by Graeme Hurry
No gravity in space. Nothing to stop me from piloting the ship. Brain was still good. Arms were both there. One leg. Who needed two?
I told myself I didn’t, and tried to ignore the voice in my head that said it doesn’t matter if you need it or not.
I noticed him the second therapy session I had. I thought at first he was a patient— after all the black metal of his left arm spoke of a certain type of kinship between us.
Very tall. Thin. It was only when I saw him speaking with one of the therapy nurses that I realised he was a doctor, not a patient.
Explained why he could afford the cybernetics. Arms like that— limbs like that didn’t come cheap.
I played with my stump as I sat in the chair. It was an instinctive thing, my fingers running over the puckering of skin and web of scars. I still expected my hand to stop— to meet the warmth of my own thigh rather than empty air. When it didn’t, I would touch the place it had been. There was a lot of scarring— the skin felt knotted under my fingers, like the raised writing they had on the emergency doors. Perhaps it was a kind of writing. Maybe it spelled out something in an alien language.
Something missing.
There was no knee joint, and they had to wait for the wound to completely heal before they could even think of giving me a permanent prosthetic. I was killing time, not fit for work, not fit for anything but hanging about in my apartment and hassling Marco. He couldn’t fly, even though I’d been trying to teach him. Didn’t have the application, I told him. He said I sounded like Papa.
Father had suggested I move back home for the recuperation period but I was trying not to think about that too much— trying not to think of the web of obligations and guilt that kept my family together, and that’s why I didn’t notice at first when the doctor— the doctor with the cyber arm— started talking to me.
“Ms Loyola, good to see you again.”
I blinked. “Huh?”
He smiled. “I’m sorry,” he said. He had slightly uneven, slightly browned teeth. Coffee, I thought. Not cigarettes, not unless he was recently from earth. Station folk didn’t smoke. It gummed up the environmentals. “You wouldn’t remember me. Doctor Reagh. You left before I could make it to a follow up consultation.”
The name rang a bell and I remembered signing my release forms. This was the doctor who’d performed the surgery.
The one who’d sawn off my leg.
I wondered, idly, if he’d had to use a hacksaw. I didn’t know anything about surgery but I’d seen my Uncle butcher a pig once. He’d cracked the ribcage with a hacksaw. Maybe Doctor Thin and Handsome had one like the one Uncle had used in that arm, like those fancy swiss army knives.
Maybe he’d worn a lumberjack shirt and sung while he hacked off part of my body.
What do you say to someone who did that to you?
“Bet you didn’t do your own, huh?” I said.
Probably not that, Sofia.
His eyes opened in surprise that quickly lapsed into a shadowed look of pain and puzzlement. He blinked a few times. Then he chuckled.
He obviously had a big emotional range.
“No,” he said. “No, that was done for me.” The metal fingers flexed slightly, then stilled. He sat on the empty chair next to mine. “I don’t do cybernetics myself, I’m just a surgeon.”
“I thought surgeons had to link them up. You know. So you can make them work with your brains…” I tapped the side of my head. “Meant to be very comp-li-ca-ted.”
He laughed again. It was a nice laugh. “Yes, well. I’m not one of those surgeons. I do trauma surgery, not elective. Like your leg.”
“My lack of leg you mean.”
“I’m very sorry,” he said, voice suddenly grave. The man could go from happy to sad in a nanosecond.
I wasn’t sure which I liked more. He had… big soulful eyes. There were crinkles at the sides of them though, that only showed when he smiled.
I shrugged. “It’s all right. I wasn’t using it much any way.”
He frowned at me, then smiled at the same time, shaking his head a little. A nurse beckoned him from the other side of the room and he got up, nodding to him and then to me. “You’re an interesting woman, Ms Loyola. I hope your therapy goes well.”
I grinned at him. “Thanks for stopping by, Mr Doctor Man.”
I saw him quite a lot after that and found out he was a regular at the clinic. Missing limbs were actually pretty common out here. Suits were designed to protect the core, keep the heart beating, the air going into your lungs. If that meant a foot or a hand had to go, well, most people wanted to live. The suits did it nicely, shot you full of painkillers or knocked you out cold while they cut off your limbs. Mine had been a little messier.
The suits didn’t leave so many scars.
“Sofia I am offering this to you, and you’re being stubborn. We have the money.”
My father was in mining. And ships. And everything else that took money and made it into more money. Mostly ships though.
Of course he could afford to get his daughter a cybernetic limb.
“Papa… I don’t need it,” I said. We were on comm, my newly fitted prosthetic making me able to take the call standing without looking like I was the hunchback of Notre Dame. My wrists were finally starting to stop aching— no more crutches. I felt good.
Papa liked the dramatic use of the pause when he wished to get his points across to me. It drove me mental.
“My sweet,” pause, “you have no,” pause “leg!”
My hand twitched towards the disconnect, but moved instead to the expanse of plastic just underneath the hem of my shorts, tapping the plastic with one finger. “Sure I do!” I put on my brightest, talking to Papa smile. “It works fine. Here I am, upright and everything.”
“That thing” pause “is disgusting,” my father said, his dark lip curling as his eyes roamed downward. The camera didn’t pick up beneath my chest. He couldn’t see the “thing”.
Unless he meant something entirely different.
As he spoke, my fingers found the gap between skin and prosthetic. I worked them in, pinching them between my flesh and the flesh they had made for me. “Come to dinner. Your stepmother and I want to talk to you about this. In,” pause “person.”
“Daddy…”
“Marco is coming.”
“I don’t…”
“Tuesday evening. Wear a dress, for the love of God. We will” pause “talk about this.”
I sighed and shut off the comm, pulling my fingers free and watching the white pressure line where the leg had jammed into them fade back into brown and pink.
The prosthetic was temporary. I needed a new one in a few months, last one, the one I’d keep forever. I’d been browsing catalogues. Back on earth you could get prosthetics that were shaped like legs with shoes, ones that were painted in all the colours of the rainbow, ones you could wear high heels with. Steampunk legs. Superhero legs. There was one with fishnets.
Up here we were more limited. The 3D printers didn’t do fishnets, or colours and I didn’t think I’d bother painting it myself. I’d said no when they’d offered me a spare foot— one that could wear high heeled shoes. I could do without high heels and decorations. I was here to work after all.
I ran into Reagh again at the hospital, the day before I was supposed to go to dinner with my father. He was out front, drinking some of that foul coffee from Bertrand’s— the ones that did the holiday themed spice coffees that Americans seemed to like so much.
I liked mine black.
“Don’t you have a job,” I joked.
He grinned. “Sofia.” He looked down. “You have your temporary I see.”
“Works like a charm.” I jumped, to demonstrate, which was stupid of me, because I wasn’t used to it yet, and I stumbled.
The metal arm moved faster than anything I’d ever seen. It caught me and steadied me before I could fall.
We were suddenly very close to each other. I could feel th
e warmth of his breath on my neck.
“Got you,” he said softly. The metal fingers let go of my arm, gently. I didn’t move away.
He had a nice apartment. Outer ring. Doctoring paid well.
He made me chocolate para mesa and I laughed at him and asked him if it was the only thing he thought we drank and he blushed and said he’d always liked it.
He’d spent time in Mexico, he said, before he came to station.
I told him I’d never been.
“How did you lose it?” I asked him, about the arm. He frowned.
“There was a blow out, on a transport ship. Six years ago.” He sipped his chocolate. “Ten dead. Eight more critically injured. And me.”
I was still on earth. Hell, I’d still been in high school. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Not your fault.”
“I guess you needed that,” I said, meaning the cybernetic arm. It was still, the black hand curled loosely in his lap.
I couldn’t think of it as anything other than a thing.
“If I wanted to continue being a surgeon. Yeah. I didn’t exactly have a choice.”
“Oh?”
He swirled the last of his chocolate in his cup. “Company brought me up here for one thing. They weren’t going to let me stop doing that and send me home again. So. Arm.”
“My dad wants to buy me one. I mean… a leg. For me.”
He looked puzzled. I hadn’t mentioned my family before now. He probably didn’t know who paid the bills for his surgeries. He probably didn’t even know how much they cost. “I didn’t think you…”
“My dad has money,” I said. I looked away and made a face. “A lot of it.”
He shifted in his seat and then I watched as realisation dawned. “Oh. You’re related to…”
“Enrique Loyola, yes.”
“You don’t sound happy about it.”
I shrugged. “We wanted to make our own way. But since I’ve been off duty Marco… has lost it. A bit. I figure he’ll be back once I’m fit to pilot again.”
“When you get your permanent.”
“Or when I let my dad convince me to get a cyber.” I grinned, but he didn’t return it, standing up and taking my cup to the kitchen. He didn’t turn around when he spoke, and his voice was harsh.
“Don’t let your dad make the decision for you,” he said.
“Come on Sofia you can’t deny it looks weird.”
“Fuck you Marco, I wear a jumpsuit most of the time and I’m not exactly dating anyone who gives a damn and if I did…”
“You don’t date anyone period…”
“If I did date someone and they thought I was weird I’d probably punch them in the face and why do you think it’s any less weird to have a great metal thing attached…”
“They’re not metal they put a skin over them…”
“This is true, Sofia,” my father said, waving his wine glass. “Most do not even know that the limb is missing, unless they touch it.”
I opened my mouth. Then I closed it.
The white plastic of my prosthetic felt slippery and unreal when I put it back on after dinner. Cheap. Something my mama would have thrown in the recycling.
When we’d made love he hadn’t touched me with the metal arm once.
“Tacos. Really?”
He shrugged. “I like Mexican food.”
I liked it too, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.
I reached for his metal hand, across the table, but he pulled it back before my fingers could make contact. “Why didn’t you get it covered?” I asked.
He tried for a smile. “They didn’t have my skin tone.”
“Bullshit.”
He looked away. “It’s not mine. I don’t want it pretending to be.”
He wouldn’t talk about it any more, not there. But afterwards, when we were lying in his sheets, he gently ran his fingers down my side, stopping just short of the stump. I took his hand and pulled it down to where plastic met skin. He curled his hand around it, resting his head on my stomach.
“I’m going to get it,” I said softly.
He pulled his hand back, and lifted his head up to look me in the eye. “You don’t have to.”
“Why are you so against this?” I sat up, reaching for his other arm, the one that had stayed inert through our lovemaking, supporting his weight like a prop but never moving, never touching. He jerked back, keeping my fingers from touching it. “What is wrong with it? Does it hurt?”
He snarled. “No.”
“Then why…”
He got out of the bed, moving to the window, human fist clenched. “It does things better than I ever did. I’m a better surgeon than I was. The best.” He looked back at me face shadowed. The light from the shipyards behind him hurt my eyes, used to the dimness of the room. “But I didn’t choose it. I spent hours out there, trapped in my suit, while it cut my arm off at the shoulder. And even though I screamed at them that I didn’t want it replaced they did it any way.”
“You wouldn’t be able to be a surgeon anymore. You’d have to go back to Earth. Your entire life would have been…”
“So? Maybe it was time. Maybe I should have stopped. Maybe I should have been given the choice.”
I was angry now. “This is my choice,” I said, pushing myself up so I was sitting.
His shoulders slumped. Then he took a deep breath. “I know.” He shook his head. “I know, I’m sorry. But you wouldn’t be making it… if…”
“If what?”
“If we learned to value people and not just… what we do. What they can get out of us.”
I frowned at him. “You don’t make any sense.”
“Don’t I?”
I grabbed what remained of my leg with both hands, and shook it. “This isn’t me.”
He shook his head and came forward, touching my cheek with his hand lightly, before spreading the fingers of his cyber and showing it to me, palm out. “This isn’t me, either,” he said.
“You made the right decision, chico,” Marco said, ruffling the back of my hair. I swung at him, the balance not quite the same as it used to be, but this time I didn’t stumble.
I didn’t care if he thought the decision was right or not. That’s the thing about decisions, they belong to you. So long as you’re free to make them.
Marco left me with the nurses. I’d told Papa in no uncertain terms that I didn’t want anyone with me before I went in, and he was so relieved I was doing what he wanted (not thinking that perhaps it was also what I wanted) that he agreed.
I looked for Dr Reagh at the hospital, when they took me to the special room. I wondered if they’d done his here. Wondered if we would have the same cybernetic surgeon.
Of course he didn’t come. I don’t know why I’d even expected him to.
You couldn’t tell, when they finished, where my skin ended and the new skin began. Unless you touched it.
Which is why I guess he never did.
THE SCRAMBLE
by Damien Krsteski
Leslie, age 6 (entry #845):
Terrence puts another cube on the pile of toys. The tower sways, then falls and there are toys all over the carpet.
I show him my crayons. “Want to draw?”
“No,” he says.
I take a piece of paper from under my bed and start drawing his face on it. It’s a funny face, with big, round eyes. I don’t have green so I make them blue.
Searching for more paper, he pulls out an old drawing of mine. Circles and squiggles and pencil holes. My face goes all hot and red when he shows it to me.
“Give me that.” I take it, tear it in half.
He doesn’t say it, but I know he’s glad the drawing is gone.
“You hate it too?” he says, his fingers digging in the carpet. Scramble – that’s what Daddy calls it. Like eggs for breakfast.
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “I just want it to go away.”
He hugs me.
“Me too
,” he says.
Marion, age 9 (entry #1530):
Today in school they’re giving us the Diary.
A brown powder that looks like what’s all over the kitchen when Mom makes cookies. Dominique, who’s usually very quiet in class, refuses to smell it in because her parents said they’re giving us little bugs just like the Scramble and that it’s only going to get worse. Some of my friends then get scared and refuse too but Mrs. Simmons calls this older doctor to come and he convinces us that what they’re giving us is nothing like the Scramble, not even a little bit.
He explains that they give us the first part of the Diary when we’re too young to remember, and that this is the second part, which is supposed to improve it very much. He says now we’ll learn to remember everything as it is.
Jody sneezes into her powder and blushes and covers her face with her hair and starts crying. Everyone laughs.
Kerry, age 13 (entry #3704):
At the Arcade with a bunch of friends, I’m killing at air hockey, when suddenly someone taps my shoulder. I turn around and feel this gigantic rush of emotion sweeping all over my body, and guess who’s standing there, smiling like stupid? They’d moved so we haven’t spoken in ages, but we’ve known each other since we were kids. His name is Bobby now.
I turn to my friends to introduce him, but they’re just eyeballing him up and down, arms crossed.
He asks about me, about my parents, what I’ve been up to, and I tell him I’m fine, we’re all fine.
He touches my bracelet, exchanging contact information. We say bye and my friends just don’t shut up about how stupid I looked and how Kerry loves Bobby, Kerry loves Bobby but I don’t pay them any attention and just keep scoring goals.
On my way home, Bobby calls me. We stroll around, catching up, end up holding hands.
Standing right next to this wooden bridge that’s arcing like a cat’s back he turns around and goes in for a kiss. I close my eyes and just as it’s about to happen this light breeze carries the little shitheads and we scramble and all changes. I open my eyes, push him away. I don’t like him anymore. He’s disgusting and pathetic so I storm out of there like the brave girl I’d become, just then, by way of the breeze.
