I woke up because somebody was talking outside the room. Voices carried through the door and one of them was Morales, the other I didn't know, and for a second I stayed where I was with my eyes closed trying to decide if I actually needed to care. The bed was warm. Pretty good reason to stay put if you asked me. Then Claptrap moved, metal scraped lightly against the floor and his voice came from somewhere near the wall. "UNIT MORGAN. WAKE CYCLE DETECTED."
"Traitor," I muttered while Morales laughed from outside. I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling until I sat up and rubbed my face. The borrowed Vault 81 suit had wrinkled around my waist from sleeping in it, which was annoying, I needed to find some pj. Morales leaned around the frame. "Morning."
"What time?"
"Seven-thirty, why you planning to sleep until noon?"
"Was considering it."
"Doctor Forsythe already asked if you were awake." I groaned and fell backward onto the pillow as Morales disappeared again, still laughing. I lay there another minute before dragging myself up. Milo moved with me while I found my boots beside the bed. I pulled them on, stood and stretched until something in my back popped. "Breakfast?" I asked.
Morales answered from the hall. "Coming. Then Forsythe."
"Great." I checked my Pip-Boy while waiting, mostly because I needed something to do with my hands. My own vitals looked normal, I stared at that for a second, then closed the screen. The food came from a woman pushing a little cart down the hall. Eggs, toast, something fried that might've been potatoes, and a cup of water. Actual eggs again. Vault 81 was going to ruin me. I ate sitting on the bed with Milo beside my knee. Morales had come back in and was reading the same magazine from last night or another one exactly like it. She watched me put half the potato stuff onto the toast.
"What?"
"Nothing."
I ate the rest before Forsythe showed up, which was probably good because he had another needle with him. I noticed when he walked in and He looked at me. "No, come on I just woke up."
"Good morning."
"That isn't a greeting when you're holding that. why do you need more?" I knew he would need more he told me yesterday but that didnt change the discomfort i felt looking at it. "Because yesterday's blood is yesterday's blood." Morales turned another page very slowly. "That is the dumbest doctor sentence I've heard in a while." He tied the band around my arm while I finished the water with my other hand. One tube really was all he took this time. He pulled the needle, put cotton over the spot and handed it to me.
"Hold that." So I pressed down on as asked. Forsythe labelled the tube and put it in a little rack. "Come to the clinic when you're finished here."
"I am finished." I said looking at the empty plate and cup. Forsythe didn't bother responding. Claptrap and Milo came with us, Morales came too. The Vault was already awake with people moving through the halls, somebody carrying a crate of tools, two kids running until a woman shouted at them to slow down. I caught the smell of cooked food from somewhere. People still looked at Milo when we passed. Claptrap got glances too, but less.
Forsythe had already set up half his clinic before we got there. Yesterday's blood was still in labelled tubes inside some little chilled cabinet and there were three slides on the counter beside the microscope. He took my new tube and set it with the others. I looked at the slides. "What did you do?"
"Experiments."
"That sounds Scary." I joked while Forsythe pulled the stool out with his foot. "Sit." So I sat while He moved the microscope toward me. "Look." I leaned down trying to understand what I was supposed to be looking for. To me it just looked like Normal Blood. Not exactly thrilling. I could recognize the red cells, obviously, and a few larger pale ones moving between them. One of the white cells had something dark inside it.
"What am I looking at?"
"A bacterial culture. A small amount." I leaned back and looked at him. "You infected my blood."
"Keep looking." I shoke my head at him but returned to look. There were more of the pale cells around the dark stuff now. A lot more than before. "I don't know what normal looks like." He slid the first slide away and replaced it. "This is a control sample from one of the clinic staff."
I looked, Same blood cells. Same dark little bits, but the white cells weren't doing nearly as much. A few had gathered around them, but slower. Forsythe changed slides again back to what had to be mine. The difference was obvious now that I had something to compare it against. My white cells were everywhere around the introduced bacteria. "They're attacking it."
"Yes unnormally fast."
I sat back while Forsythe folded his arms. "Your white blood cell count is normal."
"Okay." I sounded confused. "Mostly normal, anyway. The amount isn't the unusual part, Their behavior is." I looked through the microscope again. "So they're just better." Forsythe's mouth moved slightly. "That isn't the technical term."
"Super white blood cells."
"No."
"Sounds right."
"It isn't." Morales had followed us in and was standing near the door. She snorted causing Forsythe to give her a look. She lifted both hands. "I'm staying out of all this nerd stuff." He went back to the counter and pulled another labelled culture from a rack. "I tested three different bacterial strains and one fungal sample against your blood from yesterday. Same response."
"Did they die?"
"Yes with in minutes." He put another slide under the microscope. "This one took longer." I looked again. "What is it?"
"A fungal culture."
"Gross." Forsythe sighed. I watched for another few seconds. My cells were still crowding around whatever he'd put in there. I wasn't exactly qualified to understand every part of it, but I knew enough to see it wasn't normal. "Does it damage my blood?"
"That's what I'm trying to determine."
"Does it?"
"Not at all from what I can see."
"Then thats a good thing."
"That isn't the conclusion I would draw."
"Cause you're a doctor. Your job is worrying."
"My job is noticing when a sixteen-year-old has an immune response I've never seen before." And I just looked at him. Forsythe ignored her and took the slide away. "I want to run more tests later." He set the fresh tube into the machine and started it. The machine hummed while I looked around the clinic. Forsythe looked at the analyzer and then at me. "Any fever overnight?"
"No but you guys have really soft beds, Best sleep I had in a long while." Forsythe looked at me for a moment before writing something down on his clipboard. "Well that's good, any problems with the burns from yesterday?" I shook my head and showed him my arm when he asked. He pulled the bandage loose and checked underneath, pressing around the edge of the burn before putting a fresh dressing over it. It was still red and a little tender but nowhere near as bad as when it happened. I was more interested in what he'd done with my blood, though he didn't seem in any hurry to explain everything.
"Looks like it's healing well, I'll check it again tomorrow." He finished putting his things away before looking over at Morales. Forsythe went back to the terminal while I stayed on the stool and watched him type. He had several different results open and kept switching between them, stopping every now and then to look at the little rack of blood samples sitting beside his microscope. I couldn't make out much from where I sat, though I did catch my name on one of the screens along with a lot of numbers I didn't understand.
"So what else is wrong with my blood?" I asked after a while. Forsythe turned around and said nothing was wrong with it as far as he could tell, which sounded rather different from what he'd been telling me for the last half hour. When I pointed that out he corrected himself, saying there was nothing wrong with my blood count, or the general condition of the cells he examined, but the way they behaved was another matter. "Well if they're keeping me healthy I don't see the problem." He rubbed his forehead and said that was exactly what he was trying to understand. Apparently he'd also checked the blood he'd taken from me yesterday and found it was still responding to the things he tested, although not as quickly as the fresh sample.
That caught my attention because I wasn't entirely sure how Starborn Immunity worked once something left my body. Obviously I knew what the perk did while the blood was still inside me, but I hadn't exactly been given a medical explanation when I got it. I looked toward the older tubes and wondered how long they'd keep doing that, or if the effect would eventually disappear altogether. Forsythe seemed to be wondering the same thing because he wanted another sample tomorrow to compare them properly. "You're going to run out of places to stick those needles eventually," I told him, earning a small smile before he returned to the terminal.
Rachel came in a few minutes later carrying a tray with some clean instruments and a glass of water. She looked at the microscope before setting everything down, asking Forsythe if he'd gotten the same results from this morning's sample. He nodded and showed her one of the slides while I drank my water. They spent a while discussing what they were seeing, using enough medical terms that I gave up trying to follow all of it. I understood what white blood cells did, and I knew some of the different types from being in hospitals so much, but that was about where my knowledge ended. Rachel was a lot more interested in the fungal sample than I was, especially when Forsythe told her how quickly my cells had dealt with it.
"That's not normal," she said after looking through the microscope. "That's what I've been telling her." I looked up from my Pip-Boy. "I've been agreeing with you."
"You've been calling them super white blood cells."
"Cause they are."
Rachel looked annoyed while Forsythe shook his head and started another test. I watched the two of them work for a while, checking my Pip-Boy every now and then to see if there was anything worth doing. I still had research running, although without my bench there wasn't much I could do with the results once it finished. That was going to become a problem eventually. I needed a proper place to set my stuff up again, somewhere I could get my robots repaired and start making things without worrying about a Deathclaw coming through the wall. Vault 81 was nice enough, but there was no way id do that in a place i didn't control.
I was thinking about asking when I could get my clothes back when somebody knocked on the clinic door. Morales stepped aside to let a woman through with a bundle of folded clothes under one arm. I recognized my Vault suit immediately, though it looked a hell of a lot better than it had yesterday. The dirt was gone, the worst of the stains had faded, and somebody had even fixed the tear near my knee. My lab coat was folded underneath it. "Oh, thank God." I got off the stool and went straight over, taking the clothes before the woman had finished telling me they'd been washed. I unfolded the coat first to check it, running my fingers along the fabric until I found where the torn seam had been repaired. "You fixed it too?"
"Wasn't much work."
"Thanks, seriously." She smiled and asked if I wanted to change now, but Forsythe said he'd prefer I finish the examination first. I wasn't happy about that, although I wasn't going to argue when I had my stuff back. I folded the coat carefully and put everything on the empty chair beside Milo, then asked if I could keep the borrowed suit until later. The woman didn't mind, apparently they had plenty of them, but I would need to return it before leaving the Vault.
After she left, Rachel got back to the samples while Forsythe asked a few more questions about illnesses I'd had in the past. I gave him enough answers to keep him satisfied without getting into anything that would make him ask about my old life. Having spent a lot of time in hospitals wasn't exactly a lie, even if those hospitals were in a different world. He wanted to know whether I'd ever had trouble with infections, how long it normally took me to recover from injuries, and whether I'd been vaccinated against anything before leaving Vault 159. I told him I'd had the usual childhood vaccinations and hadn't been seriously ill in a while. He didn't seem entirely convinced, but thankfully he had something else to occupy him. Rachel had taken one of the older blood samples and introduced another culture to it, wanting to see if the cells were still reacting the same way. I watched her prepare the slide before she let me look. At first there wasn't much happening, but after a few minutes the white cells started responding. Not as quickly as the fresh blood, like Forsythe had said, but they were definitely still doing something. "How long has that been outside me?" I asked. "Since yesterday afternoon," Rachel answered while checking her notes. "We're going to leave another sample refrigerated and see what happens tomorrow."
"Can I have the rest back when you're done?" She looked at me like she wasn't sure whether I was joking. "Shame, could've sold it."
"Morgan," Forsythe said without looking up.
"What? People sell blood."
"Not in my clinic."
"Well there goes that business idea." Morales laughed from the doorway, though Forsythe didn't find it particularly funny. He told Rachel to label the new samples and put them away before going back to his terminal, leaving me sitting there wondering how much longer he intended to keep me. It wasn't that I had somewhere else to be, but I was getting tired of staring at blood under a microscope, even if it was mine. I was just about to ask if I could change when I heard somebody running outside. At first I didn't think much of it. I'd already seen a few kids running around the Vault on the way here and figured one of them was about to get yelled at again. Then somebody shouted for a doctor, followed by another voice calling Forsythe's name. Morales moved away from the doorway and Forsythe had barely gotten out of his chair when a man came around the corner carrying a boy in his arms. There was blood all over one of the boy's socks. "Doctor! Something bit him!"
Forsythe told the man to put him on the nearest examination bed while Rachel went straight for the medical cabinet. I got out of the way with Milo following behind me, moving over beside Claptrap so there was enough room for everyone. The boy looked terrified, his face wet with tears and one hand gripping the man's sleeve even after he was put down. Forsythe started cutting away his pant leg while asking what had happened. "I found him near maintenance, said something attacked him. There was a rat, I think, ran off before I could get near it."
"A mole rat?" Rachel asked.
"Looked like one, but I know how it got in." I stopped paying attention to the man after that because I finally recognized the kid. Austin. I looked at the wound as Forsythe pulled the fabric away. There were two nasty punctures on the lower part of his leg with some torn skin around them, not nearly as bad as injuries I'd seen outside, but that wasn't what worried me. I knew what happened to Austin in Fallout 4, and if he'd been anywhere near the hidden section of Vault 81 then he had a much bigger problem than the bite itself. What the hell was I supposed to say? That I knew there were infected mole rats living behind the walls and a robot somewhere down there with a cure? I'd barely convinced these people to let me keep two of my robots in the same room. Telling them that would've gone wonderfully. Austin cried out when Forsythe started cleaning the wound and I looked back over. The man who'd carried him in was trying to explain where he'd found him, but Forsythe was more interested in how long ago he'd been bitten. Apparently it had only happened a few minutes before the man found him, and he'd brought Austin straight here. Rachel brought over a bowl of clean water and more gauze while Forsythe examined the punctures. There was blood coming from one of them every time Austin moved his leg.
"Can you stop moving for me, Austin? I need to clean this properly."
"It hurts!" The boy cried.
"I know it does, but I don't want anything left inside that wound." Austin held still for a few seconds before pulling away again. I couldn't really blame him. The skin around the bite was already getting red and swollen, and whatever Rachel had given Forsythe to wash it with didn't look comfortable. He asked Austin whether he'd seen what bit him, but the kid was too upset to give much of an answer beyond saying it came out of a hole and grabbed his leg.
Morales had taken the man outside to get a proper explanation, leaving us with Austin while Rachel helped Forsythe finish cleaning the bite. She gave him something for the pain and told him he'd need to stay in the clinic for observation. He didn't like that at all. "Can I go home after?"
"Not until we're happy with that leg," Forsythe said, checking around the punctures again. "I'd rather keep you here for a few hours."
"But I didn't do anything." Austin looked miserable about it. He kept glancing at the door, probably hoping somebody would come and take him home. I recognized that look well enough. Hospitals were bad enough when you were used to them, let alone when you were a kid who'd probably never been seriously hurt before. Forsythe finished dressing the wound and asked Rachel to get him a blood sample, mostly to check for infection. I watched her prepare the needle while Austin complained about having to be stabbed again, although he went quiet when she told him she needed him to hold still. Forsythe had another look at the swelling while she worked and asked whether he'd been feeling sick before the bite. Austin shook his head. "I was fine."
I looked at Forsythe when he mentioned keeping Austin for a few hours. "I'd keep him overnight at least. Mole rats carry all sorts of diseases, and that's a nasty bite." Forsythe glanced at me before looking at the wound again. "I'm aware of the risks, Morgan. We'll see what his bloodwork says before making that decision." I wasn't particularly happy with that answer, but at least he wasn't sending the kid home right away. Austin didn't seem too pleased about staying either, judging by the look he gave us when he realized he might be spending the night here.