by Isaac Hooke
The place was packed. Wounded personnel occupied every bed. I didn’t recognize anyone from Alfa or Bravo platoons, so I assumed most of the men were Marines. My Implant was still offline, so I couldn’t just pull up the profile associated with each man and check.
I flexed my fists, or tried to. Only the left one responded. The right limb wouldn’t move at all.
I studied the arm. It wasn’t bandaged, like I would have expected. It did have a needle jabbed into the dorsal venous network of the hand, with a tube leading to an IV drip, but otherwise there was no sign the limb had ever been mangled in the crushing grip of an ATLAS 5. It did appear paler than my left arm, and far less muscled. When I spotted the thin, circular scar around the shoulder area, I had a sudden sinking feeling in my stomach.
Hesitantly, I touched the limb with the fingers of my other hand, confirming what I feared: my old arm had been unceremoniously chopped off and replaced with a bio-printed graft.
I knew this because the texture of the skin was slightly off, somewhat similar to corrugated cardboard. It felt the same as Chief Bourbonjack’s bio-printed hand, which I shook when Facehopper had first introduced me to Alfa platoon. I still remembered Facehopper’s words at the time: The Chief’s got more body parts shot off than anyone I’ve ever met.
I was well on my way down that path.
Wonderful.
Disturbed by the texture, I continued running my hand up and down the arm. The nerve endings seemed to be functional in the limb at least, because I felt the pressure of my fingertips, and when I gave the forearm a good pinch, I cringed at the pain. So it was partially working.
Now I just had to figure out how to move it.
“Welcome back, Mr. Galaal,” someone said nearby.
I glanced to my left. “You again.”
“Me again.” Doctor Banye had been the GMO (General Medical Officer) of the Royal Fortune, and he must have transferred to the Gerald R. Ford along with Alfa platoon. Still, I hadn’t expected to have him attending me—maybe the ward was just short-staffed, given the number of wounded from the last battle. Robots performed all the surgeries anyway these days. Doctors merely gave the approval.
The dark-skinned man was dressed in blue scrubs, and he still hadn’t learned how to properly comb his hair, instead leaving it in a wild, disheveled mess. Just like his scraggly beard. That ingratiating smile made him look like a cross between a Fakir and the Cheshire cat.
“What’s the deal with my arm?” I tried to move the bio-printed limb again. Still nothing.
“The skin tone will even out with exposure to UV rays,” Banye said. “And obviously it’s going to take some time before the muscle mass is restored. But given the ample PT you MOTHs perform, the arm should be looking much the same as the other soon enough.”
“I’m not so concerned with how it looks, doc,” I said. “I can’t move the thing.”
“Ah!” Banye steepled his fingers, and tapped them together repeatedly. “How can I explain this? You have a completely different arm now, one that just so happens to reside in the same place as the amputated one.”
“Yeah, doc, I kind of figured that,” I said.
“You must understand, when you move your hand, you’re actually moving the old, nonexistent ghost hand. Obviously that won’t work. Instead you have to learn to activate the muscles of the new hand, using an entirely different part of your brain. It can take some minds a very long time to reorient to the new neural pathways, though MOTHs usually adapt quicker, because of your innate competitive drive, I suppose. You MOTHs don’t like to be out of action very long.”
“No we don’t.” I tried moving my fingers again. Still nothing. “Any suggestions to hurry the process along?”
“It helps to activate the pain pathways. Take a stun pen, set it to maximum voltage, and apply it to the part of the arm you wish to train. Here, let me show you.”
He retrieved a metallic stun pen, turned the dial to the max, and held it to the bio-printed limb. “I am now activating the thermal nociceptors at the tip of your thumb.”
I felt an intense burning sensation in my thumb.
“Ouch!” I said.
He withdrew the pen.
“Now move the thumb.”
I tried. Nothing.
He applied the pen again, and while the rest of my body flinched at the pain, the arm did nothing.
“Move the thumb,” he said.
Couldn’t do it.
He repeated the painful process ten times in total, and the last three times I managed to twitch my thumb after he withdrew the stimulus.
He tossed me the stun pen and I caught it with my good hand. “Practice.”
“Great. I get to inflict pain on myself all day.”
Banye’s tone took on a cynical edge. “Not so different from what you MOTHs do all day anyway, is it?”
“Good point. Is it dangerous at all?”
Banye shook his head. “The device doesn’t actually harm tissue. It’s a stun pen. Stimulates the nerve endings via harmless jolts of electricity.”
“Sure doesn’t feel harmless,” I said. “I don’t remember Lui having to do any of this when you replaced his leg below the knee.”
“Oh he did, believe me. You just didn’t see it. A lower leg replacement is actually far easier to adapt to, because the human body learns to walk on something like a stump fairly quickly, and of course a bio-limb is far more than an ordinary stump. Plus, during locomotion, the toes aren’t really put to use, at least not with the same level of motor coordination expected of the arms and fingers, so someone with a replaced lower leg can usually be up and about by the next day.”
It made some sense, I had to admit.
Then I had a sudden thought, and narrowed my eyes. “So tell me. What other body parts did you decide to replace without my permission this time?”
Banye blinked rapidly, but the smile never left his face. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“Oh.” Banye’s smile edged toward the sheepish. “I suppose I do. You are speaking of a body part other than your arm?”
I smiled obligingly. “Yes.”
He backed away, saying nothing.
I shook my head. “Be straight up with me, doc. Tell me what you did.”
“Well, I noticed in your record that you are genetically predisposed to retinitis pigmentosa, which means you had a sixty percent chance of total blindness by age forty. Also, your eyesight wasn’t twenty-twenty. So, I took the liberty—”
“Ahh no,” I said. “Hell no. You didn’t. You couldn’t have.”
His grin wavered. “Err, well, I thought—”
I struggled to get up.
Banye wasn’t smiling anymore. He retreated to his office in a hurry and barricaded the door.
I lowered the safety rail, swung my legs off the bed, and got up. I wheeled my IV over to the nearest mirror. My eyes looked fine as far as I could tell. Even so, I pulled down the skin beneath my left eye, and rolled the eye upward. Stamped onto the sclera of the underside I saw the tiny letters ANDERSON INC.
“You bastard.” I performed a similar inspection on my right eye.
Same stamp.
I glared at Banye through the window of his office. “You replaced my eyes!”
I went back to my bed, and glowered at the Marines around me, most of whom seemed amused.
“Wipe those smirks off your faces,” I said. “He’s your doc, too. Probably a good idea to confirm he hasn’t bio-substituted your testicles.”
That stopped the smiles.
A couple of men actually checked.
The doctor tentatively emerged from his office when I slid the safety rails of the bed back into place.
“Hey, doc, can you triple the size of my dick?” one of the Marines s
aid.
“Now now,” Banye answered. “Essential procedures only.”
“That is essential,” another Marine said. “Jack’s got a dick so small his wife confuses it for his pubes.”
“Please, I’m dealing with a patient now.” Banye approached my side.
I considered making a lunge at him, but thought better of it. Instead, I said, “Why the whole eyes? Couldn’t you just replace my lenses or something?”
“Well, yes, but that would have done nothing for your genetic predisposition. I thought you would be pleased. You now have no chance of blindness, and you have better than twenty-twenty vision. Verily eagle-eyed! Perfect for a spec-ops man.” Banye sounded excited as he latched onto that latter point, and he became all smiles once more. “Can you imagine that? You no longer have to rely on your rifle scope to correct your vision, or your aReal visor!”
“I don’t want eagle-eye vision!” Again I had to suppress the urge to throttle him.
“Can he see in the dark?” a Marine asked. “Or through women’s clothing?”
“Quiet, please!” Banye scolded the man. “And no, he can’t.”
“Then what’s the point?” the Marine said.
I closed my eyes, letting my lungs deflate, promising myself I wasn’t going to hurt the doctor.
What did it matter? As long as I could see. And looked normal.
“Don’t worry,” Banye said. “You won’t have to undergo the same neural adaption period as a new limb. Once grafted, ocular tissue is essentially part of the brain, and as far as your mind is concerned your new eyes are exactly the same as the old ones. It is similar to replacement organs running on the autonomic nervous system—the intestines, the lungs, and so forth—none of which require retraining.”
“Don’t talk to me,” I said, turning away from him.
Banye sighed, but he left me alone to harass another patient.
I closed my eyes, just wanting to shut out the world for a while.
The bastard replaced my eyes!
“Is that you, Rage?” a weak voice came from the far side of the room.
“Dyson?” I sat up, but it was a big ward and I couldn’t see where he resided.
“Yes, sir!”
You’d think he’d be the last one I’d want to meet right now. But he was a member of my platoon, a familiar voice among a group of strangers. Someone who reminded me of who I was and the people I fought with. A brother, who had been injured with me. Maybe not the most beloved brother, but a brother nonetheless.
I had to go to him.
I got up and wheeled my IV toward the side of the room where I’d heard his voice. I spotted him in one of the beds near the corner.
He looked a little pale to me. I could see the square-shaped impression of a bandage wrapped around his chest, beneath the patient gown.
“What happened to you?” I said.
“Took a good hit in the stomach is what happened,” Dyson said. “Next time, try to give a little warning before you decide to sic your ATLAS 5 on us.”
I glanced at his chest. “Your stomach was punctured?”
“I’ll say. Thanks to shrapnel from the exploding booster rocket. I tell ya, it’s painful as hell when your stomach acids spill out and start dissolving your guts.”
I raised a halting hand. “Too much detail.”
“Sorry. Anyway, I made it all the way into orbit, but passed out before I docked with the Gerald R. Ford. Pyro from Bravo platoon had to bring me in. When I came to, I discovered the doc had replaced my stomach, my duodenum, and the lower half of my esophagus. Don’t know if all that was warranted or not. But he says I’ll be able to smell a match burning from a klick away.”
“Is that what he said?”
“Strangely enough. And I know he’s right, because my sense of smell has already improved. Take this room. I’ve been in wards before, you know, from training injuries. But I’ve never really noticed the smell. The disinfectant, the sweat, just this overall odor of human suffering. Did you know, I can pick out the individual smells of each man around me? I even smell you, Rage.”
“Yeah, but don’t tell me what I smell like. So the doc replaced the olfactory receptors in your nose then.”
He nodded slowly. “Probably. Though I have no idea why. I broke my nose when I was a teenager, but I can’t see that necessitating an olfactory operation.”
“Yeah well, he decided to swap out the lower three inches of my friend’s intestine during a lung operation, simply because my friend had had a prolapsed rectum at one point in the past. The doc called the operation a ‘preventative’ measure. And you just heard what Banye did to my eyes, right? It’s ridiculous. Just because I didn’t have twenty-twenty vision. I was only half joking when I told the Marines to check their testicles. The guy’s a bit whacked.”
“I’ll say.” Dyson rubbed his own eyes, apparently mortified at the thought. “This friend of yours whose lower intestine was replaced, he’s on the Teams?”
I nodded warily. “Was.”
“What happened to him? He quit?”
I stared at Dyson for a moment. Then I turned away, because I was close to punching him. “He’d never quit. And he didn’t. He gave the ultimate sacrifice for his Team. He saved my life.”
“I’m sorry,” Dyson said.
“Forget it.”
“He’s the one I was sent to replace, wasn’t he?” Dyson pressed.
“Leave it alone, Dyson.”
I heard him swallow behind me. “I’d do the same, you know. Give my life for the Team.”
“We all would,” I said. “I need some rest. Take care.”
I moved off, not so much because I needed rest, but because I was worried he’d say something to set me off.
I reached my bed and lay down.
That’s when Tahoe and Facehopper showed up.
“Look who’s gone and gotten his arm replaced,” Facehopper said. “How’s it feel?”
“What, to lose my arm?”
“No, mate.” Facehopper poked my bio-printed limb. “To lose your leg. Of course your arm!”
I sat up. “Well, it’s like I’ve had one too many beers and slept on my arm all night, and only now woken up.”
“So not too different than usual,” Facehopper joked.
“Pretty much. Except the symptoms are reversed. Instead of the arm being numb but fully movable, I feel everything but can’t move it.”
“Sounds like a new type of drug.”
“Yeah. The Banye Bio-Printed Specialty. So how’d you guys know I was up?”
“We told the doc to ping us as soon as you were awake. We were in the middle of PT, so I had to order everyone to stay behind. You can expect more visitors to trickle in later. Tahoe should’ve stayed behind too, but the disobedient little bastard wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“Hey,” Tahoe said. “There are some orders that can’t be followed. Like abandoning one’s friends.”
Abandoning one’s friends.
Like I’d done to Shaw.
Tahoe abruptly fell to his knees and teared up. “Rade.” He clasped my good arm to the elbow. It was the clasp of brothers. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there, brother. I should’ve stayed behind with you. I should’ve disobeyed orders. I . . . I just . . .”
“No, Cyclone,” Facehopper said. “If this is anyone’s fault, it’s mine. I should have been the one who stayed behind. I should have ordered Rage to eject from his mech, and taken the ATLAS from him. Instead I returned to the DV with you like a coward.”
“There was no cowardice in what either of you did,” I said. “Like you said at the time, Facehopper, don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. I was in a mech. You weren’t. And if you’d ordered me to eject, I probably would’ve told you to take your command and shove it up your ass. Sir.”
Facehopper laughed. “I thought as much. Which is partly why I didn’t give the order in the first place. Didn’t want to have to court-martial you and ruin your career when I got back.”
“Yeah, well, it truly isn’t the fault of either one of you,” I continued. “By the way, Facehopper, this is exactly why I never want a position like yours. The burden of command. I couldn’t take it. Leading Petty Officer. It’s not for me.”
Facehopper smiled. “Burden? Hardly. It does have its perks, mate. It’s kind of fun having people obey your every word. As long as you can get over the guilt when someone under you gets hurt. Besides, given a changing battle space and outdated orders, every MOTH is supposed to take the initiative and lead his brothers, completing the mission however he can. I’ve seen you do the same.”
“Not like what you did back there,” I said. “Honestly, making the decision you made? Calling Tahoe back? I don’t think I could have done it. I would’ve let him stay. I would’ve let every MOTH stay. To protect one man. And I would have put everyone at risk by doing so. What kind of a leader is that, Facehopper? No, I can’t make the decisions you do. You’re the leader, not me. And I respect the burden you carry, I really do.”
“Thank you,” Facehopper said. “I think. By the way, if you ever do become LPO, here’s a tip for dealing with the guilt: beer. Drink it in vast quantities. Speaking of which, I owe you a drink.” He glanced over his shoulder at the Marines, all clandestine-like, then lowered his voice. “The guys jury-rigged a distillery down in engineering. Been brewing up some fine rotgut. Unofficially, of course. As soon as you’re declared fit for duty, I want you to unofficially march your pretty arse down there.”
“Will do,” I said.
“Cheer up, mate.” Facehopper punched my grafted shoulder. “You’ll be out of here in no time.”
“Hey, don’t be attacking a defenseless man in a hospital bed,” I said.
“You’re hardly defenseless!”
He came in at me again, forcing me to knock the blow aside with my good arm. After some playful tussling with him and Tahoe, which resulted in the unintended, painful extraction of the IV tube from my hand, requiring the doc’s intervention, my friends pulled up chairs.
