UnCommon Bodies: A Collection of Oddities, Survivors, and Other Impossibilities (UnCommon Anthologies Book 1)

by Michael Harris Cohen

  The cy-tech already installed in her brain–tech that allowed for access to strategic combat databases–only brought her halfway back. As she squinted at the readout in front of her, the red 50F highlighted an alarming blue-green flashing color, the girl thought 50 sounded kind of low. She wished the nurses hadn't left so she could ask them.

  The heart machine from last night still blipped at the corner of her bed, slow, steady, but more halting than she remembered, like it had to think about it each time it started a new beat. She thought of the nurses calling her "undead" and "zombie." She found she didn't mind the undead part but the zombie part seemed pretty rude. The voice in her head informed her that her temp, heart, and respiration rates were significantly below the standards for human definitions of "alive."

  "Well, that's cool."

  After accessing the various new systems, and pulling up the menus she had been outfitted with, she found she didn't miss breathing. Every now and then she would remember to take a breath, but it wasn't automatic. Her heart still beat, but it pulsed at a slower rate than she was used to, the persistent throb in her ears, that bass line to life, was gone.

  She felt fine. A little tired, but not in any pain. This seemed to her a significant improvement from what she'd expected–days of painful recovery from multiple surgeries.

  She rose and went to the bathroom, the way one does, but found she didn't have to go. In the mirror, she studied her new reflection. Her skin, which had always been fairer than most people's, was now platinum-y white, with a grayish tinge. Her hair, which had been a boring brown shade people called dishwater (which she'd always found insulting) had also gone completely platinum white. There wasn't much of it left because doctors had shaved the side they put the implants into, but what remained looked shocking and different. Kind of a white side mohawk. She turned her head and found she approved of the new hairdo. It made her seem like a new person.

  Her eyes had also changed from their previous mud-brown shade to a grayish-white, ringed in black. Dark circles that could have been mistaken for thick goth eyeliner (but that she could not wipe off even when she tried) entirely skimmed her eyes. She examined her lips, which were now tinted a grayish blue. Rubbed them to see if that color came off, and...

  No. Still blue.

  Inside her mouth, her tongue was now dark, almost black. She liked the way it made her teeth shine whiter. Sharper, as though the canines had been filed to a fine point. Deadly, like a large cat. She surveyed her face from side to side and calculated that her appearance was now beautiful. She gave a little "roar" and smiled.

  Well, this is fun. Kind of cool–never been brave enough to try this, she thought.

  She mused, This new look won't make it very easy for me to blend into the crowd, which could be a drawback for an assassin.

  Then the tentative voice, which she guessed was the analytical AI software in her brain, offered a few videos of combat scenarios where such a distinguishing appearance could be turned into an asset, instead. She had been briefed that the AI would sound like someone else at first, but would eventually merge with her own thoughts until it felt seamless. Stream of consciousness, but better. It ran simulations where being the most unique looking person in the room allowed one to disappear in a way that being average didn't. No one expected the strange to do anything, apparently.

  These lessons from a newly booted cybernetic AI within her own head would take some getting used to. Gaining confidence, the voice of the AI rambled, a stream-of-consciousness kind of thought which was going to be there all the time now, making suggestions.

  She decided to climb back into bed. There wasn't much else to do in the hospital room and she didn't know how long she'd be here. She lay quietly, accessing the new technology that had been integrated into her system. The combat software and AIegis 7.1 system in her head far exceeded her expectations. She hadn't, after all, expected to wake up dead.

  They should add that to the brochure.

  Still here, she thought as she surveyed the hospital room, and then turned her attention back to studying her new alterations.

  The other upgrades she had purchased included bionic arms, and she pulled the hospital gown loose to try them out. They were thin and gray, shiny. She had planned for flesh-colored skin grafts to cover the metallic surface, but that would happen in a second stage of the process, and now, she thought she might skip the grafts.

  The sleek silver surface worked with her new platinum-gray skin tone; the dark line between the organic and mechanical split her upper arms right at the bicep, a sharp cut framed by shimmering optic circuits that wove an intricate and delicate pattern around her arms, but two inches higher. She poked at the line and felt no pain. She had expected the surgery to hurt more, had been briefed on post-surgical recovery and pain killers and the drawbacks for this systemic change.

  These arms, this skin color, this state of being alive yet not suggested the essence of better. She kept looking at the silver and black tech in her arms, which were smooth and elegant. She could see blue pulses where circuits of electric energy showed the connections worked. They pulsed again when she flexed the fingers, touched both hands together. Her arms felt strong, and she decided they were one of her favorite things about the upgrade. Before this, she had usually felt so common, normal, bland.

  Now, she felt like she was one of a kind.

  She kept wanting to laugh. For some reason, waking up dead seemed to be the funniest joke ever. A nurse came into the room and looked startled that she was laughing again. The nurse gathered herself, smoothed her scrubs in front, and asked, "How are you feeling?"

  The girl assessed her systems, "Fine. I've been mostly dead all day, though." She smiled.

  The nurse laughed, "Oh yeah, I get it. That old movie." She didn't seem to think it was funny, though.

  Undead Girl found that she could tell what the nurse was writing by the sound the pen scratched out onto the pad. Her AI translated the scritchy-scratchy noises into text:

  Odd sense of humor. Indicator of brain damage?

  Below-average heart rate, lack of identifiable pulse, and hypothermic body temperature of 67 degrees F.

  Next the nurse wrote a note in the chart:

  This patient should, for all intents and purposes, be dead. Was clinically dead for a total of ten minutes during surgery.

  Undead Girl, assessing the cynical nature of the nurse's notes, began laughing again, and the nurse did not stay long.

  This really would have been a great time for someone from the Clinic to discuss what had happened to her, but the nurses all ran away as soon as they could. Instead, Undead Cyborg Girl sat in her room, not needing to heal from a surgery that hadn't left her in any pain, no need for rehab or OT, and listened to her AI spool out its secrets to her in a palimpsest of facts, old urban legends, fleeting feelings and sensations, and stupid jokes.

  Wetware: One Month Later

  Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. ~Arthur Koestler

  Undead Girl was home. She had worked for weeks with the doctors and techs and PT personnel they brought in to train her on how to use her new upgrades. She figured out pretty quickly that they knew less about the systems than she already did. At night she dreamed about the upgrades, and in the dreams, a voice would explain how to use her arms most effectively, or why she could hear the heartbeats in the nurses from all the way down the halls, could know things about them she shouldn't.

  For example, she once heard a tiny heartbeat deep within one of the nurses' bodies, and when she asked the nurse why that would be so, "What was that tiny fluttering racehorse heartbeat?", the nurse had blanched.

  She stuttered, "How can you hear that?" and ran out of the room.

  The AI informed her that the tiny heartbeat must have meant the nurse was pregnant, but that the faint quality of the sound meant it was still very, very early. Possibly she hadn't been sure herself yet.
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  “Why did that bother her, though?” Undead Girl asked the AI.

  Silence that hissed like the gap between songs on an old vinyl record filled her thoughts. She almost felt like the AI had shrugged in her head.

  She found that she didn't need to sleep for rest, but still, her AI dreams were essential to understanding who she was now.

  She had left the clinic because the look in her eyes when she talked to the nurses, doctors, and other patients scared them. This happened more and more after the incident with the pregnant nurse, who refused to come in her room anymore. The nurses recorded in her charts a clinical detachment, an emotion of icy nothing. They made special notes about Undead Girl's bouts of hysterical laughter, and the vital signs that never changed to being, well, living.

  What the hell was she, anyway?

  When she didn't think it was hilarious, she felt detached about everything, not generally analyzing emotions. She could remember emotions, but they were far away now. She knew that she ought to care that the nurses hated her, avoided her, and that the doctors had only cursorily explained what had happened. But the feeling of empathy, the sense that she should yawn when someone else did, was only a fact on a piece of paper. Not something she actually felt.

  She didn't need to eat, either, and her undead body seemed simpler than it had been while strictly alive. She did, however, keep dreaming of pomegranate seeds. On her first shopping expedition she had loaded her refrigerator with packages of the seeds. They made her happy. She liked the way they turned her lips, which had lightened to a medium blue color, dark purple again.

  She also craved noodley soup, salty and the hotter the better, and she would order out once a day for a delivery. Other than those two desires, the old intensity of focus she remembered of eating and sleeping–maintaining your wetware meat body–seemed pointless. She felt sorry for people trapped in the conformity of life.

  The nurses had called her "undead." And "zombie."

  Trying to figure out what that meant, she watched a couple of zombie movies she remembered from before and decided of the mindless hordes of living appetites, "Wow, those guys are stupid."

  Her AI seemed to agree, flashing an image of a zombie chewing on its own arm, and the sound of laughter.

  She certainly wasn't a werewolf or a ghost or mummy, either. She researched vampires, too, but the whole Goth European aristocrat vibe was so not her thing. Also, she didn't crave blood, having the dirt of her homeland in her bed, or seem to need anything other than an occasional nap. So she deemed any "undead" she had ever heard of before irrelevant, at least as far as the "What am I?" question was concerned.

  The AI software in her head, which felt like its own separate personality, still fed her images of combat scenarios in which she was killing hard targets–especially world leaders and heads of large corporations. One time, she zoned out to a scenario where she was stalking and assassinating a famous European pop star through a concert venue, and when she woke, she couldn't get the tunes from an incessant playlist of that singer's music out of her head. It generally made her WANT to assassinate that singer. She kind of hoped the contract would happen.

  Basically any target someone could want assassinated, she knew how to make that happen. Getting used to the upgrades and scenarios in her head was helped by not having a real life; no one ever visited her. She vaguely remembered family, her sister crying with her after her parents died, but since none of them ever called or came by, she assumed everyone she had known all thought she was really dead.

  Who cares? Killing targets seemed fun. She wanted to get to do that. It was her dream job. Literally. As she thought of the truth of that, she snorted laughter and soup out of her nose. Which only made her laugh harder.

  Every night she dreamt of multiple moments when someone was standing in front of her and she assessed their weak points. Snap their throat here, plunge a knife there. It was fascinating how many ways existed to kill a person in an instant. Now that she was undead, she found that she didn't care very much about that tenuous grasp humans have on life. It slipped away so easily; why should it be so valuable?

  The chip in her head delivered the goods she had been promised. It was integrated with combat knowledge from thousands of years of training, from early martial arts to Greco-Roman combat and all the way up to close-quarters-combat styles of the trench warfare of the 20th century such as Defendu and Krav Maga. The AI demonstrated video of the best defensive knife versus sword positions, how to turn a battle where you were knocked to the ground into your upper hand rather than your loss. Everything available about firearms, every kind, was detailed in yet another video.

  But it wasn't just images; she could practically hold them in her hands, stroke their shiny grips. Touch the people she simulated killing, feel their fear.

  Fascinating.

  The AI in her head filled every thoughtful moment with another detail, and she felt she must have the most comprehensive assassin's database on the planet. She would enjoy trying it all out. But society (the AI informed her; she personally was getting pretty fuzzy on the details about why it mattered) would frown on her actually making someone else fully dead or undead without permission. She had no real-world practice, and so far hadn't found a paying gig, either.

  The impulse to get the assassin upgrade had come one day out of the blue when she was watching old movies about fighters trying to make their way out of a strange dystopian arena. The girl in the movie was amazing at using a bow and arrow. Undead Girl had wanted to learn how to do that without having to train for years of her life. She thought of the savings account full of money from her inheritance, and she used it to pay her way into what was supposed to be a new life.

  Now that her unlife was entirely different from expectations, the teacher in her head seemed almost destiny-driven, as though it had always been there, just woken up by the surgery.

  She found a website where guns were for sale and sometimes she fell asleep as she scrolled through the pages, scanning them, tasting copper in her mouth and feeling the pulse and shock of a gun's report. There was one AK-47 bedazzled with rhinestones and a kitty cat with no mouth. It was pink, girly. That made her laugh, and she entertained what she would look like holding it for a moment, but dismissed it because it would draw too much attention.

  When she woke, her hands felt empty, itchy, the way a missing limb could have phantom pains. Even though she had fully functional nanotech bionic arms with the strength of twenty men, she knew she was missing some last piece. After one of these naps, she woke with the image of the gun she wanted: a square laser-based shock pistol, pulsing green energy, coiled heat. A single blast to the right spot would render a target incapable of movement when set on the easiest setting, fatal if set higher.

  Turn it up to eleven, she laughed. Her AI was also equipped with all the pop culture references a cyborg assassin could want. Either that or she had been a nerd before. She couldn't quite remember. It didn't seem relevant.

  She ordered a simple, black, squared-off gun from the website, chose three- to five-day shipping. She had money saved up but worried that it would run out before she found work. Also, since she was undead, she had no idea how long that money needed to last. How long do the undead "live?" The AI program, that was supposed to be non-judgmental but sometimes reminded her of a favorite surly teacher she had in middle school, informed her that the gun she ordered was a great choice, especially at that price, and used by many law enforcement agencies and the military. The chip offered more opinions lately, and fewer dispassionate virtual lessons. Everyone else had hated that teacher but now, with a version of him in her head, Undead Girl realized she had missed him.

  She needed a job. How did one get a job? The AI had no suggestions. In the accident that made her an undead cyborg instead of a simple living one, the job-finding tutorial part of its coding had been corrupted. It seemed super weird that this big life-change upgrade hadn't considered adding that aspect to her programming, but she was
stuck thinking about it all in terms of her old life. Or maybe she should research it.

  She looked it up on the Internet, found cyborg professional organizations, résumé help, forms to fill out. It took her about a week, and the cans of pomegranate juice piled up next to her monitor. After filing the last application form, she looked around her loft apartment and felt lonely. She thought maybe she should get a cat, but then wondered why she thought that? Cats were interesting, but they were alive. Being alive seemed an awful lot of maintenance. Was it worth the hassle?

  Hardware

  You can mass-produce hardware; you cannot mass-produce software–you cannot mass-produce the human mind. ~Michio Kaku

  Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software. ~Arthur C. Clarke

  She walked down the street with the color red foremost in her mind. It was as though in finally deciding to buy the gun, the one she envisioned in her hand, her arm outstretched and ready, her mind had freed itself for dreaming of other things.

  Red was everywhere: fruit, lips, blood.

  Her apartment lacked the color and she decided she must have it. There should be soft red surfaces everywhere. She didn't know why her life had been so beige–beige blankets, a brown couch, white walls. She began to wonder how her body, so fragile and simple before, had survived death on the surgical table. What was special about her?

  She was still trying to figure it out, still lying in her bed lazy with dreams of apples, and red grapes, and red fuzzy starfish she had seen somewhere (Where? When?) when her computer "pinged" an email's arrival.

  You could be undead, you could be a cyborg out-of-work assassin waiting for delivery of your new gun and you'd still get SPAM and newsletters you hadn't actually meant to sign up for.