Lirin first heard a high-pitched mechanical sound, like some kind of motorbike, and then she slowly began to open her eyes. She was immediately blinded by the light from the ceiling. "Eegh…" she uttered at that moment. But soon her eyes adjusted, and she was already trying to move her head forward to see how she was actually doing. But her effort was interrupted by a concerned voice: "Lie down, don't move. It's not finished yet. You'll ruin it." and she saw the very top of a medical robot. As she slowly leaned forward, she saw more and more of the robot. He was no looker, a purely utilitarian robot. He was asymmetrical and didn't look completely humanoid. His great dominance was a huge arm, where he kept most of his tools.

"Is that a medical replibior?" Lirin managed to say with difficulty.

"Yes, but there's nothing to fear, it's essentially a triviality," the robot reassured her. But then Lirin saw something elongated and red at the edge of her field of vision. She immediately braced herself with her hands on the bed to see what it was. She instantly realized that she shouldn't have done that. A tremendous pain shot through her body, emanating from several different sources, but one of them was truly worth seeing. Through her abdomen ran a familiar thin red pipe from the Vega's reinforcement structure. A little bluish blood immediately leaked from the wound.

"Well, you've really messed it up. Now I'll have to reapply it," the robot sighed as if it was just a matter of having a little more work.

"What about the others?!" Lirin blurted out, grimacing with pain that she was vainly trying to overcome.

"It depends only on you now, lie down and give your burns a rest. You'll find out everything, but now lie down and let me patch up that wound," the robot said calmly and soothingly.

"B-burns?" Lirin asked incredulously, and then she examined the rest of her body. There was almost nothing left of her suit, and what was on her was either scorched to her or just pieces of torn rags that remained from the last protective layer of the suit.

"We will of course heal the burns, and without any trace, but the bigger problem will be if I connect you incorrectly and you bleed out here. So please lie down!" the robot urged. So Lirin obediently lay down, relaxed, and tried not to move. The robot then applied more anesthetics and continued working. When she felt a little relief, she began to ask:

"So, did anyone else survive?"

"Unfortunately, the numbers are bad," the robot replied. The evasive answer annoyed her a little, and she snapped, "And what does that mean, please?!"

"We didn't find any civilians, and Oril is in bad shape, unfortunately."

"What's wrong with him?! And what about Draine?" she inquired.

"Draine was just thrown out of the cabin. You and Oril, unfortunately, made your way through the ship. Oril wasn't so lucky. Compared to him, you escaped without permanent damage."

"So what's wrong with him?" Lirin asked, already slightly agitated, wanting to know his condition.

"Wouldn't you rather wait with that?" the robot tried to postpone the disaster.

"NO! Tell me right now how it really is!"

"All right. So to speak, a fragment of the ship aimed a little higher in his case, unlike yours," he began slowly.

"And what is his condition?" Lirin asked, increasingly shaken.

"He's alive, but he's being kept in an induced coma. They're trying to put his brain back together."

For a moment, Lirin stopped thinking, as if someone had hit her. But then she immediately pulled herself together and tried to ask calmly, "That sounds terrible. You said he's alive?" But as she said it aloud, she began to blink rapidly.

"You see, he was hit by a long, but fortunately thin, object in the head. He has it above his eye, in the prefrontal cortex. And that's... bad, very bad. Many complex brain functions reside there. Logic, decision-making, personality... To explain it to you, animals don't have this part of the brain as developed as we do. That part of the brain, to a certain extent, makes us who we are. So… you probably understand now." Helplessness and pure shock began to take hold of her:

"I, well… I'm not a doctor, but why don't they do to him what you're doing to me now?"

"To simplify it for you. All your skin cells are more or less the same, and when we ask them, they answer, 'I am a skin cell,' and we use that information to create more. In short, we copy the information of existing cells, or we create cells according to a certain key from your medical samples from the past, and at worst, according to a general model of individual cells in our database. But it's not that easy with the brain. Each cell is unique. One cell says, for example, 'I like this food,' and another says, 'I like this music.' You can't just copy the information of a cell from the surrounding area... and if we try to create some general cell according to the database, it will be empty, without information and without purpose," the robot tried to explain the issue to Lirin simply.

"And how are they trying to help him?" Lirin asked, her eyes doing their best to hold back a tear.

"It's a very delicate and demanding process; they're trying to assemble his brain like a tiny puzzle, but so far they're in the phase where they're just looking for the pieces." The robot's current bluntness was absolutely devastating to her, but it was, after all, what she had asked for. He had tried to spare her the truth. Her eyes really did fill with tears, like two small, unhappy wells.

"What if they can't do it?" she asked with fear and sadness in her voice.

"That's also very likely. It depends on what exactly the shrapnel damaged. I don't have enough data on that, but if he lives, he will remain in a vegetative state at worst."

Lirin turned her head to the left while lying down, and at that moment, a large tear flowed from her left eye, which was immediately absorbed by her pillow. However, there was now a curtain in front of her, which obstructed her view of the adjacent bed.

"Yes, he's lying there. I strongly advise you not to be there now. When I fix you up, you can visit him."

"And how long will it take you?" Lirin asked him, still in the same position, while a tear from her right eye traveled down her nose.

"I'll fix that puncture in 2 to 3 chapras. If you insist, you'll be able to see him then, but only under anesthetics and with a connected mobile replibior, which will finish the burns."

Suddenly, Lirin thought she faintly heard Berind's voice from somewhere in the hallway or maybe from the next room. She quickly turned completely to the other side and lifted herself up to look.

"No, no, no. It's torn again," the robot said desperately.

"You must stay still now. I'm actually operating on you," the robot scolded and sprayed some white paste on the wound, which immediately began to harden, thus helping to slightly close the wound.

Then he moved aside a bit and had the controls of the bed raise the head section of the bed to a semi-reclined position.

"There, now you'll see everything, even how I'm fixing you," he told her and returned to his original position. With some kind of tool, he forced the paste to break down into dust, which he then blew away with a small vacuum cleaner.

"The slightest movement will trigger bleeding again. I will gradually shorten the pipe and then heat it and remove it. Fortunately, you won't feel it, you'll only see it, and any internal burns will help me in this case because you won't bleed as much," he informed the patient and began to cut the pipe into four pieces with a laser.