Beyond the glass pane, across rooftops, cranes and the unseen waters of the Bay, the windows of Downtown resembled a nebula of stars. They were, in fact, the only stars in the sky; clouds had rolled in from the Atlantic and the lights of those towering skyscrapers were strong enough to reach that atmospheric ceiling, lighting it up so brightly that it was as if a white-gold dawn had descended on the city.
It almost drained the light out from the rest of Brockton Bay, where the buildings weren’t high enough to cast the same reflection. It drew the eye until it seemed that there was no city beyond that beating heart of commerce. The Medhall logo glimmered like the crown it resembled at the pinnacle of their corporate headquarters, on smaller ancillary towers, on the ever-scrolling advertisements flowing up the face of skyscrapers, on the side of dirigibles that circled below the cloud layer, or projected onto the underside of the clouds themselves as advertising firms took advantage of the canvas nature had provided them.
The adverts promised safety of a kind that couldn’t be achieved with guns or perimeter fences; they promised health, opportunity, a good life. Their towers promised dividends to their shareholders, an old firm dedicated to stable growth over chasing trends, a good investment. By the year’s end, according to the last projections I’d seen, it would be large enough to petition the Corporate Court for an assessment that would see it leave the United States behind and take its place on the world stage as a true megacorporation, independent and proud.
“Miss Hebert?”
I blinked, turning away from the window. I was on the sixth floor of the hospital, in a decently-furnished clinicians office that couldn’t hold a candle to the opulence of the topmost floors, but that was still more than most people could ever hope to access. The woman sitting across from me wasn’t dressed in a uniform; she was a consultant, which meant people preferred a slightly different sort of formality. Her medical license was displayed in a holographic plaque on the wall, written in German and identifying her as a graduate of the Medizinische Hochschule Hannover.
The twists and turns that had taken her from the Allied German States to the UCAS could, most likely, be read in the pattern of silvery scales spread across her brow, her yellow sclera and wide pupils, or the line of gills sitting closed on her neck. Her life in the AGS had no doubt ended in sixty-one, when Hailley’s comet passed low over the Earth, disrupting mana flows and turning her from a human into something altogether different. While all the usual suspects – and a few newer ones – were up in arms over yet another shift in the metahuman species, the Evo corporation opened the doors to millions of Changeling refugees from all walks of life, integrating them into its corporate empire.
In its own way, Evo scared me more than Medhall. Max Anders might hate whoever had kicked this gang war off, but he didn’t know my name. Medhall was immediate and powerful but Evo was something larger than this city, larger even than the UCAS. It was the seventh largest corporation in the world.
Its ideology might have been more palatable than Medhall’s but it could only ever see the people under its control as ants in a colony. They were minute insects contributing to works far greater than the value of their own lives, each one of them useful only for as long as they continued to perform their function. An insignificant tendril of that great hive had turned its eyes on me, and under its gaze I felt like a butterfly pinned on a board.
“Miss Hebert?” the consultant asked again.
“Sorry,” I shook my head. “It’s been… well.”
I didn’t want to say more, doubted I was covered by doctor-patient confidentiality.
“You have gone through a traumatic incident. It’s normal to experience some disassociation.”
I couldn’t help the angry look that flashed into my eyes. I wasn’t traumatised, I was coming down from dumpshock. At worst, I was rattled. Shaken.
“Just tell me my options,” I snapped, as I tried and failed to move my right arm.
“Very well,” the doctor answered, her accent still carrying a hint of German. “The arm itself is functionally useless. The nervous system could be replaced through nanite surgery, but such an option isn’t covered by your plan.”
I wasn’t aware I was on a plan, I thought. I wasn’t sure how Calvert had set this up in CrashCart’s system, but it seemed just like a corporate agent to try and find out exactly how much he could gouge me before I started feeling ungrateful.
“So… you’re going to replace it?” I asked. It was irrational, but I found the idea a little unnerving. I’d grown up around plenty of people with limb replacements, and of course Brian had quite happily swapped out both his arms while Rachel had gone even further than that, but some part of the metahuman brain will always feel uneasy at the thought of voluntarily chopping off your own limbs.
“Just so.” The doctor leant back in her chair, reaching behind her as she picked a glossy magazine off the shelves and passed it across the desk to me. As I opened the wafer-thin digital pages, I saw that it was less of a magazine than a brochure advertising a whole host of different cybernetic and biosynthetic arms, each page full of scrolling images, reviews and features.
“CrashCart is prepared to cover the cost of any of these replacements, but I must caution you that studies have suggested that cyberware can affect technomancer abilities in the same way they do the awakened. You may wish to consider bioware to minimise the impact on your talents.”
I froze. I wasn’t sure what I was more shocked at, but the doctor picked up on my unease right away.
“It’s okay,” she smiled, reassuringly. “CrashCart values patient anonymity. Your data won’t leave our system and, as an extraterritorial corporation, we have no legal obligation to cooperate with any national or corporate entity.”
Except for Evo, I thought.
The doctor seemed to weight something in her mind, her gills opening and closing as she thought, before she leant forwards almost conspiratorially.
“Of course, if you ever feel things are getting too dangerous for you, our parent company has a programme to offer technomancers corporate citizenship. Unlike the competition, Evo understands that metahumanity is continually evolving. We seek to accept and understand that evolution rather than lash out at it.”
She took a small, folded pamphlet out of her desk drawer and passed it across to me. On the front was a graphic of a metahuman brain formed from circuitry, pulsing with a digital blue light. Above the brain was a fairly straightforward message – ‘Technomancers: You Are Not Alone’ – while below was the megacorp’s favourite tagline; ‘Evolve with Evo.’
“Whatever you decide, take that brochure to either cybersurgery on floor eight or bioimplamentation on floor nine. They’ve been notified that you may be coming.”
“Thank you,” I said, more out of habit than anything, before I stood up and left the room.
The others were waiting outside, taking up a whole section of the seats in the small waiting room. They were meant for patients with actual appointments and a few of those upper-middle class patients were sitting a few rows back from my team, eyeing the motley crew with something between wariness and open terror. The only exception was a little boy whose mother had pulled him tight against her side; he was looking at us like we were a Firewatch team who’d come to his school to hand out free candy.
Rachel sat at the end of the row like she’d been stowed there; her boots side by side, back straight and her left hand gripping the barrel of her shotgun, the butt flat on the floor. Alec took up the entirety of the row next to her, leaning against the flimsy armrest with his knees bent and his shoes planted on the seat beside Rachel.
Lisa paced up and down in front of them, her head ducked almost beneath the upturned collar of her trenchcoat and her arms half-folded in front of her as she worried at her snake pendant with one hand. She stopped pacing the moment I stepped through the door, but she didn’t say anything; she was giving me space and I appreciated it.
Alec, on the other hand, had no such qualms.
“So,” he drawled, stretching in a strangely cat-like manner. “We’ve made a deal with the devil, nobody’s dying right this second and no corporate kill-squads have kicked down the doors with machine guns blazing. I’m going to head the fuck back and zonk out to some trideo.”
It was a statement, but it almost felt like a request. Maybe he was pushing boundaries – pushing me – but I wasn’t sure. Either way, he had a point; we’d already had our worst moments and the time of greatest danger. All that remained was the long, slow aftermath.
“Sure,” I nodded. “We’re pretty much done here. I just need to chip a new arm.”
“Should probably let our fixer know what’s going on as well,” Lisa said in a murmur, moving in close to me. Alec was already slinking off, giving the patients a wide berth.
“How much does she know already?”
“Gregor reached out to me a few hours after I left the hospital,” she said. “She knows you and Grue are still here, and of course she knows about our client. Nothing else, though.”
I sighed.
“Which means I need to tell her about our ‘new arrangement.’ Great.”
“Just keep it professional,” Lisa advised. “She has a real stick up her ass, but I guarantee that she’s had people in worse than this. Stick to pure biz and she’ll respond like it’s biz as usual.”
“Might need to talk to Labyrinth as well…” I murmured.
“Who?”
“Faultline’s technomancer,” I explained. “Think I mentioned her before.”
I paused, thinking for a moment.
“Actually, gotta ask you a question. Mages and cyberware don’t mix, right?”
“Right,” Lisa nodded. “The theory I was taught in school says that flows through the mind of the user, but that modern cybernetics are so advanced that the neural connections alter the way the mind works. It’s why they call mages with chrome ‘burnouts;’ they threw away their talents for the sake of convenience.”
I frowned, as she pulled at the thread. “Wait, did you just get told it’s the same for technomancers?”
“That’s what the doc said. Either I pick the lightest bioware they have to try and minimise the damage, or I talk to Labyrinth and see if she knows any tricks. Technomancers are still new; there aren’t any school textbooks about how it all works.”
I turned to Rachel, who’d been watching us talk.
“Actually, I was thinking… if chrome does work out, would you mind installing it? Less risk, I figure.”
Her response was immediate, and not what I was expecting.
“No, do it here.”
“Seriously?” I asked, confused.
“You saw the Chosen,” she said as if that explained it. “My work’s only as good as theirs; I need all the same immunosuppressants and anti-rejection drugs. Get it done here, you won’t have that.”
It shouldn’t have surprised me – the Chosen’s setup was a lot more sophisticated than the literal junkyard shack where Rachel had got her first chrome – but it did. It worried me, too. I was sure Rachel had a handle on her meds, but we’d just demonstrated that they were a weak thread that could be pulled.
“Right…” I nodded. “You can head back if you want, you know. Things are settled now, and I know your drones and the van got pretty beat up.”
Rachel simply nodded, making her way out with her shotgun gripped in her left hand. She was wearing a tank top, which drew my eye to the way the mechanism in her arms shifted with each step she took.
“I’m going to make the call,” I said to Lisa as I slumped bonelessly down into one of the troll-sized chairs – obscurely grateful that at least the snake-faced megacorp holding my leash had coined the term ‘metaergonomics.’ “Silently, you know? You don’t have to stick around.”
“Nothing else to do,” Lisa said, shrugging her shoulders. “Not sure I want to leave you alone, either.”
“I’m fine,” I said, but even as I said it I realised how snappishly it’d come out. “I’ll deal, whatever comes. It’s Grue I’m worried about.”
“He’s in surgery now,” Lisa said. “They started it up as soon as we made our deal. Nanosurgery, organ replacement, the works. I’d call it top of the line, but we both know that where the top is depends on how deep your pockets are.”
“And after that?”
“Induced coma for forty-eight hours of intensive monitoring, then another three days of conscious observation.” Lisa shrugged her shoulders. “Could be worse.”
“It certainly could…” I mused, before sighing. “No use putting it off any longer.”
My connection to the resonance had almost completely returned. It was like I’d gone swimming and lost my hearing in one ear, only for everything to come rushing back at once in a way that felt fresher and more vibrant than ever before. Not that calling Faultline was the most intensive use of my abilities; one of the first things I’d ever done was learn how to spoof a commlink and speaking without talking was as intuitive as breathing.
“Bug,” Faultline began, picking up after five seconds of ringing. “You have an update?”
That’s it? I thought. No ‘hello, how are you?’
“Yeah,” I transmitted, as Lisa grinned at the scowl on my face. “Our client introduced himself to us. I take it you knew he worked for Evo.”
“Naturally,” Faultline replied, matter of factly. “From what I understand, he got you out of a dangerous situation.”
“And used the medical bills to put a leash around our neck,” I snapped. “I didn’t get into this line of work to be a corporate lapdog.”
Faultline laughed; a short, sharp exhalation.
“What line of work did you think you were getting into? Tell me, Bug, why do you think it is that Shadowrunners are so prevalent in the media? They’re adventurers; rebels without causes, sticking it to the man and fighting the good fight.” Every word dripped with sarcasm. “So tell me, why do the megacorps who own the film studios allow that portrayal, when your fellow technomancers have been condemned as terrorist bogeymen?”
I paused, glancing back over my shoulder at the kid. His eyes widened at even that slight attention, his mouth spreading into a grin that more than outshone the frown that sat on my face.
“Megacorps have three choices when it comes to industrial espionage. The first are in-house operatives; trained specialists who’ve been part of the company since birth. They’re by far the most effective, but they’re expensive and if they’re ever identified the corporation suffers. The second are gang contacts. You can’t trust them as far as you can throw them, but they can be used to perform acts that the company itself can’t be seen doing. Clearing out prospective property, for one.”
Medhall’s Chosen path, I thought. It brought up half-remembered news stories of gang violence when I was growing up. I’d always thought the Chosen were nothing but mindless monsters, but how much of their brutality was targeted to help Medhall’s bottom line?
“Shadowrunners are somewhere between the two. They might not have had formal training, but they are far more experienced than the average gang member. Above all, they’re completely deniable. That combination makes them a vital tool in the arsenal of corporate agents, which is why corporations make up over eighty percent of my clients.”
“So it’s just a recruiting tool?” I asked, almost forgetting to keep my voice digital. “All the trideo I grew up on was just meant to lure people in? Keep the fresh meat coming so that a fraction of them can climb over the bodies high enough to be called a professional?”
“You’re one of them now, Bug. A professional. Don’t see this as a failure, see it as an opportunity. Take all you can from this contact and move on to the next. Above all, keep moving. Don’t stop until you have enough to get out of the game for good.”
“Is that what you did?” I asked. At what point did Shadowrunners become ‘them’ to you?
Faultline didn’t answer, at first. It wasn’t a long pause, but it was enough to be noticeable.
“You can’t fight the world and win. I’m from this city, but I didn’t work here. Roamed the UCAS putting together my team, then took jobs wherever I could find them. I ran in Denver, Seattle, St Louis, even played insurgent in California, and I made contacts everywhere I went. I’ve worked under the arrangement you’re under now; it paid for the Palanquin. Evo are moving into this city, one way or the other, and knowing a man on the inside could be very valuable if you play your cards right.”
“That sounds like giving up.”
“Then you haven’t been listening,” she snapped back. “Don’t ever trust your client unreservedly, but don’t allow yourself to think that the world simply resets after every job. Corporate agents have long memories, and always return for repeat business. Whatever his business here, when it is concluded he – or someone like him – will remain. If you make him an enemy, Evo will remain an enemy.”
Damnit, I thought, in the privacy of my own head. Paradoxically, it was easier to stop any unintended outbursts when I was thinking my words, rather than vocalising them.
“I’ll have to take your word for it,” I said, instead. “And one last thing; I’ve changed my name to Spider.”
“Understood,” she replied without so much as a pause. “I’ll feed it into the rumour mill.”
“There’s a rumour mill?” I asked, a little shocked. Faultline responded with a laugh that seemed far brighter than her last.
“Of course, Spider. You set the city on fire, upended the balance in the North End. It’s hard to ignore, and people in your profession are used to thinking in terms of single stones that start a landslide. Your hit on the warehouse stood out, though nobody’s yet linked it back to your team.”
“Great,” I murmured. “Another thing to worry about.”
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“A reputation isn’t something to be afraid of, but it is something you have to be aware of. Good luck, Spider.”
She hung up, as I clenched my teeth.
“That bad, huh?” Lisa asked.
“Honestly? Better and worse than I was expecting. Basically boiled down to ‘just deal with it.’”
“Sounds about right,” she smirked. “We’ll be fine, Spider. We just need to keep our eyes open.”
“Well I’m going to close mine,” I retorted with a grin of my own. “Need to chat technomancer to technomancer. Keep a lookout for me, will you?”
I didn’t wait for a reply, instead soaring away from my meat and into the glorious digital lights of the matrix, flicking across the city in an instant as I made my way into Palanquin’s network. Labyrinth’s attention fell on me almost immediately; firewalls shifting aside as I passed through the digital space of the club, jostling with the hundreds of matrix-linked devices worn by its patrons in meatspace and the many and varied shapes of personas enjoying the club’s digital mirror, and made my way up into her room.
Her persona resembled a Celtic priestess, with a hood of feathers as black as tar casting half her face into shadow, while her bare arms were daubed with woad paint shaped into intricate circuitry. Her raven was perched on her shoulder, shuffling from side to side as it peered at me.
“Spider,” Labyrinth said. I didn’t ask how she knew; it was no-doubt written in my code. “You look weary.”
I chuckled; a bright burst of code. “Dumpshock.”
Labyrinth nodded. “It is never easy.”
“Listen…” I hesitated. It came across as a lifeless section of the datastream that carried my voice. “I’m losing my arm. The doc told me that replacing it would mess with my connection to the resonance. I need to know if there’s anything I can do.”
Labyrinth paused for a moment’s contemplation, then tilted her head in silent conversation with her familiar. I could see the data passing between them, but I couldn’t read it. After seconds – an eternity in matrix time – she turned back to me.
“Perhaps.”
“Perhaps? I was hoping for ‘yes,’ but it’s better than nothing. Why does it even happen, anyway?”
“That is a question many have asked. MCT believed we function through quantum entanglement; that a technomancer’s central nervous system is mirrored by paired neurons in cyberspace and that cyberware alters the nervous system in a way that brings those neurons out of alignment. They were testing the theory, but results were inconclusive.”
She gave the explanation quite calmly, but I knew she was talking about her time as an MCT lab rat, before Faultline broke her out and she massacred her captors. It brought uncomfortable questions to my mind. How do you test the effects of alterations like that? How many innocent lives did their tests consume? How can Labyrinth speak of something so horrible – even through the medium of data – and sound so detached from it all?
“Ultimately, it does not matter why. There is no one in the mundane world who truly understands because true understanding cannot be found there. I have heard whispers of technomancers who have managed to focus their talents down a resonant stream, changing the very nature of how they connect to the resonance. I believe I have achieved such a feat myself; deepening my connection to the sprites of the resonance to the point where I exist in harmony with them.”
“Another vision quest?” I would have smirked, in meatspace. “Any hints, tricks?”
“None,” came the answer. “Save that your answer, as all answers, lies within the resonance realms.”
“Figures. Thanks, Labyrinth.”
“Goodbye, Spider, and good luck.”
She drifted away, her persona pulled by ephemeral strings to some other part of Palanquin’s network. Her parting words just didn’t make sense to me; ‘luck’ was irrelevant to cyberspace. It struck me that while we were both technomancers, we both had very different ideas of what that really meant. With what she’d said, it seemed she viewed the resonance in a much more spiritual way than I did – and in the most literal sense of the word, given how she treated her sprites. It almost reminded me of Lisa’s shamanic beliefs.
The shaman herself was waiting for me when I returned to meatspace, serenely looking up at me as I blinked away the harsh hospital lights.
“Any luck?” she asked, not unkindly.
“Maybe.” I leant back, resting my chin on my thumb and forefinger. “You’d probably get along if your heads weren’t in different worlds; she’s recommended I go on a spiritual journey.”
“It might do you some good,” Lisa replied with a smile. “A lot’s changing. I think we could all use a chance to centre ourselves.”
“Yeah, well, first I’ve got go to lose some weight.” I grinned, but the grin was a false one, and it became weaker as what I’d said sank in. I knew that I didn’t have any other option, knew that it was perfectly normal – almost mundane, even – but it was still a hell of a thing to think about.
I meant it as a way of saying goodbye for the night, but Lisa followed me out the waiting room and into the elevator. She didn’t say a word and neither did I, but I appreciated her presence all the same. I shouldn’t have been surprised; she could probably read me like an open book.
As the elevator climbed, making frequent stops to admit hospital staff, visitors and even one elderly dwarf on an electric wheelchair, I thumbed through the brochure, slightly surprised at the amount of options there were for what was fundamentally just a gripping tool on the end of two articulated struts.
The reception area for the cybersurgery clinic was all decorated in sterile white, with a recessed alcove in one wall that held a row of plastic plants in a plastic gravel bed and a screen that displayed shots from some distant Evo-owned factory where employees in cleansuits stared purposefully at robotic armatures as they assembled new cyberlimbs with programmed precision.
I might have been brought there by injury, but the cyberware clinic sat closer to the cosmetic side of CrashCart than the medical. Cyberware was frequently used in medicine, of course, but it was just as common – sometimes even mandatory – in the workplace. Growing up, I’d seen plenty of simplistic cybernetics on dockworkers who wanted to haul crates all day without losing their backs by the time they hit thirty-five. Not to mention all the socialites who swapped out limbs for fashion’s sake, as easily as they might a pair of shoes.
I made myself known to the ork manning the desk, his cybereyes matching up my profile with their files. He asked me which ‘package’ I would be installing, so I pointed out the right page in the brochure and took a seat beside Lisa, who was watching the screen with a complete lack of interest.
One of the tricks of my nature was that I always knew what time it was. Timestamps were encoded into almost every piece of transmitted data, which meant I was constantly surrounded by the passage of seconds measured out in perfect precision. And yet it still felt like time was running slow before the receptionist finally informed me that I could proceed to surgery.
I stood up, sighed, and looked down at Lisa.
“Wish me luck,” I said, with a half-hearted smile.
“You’re kidding, right?” Tattletale grinned back. “If you could make it through the last job, you can survive a visit to the doctors. I’ll be sure to get you a lollypop for good behaviour.”
I snorted, shaking my head as I followed the glowing green guideline that had appeared on the floor. It led down a short corridor and into a room that shared the same basic anatomy as a high-school changing room, only far cleaner, much more upmarket, and generously sized for one metahuman only.
The green line ended in the middle of the room, but there was a list of instructions projected on the wall to my left. I followed them with more than a little apprehension, stripping down and leaving my clothes and boots in a secure locker. The moment I was done, the text shifted into a green smiley face and the line resumed its rapid crawl along the floor, leading through a glass door in the far wall.
Beyond was a shower of warm water that smelled of chemicals buried beneath a minty-fresh mask, as if reminding me of toothpaste would make me feel cleaner. It snapped off after forty seconds, followed by twenty seconds of humming sonics to dry me off, the frequency causing my horns to ache ever so slightly. As I stepped through into the next room, I felt a little like I’d just been forced through a car wash.
The next stage in what increasingly felt like an assembly line was a much smaller changing room with a single locker that contained a set of pristine white scrubs and a pair of rubbery sandals. The sandals and pants were ordinary enough, but the top was lopsided; with a full sleeve on the left arm but the right cut back so far it exposed the entirety of my shoulder, about half my back and more of my chest than I was comfortable with. That wasn’t why I found it so unsettling, however; they might as well have drawn a ‘cut here’ line on me in permanent marker.
It didn’t help that the arm hung completely limp at my side, since Tattletale’s sling had been left with my clothes in the other room.
I was starting to feel claustrophobic. The rooms may have been comfortably troll-sized, but it felt like each step I took closed a door behind me. The next room was almost a relief because it was comparatively spacious, even if it marked the end of my journey.
It said something about how isolated I felt that the first thing I noticed wasn’t the array of surgical equipment or the narrow-backed medical chair in the centre of the room, but the people. There were two of them in the room; a man and a woman who were both human-standard height, though that was all I could gleam with my eyes thanks to the full-body cleansuits both of them wore, with filters over their mouths and opaque visors over their eyes.
The man’s suit was fairly unremarkable, but the woman’s ended at her elbows with an airtight seal that connected it to her cybernetic arms, both of them in CrashCart’s trademarked green and white and ending in intricately delicate hands whose five fingers were each split into a multitude of different digits. I had a suspicion that the arms never left the operating theatre.
The whole space looked more like a laboratory than what I would expect from a surgery. Everything seemed to have been set aside in its place, from the shelves of chemicals, drugs, tools and blades lining the wall to the anthropomorphic drone standing to the side of the room, holding a long black case that was out of place among the universal white and light-green decor.
“Miss Hebert,” the surgical cyberneticist – according to the RFID tag attached to her cerebral chip – greeted me. “Welcome. I am doctor Kaori. I will be your surgeon today. My associate is mister Lozano, who is acting as my assistant as part of his doctorate studies.”
“Right…” I nodded, thrown off by their formality. “So, how does this work?”
“First I would ask you to please inspect the product. There is no risk of a mix-up, of course, but we find it aids in integration if the patient is already familiar with the cybernetic we are about to install.”
I nodded as the drone walked across to me, its metal feet clicking against the tiled floor. It held up the case in front of me as a manipulator arm extended from a slot on its back, deftly flipping the clasps in a preprogrammed motion before lifting up the lid.
Inside, contained within contoured padding, was the arm I had picked out of the catalogue. The joints were coated with a black rubbery material that aped synthskin, protecting the articulated components from the build-up of dust and grime, while the rest of the limb was a mix of matte black plastic and black metal that gleamed with a dull sheen. The only concession to art was the thin yellow tracework that outlined the knucklebones and ran down the seams where plastic and metal met.
I’d been tempted by designs that were closer to Brian’s in style, with the cybernetic components hidden beneath a realistic coating of synthskin. I could even get it in the same grey hue as my skin. Ultimately, however, I decided that if I was going to commit to this, I was going to go all in. After all, the external appearance wasn’t the problem. Instead, I’d taken a page from Rachel’s book and gone for brutal practicality.
The brochure had called it ‘milspec’ gear, citing its use by the marines of Yamatetsu Naval Technologies. Once it was installed, it would be stronger than my remaining organic arm, but not by much. The difference between a troll who exercised and one who didn’t. The real magic was in the speed and fluidity of its movements, guided by both hardware and integrated software. It would never match a true smartlink, but it would make aiming more intuitive, make it a little easier to become an asset rather than a liability in a gunfight.
Since it seemed pretty obvious that there would be gunfights in my future, I wanted any edge I could get.
What I hadn’t thought about when I made my choice was the way the cybernetic limb continued way beyond the shoulder joint, the coating giving way to the bare metal and almost organic-looking synthetic musculature that would replace my arm muscles and shoulder blade. They couldn’t just take my arm off and slot another one into the socket; for the cyberlimb to actually function, it had to replace the entire supporting structure of my arm. I was suddenly struck by just how much of my body was about to be cut away.
“The limb has been fully sterilised, to avoid any risk of infection,” the doctor pressed on, oblivious to my worries or just ignoring them. Either way the effect was the same; dragging me out of my introspection and back to the here and now.
“Good,” I replied, half-heartedly. “Where do you need me?”
“The operation is quite comprehensive,” she explained. “As we require access to both sides of your shoulder, it will be conducted while you are seated.”
“And sedated?” I asked.
The surgeon paused, her head tilted to the side slightly. I was sure she was wearing a confused expression under the suit.
“Locally. This should have been explained to you.”
“It’s a bit of a rush job,” I explained, even as my heart started pounding. Local anaesthetic? “Why not put me under?”
“We’re installing technology directly onto your nervous system. Keeping you conscious is a reliable way of monitoring any adverse effects. Not that anything will go wrong,” she clarified a moment later. I got the impression she wasn’t used to explaining this information; her bedside manner wasn’t quite megacorporate smooth – “but prevention is always better than a cure. Now please, take a seat.”
I did as she asked. The narrow back of the chair was far from comfortable, but I supposed my comfort was secondary to giving the surgeon unobstructed access to my shoulder. The moment I was seated, it was as if a machine had been switched on. The surgeon, her assistant and the android all moved in what could have been a preprogrammed pattern, wheeling over stands of tools and strange machinery. At the same time, I used my left arm to move my right onto the armrest, where it sat as useless and dead as a slab of meat.
The assistant grabbed a small case from one shelf and brought it over to me, opening it to show a triangular plastic device a little larger than a headphone case, but almost as flat as a commlink.
“Since you don’t have an integrated biomonitor, we’ll be using an external model to watch your lifesigns,” he explained. “It goes on your neck.”
I shifted my head, exposing my neck as the assistant removed the biomonitor from its case, peeling off the paper on the back and sticking it right over my carotid artery. I could sense the device whirring into life as it sensed my pulse, switching on a small ultrasonic scanner and streaming data to half a dozen recipient devices, including the two clean suits.
The next device he brought was in two parts; a vial of clear liquid and a long, tube-like component with a squeeze-trigger on the side. He slotted the former into the latter and held the result in front of me. I realised that he was probably following company policy; explaining each step of the procedure to the patient.
“This jet injector contains local anaesthetic and a coagulant that will clot the blood within your arm. The cybernetic has already been pre-loaded with a counteragent that will resume normal blood flow once installed. Hold still please. This will sting a bit.”
He pressed the injector against my shoulder and squeezed the trigger, a compressed air canister forced a jet of fluid through my skin and into my bloodstream. It came with a sharp, stabbing pain that caused me to jump in my sheet.
“Some fucking anaesthetic…” I grumbled.
“It needs a few seconds to take effect,” the assistant said with a shrug. I glowered at him, but a few moments later the pain had faded into a dull numbness that slowly spread down my arm and across my chest until everything felt cold and tingly.
The surgeon stepped back into view, wheeling across a tray of equipment and followed closely by the drone. The android had the arm mounted in a bracket that kept it perfectly level with my shoulder, exactly mirroring the loose lump of meat that was my organic arm. I could see a timer in the surgeon’s HUD, visible only to her. I presumed it was counting down the time it took for the coagulant to clog up my blood.
Sure enough, the surgeon took a long, narrow tool off the countertop. She held it between two fingers that had split into three different manipulators, turning the device into an extension of her hand.
“The first step is to close the arteries pumping blood into your arm – your veins will have already solidified. For this, I will be making an incision just below the clavicle and fusing the subclavian artery. It is important you remain still.”
For a moment, I felt like watching. Keeping my torso deathly still, I turned my head slightly and flicked my head down as the tool was brought close to my shoulder. The head of the tool was topped by something that looked like the head of a bottle opener; a metal ring that was flat and sharp on the top edge. Moments before it made contact with my skin, however, I flinched and abruptly shifted my gaze to the surgeon’s arm. I didn’t feel anything, though her arm had lowered enough that I knew she had to have made her incision. There was a faint sizzling sound, then the tool was withdrawn as the surgeon stuck a temporary pad over the wound.
The tool – which no doubt had some complicated, scientific name – was set back on the table. Its replacement’s function was far easier to understand, though the sight of it sent shivers down my spine. It was a straight knife about as long as the surgeon’s forearm with yellow warning markers on the sheath cautioning the wielder – and, presumably, their target – about the blade’s monofilament edge.
I didn’t know what I was expecting when the weapon was drawn, but to my inexperienced eye it just looked like a dull blade of matte-grey ceramic. No different from some of the cheaper knives you could buy in just about any bodega in the city. I looked away again as the surgeon held the knife just above my shoulder while the assistant stepped in and wrapped his hand around my bicep.
I saw the surgeon’s arm fall seemingly without any exertion on her part and suddenly felt as if the floor had just tilted sideways. My weight felt wrong, my body off balance. I felt myself breathing heavier and forced my lungs back to something like normality. It felt easier than it should have been; I wondered if there was more in those anaesthetics than they told me.
“What-” I swallowed. “What do you do with it?”
“The bone marrow will be recycled for transplants,” the assistant explained as the android took my arm somewhere out of view. I kept my eyes firmly fixed on the wall in front of me. I didn’t want to see it. “The rest is incinerated.”
The surgeon was working with smaller tools now – perhaps even just the cutting edges of her multifaceted digits – while the android had folded back the armrest and moved the new arm into place. The sound of those smaller quantities of flesh being carefully flensed back was both sickening and indescribable; it seemed like the whole operation was dragging on into eternity. I’d switched off my view of Bitch’s optics when given the chance to see her work up close, but it felt like that had gone far quicker.
And then the horrific noises ceased, as I heard the faint clicking of the surgeon’s hands rearranging themselves into a new configuration. The arm was pushed even closer to my body, the surgeon leaning in close as she matched up arteries and veins to their new mechanical counterparts. After a few moments she pulled her right hand back, reaching into her left arm and drawing out a datajack that was slotted into a hidden port on the cyberlimb’s forearm. Through my passive awareness of her own cyberware, I watched as she tapped into a monitoring system that seemed almost like a computer’s basic startup program.
One by one, that program checked off nerves as they were attached to the arm, but for now the limb sat passive and inert. It took twenty-three minutes for her to connect all the relevant nerves, at which point she paused with her mental attention resting on an inert programme in the arm.
“Thank you for your patience, Miss Hebert. We will now test the link between the digital and biological nerves. Please try and clench your right hand into a fist.”
I did so. It didn’t actually feel like my arm was gone – it still lingered as a phantom limb – but I couldn’t hear the cyberlimb moving. Through the matrix, however, I saw the inert programme come to life as it registered the input only to prevent the signal from making the jump to motion.
That was the start of an exhaustive process of checks as I shifted every single joint in my arm in what felt like every possible direction, each motion matched by a signal in the matrix and absolutely no movement in the real world. It was exhausting.
“Good,” the surgeon said, after I’d bent my elbow five times. “No neurological anomalies detected in either the limb or your central nervous system. Miss Hebert, I’m going to activate motion. Please remain still for now.”
There was a pregnant pause. I felt like a coiled spring; anxieties and doubts piling up in my head with no way to vent them. What if it didn’t work? It was a stupid, irrational thought, but it was there all the same. What if I’ve gone through all of this for nothing?
“Now, please curl your thumb.”
The thought flashed through my mind in an instant, in a rush of released energy. I moved my thumb, my brain sending a signal down my biological nervous system, where it jumped across to a cybernetic substitute. For a moment, I thought it hadn’t worked, but then I felt it. A rubbery substance on the very fringes of my awareness. I was feeling the grip pad on the end of my thumb touching its counterpart on my palm. I could feel both, through both.
Without being prompted, I furled my fingers from left to right, shifting my thumb so that my hand could close into a fist. Touch blossomed across each digit. I wasn’t just feeling the grip pads, but the surprisingly warm metal of each knuckle. The sensation was unfamiliar; the shape of each joint – the shape of my whole hand – was different in both obvious and subtle ways, but it was all there.
“It works,” I said, breathless. “Touch, movement” – I unfurled my fist and rotated my wrist, placing my hand palm-down on the stand that was holding it in place. I could feel the chill of the sterilised metal – “everything works.”
“So I see,” the surgeon responded, her eyes looking at a digital world of readouts and sensor relays spreading from point to point like a web, flowing down from a single branch before becoming fractal and dispersed. She was watching the arm’s nervous system; watching the pulsing neurons effortlessly transferring signals to their new companions.
“A textbook installation,” she said with finality. “No signs of neurological rejection or psychological ghosting. If that changes – if you experience disassociation, nausea, sudden loss of control or violent urges within the next forty-eight hours – please contact us immediately.”
“And after that?” I asked, though my brain was stuck on ‘violent urges.’
“The warranty expires and the cost of removal would either be covered under your deductible or paid out of pocket.”
While she’d been talking, the android had undone the clasps holding my arm to the stand. The moment they were released, I stood up, swaying a little on my feet. My new arm weight roughly as much as my old one, but roughly wasn’t enough when it came to my sense of balance. I moved my elbow, then rolled my shoulder in my socket – all the while trying not to look at the plastic yellow biowaste bag that the assistant was tying off.
“Do you have a mirror?” I asked.
A gesture directed me to a flat panel on the wall. It was a digital mirror, kept opaque while the surgery was ongoing. I wanted to reach out through the matrix and turn it on, but instead I brought up my arm and pressed one metal digit against the button.
The mirror sprang into light, sweeping aside the opaque surface in a flood of pixels that reflected my own image back at me. Blood had seeped into my scrubs around my right shoulder and stained my skin. The arm began at the edge of my shoulder, seemingly anchored to the base of my clavicle – though I knew that was an illusion. My skin – and whatever flesh they’d left me – had been used to conceal the extensive cybernetics that stretched throughout the upper right side of my torso, anchoring the arm in place.
The skin itself was reddened and sore where it had been spliced to synthskin and metal. The result was almost seamless; biology transitioning into cybernetics as if both had been grown that way. The arm itself… I was glad I hadn’t gone for a realistic coating. It was jarring, obvious, but that seemed right in a way I couldn’t quite comprehend. It seemed to match the faint sensation in the back of my brain that came from the resonance and the cyberware tugging against each other. That sensation developed into a headache as I thanked the staff and made my way back through the shower and into the changing room.
With my scrubs discarded, I stepped back into the waiting room a new woman – or, at least, twenty percent of one. Lisa was waiting there, setting aside a magazine as she caught side of me. She stood, smiling, and reached into the pocket of her trenchcoat. When she withdrew it, she was holding a cherry red tootsie pop in a crinkled plastic wrapper.
“Where did you get that?” I asked, baffled.
“Took a walk down to paediatric and told the duty nurse I wanted a lollipop for my twenty year old friend.” Her gaze shifted to my arm as I reached out and took the proffered sweet. “It suits you.”
“Not quite,” I countered, shifting the lollipop to my remaining organic hand as I tested my fine motor control by unwrapping it without tearing the plastic, “but it will.”