Lisa would not see what happened after she went limp. The panic was immediate: crew members rushed up to see if she was all right, staffers dropped their SeeClips and stared at her, and everyone who wasn't immediately involved in attending to Lisa's limp, cold body was staring at everyone else.
Nobody wanted to say what everybody wanted to say. The silence was like a heavy shroud over them all.
In each of their minds was the same question, their mouths almost forming the words: Did she say David?
Nobody ever spoke of David aloud.
Lisa's eyes flickered, openshutopenshutopenshut and her chest heaved once, twice. Someone held a stim-cap to her forehead and the flush in her cheeks said it was operating but she did not move.
"Get her on here," a medtech said. Staffers helped lift Lisa's body onto the floating stretcher they'd brought in. A tube was fed into her nose as they led her out of the studio and into the hallway, providing air to her lungs.
Already, a new speaker was sitting into Lisa's chair; Kendra was her name, Lisa's understudy. She had been provided with flashnotes from a brain scan that was performed on Lisa just at the start of the broadcast, a backup system devised some time ago.
Kendra cleared her throat. The holoprojectors keyed on her.
"Lisa has taken ill," she said. "A seizure, we believe. We'll update you on her condition as we learn details. Please keep her in your thoughts. Returning to the news now," Kendra concentrated, trying to sort in her mind the memories of the Angels' talk that were Lisa's, now imprinted on her own mind. It always made her feel slightly dizzy to access them and she liked it better when they were wiped at the end of the show.
"We will also update you on the status of the Mars Orbiting Station. The Protectorate assures us that the aliens who are attacking Mars are at least 1 week away from being able to attack the... IO17... and our defenses our being mustered."
Kendra wondered whether They would do anything to repel an attack on this planet.
"Beyond that, there is little to add at this point. The hole in the ocean, meanwhile, appears to have stabilized in recent hours to a width of 37 kilometers. Two probes were sent to determine its depth but they did not return. These holos you are seeing"... Kendra saw in the edge of her vision the implant-driven holofeed that viewers at home would see..."Show the present status of the hole. The blackness, scientists say, is not simply a result of shadow but perhaps some sort of cloak."
The holo showed a nearly-perfectly-circular blackness, formed in the Pacific Ocean. Not just a hole, it appeared to be a gap in reality - the edges fuzzed and pixilated where the water met the dark. Looking straight at the blackness it was easy to see it was three-dimensional the way one knows the moon or the sun is three-dimensional but beyond that nothing could be discerned. At the edge of the blackness the water frothed and churned and spouted but did not appear to be dropping into it. As the holo continued, one of the probes Kendra had mentioned shot into view, circling around the blackness and the view on the holo switched to shot from the probe, twisting from the blackness to see the edge of the ocean and then going to black, after which the view showed Kendra again.
"Authorities are not answering questions about where this came from or whether it is associated with the Mars attacks. They are urging you to stay inside and only leave your houses for emergency purposes."
Kendra focused again, trying to access the next bit of news the Angels had given Lisa, trying to decipher the weirdly-arranged information that was conveyed from the Angels to Lisa to her; the patterns did not line up properly with her mind and it was like listening to a thrice-translated conversation. There was not much else there. She moved to Africa.
"Scientists studying the Human-Dogs hybrid creatures recently uncovered in Kenya have determined that the combinations of DNA were done by grafting that is beyond... human... capabilities at the present. The three dogs that have been located are being held at a secure facility. The DNA grafts were done inside the mitochondria of the dogs and do not appear to have been intended to create a new creature at all; instead, scientists are speculating that the purpose was to use dogs to create more human DNA strands."
There was a pause while Kendra did not say what nobody would say about that, which was that it was apparent that They were behind the creation of additional human DNA strands.
Kendra realized that the next item, in fact, was that people with quadrupled DNA strands had been discovered, that two new babies born in Denmark in the past 24 hours did not have the usual spiral DNA pattern but a strangely-set up four-strand DNA spiral. She began:
"In Denmark," but just as she did that, she saw an image of an Angel out of the corner of her eye, blotting out her own view of the holofeed. The Angel gestured angrily and shouted something guttural and although Kendra could not understand its words, her fear at its visage caused her to stop talking.
"That's the news," she said, quietly, and the Angel in her vision disappeared. Her shoulders slumped with the sudden release of tension and she hoped that Lisa would be back to do this because if she did not, Kendra was going to have to talk to the Angels tomorrow.
