by Dan Davis
The locksmith put down his drill and turned to the Tac Surgeon.
“Five minutes,” he whispered.
“Surgical team,” the Tac Surgeon said into his internal mic. “Come on up.”
There were only twelve hours and thirty-four minutes until wheels up on the orbital shuttle and UNOP were remarkably keen to get the target’s central nervous system onboard. So much so that they had offered a bonus big enough to upgrade the Tac Surgeon’s already-booked Mars colony cabin to first class. Why they wanted this particular target so badly, he could not fathom.
The Tac Surgeon waited in the hall, half-heartedly reviewing the target’s file while he waited. He had broken into dozens of homes in the last couple of years to perform tactical surgery and he knew that some people invested in security to keep their family safe. Yet the target, 28-year-old Rama Seti, had no family. None that counted, anyway. His parents lived on the other side of Delhi, he never saw them and had no other relatives. He had no children and the surveillance notes said all his sexual partners in the previous decade had been visiting prostitutes. The target must have paid them well, or perhaps they were just financially desperate enough to engage in intercourse with a man as morbidly obese as Mr. Seti.
The UNOP Marines locksmith carried on with his work, inserting a self-guiding wire into the hollow part of the door up toward the internal computer that controlled the time lock.
Previous targets had installed layers of high-tech security to protect their precious gold, jewelry, works of art or gemstones that they would not trust to bank vaults. But the valuable content of Rama Seti’s apartment was cutting-edge technology for online virtual reality competitive gaming. The target was the founder and Chief Executive of Rubicon, a gaming cooperative with one-hundred members. The gaming system was known as the Avar and it was the ubiquitous online system the world over. None of the other Rubicon members was even based in India. Avar brought players the world over together seamlessly to compete in virtual worlds. Spectators and fans would join the players and watch in real time from the sidelines or even down amongst the players, unseen by them and each other and unable to affect the outcome.
It all sounded incredibly tedious to the Tactical Surgeon. Spending your life playing make believe when humanity’s very existence was on the line.
“These virtual reality people are disgusting,” he muttered.
“Sir?” The Marine next to him asked.
The Tac Surgeon did not bother to respond.
The target’s most prized possession, the file said, was his custom Avar Chair. It cost more than the Surgeon’s annual salary had back when he had been a junior resident in Austin. The headset, gloves and shoes of the device were engineered to the micrometer and the seat itself was designed to reduce the risk of bedsores. It aerated and cooled, massaged and moved so that blood flow was unrestricted. Vital for the target as he was recorded as being in the chair anywhere from eight to eighteen hours every day.
“Remarkable,” the Surgeon muttered as he flicked through his screen. “Goddamned waste.”
“I’m through,” the locksmith said. “Ready to open.”
“Initiate entry,” the Tac Surgeon said, yawning, and the locksmith heaved open the door. It swung out into the hallway without a sound.
The team members held their breath. They had experienced more than one night when unplanned alarms sounded, ruining their carefully laid plans and earning the Tac Surgeon a mauling from his UNOP commissioners.
But not tonight. The Marines swept inside with their weapons up, leaving one man to watch the hall and another to descend to cover the lobby and their exfil. The elevator door chimed and the surgical team trundled their equipment after the Marines.
The target slept on in his bedroom, oblivious, snoring like a broken air conditioning unit.
“That is not a healthy sound,” the Tac Surgeon said, to no one in particular.
In the main living area, almost empty other than the obscenely expensive Avar chair, his surgical team laid plastic sheeting on every surface. Walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in layers of clear plastic. More team members rolled the heavily-reinforced and extra-large gurney into the target’s bedroom.
The Tac Surgeon had personally performed thirty-four corporectomies and only the first half a dozen had been in a proper medical facility. And yet, even after so much experience in the field, performing the most complicated tissue removal procedure in medical history inside an unsanitary apartment made him deeply unhappy. It was sordid. Disrespectful to the medical profession. But UNOP paid better than anyone and they didn’t care about his past run-ins with uptight Research and Ethics Boards with morals stuck back in the 21st Century.
He wandered after his anesthetists into the subject’s bedroom where the rumbling and snorting echoed from the walls. It smelled of sickly-sweet sweat and the kind of rank feculence particular to the morbidly obese.
The anesthetic dosages had been prepared well in advance. All his team had to do was inject the patient and heave the disgusting fat son of a bitch onto the gurney, which was wheeled in next to the bed.
“What are you idiots waiting for?” he said in the internal comms system. “Get on with it.”
“He’s too fat,” one replied, gesturing. “Adipose tissue at the neck too thick for the needles to penetrate. We are changing them now.”
The Surgeon drew a deep breath but he stopped himself from shouting abuse at the morons. He would just kick them from the team after they got the target’s nervous system safely back to the UNOP shuttle at the spaceport. While his morons changed needles, he peered closely at the young man’s snoring face. The neck was indeed horrendously thick, perhaps ten centimeters of adipose tissue that he would have to cut away before even beginning the surgery proper. It would be a long procedure and he silently cursed all obese people the world over for being such pathetic slaves to their urges.
His anesthetists came back and injected their first round of sedatives while the others prepared to lift the huge mass of blubber onto the gurney.
Leaning over the target’s body, he looked over his shoulder at the security team leader. “This will be the worst one yet. How anyone can allow themselves to reach a state like this is beyond me. And for a prospective subject, with his genetic potential, the waste of it is offensive to me.”
“Tall guy, too,” the Marines Lieutenant said. “Six-five, right? Taller than most of the others. That’s weird, right? I thought they were identical.”
“Environmental factors create the individual variation,” the Surgeon explained, sighing at the ignorance of the military mind. “This one ingested more calories from a very early—”
The patient groaned and waved a fat hand up in the air. The surgeon jumped back, the slab of a fist whooshing past his face.
“What the hell?” the Surgeon shouted. “What did you give him?”
Both anesthetists approached to examine the groaning patient. “Just an involuntary—”
The target opened his eyes, took one look around, shouted in fear and threw himself out of his bed in a mass of quivering flesh.
The Tac Surgeon ducked aside as his surgical team scattered, crying out as the man threw them aside as if they were children. The Lieutenant shouted to his Marines, drew his electroshock pistol and shot the man in his quivering, flabby back. It seemed to only drive the man into a wilder frenzy. He was a head taller than anyone in the infiltration team, even the Marines, and three times the weight. The target tossed the gurney over as if it was nothing.
The Surgeon fell into a stack of computer equipment, the cases of the machines tumbled down onto his head, slicing open his scalp.
In the end, despite the Marines’ attempts to wrestle the stumbling, wild, half-drugged and stunned man, it was his own size that brought him down. The sedatives and panic helped to wear him out and within a few seconds, he was wheezing and slowing. He fell quite suddenly, falling across the upended gurney, buckling and snapping the steel tube fram
e.
Everyone stood looking at each other, breathing deeply.
“Help me up, you fools,” the Surgeon commanded the anesthetists, who cleared the pile of fallen cases from him and heaved him up to his feet. “When we’re done here today, you two incompetent fools will be finished.”
“Men as overweight as this one are difficult to judge—”
“Save your excuses or I’ll operate on you next. I’ll take your legs and leave you in India, how would you like that? Just get him up and onto the gurney.”
The gurney was beyond repair.
“Can’t you operate on his bed?” the Lieutenant said.
The Surgeon did not bother to hide his contempt. “I need a completely stable platform for the procedure. Do you have any idea how precise you have to be when you sever a man’s spinal cord? No, we’ll have to call this off.”
The Lieutenant scratched his jaw. “What about that giant-ass Avar Chair?”
The Surgeon hesitated. Then laughed. Perhaps the military mind was not so useless after all.
“Get your Marines to help heave him into it,” the Tac Surgeon commanded the Lieutenant. “And hurry. We have a long set of procedures ahead of us and the shuttle launches in twelve hours.”
While the target’s mind was downloading, the Surgeon removed great chunks of body fat. The bio-waste bins filled up right away and the blood suction pumps kept clogging up. After a while, the Surgeon just started flinging globs of adipose tissue onto the floor. Most of the UNOP Marines found excuses to leave the room at that point but the Lieutenant stayed, seemingly unconcerned. Hours later, he woke the target up.
“What’s happening?” Rama Seti mumbled.
The patient no longer had control of most of his body but the Surgeon had not yet severed the connection to his diaphragm. It was unlikely that the patient’s eyes worked but he knew the young man could hear and probably retained a sense of smell, that most primal of senses. Machines beeped, plastic crinkled as the people around him walked here and there. A machine sucked and gurgled. Despite the apartment’s expensive air-conditioning system, the room reeked of the hot metallic stink of surgery. It must have been really quite disorienting for the patient and the Surgeon felt a momentary, faint pang of empathy.
“We are in the middle of performing surgery on you,” the Surgeon explained. “I have cut away much of your body, trying to preserve as much of your ganglia as I can but now I am beginning to sever your spinal column and the final links to your body. I prefer to do it with the patient conscious as any sudden incoherence on your part may indicate I am heading for a problem.”
“My body?” the patient said. “Please, please, I don’t understand, just let me go, take anything you want.”
Some people in his team laughed while they worked.
“There’s only one thing we want from you,” the Surgeon said, playing to his small crowd.
The man said nothing for a while and the Surgeon stopped, scalpel in hand until he muttered another question. “What are you going to do with me?”
“You’re going on a long journey, son,” the Lieutenant said, to further titters from the surgical team.
“Please, do not tell him anything,” the Surgeon said.
“It ain’t like he’s going to remember this, is it. You’re going to zap his hippocampus, right?”
“Quite right. Yet I would rather not stress him unnecessarily with the enormity of his situation.”
The Lieutenant chuckled. “Come on, Doc, there’s no way this disgusting sack of shit is ever going to be selected to be a subject for Mission Four. What a lazy freak. He’s going on a shelf somewhere at HQ until they incinerate him without ever waking him up.”
“I’m sure you’re right about this one. I can’t tell you how sad it makes me that these will be his final moments of consciousness,” the Surgeon said, trimming away remnants of tissue under his patient’s chin. “I will be so glad when the mission finally launches. I am looking forward to a comfortable, quiet, semi-retirement on Mars. I would rather enjoy being a family doctor for a peaceful little colony town, you know?”
“What?” Rama Seti, blind, paralyzed, and soon to be little more than a severed head, muttered. “What are you saying? Please, don’t do this. What’s happening?”
“Alright,” the Surgeon said, handing over his scalpel and taking the circular saw in its place. “I am about to remove the last sternocleidomastoid. I am afraid, Mr. Seti, that this will hurt quite a bit. Suction, please.”
A motor whirred and the Surgeon carefully eased the tiny blade sliced into the target’s last attached neck muscle.
Rama Seti screamed.
CHAPTER TWO –REALITY
Time passed.
And Rama Seti woke. He knew he was awake because the glare was like a scalpel in his retinas. There were people around him, he was sure. Shapes and sounds moved beside his head. It reeked of antiseptic and minty-fresh breath. He tried to move and to speak. Someone hushed him and sponged lukewarm water into his mouth which he licked up with a rough tongue. A cool hand stroked his forehead.
“You are currently disoriented,” a voice said in his ear. It spoke English but the accent wasn't Indian. “Please remain calm.”
Had he been in an accident? Was he in hospital? All Rama knew was that he had to find out what was going on.
“It’s bright,” Ram said, his voice sounded strange to himself. Rumbling, deep.
“You have been asleep, Rama.” The voice was soft, comforting. As a mother or father might speak to a child. Ram was afraid of it.
“Where am I?” He couldn’t see properly.
Ram's throat felt full of glass. Machines beeped steadily around him.
“A special facility, Rama Seti,” the voice said.
“Who are you?” Ram’s heart thumped in his chest.
“I am a medical doctor. My name is Dr. Fo. The others here in my team are biotechnicians, nurses, anesthetists and so on. We are all leaders in our field. None finer in the Sol System, I promise you.”
Shapes and shadows loomed around him. Soft shoes swished on hard floors. The clatter of metal implements in metal bowls rang in the cool air that drifted across his face.
“Can't see,” Ram said, fear rising.
“We will rectify that shortly,” the doctor said, a smooth, cool palm patted Ram on the forehead. “Eyes are complicated, Rama. Yours were a remarkably astigmatic and a little myopic. The muscles strained from a decade and a half of overuse of Avar headsets and we had to do a little extra work tinkering around in there.” A finger tapped Ram on the bridge of his nose. “When we correct the calibration your eyes will be significantly improved, along with the rest of you. Here we go.”
Ram blinked smears of light away and a grinning Chinese face leaned over his. The doctor was possibly middle aged but it was hard to tell. Probably a heavily-surgeried old bastard with newly-grown skin. Still smiling, the face pulled away.
He was on his back, probably on some sort of a hospital bed. The room beyond Dr. Fo’s face was lined with large white tiles and soft light came from somewhere. Ram tried to look around but he still could not move.
Was he dreaming? Had his Avar malfunctioned? He wanted to wake up, wanted to get up, run, get away.
Yet he couldn’t move, not even a little, not his arms or his legs. He couldn’t move his head to look around.
What the hell was going on?
“Can't move,” Ram said, his throat dry. “What happened?” His voice sounded amplified, as if it didn't belong to him. “Was I in an accident?”
“In a way,” the doctor chuckled again, his cool hand patted Ram's forehead and then it rested there. “But you are all better now.”
There was a faint pressure on the back of his head where it rested on the bed or gurney. Ram pursed his mouth and the skin there cracked into tiny crevices. He licked his lips, his tongue rasping against the ridges of dry skin. The wet sponge returned, dabbing cool beads of water into his mouth. He sucked the wate
r down, the moisture spreading inside, freeing his tongue.
Why could he not feel his body? Nothing made any sense.
“Tell me what happened,” Ram said. Why did his voice sound so strange? “Why can’t I move?”
The doctor leaned down to look Ram in the eyes. He smelled of powerful soap and the whiff of mint.
“You are sedated, Rama Seti and your endocrine system is under our control. Your file states that you have a high resilience to emotional shock so I don’t mind telling you that you were abducted from your home. An infiltration team escorted surgeons into your apartment in New Delhi where you were rendered unconscious and they removed your morbidly obese body. The only parts of you that we needed were your head, spinal column and as much of the central and peripheral nervous systems ganglia as we could get.”
“Am I in Avar?” Ram said, his heart racing. His face flushed with the panic of it. “This can’t be real. This is Avar, isn’t it?”
“You were a professional Avar gamer, I know. But this is the real world.”
Anger and fear surged through him and Ram tried to jump out of bed.
Nothing happened.
“You are attempting to move,” Dr. Fo said with joy, looking at a screen next to him. “That is a marvelous sign. We have disabled your movement from below the neck, other than your diaphragm for conscious breathing and speaking. Just like when you plug into your Avar, yes? Just like when you enter REM sleep. As I was saying, we brought your head and spinal column here. Plus a few of the important nerves, especially the solar plexus and so on. It makes fusing your nervous system to the new body so much easier.”
Horror crept up Ram's neck into his face, warming it like spilled blood in an Avar-induced nightmare. And perhaps that was it. Perhaps he had finally succumbed to the Avar Psychosis that had claimed so many others of his profession. His cooperative colleagues had often warned him about it but he'd always disregarded their concerns. Ram always thought he could handle eighteen hours a day in the chair every day.
