Alien Autodoc Arm Appliance

Alien Auto-Doc Arm Appliance

Copyright Sept. 2023 by Fit529 Dotcom

Creation date: Oct 7-22, 2022

== Disclaimers ==

● All the names have been changed to protect everyone, everywhere.

● Everyone is over age 18.

== Preface ==

The details of how an alien medical scanner got embedded in my forearm is not something I'm able to talk about. Literally, I can't talk about it - the scanner's AI interacts with my brain and any attempt I make to communicate details, I'd be prevented. I can't even drop clues, because I would see through my own ruse before I was even done with it.

Midvale College is a small-town 4-year college; 2/3 of students grew up in town and just matriculated, the remainder live in the dorms.

Midvale is a Tertiary Education model, which is that it's run just like a high school (9 class periods a day, 8 am to 4 pm), but year-round as a 3-trimesters per year schedule.

Midvale's focus is pre-med majors, only offering degrees in nursing, biology, biochemistry, physiology, physical education, musical education / musical physical therapy, etc.

For religious, historic, and health-focus reasons, most majors require 4 years of phys-ed and music (band, chorus, music theory, etc.) classes.

== Chapter: The Scanner ==

I have an alien medical scanner in my forearm.

It's in there deep enough it's not visible, though I can feel it sometimes if I bang my arm or it's rainy. There aren't scars, because, duh, it would heal them. There's no way to see it without an x-ray, and even then, the scanner's AI would hack the x-ray machine and change the image.

As I noted in the preface, Midvale, my college, is dedicated to health sciences, so it's not an accident that I was chosen to get this scanner. I passed a test of ethics and bravery, and my reward was the scanner.

When this all happened, I had just turned 20, and was a sophomore at Midvale college, majoring in computational biology; I lived with my mom and dad and two older sisters in our 3 bedroom house, Very Not Fancy. We weren't rich, at all, or I'd have gone somewhere else for college.

My life was mostly normal before I got the AutoDoc; I grew up in town and since there were a ton of scholarships available to townies like me, a lot of us who graduated high school together just changed from Aardmore Senior High to Midvale's reasonably compact 6-building giant-city-block campus.

So, how I got the scanner? Can't say. I can say that after I got it, I came right home. My room was in our basement, technically another bedroom but it was pretty ugly down there.

I collapsed into bed, I was exhausted.

I had no idea how to use the thing except that to turn it on I could tense a muscle in my forearm.

Obviously, the first person I scanned was myself, and I barely knew enough at the time to do that much. As I found out, it has an artificial intelligence that goal-seeks to optimize health for whoever it's pointed at. That AI didn't speak, it just could cope with my requests and teach me how to ask again, but in TWERKEL, the language it was operated in.

So, that day, I woke up from my nap, lying on my bed at home. It was a Tuesday evening in early October, and as I woke up, I started wondering what I should do with this thing now that I had it.

I flexed the muscle - and it turned on.

A few minutes later (despite 'knowing' it was on), I noticed lights shining in the vision of my right eye, and then my left eye, too. Those lights got to be more distinctive / less fuzzy, until I could tell it was a body whose position matched my own (seen when I moved my arm, I saw that happen).

These images in my vision came up as an overlay I could somehow see through. There were buttons, in colors, with writing on them. That writing was very odd and alien, but over the course of the next 10 minutes it resolved itself into English.

The buttons were, "Info", "Dive", "Enhance", and "Realize".

Not knowing much, I found which inner-muscles controlled the buttons and pressed, "Info".

Nothing happened for several minutes, until a clock appeared at the bottom of my vision with an odd design that was changing slowly, and I got some intuition that it was a countdown clock. The markings were in the alien language, but I kind of understood how the shapes would become zero after about a day.

I got seriously tired again and rolled over.

Sleep came fast.

Sleeeeeeep.....

The next day I woke to find the lights of the countdown clock were still in my vision, off to the edge so they didn't disturb me much, but it was odd to have them there.

Have you ever had something really huge happen and you just ache to tell someone? Yeah. I did, but then, I knew I couldn't, but I wanted to, but I knew it was impossible, and I STILL wanted to. Ug. Until... I realized I could be calm about this. I didn't know if that was the scanner telling me to relax, or me just relaxing?

How do you know if your own brain has been hacked?

It was a normal day. Wake up, go to school, come home, normal stuff.

The only oddity happened in chemistry. I was busy feeling sorry for myself that I didn't know very much and had a hard time memorizing things. This made the class a lot of work.

Looking at my chem book, I saw an icon in my vision that I'd seen next to my calc textbook, and my history textbook, too.

During my teacher's droning on, I figured out how to click that icon, and it gave me several options that I couldn't read. Almost at the end of the class, those options translated into, 'surface-absorb', 'deep-absorb', and 'absorb corrected version'.

The idea of the last of these seemed fun, but I needed to pass the test and not disagree with the book, so I clicked 'deep absorb'.

A countdown timer started and it showed an ETA of 4 days.

Well, it'd take a while.

So, that was chem.

In chorus, I wasn't doing much better.

My girlfriend, Lara, had given me a "don't talk to me for a week" almost-rejection when I had actually broached the subject of maybe we could do more than just kiss and fondle over the clothes. I wasn't asking for sex, necessarily (we'd done it once only, the weekend after my birthday, about 2 months before then), I just wanted a chance to do something else. I had been clumsy and asked questions and that apparently 'spoiled the mood'.

Lara was in chorus with me, which was sort-of a prime hunting ground for finding girls to date, I thought, but it turned out a lot of the girls had boyfriends already, or they just knew that I was dating Lara and no one was that interested.

I just looked at the fine female softness arrayed around me (far more women than men in a chorus, in case you didn't know the demographics). Midvale had more women than men anyway since nursing was a huge thing, and a lot of students who came from out of town were nursing majors as well.

There was a LOT of eye candy in chorus.

My only claim to singing fame, despite having a fairly deep range, was that I could play piano (10 years of lessons) so sometimes I got called on to accompany, and that was fun because the girl that usually turned pages had a big chest and she would lean in close enough for me to feel her on my shoulder... sometimes.

Only rarely did this happen, damnit, and not that day.

I ran intramural cross country - we weren't a great team since we were a small college, but that's fine, it was fun and counted as phys-ed so for every year I did it, I didn't have to take phys-ed. So my junior and senior years I could have more time for classes in my major, if I wanted to.

Yeah, anyway, so... cross country practice was a 4 mile loop that day. That's on the short side, we usually ran 3 to 7 miles - but coach had us follow that with 4 x 200 intervals at 80% effort, generally a faster than race-pace idea.

Intervals always make you feel weak because you go into severe oxygen debt and lactic-acid buildup and then can stop, panting and hurting, wait for it to just barely go away, then start again.

Plus, since we were going to do a steeplechase in a couple of weeks, we had to practice jumping over the big fence they have and then over a pit which had muddy water in it, soaking our running shoes. Coach Claon's "Get over it! Happens, gotta get used to it!"

I got home, had some frozen burritos for dinner, and headed upstairs to do some English lit reading, chem homework, calc 3 problems, and then just collapsed to watch some dumb online videos.

Lights out, I realized I was kind of horny so I rubbed one out, cleaned up with bedside tissues, and went to sleep. I didn't even need my phone's porn to help out, it was that desperate.

Like I said, a pretty normal day.

== Chapter: Day three, Thursday ==

I woke super early to a strong on-off sound in my ears, but when I covered my ears, it was still there. Something in my head was ringing.

Opening my eyes, I realized I needed to trigger my AutoDoc, and the muscle contraction I did shut off the alarm, at least.

My phone said, "4:33 am"

It was WAAAAAY too early to be awake, but I didn't feel particularly tired.

The buttons displayed had the 'Info' one highlighted. I 'pressed' it. My vision changed.

Thoughts flowed into my head, images of structures in a body, my body I was pretty sure, connective tissue, bones, muscles, nerves, all that, and then down to the cellular level.

It was too much to take in, so I figured out how to slow down the rate by staring at one spot then looking down. The dump was huge, but closing my eyes and scrunching them in pulses slowed the information flow so I could understand it better.

To say I was preoccupied is a massive understatement.

Various systems in my body were highlighted and flashing. All those threads, sort-of, were tied together back to the button that was labeled, 'Enhance', but really the alien word below it had multiple meanings and the better one was 'fix', though it got closer to 'optimize' and had elements in the word-ideas of not just restoring factory-new, but also removing design flaws to make things better-than-new?

The language was a Serious Challenge.

Obviously, I could fix things about me, but I didn't know what it was I'd be fixing, so I looked at one of the flaws closely, a line that pointed into a section of artery in my abdomen that was partly occluded by a deposit of white stuff, bulging the wall of the artery out slightly and constricting flow.

What the hell was this?

Just asking this in my inner dialogue brought forth a whole set of concepts and deep insights into what that was - arterial plaques - made of condensed fatty acids and cholesterol-lipids that had accumulated due to a small bend in the artery.

I had early stage heart disease?!?! I was a runner! This was ... impossible!

Really, though, it wasn't impossible. Mom really liked making some high-fat foods, and I got the tasty benefit of eating them. Dad was the same way - high fat stuff like ribs and strudels were tops for our whole family.

So I could fix this stuff, it seemed. Even the subcutaneous / adipose fat tissues around my stomach, those would be 'optimized', it said, turning some white fat cells to brown fat cells. I was learning a crapton about biology just lying there.

And, lie there I did. Looking up, I realized it was almost noon and I'd spaced out, missed classes and everything. I normally shut the door to my room when I left, so my mom probably didn't even know I was there.

I got my phone out and brought up Midvale's student web-app. There was a way to report yourself out-sick and it would tell your professors, kind of handier than going through each class and sending a bunch of emails.

Going downstairs, I had a normal lunch of a big sandwich and a pickle, but my vision was still a little wonky.

I had the option - fix things, or leave them be?

Deciding that having the ability to fix things and not doing so would be stupid. I mentally/physically clicked the Enhance button.

Nothing seemed to happen outwardly, but my vision showed a huge set of tasks scrolling down on the right side, and I suddenly got very, very tired.

Finishing my drink, going in and peeing, I went back to bed and lay down for a long nap.

== Chapter: Friday morning ==

Mom had left a note on my door when I got up early Friday morning (again, before 5 am). It read, "Kevin: saw you'd come home and crashed to bed early. Leaving you be. Hope you get your rest, Love you, - Mom"

I peed and pooped and my urine was seriously dark, almost brown.

Knowing that couldn't be good (and having seen some medical shows), I chugged two whole glasses of water and went downstairs Three bowls of cereal, an apple, a banana, and a can of pears later, I sat back and contemplated. Was I still hungry?

Almost. I was almost still hungry.

But, I had to pee!

This time it was a lot more clear but with some dark-red color that wasn't blood but wasn't yellow, either.

The food made me sleepy so I went back to bed.

I'll just summarize from here to say for the rest of the weekend, all I did was sleep, eat, and pee/poop (sometimes explosively).

But, checking on my status display - which I suddenly just knew how to bring up - it showed I had three more days of this to go and I'd need to remain quiet for most of it.

I couldn't complain about that, it was what it was.

Monday afternoon, I had a note in my student-app that I had to get a doctor's note, so I went to the urgent-care and had some lady doctor look at me. She told me I had some kind of stomach bug (based on my description of pooping and sleeping and feeling somewhat nausous), but was clear to go back to classes as long as I washed my hands a lot.

This was news? I nodded; docs always said that, sure, why not, wash hands, whatever.

== Chapter: Tuesday Morning ==

So one of my classes is English Literature, and we had been reading 'Shoeless Joe', a book that they based the 'Field of Dreams' movie on. I liked it a lot.

We'd been talking about the book, the themes, all that, and looking at it through different lenses, as we'd been doing in a lot of my classes recently. Through a race-aware lens, Shoeless Joe himself lived in a time of rampant KKK terrorism - BUT, book utterly ignores this. Through the European lens, it was a mystical book about history by silly Americans who thought 100 years was old.

In that same English class, one of the more outspoken (read: loud and entitled) girls was Missy, short for Melissa. She had a kickin' body, wore very stylish clothes with too many layers to hide her actual body.

I'd known her all through high school, though she had gone to a different junior high than me. It didn't matter. The thing that came through and I was pretty sure quickly was, she generally perceived the universe as existing to service her needs.

I'm guessing on this last bit because though she didn't actually say much against me, she just kind of exuded this attitude that presumed, richer-is-better, and I'm-richer-than-you.

On the plus side, she did say interesting things sometimes because she was so up-front and out-there with blatant, blanket statements as facts that were just her opinions. A perfect example was her assertion that BMW's had The Best Engineering when I knew from lots of car videos that they're terribly difficult to maintain (remove 12 parts to change a tiny $30 plastic screw) and notoriously hyper-expensive / time-consuming to work on.

Anyway, on that particular day, she gave her revealed-truth opinion that Shoeless Joe only had women that were written to give the men, 'someone to bang' with no depth or complexity. This was funny to the class, and to me, and it really was pretty true at first glance.

I'd read the book twice because I really liked it, and because my dad told me once that if I wanted to do well in English classes, I had to read the assigned books twice or I'd miss crap and get B's or lower.

I raised my hand and pointed out that Ray's wife was written realistically. She loved her husband and supported him, but she had 2 small kids to watch and keep safe, and her husband was being self-destructive, and she was trying to balance those things. That was a good character, I thought - someone who was ethical and realistic.

Missy said the lady was Really Dumb because while yes, we readers knew the ghosts were real, but the lady couldn't. She said, the lady was ignoring the midlife-onset schizophrenic hallucinations her husband was having and 'believing in things', just because she was a 2-D impression of a person, and she was just a mirror for his crazy-making.

Mullins (our prof) nodded, but I could tell she had a different lesson plan and turned the conversation to the farm metaphors.

I looked over at Missy. She was totally NOT my type (social, sexy, 9+ looks, fashion-conscious, status-obsessed). Plus, I stood zero chance with her. Objectively I was probably a 6 and that didn't mix. Technically I didn't KNOW she was a 9, but her face was... pretty. I looked at her carefully, trying to figure out what it was that made her pretty.

Maybe high cheekbones, small nose, and clear eyes, blue and observant? I didn't know from objective criteria. She did squint a lot, I noticed. I could probably tell if she had bad eyesight if I brought up my AutoDoc.

She always wore thicker tops, even in warm weather, so I didn't officially know how big she was up there, but someone who wore those kinds of clothes was definitely hiding something.

The problem was, even if she was seriously hot-looking, her attitude just totally turned me off - deliberately or unconsciously fake, it didn't matter. No one was that clueless.

Thinking of her eyes and her 2-D comment about Ray's wife (from the book) made me remember I could get a 3-D view of her, maybe?

I turned it on, and placed the target over Missy, but kept swinging it around because it didn't exactly match my arm. Mostly it was the same direction, but I had to designate the target with my eyes and pick the option with my mind and squeeze with my inner-arm-muscle just so...?

I'd never pointed it at someone before, and then trying to trigger the right button at the same time didn't work.

The result was, I correctly targeted Missy, but instead of 'VIEW, I incorrectly clicked the 'ENHANCE' button instead.

Seeing no way to undo that, I turned off my display so I could concentrate on class, and hoped she didn't get too tired, based on how tired I'd been.

Still, it didn't seem right to just leave her without any clues.

After the bell rang and some people were getting up to leave, I went over. She was still sitting there, looking kind of dazed. I was pretty sure I knew how she felt.

"Missy."

"Yeah?"

"Can I text you something?"

She shrugged, and I got her number. After she told me, I said with some concern, "You look super-tired. You should go home, to your dorm or room or whatever, like, right now."

"Huh. Maybe I will."

Yeah.

Several classes later, and yes this was on the same day, I was in chorus. Dr. Haverton called us to order.

Lucky me - I got to play piano. Most days we had an accompanist, some piano performance major, and I was the backup. The accompanist wasn't there, so Dr. Haverton told us to get out the Mendelssohn piece; I hadn't practiced the Berlioz one very much and that was a lot of loud banging so you couldn't mess up quietly.

I'd seen Lara coming in. She was obviously still peeved at me for some reason.

Lara sat in the sopranos section, in front of me but behind the music and the piano lid and Dr. Haverton, all three, so I couldn't see her.