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"Okay...before I take another step, tell me what's dangerous and what's not."
Ada stood at the linoleum shore of a cord and cable sea. Wires stuck out of every port of a hodgepodge of electronics, some bundled together in a feeble attempt at organization, others simply left to the forces of fate to lead them into whatever knots the pile formed. And in the middle of it all, on his swivel chair island, was Ian. He was holding some sort of small electronic box with a red button on top, mismatched plastic panels on the sides held together by duct tape, its own wires sprouting out from one end and disappearing into the pile.
"W-well, it should all be safe!" he said with a nervous chuckle and his eternally-sheepish grin. "I mean. I made sure all the wires weren't damaged, at least. It...hasn't caught fire yet! Or killed the power! That's good, right?"
"Yet."
Ian nodded. "Yet. Come on. I gotta show you this. Just watch your step..."
Ada pursed her lips, but she tiptoed forward anyway, wobbling a little as she tried to find places to step to without tripping. Ian scooted back a little in his chair, giving her just enough room to put both feet on solid ground in the clearing around his desk, half-sitting on the table's surface. "So this is that new prototype rhythm defibrillator thing that you've been working on?"
"Heavy emphasis on the 'prototype' part, but yes!" Ian shifted some windows around on his desktop, pulling up his code and hitting the “Run” button. “Most of all this fancy setup stuff is for enabling remote operations, but the core functionality’s pretty simple,” he continued, gesturing at the tangle of machine things on his floor.
After a couple seconds, Ian’s browser opened up, a new tab displaying something resembling an ECG, a stick figure on one end and a little heart on the other. A mild stock music track began to drift out of the computer's speakers. Ian set the button down in his lap and rested a finger over it as a pulse began to slide down the ECG, a bass drum thump sounding with every beat. "So all you gotta do—" Ian muttered as he hit the beat towards the end of the line. "—is hit on beat seven. There's a lot of other variants and stuff but—" Another hit. "—that's really the heart of it. Erm—" Another hit. "No pun intended."
Ada let out an amused huff. "So this'll let us usher in a whole new era of telemedicine, huh?"
"N-not really. It's basically just a spot treatment. Plus it's just for cardiac issues. The main boon of it is that if people are having heart problems, we can have someone remote treat them instead of us in person. Uh. Well. Non-life-threatening stuff, I mean."
Ada pursed her lips. "...We still have to assess them ourselves, right?"
Ian's brow raised. "Oh, oh yeah, of course! We still have to give the okay on the remote procedure and everything."
Ada let out a hum as she stared distantly at the display. She had her doubts. She'd always had them, ever since Ian started brainstorming this project several months ago. The idea of remote care wasn't exactly bad on principle. All in all, it could do a lot of good. Patients who were out in rural places with almost no healthcare infrastructure, staff in crowded hospitals that had to turn people away since they only had so much space and manpower on hand... having some kind of remote care for even the most mild issues could ease a lot of burden.
But no matter how much Ada told herself that, she couldn't stop the lingering doubts at the edge of her mind. A machine alone could only do so much to truly care for a patient. Even if it was another human's face behind the screen, they still weren't really there. No spontaneous check-ins, no physical gestures of comfort or empathy in stressful times...only a prescribed promise that someone out there did actually care about helping you.
And of course, whenever it came to anything technological that could increase efficiency, soon after came the money talks. And then the personnel talks. And finally, the "restructuring."
"Ada?"
She blinked. Glancing over to the side, she saw Ian looking back at her, holding the button out to her with a hint of concern lining his face.
"O-oh, sorry," she stammered. "Spaced out for a sec. What, uh, what were you saying...?"
"I-I was asking if you wanted to try."
"Oh. Sure." Ada took the button out of Ian's hands. It was a clunky thing. No matter how she placed her hands on it, it felt bulky and uncomfortable to hold.
"That's not the final design, hopefully," Ian said with a sheepish chuckle. "Should be a lot more compact when we actually roll it out."
He pressed something on his keyboard, and the simulated pulse started up again. Ada watched as it walked its way down the ECG line, towards the yellow segment of the line that indicated where she needed to hit...
...and whiffed it. LATE +233ms, flashed a notification in the top left corner.
Ada grit her teeth. Stay calm, she told herself. Next pulse on the way.
Another whiff. LATE +176ms.
LATE +189ms.
EARLY -122ms.
"Ada..." Ian said, trying to cut in as gently as he could.
"I can't see these cues..." Ada hissed.
Ian reached across his desk and turned the volume up. "It's all in the rhythm. Focus more on what you hear."
Ada took a deep breath as another round began. Calm down. Feel the beat. She’d never had any real musical experience before. How did musicians do this all the time?
Her foot began to tap along to the beat. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, she mouthed.
OK -50ms.
OK +30ms.
OK +15ms.
"There you go..." Ian mumbled, watching the screen just as intently as her.
EARLY -103ms.
"Ack!" Ada flinched.
"Hey, not too bad," Ian said. "Mistakes happen."
"I mean...if it was someone's heart hooked up to this, I'd say that mistakes do matter," said Ada with a grimace. "Can I do another? I wanna get this right."
Ian's eyes flickered around as he wrung his hands. "W-well, the thing is...I think it's better if maybe we move on to the variants? We can always practice this case, but it's basically the most ideal scenario. No problems. So...basically not at all what we'll really be seeing out there."
So this was supposed to be easy mode? Ada let out an uncertain hum. "Yeah, that...makes sense. What else, then?"
And so they went down the entire list that Ian had scribbled down in his notes. Skipped beats. Swung beats. Skipped and swung beats. Multiple lines at once. Then onto different kinds of pulses that had nothing to do with sevens at all. SVT beats. MAT beats. Irregular time signatures. Tuples. Held beats. An entire introductory music theory course compressed into a button and a screen.
Each time, Ian went first, flawlessly demoing the beat pattern on another button of his, which looked more like just a spring with a pad of duct tape over the top (an even earlier version of the button, he explained. He only used it for testing purposes, since its timing was apparently far less forgiving than the one in Ada's hands). Then Ada went, stumbling through everything, always one eye on the stern timing notification in the top left. Some patterns were a lot easier than others. Anything that was a regular, square beat was fine. It got messy once uneven beats or numbers other than seven got involved.
"It's okay if you don't get it at first!" Ian assured her for the tenth time once she had fumbled through one last round of held beats. "If it was easy, the whole world would be using it by now."
Ada set the button down on the desk with a sigh. Her head was spinning. Or swinging, rather. Swinging in triplet form. "Still. I-I need practice. When do you think we're gonna roll this out for patients?"
"Not sure," Ian said, a hand on his chin. "Still have a lot of bugs to iron out. By the end of the year, maybe? And that's being optimistic."
Two months. They were going to roll this out in two months and Ada could barely keep a beat to save someone's life.
"...Hey, it's okay," murmured Ian, seeing the doubt still clouding Ada's face. "We still have time. You can get plenty of practice in before then. You'll be fine."
Ada stared down at the button. "...Yeah. Just need more practice."
Over the weeks that followed, during the fleeting moments of respite when they had no patients to attend to, Ada and Ian practiced. Well, Ada practiced. Ian was just there to help Ada get her bearings. She knew all the practice tracks by heart now. Even when she was home, she could still hear them in her head. She'd even find her fingers tapping along to any beat, whether that be the familiar tunes she put on while she did chores, or the music over the tinny speakers in the grocery store. Sevens, sevens, sevens.
She was getting better as time went on, she could feel it. But at the same time, with every missed beat, she still felt like there was just something missing. Was she really getting these beats, or was she just working off muscle memory based on all the trial and error that came before? It was supposed to be all about what she heard, all about the music, but there were some times where she swore she wasn't even hearing the music at all. She was just so concentrated on the beats and the ECG that it simply was not registering in her brain.
At the end of another go at Ian's Varied Pulse Types Training Course #2 with another mediocre hit/miss ratio, Ada groaned.
"Little better than last time," Ian said with a sympathetic half-smile.
"Still not good enough to pass," Ada grumbled.
The smile faded from Ian's face, and he wrung his hands again in that antsy manner of his. He'd been doing that more often during their practice sessions, Ada noticed. She glanced over at him before letting out another sigh. Whenever Ian got worried like this, he'd almost never say it aloud, but it would be written all over his face.
"Listen..." she said, one hand clenching her hair. "It's not like I don't have faith in this. You put so much work into it. And it'll help a lot of people, I know it! But..." She looked around at the remote defibrillator setup, getting cleaner and more refined by the day. "...I just can't get it. There's just...something missing with how I'm doing it, but for the life of me, I can't figure it out!"
"Ada..." Ian started, before he abruptly stopped, eyes nervously bouncing around as he thought about what he wanted to say. "...It's okay, I swear. The Rhythm Doctor system's still effective even if you mess up a beat or two. If it had to be perfect in order to work, there'd be no reason to make it! It just wouldn't be worth it."
"Ian, at this rate, putting a patient in my hands with this has a 50/50 chance of not helping them at all! Harming them, even!" She jabbed a finger towards the screen, the massive C+ in the center only hammering home her poor performance. "I don't even care about perfection right now, I'm just trying to get a passing score!" It felt like she was in uni all over again.
Ian was silent, face twisted into a helpless and guilty-looking expression.
Ada sighed for what felt like the hundredth time that afternoon. "I... We don't know how this'll affect things once we start using it for real," she muttered. "Obviously, it won't replace everything, but if it has to be a regular thing we do like Edega wants..."
Ian still couldn't muster a reply. The rumble of the boiler and the hiss of the air vents filled the silence between them.
But finally, Ian reached out and took the button from Ada's hands. "Give...give me some time."
Ada blinked. "Huh?"
Ian set the button down on the desk and opened up his code. "I'll figure something out. Shouldn't take me too long."
Ada felt her stomach twist. "Wh— Ian, it's...it's really not that big a deal. You shouldn't have to—"
Ian shook his head. "It's really not that bad," he said, voice growing more distant as he dove back into the endless lines of text. "I think I even know where exactly to look..."
After a good deal of scrolling and switching files, Ian began typing, his back slowly starting to hunch forward like it usually did when he was super focused on his work or a game. Ada had no idea what he was writing or even how to read any of the stuff around it. She frowned, glancing at the clock on the wall nearby. This didn't look like a quick fix.
She spoke up after a few moments. "I, uh...I think I need to go. Gotta get back to the patients."
"Hm?" Ian's eyes widened and his fingers paused. "Oh yeah, no problem. Don't let me keep you."
"Um...yeah. See you later, I guess."
With one last brief, uncertain glance at Ian, Ada left the basement. At least she had plenty of patients to occupy herself with to distract her from the uneasy feeling in her gut.
A few days later, Ian ushered Ada back into his office.
"So here's what I did. It should help!" From behind a stack of papers and books on his desk, he pulled out a new button gizmo. It was smaller than the prototype button that Ada had been using for practice...overall. There was no bulky casing beneath it, and there were far fewer wires sticking out from it. But the button itself was...comically large. At least three times the size of the other button. Bright cherry-red, too, like an absurd self-destruct button for a space ship in a tacky old sci-fi film.
Ada stared at it for a moment. Then she rummaged around in her pocket and pulled out her clown nose, sticking it on and giving it a honk, her face flat all the while.
Ian let out a confounded snort before bursting out laughing. "W-wh-what?!"
“I mean…big, shiny red button. Sue me for seeing a little resemblance,” Ada chuckled as she honked her nose again.
Ian cut off the last of his laughter with a cough. “Uh…no, Ada. As you can see, this is a very serious and legit medical apparatus,” he said, holding it up with a little flourish.
"It looks like a kid's toy."
"Maybe…that's 'cause I may or may not have repurposed an old kid's toy part for it?" Ian said, scratching the back of his head.
Ada snorted. "Ian...which little kid did you steal from?"
"I-it was already broken! One of my cousins was just clearing out her old stuff!" Ian exclaimed. "I picked it 'cause I need to distinguish these buttons somehow! And the push-feel on this button's surprisingly good for a kid's toy, I mean..."
“Will a little voice pop up when I press it and say ‘Cow goes moo’ or something?” Ada couldn’t help but grin, stifling a bit of laughter.
“A-Ada!” A bit of an embarrassed flush crept up Ian's face. “W-whatever, whatever! What's important is that it'll help! I managed to stretch the timing frame for hits a bit, so it's easier to get a valid hit."
Ada put her clown nose away. Silly time over. "Does it affect the defibrillator? Like, does it make it less effective or something?"
"Nope. I basically just trial-and-error'ed it a ton to figure how much leeway I can get with the timing window. Managed to add a few dozen milliseconds on each side."
"Doesn't sound like a lot."
"Trust me, when it comes to fractions of a beat, it counts." He queued up the practice program once again and handed the button to Ada. "Give it a shot."
And so began another round of those all-too-familiar tracks. And to her surprise, Ada found that the big button...worked. Sure, she was still stumbling over some of the more complicated patterns (God, she could never get held beats scooping up regular beats), and her fingers still twitched and panicked sometimes with sudden beats, but she was hitting more of them now. Her scores used to be split down the middle with Bs and Cs, with the occasional A if all the stars aligned, but now it was moving up towards a solid B average. She could even appreciate how the hits synced up with the music a little now, too.
When the last track faded out with a proud B+ blazoned on the screen, all Ada could say was, "Huh."
Ian smiled. "See? Still might need some practice, but this should make things a bit easier, at least."
Ada tilted the button in her hand, giving it a once over. "Yeah, it...it should. Perfect training tool, too. If...or when...we need to onboard somebody to the Rhythm Doctor program, we can set them up with this if they have trouble with all the rhythm stuff."
Ian's brow raised. "Oh! Yeah, that...that too, I guess."
Ada frowned. "Was...that not the point?"
Ian's eyes darted away, fingers nervously knitting together in his lap. "I mean, I...made it for you, really. B-but you make a good point!"
Now Ada's brow flew up. "O...oh..." she murmured. "I...well...thank you, then." A soft smile lifted the corner of her mouth.
"Yeah, n-no problem." Ian was still too nervous to look Ada in the eye. "I just— You're—erm. I guess...I just didn't want you to feel like all this rhythm stuff's out of your control. You're picking it up quicker than I thought, seriously."
"Well, I dunno about that, but..." Ada shrugged. "I think...at the end of the day, if this'll help people, then I want to be a part of it. Or at the very least...I want to try. I still... There's still a lot of things we don't know. But...even so."
Ian let out a quiet hum and a faint nod. After a breath of silence, he suddenly said, "Um. S-so...you can go ahead and keep this one." He turned in his swivel chair to swiftly unplug the button from his computer. "You can just plug it into the system whenever you need to use it. No extra setup or anything."
Ada snorted, pulling her clown nose out again and holding it out to him. "Great! Swapsies, then," she said as she honked it with a squeeze of her hand.
"E-enough with the nose already!" Ian floundered, swatting her hand away. Even so...he was smiling.
Ada laughed as she finally took the button, slipping it and the nose into her pocket. Ian raised an eyebrow as she did.
"You sure you wanna do that?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Keep them in the same pocket."
Ada snorted again. "What, you worried that I'll whip out the button one day and smack my nose with it?"
"After that 'fight' you got into that one time in the park, I'd say anything's possible."
"...Shut up."