The golden hue of dawn beamed through the iron mesh in the window as with his body hunched over and shoulders contorted to look at the dim rectangular screen in front of him, Saul typed his observations for the upcoming teleconference. His eyes scanned the lines over and over as if they could magically change to become more palatable.
"She continually reports severe physical and mental pain which worsens as time goes on. She perceives herself in a denigrating light, for example as trash or as a criminal."
"She expresses the desire to have the technology removed from her, even though that is clearly not possible given the circumstances which have been explained to her many times."
"Her visual cortex is especially stimulated at night, manifesting many visions which reflect far-fetched fantasies of other worlds and creatures."
"She acquired an unusual fixation on plants, requesting that her room be filled with potted ferns of numerous varieties, which she moves close to her bed in order to touch their leaves while lying down."
"She does not prefer to stay within the area required by incubation period procedure and often leaves the area in brief stints which have been shortened to the best of my ability."
He remembered her figure slumped against the metal cabinet in the back of his room last night, her hair and black gown too neat for having just woken up, her eyes - illuminated only by the implants behind her ears blinking rich green - glancing at him, then up and to the left, then back at him. She explained, with syllables tumbling over each other, how she had been feeling that some valve in her body was stuck, preventing the streams of images and data from passing through. She stretched her elbows above her shoulders and let out a yawn like a muted wail.
It was like being congested, she said, but on some inner plane where writhing worms were coagulated. It was as if she was being taunted by a sticky gangliated clump which was perched in a secret place within her from where she couldn't vomit it out. She had woken him up and he, tired and mucus-eyed, stumbled out of bed and took her hand to drag her back into her room, and she went, tugging back reluctantly yet knowing that it was for her own well being. Saul also remembered the straight white teeth of his supervisor, his rimless glasses, and his gray buttoned suit in front of a wallpaper of colorful boxes placed atop one another. The intonation in his voice during the previous conference when he had pronounced the word "aberration" was different from the calmness in his voice as he emphasized that the technology had been proven to be safe.
"Let me emphasize once again that the components of the technology have been proven to be safe for the body. As for the mind, unfortunately those phenomena are relative. The technology causes the user to undergo a wide array of thoughts and emotions, of course. A thought might be harmless to one person, but painful to another. It's difficult to predict what the response will be. As of yet, we have found that there is a portfolio of divergent responses to the technology which are difficult to predict. These likely relate to existing, possibly undiagnosed medical conditions. In any case, if this has not straightened out naturally over many weeks, it is certainly an aberration."
Saul was about to open the app he used for business meetings. It was called CloudRoom, its icon was a three-dimensional roomlike expanse of royal-blue sky texture, but he noticed a notification box in the lower right corner of his screen from another icon. It was a coiled, cream-colored serpent, which was an open-source, anonymous messaging app he hadn't used in months called Serpent Messenger. He had installed it on a whim a couple years ago after hearing on a message board that it was commonly used by some of the more eclectic folks at slime bars, who used it to organize large slime parties undercover, since all messages were intended to be private and encrypted.