by JCH Rigby
I constantly run my hands over my face, tugging at my ears, squeezing gently around my eye sockets. The ears feel odd, but then I can’t really remember how they felt before the operation. There seem to be a few extra folds, or something. The eyes are even weirder. When I press my face, under the lids my eyeballs feel harder than they should, and my eyesight doesn’t seem quite normal. Everything looks a lot further away than it ought to. I walk with an exaggerated caution, feeling disconnected, as though I’m looking out from deeper in my head than before. But at least my eyes are working together now.
I stumble repeatedly. I put it down to the aftereffects of the anesthetic at first, but it won’t go away. Weird isn’t really an adequate word. I don’t feel Enhanced, just odd.
I’m desperate to know what I look like, and I can’t find out. The others are no help. Although there’s seven others on the ward, I’m still the only guy awake, and everyone else has heal-zones over their faces, like they’ve been in a fire or something, so I can’t see what they look like. I know my head’s been shaved; running a hand over my head tells me that. I’m used to a pretty short crop, so I’m not worried about that. But what does my face look like? Every now and then one of the staff comes in, and I always ask them for a mirror, they smile an empty smile at me, do whatever they came in for and leave. Do they have no concept of how infuriating this not knowing is? I want to grab someone and shake answers out of them.
The second day after I wake up Anstruther breaks the good news to me. They haven’t finished changing me.
“We’ve fixed your hearing and the fitted the basic comms package. All told that took eight days of work. Not continuously, of course—your body couldn’t take that—but spread out over several operations. Next, we need to do some more work on the optics, and that’ll be another series of sessions. We won’t go any further until we’re sure you’re accepting the Enhancements without any problem.”
“What, tissue rejection? Is that what you call it?” I say it a bit snappier than I mean to but, damn, after all this to be dumped from the program because of something I had no control over.
Anstruther held both hands up to placate me. “That’s not really what I mean. I’m not a medical doctor; I told you. It’s your psychological reaction to the alterations I’m here to observe. Some people can’t adjust smoothly to the change in their appearance. It’s not just vanity; a surprising amount of most people’s self-image depends heavily on the way they look. As creatures, we rely so much on the visual sense to tell us about the world I suppose it’s not surprising we define ourselves largely by our externals.”
That gets a chuckle out of me. I was never the vain type. “So, you reckon I might burst into tears when you finally show me what I look like?”
“No, you won’t do that.” He seems perfectly serious. “We’ve taken your tear ducts out. They interfere with some of the optic work.”
For some unexplainable reason this shakes me more than it should. I’ve spent a long time thinking about the implications of the surgical enhancements, but the realization I’d been modified, altered in so basic a way, hasn’t yet registered this strongly. Anstruther is wrong; within reason, I’m not bothered about the way I look—I wouldn’t want to be a fat slob, mind you—but this feels like a deeper invasion. I can’t remember when I last cried, sometime after little Molly, probably. But not to be able to, ever—that really tells me I’m different now.
Anstruther wasn’t finished. “There’s still a lot to do,” he goes on. “The comms fit and the optics are the easy jobs, which is why we do them first. If you can’t handle them, out they come and you’re none the worse for it.” I’ll bet. “But the big jobs—the nervous system rejigging, the skeletal strengthening and so on—they’ll take quite a time, and you’ll be cut up a bit while that’s being done, I’m afraid. We’ll not start on those until you’re certain you can cope with what you’ve already got, so priority one right now is gaining a feel for the implants.”
Some people can’t adjust. Does that mean there’ve been others, others who didn’t cope with the changes? What the hell happened to them?
"NO, NOT LIKE THAT. It’s a graduated increase in sensitivity, building up little by little till you can hear a pin drop from miles away. A tiny nudge will do it; don’t clout it.”
The tech steps back and checks his meters again. I have another prod at the switch with my tongue. Two of my back teeth have been removed, and now tiny controls nestle in their place. Not quite what I was expecting, somehow. Seems kind of crude considering.
The strange tickling feeling returns, maddeningly deep in my head. Everything starts to sound a little clearer, rather than louder. I try again. The whining of the tech’s drone becomes sharper, and I begin to feel uncomfortable.
“…reduce the tendency to self-identify, Colonel. Careful adjustments remove the feeling of strangeness…”
Suddenly I realize I can make out the conversation between Anstruther and a fat little man at the far end of the room. That would be the colonel then. As soon as I twig this, they fall silent. Anstruther’s playing with those old-fashioned glasses of his, turning them over and over in his hands as he talks. I momentarily wonder about a man who judges if people are stable enough for massive physical alterations, but who won’t fix his own eyes.
The tech steps into my line of sight blocking my view of Anstruther and the colonel. “Yeah, that’s it. Keep it like that; a gentle push is fine. Don’t forget there’s a cut-out. If the ambient noise level ever increases sharply, your ears will react in fractions of a second and reduce the sound to something more tolerable. You people will want it for gunshot noise, I understand. Takes a little while to settle in, but we’ll fine-tune it for you if you need.”
You people? The tech is speaking briskly, at me rather than to me as if I’m a slate taking dictation. I wonder if I’m expected to reply.
“Okay, fine. Now for the comms pack. Datalink and frequency setting are on the right- side switch. Comms info—frequency, power level, station ident, stuff like that—appears as a menu in your upper left field of vision. A blink will clear it if you don’t need it. You’ll find the comms pack a bit sensitive at first, and you might get stray stations drifting in and out until you’re used to controlling it.”
The ghosts. The mad little voices. So that’s what that had been. Not a fever dream after all.
The tech was still talking. “Okay. That’s not bad for today. Tomorrow we start your comms exercises. Be back in here at 0900, and we’ll work through some basic procedures until lunch.” Gathering up his equipment, he loads it onto a cart, and leaves. I look around. Anstruther and his tubby colonel pal have gone as well.
The penny drops. The tech never once made eye contact, or called me by name or rank.
I wonder what he sees when he looks at me?
January 2262
MORE OPERATIONS; THE EYES AGAIN. I’m the one in the heal-zone this time, and I can’t see a thing. More nurses and techs treating me like a kid, like a harmless idiot. They wash me and feed me and take me to the toilet, my frustration at my own helplessness growing daily. Anstruther drifts in and out, soothing and useless, urging me not to worry about things I’d not even thought about.
I’m losing my grip on time; I find I can’t remember what date it is, or even where the hospital is. More crazy dreams. I’m unsure if I’m still in the unit medical wing?
Somehow, I thought by now I’d be outrunning cars and leaping tall buildings in a single bound, or something.
All I can see is darkness shot with flashing spirals of light, weird lines rushing and fading, changing color as they go. Tiny explosions of red and gold pop and fizzle out; green rocket trails arc off into the distance, falling more steeply as they get further away. Looks like the machine gun tracer rounds we fired, Earth side. Wonder what the boys are doing now?
A WIZENED LITTLE MAN, older than anyone has a right to be, stares at me across the ashes of a fire. It’s
a desert night, but I have no real idea where we are. He’s wearing a scruffy loincloth, and his eyes hold a look of utter compassion. I’m indignant; what do I need his compassion for? What good will it do me? Can it replace my lost eyes?
Hang on; how can I see him without my eyes? Yet here they are in my hand, a pair of polished black orbs, delicately inset with intricate mechanisms, tiny lenses at their centers. Madly, impossibly, I’m examining my eyes from the outside, turning them over in my palm, squinting uncomprehendingly at their mechanical perfection. The old man speaks.
“You will never see the truth with those.”
I heft them thoughtfully in my palm, considering his words. A warm wind blows on my face in the darkness.
“They are made for a machine, for a silicon-hafnium toy. You are a man, and a man must see within, to the heart and the sinew and the blood.”
The eyes have a fine texture. There are minute indentations all over them, and they’re made like onions; shells within shells within shells. I raise them up to my face. The old man looks sadder still.
“How will you know the soul? How will you understand?”
I push the machine eyes gently into place. The eye sockets resist them slightly, then with a squeezing, stretching feeling they’re in, nestling snugly in my skull. My vision blurs, fades, and returns in impossible purity. The old man is gone.
I REMEMBER BEING A MACHINE. A remote, perhaps; one of the devices working everywhere across our worlds. Or maybe an in-system relay, flashing streams of data between the mining craft and the transports and the orbitals, steering them in and out of dock. Or maybe a sea floor probe, crawling beneath the oceans in search of nodules of manganese, cobalt, or nickel.
Mysterious, mundane; my tracks churn, antennae quiver, processors shunt. I remember, I remember, I remember.
I wake from these dreams without a clue where I got these odd ideas from, and whether they were telling me something significant, or whether they’re a mad fantasy brought about by all the drugs and operations. I worry I’m starting to forget how I used to think.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Boundary Layers
February
They’ve kept me hanging around for hours. Anstruther is nowhere to be seen. A nurse comes in and gives me one of those empty smiles. He offers me tea, then fusses around trying to make it, ruining it by not letting the water boil before pouring it.
“How much longer?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer, he smiles and shrugs. I want to strangle him, or at least stand up and walk out, but I know they’ll take that as a sign of tension. Instead, I sip unwillingly at the ghastly weak tea, eager for something to do. I walk over to the window to look out at the parkland beyond.
It’s a cloudy, damp day and cows have gathered together in the partial shelter of the trees. I guess they’re smart enough to take cover from the rain. In the middle distance, a river winds between meadows, and a fisherman stands thigh-deep in the water, casting well out into the deeper pools. I’ve never fished, so the miserable weather makes me wonder why he’s not as bright as the cows. A fresh wind is pushing the smaller branches, I build up my hearing until I can make out the fizz of the line as it feeds out, tinkling through the rings of the rod. The rustle of the leaves comes clearly to me, too, and the placid chomping of the cows as they feed off the lush, green grass. I can even hear the occasional slurp of a hoof stirring in the mud.
For the past couple of days, I’ve been playing around with the vision modifications, and I’m starting to get the hang of controlling it now. Idly, I focus on the distant fisherman and close my trigger finger as if taking up slack on an imaginary rifle. The range—650 meters—pops up in my upper right visual field. A quick double blink shifts the frequency, and brings me the infrared pattern of the water.
The fisherman is playing the rod well, dropping the bait neatly so it floats across the boundary layers where the temperature changes, looking for fish to fool. Perhaps I should fish. Does anyone do that, Five Side? It’s a restful scene, soothingly Earth-normal, and it swallows me up for perhaps a quarter of an hour until I notice the door mirrors on the fisherman’s jeep.
Instantly I’m fixated. This could be my chance to see what they’ve done to me. I know I’m bound to find out sooner or later but, despite bullshitting Anstruther, I’ve been burying my curiosity. For some reason, I feel their refusal to let me at a mirror is not exactly sinister, but certainly significant. It’s as if they’re trying to control me at a deeper level than I want to allow.
The tech’s voice comes back to me from the last half-dozen training sessions. “The human eye moves constantly. You’re always shifting the object of your attention, changing the focus of the eye, unconsciously dilating or contracting the pupil in response to external stimuli. Even when you read a book you’re doing this. What’s more, most people have a blink rate that causes the lid to move and clean the eyeball at least once every ten seconds. The human eye is hardly ever still.” With the slightest of emphasis, he seems to say the word ‘human’ as if it now excludes me.
“We’ve used this attribute to allow you to control the zoom and track capabilities of your new eyes. The default situation is zoom, with a six-second delay. That’ll be reduced proportionately when you’re operating in Neural Overdrive. Meaning in practice if you stare at something, without blinking, for more than six seconds, you’ll zoom in on it, to as much as times forty magnification. Initially, there’ll be some cranial discomfort as the sockets adjust to the new pattern of movement. Widening your eyes will cause the zoom to hold; blinking once returns you to times one.”
I lean on the window sill trying not to attract the nurse’s attention to what I’m doing, and concentrate hard on the jeep’s mirror. Sure enough, after a few seconds the zoom starts and I try to hold my head still.
I tried this in training the other day, finding it uncomfortable, now though, the pain is severe after only a couple of seconds. I feel more than hear a grating noise through the bone of my skull, as if my eyeballs are trying to carve new sockets for themselves, and my head feels full of fire. My skin is slick with sweat, my heart pounding. I force myself to ignore the pain as the landscape pulls in closer all the time.
My whole attention, my whole being is straining toward that mirror. The jeep comes more sharply into focus, a jaunty, chunky-tired little vehicle with a bulbous hardtop. I don’t recognize the make. Why would I? Earth loves the things; L5 doesn’t have much use for them. The door mirror holds an image of parkland, with a group of buildings at the center. Everything depends now on how much of the buildings I can distinguish.
The pain is so bad my eye sockets must surely be bleeding. My fingers are digging into the window sill, and I’m sure the nurse must see what I’m up to, but my ears tell me he’s leafing through a magazine completely ignorant of what I’m doing.
A blurred landscape slips away out of my peripheral vision. The reflected buildings come closer, and I make out a shape at a first-floor window. It’s a man, wearing my L5 barrack dress uniform. Gritting my teeth against the pain, I creep the focus in closer still.
I gasp. The face is covered with the silvery lines I’d seen on Mahmoud, the ears are twisted, looping and refolded in complex whorls. I’d known about this, and the flattened nose with its flaring, filtered nostrils, but it hadn’t been me before. Maybe I was too cool with Anstruther: the sight of my misshaped head would have shaken me to my core if I hadn’t been forewarned.
I study this stranger, noting the thickness of the three silver scars that divide the head into roughly equal portions. Another pair of scars loop around the ears, tailing off down toward the neck. I wonder if the silver scars will cover my whole body when I’ve had the rest of the work done.
I stand by the window, absorbed in contemplation of this new me, for a long time. I keep listening for the nurse, but he’s still reading. Eventually, my enhanced hearing picks out the thin whine of an aircraft engine. The whine is g
etting louder as the aircraft nears the hospital. With a nauseating jerk in my vision, I zoom back out again searching for the aircraft.
It’s a military flitter. I watch the little machine while it curves overhead, braking as it approaches the hospital. Losing sight of it as it swings around the building, dropping toward a landing pad somewhere. After another few minutes, I hear footsteps coming up the corridor outside. They sound urgent. The door opens and Anstruther finally arrives.
He bustles in with his fat little friend from the other day hard on his heels; the new guy is in uniform, but I don’t recognize it or his rank insignia. Must be from some unit I don’t know. An office remote wheels in after them, almost catching in the door. I’ve noticed the good doctor isn’t too impressed with military protocol, so the fact he’s chosen to push in ahead of fat guy tells me there’s little love lost between them. I remember Anstruther called Fats ‘Colonel,’ and decide to play it safe. There’s too much I’m not sure of here for me to start mouthing off.
I brace up. “Afternoon, sir; Doctor.”
Fats looks pleased, Anstruther irritated. They sweep over to a couple of chairs, and Fats gets gracious. “Good afternoon, Corporal Arden. At ease.”
Anstruther waves crossly at another chair, and I sit down. They both start speaking at once, and I swallow a smile. With exaggerated politeness, Anstruther gives way to Fats.
“Corporal Arden, my name is Colonel Simpson. I’m from the U.N.’s Weapons Development Directorate and,” Simpson nods in the direction of Anstruther, “working with our partners from the ARTOK corporation, I’m ultimately responsible for the Human Enhancement Program.” You can hear the capitals when he speaks.
“I’d like to congratulate you on passing Selection. You achieved some exceptional results, resulting in you being accepted for the Enhancement Program itself. Those who did well in the tests but were not among the very top scorers were offered the chance to go on to the U.N.’s Special Forces Training School at Fort Bragg. They’ll be absorbed into the regular SF cadres and will, I’m sure, do excellent work there.
