The Red: First Light

by Linda Nagata

  I look up at the major. “It says the prosthetics are experimental. What if they don’t work right?”

  “They’ll be replaced with a less-advanced system, and you’ll be separated. Terms are detailed in section nine.”

  I keep reading, and learn that shiny new legs are only one part of the agreement. I’ll also be getting a permanent mod in my head that will take the place of a skullcap. It will always be there, even after I leave the army, and it will always be turned on.

  I’m ready to sign the document right there, but I make myself read the whole thing. I make myself really think about it. I know I can deal with life in the army. I’ve done okay so far. It’s the alternative that scares me.

  “Questions?” the major asks.

  I come up with a few, just because I think I should. She provides answers, and then asks if I understand. I say that I do, while her farsights record it all.

  Eventually, I wave my hand in the air, executing my signature on the document, agreeing to continue my sojourn in the United States Army, because they’re offering me what no one else has ever had, and it looks a whole lot better than spending a year as a pretty cripple in prison.

  ~~~

  After the major leaves, my dad comes in.

  He doesn’t understand my decision.

  “For God’s sake, Jimmy! What is going on in your head? What have they got you wired up on?”

  He’s a half-inch taller than me, his skin a shade lighter, eyes slate gray. His ritual workouts keep him lean and strong, and he loves to dress in finely made, conservative clothes. Even now.

  He’s wearing khaki slacks and a short-sleeved designer dress shirt in a pale blue that mocks his anger.

  “That army attorney played you. No way are you in any kind of shape to be making a decision of this gravity and they know it!”

  “Dad, you need to understand. Even if this isn’t what you wanted, it was my best option—”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “It’s not. Listen, I know what I’m doing—”

  “You just signed up for seven more years—”

  “I know that. I know what it means.”

  “—and the only way the army will let you out before then is if you’re dead.”

  “Dad, I’m not going to die.”

  “That’s not something you get to decide!” He holds up his hand—it’s a large hand, light-brown skin, neatly manicured nails—his thumb and forefinger are a millimeter apart. “You came this close to being dead, Jimmy. One of the soldiers in your squad, Matthew Ransom—”

  “I know. He saved my life. So I didn’t die, and I’m not going to die.” Then, because we’ve had this argument before, I add, “And I don’t have a death wish.”

  His lips press together; he turns away from me. With his arms crossed over his chest, he stares out the window. Morning light gleams on his face, catching on the gray strands in his short black hair, making them seem more abundant than I remember. He’s only fifty-one.

  After a couple of silent minutes creep past, I ask him, “What’s out there?”

  A smile quirks his lips. “San Antonio.”

  “Crap, I’m in Texas again?”

  “The Kelly Army Medical Center.”

  I want to apologize for the hell I’ve put him through, but I don’t, because an apology implies you’d do things differently, if it was given to you to do it all again.

  ~~~

  The surgeons want to work on my legs while my injuries are still raw, so within an hour I’m being prepped for surgery. Guidance must have issued a prediction with greater than 95% confidence that I would sign the new contract, because the surgical team is onsite and waiting for me. My dad jokes with me while the stubble on my scalp is washed away. He waits outside while my bowels are forced to void. Then he walks with me while I’m wheeled to the surgery. He’s got that stonewall look, and I know he’s scared.

  Outside the double doors he takes my hand and squeezes it.

  “It’ll be okay,” I promise.

  He nods, and lets me go.

  ~~~

  But when they bring me out of a medically-induced coma for the second time, he’s there at my bedside. “Jimmy, are you back with us?”

  I have no idea how long I’ve been under or if anything went wrong. My gaze goes to the overlay, which is working. I pull up a date/time display and learn I’ve been under another fifty-seven hours. So it’s been almost six days since Africa, though I’ve been conscious for only a couple of hours of that time.

  As my gaze passes over the screen, it triggers an icon to brighten, one I’ve never seen before. Curious, I fix my attention on it, but no menu pops out; just a label with a model number that I don’t recognize.

  “Jimmy?” my dad asks again. He’s watching me with a worried frown. “You awake?”

  “Yeah.” A single, hoarse syllable.

  In theory I should have legs now—not human legs, but functional. I try to lift my head to look, but my body has withered from inactivity and the effort is more than I can manage. I lie back again, trading gazes with my old man.

  “Did they do it?” I croak.

  “They did it.” He leans back in his chair and heaves a great sigh. “You are now the most advanced cyborg in the United States Army.”

  Not exactly the future he’d planned for me. It’s kind of funny sometimes, the way things turn out.

  “Take a picture,” I tell him.

  He winces at my request, but he stands up and folds back a feather-light, insulated white sheet from the foot of the bed. Then he pulls out his phone, composes his shot, and the flash goes off.

  I never actually saw my injury—I just took everyone’s word that it was real—but I want to see what I’ve become.

  He taps the screen of his phone, transferring the image to my overlay. “Did it go through?”

  “Yeah.”

  My new legs and feet are flat gray titanium. They look a lot like the bones of a dead sister. Large joints re-create my knees. Smaller joints replace my ankles, and even smaller ones will give mobility to appendages that mimic toes. It’s a robot’s skeleton, grafted onto my living flesh, fueled by calories harvested from my body. Nightmarish, to think that’s me.

  The ‘me’ I’ve become.

  A thick plaster dressing, almost like a cast, hides the boundary between me and the machine. Inside my thigh, permanent titanium posts have been grafted to what’s left of my natural bone. My severed peripheral nerves, that used to control the movement of my legs, should now be spliced into the prosthetic’s artificial nervous system. I’m supposed to be able to bend my legs in directions I never could before, and to run and climb—but when I try to wiggle my toes, and then to bend my knee, nothing happens. It’s like nothing is there. I can’t feel any sensation in my legs; I can’t feel any pain.

  “It doesn’t work,” I say, a wave of anxiety rolling through me. The new icon flickers.

  “It’s switched off. The doctor said it will be several days before your... your remaining leg muscles heal sufficiently, and your nerves grow into their new connections.”

  Right. Of course.

  I send the image off to storage. Then I look at my dad again. “Show me the incision on my head.”

  “There are just two faint lines. They’re not even red. The surgeon did a really good job.”

  “Take a picture.”

  The agreement I signed said a skullnet would be installed beneath my scalp, directly against the bone. The surgeon explained that two incisions would be made at right angles across the top of my head, and then the scalp would be peeled back, allowing a mesh of sensor threads to be glued to the outer surface of my skull. Like a skullcap, it’s supposed to sense brain activity and stimulate the production of brain hormones, but the net is permanent. I know it’s been successfully installed, because the great, black, crushing, void I felt before I went under just isn’t there anymore.

  My dad sends me an image of my head and he’s right: there
isn’t much to see. “My hair’s already growing back.” I start to raise my hand. That’s when I notice a tan-colored sleeve around my forearm. “What is this for?”

  “Monitoring sleeve. Tracks your heart rate, blood pressure, temperature. Maybe your location too, I don’t know.”

  “Beams all the data back to the home planet?”

  “If the home planet is the nursing station.”

  The sleeve doesn’t hinder my movement so, cautiously, I stroke the stubble on my scalp. “I guess I can grow my hair out, now that I won’t be wearing a skullcap anymore.”

  Right away, though, I decide I’ll keep it buzzed down to bristle. That way it’ll resemble a skullcap, even if it’s black and not brown—and I won’t look like too much of a freak in the LCS ranks.

  The icon flickers again. I stare at it until the label pops out and I can see the model number. With my gaze fixed on it, I whisper, “Search.” The answer comes from my encyclopedia, which has subsumed the information in my newest army contract.

  “What are you looking at?” my dad asks.

  “A new icon. It’s labeled with the model number of the skullnet.”

  “The medical team worked on that first. Can you feel any effect from it?”

  “Not directly. I feel neutral, but that’s good. I don’t want to feel anything.”

  He gives me a worried look. He doesn’t know I’m an emo-junkie, and I don’t want to explain. Things are okay now. There’s no reason to talk about it. I feel just the way I would if I was wearing the skullcap, and that’s how I want it to be.

  ~~~

  In the evening I’m given a pill that neatly snips the night right out of the flow of time. The next thing I know, it’s dawn. I feel so disoriented I check my overlay just to make sure only one night has passed.

  I try to sit up. I don’t quite pull it off, but I do manage to prop myself up on one elbow, which lets me get a look at the controls for the bed. I’m trying to figure them out when a CNA comes in—a certified nursing assistant, the hospital’s essential small-jobber. She’s a big, dark-skinned woman with a warm smile and small eyes that look at me in surprise from behind the thin, clear band of her farsights. “Good morning, Lieutenant! Awake already? How did you sleep?”

  “Like a dead man.”

  “Lieutenant, we don’t talk like that around here.”

  Insignia and name tag identify her as Specialist Carol Bradford. She gets me ready for the day efficiently and with a minimum of embarrassment, and then cheerfully informs me that I’m going back to work. “We’ve got you scheduled for an hour of physical therapy this mornin’.”

  I wind up dressed in army-issue T-shirt and shorts. My new legs still aren’t working, so she brings in a muscular young private to help get me from the bed into a reclining wheelchair. I’m dizzy for a few seconds as my heart figures out how to pump blood uphill again.

  Specialist Bradford looks suspiciously from me to the display on her farsights. “You feelin’ okay?”

  “Good enough.” I tap the monitoring sleeve. “I guess we’re leaving this on?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  She belts me in, and then I annoy her by leaning forward to get a look at my robot legs.

  “You tryin’ to make yourself dizzy again?”

  My shoulders ache as I grip the armrests, but for the first time, I have an excellent view of my bony gray feet, balanced on the chair’s footrests, and of my shin bones—a flat, non-reflective gray—and my knee joints. I want to know what it looks like where the titanium meets living tissue, but that’s hidden under the plaster dressing.

  I’m still not feeling any pain from my stumps; I’m not feeling any sensation at all.

  I push against the armrests and manage to sit back again.

  “Are we ready?” Specialist Bradford asks me.

  I nod. Somehow, I have to make this work.

  ~~~

  Physical therapy focuses on my back, shoulders, and arms. It hurts, but not enough to make me want to stop. I ask to stay longer, but it’s not in the schedule, so I’m put back in bed. It doesn’t take long to realize I’m tired, so I wrestle off my T-shirt and try to sleep.

  Grim dream images come and go in my head—dead sisters walking, with dead soldiers held in a close embrace, and anonymous ghosts whispering unintelligibly in my overlay. Then my brain shifts tracks, conjuring up a remembered scent, sweet and warm. I see sunlight on brown skin, a faint sheen of fine oils and tiny, glistening hairs. Lissa. In my dream I bite gently at her thigh, and her skin shivers with a sudden flush of goose bumps. The heady, intoxicating smell of her vagina shoots straight to my brain as I taste her, every intricate fold.

  “Shelley?”

  “Why are you here, baby?” I ask, my consciousness adrift behind closed eyes.

  “Are you awake?”

  I smile, knowing this is a trick question. “Would you still be here if I was awake?”

  “Damn it, Shelley! Do you always have to be such a brat? Open your eyes and look at me.”

  I do what she says, of course.

  And she’s really there.

  “Jesus,” I whisper, staring up at her—an angel descended from my personal Heaven. The skullnet icon flickers, and my racing heart begins to slow.

  Lissa is tall and slim, dark haired and dark eyed—a nearly even mix of Asian and European, with a dash of Hawaiian tossed in. She has three tiny freckles in a perfect equilateral triangle at the corner of her right eye, and another on the lobe of her left ear.

  Today she’s wearing a short gray skirt and a clinging, sleeveless silk blouse. Her glossy hair falls past her shoulders. She tries a sly smile, but I don’t believe it. Her eyes are puffy and red.

  “You’ve been crying.”

  “You idiot,” she whispers. “Of course I’ve been crying.”

  Lissa isn’t mine anymore. She hasn’t been since I went into the army. We’re friends now. Good friends. We trade emails all the time. She doesn’t tell me about her boyfriends; I don’t tell her when I kill people. Most of the rest we talk about. But it’s a cautious friendship. Last time I was on leave I asked if I could fly out to San Diego where she lives now. She told me not to come.

  “I guess my dad called you.”

  Her nod is a little shaky. “He’s been keeping me updated. I didn’t come sooner, because he said to wait until you were out of surgery and awake.”

  “Yeah, mostly I’ve been asleep.”

  “I’m sorry I woke you up. It’s just... I won’t be here long. I’m flying back this evening.”

  She says it defensively, like she wants to keep some distance between us, but at the same time she raises her hand—fine, strong fingers, with nails painted bronze. We both watch that hand moving as if with a mind of its own until her fingertips come to rest against the bare skin of my shoulder—an electric touch that turns me on so fast I’m dizzy. It’s been over two years since I’ve been in the same room with Lissa. Longer than that since I’ve been inside her, but I’m transported back to the way it used to be between us.

  She is too.

  I reach for her. She leans into my arms and we’re kissing, hard and frantic, as if this is the last day of the world and we’re going to end it fucking. “Come lie down with me,” I growl. And she does it. She drops her purse on the floor, drops the bedrail, and then she climbs into bed beside me. Her lips move in light, hot kisses across my face, my neck, my chest, my nipples until I shudder. I can barely sit up on my own, but I don’t need to sit up to reach under her skirt, to get my fingers inside her panties, and feel the hot, wet heaven of her vagina. A soft, gushing sigh as I find the rhythm of her mood, and in seconds she comes, her powerful darkness shuddering against my fingers in wave after wave until finally she whispers, “Fuck you, Shelley, you asshole. Why did you fuck everything up?”

  I kiss her face, knowing it’s rhetorical. We’re both aware that I’m a stupid shit.

  She rests her head against my shoulder, taking long, deep breaths. My h
and is still between her thighs. After a couple of minutes she stirs and starts to push back the sheet, but I catch her wrist. “No.”

  She knows exactly what I’m thinking. “You don’t want me to see what your legs look like.”

  “I don’t have legs.”

  She snaps her wrist free. “Your dad said you have new ones.” She sits up, her lips slightly parted as she gazes toward my crotch, where my shorts and the sheet are not enough to hide the evidence of my lust. “Anyway, you still have a dick—and you’re still a dickhead.” She pushes the sheet back and this time I don’t try to stop her. Gently, she slides my shorts out of the way; and then she goes down on me. I try to hold back. I want this to last forever, but I come as fast as she did, erupting into the warm chamber of her mouth with a stifled roar.

  Oh God it has been so long.

  And then I faint.

  ~~~

  When I come to again, there’s a nurse standing over me, wiping my face with a wet washcloth, studying me with an annoyed frown. On the other side of the bed, Lissa is holding my hand, looking guilty.

  “Shelley?” she whispers.

  My ears are ringing and my skin is sticky with sweat, but I tell her, “I’m okay.”

  The nurse rolls her eyes and shakes her head. “I hope it was worth it.”

  “No question.”

  She gives me a stern look. “Lieutenant Shelley, I do not care how long it’s been. This is not going to happen again during my shift. Not if you want your girlfriend to stay. Understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The nurse is a captain. I’m not going to argue with her.

  She taps my monitoring sleeve, and then gives Lissa a scathing look. “If I see an elevated heart rate, I’m denying him visitors.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lissa whispers. She stands there frozen until the door closes behind the nurse. Then, “Fuck,” she whispers. “Shelley, you scared me so bad.”