by Dan Davis
Maybe he had been wrong.
“What a second,” Ram said, his voice deep and unfamiliar in his ears, panic rising in waves through his face. “Are you seriously telling me that you cut off my head?”
Dr. Fo chuckled. “Oh dear me, no. How could you think such a thing? No, no, no. We cut off your body. The procedure is called a corporectomy.”
Ram’s throat constricted and his heart thudded in his ears and he struggled for breath. It had been years since he’d had a proper panic attack but he knew the signs.
I have to get out of here.
A new voice, a woman’s voice, close above him muttered a warning. “His catecholamines are spiking. I’ll ease him back down.”
The hot sensations drained from his face and his panic receded. They were controlling him, somehow, giving him drugs and he knew he should be angry about it yet he was relieved. It was nice, feeling calm.
“Why are you doing this?” Ram asked, straining to see as far around the room as he could. He could not see much. There were people there. Machines, beeping and humming.
“I will show you.”
Even swiveling his eyes so far over in his sockets that the muscles ached, Ram couldn't see the doctor anymore. Instead, he noticed the soft glow of pale blue lights from high up around the room. The white ceiling above had a bluish tinge from the artificial lighting. There was no daylight.
Someone pulled a screen attached to a mechanical arm down over him. Ram looked up and for half a moment saw a reflection in the black of the screen.
The face was familiar. But it was not his own.
“Welcome to the new you,” Dr. Fo said and the screen flicked on.
The image showed a man on a gurney, covered by a sheet up to the upper chest. A screen on a mechanical arm overhung his face.
That man was not Rama Seti.
It couldn’t have been.
The figure was muscled as heavily as a bullock. The body of a champion bodybuilder only bigger, all veins and lumps and crevasses and ridges. A body resembling a relief map of the Himalayas. A body like the avatars Ram used in the Galactic Games persistent world, and Shield Wall the European early medieval massively multiplayer wargame that had pretensions to historical accuracy but disregarded scale. A body that existed only in comics and animated films and maybe on the Artificial Persons that they designed for asteroid mining and outer system exploration.
A creeping horror crawled over his skin as he began to understand, at least a little, of what was happening to him.
Tubes, data cables, and fluid drips ran out from under the blanket and snaked along the floor out of sight.
In the image on the screen hanging over his face, the screen hanging over the face of the muscled giant on his screen.
Dr. Fo stood next to the bed, at the giant man’s shoulder. He seemed diminutive in comparison.
“Do you like it? We matched the skin tone of the body to your own. It was paler than you before the procedure but it’s trivially easy to do. You have a rather lovely natural color but it was awfully washed out from the lack of vitamins and UV.” Dr. Fo chuckled, shaking his head. “Your diet was appalling, Rama Seti.”
“That's not me.”
On the screen, the giant’s mouth moved as Ram spoke.
“You will experience a period of adjustment to your new self, of course,” the doctor said, resting his hand on Ram’s forehead. He saw it happen on the screen and felt the palm on his head at the same.
Ram struggled to comprehend what was happening.
“That’s not my head, it’s not me.” Ram swallowed as he spoke.
The muscular figure on the screen was Indian but he had a handsome face, a strong jaw line. Prominent cheekbones.
Nothing like Ram's face at all.
“It is very much your old head that you grew all by yourself.” The doctor stroked Ram’s shorn scalp. Caressed it. “Rama, your face and head is the only external part of you that remains your own. You have been increasingly overweight since your early childhood. Not your fault, of course, it was your mother and father’s fault. Your mother did it because she wanted to make you happy. You father, well. Never mind about him. My surgeons removed the excess adipose tissue from the face and especially the neck area.”
“I’m thin.”
Ram had never seen himself thin before. He had never looked in a mirror and seen a face that was tight. He had never seen his cheekbones. His cheeks had never gone inward, only puffed out like a cherub or a hamster or the other horrific terms of endearment his mother used to call him by. Ram watched on the monitor as a single, shining tear ran down one temple into the raised sheet that cushioned his head. The urge to wipe it away was intense but Ram could not move so much as one of the massive muscles that he now owned.
Ram's head looked smaller than he remembered it, with all that fat taken away. In fact, it looked small attached to those huge shoulders.
“Wait a minute,” Ram said, watching himself on the monitor speak the words. “Did you shrink my head or something?”
Dr. Fo chuckled. Even a couple of amused snorts came from the nurses and technicians as they worked around him.
“We have reinforced your skull with extra bone mass, in fact. As with the bones in your new body, we have increased the density and so increased the overall cranial mass. In terms of volume, we encouraged extra bone growth on the external side but of course, we did so subdermally. You have extra bone all around the cranium, face and jaw which has made your head around six percent larger. And it was already a deliciously big head to begin with. Indeed, the size of your big old head was one of the factors in your selection. You see, your new body is very large indeed, for a human, and having such a large head helps with the transplant process.”
Your new body. Strange thing to hear. It couldn’t be real, could it?
“I was always tall,” Ram said, feeling the need to stand up for himself, for his old body.
Dr. Fo grinned and pulled out a screen. “You were a fairly impressive 199 centimeters tall, much taller than the Indian and Earth average. You certainly maximized your genetic growth potential. But now, you are 261.26 centimeters tall. In other words, in the top one percent of the tallest people who ever lived, although most of them were gangly weaklings, half crippled by pituitary tumors. You, on the other hand, may have the most muscle mass on a single body in history, even counting Artificial Persons. Although, this body is not natural. We designed it, we grew it, nurtured it so I suppose it’s cheating but you are a human from the neck up.”
Ram had a wave of unreality flush through him. The sense that the world could not be trusted, that he could log out of his Avar and be back in his apartment if only he could find a way of getting out.
“This is not happening,” Ram said, hearing his now-deeper voice rumbling in his chest. A larger chest cavity, a larger throat and a deeper voice.
“I assure you it is,” Dr. Fo said, gesturing at the room around them. Ram could see quite a lot with his peripheral vision but a single room could be modeled with perfect realism within Avar. “But if it helps you to feel better in the short term then please, go right ahead and believe that you are in some sort of VR device, while you acclimatize to your new reality and learn why you are here. No skin off my nose.”
“Why?” Ram asked. “Who are you people? Where am I? I need to speak to my co-op. I need to speak to my parents, come on, you have to let me out of here, this isn’t legal. This isn’t legal, you can’t do this to me.”
He needed to get out, to get away from them.
“Rama Seti,” Dr. Fo said, leaning over him. This time, the man’s face was not smiling. Not even a little. “You will find no allies in the judiciary realm. As for your friends and family, well, they believe that you are already dead. We will never let you go. Not ever. Of course, this is a violation of your legal and human rights but our purpose is so vitally important that we left ordinary ethical concerns behind us decades ago. Your rights as an individual are as
nothing in comparison to what is at stake here.”
“Bullshit. What could possibly be so important?”
“Rama, you are here to save humanity.”
***
Read the whole story now:
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KSJTPYO
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01KSJTPYO
Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01KSJTPYO
Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01KSJTPYO
Orb Station Zero Plot Summary:
An alien space station appears beyond the orbit of Neptune. A threat to humanity’s existence and the gateway to a galactic empire.
Every thirty years, humanity sends a single champion to fight for our future. But every one of our finest heroes is torn to shreds.
Rama Seti never volunteered. He’s no soldier. And yet his head is grafted onto the body of an 8ft tall, genetically engineered supersoldier and blasted to the edge of the Solar System to battle the giant alien warrior.
First, Rama must survive four billion miles in a colossal starship, the UNOPS Victory, training with the deadliest space marines, soldiers, fighters and killers the world has ever known. And each of them will stop at nothing to be the savior of the world.
This is the final chance. Win humanity’s future. Or lose the Earth itself.
If you enjoyed Ender's Game, Starship Troopers and Old Man's War, you'll love Orb Station Zero, the first in a new military science fiction series, Galactic Arena.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Davis writes science-fiction, fantasy and historical fiction stories packed with exciting action, captivating characters and intriguing themes.
He is inspired by science fiction authors such as Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Kim Stanley Robinson, Orson Scott Card, John Scalzi, Neal Stephenson and Iain M. Banks. He has read all of Bernard Cornwell’s books more times than can possibly be healthy.
He is a husband and father living in Essex, UK.
Please contact Dan here:
WEBSITE: dandavisauthor.com/
TWITTER: twitter.com/DanDavisWrites
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/dandavisauthor
EMAIL: [email protected]
Thanks so much for reading
BOOKS BY DAN DAVIS
The Galactic Arena Series
Inhuman Contact (Prequel 1)
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MG47ANM
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01MG47ANM
Onca’s Duty (Prequel 2)
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MR96YGW
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01MR96YGW
Orb Station Zero (Book 1)
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KSJTPYO
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01KSJTPYO
Earth Colony Sentinel (Book 2)
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073XBLFZV
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B073XBLFZV
The Immortal Knight Chronicles
Historical Fiction - with Vampires
Vampire Crusader (Book 1)
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0157LXEEA
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0157LXEEA
Vampire Outlaw (Book 2)
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CKU0VJM
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01CKU0VJM
Vampire Khan (Book 3)
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BX7D43M
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07BX7D43M
Gunpowder & Alchemy
Flintlock Fantasy
White Wind Rising (Book 1)
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QH0PIVI
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00QH0PIVI
Dark Water Breaking (Book 2)
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZOARVMG
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00ZOARVMG
Green Earth Shaking (Book 3)
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018THC1LQ
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B018THC1LQ
For a complete and up-to-date list of Dan’s available books, visit:
http://dandavisauthor.com/books/