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As Summer went back to her bedroom, trying to get her mind back to the idea of sleeping instead of being on alert, she thought back to what Doctor K had said after the whole emergency that night with Dillon. It said something, Summer thought, about Doctor K and the way she looked at things.
Summer didn't know the woman all that well, because Doctor K didn't precisely talk about herself and her past, and she didn't talk to the Rangers unless it was job-related. She had a feeling that Doctor K just couldn't deal with them on a personal level, which was why she used their titles instead of their names, as if using their names would hurt her in some fundamental way.
Or maybe it was that she just didn't know how to deal with them in a personal way. After all, while she'd figured out that Summer was pondering her relationships with Scott and Dillon, she seemed not to be able to figure out later that Summer's insistence of calling Dillon by his name had nothing to do with love or relationships or anything like that.
It had to do with Doctor K, her insistence of using their titles, and how that dehumanized Dillon. Dillon might have been a hybrid, part mechanical, but he was a person, and treating him like he was just a piece of machinery… well, it was more important than ever to treat him like he was a human.
But Doctor K didn't really understand that, like she'd missed some important piece of socialization, or lacked a certain bit of empathy. She thought in statistics, in results, in tests, not in people. As Ziggy had said once in frustration to what he probably thought was an empty garage, "I'm not a piece of equipment, I'm a free man! Okay, not really."
They weren't pieces of equipment, or data to be analyzed. They weren't something that Doctor K could deal with easily. Summer wished she could make the woman understand, but she had no clue how to, and she didn't know if anybody could.