Dr Kelley was really concerned about Candy, and rightly so.
After her finding about how badly injured she was, she had completely withdrawn and refused to see anyone. Even the carers either just couldn’t get her to answer the door or were thrown out bodily when they let themselves in. Eventually, Candy just wedged the door shut.
After hearing nothing from her all day, even just a voice telling her to F off, Dr Kelley had the flat supervisor break down the door…
Candy was in the bath, barely alive. She had slashed her wrists with a kitchen knife…
She was rushed to hospital, where staff managed to stabilise her.
Dr Kelley, at her wits end, phoned Shan at Samoto.
“You’ve had to deal with a woman with bad facial injuries, haven’t you? Can you help in this case?”
Shan said she had done something similar before; one of their teachers was wearing a custom mask that she had designed. She had also recently been fitted with one of their ‘voxbox’ units, and was learning to talk all over again. Would this help?
“Definitely”, said Dr Kelley. “Anything to stop her trying to kill herself again.”
Shan said if they sent her over photos and x-rays, she’d get straight on it…
Shan was quite liking her ‘helpful phase’. It was making her very popular in the village, as word was getting around about how she was helping people. At the same time, people had suspicions that she was behind the ‘maid programme’, and the people that knew weren’t talking…
Anyway, Shan soon 3d printed a lower jaw assembly for Candy. She had discovered from the x-rays that the skull itself was undamaged, so a properly made artificial jaw could be fitted and made usable. She also managed to make some artificial skin from a special latex using the photos to match the colour.
She then decided to use Candy to test the new version of the ‘voxbox’. It could be connected to the remnants of the vocal cords in such a way that Candy should be able to talk almost normally. Shan got Stacey to try it out on one of the resident maids first, and the result was very encouraging, even if the language wasn’t printable…!
She found that threatening to take the collar away from the maid gave her another really good way of controlling them. It seems that the maids would do anything to get their voice back…!
“Interesting…”, Shan mused. “Anyway, I’m supposed to be a good Shan at the moment. Their programming will stop them from revealing anything about Samoto, so I think I’ll give all the maids a new collar as part of the ‘upgrades’ on offer and give their owners an option to turn their voices off from their remotes. Come to think of it, I’ll upgrade my voxbox at the same time.”
She picked up the equipment to ‘repair’ Candy, and set off for the hospital, asking Stacey to start upgrading the maids.
At the hospital, it was short work to fit the new jaw assembly to Candy and connect the collar. Shan and Dr Kelley then waited for her to wake up…
Candy started waking, realised she was still alive, then immediately started crying.
“No, I wanted to die…”, she ‘said’, in her new electronic voice. She then realised, with amazement, what she had done. She also realised she was no longer wearing her hood…
Her hands went to her head. She felt her new jaw for the first time…
Tears streamed from her eyes. Shan held up a mirror, and showed her…
“You can talk again. You can also eat solid food again, but take it easy, your system will need a while to get used to it again.”, Shan said.
Crying, Candy hugged Shan. “Thank you, thank you…”
“You’re welcome”, said Shan, turning and going to leave the hospital. “Dr Kelley can take care of you now, but don’t do anything so stupid as that again!”
“There was no hope left…”, Candy said.
Shan flipped back round.
“There’s always hope! Never forget that!”, she said, angrily. She then left.
Candy had got her life back…