The Actor

Travis's story

Chris

They met again later that day, early evening at the hospital. Three of them: Chris, Jenny and Alex taking their place by the bedside while Travis's parents broke from their vigil for long enough to eat a quick meal.

Travis's condition in the Patient Supporters app remained "stable", as it had been for several days now. Initially a cause for hope, the term had since developed ominous overtones as doubts grew about the chances of his ever waking from the coma. This aura of frustrated limbo hung over the trio, transforming the gathering of friends into something more like a business meeting as each brought the others up to date on their activities of the afternoon.

Jenny told of her setting up search routines that, she hoped, would track down their hacker in the agency's databases. She had left the analysis running overnight, she explained. It would continue uninterrupted until either it found what it was looking for or ran out of data to sift. How long this would take was an open question. They would just have to wait.

Chris asked her what IntSec would do once she found their man. The answer that came back was non-committal. "Depends who he is. If it turns out he is already wanted for something else, we can just go in and grab him. If not ..."

As he listened, Chris wondered whether he should tell her about his own independent plan to track down and free the hacker. The temptation to do so was strong, but he resisted it. To have any chance of success he had to act before IntSec involvement scared everyone away.

Had Jenny allowed herself to be saved? Chris wasn't going to be the one to bring the subject up. And while he didn't believe her reluctance to involve the technician in their scheme was motivated by anything other than compassion, nor could he help but note how this stance absolved her from taking any career-threatening action.

When it was his turn Chris recounted to Jenny what he had done to fulfill her parting request at the café. The relevant people had been contacted, he told her, and the item in question should be ready by now, should arrive at her office the following day.

Alex, caught in the same somber mood, listened to these reports without comment. When he did finally start speaking, he went on for some time.

"You must have heard that old urban myth. How it's considered a good idea to talk to people in comas, that they sometimes retain a degree of awareness and are comforted by the sounds of human activity around them?"

Chris and Jenny nodded a silent acknowledgement, letting him continue.

"Now we have scanners that can look inside the head. They aren't as sophisticated as those that Graeme Williams uses, but they are good enough to locate auditory processing centers and observe the response to a stimulus, or to its absence. These machines can't read people's thoughts, but they can see what is and isn't there. They can measure the sound of silence.

"The other night when I was here by myself – I didn't try to talk. Just sat beside him for a time. He looks so inert, lying here like this, kept alive by artificial means. It's a very quiet way of dying."

"Or an unquiet way of being already dead?" Chris spoke softly, just audible above the hum of machines.

"You must have known Travis for a long time?" asked Jenny.

Alex nodded, was thoughtful for a moment, then began to tell a story.

*

"When people investigate a tragedy – an airplane crash, say – what they tend to find is that it wasn't one crucial mistake that brought the plane down, rather a sequence of failures, any one of which, if avoided, could have prevented the catastrophe.