A light flashed. Jamie looked up at the screen.
“Okay, Jamie,” said Joshua Ford. “Try gripping the egg again with your left hand. I’ve tweaked some settings on my end.”
Jamie read the subtitles on the screen. “Okay.” The diodes on her arm turned blue as she reached from the egg. “Almost…” Jamie lightly gripped the egg and CRACK! The egg shattered in her hand.
Jamie took a shuddered breath as she tried to keep herself from crying. She’d broken two dozen eggs during their testing that day and three dozen the day before that.
“This shouldn’t be so hard,” she whimpered, sitting back on her stool. Her body didn’t feel like her own anymore. If she had been able to relearn how to walk on the T.I.M.E. prosthetic leg after the explosion, she should be able to regain the use of her hands. The two cybernetic implants in her arms restored feeling, but they also gave her enhanced strength. She felt like a giant trying to launder tissue paper.
“It’s okay, Jamie,” comforted Joshua. “You’ve gone through a traumatic experience. You are the first human to receive these types of enhancements. There’s going to be a learning curve.”
Jamie laughed dryly. “Yeah, a learning curve.” She pointed to her ears. The explosion had left her partially deaf in her right ear and completely deaf in her left ear. She was scheduled later that day for a procedure to active and fine-tune her bionic ear. Joshua had promised it would completely restore and improve her hearing. “What about my ears? I feel like a lab rat.”
“You just have to have a little faith…”
Another light flashed, alerting Jamie that someone was outside of her lab. “I got to go, Joshua. Someone is at the door.”
“Alrighty,” he replied. “Call me later, and we can keep testing the enhancements.”
“Okay, bye Joshua.” Jamie peeled off the diode stickers as she shuffled to the door of her workshop.
“Hi Daddy.”
“Hi sweet girl,” he signed. “How are you doing?”
“Fine,” she signed back. “We’ve been testing my grip strength again today.”
Cole looked at the faint, fingerprint indentions on the doorknob. “How’s that coming?”
“It shouldn’t be this hard,” she voiced. “I’m usually can learn things just like that,” Jamie snapped her fingers. “But, for some reason I can’t learn how to grab things.”
“It’s just takes practice,” he reminded her. “It took you time when you were a baby to learn your own strength; it’s going to take you time to learn your strength again now.”
Jamie smiled and signed, “why are you so smart?”
“Because I’m your pa. It’s part of my job.”