The peaceful environment of that place was fascinating Vikram, giving him somewhat of a safe vibe. But still, he was uncertain about his safety and was remembering his old life.

  At that time his eyes were almost overloaded with tears of pain and sorrow, but before he could let go of any of that, he saw a child right next to his bed who wasn’t much older than him. That boy was crying for the eighth time today, and the nurses were trying their best to stop his tears.

  “It is pretty hard to accept what you’ve lost, isn’t it?” the same nurse that was near Vikram when he woke up came and said to him.

  The nurse had brought some medicines and water for Vikram to ingest. Vikram hesitated a bit to take these, but looking at the nurse’s tired face, he decided not to give her more trouble. The medicines he took were bitter; he wanted to vomit them, but he couldn’t.

  “I know it’s hard to take them, but you still did it without even doubting us. Thank you for that,” the nurse expressed.

  “No, it’s alright, I have to take these for me to heal,” Vikram replied. “But, as for the question you asked me earlier. Yes, it is really hard to accept what you’ve lost. Did you ever lose something like that?” he questioned.

  “No, I didn’t,” she replied. “In all these years of my job, I’ve dealt with a lot of persons like you who faced great psychological trauma. I asked this question to most of them, but only a few replied in words.”

  “So, have all the people who came here faced the same experience as me?” Vikram questioned again.

  “Mostly, but not always,” she replied. “Mainly a person becomes a tracker because of their past trauma or because of a specific situation and by genetic engineering. There are rare cases in which people become trackers in normal circumstances. All the people around you, except for the nurses, are trackers—people like you who are helped by the ‘World Trackers Academic Association’, in short, WTAA, which is a branch of the ‘Global Calamity Suppression League,’ GCSL. You're currently in an academy of WTAA at the state capital of the Khandarath region, ‘Langhad’.”

  “GCSL… Now it’s getting clearer,” Vikram said, his voice shaking a bit. “They helped us at the time of food scarcity; every week they distributed vegetables and fruits at our village. They really helped us at times, but still, I didn’t know anything about these trackers nor about the whole WTAA organization you said. My mother never told me about that; even my friends didn’t know about it. Why did they hide the truth? Maybe they didn’t know about this at all?”

  Then the nurse calmly said, “You know, most parents intentionally didn’t tell their children about it. Because if they do, it will become a dream of theirs, and that is what parents don’t want because most of the trackers die in their expeditions, which are very risky; only a few of them survive annually. I am myself an example of this; I didn’t know about it until I reached my adult age. And even after then, my parents refused to let me work with the organization. But alas, I am here helping these poor souls.”

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  “So is that the reason you didn’t tell me about them earlier, Maa? Is that why?” Vikram was thinking inside of his head about the thing the nurse said.

  “OH! I almost forgot what I came here for,” the nurse exclaimed. “We need to do a health examination of your health. For that, you need to depart after some time to the examination center at the academy. So now, do you feel anything weird or uncomfortable, or pain in any non-visible body parts?”

  Vikram then answered the nurse, “Yeah, I always feel dizzy at times, and my chest and throat ache too. And my eyes… my eyes now can only sense the color gold. I—I can’t see any other color than that. I can now also sense some kind of energy in people, and can also sense where it focuses the most. It’s also like my eyes can sense the heat in other people, and I can also now see things I wasn’t meant to see…”

  The nurse was a bit surprised after hearing this. She said, “Yeah, now you can sense how much ‘Aura’ people have in them because you are a tracker now. But your eyes… it is like they are shining right now. The pupil—the golden outlines surrounding a giant black void at the center of your eyes. It’s like they are special. It isn’t normal for a person to be colorblind and see only a specific color and sense it that accurately.”

  She then returned to her casual mood and said, “Anyways, the staff will also examine your eyes today. They will surely find out what happened to them.”

  The nurse then turned back to leave the room, but before she could, Vikram asked, “Just one last question, please.”

  The nurse kindly said, “Yes, please.”

  “Who was the person who saved me in my village?” he asked.

  Then the nurse replied, “I don’t actually know who saved you. But I heard rumors from some academy teachers that you were saved by one of the globally top-ranked trackers, ‘Mr. Christopher Clementine,’ who is also debated to be the world’s strongest tracker.”

  “Okay, thank you, Ms. Nurse,” Vikram thanked her.

  “No problem at all; it’s also my job to clear the doubts in my patient’s mind,” she said and left the room.

  Now some doubts in Vikram’s head were cleared, but still, he had many things going on in his head, mostly about his eyes, the checkup, and about where he should go next or what he should do now.

  The time quickly passed by his thoughts. Then a nurse came to call Vikram for his health checkup.

  “Mr. Vikram, it’s time for your health checkup,” that nurse said.

  Vikram at that time was thinking, I couldn’t even stand on my feet right now, and they didn’t even bring a wheelchair for me—

  Then suddenly the bed he was resting on started moving on its own and left the room. He then realized that the bed was powered by AI to move automatically.

  He saw the doctors strolling through the corridors and other patients like him were also being carried on these automatic beds.

  The doctors he saw were equipped with advanced equipment; not only them, but the whole hospital had really advanced technology that he had never before seen in his entire life. He had just heard the word "AI" once when he was in his village school, but now he was seeing it for the first time and seeing it everywhere.

  Then the bed reached a door on which “Checkup room” was written. That door also automatically opened, and inside was a team of four doctors waiting at the table for their next patient.

  Vikram had always been scared of doctors since his childhood, and he still was unsure whether to really trust the staff or not. His hands were sweaty at that time and he was really being impatient to know the answers.

  But the question still lingers: “Is the check up worth it?”

  To be continued…

  Is it going well?