Page 38 of A Lab Rat's Guide to Fated Love
“What happened?”
“I was in the kitchen, making chai, when the alert on my phone went off.” She squeezed his hand. “You usually rise so early. But when you didn’t, I thought I should just let you sleep in. I should’ve…” she trailed off.
“Your phone?”
“I have a basic version of the algorithm mapped on there, with alarms to alert me if any of your vitals veer off the permissible limits.”
Vir nodded, unable to keep himself from being impressed, despite all his bones actively crumbling to dust while he lay there.
“Both your temperature and heart rate had dropped too low.” Nori sighed, leaning her head back against the bed.
He attempted to feebly squeeze her hand in response till he noticed the smell. “Is something burning?”
Nori sprung up and darted out of the room with a loud, “Fuck!” before yelling from the kitchen, “No, don’t get up! It’s the chai—wasthe chai. Its tar now.”
Relieved, Vir slumped back against the mattress. It’d probably take days to get the smell out, but he was glad it wasn’t something worse. He didn’t have the strength to do anything other than being a useless lump right now.
He turned his head to the side and groaned wordlessly into the pillow. He hated it. All of it. The needles, the passing out, being sick and weak and useless.
A breakfast of sandwiches in bed, followed by a long nap later, Vir was feeling a lot better already. But Nori only let him step out of the room once she’d rechecked his stats at least five more times, to be sure.
Against his unconvincing grumbles of protests, he now sat toasty warm, burrowed undertwoblankets on the living room couch. His attempts at sneakily peeling them off were met with wordless glances from Nori, a certain kind that told him it wouldn’t be smart to cross her at all. Not unless he wanted athirdlayer of insulation to bake him to death.
“I’ll let you take them off. Just wait till the food’s done,” she assured him, motioning towards the furnace he was in. “I’m making fried rice.”
“Do you know how to make fried rice?” He eyed the messy assortment of vegetables strewn over the counter with suspicion. “I can—”
“No.” She slid a large pan over the stove. “But I’ll get the recipe online.”
A while later, she set two bowls of vegetable-fried-rice on the dining table before giving him a curt nod, her expression business-like as ever. Finally rid of the blankets, Vir hurried over and took a tentative whiff at the steam rising from his bowl.
It smelled… good. He took a small bite and his eyes widened in surprise.
“This is good. I thought—”
“You thought I was going to poison you with my culinary skills, didn’t you?”
“No, never. I—maybe. A little.”
She chuckled before shaking her head in mock disappointment. Neither of them spoke for the next few minutes while they ate.
“We should talk,” Nori said once they were done.
Vir nodded, sensing undertones of excitement and…joyinterrupting her otherwise neutral mood.
“I finally managed to bring the lag down to seven seconds,” she quipped. “That’s how I got to you in time this morning. Had the alert gone off with a delay of minutes, not seconds, we would’ve been in trouble. I was going to tell you yesterday, but… Oh, and the even better news? The mites have started showing redundancy. We’re at two percent already.”
His face must’ve betrayed his shock, because Nori’s mouth instantly stretched into a big grin.
“You really didn’t believe this would work, did you?”
Vir opened his mouth to respond, then closed it and settled for a wordless shake of his head.
When Nori had gone through the treatment plan with him over their discussions early on, she’d explained the nano-mites’ role in the overall scheme of things as something similar to a secondary, artificial immune system for his body that would keep hisownimmune system from further attacking his heart or the implanted chip, while keeping his vitals stable.
As he healed, his body would gradually start accepting his heart and the chip, instead of rejecting them, and the mites wouldn’t have to work as hard and in as many numbers. They’d slowly become dormant—redundant—as their requirement went down. Once they’re fully dormant, reaching a hundred percent redundancy, the experiment would be deemed a success, and Vir could live a normal, healthy life going forward.
That was all good in theory, but he hadn’t been holding his breath on it. But now…
