Technocracy: Epiphany, Part 4

And Marin’s hair billowed and sank, as she sat there, in Dr. Crickson’s office three days later.

Bellona sat next to her, wearing a beautiful cashmere pantsuit in deep purple. Marin herself was wearing a dress, and she seethed as she sat.

She thought about her left eyebrow. They had been preparing, on this Thursday, to skip the school day and take her to the doctor. Marin had gotten dolled up; she did not typically wear makeup, but she had at least put on some blush, considering her face was going to be examined.

But when she had come out of her bathroom, her mother had said, “Oh, darling, it’s on your eyebrow now, too.”

And Marin had blanched and flinched. She had not noticed this, for all the care she had paid to her face. Hastily scrambling she had moved to the nearest mirror in their house, and she had examined her eyebrows. The right was still black; but as she had looked, she had seen, to her terror, that a big stripe of her left eyebrow had turned navy blue, just like the streak in her hair.

So she sat there, waiting in the doctor’s waiting room,

Bellona beside her, and she sat, and puffed her cheeks.

As she watched there was a woman sitting ‘cross from her,

Drinking something clear out of a plastic serving cup.

Marin looked at it—and suddenly it bubbled up,

Popping off the lid and spraying liquid everywhere.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” said Marin.

“Oh, it’s no big deal, sweetie,” said the woman, smiling at her. “There’s plenty left. Besides, why would you apologize? It’s not like it was your fault.”

This caused Marin to raise her eyebrows. Next to her, Bellona made a strange expression, but then smiled kindly. Just in time, too, for Marin swung her gaze her mother’s way, and Marin’s eyebrows, mostly black but with that navy blue stripe on one of them, had lowered. She was thinking. “Not my fault,” she whispered.

“What’s that, darling?” asked Bellona.

“Nothing, mom,” her daughter said.

Then the door swung open and there was a flash of red.

“Oh, Bernardo!” said Bellona brightly.

Marin’s eyes whipped up. Ardo was exiting the back area of the clinic, accompanied by his Aunt Maria. And Marin’s eyes bulged. There was another streak of crimson red in Ardo’s hair now, this one further back and to the right.

“Yo,” said Ardo, waving at Marin.

“Hey.”

“Oh, hello there, Mariana,” said Maria, smiling gently at her.

“Meni?” came the sharp call of the nurse.

“That’s us,” said Bellona, rising from her seat at almost the same speed that Marin did. “So nice to see you, Maria. And you, Bernardo. I guess we can expect to see you over at our house again soon?”

“One would hope,” said Maria, flashing a pearly white smile. Bellona arched her eyebrows at this in a mysterious way. Ardo saw it, but did not pay it mind.

Instead, he turned to Marin. “Your turn in the torture chamber?”

“I guess,” she said. “They find anything wrong with you?”

“Nope,” said Ardo.

“Saera said the same thing when she was here on Wednesday,” said Marin.

Ardo shook his head, and twitched his eyes towards Bellona and Maria, who were right next to them. Marin’s eyebrows rose, and she nodded.

“Well, we must be going,” said Maria. “Come on, principe. It’s just in time for lunch.”

“See ya,” said Ardo, waving as he followed his aunt to the exit. Marin waved at him in turn, then followed her mother and the nurse into the winding hallways of the doctor’s office.

“Well, hello there, Marin!” said the nurse, smiling at her as she walked. “What seems to be the trouble today?”

“I have blue in my hair,” said Marin, a bit sharper and more sarcastic than she had intended. She considered apologizing, but ultimately refused. It was only a nurse, after all.

“Yes, I see that!” said the nurse, smiling at her, disarmed and gentle. She’d been seeing Marin since she was a toddler, and was used to her by now. “And that’s not a dye.”

“No,” said Bellona. “Hence why we are here. I would like Doctor Crickson to take a look at her, and run some tests.”

“Well, okay,” said the nurse. A door slid open automatically, and they entered the gently-swooping, beige-colored examination room. It had a soft, gentle couch built into one of its walls. Marin knew the game by now, having come here so many times: she went to the couch and took a seat on it. The sensors in the couch instantly measured her height and weight, and took her pulse and blood pressure as well. This data was all transmitted to the pad carried by the nurse, who saw it as it appeared on her screen.

“All right,” she said. “We’ve got your preliminary data. Doctor Crickson has said that it would be better for us to go ahead and administer the testing, so if you will hold out your arm…”

Marin grimaced. She knew they’d roll up her sleeve, stretching the elastic of her dress’ cuff. But what could she do? So she pulled it back, exposing her sallow-skinned arm. The nurse came forward. An apparatus was in her hand, a gleaming blue device, and at its end was a needle. Marin winced. She hated giving blood.

And she said, “Oh!” as the needle gently penetrated into her skin, at the elbow joint where her veins were biggest. “Ah,” she winced as the needle vacuumed up its small but noticeable level of blood, and then sent its creamy white anti-coagulants into the wound, sealing it up and acting as a discrete bandage. The needle twitched a bit, an arc of pain ran through Marin’s arm,

And she hissed and then her eyes just barely flickered blue,

Just a gentle hint of color, just some neon faint,

And the sink across from her, amid the cabinets

Started dripping just a little harder, more intense,

Heavy drops of water that were spattering into

The drain, but it only lasted just a moment more.

Then the needle was withdrawn, and the bandage was set. “Mmm,” mumbled Marin, pulling her sleeve back down.

“Sorry, honey,” said the nurse.

“I hate getting shots,” said Marin.

“I know, honey,” said the nurse. “You do always say that, every time you come in.”

“Because it’s always true!” Marin whined.

“Manners, Marin,” said Bellona, not looking up from her phone as she said it.

Marin flinched, her big blue eyes blanching. “Sorry,” she said.

“No big deal, honey,” said the nurse. “I’m used to that by now.” She went to the door. “Doctor Crickson will be with you shortly,” and with that, she left.

“Sorry, Mom,” said Marin.

“Darling, you are too sharp sometimes,” said Bellona. “You can’t just order people around. You’re not a god.”

Marin glanced to the side. She put her fingers on the edge of the couch. She arched her eyebrows. “It sure would be cool if I was, though.”

“Hmm?”

“Nothing, Mom,” said Marin. She bit her lip. She noticed the water dripping in the sink. Maybe. Maybe? She focused on it. She immediately felt stupid. What was she doing? There was no way—

Or, maybe, there was.

She gently stretched a hand out, and her fingers flickered up. She glanced to the side; Bellona was still staring at her phone, and she very pointedly did not want her mother to notice. So she tried to be discrete, only stretching her hand out very briefly and very cautiously. She tried reaching. She pulsed her muscles and flexed her joints. Nothing happened. Hmm. But maybe not? She tried to—

“Well, hello there, Miss Meni,” said Doctor Crickson, coming into the examination room in his typical abrupt style. He was a middle-aged man with brown skin and black hair that was gray at the temples. His green eyes alighted on Marin, and she smiled. He had good bedside manner, and had always put her at ease. “And Miss Meni,” he said, turning to Bellona. Marin did not see the two adults arch their eyebrows at each other, and hold their gazes on each other for a very long moment.

Marin did not see this. But now Doctor Crickson turned to her, and said, “So, Marin, I hear you’ve had some troubles with your hair?”

“Yes,” said Marin. “Yes, yes, yes. I mean, look at this!” She jerked the long navy streak in her hair towards Crickson’s face. “This just happened one morning when I woke up. It was only about five days ago.”

“You haven’t been dyeing it?”

“No!”

“I can confirm that,” said Bellona. “Marin has never had an interest in dyeing her hair. She certainly didn’t express an interest in the last week. Whatever this is, it’s entirely natural. Or unnatural, as the case may be.”

“May I?” asked Crickson. He reached a white-gloved hand towards the length of hair Marin was holding out.

“Sure,” said Marin. She let him take up her hair. She saw him pull out his examination lens, which was a medical tool with a wide variety of functions. He flicked it up to his eye as he peered down at Marin’s hair.

“Oh, wow,” he said.

“Huh? What?” said Marin, startled by his tone.

“Well you’re certainly not dyeing this hair, because dye wouldn’t penetrate so deeply into the cores of the hairs themselves,” said Crickson. “Switching on microscope function is really fascinating here. Hair dye, even modern hair dye, tends to just coat hair in outward color, exterior color. But this goes deeper.” His hand dropped Marin’s strand of hair, and reached up to touch her scalp. “It’s as though the change goes very deep, all the way to the actual hair follicles themselves.”

“Sounds… strange,” said Bellona.

“Very strange,” said Crickson. “But also completely natural. And you seem to have no adverse effects from what’s taken place.” Crickson tapped his examination lens a few times. The big blank wall to the left of them lit up with various screens and images. “Obviously we’ve already processed your bloodwork. And it’s all… pretty normal, really. Nothing out of the ordinary. No illnesses, no pathogens, no parasites, no nothing.”

Marin almost started telling him about her long illness over Christmas, and the strange things that had happened around her in the last week. But she remembered Saera’s words and held her tongue.

So when Doctor Crickson said, “Has anything unusual happened to you in the last few weeks?”

She thought a moment. She knew her mother would mention the illness, so she couldn’t get out of bringing it up. And at length, she carefully said: “I was sick for more than a week, just after Christmas. It was pretty bad… but I felt better only a few days after the new year.”

“Yes,” said Bellona. “It really was a very nasty illness. She vomited constantly.”

“Interesting,” said Crickson. “One might think there’s a correlation there. But I can’t prove causation, not without more data. I’ll go over all your test results more carefully later tonight. Even now, even after all our advances in computer science, human eyes can sometimes notice things that machines don’t.” He sighed, and crossed his arms over his chest. “But, frankly, unless it’s something truly unusual, even if I do notice something out of the ordinary, it’s not going to be a major, significant thing. Probably certainly not the sort of thing that would explain a lock of your hair and a section of your eyebrow turning blue.”

“So,” Marin kicked her legs. “So you’re saying you don’t know what’s happening.”

“No,” said Crickson. “I have data, and I could perhaps collect more data. We could scan you, for example. CT scans, MRIs, X-Rays, that sort of thing. I neglected this because it did not seem relevant, and also because it would cost more money. We could gather more data, though, if we wanted.”

“Do you think that’s needed?” asked Bellona.

“Honestly… my instincts tell me ‘no,’” said Crickson. “CT scans, X-Rays, these sorts of things measure for… organ failure, fractures, broken bones, things that would have far more immediate and more life-threatening consequences than just your hair changing color. Marin, your hair turning blue is very strange, I won’t deny that. But it’s also very benign. Your bloodwork shows no adverse illnesses or any apparent health problems. And you, yourself, feel fine, right? How would you judge your own health?”

Marin kicked her legs again. She thought. She decided to give him an honest answer: “I feel really good.”

“There we go,” said Crickson. “And that’s my judgment. Whatever this is, it’s not causing you any adverse health conditions. If I didn’t know any better… if it wasn’t so utterly odd… I’d almost say it was natural. Like your hair changing color was always going to happen. It striking right in the middle of your adolescence, when you’re in the midst of puberty, might make one suspect that. But that’s as may be. I can’t determine the cause, and I do not have confidence that further testing would reveal anything definitive. And you are suffering no adverse health effects from your hair changing color. So… whether you like it or not, I’m just going to say that this is going to happen, but it shouldn’t do you any harm.”

“Hmm,” said Marin. She thought about Saera’s words, about that conversation around the cafeteria table again. And so, she nodded, and smiled. “Well, thanks anyway. I really appreciate it, Doctor Crickson!”

“Don’t worry, Marin,” said Crickson. “I’ll always look out for you. And I think you need a health note for your school, right?”

“Yes,” said Bellona. “So the front office doesn’t keep citing her for violating their dress code.”

“Well, I can do something about that,” said Crickson. “Should be simple enough. A note that will keep you safe, both for your current hair coloration and for any changes to your hair color that may take place. Because, based on the pre-check report you gave about your eyebrow, I suspect this color change is going to continue. You may wind up with all the hair on your body turning blue.”

Marin felt her spine tingle at this. The thought flashed across her mind of that navy blue, that deep, marine blue, covering her entire body. Her hair almost the same color as her eyes. A flicker of thought came across her mind as she wondered how she would begin to pick out clothes and color-coordinate for such a thing.

“But I’ve got the note ready,” said Doctor Crickson. “And there’s nothing else that’s causing you trouble at the moment?”

“No,” said Marin. “No, Doctor Crickson, there isn’t.”

“Well, that’s it, I suppose,” said Bellona. She rose from her seat. She and Crickson shook hands. “Thanks as always, Doctor Crickson. Always a pleasure to see you.”

“Always a pleasure to see you as well, Bellona,” said Crickson. He turned to Bellona’s daughter, and he smiled kindly. “Until next time, Miss Meni.”