered her ear holes and eyelids with a protective gel before fixing Balot into position. The bubbles moved to cover her completely.

“The fibers have started developing out of control, right, Doctor?”

“Not exactly, no—they’re developing just as the girl wants. The rate of development might seem abnormal to us, but as far as Balot’s body is concerned, everything’s going according to plan.” The Doctor wiped her right arm down and prepared her intravenous drip. “What we need to do now is make sure we have adequate preventative measures in place to keep things from getting out of hand. Help bring a semblance of normality back into the poor girl’s life. Show the aimlessly meandering runner that the goal is in sight. In order for us to do that, you’ll need to consider yourself attached at the hip to her.”

“Attached at the hip?”

“Stay inside the pod with her, I mean. She’ll feel so much better knowing that it’s you she’s inside, not just some machine. I’ll feel better too.” The Doctor fixed the intravenous solution to the wall of the pod.

Then, just at the point when all there was left to do was sit back and wait, Oeufcoque screamed out in panic, “Balot’s responsiveness is fading! What should I do? Doctor!”

“Just stop trying to make her respond,” the Doctor said, nonplussed. Oeufcoque was at a loss for words.

“Let’s just allow her to rest,” the Doctor continued more gently. “She’s survived so far, hasn’t she? Using her own strength?”

The Doctor tapped the pod lightly to provide reassurance—to Oeufcoque, not Balot.

“I’m just going to transfer the data from the chips we won onto another drive, then get some sleep myself. We’ve still got a long road ahead of us, after all. Our next task is to go through all the memories of a man—and a serial killer at that.” The Doctor looked at Balot as she slept inside the pod. “Let’s just pray that they hold the key to victory for the girl.”

Balot slept for nearly twenty hours solid, cocooned by the white bubbles, her lungs pushed onward by the respirator.

She didn’t dream. The time simply disappeared.

She remembered pulling the trigger on the gun, then found herself inside a pod.

When she awoke, Balot found that she felt absolutely fine. Indeed, the whole world seemed clearer to her than it had ever been.

It was a peaceful existence inside the Humpty—the very definition of tranquility, if you ignored the Doctor’s constant clatter as he processed the data and sent and received emails to and from the DA’s office.

It was in these serene surroundings that the pieces to the puzzle all started to fall into place for Balot.

She got a glimpse of the yolk of one man, rotten to the core.

?

Balot stared up at the ceiling from her easy chair.

She felt as calm and composed as she had when she first woke up back at the original hideaway.

Her body was covered in a figure-hugging black outfit. Made by Oeufcoque. Virtually identical to the one she had worn for target practice. The only difference was that there were now a number of electronic terminals attached to her body, connected by a multitude of cords that spread out from the center of her body in all directions, winding their way back to machinery shoved into a cramped corner of the dining room.

“It’s not enough for us just to analyze Shell’s memories to prove what he did when,” the Doctor said over the clutter on the table. “In order for it to stand up in court as proof, we need to also replay his thoughts and emotions—we need to establish the process as much as the actual results of his actions. This is a mammoth undertaking, really, and would normally take the best part of half a year, but I’m sure you and Oeufcoque will be able to work it out in less than a day.”

At this point the Doctor took his eyes off the screen and looked at Balot. “Now, are you really all right with this?”

Balot slowly lifted her head up from its relaxed position on the easy chair and looked straight at the Doctor.

–I want to know the answer. Why me? As long as I can get just a little bit closer to the answer, I’ll be satisfied.

She snarced the electronic voice box built into her suit. The Doctor’s eyes turned to it—to him.

“Make sure you filter out any material that’s too inappropriate, right, Oeufcoque? Anything too shocking and we’ll end up in violation of the protection of minors law ourselves.”

“Balot’s plenty sensible and mature about this, Doc. She’s the one who got the chips, after all. If she wants to see what’s inside them, we shouldn’t keep it from her.”

The Doctor scratched his head when confronted with Oeufcoque’s intractable bluntness. “It’s just that we had a warning from the DA. He told us to make sure we take into consideration the reactions from the Women’s Institute and other educational charities…”

Still in her prone state, Balot shrugged her shoulders. Why should the WI or the children’s charities care now if she was exposed, secondhand, to sex and violence? They couldn’t have cared less when they were the ones exposing her to it firsthand.

“It’s precisely because the laws of the land designed to protect minors didn’t protect her that Balot’s here with us today, Doc.” Oeufcoque seemed as unconcerned as Balot by the wrath of the do-gooders. “Besides, this is what Mardock Scramble 09 was made for. Balot wants to know why she was killed. It’s what she needs to do in order to move on and live again. No one trying to obstruct that has any claim on us—this is firmly outside their jurisdiction.”

The Doctor shrugged. It wasn’t as though he actually cared about the DA’s request, anyway.

–Don’t worry. I’ll be all right, ’cause Oeufcoque will be with me the whole time.

Balot smiled, and the Doctor couldn’t help but smile back. “So, even little half-baked Oeufcoque ends up getting cooked in an instant under the spell of the girl.”

“I’m just trying to do the right thing, based on what we know about her abilities and her feelings.”

“No need to go all red—I’m only teasing you! Are you blushing, my wishy-washy little friend?” the Doctor interrupted Oeufcoque, who was about to come to a spluttering halt anyway, and then turned toward the monitor.