The Red: First Light

by Linda Nagata

  “What the fuck?” I whisper as the crowd of observers chatters madly.

  I push myself to a sitting position and, without thinking about it, I bend my left knee, and then my right. Everyone goes silent. That’s when I realize what I just did. I freeze, staring in shock at my robot knees while Joby scratches his head and says, “Oops. The signal intensity was a little high.”

  “Asshole,” I growl. But I can’t turn my gaze away from my robot knees. They work. And they also hurt. I feel a deep ache in the mechanical joints, while the titanium legs throb with a pain like shin splints. I want to writhe.

  Instead, I stretch the left leg out and then draw it back again. I do the same thing with the right leg. The observers murmur, but I ignore them, focusing instead on flexing my robot feet.

  The movement this produces is not remotely human.

  The feet reveal themselves to be a titanium puzzle, segmented in two directions. I stretch my feet and the puzzle aligns into five long slices along the lines of the bones in my missing feet. When I curl my foot, the longitudinal segments seal up seamlessly, instantly, and the foot curls along side-to-side segments... curls so far back that I make the toe of the foot touch the bottom of the heel.

  I do it a few more times to convince myself it’s not a pain-induced fantasy. Sweat drips into my eyes. I wipe it away with the back of my hand. I wipe my face on my T-shirt’s wet sleeve and realize my whole body is soaked in perspiration. Even the monitoring sleeve on my forearm is dark with sweat.

  Silence falls across my audience. When I glance up, a few of the observers have the decency to look horrified, but the rest, including Dr. Masoud, are waiting with bated breath, like they’re ninety-nine percent sure that they’ve hit the winning number in the lottery.

  Joby’s the only one in the room not looking at me. He’s working his keyboard, his intent gaze fixed on the monitor that’s suspended above his console.

  “Joby,” I growl, “what the fuck did you mean you’ve never done this on a person before?”

  Joby stops typing and looks at me, his eyebrows raised in what might be interpreted as apology. “Somebody had to go first. Turns out the intensity was off by a factor of ten.” Then he cocks his head. “Can you stand up?”

  I consider it, and decide that standing is the only way I can get close enough to strangle him. I get my feet flat on the ground. The segments lock up in both directions, giving me a firm base. With my palms pressed to the carpet, I push until my ass comes off the floor.

  I’m crouched on robot legs.

  They feel locked solid, like I’m wearing a cast, so tight they could never move. A shiver of panic runs through me as I flash on what might happen if these alien legs ever truly lock up... or if they move against my will. Despite the pain, they aren’t really part of me.

  “Enough,” Dr. Masoud says. He steps toward me, his hands raised as if he intends to hold me down. “Lieutenant Shelley, it’s too soon.”

  “Don’t touch me,” I warn him, and I stand.

  I try to stand.

  In fact, I hurtle onto my back. The thick padding beneath the carpet is all that saves me from cracking my head open, but it’s still a near thing. I groan as Masoud barks, “Enough! Joby, turn it off. This is not a game.”

  It sure as hell isn’t. This is my life. “Leave it on!” I roll onto my belly. “You don’t get to turn me off, Doctor. Not ever! That is not part of this deal.”

  I do a push-up with my arms. I bring my legs under me again, bending my knees, my robot knees. I settle back into the same crouch I managed before.

  Masoud is hovering. “Jimmy—”

  “You’re not my dad. Don’t call me Jimmy.”

  “Lieutenant, you have to learn to use your prosthetics. They are not the same as the legs you lost—”

  “I think I figured that out.”

  “One wrong move and you could seriously injure—”

  He stops talking as I try again to stand. This time I move slowly, carefully. My thighs—what’s left of them—tremble with the effort. My hip joints feel weak, like they’re about to slip. But my knees and my ankles... they feel solid. Steady and strong. Locked in place.

  I’m standing.

  I feel like a giant.

  I’ve got to be at least two inches taller than I used to be.

  “Fuck me,” Joby says with a lopsided grin. “I am a seriously good body engineer.”

  He is a good engineer, but I hate him anyway. “Hey Joby, when I figure out how to walk, I’m going to strangle you. How cool is that?”

  His grin widens. “Should I turn you off?” he muses. “Or turn you up?”

  I lunge for him.

  He turns me up.

  ~~~

  Dr. Masoud is livid. “Do you know how much money has been invested in you? How much research? How many futures are dependent on the outcome of your case?”

  I’m sitting on a table in an exam room, clutching a bloody wad of tissue that served as a temporary dressing for the gash on the side of my head, acquired when my skull bounced off the edge of Joby’s console. The little peacock loves his power. He put me down before I got anywhere near him. I’m not happy about that, but my foul mood can’t compare with Masoud. He’s so angry, spittle is flying. Literally. I feel specks of it impact my cheek.

  “You have no idea what you can do,” he tells me, his voice booming in the little room. “None. You have no idea what you’ve become!”

  I think he’d slap me around if he could get away with it. I even start to worry about his wife and kids, and what they go through—but his huge hands are feather-light as he cleans the gash and then glues it shut. The contrast is surreal.

  ~~~

  Masoud and my physical therapist, a civilian named Jen Krause, have conspired to develop a training schedule for me. Jen is a white-haired woman of middle height who disguises her broad shoulders and expansive bosom within the sheath of a simple white lab coat. She smiles at me in a grandmotherly way as she drags over a harness that hangs from a track in the ceiling.

  “The feedback mechanism in your legs will take some time to get used to. So we’re going to start you in the harness, where there’s no chance that you can fall down—”

  “That’s not going to work for me, Jen.” I’ve had enough of being strapped in, strapped down, ferried around. I have legs again. Working legs. “Let me figure it out. I’ll use the parallel bars and teach myself.”

  Jen shoots a disapproving glance at Dr. Masoud, who’s standing behind my wheelchair. He doesn’t say anything, so she tries again. “No, Shelley, I just can’t allow it. You could be hurt—”

  “It’s on me.”

  “—and your experience will be used to refine the program for other soldiers.”

  “There is no program. Look, I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, but right now you don’t know what I need. No one does, because I’m the first to try to walk with legs like these. If I can’t handle the parallel bars, I’ll tell you. Until then, I do it my way.”

  “Let him do it,” Masoud growls. I imagine him armed with a baseball bat, ready to use it on my head if I fuck up his Nobel prize. “Shelley’s a man. A real man. He doesn’t need coddling.”

  “Glad we got that straight.”

  So I get to use the parallel bars.

  It’s an exercise in concentration just to stand up from the wheelchair and reach for them. Jen hovers, but I manage it without her help. “Take the chair away,” I tell her. “I don’t need it anymore.”

  I’m trying not to show the pain I feel, but the truth is, my legs hurt—and not only in my human parts. There’s pain too in my robot legs, generated by a feedback mechanism that lets me feel their presence, their position, and the force I’m asking them to exert. I’m starting to sweat.

  “Is there a problem?” Masoud asks acidly.

  “Joby had a way of adjusting the signal strength. I need that.”

  “Too much feedback?”

  “Maybe. I don’t
know.”

  “I’ll ask him about it. Do you want to sit down for a while?”

  “No.”

  Masoud gets on the phone with Joby. I leave him to it. With my gaze fixed straight ahead and my hands keeping a death grip on the rails, I flex my thigh, bringing my right foot up, forward, and then down again. I feel the heel touch first, and then my weight rolls forward until my foot is flat, and I’m squarely balanced. My heart is racing, my hands are slick with sweat, and it fucking hurts, but other than that, it was a perfectly normal step. I do it again with the left foot and slide my hands farther along the rail. Right and left, right and left. I ease off on my grip when I’m halfway through the bars, taking all of my weight on my legs. The pain ramps up, but I keep walking, one slow step after another until I reach the end.

  My therapist is there, hovering.

  I get a good grip on the rails again and turn around. Using the sleeve of my T-shirt, I wipe the sweat from my eyes and then start off again, walking a little faster this time, my palms skimming the bars, but not really holding them. I reach the end. No one cheers, not even me. My legs are trembling from fatigue. I know I need to sit down, but I don’t want to sit in the wheelchair. Looking around, I spot a row of plastic seats maybe ten steps away against the wall.

  I know I can get there. I just walked twice as far, without losing my balance.

  I let go of the rails and head out. Jen is instantly at my side. “Grab my arm if you feel yourself falling,” she says grimly.

  “I’m okay.”

  It’s almost true. If I fall, it’s going to be because the muscles in my thighs and hips give out, not because of the robot legs. I grit my teeth and focus on the next step, nothing more. And I make it. I’ve reached the row of seats. But now what? It occurs to me that sitting is a complex action requiring a turn along with controlled flexion in the hips, knees, and ankles. I haven’t practiced any of that yet, so I just let myself fall forward until I can grab the seat back, then I twist my hips and drop into the seat with a thud. I lean back and clench my eyes shut as pain shoots up my spine.

  “Very impressive,” Jen says. “But you’d suffer less if you took things more slowly.”

  I open my eyes and grin. “I can’t believe how well it works.” Then I straighten up. Masoud is walking toward me while side-eyeing his tablet. “Joby’s a fucking genius,” I tell him. “It’s like the legs know that they’re legs. They know how to flex and stiffen the knee, and the ankle. They know how to distribute weight across the sole of my foot.”

  “They only know to do it because I designed the neural interface,” he snaps.

  “Yeah. That’s impressive too. I hope you get your Nobel prize.”

  His gaze shifts from my face. He speaks again, but not to me. “Then it’s my responsibility. We need that open connection. Just do it.” I can only hear his half of the conversation, because the incoming sound is being fed directly into his ear canal by the audio loop he’s wearing.

  I blink in surprise as an icon flares in my overlay. It’s the green circle of an open network, and just like that—despite Kendrick’s order, because Dr. Masoud said to do it—I’m back in the Cloud—and new software drops in. An application installs. Messages flash near the bottom of my field of view, too fast for me to read, and then a new icon pops into existence: a slender, red, horizontal bar, with a numerical value beside it: 71%.

  Masoud looks up from the screen of his tablet. “Do you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Use your gaze to adjust the intensity. Higher to the right. Lower to the left.”

  “How high does it go?”

  He snorts in cold amusement. “Not as high as you experienced this morning.”

  I’m glad to hear that.

  The bar has started to fade from sight, but as I fix my gaze on it, its red glow brightens. I shift my eyes left, and the bar retreats while the digital readout rolls back: fifty, forty, thirty, twenty. As the signal strength drops, the pain in my legs fades into numbness. I take it all the way to zero and I can’t feel anything except the mass of my prosthetics, tugging on the stumps of my organic thighs.

  Even though I’ve shut off all feedback, the legs still work. I raise my right thigh, straighten the knee, extend the foot. It’s easy enough to do, and there’s no pain, but there’s no sensation either. I know it’s working only because I see it working.

  “What are you feeling?” Masoud asks.

  “Nothing. It’s like the leg doesn’t belong to me.”

  I bring the signal strength back up. At around twenty-two percent, I feel the presence of the legs again. At thirty-nine percent, the legs become mine, and I use the feedback to guide me as I set my foot down. At sixty-four percent I’m getting more feedback than I want—my legs are hurting. I take it all the way up to one hundred anyway, because I want to know what will happen, what could happen if someone—or something—ever gets access to the system.

  I’m braced for pain, so I don’t fall screaming to the floor when a red hot pulse slides up my spine.

  Masoud is talking to Joby. “Reset system max to eighty-five. No. He’s not going to need any finer proprioception than that. Do it.”

  The bar stays the same, but the pain recedes. I’m aware of my heart, pounding in my ears. Masoud is speaking again, but his gaze is still on the tablet, so it takes me a second to realize he’s speaking to me.

  “Proprioception is the body’s awareness of the position of its limbs. The higher the signal strength, the more finely detailed your control of the prosthetics will be.”

  “And the more it will hurt?”

  He scowls. “It’s first generation. The signal transfer process will be improved.”

  “It’s fucking amazing now,” I tell him, because it’s true. Still, I’ve spotted the flaw. I tap my organic thigh. “There’s some device in here that generates the signal strength, right?”

  “It’s not in your leg. It’s inside the prosthetic. We’ve adjusted the output. You can’t hurt yourself.”

  “But that’s just a software fix, right? And software gets hacked. Is there any way to get in there and adjust the device so it can’t generate a signal strong enough to fry my nervous system?”

  His stony expression tells me this is not an issue he wants to discuss. “This is first generation,” he reminds me. “The system will improve with time.”

  ~~~

  It’s Sunday when I start walking again. The first couple of days are hard, not because of any problem with my new legs, but because the muscles in my back and hips and thighs have deteriorated from lack of use. I work hard in physical therapy, and I spend extra hours walking all over the hospital. The padded soles of my titanium feet make a soft clicking sound against the vinyl floor, and I get stronger.

  By Thursday I’ve learned how to handle stairs, so I slip into the stairwell, where I practice climbing and descending. No one comes to check on me, not physically, but the monitoring sleeve lets the nursing staff know where I am and how I’m doing.

  After an hour, a message from Command pops up on my overlay, alerting me to a priority email delivered to my dot-mil. Halfway up a flight of stairs, I stop to read it. The email contains the orders for my next assignment. My stay at Kelly Army Medical Center is done.

  ~~~

  Lissa and I have talked every evening since she went back to San Diego. We talk about her work, and she always wants me to fill her in on the progress of my therapy. But we talk about other things too: our parents and friends, funny stuff that happens, the stupidity of politics, who’s getting married and who’s splitting up... anything at all, except us. She hasn’t come back to see me, and I still don’t know where we stand.

  I sit on the stairs, breathing in the stink of concrete and stale air. Footsteps patter somewhere below, a door creaks open, booms shut, and then silence descends.

  I fix my gaze on Lissa’s icon and my overlay pushes through a call to her. A few seconds later her voice is in my ears. “Hey, Shelley.” She
sounds surprised and a little anxious. It’s not our usual time to talk.

  “Lissa, I know you’re at work—”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I just got my orders. I’m getting transferred.”

  “Oh God. When? Where?”

  “Monday.”

  “Monday?”

  “I’m not going far. It’s just some cyber camp west of Austin. It’ll be six weeks, though, with no outside contact.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “It’s the army. They can do what they want.”

  “But you said you’d get leave!”

  “It didn’t go through. Maybe there wasn’t time. Maybe they’re afraid if they let me out on the street for more than a couple of days I’ll get pissed at some yahoo and kick his guts out with my new cyber enhancements.”

  “That is not funny.”

  I draw a deep breath. Now or never. “I did get weekend liberty.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I get the weekend off. I can get out of the hospital. I have to stick around San Antonio, though, so I can’t fly out to San Diego—”

  “You couldn’t get through airport screening anyway, with all that hardware.”

  “Huh, yeah. I never thought about that. But Lissa, you can come here. We can get a hotel.”

  She’s quiet for several seconds. Then she asks, “What about your overlay?”

  And I know I’m going to win.

  “We don’t need to worry about that. When I’m on liberty or on leave, the recording stops. That’s always been in the contract. GPS will still be active, but that’s all. So come. Please. Tomorrow. I get released at noon.”

  “Tomorrow’s Friday,” she says in surprise.

  “Yeah. I get a long weekend. We can have until Monday morning. Please, Lissa. Please, please, come.”

  She laughs softly, low in her throat. “Shelley sounds hungry.”