Chapter 19
Thomas was torn apart, limb from limb, cell from cell, molecule from molecule, atom from atom. Everything that was a part of him was encoded as a batch of electronic data and sent along a high speed fiber link a distance of 1.5 miles in less than a second. The next thing he knew, he was looking through the glass doors of a chamber in the 116th Street station at Darin, Doug and Vera. Vera waved but Darin seemed too busy getting talked at by Doug to notice that he had arrived. Thomas moved his hands around tentatively as if they might fall off at any second, but upon finding nothing wrong with them, he slowly opened the door of the POD unit.
"I just can't believe it!" Doug was saying, "that was incredible, you don't feel a thing and don't even know it’s happening except for that noise that it makes! How on Earth does it work?"
"Actually..." Darin said sheepishly, "I'm not sure. I keep up on how most technology works, but I've not seen much published information on how the PODS work."
"But how can there not be information about an awesome breakthrough like this published somewhere? That's impossible! Someone somewhere must know how it works!"
"Well those who do are doing a good job of keeping their mouths shut about it. I occasionally search to see if there's anything new about it, but there hasn't been much of anything released that I've found."
"That's annoying," Doug said, defeated. "Oh, hey Thomas and Lyla." Thomas whirled around to discover that Lyla had indeed shown up without him noticing.
"OK, where do we go from here?" she asked Darin.
"We exit on Broadway and go left, and it's about another block south." The group exited the station and continued walking, and it wasn't long before they found the building they were looking for. "OK, here it is, 2929. Let's go!" Darin held open the door and handed the three their papers as they passed. They had entered a relatively large waiting area, and, they happily noted, this office was very empty. "Just take your papers up to that woman there in the booth and she'll direct you. Lyla and I are going to wait here." The three went off, and Darin sat down next to Lyla. "They're exhausting!"
"I know, I know," she responded, "they're just not used to the way things are now. They'll get accustomed to it eventually, just give them some time."
"I hope so. Vera is OK, but Thomas does nothing but whine and Doug always wants to know how everything works..." Darin stopped for a second, a thought triggered in his mind. "Hey... Why do you think they've never published anything on how the PODS work?"
"I don't know... They never really published much on how the hovercars worked either."
"Hey, you're right... I wonder why that is?"
Meanwhile, over at the receptionist, Thomas was discovering all over again why he always hated dealing with these people.
"Oh it's YOU! I heard about you! My good friend Miriam at the ID Office phoned over to let me know you'd be coming, you're the Form 1356-B people! Oh this is just so exciting, I can't even begin to tell you, we've never had any 1356-B people come through here before! I mean we thought it was big stuff when we got the occasional 1337, but 1356-B! Wow! Well, anyhow, we've got your implants prepared, and the doctor is ready to install them. We'll take you first," she said, pointing at Doug, "and then the girl, and then you."
"Doug?" A nurse opened a door off to the left and shouted. "DOUG?"
"Coming! Hold your horses!"
"My what?" the nurse said.
"Oh never mind." Doug disappeared through the door with the nurse. Thomas and Vera walked over to the benches that lined the wall and sat down. Thomas flipped through the magazines and saw nothing of interest on the covers, just Pangaea politics and a news magazine featuring some new technology that had been released. Thomas had had quite enough of politics and science for one day.
"So," he said to Vera, who was looking at some brochure, "are you nervous at all?"
"Well I was but I found this brochure. Apparently it's meant for the children that normally get these implants. It's written in an extremely simple way and has all these pictures of perfect looking little kids and their parents. This implant thing is pretty complex though... It's not only a phone, but it allows you to get directions, listen to music, send and receive email, and--perhaps neatest of all--it's a translation device!"
"Really?" Thomas was suddenly interested. "Translation?"
"Yeah, apparently it contains ninety percent of today's used languages, and they're working on the remaining ten percent. The implant uses motion detectors and accelerometers to guess when you're making eye contact with an individual. It then communicates wirelessly with their implant to find out what language they are speaking. If it doesn't match your language, the implant begins listening and translating their speech."
"So will you hear their language and then hear a translation when they stop speaking?"
"No, apparently the projector thingy Darin was talking about shows a text translation like closed captioning."
"Well what if you're watching a recording of someone speaking in another language? It won't be able to communicate with their implant to know to start translating."
"You can apparently use a voice command to tell it to start translating from one language to another if it doesn't start automatically. It looks like there are voice commands for everything the implant does..."
"VERA?!" the same nurse from before shouted.
"Oh, better go, here, you can read the rest of it." She threw the brochure at Thomas and ran off towards the nurse who was bellowing her name once more. Thomas picked it up and looked at it. Pictures of happy children engaged in phone conversations and emails showed everything included in Thomas' worst nightmares. One child was saying "Did you hear about Charlie?!" and the other replied, "Yes! ROFL!" The other child was emailing his friend using a little keyboard (sold separately) and the contents of the email were apparently being displayed by the eye projector. Thomas dreaded the thought of meeting children of the future who were likely spoiled to an excessive degree. Then again, Darin and Lyla seemed pretty normal and well balanced... Maybe this wouldn't be such a bad thing after all...
"THOMAS!!!" the nurse shouted as if she had been screaming it for hours with no response. Thomas jumped up and ran over to prevent the horrid woman from screaming in that tone again. "Right this way!" she said sternly. Thomas followed her through a corridor and into a room on the right. It was a small room, but it seemed somewhat welcoming. Sunlight poured through a window high up on the wall through which Thomas tried to look out, but couldn't see anything. Thomas was about to turn around and ask the nurse a question when he felt a sharp pinch on his butt.
"Hey now!" He whirled around. "That's ..." he quickly felt dizzy and fumbled for the chair, which he promptly fell into. "Inappropriate...." he muttered. He swung his head around and caught a final glimpse of the nurse--grinning in quite an evil way--before he lost consciousness.