He was beaming at her as he spoke these words, his apparent happiness for her evident. Reassembly, as though she were a broken toy being rescued from the corner of Santa’s workshop.
She didn’t quite share his enthusiasm, fearing, as unlife had taught her to, the worst.
And then the worst arrived.
“But we will have to take you offline. Just for a little while.”
Her mouth was working, but the scream she felt building in her brain had no release.
* * *
She returned on the operating table, in time to witness most of her reassembly. The doctors acted swiftly in reattaching, transplanting, and positioning all her new or refurbished parts. Drs. C and Beck were assisted during the various procedures by a revolving cast of lab-coated assistants, and all were observed by the attentive—and somewhat sad—eyes of Angela and Alish Hunter. Alish, already ancient in appearance, looked as though he’d aged another eon since she’d seen him last. Sylvia found herself hoping that it was from watching what they’d done to her.
The thought wasn’t like her at all, she observed.
She watched them return her lungs, two withered purple sacs, to her body, Dr. C placing them down into her chest as though he were lowering a baby to its cradle for a nap. She lost track of the order of the reassembly after that, closing her eyes for many of the procedures, no longer wanting to see what they were doing to her. There were mirrored light fixtures above her; she had to clench her lids tightly to keep their harsh white glare from penetrating through to her eyes. She couldn’t clench her eyelids tightly before, so this represented some progress. Seeing the pieces of her scattered across the room in jars hadn’t been an issue for her, but seeing them replaced in the hollow of her body cavity was. She began blinking, and it was Angela who finally realized, nearly an hour later, that she was blinking in code. Angela held her hand and whispered in her ear.
“I don’t understand,” she said, a statement Sylvia found extremely ironic. “I will ask you questions, and if you can, blink twice for yes and once for no. Do you understand? Can you do that?”
Sylvia blinked twice.
“Do you feel any pain?”
Blink.
“Are you uncomfortable?”
Blink.
“Would you like me to continue holding your hand?”
Blink Blink.
Through blinking alone, Sylvia was able to convey to Angela that the lights above were bothering her and that she didn’t want to witness the procedures. Minutes later she was wearing sunglasses, and there was a curtain hanging above her neck. It took Sylvia much longer to request some music to listen to while undergoing the operations, and longer still to assist Angela in finding the sort of Deep House/Trance music that she had enjoyed when she was alive. She’d listen to the music in hope and anticipation of someday having the courage and the lack of inhibition to dance; now she just hoped that she could walk out of the Foundation under her own power.
Angela asked her if she was excited that the augmentation was nearly complete, and Sylvia blinked twice; but her answer didn’t mean what Angela thought it did.
She tried to make Angela aware that she didn’t want to hear any progress updates on the procedures, but Angela never quite grasped this, dutifully informing her of every step along the way.
“Your liver was damaged beyond repair,” she said, a single worry line creasing her normally untroubled forehead. Angela had argued with Dr. C only a moment before, telling him that it was inappropriate of him to complain in front of their patient (a term Sylvia considered to be a status upgrade—she’d heard herself referred to by many terms: “the experiment,” “the project,” and once, “the body,” but never as “the patient” or, even more tellingly, as “Sylvia” by anyone other than Angela). Apparently, Dr. C went on a mini-tirade about how her music was “driving him crazy.”
I’m driving him crazy? Sylvia thought. After he went tromping through the jungles of my mind, swinging his machete?
And actually, she concluded, he was crazy long before I arrived at the Hunter Foundation. They all were, herself included.
“We’ll have a new one for you tomorrow.”
Three days later, her reassembly was all but complete. Somehow they’d replaced the front of her rib cage—Dr. Beck was going on about ceramic polymers and bonding agents, and Sylvia blinked rapidly at Angela in an attempt to get her to talk over him. She tried this technique again to silence an assistant who was talking about stitching.
An hour later, Dr. C entered the room. He was whistling a jaunty tune, but the moment he arrived the worry line was back on Angela’s brow. They whispered in the corner of the room for a few minutes. When they finally approached her, Angela would not meet her eyes, and she knew the news would not be good.
“We have to take you offline again.”
Blink
She was aware that Angela was squeezing her hand in both of her own. “This will be the last time, honey. I promise.”
Blink
Dr. C walked around the table and behind her, then leaned forward, his bald head like a full moon eclipsing the bright lights above.
“Your augmentation is nearly complete,” he said. “Taking you offline in ten seconds. Nine.”
Blink
Dr. C continued counting.
“You’ll see it is for the best, Sylvia,” Angela said. “When we bring you back.”
Blink
Blink
Bli
* * *
When she returned from nothingness, she knew that they were playing with her brain, detaching wires, providing stimulus, because she had similar experiences to those the boy had given her when he was torturing her. She woke up drowning, her throat and her new lungs burning, unable to draw air. There was intense pressure against her eyebrows, and the pressure was building from within her. The burning sensation spread from her lungs to her extremities, and then she was no longer drowning but on fire, as though the liquid that had been clogging her lungs had been gasoline and Dr. C had lit a match. After total immolation, which took approximately one thousand years, Sylvia returned to her childhood once again. She was holding her father’s hand in a crowded city street, and then he let go, and she was adrift in a tide of humanity. He—neither of her parents, really—had ever been good at holding on.
The smell of wintergreen came as the vision faded. Then she was on a hill at the edge of a city—the same city where her father let go of her, maybe—and she was standing under a bruised and purpling sky, a crowd of corpses gathered at the foot of her hill. Not all of the corpses were still walking, and she heard Dr. Beck telling an assistant that most augmentations were unsuccessful. She heard the clacking of bones in the wind and then the taste of steel wool was in her mouth. The sensations were winking in and out, as though someone, Dr. C most likely, was taking her on- and offline rapidly.
The strobe-effect sensations ceased suddenly, and then she felt warmth spreading through her, a warmth that was as emotional as it was physical, and she understood herself to be in the presence of God. She could not recall what He said to her when she awoke a few minutes later, but she knew that His words had made her happy.
Angela’s was the first face Sylvia saw when she returned.
“Sylvia,” Angela said, all worry gone. “You’re back.”
Sylvia blinked twice and could feel herself blinking. She opened her mouth, and she could feel her lips parting.
“Happy…birthday,” she said.
* * *
Angela had frowned then, not understanding Sylvia’s little joke. She’d spoken the same words that Frosty the Snowman had said whenever the children reincorporated him from snow and his magic top hat. Even when she’d been a small child herself, she’d always wondered where Frosty went after being melted, and how it was that he was able to retain his memories after being destroyed.
And did he want to remember? It always seemed to her that melting—going offline—in such a manner would have
been a very painful experience.
Thinking of him now, she wondered why Frosty had never been angry at his destroyers—wouldn’t he have wanted vengeance on those who melted him out of existence?
Or maybe, she thought, he reserved his darkest feelings for his creators, the children who brought him back time and again to relive his own destruction.
* * *
Angela brought a mirror with her on Sylvia’s first day “back” from augmentation. The girl that stared out at her from the glass was prettier by far than the one that had come back from the dead nearly a year ago Her hair was glossy, not dry and withered, as it had been in death, and her skin was smooth and had tone and color. While still a shade pale, she no longer possessed the mottled, grayish pallor she’d had since returning. Her eyes no longer just reflected light, they now had a light within them; and when the girl in the mirror blinked, Sylvia gasped in surprise. She smiled—the muscles worked, by reflex—and she brought her hand up to cover the astonished O of her mouth.
“I’m…I’m breathing,” she said. “Am I…alive?”
She was pausing because she was surprised, not because of the debilitating effects of zombie-ism.
Angela shook her head and reached toward her. She used her fingernails to comb the hair that had fallen over Sylvia’s eyes
“No,” she said. “But you aren’t fully dead, either. You’re something new. Something…differently differently biotic. We think that with more treatments…”
“Treatments?” Sylvia said, running the tips of her fingers over her forehead, expecting to feel a ridged line of stitching; but she could feel nothing except supple skin. “Don’t take me offline again.”
“We shouldn’t have to,” Angela said.
“You don’t have to…remove…the top of my head…again…do you?”
Angela laughed, but Sylvia hadn’t meant it as a joke. She didn’t see anything funny about the question at all.
“No, we shouldn’t. You can’t feel a scar, can you? We can do wonders with skin now.”
Angela leaned forward to hug her, and Sylvia allowed her to. Angela had held her hand for hours at a time during the many procedures; and she’d barely left her side the entire time she had been conscious. An internal voice that seemed entirely unlike her own asked Sylvia if that had been for her benefit, or for Angela’s.
First, they took your body, the voice continued. Played with it and took it apart like you were a cheap plastic doll. Then they tampered with your mind, made you experience and feel things you’ve never felt.
Then, worst of all, they erased you.
And when they brought you back, who is to say that you are still the same you?
Sylvia could feel Angela’s warmth, and she could smell her perfume. After a moment, she hugged her back.
“Is there anything that you would like to do?” Angela asked, breaking their embrace. She beamed at Sylvia, and Sylvia could tell that Angela thought she was the same girl she’d always known. “Anything that you have been dreaming of?”
“Yes,” Sylvia said, and she remembered to smile. “I’d like…to take…a shower.”
* * *
Coming back from augmentation was far, far different from coming back from death. Sylvia was walking and talking with few hitches and pauses almost immediately, and her abilities were very close to those she had possessed when she was alive. Prior to augmentation, she’d only been able to move her arms laterally unless she concentrated very hard, as the muscles that allowed her to twist and rotate simply did not work the way they were supposed to. But now…now she could do so much. She could run short distances; she could read an entire paragraph of a book out loud without pauses. She could shoot a basketball and once in a while she could even put it through the hoop.
She could even type.
Angela thought that typing and light office work would be a good thing to incorporate into her overall therapy, and although Sylvia accepted the duties without complaint, Angela felt she needed to sell her on the benefits.
“Phoebe and Karen used to work in the office,” Angela said. “We’d worked out a schedule, remember? The duties would rotate so that everyone would get a chance. We were hoping to do a study on whether or not certain activities helped improve a differently biotic person’s functionality.”
Sylvia remembered a day when some of her friends had come into her lab. Karen had looked around the room at her, fury blazing in her diamond eyes.
“Where are…my friends?” she asked.
Angela told her of the dissolution of the Undead Studies program. She didn’t say so directly, but Sylvia got the sense that her friends’ walking in on the augmentation mid-process had been a contributing factor.
“I hope that one day they will reconsider,” Angela said. “We…I think that we were doing very important work together, work that would have a very meaningful impact on trad/db relations.”
Sylvia, pretending to be studying the computer screen, did not look at her.
“Maybe when they see you,” Angela said. “Maybe when they see how wonderfully the augmentation worked and they see you, they will come back.”
“Oh, they will…come back,” Sylvia told her. “I’m sure of it.”
* * *
She was correct; her friends returned a week later for a visit. Angela paraded Sylvia before them as though she was a show horse, and Sylvia was struck by the irony of the proceedings. The comments from her friends were mostly about how well she was moving, or how pretty she looked, or how she could speak without pauses. Once again, the discussion was about her body, about the assembled pieces, and not the mind that gave those pieces life. Only Karen seemed to sense that there was something else at work behind Sylvia’s eyes, but Karen didn’t share whatever it was that her telepathetic powers were telling her, as was her way. They embraced, and when they were cheek to cheek, Sylvia couldn’t help but think that the primary result of the augmentation was that it made her more Karen-like.
“Are you okay?” Karen whispered. “Do you want to leave with me?”
Sylvia shook her head, smiling at her friend. In her heart, which may have even beat on occasion, she did want to leave with Karen, but there were some things that she needed to do first.
Not all of her various therapies had been completed.
* * *
She’d been online—online via the computer; she herself had been “online” without cease since confusing Angela with her “happy birthday” greeting—reading about automobile construction and repair when the boy who’d tried to destroy her, Pete Martinsburg, had walked past the office where she worked. She’d never had an interest in vehicles prior to her augmentation, but now she found the subject endlessly fascinating, and she could spend up to an hour at a time looking at a single schematic. She especially liked the schematics that showed the various parts separated but ready to be joined, their connection points indicated by dotted or solid lines. She learned that these particular drawings were called “exploded drawings.” “Exploded drawings”—she liked that phrase.
The idea that an engine—each operating system within an automotive, really—could be broken down into its component parts and be reassembled in a manner that actually improved the overall performance of the vehicle was both inspiring and illuminating to her.
She saw Pete Martinsburg out of the corner of her eye. She barely glanced up from the exploded drawing of a motorcycle carburetor on her flat computer screen as she palmed a pair of very small but very sharp scissors. This was a purely reflexive reaction, like reaching for a magazine or a shoe when encountering a large and leggy bug crossing the kitchen counter. It was an action devoid of conscious thought, an impulse driven by a hot wire in the brain.
Martinsburg gave her a look that was at first smug and appraising and vaguely threatening, but ultimately one that morphed into shock. He recognized her. That was good, she thought. If she’d seen even a flicker of guilt or remorse register on his handsome and evil face, she might have
felt something different than what she now felt.
Angela accepted him into her office, closing the door behind him. Sylvia had never spoken to her about what Martinsburg had done to her body, and she wasn’t certain that Angela was even aware of the extent of it. Perhaps Drs. C and Beck had conspired with Duke Davidson to keep the incident a quiet, shameful secret. Maybe they had been afraid for their jobs. Maybe one more botched augmentation would have been the final straw, and they would be out on the street.
Or maybe they all knew—Angela, Alish, the doctors, all of them. Maybe they all knew, and they were just too afraid to tell her.
And maybe they should be, the voice in her head whispered. That voice was sounding more like Sylvia every day.
She waited for Martinsburg to come out, the scissors hidden under her sleeve like an amateur magician’s finest trick. She was breathing now, and although Dr. C said in one of his periodic examinations that it wasn’t really necessary, he also said that there might be some positive benefits, so keep it up! She kept her breathing even and steady, and though she could feel the excitement bubbling out and over the edges of her mind there were no physiological effects visible whatsoever. She was looking again at the schematic of the carburetor, admiring the elegant complexity of how the individual pieces fit together.
Martinsburg emerged from the office not very long after entering, and then was taken on a detour from the exit by Duke, who steered him back into the depths of the facility. Sylvia waited until they reached the end of the long corridor before rising from her chair to follow them.
How nice it was, she thought, to feel the silvery coolness of the scissor blades pressing against her forearm. Of course, it was nice to feel anything at all—back when she was differently biotic instead of differentlydifferently biotic, they could have driven nails into her flesh and she wouldn’t have felt a thing. Now she could feel almost anything.
They turned to the left and took another long corridor to an elevator, so she took the stairs instead. The elevator only went down from this floor, so that was the direction she went.
Generation Dead: Stitches Page 4