“I see you are proceeding,” Dr. Tyler interrupted.
“You have eyes, then,” Dr. Grayzan parlayed.
“This is too bold,” Dr. Van Wijk interjected. “Even with all of our planning and our work with dogs and monkeys. Too much, too soon.”
“I disagree,” Grayzan countered.
“You always have,” Dr. Tyler parried.
Dr. Masato (正人) Takahashi (高橋) from the Yamanashi (山梨県) prefecture near Tokyo entered.
“Greetings, my esteemed colleagues,” he offered, nodding.
“Doctor Takahashi,” the other surgeons mumbled back in acknowledgement, bowing slightly.
The operation proceeded without incident. No heart failure. No near death experiences. Bit by bit, machine parts replaced portions of Zachary’s body. His tibia replaced with a small piston. His fibula with a much larger piston. His shoulder with a metal ball and a carbonite socket. Bits of his spinal column with titanium blocks.
Hour by hour, the team of nurses and surgeons worked together to make Zachary better, stronger, and worth more money—billions more. They replaced parts of his skull with bulletproof metal and fiber. They replaced part of his jaw with metal rods and metal screens and a system of wires. They replaced some of his fingers with robotic ones.
Beads of sweat dripped from Dr. Grayzan’s forehead and swam towards his eyes. Before the sweat could blind him, a skilled human nurse dabbed his forehead with a sponge. He continued on.
Dr. Takahashi from the Yamanashi prefecture concentrated on the reparation of Zachary’s brain. Brain damage was his specialty. He was world-renowned for his breakthroughs in the field. In this case, the fall did not cause the harm. No, unfortunately, the injury was caused by Chief Borgnine boring his insect head into Zachary’s soft brain tissue.
With care, Dr. Takahashi oh so gently extracted Borgy from Zachary’s skull. Borgy’s removal left a rather noticeable crater and a little tunnel. Dr. Takahashi attached a tube of Brain-Goo39 to an electric caulk gun with a detachable head, sporting a miniscule hose. He inserted the hose into Zachary’s skull and wiggled it up into his brain until he reached the cavity left by the extraction of Chief Borgnine.
Using a microscopic video camera, Dr. Takahashi monitored his progress with the little tube inside Zachary’s gray matter. Dr. Takahashi viewed it all on a TV monitor, his back to the patient, and once safely inside the hollow, he squeezed the trigger on the electric caulk gun and started to fill Zachary’s cranium with Brain-Goo. As he filled, Dr. Takahashi gradually pulled the little hose (and the attached digital cam) out of Zachary’s head, backfilling with the Brain-Goo product as he went.
In just a couple of minutes, the hole in Zachary’s head was packed with the biodegradable, brain-compatible, friendly-to-interneurons-and-neurons, growth-encouraging Brain-Goo. Dr. Takahashi finished with a flourish at the end, as if pouring a glass of wine. He twisted his wrists in a short circle and ended up holding the caulk gun straight up. A human nurse took the device from him and put it on one of the tables behind them.
Dr. Takahashi was next handed a miniature metal disk with four holes. He applied the disk to the opening on the side of Zachary’s head; the Brain-Goo temporarily held the disk in place. The nurse handed Dr. Takahashi a small power screwdriver. Dr. Takahashi drove four screws, one by one, through the plate and into Zachary’s skull.
The nurses applied artificial skin to the repaired area. The artificial skin needed about two weeks to incubate under bandages, slowly stretching and meshing with Zachary’s existing skull skin. One day, if Zachary should make the request, the doctors could seed the area with hair plugs from Zachary’s own head. Soon, it would be tough to tell there had ever been any damage.
In the meantime, Dr. Van Wijk from Universiteit Leiden, the Netherlands (in the Zuid Holland region) worked earnestly on Zachary’s crushed ribcage and the internals therein. He started by yanking out all of Zachary’s ribs. He cracked each rib like a wishbone, removing them one by one from Zachary’s body. The work was tedious and disgusting, but the man was from the Netherlands. Once all of the rib bones had been torn from Zachary’s body, the empty sack of the skin of his thorax collapsed onto his vital organs.
Dr. Van Wijk was prepared for this inevitability, however, and had inserted a Jaws of Life™ brand rib spreader into Zachary’s chest. He jacked the device until the cavity was gaping and Zach’s interior was ready for more work. The nurse bots buzzed back and forth between the operating table and the tables of metal things. They passed various surgery-related items to the human nurses standing by Dr. Van Wijk’s side.
One by one, Dr. Van Wijk received—from robot nurse to human nurse to himself—chrome-over-biocompatible titanium ribs. These would replace Zachary’s smashed, useless, and beyond-repair ribs. He attached each rib to Zach’s spine using chromium plates. He fitted the ribs into the plate and locked them into place with an electronic Allen torque-wrench, which tightened using advanced technologies to avoid cracking any of the real bone still left in Zachary’s body.40
After all of the shiny chrome ribs had been attached to Zach’s spine, the full complement of nurses—both human and bot—helped pull them together in front. With careful pressure applied, the ribs snapped into the artificial sternum.41 Once finished, the ribcage stood virtually indestructible and rather cool-looking as well, the way the chrome bones reflected the lights in the operating room like an Aston Martin One-77 car in a showroom.
While all this ensued, Dr. Nokuthula Botha, the doctor from Johannesburg, the provincial capital of Gauteng and the wealthiest province in South Africa, arrived. She scrubbed and wore her scrubs, too. She would be working on Zachary’s entire nervous system tonight. Replacing, strand by strand, most of the neural network in Zachary’s body with a fiber network of the most delicate size.
The fibers were delicate in size only, however. They had a strength beyond that of the jet-arresting cable on aircraft carriers. The filaments had been derived of spider webs, modified genetically, and altered to conduct electrical impulses. The world’s tiniest internet, in a way.
The trickiest part, after threading all of this throughout Zachary’s body, involved connecting the millions of loose ends into Zachary Zemeritus’ brain. This would prove to be a bigger challenge than Dr. Botha had anticipated, and she found herself feeling exhausted with the effort, after working on the project for over twelve hours. Granted, she had the help of over 1,000 nano-bots who did most of the threading of the fiber optics throughout the unconscious body of Zachary Zemeritus, but Dr. Botha still needed to supervise the goings-on.
When it came to attaching all these leads into the brain, that was Dr. Botha’s job alone. She would be at this for another twenty-four hours, probably longer. She would need to take even more NASCAR42 pills to stay up an additional day, but that was what the job called for. The bots had no such need for speed. They could go on this way for weeks before needing to charge their micro-hydrogen cells. But the nano-bots could not help Dr. Botha here. The work was so complex no one had yet been able to program a nano-bot to do it, not even the most sophisticated of the programming bots, which programmed everything else on the planet.
Dr. Botha yawned while she worked—nothing to be worried about. She was tired, yes; but, rest assured, quite awake. She concentrated on each connection, and there were thousands of them, each smaller in width than the tiniest baby hair.
With care, she connected the right fiber cable with the correct “insertion point” in Zach’s brain. Hungry and tired, Dr. Botha worked on into the night and through the next day. This was what she had been born to do. She was the best in the world at this and had never made a mistake, never lost a patient. The team counted on her outstanding record. What Zachary would be counting on, too, if he weren’t in a chemical-induced, dreamless pseudo-coma.
The final step: embedding the gemstone. It had been found on the ring that he had on his body, on a chain. They had made the decision to embed the ring into the armor. D
r. Botha inserted the ring into the pre-formed slot in his chest, with only the gemstone left visible. She connected the microscopic technology that would meld the ring with Patient Z’s biology: it would react to his emotional state with the Alexandrite stone’s rainbow of colors. A new-millennium mood ring.
After all the doctors, human nurses, and bots had finished their work, Zach was disengaged and disentangled from the monitoring machines and feeding tubes and saline sacks and wheeled into recovery. Recovery, in this case, would be two weeks. He was mostly metal now: the strongest on the planet.
While his body fought, then forgave, then coexisted with all these changes, the best thing to do was to keep Zachary totally unconscious. For the next two weeks, he would be a hibernating bear. He’d slumber somewhere between asleep and awake for two more.
Beyond the first month, he would still be in recovery, but mostly awake during the day, same as anyone else. Step-by-step eating solid foods, and starting to be weaned off painkillers. Around the eighth week, physical therapy should begin. He would need to relearn everything. How to walk, how to talk, how to use his hands, his arms and legs—his brain. And every muscle, tendon, and ligament still remaining in his body would be sore as hell.
That was the price you paid for resurrection.
In the meantime, with each passing day, Helena and Dani grew more concerned. Now, after almost three weeks, they had started to give up hope, fearing the worst. Afraid both Zach and Mallory were dead.
“This is bull,” Dani said.
“If they’re dead, I’m going to be so, so pissed.”
Dani got up from Helena’s couch and poured herself another cup of tea. “This tea is the bomb. What is it again?”
“Peppermint Cannabis.43”
“I love it.”
“Yes. You should try Vanilla Honey Cocoa,” Helena said.
“MMmmm. Yes, sounds yummy.”
“It is. Gives you a kick that lasts two days.”
“I’ll have to try it!” Dani said, sitting back down.
“Anyway, back to Zach and Mallory. WTF, right?”
“Right, girl.”
“What about all this crazy going on in this city these days? I’m totally sick of it,” Helena said, crossing her legs. “I mean, who are these damn demons, anyway? Some kind of new terrorists?”
“Why do they have to smash up the buildings, right? Why do they have to snatch people and fly them away? I don’t get it, you know?”
“Me neither.”
“We need to get our friends and band together and stop this,” Dani said, biting her lower lip. She took a sip of tea to calm down.
“Did you see the ALARM page that got set up? Very cool,” Helena said.
“Duh! Of course,” Dani said. “Something around two million Alarmists have already signed up to get autofied.44”
“They want answers,” Helena said. “We want answers.”
PATTY PATTY
“Hi,” said the little girl he had saved.
She stood in front of him in her filthy, blood-splattered school outfit: white blouse under a pale blue jumper. Even though it had been many days, Timmy Jimmy was not able to respond much. Still weak from his pummeling by the beasts, his body had to recover on its own with no medical intervention. All the same, he managed a bit of a smile.
“My name is Patricia,” she said.
He could only just make out the patch on her little dark blue jacket. It was ripped, stained, and dirty, but he thought the words spelled out, “Marymount School.”
“Hi, Patty.”
“No. Patricia. Patricia Mumford Patterson.”
“Okay,” Timmy Jimmy said, moaning. He tried to sit up, but the effort was too painful. “Patricia.”
“What’s your name?”
“Right, how rude of me.” Timmy Jimmy coughed into his fist. When he pulled it away from his mouth, there was blood on his hand. He wiped his hand on his pants in a casual way so Patricia wouldn’t notice. “My name is Timmy Jimmy.”
“That’s a funny name!” the girl said, laughing. She sat down beside him with her legs crossed “Indian-style” and her two little fists up under her chin. She stared at him with curiosity.
“Well, it’s not my real name. My name is really Timothy. Timothy James. ‘Timmy Jimmy.’ See?”
“Yes. I love it! From now on, I want to be called Patty Patty.”
“I thought you preferred Patricia, Patricia Mumford Patterson.”
“But I want a brave name; a hero’s name. Like yours. Heroes’ names must rhyme.”
“Ha, ha. Okay. But, technically, ‘Patty Patty’ is not a rhyme. You’re just repeating a word.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry about it. Look, I’m no hero, Patricia.”
“Of course you are. You saved me. You risked your life. Plus remember: I’m Patty Patty now.”
“Well, I may have done so, but I was so beaten up and weak, my head was swimming. Not sure I had any real control over what I did. Know what I mean?”
“I suppose so. I also suppose you are a hero, my hero, but you are quite modest. And that, Timmy Jimmy, is also how heroes are. They never brag about themselves, now do they?”
“You are a smart one there, Patty Patty. If I say ‘yes,’ you say it means ‘no.’”
“What?”
“If I say I’m not a hero, you say it’s proof I am a hero.”
“Well, silly, it is!”
“Okay. If you say so.” Timmy Jimmy started to laugh, but it hurt too much, so he stopped. “So, Patty Patty. Where are your parents?”
The little girl said nothing.
“I’m—I’m sorry . . .”
“They are gone,” she said. “The monsters took them.”
They sat together in silence for a minute.
“Do you have brothers? Sisters?”
“No, I’m an only child.”
Timmy Jimmy did not want to keep inquiring, but he had to know. “Uncles or aunts? Grandparents?”
Patty Patty didn’t speak, she just shook her head back and forth a couple of times.
Timmy Jimmy, despite the pain, leaned over to her and gave her a gentle embrace, then sat back. Patty Patty went quiet, and Timmy Jimmy soon became lost in his own thoughts.
“What’s going on? Is it visitors’ hour?”
Timmy Jimmy pulled himself back to the present moment. He looked up and saw Village Smithy smiling down on them. Patty Patty glanced up, too, one eye closed.
“Oh, hi, Smithy,” Timmy Jimmy said. “Um, this is—”
“We’ve met,” said Smithy.
“Yeah, silly,” said Patty Patty. “We’ve all been down here for days already.”
“Yes, but Patty Patty, she doesn’t know about your new name yet.”
Smithy sat with a grunt on the softer materials. “Ah, that’s nice,” Village Smithy said. She pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them. “I like your new name, Patty Patty.”
Patty Patty smiled as Timmy Jimmy lay back down, his hair falling across his face, covering his eyes.
“You go ahead and rest,” Smithy said to him. “You’ll need your strength.”
“You the new one?” A man’s voice entered the conversation. Other voices whispered and mumbled just out of Timmy Jimmy’s view.
“Oh, God, let him sleep,” Village Smithy addressed the first voice. “Can’t you tell he’s hurt?”
Timmy Jimmy raised his head. It was pounding and, for a second, red and white flashes filled the room, and the room spun, but after a bit, this stopped. He sat up again. A group of men and women of different ages, around twenty or so of them, stood in front of him. Behind them, possibly another fifty or sixty people milled about.
“Good to meet you,” said the man who’d initiated the conversation. He was about five-ten, a bit overweight, with a black, gray, and white broom of a beard. “I’m Derek Frost. They call me Frostbite. I’m gruff, I guess. Barks worse than my bite, though.”
“Yes, hello,” Timmy Jimmy said. “I’m Timmy Jim—uh, Timothy.”
“Timothy? Good. Let me introduce you around.” In a few minutes, Timmy Jimmy had met the core group, all except one. “Timothy, this is Malcolm Spess—we call him Malcolm ‘S,’ like ‘X.’”
“Not my idea,” Malcolm S said, stepping forward. “The nickname.” He was a thin black man in his late thirties, early forties. His head was shaved and he had a large birthmark of the map of New Zealand on his cheek.
“Understood,” Timmy Jimmy said. “Nice to meet you all.”
“That’s why we came over to talk with you,” Frostbite said. “We intend on surviving this, this—whatever it is. Somehow, some way, we will be alive when this is all over. Now, you seem to have some impressive battle skills . . .”
“Hold on, hold on just a minute—” Timmy Jimmy started.
“Let me finish, young man. You’ll get your turn. Now, as I was saying, you seem to have mighty good battle instincts. We could use your insight on what to do. We want you to hear us out, and evaluate our plan.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I don’t have—”
“Enough negativity. Just say you’re in; that you’ll help us.”
“Yeah, I guess. I mean, I’ll help in any way I can. It’s only that—”
“Good! Great. Okay, let’s gather ‘round.” Frostbite waved his hands as if hugging an invisible barrel. “Make a circle, pretend a campfire’s in the middle. Which I sure wish there was; it is mighty cold and damp down here. Dank and drippin’.”
“I—” Timmy Jimmy said, trying again to be heard.
“Yes? Speak up, young man.”
“Never mind.”
“I tell you, Frostbite, this boy needs his rest,” Smithy interjected from her position on the floor. “He can’t even gather his thoughts. Can’t you see?”
DEMON DAYS: Love, sex, death, and dark humor. This book has it all. Plus robots. Page 6