Episode 11 - Lab Notes

Date: 629/2/2732 

Patient: Orik Orikosint, Calibuman 

Patient ID: 11948526 

Please attach to Lab Notes γτ97-W4-OOC-19

Presenting Complaint: Nil - Attended as part of routine research follow-up
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Transcript:

[MUSIC: The Vesta Clinic Theme]

[SEC: file open]

[SOUND: The Professor's music, sound of things being moved around on the desk]

PROF: 

Now . . . uh. 

[SEC: typing on screen]

Are you paying attention? Hm? 

[SEC: typing on screen]

[Laugh] Sec!

[SEC: typing on screen]

 Yes, I know exactly what you think of my computational skills. Why do you think I keep you around, my love? 

[SEC: typing on screen]

Are you listening? 

[SEC: affirmative ping]

What if I connected you up here like this?

[SOUND: plug inserted, electrical hum]

Comfortable? 

[SEC: affirmative ping]

I need you to tell me if it's not, Sec. I must know in advance.

[SEC: typing on screen]

I never programmed you to be so . . . 

[SEC: typing on screen, questioning ping, typing on screen in short burts]

Oh, stop it.

[SEC: negative ping]

[SOUND: button click, electrical hum restarts]

 This is a very promising step, dear. A single lifetime has never felt less finite. 

[SOUND: clinic door opens]

[SEC: file closed]

[SOUND: footsteps, clinic door closes]

FAYE: 

I feel like I should start knocking. [Pause] Do you want me to knock? 

[SEC: negative ping, typing on screen, questioning ping]

[SOUND: footsteps, chair]

With Dakarai, he had a subject who was having some symptoms, so he had to bleep me 

[SEC: typing on screen, questioning ping]

[Laugh] Yeah, it is still exciting to be bleeped. I'm kind of amazed I've gone this long without Xael taking it off me.

[SEC: affirmative ping]

Rai made more than one comment, actually, about how nice it is that we're talking. 

[SEC: questioning ping]

Nothing like positive reinforcement, eh? 

[SEC: typing on screen]

Hah. I know it makes no difference to you. 

[SEC: negative ping]

How about I do the letter and leave you to reminisce, hm? 

[SEC: typing on screen, affirmative ping]

Date: 629/2/2732 

Patient: Orik Orikosint, Calibuman 

Patient ID: 11948526 

Uh, please also attach to Lab Notes γτ97-W4-OOC-19

Many thanks to Dr Solari for referring this pleasant gentlesomeone to me. 

[MUSIC: begins]

 I won't lie, Sec, when I saw it was Dakarai on the bleep, my stomach filled up with ice with the sudden fear that we were about to have another Space Whale Incident. 

[SEC: multiple negative pings]

Yeah. 

Oh! Also! Unrelated, but I want to lodge a complaint. 

[SEC: questioning ping, typing on screen]

About the absolute imbalance of tech between the Clinic rooms and the Research Centre. I stuck up for this place the other day, when Captain Adrastos was looking down her nose at us, but walking in there honestly felt like stepping into a different ship. There's nothing older than like 4 or 5 orbits. Ugh, and he has some incredible stuff!

[SEC: questioning ping]

Llike the aquaponic limb regenerator? I had no idea we had one of those! A Child of Da Vinci? Rai could be doing full-blown operations down there and we'd never know. The computers were all very pretty as well.

[SEC: typing on screen]

I know, but they had light-up keyboards and I'm a very simple girl . . . 

[SEC: typing on screen]

 Seriously though, each big piece of kit in there must have cost thousands, if not millions of creds. Rai grinned at me even as he gently batted my hands away from one of the most beautiful holographic scan controls I’ve ever seen. 

'I get a little overexcited when I hypothesise.' He said. 'Now Xael has a tight control of the budget so . . . No more toys for Dr Solari.' 

[SEC: typing on screen]

Yeah. Sounds like she reels us both in. 

 So! The Patient. Focus. 

[SEC: affirmative ping] 

Orik has been a part of Dr Solari's research into the long-term use of bionic modifications for . . . I want to say four orbits now. The ongoing study is investigating how various lifeforms have been adapting to their modifications over time. Every patient with mods who attends the clinic is invited to join the study, and they’re followed up through comms interviews over time. I think Rai said that he and the Professor have cultivated the most diverse database of lifeforms with body modifications - and their complications - in the galaxy. 

 This particular check-in was to determine how Orik was continuing to use and cope with his implanted corneal filters. From a quick scan through Orik's records, and the verbal account Dr Solari and the patient shared with me, I gathered that Orik moved to his current home of Tethys in 2701, after meeting his partners and relocating to be with them. He maintains a stable job as a waste redistributor.  

They have an interesting and . . . Somewhat ill-considered refuse collection system on Tethys. Because the moon is tidally locked, its inhabitants have agreed to live on the planet-facing hemisphere and dump all of their rubbish on the trailing hemisphere. 

 One thing that even the least sentient blobs of Oogaroob know, is that Tethys is bright, and Orik, having grown up on Uranus' Caliban, was not adapted to his new job outside in the blinding ice of Tethys' surface. Um, therefore, he invested in a pair of biologically interfacing polarising light filters to stop him from singeing his retinas. 

[SEC: typing on screen, questioning ping]

I asked Orik that. There are loads of centres around Saturn that can do corneal transplants for a reasonable price if you can prove that you need them. The Calibuman explained that he still visited family on Caliban at least once every other orbit so he appreciated the reversibility of the mod compared with the transplant. 

Orik wasn't sure if the filters had been getting steadily worse in the 30 or so orbits since he had them implanted, but he seemed satisfied that they were functioning well enough to protect his almost-human eyes. Orik is a healthy 46 Vesta years, so I suspect he's aware that he can expect to retire fairly soon. The filters don't need to last him forever. 

The neural link - which was definitely the part that Rai was most interested in - was still working perfectly. To satisfy my curiosity, Orik kindly demonstrated his filters over the video link for Dr Solari and I. I shifted closer to the screen, enraptured, as Orik blinked purposefully and a metallic sheen bled out over his iris and pupil. It looked as though he were resting the oil-slick gold of a pair of beetle wing-cases over his corneas.

[SEC: typing on screen]

Yeah, really cool!  

Hey, if you had a body, what would you get, Sec?

[SEC: typing on screen]

Alright, but if you did want a body, what mods would that body have? 

[SEC: typing on screen]

Oh, like the, um, ah, what are they called? On Earth they called them Berners, after the inventor of our version of the Main Network. 

[SEC: typing on screen]

Yeah! They just link you up to the Network, right?

[SEC: affirmative ping]

 So . . . If you were human, you'd want to be a computer? 

[SEC: affirmative ping]

You are . . . 

[SEC: questioning ping]

Funny. 

Orik, after flicking his eyes back to the usual watered-down apricot of his kind, went on to describe his symptoms. The change he had been finding most troubling was an unintentional increase in his weight. The Tethys-born are a classically slender species, and he said that the weight gain was making him stand-out even more than his peculiar gold irises. 

 On prompting, Orik also described hair loss, a reduced rate of solid excrement formation and feeling the bite of the ice deeper than before. He had been feeling increasingly tired, and his partners were concerned at his more irritable moods. He denied any other symptoms and a quick screen of his mood revealed nothing else concerning. 

 Dakarai and I shared a pointed look and he tapped the base of this throat subtly. He'd clearly reached the conclusion before even calling me down to diagnose Orik officially. 

 The top differential diagnosis with this constellation of symptoms was, of course, hypothyroidism. 

[SEC: questioning ping, typing on screen]

‘O’, Sec. Hyp-Oh. 

[SEC: affirmative ping]

Something had happened to the little metabolic gland in . . . . Well, it depends on the proportion of human that Orik is as to where his thyroid is. It usually sits pretty over the trachea in the neck but, in Calibuman, I've known them to be in the abdomen, the chest, and, one time, bizarrely,  in the palm of an accessory hand. Wherever Orik's gland is, it had stopped functioning to keep his metabolism running at the right level, and we needed to find out why. 

It was . . . Pretty difficult actually, trying to assess a patient who was literal light years away. But Orik dutifully followed our fumbled instructions on how to examine his neck and I saw his frosty eyebrows knit in confusion as it dawned on him that he had a previously undiscovered lump in the midline. From what he described, the mass was mildly tender and did not have any nodular lumps inside. 

Orik had nil other than his corneal filters in his medical history, and takes no regular medications or other recreational drugs. He'd had no recent change in his job and was settled and happy at home with his two partners and their two children. He laughed when I asked him about his diet, the sound rich and booming through the lab's expensive speakers. Apparently pickings for Calibuman on Tethys are pretty slim, so he's had the same diet of Gnashfish and Tethys' answer to a potato for orbits upon orbits. Which was another reason why he'd found the flux in his weight so perplexing.  

Dr Solari and I ended the call with Orik and promised to call back when we had a plan for his care. 

[SEC: typing on screen, questioning ping]

It was nice! I know you help me bounce ideas around a lot but . . . I dunno. Part of me felt like I'd been brought in to handle a situation that Rai was perfectly capable of managing alone.

[SEC: typing on screen, questioning ping]

Yeah, exactly. I wanted to bring something to the metaphorical Lab Bench. 

Dr Solari and I then proceeded to consider the possibility that Orik's symptoms were due to an underlying autoimmune condition, but this felt unlikely given his otherwise perfect health and the Calibon in him is usually protective. 

[SEC: affirmative ping, typing on screen]

Humans do have feeble immune systems, sad but true. 

 Malignancy was unlikely. Most thyroid tumours don't cause the hormone issues he was describing. We floated the possibility of a brain tumour, just to make sure we'd ruled it out. But Dakarai - my colleague - explained that the wiring for the filters runs right into the skull with the oculomotor nerve, so even a slight increase in pressure inside the head would cause a malfunction. Also, the most recent bloods, uh - which can be found in the lab notes - show a high thyroid stimulating hormone, not a low one. 

Orik was adamant that his diet hadn't changed,, so we ruled out a dietary cause . . . Which got us thinking about other kinds of environmental toxins. As a waste redistributor, Orik could have come into contact with all kinds of nasty things. This would fit the insidious onset that Orik described - 

[SEC: questioning ping, typing on screen]

Oh. Didn't I?

[SEC: negative ping]

I'm so sorry. He said that the weight gain had been getting worse over a half-orbit, um, with the other symptoms starting up in the last few months. Can you squeeze that in somewhere that makes it look like I know what I'm doing?

[SEC: affirmative ping]

Thanks. 

 Ah. So, we had a little muse about what other things can cause thyroid problems. I was drawing a bit of a blank until I spotted the periodic table tucked into one of the far corners of the lab. It was one of the blue and orange classics from the back of Martian-brand cereal boxes. The blue elements were what could be found in the enriched plant milk they drink out there, and the orange elements were baked into the cereal itself. It looked so out of place, a cheap, nostalgic piece of cardboard among the patiently thrumming monitors which lined the rest of the walls. It was useful because - 

[SEC: typing on screen, questioning ping]

Iodine. Exactly. 

The thyroid gland uses iodine to make thyroid hormones and too much or too little over a long period of time does not a happy thyroid make. Dakarai nodded through my thought process and pushed up his glasses with a smile. 'As long as it's not the corneal filters, I'm happy.' He said. 

 But, once he'd said it, it would have been neglectful of us not to at least check that the filters weren't involved. Even if finding a complication would mean that a lengthy report needed completing by Rai.

 Speaking of which . . . Um, please remind me to message Xael and warn her that it's just going to be us at dinner.

[SEC: typing on screen]

Rude. I hope she doesn't make up an excuse. 

[SEC: negative ping]

 Dr Solari and I then spent the best part of an afternoon trying to figure out what in Saturn's Rings they had made these corneal filters out of. Rai actually went on an impressive and very dramatic rant about how the Interplanetary Modification Commissioning Board had a duty to catalogue approved tech and how information about it all should be easily accessible in the public domain. He had a point though, everything you clicked was just another back alley in the Network dedicated to forcing a pair of these things into your eyes. At one point, Rai ended up on a comms call with an advisor, who told him in a smooth, Mercurian rumble that ze was delighted to receive his custom. Rai looked at me, nothing filtering the pure horror in his eyes. He only flicked back to his senses when I nudged him, whispering for him to ask for the component list. 

The salesbot was not comfortable sharing that information, but Rai, once again brimming with his usual charm, waxed on about his tragic allergy to iodine and, in the end, I think the bot told him that the filters do contain iodine just as an excuse to end the call. 

So, our working diagnosis, or . . . Perhaps, I should say hypothesis, we were in the lab, after all, uh, was that Orik's light filters had been slowly trickling iodine into his bloodstream. This was degrading the filters over time and this thyroid had responded to this new excess of building material by assuming that it was an excess of the hormones and stopping further production. Feedback loops are stupid. 

[SEC: questioning ping, negative ping]

Sorry. Not yours. 

 The good news for Orik, which we told him in the second video call, is that fixing the filters should fix the problem. Until then, he can take a replacement hormone, synthyroxine, to alleviate his symptoms. 

[SEC: typing on screen]

We do love an easy fix. And so did Orik's partners. They bobbed their heads in, mostly fur and eyes, towards the end of the call, as though they hadn't been listening the whole time. Apparently, it's been a nightmare to get Orik to speak to the doctor, so they were both delighted at the outcome and fussed over our patient until his translucent skin became steadily more vascularised. 

Dakarai shook his head as we ended the call, freezing the tableau of a happy family onto the screen for a second until it disappeared. 

'Can you imagine?' He asked me. 

'What?'

'Being able to keep two people happy?' 

I laughed, admitting that it was hard enough to keep myself happy some days . . . 

[SEC: typing on screen, questioning ping]

 No! Obviously don't put that in the letter.

[SEC: typing on screen]

No . . . It's just . . .

[SEC: questioning ping]

He then proceeded to ask some . . . Probing questions about - Nic. And our relationship - and - and, I don't mind. We're friends and I, you know? You know, I - 

I want to - 

I want to sh- [Sigh] I want to share stuff with him just as I want to get to know him in return but -  Sometimes it feels as though he and Xael have been . . . . Talking. 

[SEC: typing on screen, questioning ping]

 Well, he asked me if Nic had given me a date yet and, obviously, she hasn't. I mentioned - stars - like weeks ago now, that she was difficult to get hold of and, I love Rai, but he brings it up all the time. 

I know how it looks. I moved all the way out here, spouting on about how there's someone else coming to join me and, all of a sudden, half - no, more than half - of my comms calls don't go through. It looks insane. I know it looks insane. But Xaelest made it pretty clear that this job was a shooting star kind of situation, and I wasn't sitting on a lot of offers. But, it - it's not like I left on bad terms! Nic had a contract to fulfil at work. That was it. 

And I know - I know Rai has a heart of gold, I know that both of them mean well when they bring it up or go to ridiculous lengths not to bring it up, but I don't know how to explain to them that I wake up each morning and check the expected docking rota for the day, not even breathing until it tells me what I already know. 

[SEC: typing on screen, questioning ping]

I'm telling you this because - Well, [Sigh] I don’t want you to be annoyed . . . 

[SEC: questioning ping]

But in an effort to swing the scrutiny away from my relationship, I said that there must be some juicy gossip from this satellite before I arrived and Rai mentioned . . . You. And the Professor. 

[SEC: typing on screen, questioning ping]

He said that you used to have that kind of . . . Connection. . . No pun intended. 

[SEC: typing on screen]

I guess, he said you were both fairly private about it but that the Professor let slip a few things when they used to work together. And, I thought about how you still listen to their recordings - 

[SEC: negative ping, typing on screen, questioning ping]

Ah, no. He didn't. I've never asked him why he doesn't see patients anymore. 

[SEC: typing on screen]

I figured that it was -  sensitive? 

[SEC: typing on screen]

Okay, I'm sorry, clearly I should have - 

[SEC: typing on screen] 

 I just wanted to say that I'm really sorry for your loss. If you - feel loss?

[Brief pause] 

[SEC: typing on screen]

If you ever want to talk about it -? 

[SEC: negative ping, typing on screen]

 Alright! Alright. Okay. Sorry. 

[SEC: typing on screen] 

Orik has been prescribed a course of synthroxine and provided the names of several legitimate medical establishments closer to Tethys which should be able to help with his modifications issue. Dr Solari has taken responsibility for the form detailing this complication which will be added to these notes and also anonymised and put into the larger database. For all his complaining, I think Rai was secretly excited to have some data to file. 

Orik is welcome to contact the clinic if he experiences further issues with his symptoms and I will review him - or, someone will? He will be reviewed at his next research review in 3 Vesta years. 

Signed,

Dr Faye Underwood,

The Vesta Clinic

 [MUSIC: The Vesta Clinic Theme]

CREDITS

This episode of the Vesta Clinic was created by AMC. It starred AMC as Faye Underwood, Christopher Stoops as The Professor and Sec as himself. Music by AMC and Ruby Campbell. 

Please check out our show notes for content warnings, transcripts, and your prescription of: a new friend, who may or may not be a frog.

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Sound Effect Attributions: Spaceship compartment door.With pneumatics(8lrs,mltprcssng).wav by newlocknew at Freesound.org 

Typing metal plate(reson,rev,DTBlkfx,Eq,Extr,sat,dcmtr)12.wav by newlocknew at Freesound.org 

Content Warnings: Referenced past death of a character