"Let's start with a simple set of questions," the man said, moving slightly in the chair across from Ashe. "Do you know where you are?"
"No clue. A room somewhere where rogue people such as myself are taught how to properly behave." Ashe replied. "So, yeah… Your place."
He didn't react to her sarcasm, perhaps because it meant little in the face of his job, or maybe he was just too used to people behaving this way. Ashe couldn't tell.
"Do you know what day it is?"
"No."
"Do you know how long you've been awake? Since emergence, I mean."
Ashe looked at him for a moment. "Less than two days, I think."
He made a note. She watched the movement of his hand across his ledger and told herself the questions didn't bother her. What they were really doing was assessing whether she was coherent enough, whether her ability to think had degraded in some way, enough to place her somewhere in some contained place. But she wasn't going to give them a reason to "contain" her more than they already had, so she answered clearly and without resistance.
"Do you remember your emergence point? The location."
"It was a facility of some kind. Old and pretty much deteriorated." She paused for a moment, reliving the entire event all over again. "I was inside of a pod."
"Were you alone when you came out?"
For a brief moment she thought of Seven guiding her through that place, and of how different things might have gone without him.
"Yes," she said.
He wrote something else, then set the pen down and looked at her directly. He had a calm and composed way about him, as if he had reached a point in his line of work where nothing could surprise him anymore, not even the current state of things.
"I'm going to explain what happens next," he said. "We could proceed the hard way but I think we get better results when people aren't caught off guard."
Ashe said nothing, which he seemed to take as permission to continue.
"We're going to conduct a physical assessment. It's standard procedure after an incident like the one this morning. The device we use is able to read your organism through the contact points you're connected to." He gestured toward her wrists. "It sends a pulse through your system and maps what it finds. The output is a rendering of your body's interior that my team and I can read. The process takes between four and eight minutes depending on the individual." He folded his hands on the table. "It's not painful, in case that's a concern. Some people find it disorienting, but if that happens, tell me."
"And if I'd rather you didn't perform this little assessment of yours?"
"Then I'd tell you that after what happened, you don't really have that option."
She scoffed as she had already figured as much.
"But I would also tell you that the sooner we understand your condition, the sooner we can make a decision about what happens to you next. Which is, I think, something you'd want to participate in as well."
At some level, she understood their concern, but she disagreed with the methods entirely. This pattern of people resorting to force to achieve whatever their priorities were had followed her since the moment she woke up. And she was just as disoriented as anyone would be.
"Fine," she finally said. "At least this way I can finally get some answers myself."
He stood and moved to the door, opening it. Two people entered behind him: a woman carrying a dark case, and a younger man who moved immediately to the far corner of the room. There, he pulled a section of the wall aside, revealing a wide, flat panel behind it.
The woman set the case on the table and opened it. Inside sat a central piece encased in materials that didn't seem to fit together properly, as if assembled from components salvaged from different sources. At its center, Ashe recognized biological filaments running through narrow channels, similar to the ones she had seen inside the walker, though these were finer and more densely packed. The woman then connected two of them to the two compartments on the table.
"Ready," the woman said, keeping her eyes fixed on the filaments.
A moment later, Ashe felt the pulse she had been warned about. Just as the man had said, there was no pain, she felt it as a cold wave passing through her, like a faint breeze of sorts. Then the display came to life on the wall where the young man stood.
The scan initialized at her wrists, which made sense given the contact points. Two concentrated nodes of light appeared there and began expanding outward until, almost immediately, the blackness appeared on the display as well. It looked like fluid branching out, following the pathways of her system. And it was everywhere, concentrated in such amounts that the contrast darkened the entire room.
The woman beside the table leaned in almost imperceptibly, her eyes narrowing at the density of it so early in the rendering. She said nothing, but she reached toward the device and made a small adjustment, as if confirming the reading wasn't a fault in the equipment itself.
The scan continued moving upward through her arms, her torso, and finally her brain. The blackness was everywhere. The team's reaction to it was immediate, even as they tried to control it. They were all staring at the rendering, with the tension growing even more as the rendering approached completion.
Ashe looked between the display and their faces, trying to fill the gap between what she could see and what they clearly understood. The black fluid was extensive, she got that, but she wasn't sure what that meant.
"We're going to pause here," the man who had conducted the interview eventually said. His voice was exactly as composed as it had been at the start of the assessment. "I'll be back shortly."
"What does the blackness mean?" Ashe asked.
He looked at her for a brief moment, showing perhaps what was the first sign of hesitation in an otherwise very confident demeanor.
"I'll be back shortly," he repeated.
Ashe let him reach the door first, then said, "You'll tell me what all of that means when you come back. That's not a request."
The man paused at the threshold for just a fraction of a second, then he stepped through without answering. The woman followed, and the younger man behind her did as well.