Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

“No, I’m the only one going off a cliff.”

  The intake center was a modern sweep of glass overlooking a frozen lake. Jake and his father asked to tour the warehousing facility before Jake began his procedure. The warehouse, an enormous, squat, brown building, stood a short distance away in the snowy woods. They were advised to keep their coats on as they toured the cavernous space, which was kept at approximately zero degrees Fahrenheit. The racks of metal canisters, inside each of which was a frozen human body—or a space waiting to be occupied by a frozen human body—reached all the way to the ceiling, in every direction. Their tour guide, a charming, middle-aged woman in a lab coat, stopped now and then to point out a particularly interesting specimen.

  “This is a great-grandfather from Germany,” she told them, placing a hand on a nearby canister and reading the occupant’s details off the display. “He will be reanimated when life-extension protocols are able to give him at least twenty more years of life. And here, this is one of our youngest clients. She’s an eight-year-old girl with an inoperable brain tumor. On our brain cancer list, of course. We have a projected timeline of when every sort of cancer should be cured. We can only make educated guesses, naturally, but there are so many reasons to be hopeful after the advances of the past decade. Oh, and here, this girl is fifteen years old, only a bit younger than you. Neurological disease.”

  Jake touched one of the metal canisters on the lowest shelf. I won’t even know I’m in there, he thought. I will wake up as if no time has passed. Like magic.

  An hour later, Jake was on an operating table, with a heated blanket over his naked body. The tubes of his IV snaked away to the hissing machine at his left. Through the window of the operating theater, his father was visible, watching him with a hopeful expression—no, not hopeful. Desperate. Of course, they were all desperate. No one came here who wasn’t. As he looked through the glass at his father, Jake felt his throat closing up. He was going to cry. He did not want to die crying. He did not want to die at all….

  “Are you ready?” the anesthesiologist asked gently.

  The tears were just behind Jake’s eyes, making them sting.

  He nodded his head. “I’m ready.”

  A moment later, the anesthetic had begun. He felt it first as a strange taste at the back of his throat and an itch along the artery of his left arm. Then he was easing downward, away from the operating room, away from the doctor. He thought of all the girls he had slept with, all the alcohol he had drunk, all the days spent on the beach, all the early mornings in the water, the late nights by bonfires, the lazy Saturday mornings in bed. All these were receding from him. They were becoming meaningless, a life lived by someone else. He should have been nicer to those girls. Dahlia. He had liked her. He should have shown it.

  He was asleep now, he supposed. There was no pain, yet other sensations still existed. Something cold and antiseptic and impersonal flowed through his veins. It was, he knew, the cryoprotectant that would keep his cells from forming ice crystals. Human antifreeze. When it reached his mouth, he found, with his last perception of taste, that the cryoprotectant had the flavor of novocaine and wet dog. And then he was in blackness with no further sense of anything. He slept not the sleep of the dead, but the sleep of the waiting.

  8. TRAIN

  “Shit,” Yulia said, but whether in response to the story or to something else, was not immediately clear.

  She elbowed Jake and he followed her gaze. An old man was pointing at Kostya. When he caught Jake looking, his eyes flicked away, and then the man grabbed the sleeve of another old man and together they shuffled off into the crowd.

  “Shit,” Yulia said again, nodding at Kostya.

  Kostya’s coat collar was turned down, and his scarf had worked its way up his neck. The seam between his reskinned skull and the artificial flesh of his neck was, in the bright lights, plain for anyone to see.

  Yulia quickly removed Kostya’s scarf and tied it around her own neck, and then she turned up his collar until it touched his chin. For good measure she switched her hat for his.

  Commuters were swarming about the platform as their train at last glided to a halt. The Russian language swelled around them from the mouths of everyone in the crowd. Was it Jake’s imagination that he heard the word katorzhnik, “convict,” floating toward him?

  “Shit,” he whispered.

  With a second glance, they observed the old men approaching the knot of policemen who were lounging near the station end of the platform.

  “Old bastards!” Yulia hissed.

  She moved them farther down the platform, retrieving their tickets from her pocket as the doors all along the train slid open. Yulia pushed Jake and Kostya ahead of her onto the nearest carriage amid the crush of other passengers. Outside, the old man was pointing a shaking finger at the train, saying, “Katorzhnik, katorzhnik!” with four policemen in tow.

  “Kostya,” Jake whispered, nudging him discreetly. A pair of old-fashioned reading glasses was sticking out of the pocket of an elderly woman’s jacket.

  With a quick motion, Kostya took the glasses and slipped them onto his own face. He had no ears to hold them, but the arms lodged snugly beneath his hat. Yulia pushed him into a seat and shoved a small paper book into his hands. She and Jake took seats across the aisle.

  The police had entered the car with the old man.

  “Young fellow in a pink scarf,” the man was saying as he squinted at the passengers.

  Jake risked a look at Kostya. With the glasses and the book, he appeared to be nothing more than a cold student eager for the train doors to close. The old man and the officers walked right past Kostya and continued on into the next car without a backward glance.

  In minutes, the train began to move.

  Yulia leaned close to Jake and asked, “You really thought you would wake up?”

  Jake shrugged.

  9. WAKE

  A week, a year, a decade, or a lifetime later—however long it was, Jake experienced only the passing of a single moment—Jake was waking to screams and echoes and bright lights. Human cries were mixed up with a hideous cacophony of other noises—the shriek of bone saws, the whine of drills, the sough of vacuums, the hiss of electrical sparks. The smells came in waves, creating a brew of coppery blood, burning meat, metal, smoke, solder, vomit.

  There was pressure. Pressure. He could feel his legs and arms, because of the pressure being exerted upon them. Except it was not only pressure; it was becoming something else.

  Jake opened his eyes as he recognized the sensation: Pain! Holy fucking shit, there is so much pain!

  He screamed, and he was screaming into a blurry world, because his eyes were still half asleep. A moment later, his pupils recalled how to focus, and his surroundings jumped into view. He was strapped to a bed, a bed like the one he’d been in when he fell asleep, but this was not the same place. He had gone to sleep in the sterile intake center, and he had woken up in a slasher movie. Men were standing over him in spattered lab coats, wearing full face shields. And they were piercing him with needles and cutting him to pieces.

  He screamed again.

  “Rak vylechen— Chyort voz’mi!” the man by Jake’s head snapped impatiently. “Ty smotrish smes’? Ili ty spish’?” Jake spoke no Russian then, but later, when he knew the language, he would recall with perfect clarity that the man had said: Cancer is cured— Dammit! Are you watching the mixture? Or are you asleep?

  Jake tried to struggle, but he was cinched firmly in place. Another needle stab in his shoulder, and then the icy sensation as the syringe emptied into him. Blessedly, the pain lessened, but he could still see everything. They were hacking apart his legs, stripping away the feet, the skin, as if he were a pig in a slaughterhouse. Two men were wrestling with an enormous machine that towered over them, attaching tubes to Jake’s remaining bones.
One tube was hooked onto the brilliant white of Jake’s newly cut thigh bone, which quickly aged, darkened, thickened, and began to bend as the machine roared. They were coating his bones with metal.

  This was the warehouse, he dimly realized. He was in the warehouse he and his father had toured; he was in the room where his metal canister had been laid to rest. Towering space, lost in darkness above him; huge, glaring lights bathing him in whiteness; puffs of steam around the men’s visors, because the air was almost as cold as it had been when Jake visited that first time. In every direction were groups of men like the one huddled around Jake, tearing people apart, remaking their bones. A very old man lay on a nearby table, his mouth open to say something to the men busily dissecting him. No words came. He could only stare at what was left of himself.

  They were beginning on Jake’s arms. When his right hand was sawed off, Jake screamed again, just before he fainted.

  * * *

  A week full of momentary flashes:

  Jake was standing on new legs, skeletal legs that contained his remnant limbs somewhere inside their metal framework of bones. A medic stood in front of him, a flashlight in one of her hands and a computer tool wrapped around the other.

  “Right leg,” she ordered, in her rudimentary English. “Left leg. Right leg.”

  Jake could move the new legs. It had taken him a few minutes to get the hang of it, but no more than that. His own nerves had been tied into them in some way. There was no room for horror or confusion in this place. Things simply were. He obediently lifted one leg and then the other.

  “Arms,” she ordered.

  He was blinded by the woman’s flashlight and by the strong lights above.

  “Narrow eyes,” she ordered. “Will adjust.”

  He tried what she said, squinting at the bright lights. Immediately his eyes did something they had never done before—they changed the way he saw the light, muted it, while allowing him to see into dark areas of the room as well. They had changed his eyes, which perhaps explained why his entire head felt as though it were on fire.

  He peered at the distant shadows on the other side of the warehouse, able to make out every detail. The metal capsules in which they had all been frozen were stacked, empty now, along the back wall. The towering racks that had once held the capsules were being taken apart and removed by a loading bay. The endless expanse of the warehouse floor was covered in blood and chunks of flesh and other, less identifiable fluids and objects. Jake could still smell some of the odors in the air, but his olfactory sense had been altered, turned down. His hearing, on the other hand, was acute. A cleaning crew was slowly creeping across the floor with hoses, washing everything into drains, and the sluice of water carried clearly to his ears.

  “Arms!” the woman reminded him.

  He flexed his arms one after another.

  After a long series of simple motions, the medic nodded. “Enough,” she told him. The tool wrapped around her left hand snaked forward, hooked into a receptacle beneath his crystal-metallic ribs. Behind those ribs were the scraps of his old body. A wash of bliss as an opioid was unloaded into his new circulatory system. Then the whir of tiny drills and dozens of small tools that pricked and sliced and twisted, the sensations they created muted by the drugs, but still discernible, as she made subtle adjustments to his new body.

  * * *

  Jake in a group of ten, following the motions of another medic who stood facing them. The young man squatted, jumped up, rotated in place. His motions were copied by the ten new…what were they? People? Machines? Every part of Jake hurt, with a fiery ache radiating inward from the new metal and outward from his brain and heart.

  The medic called out the Russian word for each action, and the ten people-machines repeated it aloud. Their voices were still their voices, each one individual. Jake was supposed to keep his eyes on the leader, but when he risked a look at the others, he saw what he himself must look like: human in form, but remade from dark, crystalline metal, ribs, leg bones, arm bones, collarbones, all prominent. Inside the metallic rib cage was what remained of each person’s human organs, held together by the pink, pulpy vestiges of a torso.

  And the faces…the faces were somehow both identical and unique. They were like masks, because the part that appeared to be skin only covered the front of the head, back to about where the ears should be (but no longer were). And still…each face was distinct. They all looked young, or perhaps ageless was a better word, smooth, clear-eyed, yet the features of each face were different. They were, Jake hoped, the personal features that had been on their real faces before they’d been modified, but since there were no mirrors in the warehouse, it was impossible to study himself to know for sure.

  “Leap and lunge left and touch the floor and leap again,” the young man ordered in Russian, translating by his actions.

  Jake followed along with everyone else, his new body mastering every motion with ease.

  * * *

  A severe woman in a lab coat gestured at Jake and said in Russian, “Hit him!”

  Jake was standing in front of a male medic and the woman was ordering him to strike him.

  “Yes, hit him!” the woman repeated sharply, in English this time, when Jake showed reluctance.

  Days and days had passed since he’d woken up, as far as Jake could tell, though he was knocked unconscious so regularly it was difficult to sense the passing of time.

  “Do it now,” the woman said firmly.

  Jake’s victim appeared entirely untroubled by the order, so Jake struck the man with his right arm. Except he could not properly finish the action. The blow became nothing more than a caress when he made contact. There was no time for confusion, just as there was no time for any emotion.

  “Now left arm!” the woman ordered.

  Jake tried again with his left arm, which was, he noticed, just as agile as his right. His right-handedness, like so many other pieces of him, had been stripped away. Still, he could not strike the man with his left arm either.

  His victim was watching Jake placidly, and the woman nodded in approval. Jake understood: they were slaves now, and as slaves, they were designed so that they could not hit their masters.

  * * *

  Hundreds of new, half-mechanical people, everyone who’d been woken up from cryo-sleep, charging around the warehouse like a herd of alien creatures spooking before a predator. Jake could run now, really run. Their trainers stood in the middle of the space, while the slaves ran in a vast circle around them, faster and faster, their new legs responding to their own commands, carrying them at speeds humans could not achieve. A monstrous stampede.

  A small section of the warehouse’s exterior wall was made of glass, and because it was nighttime outside, this glass had become a mirror in the bright interior lights. A mirror! Over the course of several laps, as Jake discovered that his lungs could easily supply air to his new body, even at high speeds, he maneuvered himself into the outer ring of the herd. When he had reached the edge, he glimpsed himself in that mirrored glass as he darted by. His modified eye captured the image easily. His face…his face was still an echo of his real face. There was solace in that. He was not a clone of no identity. He looked like Jake.

  * * *

  On the last day in the warehouse, the medics activated a new mechanism in each slave’s body. Then Jake and the others were instructed in how to adjust the settings of the panel along the bottom of their rib cages.

  Jake felt a tingle throughout his body, a sensation that was somehow simultaneously hot and cold. Within moments, the metallic framework of his new body began to fill up with a strange, thick liquid. It was happening to everyone, and the warehouse was full of startled gasps. In less than a minute, artificial skin had grown out to conceal all of their crystal and metal parts. Jake watched in wonder as his leg bones and arm bones disappeared beneath
this covering.

  None of the reconstructed people could cry actual tears anymore, and yet half the slaves openly wept, by gesture and by sobs, at the sight of their bodies becoming covered by what looked like human flesh. When you had been remade, any sign of your old self was precious. Jake was crying with the rest. There was nothing left, really, except his remembered humanity, and this artificial skin was a reminder, a gift.

  10. BETWEEN CARS

  Yulia had found them a set of fold-down seats in the luggage area between train cars. It was much colder here, where outside air leaked in around the train doors, so that there was nothing suspicious about the three of them remaining buttoned up in their winter clothing.

  She had fallen into a reverie as Jake spoke of the warehouse. When he stopped his narration, she continued to stare at him, her lips parted in distress.

  She roused herself to say, “That, that was…” But she trailed off without finishing the sentence, and really, thought Jake, what could she say? A new emotion had crept into her face: pity.

  “Tickets!”

  The three of them jumped in unison. Jake nearly forgot himself, but remembered at the last moment that he must not give a clear view of his face and so kept his head down as he turned toward the young man in the conductor’s uniform who had appeared so suddenly between the cars. Kostya was not as careful and looked directly at the man before lowering his gaze.

  “I have the tickets,” Yulia said in Russian, sharply, which succeeded in drawing the conductor’s attention away from Kostya.

  She handed over their tickets, one by one, so the man could scan them. “You know, we already scanned them when we got on the train,” she told him.

  “I still have a job to do,” the conductor replied.