(no subject)

[evowhisperer]

  

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"Stand aside, please, I'm a doctor!"

 

Chaos. Pure, grainy, cheaply recorded chaos. The cellphone trembles violently with its owner's hands, and frightened shouting in Spanish from all around threatens to drown out the wails of a child. The dirty sidewalk is no place to treat the wounded.

 

The seven people bleeding out on the ground may not be alive to care, soon. The child screaming at a young couple's side is unhurt, but rightfully frightened.

 

Several someones pass in front of the camera. The owner moves to the side, and a loud male voice blares out, 'Are they alright? Are they alright?' when no one answers. The owner continues to move, and a frilly sleeve is pushed out of the way.

 

There's a man in a white labcoat kneeling over one of the bodies, pressing a cloth flat against a puddle of red.

 

'Hey, are they going to survive?'  the phone owner repeats. The doctor snags the cuff of someone standing too close, and orders them to keep pressing down. They step forward with shaking hands and kneel also, and soon the doctor stands and moves on.

 

Someone's voice is rising and falling hysterically. There's shouting about police, and an ambulance. The camera turns to look, but it doesn't seem that either have arrived, and when it looks back several people have begun to grab shirts from the store's open sidewalk display, following the doctor's example. 

 

The doctor is wearing a large woman's hat with a tag sticking out of it, now, conspicuously snatched from a knocked-over shelf. He's facing a direction that would normally let the camera see his profile, but the hat is big enough to hide all but his neck. He slows as he reaches a body that stares vacantly away--it's not the first he would've reached, but it is the first the camera has seen--and moves on.

 

Finally, there's the body that no one seems ready to approach, curled up and with its back to the crowd. Broken glass litters the ground around it, and when the doctor pushes it onto its back, he kicks a gun further out of reach.

 

Someone passes in front of the camera. "Hey..." The owner complains. No response, and the owner moves around. "Hey, why's he helping that fucker when there's people here who need help?"

 

The doctor's back is to the camera. It's impossible to see what he's doing until he glances towards the crowd, loops the hat's strap tightly around his jaw, and starts CPR.

 

No one stops or helps him. The camera continues to watch, eventually panning over the wounded, and the unhurt victims still milling around. Someone shouts about the police again, and more people are kneeling over the wounded victim's bodies, pressing down more cloth. The child has climbed into a sitting woman's lap, face buried in her hair.

One of makeshift medics calls out to the doctor tearfully, but they are ignored.

 

There's an outcry. The camera snaps back to the doctor, who's lifting his head from the shooter's chest, pushing down arms that have begun to move sluggishly. More shouting, with more than a couple of screams. The crowd is starting to shuffle back, and the doctor throws up a blood-soaked hand, shouting urgent assurances. The camera glimpses part of his face, and he's young, and very clearly aware of the new dangers--both from revived shooter, and the crowd.

 

"He's not armed!" Triple checking. The doctor kneels on his wrist, shifting the man to check underneath. Quadruple checking. "He has no more weapons! He's unconscious!"

 

The shooter's eyes are glazed but open, and the confusion in the crowd eddies and swirls. Before anyone can do anything, there's armed men in uniforms of the law shoving through the crowd, taking control of the situation. The crowd's din reaches a new high, and the man with the camera is forced back. It becomes impossible to see anything else, as people move back and shake the camera every which way.

 

There's only a glimpse left of the doctor left in the clip, and it's from one last ditch effort. The phone gets held high in the air, and it shows a white coat turned to one of the uniforms, hands forward, bloody, and earnestly reassuring.

 

The clip cuts out.

 

Comments

[evowhisperer]

Hazard one: Ryuzaki might not believe him if they can't find anything. (They're never going to find anything, so this is concerning.) Hazard two: Caesar wracks his brain, trying to remember if he's already said anything about this. There's a reason why he'd rather say nothing instead of saying things that aren't true, and it's that it's a lot easier for him to calculate things than it is to remember his own lies.

"The work was complicated," he explains blandly. Stay close to the truth. "As I've just said, we're effectively talking about the cure to cancer, and these have evolved into being one of the most sophisticated computer networks known to man. There's bugs everywhere, and nearly every interaction has to be reexamined."

[dead_black_eyes]

If Cesar isn't memorizing his lies, then he can rest assured that L absolutely is with those cold, calculating eyes unwavering as they fixate on every little detail of his telling.

"Complicated... see, I would assume that that would light a fire under you, rather than deter you," he muses. "I feel I know that, because I am much the same way. Is it that your colleagues gave up and you were the only one willing to press onward, even alone?"

[evowhisperer]

Cesar's eyes narrow infinitesimally. "Again, not exactly."

"The problems with the nanites as an active agent in a living being's body were perhaps more problematic than I think you realize. They're able to replicate hundreds of natural processes, but there have been occasions where they do so inappropriately. Being able to regrow the scales on a lizard is--worse than useless, actually, when it starts to occur on a human." He pulls the corners of his mouth up, though not for long enough to be making light of the situation.

"That's one of the reasons I've been as sparing with the cure as I have. It's not common, and there are ways to decrease the chances of this happening until they're almost negligible--but until the causes of that are isolated, it's going to remain a possibility."