The unit that I met Desmosa Upgail was not one that I will be forgetting any time soon.

The building in which she was staying was about a half an hour walk from ours.  I chose to go by foot, purely because I wanted to have as much of Kenglowe imprinted upon my mind as possible before our departure tomorrow.  I was joined by Phoebe, Laura B and Felix who all walked half a pace behind me and avoided speaking directly to me as much as possible.  Their curiosity was intense and they wanted to discover if my predictions involved anyone that they cared about.  To be fair, everyone wanted to know the same, however most of them were still giving me the silent treatment so only a few were nominated to go along with me.
Gheetoh walked directly next to me, talking away a length a lal (substitute for mile a minute).  I had deactivated my translator for the journey, so every now and then she stopped and asked if I was keeping up with what she was saying.  I responded in her language that I was just about keeping up, each time asking her if she could speak a little slower.  She would start speaking again at a normal pace, however within moments, she was back up to the same speed.
My language skills are not to be sniffed at.  I am not even close to being fluent in any other language, however I have enough conversational and basic knowledge to enable me to just about keep up.  As long as whoever I am talking to speaks slowly.
We arrived at our destination a few lals ahead of schedule so we were shown to a small lounge which was set up for customers.  It had a pastel colour scheme with smoothly cornered furniture, no doubt to relax the nerves of the person who was waiting to learn their fate.
I was taken off on my own to the second floor and into the room where Desmosa was waiting for me. 
Her room was a stereotypical student’s room; images plastered over the walls of musicians and events, clothes that had been piled onto a chair and covered with a brightly coloured throw, there were probably still more under the sheet of the bed, a shelf covered with bottles whose labels indicated their cosmetic contents, several tablets and books, a slightly musty smell masked by a fragranced scent and an open window.
All of that was hidden behind a latticed room divider, upon which hung a small selection of simple charms and chimes.
In the space between the door and the divider were two comfy chairs and a table upon which there sat two glasses of water and a large tablet.
When Desmosa opened the door, it was clear that she had been waiting behind it since having sent word that she was ready to see me.
“Laura MacPhaid,” she greeted me with an outstretched hand and huge grin upon her face, “it is so good to finally meet you.”  For the first time in many units, I shook someone’s hand.  Since meeting Orthus back on the Screnac, not a single being had even been aware of what it was to shake hands as a greeting.  The original meaning behind the gesture was to prove that you held no weapon in your dominant hand whilst exhibiting your potential physical strength with your grip.  The outdated motive was eventually replaced with the need to be polite.
The meaning behind Desmosa’s hand shake was to show me that she was knowledgeable of human customs and wished for me to be at ease.
At ease I was not, however her attempt at hospitality was at least helped to understand her and appreciate her efforts.
“Please take a seat, may I have your permission to connect to your nanobots with my own?”
I raised an eyebrow yet gave my consent.  Deia had explained to me that my nanobots contain all sorts of information about their hosts, including, but not limited to, tracking the interactions that we had with other technology, like a computer logging key strokes.  An alive could use their own nanotechnology to extrapolate information such as mannerisms, behaviour and different reactions which, when integrated into their prediction software, would increase the accuracy of the reading.
I was rather alarmed when she drew her face to within an inch of my own and instructed me to open my mouth.
“Excuse me?” I widened my eyes as far as they could go, yet somehow kept myself from jerking backwards, “I… uh…”
Desmosa pulled her head back, realizing what thoughts had sprung into my head, “oh no, sorry, it’s not…  The nanobots can’t pass through skin, it’s quicker being face to face, where there are a few openings for the exchange.  I wasn’t going to kiss you, it’s all done now, that’s how fast it is.”
I lowered my eyebrows a little, although not completely as her flustered way of trying to explain herself was somewhat amusing.  “It’s okay,” I found my voice, “just caught me off guard.  So what happens now?”
“Now,” she drew out the word like a teenager stretching gum from their mouth, “we wait.  I am running the calculations as we speak, there is a lot of information to process.  If you have anything to add, now would be the time.  The more information I have, the more accurate I can be.”
I thought for a moment before drawing out my phone.
Thanks to Phillip’s tip, we had been introduced to a device that could covert any wire to the local power supply.  Using the USB cables I had with me, I could feed the power end into a device the looked like one of those pin toys, the ones where you push your hand or face onto a bed of dull pins so that you can see the shape on the other side.  The device molded to take in the USB and was able to calculate the amount of energy to feed through the wire for optimal charging.
I opened up my photos and handed over my smart phone, instructing her to swipe to the left to go through them.  The majority of my albums contained photos that were taken purely to be edited and posted across various social media so there was no shortage of flowers, sunsets, clocks and the odd selfie.
The abundance of clock photos was due to my final job.  I worked in a family owned department store in the, somewhat obsolete, clock concession, Time Keepers.  The number of visitors to our department rarely exceeded five or so per day, and during the long hours of doing nothing whatsoever, I would use my phone in an attempt to advertise the stock on social media.  It was really just an excuse to practice my photography skills and have my phone out on the shop floor, however we were in the attic, and no one ever came browsing up to us unless they were after something specific.  I would have given it less than a year before the concession pulled out of the department store, now we shall never know.
I must also admit to not being much for the whole selfie hashtag, if I ever did one, I was usually pulling a silly face.  There was a brief period of time when I tried to start a self-confidence campaign using #ilooklikeme to advocate that, when I looked in the mirror, I neither looked good or bad, I looked like me. 
It never caught on. 
And those pictures flashed to and fro across Desmosa‘s vision.
Occasionally there would be a flurry of furry animals or small children as I had attempted to capture a non-blurry image of my mum’s dogs or any of Jennifer or Sylvia’s children.  My heart squeezed painfully as she swiped impassive the images of Aurora, and I hoped like hell that Sylvia and Elia were safe.
It took Desmosa a long while to work her way through all of them, so for a while I simply, and hopefully subtly, observed her.  She had hair, short and fine, that brushed over her shoulders as she moved her head.  It was a few shades darker than her skin which was an orange and peach colour.  Where the skin hardened, it became a few shades closer to brown.  I could not help but think that it looked like dragon scales.  Her eyes were fascinating; glass orbs that glowed with low lit lights that changed colour from one moment to the next.  Those lights were arranged as though they were veins, yet they moved, changing in shape and size.  It occurred to me that they were similar to having computer monitors instead of eyeballs, what was displayed would be ever changing, allowing you to view life with clarity.  As it turned out, alive did not need tablets or nanochips, it could all be programmed within themselves whenever they need it.  The information that we would absorb from the consoles, would be fed directly into their brains.
“There are conversations there to,” once the photos had all been seen, I leant over and tapped back to the main screen then on the messenger app, “the words on the right are mine and the left are the person I was talking to.  Would it help to see my correspondence since we arrived?”
She glanced up quickly, “that’s not necessary, I got that information from your nanobots.”
It had been explained that, unless you actively gave someone permission to access your nanobots, they were basically hack proof.  A few of the others had been massively skeptical about sharing information, thanks to the paranoia that existed around the privacy settings and information mining that all but ruled the internet in Earth’s later days.  The nanochips however, were about information stored literally within your person, that could only be accessed by someone else if they got your permission.  If you changed your mind after you had let them in, you could just as simply eject them and erase the information they had accessed with a simple predetermined pattern of taps with your fingers.
Desmosa had finished scrolling through the digital version of myself, and, nodding to me sat back for a few lals with her eyes closed.
Her expressions were straight forward enough to follow; she furrowed her brow as she calculated, her face relaxed as she observed the results and frowned the split second before her eyes snapped open.
She looked straight at me, her face so completely impassive that she almost looked like an figurine of herself.
“I…” she tried to speak without knowing what she was going to say, “I don’t know how to tell you what I saw.”
My heart beat had become alarmingly loud.  “Take your time, be as frank as you need to be.”
It felt as though time was slowing down, my mind was beginning to get fuzzy and my ability to focus on what she was saying was becoming increasingly difficult.  This was what would happen when I knew I was about to receive important news, it was as though my entire being were trying to reject the information before I could even hear it.  With a tremendous amount of effort I tried to focus on what she would say.
“I think,” she started, “I think you will need to see, for it to make any sense.  It seems like one specific kind of situation, however it might mean something different from your perspective.  One moment.”
She sprung out of her seat and dove behind the divider.
My body was frozen in place, as though any movement would cause me to collapse.
I could hear her moving around yet somehow found myself startled when she reappeared.
She handed me a small object.
It took substantial effort to tear my eyes away from her to the case that she had placed in my hand, even more effort was required to open it without trembling.
“This is a vision lens,” she explained as I pulled a smaller container filled with liquid and one contact lens,“ it will allow you to see what I have seen.”
“What about sound?”  If nothing else, my brain was focusing on practical thoughts.
“There was no sound.”
I took in a deep breath, removed my glasses and opened the lid.
It had been about ten years since I had last attempted to wear contact lenses; my prescription was such that I would have had to have worn reading glasses as well so I quickly gave up on the idea.
The vision lens was a lot stiffer than what I was used to, not to mention a little bigger.
It took a couple of lals to get it beneath my lids and into a position where it would not pop back out again.  At Desmosa’s recommendation, I kept that left eye closed, just to be sure it would stay in.
The apprehension that I had been feeling, had dissipated somewhat due to all the faffing about.  Once I was sat there with a piece of technology literally covering my eyeball, whilst an advanced A.I. set it up to show me the future, the nerves began to creep back in.
“Okay,” Desmosa spoke, evidently ready, “the lens may warm up a little to begin with, but that’s completely normal.  You can view the event from either your point of view or from the third person, like an out of body experience.  To switch between the two you only have to think it.”
A thought occurred to me, considering how serious she was being about it, the accuracy rating must have been pretty high.  “Can I just ask,” my voice sounded as though I was in a car traveling over multiple, small speed bumps, “how accurate is it, what you saw?”
She looked straight at me, before dropping her eyes back to her tablet, “it is eighty-seven point three nine two percent accurate.”
My breath caught in my throat.
I was somehow able to speak, “that’s high, isn’t it, I thought anything more than eighty-something percent was unusual.”
“That’s true,” she refused to pull her gaze up from the screen, “it’s very rare, less than one percent of these predictions are more than eighty-five percent accurate.  That’s the reason I am able to let you see it first hand, you have the right to see for yourself, according to my practice’s guidelines.”
“Right,” I searched for more words to say, questions to ask, yet none would form in my mind or my mouth.
“Sorry,” she wore an embarrassed look on her face, “I will have to come close again, to allow my nanobots to directly link to yours.”
“Okay,” I nodded and closed my right eye.
I could feel her move closer to me, her breath merging with my own as she brought her lips close to mine.  A floral scent reached my senses in the split second before she pulled back.
The darkness of the back of my eyelids began to fade.
The light that appeared indicated that I was inside, under artificial lighting.
I took myself into the third person view, feeling very much like a spirit that had escaped its corporal host.
The room was filled with people, the majority of which were human, however there were a few other beings there.  More people stretched out through a nearby door to where hundreds more were stood in a crowd.
It looked as though the whole of humanity were with me, watching and waiting for something to happen.
Directly next to me were Phillip, Ishni, Silvia, Phoebe, Jennifer and Evie Freeman, another cinema veteran, as well as Gheetoh, Culpin and a hlorsiené I did not recognize.
Beyond them were their families; partners, sons, daughters, parents.  Then were people I knew well, the further away, the less I knew of them.
A human face that I did not recognizer stood just beside Evie, holding her hand.
There was something in front of me, something unstable, something dangerous.
I watched myself begin to move forwards.
Phillip stopped me, pulling me towards himself and away from the danger.
We kissed.
It was a gesture of goodbye; painful and desperate.
A kiss that we knew would be our last.
He held my head in his hands, tears were spilling from both of our eyes.
I was the one to pull away, my mouth moving, speaking.
I did not need to be able to read lips to know that I was telling him how much I loved him.
His mouth was spelling out the same.
I pried myself away from his grip yet he tried to keep the contact between us.  Only Ishni, placing his wing over his shoulder, kept him from reaching me.
There were moist eyes everywhere I looked.
Faces twisted in regretful sorrow.
I looked to Phoebe, to Sylvia, to Jennifer, to Evie.
I turned away from them, to face the something.
In one swift movement, I placed both of my hands upon it, my body went rigid and everything went black.
I tried to open my eyes, only to discover that my left eyelid would not budge.  The lens, which had been noticeably warm throughout had begun to heat up.
My hands flew to eye, fingers fumbling to force my lids apart.
I uttered a few small cries of alarm which quickly turned to cries of pain as I could feel the heat begin to sear my eyeball.
The more I pulled at my lids, the more pain I felt, although I suspect that the pain would have increased even if I had left them alone.
Whatever the case, they would not open.
I had lost all awareness of Desmosa almost immediately.
She made her presence known all of a sudden as she grabbed my head, pushing it forcefully backwards and stabbing something small and sharp into the space between the bridge on my nose and my eye socket.
Without hesitating or heeding my screams, she reached for something else and jammed it into the side of my neck.
It took three heart beats for the sedative to knock me out.