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Merrin working in Exception Handling
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The next checkpoint is another very thorough lab panel, testing for all the known cell-damage byproducts that the protocol is trying to prevent or minimize, rather than just the few dozen that Merrin's continuous sensor can detect. 

They are mostly expecting mildly bad news. Call it a 75% chance, 3:1 odds, that the more sensitive panel will in fact detect a lot of damage markers from areas of the cascade that the protocol imperfectly blocks. (Which markers they detect, and at what levels, is going to be input for the next phase, hopefully tweaking it to work a little better, but that's already taken into account in the outcome estimate.) 

The markets are putting down a 25% chance that they won't detect appreciable quantities of a bunch of damage markers that they know the protocol doesn't fully block. This would be substantial evidence that, despite 11 minutes without oxygen, the damage wasn't actually that bad - maybe because the patient's heart was still beating until only a minute or two before they pulled him out - or that their initial stabilization worked really well to prevent reperfusion injury. 

It's good news that won't affect the worse outcomes much; the probabilities are, as expected, narrowing further as time passes and information accumulates, and those are already very low. But good news will buy them a 30% drop in the odds of even minor permanent damage, all the way down to 15%. 

(And it's not just long-term outcomes that would predict, but a less grueling recovery, an earlier discharge from the hospital, Kalorm making it back to baseline functioning in weeks rather than months.) 

They probably aren't going to get that lucky. They're probably going to see an increase of 10% instead, when that implausible best-case scenario is ruled out. But they might actually be that lucky. 1 in 4 odds isn't that low. 

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Merrin is not actually a puddle of stress this time! There are probably going to be spiders but, like, little spiders. 

Still. There might not be. What if she believes in Kalorm extra hard. What if she has information the markets don't, which is that Kalorm is very good at implausible recoveries Merrin doesn't, actually, have information the markets don't. But she can hope really hard. 

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....They are not that lucky. 

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Negligible change to the predictions of moderate or severe damage. Predictions of mild damage, 55%. 

 

...Final protocol updates up, clear to proceed, now at 1 C per hour until the final checkpoint. Five hours left. 

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Coming on twelve hours since Finnar and his family were woken in the middle of the night by horrible news. 

Finnar is really quite high-stamina, by dath ilani standards – he gets way more done than you would predict just from +3 SD thinkoomph – but even he can't go all day on at most three hours of sleep. He's still in the projector-screen room, but sitting rather than pacing, and not really making much progress on untangling neurogenesis-related gene expression pathways. 

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Kurthin started crashing a while ago, and is now half-dozing on his mother's shoulder. 

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The twins are playing a complicated strategy game to pass the time. 

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As usual they are almost perfectly matched, and could easily go at it all day, if they can manage to stay awake that long. 

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Mallor is singing quietly to herself, though if she keeps at it much longer she's going to start losing her voice. 

(She doesn't super care, right now. It's not like she's going to make the next few concerts anyway.) 

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Ranthir did manage to regain some focus, but she also didn't get much sleep last night, and she is at this point legitimately too fatigue-impaired to really be net positive betting on markets. She is half-dozing and mindlessly refreshing them instead.  

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Khemeth is so incredibly exhausted, and not even mostly because of the disrupted sleep. Imaginary Kalorm has had pretty much every imaginable iteration of a screaming argument with imaginary Merrin, and also with Khemeth's mental model of Finnar, and of pretty much every family member except Nerdel. Somehow he doesn't actually predict that Kalorm will be mad at Nerdel. 

He desperately wants to just skip ahead to the part where they wake Kalorm up and at least they know how bad it is. He wants to go back to yesterday and tell Merrin's crew to be closer. He keeps fantasizing about being at Kalorm's bedside when his brother wakes up, and explaining everything about the Basement - and Finnar's secret work that Khemeth is not actually sure he is supposed to know about, but was blindingly obvious from the moment he was cleared to know that the Basement existing, because obviously his father would have guessed it on his own and obviously he wouldn't trust them to do it right - and then, at least, getting to know whether or not that would change Kalorm's decision. 

 

 

...He keeps vaguely wondering if there is any even vaguely coherent possible world with a Civilization in it that Kalorm wouldn't fundamentally detest. If it's even coherent to posit a Civilization that his brother could uncomplicatedly trust, the way Merrin so obviously trusts this one. 

 

 

He wants Dekan. He can't make himself actually open that text-conversation window. 

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...The checkpoint data comes in, and the markets update, and for a moment he's pointlessly furious with Kalorm for not trying harder, at which point of course his mental Kalorm model starts yelling that it's not as though he owes it to anyone to be trying at ALL, it's HIS LIFE and HIS BRAIN and why do they keep having to OPTIMIZE IT ON HIS BEHALF. 

There is a collective wince from everyone awake enough to actually be tracking the numbers. 

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Nerdel looks over at him, and sighs. "I wish this wasn't so -" she seems to hunt for words for a moment, "- so much on you." 

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If she asks how he's doing, Khemeth very badly doesn't want to go into it, but he's not sure that right now he can convincingly lie. "Mom. Please. Don't." 

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Nerdel raises her eyebrows. "I don't need to ask. Just..." She pats her knee. "Come here. You should try to rest." 

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She's probably right. He's already a wreck just in terms of sheer fatigue, he can barely keep his eyes open, and there are still hours to go. (How is Merrin still going?) 

Khemeth sighs, and shuffles over to the long settee sofa, and stretches out and rests his head in his mother's lap. 

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The Medical Crisis Liaison is still on hand to explain updates to everyone still awake and listening, but at this point has much less to do. Fanthim, for her part, is starting to feel a bit tired, but given how it started off, the last seven hours have been remarkably calm. She's mostly just making sure they're having literally anything to eat or drink, and being unbothered when people cry in front of her, which has happened at various points. 

When she goes to bring Finnar a glass of water in his projector room, she finds him asleep in his chair. She manages to move it into recliner mode without waking him, and drapes a blanket over him and tiptoes out. 

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They're getting so close. 

At a degree per hour, Merrin is definitely being kept busy accounting for various blood chemistry wackiness, as different control systems in Kalorm's body come online piecemeal and in an unpredictable order. His lactate keeps stubbornly trying to rise above parameters – a sign of microcirculatory dysfunction, probably, but hopefully - mostly - not in his brain. His CO2 also keeps doing random spikes, as metabolic systems wake up and burn more oxygen. With both of those combined, Merrin is having a time keeping his blood pH where it's supposed to be. Also his blood sugar keeps doing scary nosedives that she has to frantically correct but manage not to overcorrect - the ceiling on that is very strict, too high is just as bad if not worse for his brain as too low.  

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Still, the riskiest parts are past. The per-hour odds of a random catastrophic complication are much lower, now, and they don't get that unlucky. 

 

At 27 C, two hours into this section of the protocol, Kalorm's heart starts attempting snippets of organized rhythm. It's actually really inconvenient! He is alternating between like six different electrical rhythms, all of them abnormal and only half of them even theoretically capable of pumping blood, and the various pressures in different compartments of his circulatory system are all over the place. Merrin can manage to keep the most important one, blood pressure directly to his brain, in vaguely reasonable parameters by making very heavy use of the vasodilator-constrictor while they dump a lot of anti-arrhythmic drugs into him, and then eventually just try using the pacing wires still in place along with the no-longer-in-use mechanical pump, set to the slowest rate that doesn't leave long enough gaps for him to randomly go into ventricular tachycardia. 

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Merrin recognizes that Kalorm is trying very hard! It's not his fault that having a normal heartbeat is unreasonably difficult when your body temperature is still like ten degrees too low. She's not mad at him or anything! They're on the same team. This team coordination is maybe going to take a bit more workshopping, that's all. 

(She does spend a while being constantly very mad at the machines.) 

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At hour ten of the protocol, Nerdel - who has perhaps herself been dozing a bit, but is now mostly awake - gently nudges Khemeth. "Results incoming." 

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Urghhhhhh where is he - also everything is terrible and Khemeth cannot, for a moment or two, actually remember why or how everything is terrible - 

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Merrin, on the screen, looks more frazzled than at the last checkpoint but definitely wide awake! (She was starting to flag a bit, and is now very caffeinated). She's fidgeting while she adjusts machines, talking to herself out loud rather than subvocalizing, conversationally calling the machines rude names alternating with reassuring Kalorm that she's not talking about him, and occasionally pacing in circles with her portable console. 

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....Okay, Merrin isn't terrible. And Kalorm is presumably not being obnoxious on purpose although, you know, he totally would be obnoxious to his nurse on purpose if he were in fact in a state where he could do things on purpose. Which Merrin wouldn't know, because like she said to Nerdel, she hasn't actually met Kalorm per se – Khemeth should warn her about that...

 

- if she's staying on the case after this? Khemeth actually has no idea how Exception Handling assigns their oppers. Maybe they need to send Merrin to the other side of the planet as soon as the actually crisis is over. 

Wow, Khemeth's Merrin model objects to that really strongly. Khemeth's Merrin model is also definitely not going to say anything about this, but - yeah, no, it's going to be important to her to see this one through. And if all goes well then it might be, if not an uncomplicatedly happy ending, at least not a grimdark tragedy. 

All right, Khemeth is going to put in some firm recommendations to Personnel that they keep Merrin assigned to Default Hospital at least as long as Kalorm is an ICU patient, and really for as long as they can spare her. And he...can probably convince Finnar to put in a pretty hefty performance incentive. Not that Merrin will look at it, but she shouldn't be penalized for having weird alien neuroses. 

And for right now he's going to blearily but anxiously watch the screens. 

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Merrin's STRESS about the results here is almost starting to be outweighed by her sheer desire for this to be over.

She's not running out of stamina, exactly. Caffeine works great for her; her focus and reaction times had been starting to slip, but are mostly back now, and any gradual degradation in her performance is more than made up for by the fact that she is intimately familiar with every single quirk of how this patient's body behaves when they change things around. 

But it has been like fourteen and a half hours. Her emotional balance is GONE. She is hours past the point at which she stopped really trying to parse the Treatment Planning markets whenever anything complicated came up, and just started demanding that someone explain it to her like she's five. She quietyelled at someone for getting on her nerves by standing too close to one of the machines and then that person turned out to be a STEALTH KEEPER IN SCRUBS but, see, how was Merrin supposed to know that. There have been like four shift changes around her and she may be good at recognizing faces normally but her visual processing kind of hurts after this long - it still works, it's just starting to feel aversive when her environment suddenly throws visual or auditory stimuli at her which are not directly patient-related - and she's sort of given up on tracking who else is in the room. No one can possibly be expecting Merrin to be checking everyone's hair for rank insignia in case they are SECRETLY KEEPERS. Merrin wasn't even really embarrassed about it, just done with this entire situation. 

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