Page 33 of Proslo

“Yeah, okay.”

So far, so good, I thought to myself as I led us over to the directory sign. I can do this. Definitely.

22

PROSLO

Kaia’s medical file made grim reading. She had no medical history before the age of nearly eight as both she and her older brother had been unattended births and never taken to see a medical professional. Not for so much as a check up, no immunizations, and definitely not whenever they’d inevitably fallen sick. Neither child had seen a dentist prior to then, either.

Cross-referencing this information with what was in their social services file legally, the two children had never existed prior to the day their mother, one Kathleen McGillis, tried to board a flight from Honolulu to Hilo, on the Island of Hawai’i, for which the state was named. She had been acting erratically and was found to be under the influence of what was later determined to be an illegal substance known as magic mushrooms. She also did not have a valid ID, instead insisting that the flying was freedom and that they could just take her word that her name was Plumeria Surfrider Stargazer.

Her fingerprints quickly proved that to be false and she told the social worker who came to take the children that their fathers were ‘all men’ and she didn’t have names for them. Kathleen’s parents hadn’t been able to take the children for medical reasons of their own, nor had they wished to.

Kaia’s heart condition was discovered after she fainted several times at school and her foster parent took her to a pediatrician. It was determined that at some point she’d most definitely had had scarlet fever, which had attacked her heart, and further damage was caused to it from advanced dental caries. What could be filled had been and several of her baby teeth had to be pulled. She had adult teeth appearing and they were coming in decayed.

Akoni was fortunately healthy, despite his own bouts with childhood illness, poor diet, and lack of appropriate medical and dental care. He too, had cavities, but nothing as severe as his sister’s. A note was there stating that Kathleen had told them she’d given Kaia pineapple juice mixed with sweetened coconut milk in a bottle to keep her quiet as she was a colicky baby who’d cried a lot. Copies of their dental records showed the pediatric dentist felt the decay was due to sugars pooling in the mouth from sweet drinks placed in a baby bottle they kept in their mouths as infants and toddlers and made worse by a diet which contained a lot of fruit, candy, and carbonated soft drinks.

I took a closer look at Kaia’s test results and scans done at the human hospitals and compared them to the doctors’ findings as to the severity of her heart problems. Our own scans had quickly revealed the damage not only to her heart and teeth, but her immune system in general. Getting up from the conference table I was currently using as a desk, I returned to sickbay, entering the acute care wing. I plastered a smile on my face, approaching the bed holding the girl’s diminutive form.

Michik and Lithir looked up from where they were reading the monitoring screens.

“There’s your dad now,” Lithir told her brightly.

She stared at me wide-eyed.

“Hello, sweetheart,” I said to her, keeping my tone gentle.

“Hi.” Her hand reached for mine and I took it. She was frightened, her fingers squeezing mine in desperation.

“She’s a brave little female,” Michik informed me, reaching down to ruffle her hair. “She didn’t even flinch when I held the injector against her arm to release the nanites into her system.”

“I’m used to needles but that was better because it didn’t hurt,” she told him gravely. “Just a poof and some tickles which made me want to wiggle.”

“That’s my girl,” I praised her, bending down to kiss the top of her head. She stared at me wide-eyed, as if no one had ever done that before.

“So it’s for real? You’re my forever Daddy and the little robots inside me are going to fix my heart?”

“I am your Daddy and the nanites will do what they can.”

“I’ll just take the DNA sample to the lab so they can start,” Lithir said, hurrying away with a sealed swab he picked up from the side table.

“The nanites will fix it enough to make you well enough to go home,” Michik explained to her. “The lab is going to sequence your DNA and use it to grow you a new heart. After you get it, it will be as if you’d never been sick.”

“Okay,” she whispered.

Michik turned his attention to me. “I injected her with three different sets of nanites. One set is repairing and maintaining her heart and its functions, the second will repair any other damage they find in her body and support her immune system in general. The third set I have repairing the enamel on her teeth and killing the unwanted bacteria in her mouth feeding caries and causing plaque. Once she’s had her new heart, she’ll need to rest while her body gets used to having full function. Then we’ll have her come in, remove the fixes the human dentists did by filling and capping, and introduce new nanites which will continue the repair to her teeth, both those above and below the gum line.”

I nodded. It was a sound plan, one I would have implemented if I had been in charge of her case. She was my young, so I wasn’t.

“Where will I go home to?”

I looked at Michik. “How many days?”

“Two should be sufficient, including today. The nanites will be well established and done enough by then. We’ll run diagnostics first to be certain, however.”

Two days. We’d still had a week left of our honeymoon, having spent a week in Guam for our wedding and the first half of our honeymoon before arriving in Honolulu to start the second half. We’d been there less than a day when Keliani had shown up to upend our lives once more.

“Well, first, we’ll go back to the hotel so we can continue our vacation. Vacations are wonderful ways to rest. You can float in the pool and we’ll go sightseeing. Have you ever been to the royal palace or the aquarium?”