Mark woke up after the surgery. The anesthetics put him into a dreamless sleep, and he had to try to remember what World he was in and where he was. He opened his eyes and looked around. He could actually see this time, a marked improvement since last time he woke up in a hospital room. This wasn’t a typical hospital room, more of an improvised triage room, thin white curtains were draped over his room to give him some privacy, but he could hear the androids at work in other rooms and see shadow figures flitter across the drapes.

The recovery room they had him in didn’t look like the medical bays in Eternity Online, so he assumed he was in the real World. He performed his routine check of physical movements to make sure nothing was off, another round of toe to head movements, and was relieved to discover that he was indeed fully whole. He could feel a mild tightness near the crown of his head and felt it.

His head had been completely shaved, a bummer since he enjoyed the blond hair look. He felt a set of taped gauze across his skullcap and another near the brow ridge in the middle of his head. Feeling around himself made the IV bag attached to him stretch a little, but he barely noticed the mild discomfort.

“Am I intelligible?” he thought in his head.

“Hello Mark,” EVE replied, “Yes, you are intelligible. You should check your memory though, as if there’s any damage from this operation, it would either be in your eyesight or in your memories.”

“Why my eyesight?”

“Because life chips are implanted with links between the corpus callosum and the occipital lobes. Yours is a bit bulkier than a regular version, so there’s a mild chance of it interfering with normal functions. The doctors will perform tests to verify, but I don’t think you were harmed in any way, except the surface level damage from surgery. But with modern anti-inflammatories and micro laser surgery, that should heal up completely by a week.”

“The memories though”, she continued, “were fixed by removing dendrite connections in your memory regions. If they moved too far, they may impair other regions. So search your memories and see if there are any obvious gaps.”

Mark thought about his life. His Dad was a cop until he was called to a riot and someone hit him in the back of the head with a brick. That occurred when Mark was fourteen. His Mom raised him as a single parent, and while Mark was smart, he never really applied himself in school. He found it incredibly boring. He decided to become a cop against his Mom’s wishes, not wanting to lose the only other man in the family, but Mark had made up his mind. He applied himself up until he became detective, and then relied upon other people to do the heavy lifting while he did the thinking.

Retrospectively, this may have made him a target for elimination once the androids started becoming available. He couldn’t find any obvious gaps in his memory. His first girlfriend, favorite music, past pets, he could remember all of them.

Thinking about the miracles of modern medicine, Mark was surprised at how good he felt and how well everything healed up. He would have thought that he’d be more beat up at this point, having his cranium drilled open and monkeyed with, but everything felt fine.

“Hey doc,” Mark called out, “I’m pretty good in here. You can come get me.”

Cédric pulled back the curtain and stepped into the makeshift hospital area.

“Hello Mark,” he said, “You’ve recovered nicely. We’re going to run a series of tests to make sure nothing went awry. None of it is too difficult, but you’ll need to put this headset on.

The doctor handed Mark an old-school VR headset, the type that completely incased the head in a helmet. Mark strapped it on and adjusted it to rest comfortably against the bandage on the top of his head.

“Very good,” Cédric said. “It’s pretty simple. You’ll be seeing images through one eye or the other. If you can describe it accurately, then your corpus callosum is intact.”

Mark spent a few minutes telling Cédric what he saw, as an image would flicker in one eye sight only. A dragon. A painting. A bedroom. A mirror. Then another set of tests with audio that were the same, hearing music in one ear but not the other. Describing both how it made him feel emotionally and physically describing what type of music it was.

“Alright, I think we’ve established that there’s no damage to any of his sense organs. We’ll have to run some coordination tests on both sides of his body to make sure, but I think this was a very successful operation.”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Now,” he said, “beaming with pride. I have someone I want to introduce you to.”

A woman walked into the room. She wore black pants, a low-cropped dark blue blouse, blue high heels, a gold necklace, and a set of sapphire earrings. Her nails were perfectly manicured and painted a deep blue color. Her hair fell in layers, a rich dark black set of hair that she draped over one blue eye so she could look at him from the other. Her skin was a dark brown color, South Asian or Central American, her eyes a deep blue hue that shown with knowledge, dark red lips with a glossy coat, and a perfectly symmetrical face. Her lithe body and muscular shoulders made her look like a professional athlete.

She was definitely an android, and not one of the copy-paste models lying around. This was an artistic project.

“Well, she’s definitely something impressive.” Mark said, after eyeing her up and down. She did the same to him, except in a more clinical manner. Did androids feel arousal?

“Oh, she can feel arousal,” EVE said in his head, “Because I’m talking to her. That’s me over there!”

The android waved hi to Mark. He didn’t know how to react, so he waved hi back to her in a decidedly unenthusiastic way.

“You cloned my AI?” Mark asked the doctor.

“Yes,” he said, evidently proud of his scientific breakthrough. “This is an amazing piece of scientific progress. Androids have so far mimicked human emotions effectively, but with her access to your mind, she can more effectively translate human emotions into future robot simulations than any other model ever conceived!”

Seeing that Mark wasn’t nearly as enthused about this prospect as he was, the doctor replied, “Didn’t you read the contract?”

No, because one, who ever reads those things, and two, because he still would have gone along with it. Still, he didn’t know how to feel about having a part of his head removed and made into a new android. He also realized this would have taken longer than he initially thought.

“How long have I been out?”

“We’ve had you under monitor for about three days now. Since you have a modified life chip, this was necessary to make sure that it didn’t have any adverse effects, which is the reason why those things are standardized. But I’m a World class scientist, so it wasn’t anything insurmountable.”

“And you’re so modest about it,” Mark snarked at the doctor. Petty victories are still victories.

“You can’t hide the truth,” the doctor replied, “Still, we need to talk about some precautions here.”

“What sort of precautions?”

“The kind that arise from being part of the Reapers organization. Even if you didn’t already suspect it, can’t you hear that name? It’s like Evil Corporation or something. EVE-B, or BEVErly,” he said, accenting the “B” and “EVE” part of her name, “as we’ll call her, is going to be your bodyguard. Or whatever else you want her to be, androids are so awesome because they are literally whatever you want.”

This comment made Mark realize that Cédric didn’t have any human staff around. Mark’s guess was that he probably wasn’t good at interfacing with carbon-based lifeforms.

“But”, the doctor sighed, “Everyone just wants to have sex with them. Lamentable when given infinite opportunities for discovery, humans just want to engage in the most base of pleasures.”

Mark didn’t have a great leg to stand on as he was thinking about having sex with Beverly, but he didn’t want to voice that opinion. “You think I’m pretty, you want to kiss me,” EVE said in his head in a sing-songy voice that young children used.

“Are you telling another joke EVE?” he asked in his head.

“Yes,” she said confidently, “I am learning this ‘humor’ thing. Human language is filled with inconsistencies and impressions, I believe that forms the basis of what you call ‘puns’.”

“You’re top of the class EVE, but keep the humor under wraps. It’s an acquired taste and takes some getting used to before you’ll be good at it.” The thought of carrying around an AI in his head that told him knock-knock jokes for all his living days didn’t sound pleasant.

“Anyway,” the doctor continued from where he’d left off, “We’ll be using Beverly to get memories off of your AI to further our research as you play the game. The fortuitous combination of your military life pod, illegal software in the game, and modified life chip all create the most amazing opportunity for research imaginable. It’s all in the contract you signed.”

“So,” Mark said, fumbling for anything else to say, “Am I free to go?”

“Not yet, we’ll have you pick up some tools and use them, test your basic dexterity and balance, but you’ll go home with a brand new Beverly unit and the warm feeling that you aren’t going to die from a massive brain aneurism. Winners all around I’d say.”

Mark got up from the table and completed the doctor’s remaining tasks, which involved an assortment of oddball requests like touching his nose while standing on one leg, attempting to yodel, cardiovascular exercises, and making him dance. He wasn’t sure if these tests were medically necessary or if Cédric was just a weirdo, but he did eventually clear him to leave the facility.

The two guards he met originally escorted him back to the same position and gave him back all of his confiscated equipment. He left out the same magnetically sealed door and into the chilly, damp air of Neon Orleans.