Dr. Carter Ramirez — 2112

Carter rubbed her face into her hands, ground her palms against her eyes until she saw stars, slicked her hair back in a vain attempt to wrangle fly-away hair. It had been in such a neat bun this morning.

She wasn’t the last one left in the lab, but it had reached that point of the night where collaboration had stopped and everyone was butting their head against their own individual problems, toiling in silence. She folded her rig’s screen down, socketing her tablet in next to it to charge.

It had also clearly reached the point of the night where she wouldn’t be getting anything else done.

She felt out of her league. Everyone did, or said they did, here on her team, but that didn’t stop the fact from wearing on her. It’s not that there wasn’t any support from on high. There was. It’s not that there wasn’t anyone else trying. There definitely was.

It’s that no one seemed to take the lost all that seriously. It was like addiction, or plane crashes, or suicide. Something to look at, to study long enough to say “Ah, this is happening now,” and then set aside. Conversation-piece science.

People admitted that the phenomenon was there, but only inasmuch as it didn’t affect that many people. A simple number to point to. See how small?

It was as though the minds of the lost were just…elsewhere. Just dreaming. Implants showing them connected while no such connection existed.

There was no sense to it, though. No rhyme or reason to why such a thing would happen to the patient. Some of her team were pulling together all of the facts about the population that they could, from demographics to physical stature, searching for clues in the rig and the ‘net itself, sim histories to go with personal ones. The neuroscientists were digging into what was going on within the brain, and what few scans they had from before someone had gotten lost. Their two pet lawyers — just law students on internship, both also versed in stats — were digging into the legal status of the lost as well as writing queries to procure patient medical histories.

And Carter was supposed to tie it together.

Or, that was her stated goal. The university medical center had only grudgingly provided space and funding for the project. An attempt to win some much-needed kudos, she suspected. Still, she was beginning to doubt just how much the UCL wanted her to succeed.

There had been an initial dataset dumped on her team, and a slow trickle as new cases came in, but it all felt so carefully curated. As manager, she had been met with hurdle after hurdle as soon as she started to venture beyond that. Colleagues assured her that all projects worked this way, but it was as though the advisory board had given her all the data that it was willing to give, and any more might…what? Put those kudos at risk?

Carter stood, stretched her back, winced. “Sorry, Sanders. I’m shattered. Catch you in the morning?”

“Mm,” he replied. The interruption seemed to remind him of his physicality. He rubbed at his eyes and stretched his arms out, alternating between clenching his long fingers into fists and flexing them out wide. “Sounds good, Ramirez. Catch you then.”

Carter gathered up her coat and her messenger bag, taking one last look around the lab, counting heads to see who would be staying later than her. Not too many. Sanders, one or two of his neuroscientists. Prakash and the new guy.

She swiped her way out of the wing and signed out at the front desk before making her way out into the night, bundling up in her coat.

At home, she scavenged a few pieces of salami stacked onto a couple of crackers, enough to keep her empty stomach from complaining through the night, and crumpled onto the couch in the shared living room. She left the lights off so that she wouldn’t bother her flatmates.

Or so she told herself. In truth, the darkness felt good. She could keep her eyes open and not be greeted with a tablet, a screen, a sim.

She sat long after finishing her snack, listening to her flatmates sleep, the sounds of the road outside, her own breathing. Sat, thinking in the dark of all the administrivia on tomorrow’s docket.

Eventually, finding herself at as much of a dead end as she had at work, Carter ambled off to her room, changed from her work clothes into a comfortable pair of lounge pants and a night shirt, and crawled into bed.