Defragmenting Daniel: The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by Jason Werbeloff

  The fan on the android’s head stopped.

  Daniel knew he had her attention now. He pressed home his advantage. “You and I both know that the liver, even one lobe of it, is worth far more than feet, or a few ounces of anesthetic.”

  Hal nodded cautiously.

  “You can keep the left lobe of the organic liver.”

  The compartment in Hal’s abdomen slid shut. “Fine,” she said. “Who’s going first?”

  Autumn squeezed Daniel’s hand. “We’re not done yet.” She pointed to Daniel. Pulled a piece of plastic wrap off one of the open wounds. “Fix his face.”

  “I don’t like her,” said Hal.

  Daniel nudged Autumn’s side. “We’ll get to that later,” he whispered. “We have a deal,” he said to Hal. “Exchange our livers, and you can keep the left lobe.”

  Hal glared at the two young lovers. She pursed her rubber lips. Shook her head almost imperceptibly.

  “Let’s get started.” The android’s voice dropped to a murmur. “Damned humans. At least anesthesia shuts them up.”

  Hal cleared the operating table of its clutter. Bloody swabs, forceps, scalpels, dressing, smart tubes. She swept most of it onto the floor. Wiped down the operating table with a tattered rag.

  “Take it off,” she said to Autumn. She pinched the girl’s blouse between her fingers.

  “Do you have a gown I could wear?” asked Autumn.

  “Fresh out,” said Hal.

  Autumn unbuttoned the blouse with unsteady hands. Lay back on the steel. She crossed her arms over her breasts.

  “I won’t let anything happen to you,” said Daniel, brushing a wisp of hair from her damp forehead. “I’ll be here the whole time.”

  A warm wetness suffused his foot. “No!” he hissed at the dog. Roger had sidled over to Daniel’s leg, and peed in his shoe.

  “Not yet,” said Autumn. She swatted Hal away. The android was trying to place the anesthesia mask over the girl’s face. “How long will the operation take?”

  Hal sighed. “It’ll be done before you know it, deary. Now relax. Breathe deeply … That’s it …”

  The tension in Autumn’s lips drained under the mask. Her cheeks unbunched.

  “You can wait in there.” Hal pointed to the couch in the living room. The cushions were buried under mounds of medical equipment.

  “I’ll stay with her,” said Daniel, his hand still clenching Autumn’s forearm.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Hal pried Autumn’s fingers from her breasts. Tossed her arms to her flanks. The girl’s knuckles knocked hollow against the steel table. In the cold light of the operating theatre, Autumn’s jaundiced skin was painful to look at.

  “Nice breasts,” said Hal. The android ran the blunt edge of the scalpel along their curves. “Could get a pretty penny for –”

  “They’re not yours,” said Daniel.

  “Relax, deary.” Hal flipped the blade around, sharp end poised above Autumn’s ribs. “Let’s take a look inside.”

  *

  It could be worse, Daniel told himself. Those bubbly white spots weren’t all that big. Not really. And the gray patches … a pint of Rejek and a decent micro-needling brush would clear those right up. He was sure it would.

  Daniel got to work on the liver. He did what he’d been trained to do. He scrubbed.

  Hal’s Rejek was far purer than the diluted solution in Autumn’s bathroom cupboard. Fifteen minutes later, and he’d pumped and massaged enough of the goo into the liver to change its color. Under the emerald lumps of Rejek, the organ had turned from gray to pink. Most of the spots were gone. He took the micro-needling brush to the lobes again. Really worked at those bubbles.

  There. It wouldn’t pass inspection at the Organ Farm. But they were wasteful with their organs. There was a surplus of orphans. A surplus of organs. They had the luxury of throwing away perfectly good parts.

  But this was his liver. Irreplaceable.

  Daniel’s gaze fell onto Autumn’s open chest. Her ribs were tighter, smaller, than Thomsin’s had been. Tubes snaked into her, processing her blood until Hal was ready to implant Daniel’s cybernetic liver.

  He held the scrubbed organ up to Hal, unsure what to do next. At just over three pounds, it was a solid mass in his hands. Substantial. It felt heavier than it was.

  “Your turn,” said Hal. She cleared the desk adjoining the red wall of the operating room. Springs and capacitors and circuit boards clanged to the floor. “There you go.” She tapped the wooden top. “Up you get, deary.”

  Daniel removed his shirt. Tested the stability of the surface before he shimmied onto it. The wood was rotten in places. It yielded under his weight.

  “I don’t do live transplants often,” said Hal, searching her cupboard. “Here it is.” She held up another gas mask.

  “No anesthetic for me, thanks,” said Daniel. “I want to be awake for this. You can use the epidural.”

  “Oh, so now he doesn’t want the anesthetic. Even when it’s free? Listen, child. Never turn down something to numb your pain, especially when it’s free.”

  He removed his glasses. Hung them from a nail in the wall. He balanced them just right, so they stared down directly at his chest. He tapped a button on their side, and they projected a 3D image above him – a perfect rendition of what they saw.

  “Not this time,” he said. “I want to watch. If you put me under, you could chop me or her up for spares, and I’d never know.”

  Hal fished out a thick needle from the cupboard, and filled it with anesthetic fluid. “Once I give you the epidural, I can do anything I like to you.”

  Daniel smiled. “Sure, you could. But I’ve scheduled an email to Bubble PD for just after breakfast. It’s a particularly informative message, detailing everything I’ve done, especially your part in it. All the help you’ve given me. And it ends with my location. Your address. If I’m not around at the end of this operation to stop the message, off it goes.”

  Hal grinded her mechanical mouth. “Uhuh.” She turned him on his side with strong, tiny hands. Jabbed the needle into his spine.

  Pain. Hot, tentacled. Then the welcoming embrace of the epidural wrapped itself around his feet. Up his calves, and through his groin. Its cool fingers interlaced his ribs. Squeezed. And released.

  He was numb.

  “You want to watch – that’s fine by me.” Hal raised the scalpel.

  Daniel had cut into several people, and watched many more sliced up by Geppetto. He’d undergone plenty of operations, both at the hands of the Orphanage staff, and under Hal’s knife. But seeing the blade of the scalpel trace a thin red line around his ribs felt entirely different. Right there on the projected holographic image above him, he witnessed everything.

  He felt strangely alienated from his body. An out-of-bodyness. The epidural had numbed his nerves, so although he knew it was he who was being sliced and probed in the holographic image, at the same time it wasn’t.

  Hal peeled off the layers of tissue, laying them on his shoulders like butterfly wings. Wet, white ribs glinted against the LED fluorescent, almost as bright as the bone saw Hal raised. Daniel’s heart fluttered, and he could almost see the organ flurry beneath his ribcage. Almost. He’d see it soon.

  The saw made quick work of his ribs. Hal cracked the interlocking bones apart in under a minute. There they were. His lungs. His heart. And tucked among them, the cybernetic liver. Stark. Alien in his human chest.

  Hal’s hydraulic hands heaved this way and that. Forceps clamped and released. A blade sliced through the connective tissue … It was out. Hard and round. Mechanical. The cybernetic liver was out.

  Daniel’s heart quickened at the sight. He watched it on the holographic image above his head. He heard it. Not the drowned internal rush of blood one hears through a head cold. No, he heard his heart directly. Moist and strong.

  But as good as it felt when Hal lowered the right lobe of Autumn’s organic liver into his chest … as whole, as com
plete as he felt, Daniel felt something else too. It could have been the epidural. It could have been the strange sensation of watching himself in real time being sliced open, but feeling no sensation. Whatever the reason, Daniel realized something he hadn’t right from the beginning of this journey.

  He was not his body.

  Hal could remove all his organs right this moment. His heart, his liver. His lungs. Intestines. Kidneys. The lot of them. If she hooked him up to life support, if he was still conscious, he would still be himself. He would still be able to look down on those changes, and see them as happening to his body, but not to himself.

  His body belonged to him, but he was not his body.

  He watched the thought slow his heart in the holo-image, just as he felt it permeate his mind. Daniel was not his body.

  As Hal connected the smart tubes to the connectors on the liver, he wondered whether he’d made a mistake. Was his journey to retrieve his organs, foolish? Was the notion of completeness silly after all?

  No.

  As sure as he knew anything, Daniel knew that those organs were his organs, even if they weren’t him. He had the right to choose what happened to them. Not the Orphanage. Not Lincoln Russell or Daggy Munch. Not Margaret or the Stantons.

  Hal removed the clamp that spread his ribs apart. Stapled his butterfly wings shut. “There you go, deary. Now let’s get that cybernetic into your girlfriend over there. Just need a few more connectors …” Hal rummaged through the cupboard. Shelves of cybernetics. Arms and legs. Heads and pumps. Eyes and pincers. Everything an android could want.

  Daniel thought about what the Holey Man had said in New Settlers Way. “Your parts are missin’. They ain’t together the way the Gods intended.”

  They ain’t together, he thought.

  He thought about his amygdala, in some woman’s head. Inside Kassandra Jackson. He’d have to hurt her to get at it. Gods, he’d probably have to kill her to remove it – he was no neurosurgeon.

  And his face … sitting in a jar somewhere, perhaps with Kage. How could he ever wear it again? The police were looking for that face. If he wore it, he’d be found and arrested. He’d be strung up, or whatever they did to criminals in the Bubble.

  What the hells was he going to do?

  “Your parts are missin’,” the Holey Man had said. “They ain’t together the way the Gods intended.”

  The solution struck Daniel like a hover taxi in midflight.

  “Just how many parts do you have in that cupboard?” he asked.

  “Not many human. But cybernetic … enough to make a dozen service bots,” said Hal. “Or more.”

  “I have a proposition for you,” he said.

  Paralyzed, lying on the rotten table, Daniel spoke. Over the next few minutes, he outlined his plan. Hal listened at first with skeptical surprise. But as he continued, the android’s excitement grew. The compartment in her abdomen slid open and shut, open-and-shut. The fan on her head spun. Faster. Then faster still.

  “All of them?” she asked eventually, when he’d finished his proposal.

  “All of them,” said Daniel.

  Hal nodded so quickly, he worried the servo motors in her neck would jam.

  “One more thing,” he said.

  “Anything, deary.”

  “What’s the strongest sedative you’ve got?”

  Orgia

  Phil’s Pharma. Heal-It-All gel for the shoulder. Anti-Sleeps for the mind. An eternal, scorching shower at the gym.

  Kage felt like a new man.

  He stepped out of the wet area, and dressed at his locker. Caught sight of his reflection in the panopticon of mirrors. Almost didn’t recognize himself.

  His arms.

  Ben Stanton had been tall – a head-and-a-half taller than Kage. So the musician’s arm muscles had gone a long way toward supplementing Kage’s frame. Geppetto had done a superb job. Kage’s biceps rippled under the gym’s spotlights. His forearms burgeoned. The old surgeon had even found spare tissue to implant into Kage’s pectorals.

  Kage rotated his profile in the mirrors to hide the bruise on his shoulder from where that damned android had smashed into him. He allowed the light to bathe the curves of his arms. His chest.

  One of the Hyenas, a man at least double Kage’s new size, did something no man had ever done to him before. The bobbed chin. The slow blink.

  The Hyena had nodded at Kage in appreciation.

  Acknowledgement.

  Adrenaline flushed Kage’s body. Pulsed in his groin as he stepped into his underwear. He could barely fit Ben’s meaty member into the fabric.

  Kage’s newfound masculinity pervaded him. He swelled his chest. Tightened his belt. He was rough. He was ready.

  Fuck yes – he was a man.

  Kage tapped his glasses. Almost 3:30 a.m. He retrieved the information for Orgia to check their opening times.

  An advert swallowed his vision before he’d clicked the link to Orgia’s website. A pair of high-resolution ruby lips were suspended in a vast opalescent room. The lips parted. “Orgia,” they whispered. The voice was glossy. Drenched in sex. “Veni, vidi, veni.”

  Kage’s heart lurched.

  Every Bubbler over the age of eighteen knew of Orgia. The playpen of the illustrious. The club nobody would admit to visiting. The place Bubblers spoke of in hushed tones and private messages. A haven of hedonism.

  A shard of guilt pierced Kage’s breast. He should be going to Una’s. He should be doing whatever he wanted to do at Orgia, with her instead. But he couldn’t face the humiliation again. If the penis didn’t work …?

  No, he needed to experiment before he stepped back into Una’s den. He needed to see what Ben’s member could do. And Una wouldn’t mind – she wasn’t exactly a nun herself.

  “Open twenty-four hours a day,” mouthed the lips. “Tap your glasses now to receive our location. We’re waiting …”

  Kage hurried out the gym. Signaled a cab. He relayed the address to the taxi.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Anti-Sleep had taken full effect now. The stimulant pumped his chest. Twitched his fingers. Tap-tap-tapped his foot against the hovercab floor.

  He couldn’t be doing this.

  He shouldn’t be doing this.

  He stepped out of the cab, one quivering ankle at a time. Fear coursed through his veins. Expectation. Potential regret.

  What if the penis didn’t work? What if he couldn’t do it, even here?

  He stepped through the shimmering forcefield at the entrance to the club. The ions stroked his cheeks. Draped him in a subtle embrace, until he shoved against the resistance of the field.

  He was through.

  Kage’s footsteps echoed as he walked. The walls, the ceiling, the floor – all were clad in glistening ebony. The air was soaked in French perfume. He suppressed a sneeze. Twice.

  “Welcome,” said a woman taller than Ben Stanton.

  “Uh, thanks.”

  She craned her neck to a disturbingly canine angle. Kage noticed that she managed to bunch her forehead without creating any frown lines. The woman was doped with more Botox than a 20th century pop idol.

  “Your first time, sir?”

  Kage nodded.

  Botox grinned a knowing grin. Reached below the counter, and handed him a pink envelope.

  “The Gay Area is on your left. Phase four thousand. You’ll find a towel and –”

  “I’m not gay.” Kage swallowed.

  Botox barely masked her annoyance at the interruption. She tugged the envelope from his fingers. A moment later, she furnished a crimson replacement.

  “To your right, then. Default phase. Inside your envelope …” She waited for Kage to open it.

  In an attempt at suavité, he tried unsealing the top with his fingernail, but succeeded only in tearing off one corner of the silky paper.

  “Sorry about that.” He ripped the rest of the seal, but with too much force, spilling the contents over the counter. “Sorry.”

>   Botox raised her eyes to the gleaming ceiling. Sighed. Waited for him to retrieve the contents from the length of the counter. She cleared her throat. “The key is for your locker. The pill is for you. Take it now, please.” She handed him a tumbler of water.

  Kage held up the pill to the light. It tingled faintly on his fingertips. Its color shifted depending on the angle. “What is it?”

  “Phased prophylactic.”

  Kage nodded. He was scared to ask, but couldn’t help his curiosity. “Uh, what exactly is that?”

  Footsteps echoed behind him. A burly sexagenarian stood with his thumbs hooked into his waistband, framing a massive crotch. Kage was sure Botox would make no mistake in assuming he was headed for the Straight Area.

  She gritted her teeth. Now her frown lines showed. Botox raised her voice for Burly’s amusement. “The pill alters the phase of your excretions, sir. When they leave your body, your fluids switch phases, rendering them ineffective for transmitting infections or pregnancy.”

  “Uhuh.” Kage lowered his voice. “And how long does the pill last?”

  Botox thrust a paypoint at him. “The entrance fee is four hundred credits. Will that be straight or budget, sir?”

  Burly tapped his foot on the ivory tiles. Shoved out his paunch. Fingered his gold-framed glasses.

  Kage handed over his card. “Budget,” he whispered, and swallowed the pill dry.

  *

  While Autumn slept in his arms, Daniel struggled up the staircase of Alderbury Lane. He did everything he could to minimize bumps and judders, but his unsteady thighs echoed the last effects of the epidural. He was forced to pause on every landing to catch his breath.

  Autumn hadn’t woken from the anesthetic yet. Daniel couldn’t have waited at Hal’s until she did – time had compressed ever since the Detective had found him at Margaret’s. He felt Kage at his back. Knew the Detective was close. Daniel had to find his amygdala.

  Now.

  Sixth landing. Third floor. He trudged down the corridor. Fished the key from his pocket, and stumbled into the dark apartment. He lay Autumn on the floor. Searched the wall beside the door for a switch.

  Light.