Girl of Flesh and Metal

by Alicia Ellis

  I spun my seat around, so I could confront Jackson face to face. “You really think I would want to own CyberCorp?” I couldn’t help myself. This conversation would make more sense if we had it tomorrow, when Jackson sobered up and I felt less like killing my car. But my irritation bubbled at the surface, like water in a tea kettle on the verge of screaming. “Do you even listen to me when I talk?”

  “Sure, babe. It’ll be perfect. You’ll see.”

  “I’ll see? Anti-technology isn’t a phase for me. People aren’t connecting anymore.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” His words agreed with me, but his indifference said otherwise.

  The conversation struck a familiar chord. He knew the words to this exchange just as well as I did because he had listened every time I told him how I felt. But as far as he was concerned, his picture of our future meant more than my feelings. And that wasn’t something I could live with.

  “I want to break up,” I said. The words flew from my mouth on their own. But once they were out there, I meant them.

  “No you don’t, babe.” His eyes drifted shut.

  “Go back to sleep.” I spun my chair to face forward again. In the morning, we’d have a serious talk.

  Obediently, he leaned against the window behind me and, ten seconds later, started snoring.

  The car steered itself toward the road, and I figured I’d try my luck at a detour. I yanked the wheel left at the edge of the parking lot, but it locked.

  Groaning, I hung my head while the wheel rotated to the right on its own and pulled onto the street in the direction of the fastest route home. When we hit the highway, the car shot into the night, zooming past the white dashes that marked the lanes to my left and right. The needle on my speedometer inched upward until it pointed straight at the line between sixty and seventy.

  Winter break had just begun, but the night held barely any chill. I pressed the control to roll down my window, and the wind whipped across my face so hard it stung.

  Outside the window lay a starless sky. When I was small, there had been stars visible overhead, instead of this matte gray covering a city too bright for them. The city’s lights hid them now. I missed the stars.

  I pressed my foot hard on the accelerator.

  “The speed limit is sixty-five miles per hour,” came the car’s syrupy voice.

  “Oh, come on,” I muttered.

  At the precise speed of sixty-five, the car took me to my side of town, while I sat in the driver’s seat with my arms crossed over my chest. I ripped the glove compartment open and extracted my emergency bag of gummy candies. Too frustrated to fumble with the tie, I tore the bag open and stuffed three in my mouth.

  A mile from my house, the car stopped at a red light. For the hell of it, I slammed my foot on the accelerator again, but the car ignored me.

  There was an emergency manual override somewhere. My dad had pointed it out on the day he bought this vehicle to replace my older one, only a week ago. I squinted at the controls between the driver and passenger seats. Manual controls for navigation and music, but nothing for switching to manual drive.

  My hand brushed against a button under the steering wheel. I slammed it, and the word AUTO-DRIVE disappeared from the dash. I pumped my fist into the air in celebration.

  The movement tipped the bag of candies off my lap and onto the floor.

  “Crap.” I ducked beneath the dash to retrieve the bag, muttering a curse for the lost gummies strewn across the vehicle floor.

  “Collision imminent,” the car said. “In three . . . two . . .”

  “What?” I sat straight up.

  A silver vehicle streaked along the cross street, angled toward me. My stomach shrank into a tight ball.

  This time, when I slammed my foot on the accelerator, the car jumped forward. For an instant, I squealed. But the other vehicle slammed into the side of my car, and my celebration morphed into a throat-tearing roar. Metal crunched and folded against more metal.

  Numb.

  Time slowed and skipped ahead in tiny blips.

  To my left, someone moved in the silver car. A man stumbled out. He stood beside my window, his face painted with concern and panic.

  The rush of adrenaline passed, and pain ripped through my arm. It burned, like it had been ripped apart, seared in two. The crushed car door hid most of the limb from view, and what I could see of it was only the smashed, bloody flesh of my shoulder.

  I yanked to free it. Sobs mingled with my screams, and darkness crept inward until nothing else existed.

  2

  “Lena.”

  I wasn’t dead. I knew that for certain because, if I were, my body wouldn’t feel like it was being crushed under a giant boulder.

  “Lena.” I recognized my mother’s voice now. Doused with concern, it sounded hollow and far away. Yet I smelled her rich, flowery scent as if she sat right beside me.

  A steady bip, bip, bip sounded from my right. I tore my eyelids open, but squeezed them shut when fluorescent light stung my eyes. Still, I sensed the brightness on the other side.

  “Can we lower the lights in here?” My father had a way of making his requests sound like commands.

  A moment later, the room dimmed enough that I risked opening my eyes again.

  Seated on the side of my white-sheeted bed, my mother stared down at me. Concern swam in eyes the same dark-brown as mine. For once, her tight curls poofed around her head and fell to the top of her shoulders, instead of being tied into a tight knot. An ivory tunic contrasted against her dark-brown skin. Puffy red eyelids surrounded her eyes.

  “Mom.” My voice came out ragged, rough against my raw throat. My tongue somehow got in the way of speech instead of helping it. I swallowed the saliva in my mouth and tried again. “Where am . . .”

  “Shh.” She stroked my hair in a vaguely familiar way—something she hadn’t done for many years. “You’re going to be fine. Your father’s here too.” She gestured to my right.

  With an effort that made me grimace, I turned my head. Clad in a dark-gray suit, Thomas Hayes sat in a leather armchair, one ankle propped up on the other knee. His tan skin looked paler than usual, and tired eyes stared back at me. But he said nothing, only offered an encouraging smile.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had both my parents’ attention, without either of them rushing off to work. And all it took was me almost dying. I would have laughed if I didn’t hurt so much.

  Details of the accident came spinning back to me. The road twirled around me. The door crushed into my mangled arm. My own screams—and nothing but silence from the backseat.

  “Jackson,” I said, trying to sit up. “Is he okay?”

  My mother covered my right hand with hers. “He’s here, in another room. With his own doctors.”

  “How is he?”

  “He’s not awake yet. He . . . needed a little more work than you.” She nodded toward my left arm. A white sheet covered the limb from shoulder to fingertips.

  “We have a lot to tell you,” came an unfamiliar female voice from the doorway.

  Its owner stepped into my oversize hospital room—at least I guessed it was a hospital room, or a cross between one and an office. The beep I was hearing belonged to a heart monitor, attached by a clasp to my right forefinger. A metal stand held a bag of liquid, from which a clear solution flowed through the needle stuck into the crook of my right arm.

  But most hospital rooms didn’t contain so many robotic parts.

  What looked like an array of robotic arms and hands littered a long table stretched across the left side of the room. Some were partly disassembled, with wires attaching the hand to the arm or the fingers to the hand.

  Something about them struck me as odd—something other than the fact that they were arms with no torsos, legs, or other body parts. But my head felt cloudy, groggy. My thoughts moved slowly. I couldn’t figure out what bothered me about them.

  The least hospital-like thing about the room was the w
alls. Four giant vid-screens surrounded me from floor to ceiling. They displayed a panoramic beach scene in such high resolution that I could almost believe I was lying on the sand.

  Waves lapped against the shore in a calming rhythm. Whisper-thin clouds drifted across a blue sky. Faint seagull calls sounded, as if from a distance. The images contrasted sharply with the sterile machines and robotic parts around the room.

  The woman who’d spoken wore a white lab coat with the name CyberCorp stitched on it in blocky red letters. A pen stuck out of her light-blond hair, which was twisted back into a knot. She stood at about six feet, broad-shouldered, with a nice padding around the waist.

  She held a tan folder about an inch thick. The folder’s cover had my name, Lena Hayes, printed in large letters.

  “I’m Dr. Fisher,” she said, her tone clipped and businesslike. “I work for CyberCorp.”

  So it wasn’t a hospital after all. I glanced over at my mom, praying she could see the pleading in my eyes. The pleading to escape this place as soon as possible.

  “There’s nothing to worry about now,” my mother said. “You’re at CyberCorp.”

  I groaned, then flinched when the groan bit deep into my chest. “Allie,” I said. “Is she here?” It hurt to talk—like gravel rubbing inside my throat.

  “Allison’s at home. I didn’t want her to see you like this.”

  At four years old, my sister had a way of looking at the world that I envied. She saw the good in everything. And with the grim faces peering down at me, I could use some of that spirit right now.

  “These are my college interns, Ron and Simon.” Dr. Fisher nodded toward two young men behind her, both brown-haired and dark-eyed, but only one wore glasses. They couldn’t have been much older than me. “You were in an accident.”

  Ron or Simon—I didn’t know which was which—hurried to my side to check the readouts on the machine tracking my vitals. The other boy stayed locked to Fisher’s side as she moved farther into the room.

  “I want to go home,” I said. My words stumbled all over each other, flipping and sliding. But somehow, my mother understood them.

  “Not yet, honey.”

  Dr. Fisher cleared her throat and moved to the foot of my bed, where she was impossible to ignore. “Miss Hayes.” She cleared her throat loudly.

  “Lena,” I mumbled.

  She continued with barely a pause. “You were in an accident three weeks ago. Your arm was—”

  Without thinking, I jerked my body to try to sit upright. Pain shot through me like a blanket of needles shoved into every inch of my body. I lay back against the pillow. “Was I in a coma?” I asked.

  “Yes. A medically induced one.”

  I opened my mouth to ask why they’d induce a coma, but the doctor continued talking without giving me the opportunity.

  “We induced the coma to allow us to operate on your arm, and then to give you time to heal after the operation. You might not remember that it was injured in the crash.”

  Of course, I remembered. Feeling like my arm was being twisted and seared and burned all at once was not something I would forget. For the second time in a span of five minutes, I tried to see my left arm. It wasn’t my bedsheet covering the arm. A second sheet lay over one side, and its sole purpose seemed to be hiding the limb.

  It suddenly hit me what was odd about the robotic parts in the room: every one of them belonged to a left arm.

  “We tried to save your arm at first, but it would never have been the same again,” Dr. Fisher said. “At your parents’ request”—my parents rarely made requests, which explained this woman’s distaste at being here—“I fitted you with a cybernetic limb.”

  “A cyber—what?” My right fist clenched. I’d lived with my parents long enough to be computer savvy, and if that word meant what I thought it meant, I wasn’t about to like whatever Dr. Fisher said next.

  “A cybernetic limb. It’s coupled directly to your nervous system and to the chip we installed in your brain. Once your body becomes accustomed to it, you’ll be able to use it just like the arm you were born with. At first, you’ll have to explicitly think about it to make it move. But eventually, thanks to advanced AI—artificial intelligence—the arm will learn how your brain works, and it will react more naturally.”

  I understood each of the words as she spoke them, but it took a moment for me to recognize their meaning when strung together like that. Cybernetic arm. Chip in my brain.

  My parents knew how much I valued humanity and human interaction, and despite that, they’d cut off my arm and replaced it with a machine. For the rest of my life, everything I did would involve a computer.

  The artificial intelligence only made it worse. I wouldn’t be operating the arm—a machine would do that job. Part of my body had been replaced by a whole different entity.

  “You installed hardware inside my body?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Fisher said, “and software too, or else the hardware would be rather useless.”

  “There’s a chip in my brain?”

  “Yes.”

  I blinked at her, mutely. I should have had a hundred different questions, but I had none. None that would rip the chip out of my head or reattach my flesh-and-bone arm. I didn’t care how destroyed it was. It was mine. It was human, not an artificially intelligent machine.

  “I want to see the arm.”

  My mother shifted in her seat, and in response, I could practically feel my blood pressure catapult through the roof. She’d already seen the arm, and she was nervous.

  I resisted the urge to ask her to leave the room. I was wrecked enough without her making it worse.

  Without ceremony, the doctor strode to my side and lifted the sheet. My mouth fell open.

  The corner of my shoulder—where it began to curve downward—was still me, but scarred. My olive-toned skin wore a mess of raised scars. The flesh there was all ragged patches, still healing, in an array of shades approximating my usual skin tone. Lines of scarred skin extended upward to the top of my shoulder and over my collarbone.

  Just below the curve of my shoulder, the flesh stopped abruptly, melded to silver metal with a slight yellow tint.

  I had seen the material before, in news reports and in my dad’s home office. CyberCorp called it Flexim, a flexible metal. It had just a touch of elasticity, which made it difficult to break, but it could bend over and over again. The elbow and fingers were made of a series of narrow metal pieces layered to slide over one another in joints.

  I reached across my body and touched the connection between flesh and metal. The metal extended even beneath the skin, which felt rigid and stiff overtop it. Inching the fingers of my other hand up along the shoulder, I kept pressing until I hit soft flesh near my collarbone. They’d replaced the entire arm and most of the shoulder.

  I tried to raise the arm to get a closer look, but it wouldn’t move. I tensed my whole body and concentrated on moving it, but it just lay there like the hunk of metal it was. Like the machine it was. Like the lifeless, heartless, inanimate thing it was.

  “It’s thinner than my right one,” I said. The statement sounded ridiculous, even to my own ears. But it seemed strange that CyberCorp would work so hard to make me a new arm, and then make it narrower than the other one. If I was going to be artificial, at least I could be well-proportioned.

  “After we’re sure it’s working okay, we’ll add a layer of skin we’ve grown in the lab,” Dr. Fisher said. “It’ll look and behave just like skin you’ve grown yourself. It will even be able to experience pain. And once it’s on there, your arms will be the same size.”

  “Why would I want pain?”

  “Pain lets you know something’s wrong. Just think. If you were shot with a bullet and felt nothing, you wouldn’t know to go to an emergency room. You’d bleed to death.”

  “Okay. So when am I going to get the skin?” I cringed at the thought of walking into school with a robotic limb. I’d attract attention, and not in a good w
ay.

  “When you’re mostly healed from the surgeries and the arm works as well as your other one. Then we’ll know everything’s operating as it should. I expect that’ll happen by the time we send you home.” Dr. Fisher reached into her breast pocket and withdrew a clear disc-like container. It held a tiny black chip, no more than a third of an inch on each side. “We recovered your ID chip. There’s a slit for it in your new wrist, but it won’t stay put there until we install your skin.” She passed the chip to one of her assistants—Simon or Ron—I still didn’t know which.

  In my original arm—the one I’d lost—the chip was surgically installed. Most people had them installed in their right arms, but my left arm was dominant, so that’s where they put my ID chip when I was a toddler.

  Fisher’s assistant reached over my left arm, which lay limp at my side, and pressed a spot between my bicep and shoulder. A small compartment door slid open. He pushed the chip into the compartment, which slid closed again. “For now, let’s keep it here. We’ll get it properly installed when we put the final touches on your arm.” Unlike Dr. Fisher, this guy was grinning like crazy. He walked with an excited bounce.

  It was only after the assistant stepped back that I realized I hadn’t felt anything when he’d opened my arm.

  “How come I didn’t feel that?”

  “Right now,” Dr. Fisher said, “the arm is just metal, programming, and circuitry. It won’t feel touch until we add the skin.”

  For the second time, I tried to lift my hand to my face, but it refused to budge. “I can’t move it.”

  “You’re going to need physical therapy, but not nearly as much as you would with a traditional prosthetic. It will react more naturally over time. Eventually, you’ll regain full function, which is more than you could ask for with any other prosthetic. Soon, you won’t even have to think about moving it to do so—just like your other arm.”

  “About that physical therapy,” my mother said to the doctor. “I realize most of your work on the arm is behind you, but please remain actively involved in Lena’s treatment going forward as well.”