Page 7 of Elanie & the Empath
“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 sayabsolutely 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 apparentlyverylong-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 actuallyexamineyour 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.
3.ELANIE
While I waited for a response,I realized that Dr. Semson might be the strangest man I had ever met. What kind of doctor didn’t want to examine their patients? What kind of doctor stared in slack-jawed silence at someone sitting on their table for this long?
Maybe it was just me. Maybe it was because I was a bionic and he was a Portisan. Either way, I had no time for his prejudices.
Giving him a pointed look, I said, “Well?”
His throat bobbed, my sensors detecting his accelerating heart rate, constricting pupils, perspiration lining his upper lip and beading across his brow. Was his sympathetic nervous system activated? Was he scared? It didn’t make any logical sense. I was not a threat to him. He must see that.
Eventually, he said, “Lie down, please,” and I released a breath at his calm voice and soothing tone. Good. Maybe I could finally get out of here and back to work.
Reclining onto my back, I settled my head on his pillow. His ceiling was composed of digtiles, all depicting a sky as blue as his skin, with puffy white clouds floating lazily by. Itwas a nice choice for a doctor’s office, all things considered. Peaceful.
So were his instructions: “Raise your arms above your head.”
I detected a three-degree increase in the temperature in his office, a pleasant warmth covering my exposed chest as I obeyed his command. Closing my eyes, I said, “That’s nice.”
