“We’re explorers on a new frontier, developing everything from exoskeletal reconstruction, making soldiers faster and stronger, to neural prosthetics, which enhance the way they react,” Harting told them as they made their way across the lab.
Bloodshot was looking around, trying to take it all in. Trying to suppress the feeling that this high-tech workshop, a place where machines were put together, had been where he’d been born, or reborn anyway. It was clear this was where the doctor’s hand had come from as well as the strange breathing apparatus on KT’s neck.
“Even ocular implants,” Harting continued, “that have the ability to not just restore vision, but to push it past biological limitations.”
They followed Harting around the walkway and into a glass-fronted office that overlooked the workshop/laboratory. It was clear that this was the doctor’s office, and it looked lived in. The long desk was cluttered with books, blueprints and bits of tech. Bloodshot couldn’t tell if the tech were works-in-progress or decorative. Behind the desk were bookshelves and above those a display cabinet. The cabinet was filled with all sorts of paraphernalia from the history of science and medicine, particularly, and not surprisingly, the field of prosthetics. There were also a number of framed certificates and, looking somewhat out-of-place, Bloodshot thought, a tennis racket. There were workbenches pushed up against the office’s glass walls with a collection of various tools for working microcircuitry, a computer workstation with several monitor screens and even an electron microscope.
Harting stepped up to the workstation.
“But you are the proof that we are leading the way in one of the greatest human advances of all time...” Harting continued. He turned back to face Bloodshot and held out his normal, human, flesh-and-blood hand.
“May I?” he asked.
Bloodshot hesitated. He wasn’t sure about this but he held a hand out anyway. Harting, or rather his prosthetic limb, moved with startling, superhuman speed. The scalpel the doctor had palmed from the workstation sliced Bloodshot’s hand open. Bloodshot recoiled, suppressing the urge to use one of a dozen options he had to kill or maim Harting with his bare hands.
“The hell, doc?”
He was more than a little wary of the speed with which Harting had struck. Despite being attacked with a scalpel, however, Bloodshot felt strangely calm. There had only been a moment’s pain. He looked down at his hand and suddenly he wasn’t so calm. His blood was metallic, like crimson mercury, glistening in the light as it oozed from the wound.
“Holy shit!”
Bloodshot clamped a hand over the wound. The granular liquid oozed between his fingers, moving with a will of its own. He forced his hand away from the wound. The iridizing liquid turned into a kaleidoscope of millions of particulates moving in hypnotizing geometric patterns as they crawled back into the wound.
“Let me explain,” Harting said gesturing toward the electron microscope. “If you please, place your hand on here.”
Bloodshot just looked at him. Once cut, twice shy. He had been thinking of these people as freaks because their augmentations were out of the ordinary, because he himself was feeling far from normal, even though he had little idea of what his “normal” was. Calling them “freaks” was wrong but he was trying to avoid the alternative: “superhuman.” It just seemed so ridiculous. Whatever he called them he knew he had to be careful, he couldn’t just judge them on what he could see, he had to assume that each of them had capabilities as yet unseen. He found himself looking at KT.
“Indulge me.”
“That’s all I seem to be doing,” Bloodshot told him, looking around. Glancing at KT, trying to read her expression. “That’s all anyone seems to be doing.”
He was wondering if he would be allowed to leave if he wanted to. So far he had seen a lot of tech. He was sure there was all sorts of security, particularly electronic, to protect it, but he hadn’t seen an armed presence: there were, as yet, no guards. It was clear they had a vested interest in him but would they stop him from leaving, he wondered? Could they? None of this was making him feel comfortable but he felt a desperate need to find out what had happened to him. To find out who he was.
Are you sure you want to know? a voice in his head asked. After all, nobody had claimed his “remains.” What kind of person was left that alone?
He turned back to Harting, staring at him as he slid his hand under the lens of the electron microscope. A monitor on the wall displayed the view from the lens. Million, billions, entire civilizations of aggressive-looking biomechanical creatures buzzed around the scalpel wound. They may have been tiny but something about them had the unmistakeable look of military tech.
Bloodshot stared, eyes wide.
Silver-faceted graphite shells protected scarlet myofibril arms as they worked to perform complex microsurgery and the tiny machines knitted Bloodshot’s damaged flesh and skin back together.
“What are those things?” Bloodshot asked.
“Biomechanical constructs. We call them nanites. They instinctively enhance your biology, most notably by quickly reacting to catastrophic injury, rebuilding damaged tissue.”Bloodshot could hear the pride in Harting’s voice. The boy with the test tube was back again.
He pulled his hand out from under the microscope’s lens and stared at it, not quite believing what he was seeing. His pale skin was pristine, fully healed.
“You’re telling me those are in my blood?” he asked.
“No. They are your blood,” Harting told him before turning back to a computer terminal, cuing up some footage. The words: PROJECT BLOODSHOT appeared in the corner of the screen.
Bloodshot watched as silicon-based machines colonized the gelatine structures of amoeba-like robotic cancer cells. It looked like a violation, an invasion. The image changed to show clusters of the tiny robots merging with cells, and then what looked like a cloud of metal invaded the bloodstream of a test animal. Bloodshot was transfixed.
“We’d had success applying them to single organ systems, we decided to try a full body transfusion.”
Bloodshot looked down at the hot, red, circular scar on his chest.
“Of course you did,” he muttered.
On the screen a lab mouse was sitting upright breathing shallowly as its chest pulsed with a red glow. That’s me, Bloodshot thought.
“Just like our bodies require calories, nanites need their own energy. This lab supplies that,” KT told him.
Bloodshot wasn’t sure he liked that, it sounded too much like dependency.
“And like our bodies, the harder the nanites work, the more energy they consume,” Harting added.
“What’s with the glow?” Bloodshot asked.
“Heat. Generated by the nanites working overtime to try and save that mouse,” Harting explained.
Save? Bloodshot wondered, though it explained why the scar was hot to the touch.
On the screen the mouse keeled over and went very still, and the red glow in its chest went out.
“The mouse that just died?” Bloodshot asked.
Harting gave the question some thought.
“Early results were, admittedly, suboptimal,” the doctor told him.
“Maybe you should fast-forward to the optimal part?” Bloodshot suggested. He was liking this less and less.
“You are the optimal part, because now we have the ability to track your energy levels.”
“Which we just recharge when they’re running low,” KT added.
He didn’t like the sound of having to be “recharged.” As it further suggested dependency.
Bloodshot moved closer to the screen. It was filled with swarms of buzzing nanites. He was not sure how to respond to this, how he should feel. He had no frame of reference, but then he had little frame of reference for anything. Should he feel disgust? As though he had been violated? Or perhaps a sense of wonder? He was leaning toward the latter but then he couldn’t quite get his mind round the idea that the tiny machines he saw on the screen wer
e living inside him. Again, he couldn’t be sure but he suspected that this technology was far beyond what most people considered technologically possible.
“Are you saying that those things brought me back to life?” he asked.
“Yes,” KT told him.
He was Frankenstein’s monster. Though a Tier One, pipe-hitting, badass Frankenstein’s monster if what they were saying was true, and he was so far away from Kansas right now he saw no reason not to believe them. For the time being at least.
“Well we did,” Harting said. He seemed keen to take the credit.
“Then why can’t I remember anything?” he asked. After all, if they could fix the meat, then why not the mind?
Harting sighed.
“I don’t know. Uncharted territory. My best guess is the nanites saved the hard drive but lost the data,” the doctor told him. “But that doesn’t matter.”
Bloodshot was pretty sure it did.
“But I remember how to walk. I remember how to talk,” he turned to look at KT. “I remember...”
“You’ll remember all kinds of things,” Harting told him. “But what’s important is you’ll now know things you’ve never known before. What’s the square root of seven thousand nine hundred and twenty-one?”
Bloodshot stared at Harting. It didn’t feel like the kind of thing he would know.
“How the hell would I know that?” he asked. He felt the strangest sensation under the bone of his skull, a psychosomatic sensation born of the knowledge of what was happening in his body. It felt like electricity crawling with insect feet across his gray matter.
“Eighty-nine,” he told Harting.
The doctor smiled.
“What’s the word for winter in, I don’t know, Gaelic?” Harting asked.
The sensation again, though lessened. He knew the Gaelic for “Wing”, “Winner” and then:
“Winter... gheimhridh,” he said. This explained the voice he’d heard when he’d first awoken and how he’d known what the constituent parts of the nanites were when he had watched them on the screen.
“Who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953?” Harting asked, seemingly enjoying himself.
“Winston Churchill. Who said, ‘The empires of the future are the empires of the mind’. This is cool!” It was strange, the information felt like it was coming from somewhere else but also he just knew it. At the same time he instinctively knew that this wasn’t him. He did not in any way reject this or any other knowledge, but he didn’t think he had been that kind of guy, he didn’t think he had been in any way academically minded. He was definitely feeling the call of some residual personality, which appeared to be at war with a mind that had the potential to be weaponized to the same degree as his body could.
“Whose statue stands outside the Monument to Reformation?” Harting continued.
“John Calvin,” Bloodshot said before turning to KT. “Do you believe in free will?”
“Patriot League Championship? Gold. Oh-eight. Who won?” she asked him.
“Karina Tor...” He stopped. Studying her for a moment. “You did.”
She grinned at him and then winked.
Harting coughed.
“The nanites are essentially mobile microprocessors inside your brain, all pulling the answers for you like a full bandwidth search engine,” the doctor told him. The pride was back again. “It’s incredible.”
“Is it?” Bloodshot asked.
“Yes!” It seemed the doctor was struggling to contain his excitement.
Bloodshot tried to take in everything he’d been told. He tried to evaluate the implications of this. The tech in him, this whole operation wasn’t cheap. The potential amount of power he could wield, if what Harting was saying was true, was incredible. There had to be conditions, strings, oversight, all of which left him wondering if he was free. Having to be “recharged” aside, he didn’t like the idea of being trapped in a cage, as nice, though strange, a cage as this was. He would make a decision when he knew who he was and what had happened to him, which should be easy with all the tech he had inside him now.
He concentrated for a moment.
“Why can’t I find anything about myself?” he finally asked.
It went quiet. Bloodshot could hear the technicians and the machinery in the lab beyond the office, even the barely audible sound of KT’s breathing apparatus.
“Well, because you’re looking for personal information on a special operator KIA, working exclusively classified ops,” KT told him.
Even allowing for this something wasn’t quite right. If he had family, friends, surely there would be some footprint, some trace.
“Yes,” Harting added, “and all of that was your history. This is your future. Here you’re one of us. The family it seems you never had.”
Harting rolled up his sleeve, showing Bloodshot the impressive-looking, fully functional prosthetic arm. It even had some kind of touchscreen device embedded in it.
“Listen, when I was a boy I was a tennis prodigy. Then when I was fifteen I got cancer and they took my arm within six months. But I was lucky. Instead of dwelling on what I’d lost I spent my time thinking about what I could create. So now when a soldier loses his arm...” Harting slammed his fist down onto the metal table and dented it. “...he gets a better one.”
Bloodshot looked down at the dent and then back to the doctor.
“I get that you want me to be impressed, I guess the problem is, I don’t know what I lost.” And Bloodshot couldn’t shake the feeling that he had lost something, beyond his identity. He felt it keenly, like an ache for something he couldn’t know.
“Here at RST, you’re one of us. The family you never had. And in this family...” He was beaming at Bloodshot now. “We call you Bloodshot.”
Bloodshot stared at him. He had known this was coming. It was the name of the project after all. Still, he had hoped for a real name. A sense of who he was, even if he had to start building the person from scratch. Instead he was just a science experiment.
“Do you now?” he finally asked, his voice flat.
Harting smiled again.
“Yes.” He said it pleasantly enough but there was finality in the word.
CHAPTER 9
The three of them took one of the glass express elevators down the side of the tower. His stomach lurched at the speed with which they dropped seventy-five stories into the basement.
Bloodshot followed as Harting and KT continued with their tour of tech Wonderland. He was content to do so for the time being. He suspected he didn’t have much in the way of options whilst he was reliant on them for charging his batteries. His life was in their hands, for now. Some instinct, he presumed left over from his training as a Tier One operator, meant he knew that he had to gather intel about his situation, particularly as ultimate knowledge now seemed like one of his superpowers. He couldn’t help but smile at the nonsense of the situation. Then he would decide what he wanted to do.
They entered a large, split-level training facility. Bloodshot found himself looking at an Olympic-sized swimming pool that shone with a soft, warm blue subsurface glow the color of Cherenkov radiation. To his left on a mezzanine floor level with the edge of the pool he could see weight machines, pull-up frames and some robust punch- and kick-bags. The level below, next to the pool, was split into two areas. The open area contained a pair of heavy-duty treadmills, wooden practice dummies and free-weights. Behind bullet-resistant glass, the area under the mezzanine floor looked like an indoor pistol range. The training facility had the kind of cutting-edge rehabilitation and exercise equipment that the Veterans’ Administration would kill for. The whole thing looked like a mix between a military-industrial gym and a NASA facility. Bloodshot found himself smiling again at the thought of NASA. Am I some kind of rocket scientist now? Technological near-omniscience notwithstanding, somehow he didn’t think so.
There were two other people in the training gym. The first was a Hispanic man with a serious expre
ssion wearing some sort of sophisticated armored harness that was studded with lenses. He was practicing knife patterns on the kung-fu training dummy. Even this far away Bloodshot could see that he was fast and precise. The other was an intimidating-looking, powerfully built white guy. His hair was slicked back, and he had stubble on his face. He was wearing a pair of shorts. Below the knees his legs were robotic-looking replacement prosthetics, and from what Bloodshot could see they were every bit as functional as the real deal. Both of them looked to be in their thirties and both registered as a threat. Bloodshot recognized them for what they were. He knew fellow predators when he saw them. They both glanced his way, just for a moment, just long enough to size him up.
“The rehab room. This is where patients go to test the limits of their augmentations, their new bodies,” Harting explained as the three of them strode across the gym.
“I thought you said I was one of a kind.”
“You are. So are they in their own ways,” Harting told him. “You’ve already met KT.” Bloodshot glanced back at her, again unable to read her expression. Something told him she was holding back. “Ex-navy swimmer. Part of the rescue deployment in Syria during those chemical attacks a while back. Superheated chlorine gas ate through her entire lower respiratory tract. She now breathes through a clavicle-mounted respirator.” He nodded toward the respirator on her neck. “Makes her totally immune to inhalants.” This last was said as though it was a flourish, a magic trick that all should be impressed by.
Or the punchline to a joke, Bloodshot thought bitterly.
He watched, warily, as the soldier wearing the harness approached them. Even as he deftly twirled a bali-song knife around it was clear from his scarred eyes that he was blind.
“Tibbs graduated from Fort Benning top of his class. Became one of the army’s most accomplished sharpshooters... until an Iraqi mortar took his sight.” Harting paused for effect again. “We remedied that with ocular prosthetics, gear-mounted camera arrays that feed directly into his optic nerves.” Bloodshot was wondering if the doctor was expecting a round of applause. “Now he sees, well, everything,” the doctor finished.
Bloodshot--The Official Movie Novelization Page 4