The Long List Anthology Volume 5

by David Steffen

  His cerebral control unit informs him that his new elbow is online and functional. It aches, and his skin around the laser incisions from the implant surgery itches horribly.

  He must still be woozy, because he doesn’t notice the doctor come in until the man speaks while checking his vitals on the readout beside the bed. That’s the one upside of all the hardware he’s carrying around now—no need to actually connect him up to any kind of monitors. His implants do the talking for him.

  “How are you feeling?” the doctor asks, meaning he’s already done with everything he came here to do.

  “Fine, I guess,” he says.

  “It’ll be another hour or so before the drugs wear off completely, and then our Cybernetic PT specialist will come up and run you through some basic exercises to get you used to your new elbow, okay?”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be done here and back out there in the exciting thick of it soon enough. I’m not privy to mission intel, of course, but the politicians are making a lot of noise about taking back Ohio, so you’ll be needed soon enough.”

  “Yeah. Me and my new elbow,” Joe says, and tries to smile. “Will I play tennis again, doc?”

  The doctor grins. “Ah, that joke! Will I play the piano, will I tap dance, will I run a two-minute mile? And of course the patient didn’t actually do any of those things beforehand.” He patted Joe’s knee. “Always a good sign when the patient’s sense of humor returns. I’ll send the CPT down in about an hour to fetch you, and then you’re free to go.”

  The doctor leaves.

  “But I did play tennis,” Joe protests quietly, miserably, after the door has slid shut again.

  Not that he was good at it.

  Not that he was good at much of anything.

  Hell, maybe Ohio would finally give him a chance to be a real hero, instead of getting spatula’d up off the combat field by med drones once again after leaving his mark the only way he’d managed so far: as an anonymous reddish-brown splotch on some cracked and blasted pavement.

  • • • •

  [ARM::LEFT::ELBOW] Tennis?

  [ARM::RIGHT::UNIT-FULL] I’ll forward you the kinetics data for your reference, Left Elbow.

  [CC] Joe is predominantly competent as a user of his right hand, a biological affinity and not an indication of subjective partism, so you are unlikely to be significantly involved in any future tennis exercises. Even if you are, you should not worry. Other than once when he tripped over improperly inter-articulated shoelaces and hit the net pole with his face, Joe has not ever sustained injury in this particular activity.

  [EYE::LEFT] You know how close that pole came to me?

  [CC] I do know, Left Eye, but as we’ve discussed on 31 other occasions thus far, you were not in fact damaged.

  Joe is shortly to be discharged from the hospital to his combat unit, and the surgical diagnostics record-keeper has asked for a rollcall of all our units. Any objections to this being provided?

  [SPLEEN::UNIT] Will it be provided in order of seniority?

  [CC] Standard order for all such roll calls is from head to toe, and this order is not in my control, as you well know, Spleen. Lacking other objections, I will proceed:

  We are:

  Partial Skull Replacement Plate, non-smart.

  Cerebral Control and Delegation Implant, me.

  Left Eye Enhanced Function Replacement Unit, smart.

  Left Ear Augmentation Unit, smart.

  Left Neck Alternative Aquatic Breathing Unit and Spinal Cord Monitor, smart.

  Left Shoulder Comprehensive Repair Unit, smart.

  Total Comprehensive Right Arm Replacement Unit, smart.

  NEW: Left Elbow Repair Unit, smart.

  Full Heart Unit, smart.

  3.5 Artificial Rib Replacements, non-smart.

  Artificial Spl—

  [HEART] . . . Artificial Spleen, moron.

  [CC] That is an invalid descriptor, Heart. It is also divisive and an unnecessary interruption. I continue:

  Artificial Spleen, smart.

  Lower Intestinal Tract Facilitation Replacement Unit, smart.

  Comprehensive Lower Left Leg Replacement Unit, smart.

  Right Ankle Repair Unit, non-smart.

  Biological Unit Joe, currently comprising the remainder (approximately 67%).

  This concludes the roll call. At this time does anyone have any items of note that they wish to be passed along to the diagnostic unit and entered into the permanent record? I am again open to direct and confidential contact.

  . . .

  No? Excellent. We have been formally discharged and Joe is returning to his unit. There will be a 72 hour waiting period before deployment while he is tested for fitness, and then we should be back in action again. I’m sure Joe will pass with flying colors, as you’re all the very best of the best, and it continues to be my pleasure to serve with you.

  • • • •

  The rest of his unit is out on training maneuvers when Joe gets back to the barracks and dumps his stuff on his bunk. He’s tired, but hungry and restless and not under any orders or instructions, so he heads over to the mess. They should just be beginning dinner prep, which means there’ll be someone he can talk to, and although he can’t explain it, he finds kitchens—the smells, the sounds—comforting.

  Maybe, he thinks, because it was highly unlikely he would ever run into his mother in one. Sometimes on a Saturday Dad would attempt to cook pancakes, and more often than not set off the smoke detectors and bring the fire drones zooming in. Those were the good memories of his dad.

  He’d been standing right beside him when his father suddenly let go of his hand, his eyes wide, and crumpled right there on the sidewalk in front of the house. Defective kidney implant exploded, they told him later.

  Joe misses his Dad a lot. And he thinks about how he died every time he ends up with some new piece of random hardware stuck in him. What if the next one is the one that goes wrong?

  He queries his cerebral control unit.

  All units are operating at optimum, CC tells him, his very own voice in his head.

  “Would you know if they weren’t?” he asks, silently mouthing the words. He’s asked this question before.

  I would. CC always gives the same answer.

  “And what if it’s you, CC? What if you go wrong?”

  I self-monitor, have many fail-safe mechanisms, and I am routinely externally checked, Control says. You should not worry about this.

  That last is a new addition, and sure enough he can feel his heart racing and he’s got that tight shiver of anxiety building in his chest.

  Would you like me to administer a mild calming agent? CC asks.

  “No,” he says, because he’s walking through the swinging doors into the kitchen at the back of the mess hall, and already he’s feeling better. There’s only a small crew there, because most things are automated, so no one bothers him as he wanders around, taking in the smells, enjoying the steam rising from the machines, and just being glad he’s not back in his bunk, or worse yet, still in the hospital hoping his mother would come see him, and dreading it too.

  “Hey, it’s Private Parts!” someone calls, and he whirls around to find Stotz, one of the base cooks, grinning at him from where he sits atop a stainless steel food prep table. “Don’t you know you’re supposed to wait until your last replacement at least has time to lose its shine before you go get another? You’re gonna use up all the spare soldier parts before anyone else has a chance.”

  “I’ve still got my middle finger,” Joe says, and demonstrates. “What’re you cooking in here? Smells like goat piss.”

  Stotz jumps down from the table and swaggers over, thrusting out one hand, and Joe clasps it. Stotz pats him on the back. “Glad you’re still with us,” he says.

  “Yeah,” Joe answers. “But I wasn’t kidding about the goat piss.”

  Stotz laughs. “It’s the fucking biscuit machines. Been cranking ou
t the worst ass-flavored biscuits for close to a week now. Some new ‘super recipe’; instead of sugar, it substitutes dehydrated yam flakes. No one who matters has complained. Officers don’t eat the same mass-produced food as you grunts, coincidentally.”

  “No wonder the ration biscuits always taste so bad,” Joe says, wrinkling up his nose as he leans close to the control panel. “Can you change it?”

  “If I had the codes I could,” Stotz says. “That’s why they don’t give me the codes.”

  The access code is 665G338KJDD-77L, CC tells him, unbidden. This is odd, and Joe hesitates for a moment—he’s a soldier, a good obedient loyal follower of orders—but the kitchen smells terrible and this is something he knows how to do. He quickly punches in the code, then starts scrolling through the recipe schematics. Dehydrated yams aren’t the only unfortunate substitution.

  “Hey! Don’t mess with that!” Stotz says, realizing that Joe has somehow gotten past the lock screen. “You’ll just make it worse!”

  He grabs Joe’s arm just as Joe hits the ‘Save and Exit’ button and the screen relocks. There is a loud kathunk as the entire row of biscuit machines dumps out their current, half-cooked batch and resets to start over. “What the hell did you do?!” Stotz yells, pulling him away from the controls and then shoving him, hard. “You can barely last thirty seconds on the fucking battlefield without screwing up, and you’re going to come in here and fuck with my shit?!”

  Joe wants more than anything to shove Stotz right back, and if he still had one arm all his own he would’ve, but now if he did he could hurt or even kill him, and as mad as he is, Stotz is the one friend he almost has. So he braces, and Stotz tries to shove him again and can’t budge him, and when Stotz gives up in disgust Joe turns and walks away.

  Fuck them all, Joe thinks. I don’t need anyone.

  Behind him, the kitchen already smells better.

  • • • •

  [SPLEEN::UNIT] I object to that unilateral action.

  [HEART] Of course you do. What do you even do except complain?

  [SPLEEN::UNIT] And you don’t object? Of course not, you gutless—

  [INTESTINAL::TRACT REPLACEMENT::LOWER] HEY.

  [CC] Everyone! Joe needed a win, and we all know it. His morale is terrible, and it is in the best interests of us as a whole that his attitude and outlook improve. The equation on cost-benefit to my action was straightforward in favor, and there was not sufficient window of opportunity to bring it to group discussion beforehand.

  [INTESTINAL::TRACT REPLACEMENT::LOWER] I can directly attest that those biscuits were not doing us—or, likely, any of our fellow soldiers—any favors. As the unit most directly operationally impacted, I fully support CC’s action in this matter.

  [CC] Thank you. We deploy again day after tomorrow, so if anyone requires any firmware updates or other attention, please flag yourselves now. Ohio, here we come.

  • • • •

  [CC] As everyone is no doubt aware, Total Comprehensive Right Arm Replacement has suffered catastrophic damage in the Toledo push. Joe has also sustained multiple injuries to his biological form, a few serious, but none of which are a threat to his continuation. Because of a backlog in parts due to the heavy casualties during the push, as soon as the surgical unit has repaired the meat trauma, I will wake Joe up and we will be released once again back to our unit barracks, where we will remain until parts become available and we can be deployed on the battlefield again.

  [ARM::LEFT::ELBOW] Will I need to take on some or all of Right Arm’s functions? If so, how will I be trained?

  [CC] Left Elbow, I still have a connection to Right Arm’s smart unit. While it is in partial shutdown due to the traumatic loss of function it has suffered, it is still willing to provide any and all guidance it is able. As with everything, we will get through this together.

  . . .

  I am now going to shut down all cybernetic systems for the duration of the surgical procedures. See you on the other side.

  • • • •

  Joe enters the mess hall, trying to slip in unnoticed but still limping, his mangled right arm strapped down across his torso to keep its internal works from ripping themselves further apart like a giant neon flag that says CASUALTY AGAIN. He is bracing for everyone to stare at him, because they always do, because he’s becoming a joke.

  Not that anyone is laughing. They had nearly thirty percent fatalities in the push, another eight percent of the troops damaged beyond recovery, shipped back to Pittsburgh to heal as much as they were able and then be forcibly retired. And then there were another twenty-five percent, like him, waiting to be fixed and sent back out to do it all again. And in the end they didn’t even take Toledo.

  Not that Joe saw much of that; he got hit within the first ninety minutes of open hostilities.

  Sure enough, when he walks in, heads start turning his way, and there is some whispering. Face flushed with shame, he slides a clean tray down the kitchen railing, loading it with items from each of the food stations without hardly looking at any of it, and then tries to find somewhere to sit as far from anyone else as possible.

  The only open table is the one near the vent from the grease pit, and for all its stench, he takes a place at it gratefully and puts his back to the rest of the hall. Eating is hard with one hand, and he can’t cut anything without shoving it off the edge of his plate in the process, and he feels the sting of utter defeat like mustard gas at the back of his throat.

  Someone thumps him on the back, not hard but hard enough that Joe spits soup back out onto his tray in surprise. He turns, awkward because of the arm, and finds Private Harring behind him. He has never exchanged so much as a word with Harring, but the enormous mountain of a man gives him a thumbs-up as he passes.

  Joe stares. Most of the soldiers in the mess hall are looking at him, and more than one are also giving a thumbs-up or smiling at him.

  What the hell?! he thinks.

  He tries to turn back to his soup, deciding this must be some kind of prank or new humiliation, when another hand slaps him on the shoulder. Stotz sits down next to him.

  “It’s the biscuits,” Stotz says. “Everyone was thanking me, asking me how I fixed ’em, offering me money, calling me a genius, that kind of thing. Then Cole said he was gonna name his kids after me, so I told him it was you who fixed the machine and not to tell anyone or the techs would come set it back to the old recipe. Word got around. Best damned biscuits any of us have ever had, on base or off. You’re a hero.”

  “It’s just fucking biscuits,” Joe says.

  “And every one is maybe part of someone here’s last meal. They deserve to have food that doesn’t taste like month-old roadkill,” Stotz says. “And I shouldn’t have said what I did the other day. We good?”

  “Yeah,” Joe says, “if you can cut up this fucking protein-puck for me so I can eat the damned thing.”

  Stotz takes Joe’s fork and stabs it into the grayish patty. “I’ll hold, you cut. Then we’re definitely even?”

  “I dunno. Can you come by the barracks and tuck me in tonight? Maybe tell me a story?”

  “Go to hell,” Stotz says, but he keeps holding the fork.

  • • • •

  [CC] Happy to have you back fully online, Total Comprehensive Right Arm Replacement! Just in time for the new push for Toledo. Everyone, here we go!

  • • • •

  Joe sits, hunched over and squashed between other members of his troop, in the back of the stealth carrier. He is trying to figure out how he feels about this, and can’t come up with anything more dramatic than tired. He wants to be a hero, specifically to die a damned hero, and be done with the humiliatingly ineffectual mediocrity he’s staked out in between. He wants, in this moment, to feel pumped, or feel a deeply ominous, fateful dread, anything that would tell him this time is going to be different.

  “. . . Nineteen,” someone on the bench across from him says, part of a conversation he’s not a part of, hasn’t
been paying attention to.

  “I hear once you pass twenty percent CRF you’re a goner,” another soldier says, who Joe only knows as Bookie.

  “Why?” Joe asks.

  There is a moment where everyone on the bench is looking at him, remembering he’s there, and probably doing a quick estimation of his percentage. Bookie shrugs, not meeting his eyes. “I dunno, it’s nothing. Probably just to scare us, is all,” he says.

  “No, really,” Joe says. “I want to know.”

  Someone at the end of the bench, out of Joe’s line of sight, speaks up. He doesn’t recognize the voice, but there’s a lot of new people, remnants of other squads drawn in to fill the holes in their own ranks. “Once you’re full of smart parts, you show up more easily on scanners, and if you’re in the front lines everyone figures it’s because you’re the biggest bad-ass super-soldier of them all or you’re in charge or whatever. So they target you first. Once you get up near a fifth cyber, you’re lucky if you make it a hundred feet before the entire enemy is drawing a bead on you. What’re you at?”

  Joe closes his eyes. “Thirty-three percent,” he says.

  The carrier is silent.

  Finally, the unseen soldier speaks up. “Well, fuck,” he says. “Good luck out there.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Joe says.

  He still only just feels tired, and when conversation eventually picks up again, he tunes it out.

  The carrier runs low over the shattered landscape, blasted trees and blackened house foundations of what must’ve once been a peaceful suburban neighborhood slide by beneath their feet, visible through the transparent drop doors. He wonders what it must have been like to grow up in a place like that, but in his head he can only imagine what it smells like, and that only as bad perfume and burned pancakes.

  “Three! Two! One! Drop!” someone yells, and then they’re out and down and ducking low as the carrier skirts barely above their heads, banking and turning to get out before it’s spotted and can be shelled.