Lucia understood her city and her place in it all. She knew that Dockside wasn’t where she was supposed to be, but it was where she had to go. So, it was with very real trepidation and no small discomfort that she hailed a cab and hopped in to take the long ride over the container tram lines into the seediest and most dangerous area in the whole sprawling megalopolis. The cabbie knew it too, but was too polite to say anything.
Lucia had her second bout of panic when the cab driver stopped the car four blocks away from “The Smoking Wreck” and told her that he could go no further. Only cabs that were paid up with the local crime syndicates were allowed to operate in the Dockside district, and her guy was behind on his dues. She would have to walk the last mile, and hope that the local criminal element was not interested in well-dressed urbanite ladies walking down dark alleys at night in the bad part of town.
It turns out that this was a silly thing to hope for. When she felt the two men settle in behind her as she walked, she knew deep down in her lizard brain that they intended to rob her… or worse. It just wasn’t fair! She was scared, worried about her father, confused, and she could feel a migraine coming on. Now two assholes were going to jump her for the seventy-one creds left in her purse. She quickened her pace to try to put some distance between herself and the two men behind her, but that only hastened the outcome.
Those two men behind her, affectionately known among the folks in Dockside as “Mooch” and “Poco” were professional-level losers. They had never met a get-rich-quick scheme they didn’t like, and they were prone to bouts of intense physical violence whenever the mood (or the drugs) came upon them. They were street-level opportunists with a moral compass that never pointed north. The sight of an uptown girl with expensive boots and a purse that just had to be stuffed with creds was just too appealing to the two young men. Especially since the word was already trickling down about a certain short-haired rich bitch that might be worth some serious creds to the right people. They had no clue at all if this was the right girl, but either way, they were going to have some fun tonight.
They fell in behind her to see if she would turn onto a less-used side street or even an alleyway so they could make their move in private. When she sped up, they knew they were caught. All thoughts of strategy went out the window at that point, which did not change the results by as much as one might think. The duo were not high-level strategic thinkers on their best days; and today wasn’t even close to their best. They simply ran and clutched at the fleeing woman.
Lucia, now fully panicking, experienced the strangest sensation when Mooch and Poco started to grab her: Everything slowed down. A lot, really, when she thought about it. The closer their hands got, the slower they seemed to move. The headlong charge looked more like an underwater ballet as the two men hurtled toward her, arms outstretched and fingers reaching. All the terrified woman saw was the languid loping of a pair of drunkards.
Her own reaction was slower than she expected as well, but it was light-years ahead of the two thugs. Her right hand, clutched tight in a balled fist, came under the first one’s arm and arced cleanly up to the chin and made solid contact. Poco’s jaw clicked shut hard enough to break teeth. His head snapped up and back in an abrupt u-turn and a stream of blood and tooth fragments began a torpid parabola from his broken mouth.
Mooch registered none of this as his own clumsy fingers closed on the empty air where his erstwhile quarry had just been. He saw Poco’s misfortune in passing, but he could not alter his own trajectory in time to do anything about it.
As soon as he had control of his momentum, Mooch spun to take another swipe at the small-yet-slippery girl. He got his bearings on her just in time to catch a savage kick to the groin. It was the first time in two years a woman had touched him there, and sadly, the previous contact had also been a soccer-kick to his tender bits. His knees buckled immediately as fireworks of pain danced on his retinas.
Lucia was already turning back to Poco, who was still holding his leaking face. His eyes grew wide for a moment as they caught the image of a small, well-dressed woman streaking towards him. He never even saw the ferocious whipping trajectory of her tiny, bony elbow as it traced a horizontal path to, into, and through his left cheekbone. Poco checked out of reality at that moment and took a nap on the street, blood and dignity oozing pathetically from his ruined face.
Mooch decided at that moment to try to extricate himself from the rapidly deteriorating situation. His crushed testicles limited his mobility, and the bottled lightning he and his unconscious partner had tried to abduct got to him before he ever found his feet. She punched him four times in one second, with alternating hooks fired with machine-gun-quick patter. Each impact whipped his head in the opposite direction, turning his cranium into a spastic oscillating speed bag. He was unconscious before he hit the ground. Which was a blessing, really.
So, it was less than twenty minutes after winning her first fistfight ever, that Lucia found herself hiding under the table at a bar, watching a man she knew only from her father’s stories fight a battle against superhuman enemies to protect her. She felt, as the incessant pressure of a mounting panic attack began to fray the edges of her sanity, that it would be entirely justifiable if she lost her mind completely and fainted from all the pressure.
And that’s precisely what she did.
Chapter Four
“So what, exactly, are you?” was Lucia’s understandable, if not entirely polite, question. For reasons purely practical, Roland had brought her unconscious form back to his apartment in Dockside. Since she was obviously being pursued vigorously, he needed to get her out of sight quickly; and he lived in highly convenient proximity to the Smoking Wreck. He liked to consider that a coincidence, but he knew deep down that living close to his favorite bar was more than a little intentional. Lucia sat in one of the two normal sized chairs in his otherwise blandly furnished apartment. Roland did not entertain often, and his domicile reflected both his girth and his military background in its spartan décor.
A generous Army pension and numerous paying gigs as a Dockside ‘fixer’ meant a comfortable existence, if not an extravagant one. His apartment was bigger than most, and in a section of Dockside that was at least two standard deviations above the mean for squalor and crime level. Roland didn’t have to sweat petty crime that much. Every mugger, bruiser, drug-dealer and pimp in Dockside knew to give Roland’s apartment a wide berth. Roland appreciated peace and quiet. Those that disturbed the peace became examples for the rest, and it had been a long time since he had needed to reinforce the lesson.
The apartment had three largish rooms. A kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room; as well as a bathroom. His furniture was sized and built for his stature out of necessity and represented the only really expensive items in the place. It was kept to military standards for orderliness, and while tidy, exuded no real warmth. Lucia acknowledged, in an archaic fashion, that it certainly lacked a ‘woman’s touch.’
Roland had not been expecting company, but he was lucky enough to have a few beers in the fridge. He offered the lady a lager while she pulled herself together. Of course, Roland always had beer handy, so luck may not have been much of a factor. When you weigh a thousand pounds, and have things inside you that make getting drunk very difficult, you are going to go through a lot of beer.
“What am I?” Roland feigned offense, “I’m a decorated veteran. What are you?”
Lucia at least had the decency to appear sheepish, “I’m sorry! I just…” she gestured at him, “I mean... uh... what are… uh… you? Like a cyborg or something?”
He tried to smile in a disarming manner. He was bad at it, and he hoped she accepted the gesture in the spirit he was trying to deliver it. She relaxed visibly at his feeble attempt, and he took that as a good sign. Roland was not what most would call a ‘people person.’ But neither was he a stupid man. He had muddled through a few years of engineering school and had been a proficient combat engineer during his traditional mi
litary service. He understood physics and chemistry better than most, and further schooling during the process of making him into what he ultimately ended up becoming had made him fairly conversant in his own systems. His imperfect understanding of the harder science coupled with his natural inclination to brusqueness made explaining it all somewhat tricky.
“Technically, it’s classified. I can go to jail for telling you and you could go to jail for knowing. But,” he paused for a moment, choosing his words carefully, “… since the answer probably has a lot to do with your father’s trouble, I’ll clue you in.” He gestured to the fridge, “It’s a fairly long story, so grab a fresh beer if you need one.”
Lucia took his advice and cracked open another can of beer. She settled into the chair and assumed an exaggerated listening pose, “I’ve got nowhere to be, buddy.”
“I’m not what most people think of when they think ‘cyborg’, per se…” he began in a wholly inadequate introduction. “I mean, I have inorganic components, but it’s different from a regular prosthesis,” he continued, as if that cleared everything up.
Lucia’s scrunched brow only reinforced the sinking feeling in Roland’s guts that he was making no damn sense.
He sighed, “Cyborgs get body parts replaced with artificial versions of stuff. If a guy gets his regular arm blown off, the army puts a metal arm back on. That arm is just a mechanical replacement for the organic thing that got lost.”
Lucia looked at him; took in all seven and a half feet and nine-hundred-and-forty pounds of him, and politely asked, “So none of… that…” she gestured in his direction, “… constitutes ‘mechanical versions of stuff?’”
“Well… sort of…” Roland backtracked. This was not going well, “It’s not so much ‘mechanical’ in the traditional sense. It’s…” Unable to find a better way to explain, he simply told her what he had been told, “It’s mostly techno-organic myofibrillar and osteoplastic analogs.” He shrugged, “my body is not strictly organic, but it’s close enough that my brain thinks it is, and my nervous system treats it like it is.”
Lucia did not look convinced, “I’m not going to going to lie. I have no idea what any of that even means.”
“My body parts were not built in a shop and then attached to me like other ’borgs,” he sighed. “The body was grown, molecule by molecule, from polymers that mimic human muscle and bone. My own DNA was used as blueprint, so my nervous system would treat it just like my own bones and muscles.”
She gasped, “Oh my god! Is your real body underneath all that…” she gesticulated wildly, “… stuff?”
Roland shrugged, “Some of it. We call the techno-organic stuff the ‘chassis’ or sometimes the ‘frame.’ It helps differentiate the systems.” He went on, “The chassis was grown separately, but most of my organic mass was removed long before my nervous system was transferred.” Roland wasn’t sure that was the right way to phrase it. His arms, legs, and several of his internal organs had conveniently been removed by separatist explosives prior to his conversion, but that was a much longer and grislier story. One he’d prefer not to get into at this exact moment, to be honest.
“My liver, pancreas, heart and other organs were replaced with better synthetic versions grown from my own DNA by the program.” That wasn’t the whole story. He didn’t mention that he didn’t have lungs or that his heart was an actual mechanical pump. It seemed like unnecessary detail. His spine and skull had been reinforced to an absurd degree with liberal quantities of bleeding-edge polymers. The skin of his face and head were laced with a fast-repairing mesh of artificial skin lattice. It gave his face a flat, dull, sheen; and the greatest scientists of Earth’s mightiest military hadn’t been able to figure out how to get hair to grow on it, either.
The program had regrown or rebuilt the balance of his limbs and organs, peeled the skin form his torso, and mounted the depleted, raw, and bleeding meat that was Roland Tankowicz into a home-grown cybernetic body built right to the specs of his own DNA.
“I was a big boy before I got all cyberized, so my chassis ended up looking like this,” he flexed playfully, straining the seams of his 4XL shirt. “I don’t think this is the look they were going for, but it’s what they got,” he added, trying to lighten the mood. She chuckled politely.
Roland had been a large, powerful man when he joined the United Earth Defense Force. What had been six-foot-six and nearly three hundred pounds of idealism and enthusiasm got pulled right from the front lines of a Venusian border dispute and plopped into the most ambitious warfighter enhancement project in human history. This had been for the best, really. The injuries he sustained on Venus were not going to be survivable, and everyone knew it. He mentioned this without going into too much morbid detail.
“Thankfully, it seemed, the Army had plans for me, and it was all going to be OK. They would just build me a new body!” He snorted derisively, “You know, as long as I agreed to a few terms and signed some waivers. Shoulda read the fine print, first.”
Since his options had consisted of “sign here or die a horrible slow death,” he had gone ahead and volunteered for the program. The Army delivered as promised: the new body grown for him matched all his genetic potential and enhanced it. Impressive musculature became extreme, and what had once been a big, strong man was now a towering technological juggernaut.
“Most of me is just high-tech synthetic versions of regular human tissue. I have a synthetic immune system and even synthetic blood.”
That was a rather gross oversimplification. A veritable swarm of nanomachines took the place of blood and other cells in the techno-organic hulk, and billions of microscopic robots moved resources around and suppled energy and fuel to the various systems. Roland’s remaining organics (such as they were) still had and employed human blood, but thanks to those little ’bots, most of the resources he needed could be gleaned from any environment. Minerals and chemicals could be consumed as raw materials, or synthesized from available properties in the environment. Oxygen was scrubbed from virtually any combination of atmospheric gasses, or simply used in a miserly fashion from the onboard stores.
A testimony to his builder’s commitment to durability, approximately 150 pounds of Roland’s total mass was allocated just for spare resource materials. His faithful nanobots could rebuild an entire limb from these stores, provided Roland had the time and energy to accomplish such a task.
Which was a bit of an issue, actually. Energy was not a big deal when he was still with the army. Roland was equipped with the same military-grade ShipCel that powered the Avenger-class strike drone, and the Army had lots of those lying around. If Roland limited himself to basic locomotion and everyday tasks, then the power source was good for close to a decade before the core needed recharging. At standard combat-theater output, he might get nine months out of a full charge. Full Power? He’d be lucky to get thirty days. It was something he had to stay on top of though, because when Roland ran out of ShipCel power, his body stopped moving. That can be a very big deal when one is built from a half-ton of exotic metal and plastic. In an emergency, he was capable of absorbing most frequencies of electromagnetic radiation and converting them to power, but it was brutally slow and exposure to direct sunlight on earth would net barely enough juice to walk very, very, slowly. It was an ugly proposition.
Adding another layer of complexity to his power issues, Roland’s body was not strictly his own. It remained officially classified as “defunct military ordnance” and as such he could not easily acquire new ShipCels for it. The Army had scores of them, but Roland was not in a position to requisition any from his former employer. Purchasing one would cost more than a nice house in the suburbs, and he was nowhere near having that kind of money. Basically, Roland had to get creative when it came to managing his power needs.
ShipCels could be recharged, but that meant plugging in and sitting for a very long time; and ShipCels had a limited number of recharges in them before they required new cores. He had been out o
f the military for twenty-five years, and Roland was on his third ShipCel. The last one he had to ‘acquire’ from a black-market gun-runner who had a crashed Avenger stashed on one of Saturn’s moons. Roland was not slavishly loyal to the government, nor was he overly fastidious about operating in strict legality, but dealing with that gunrunner had left a bad taste in his mouth. He had set himself more than one mental reminder to murder that particular bastard at some point. He just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
His current ’Cel was in good shape, and he did his best to keep it topped off by plugging in at night. The power bills were brutal, but he didn’t know what else to do. If he stayed out of pitched battles and charged obsessively, he might get twenty years out of this one. That was the plan anyway.
Keeping his power consumption low wasn’t all that hard. At 100% output, Roland could press close to twenty tons over his head, or sprint sixty miles per hour on a straightaway. Hilariously, he had virtually no ability to turn corners at that speed, but technically he could go that fast if he needed to. Since that sort of silliness was rarely necessary, getting through the typical day used only the tiniest fraction of juice. If he avoided strenuous activities, then eight hours on the charger was usually enough to offset a typical sixteen-hour day of working and drinking. The power bill was a little painful, but he could afford it. Roland felt it was worth it if it helped put off sourcing another ’Cel.
The eighty-six pounds of organic material that lay cocooned inside all this high-tech wonderment was easier to handle; as the needs of the flesh were comparatively tiny compared to those of the machine. Why he retained eighty-six pounds of organic material was an altogether different story. Organic components served very little purpose in the interstellar combat theater, and were technically a weak link in the system due to their inherent squishy-ness and incessant need for fuel, air, and water. Lucia wondered aloud if it would have behooved the project to eliminate them, “Why didn’t they make all of you… uhm… synthetic?”
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