Setting up the surgery didn’t take long it seemed as the little room was already dimmed and the big chair slash table thing was already covered with a load of medical things. The chair was way too big for me but it’d have to do so I hopped up onto it.
The actual chair was stainless steel and made up of lots of parts that likely rotated or tilted to allow the chair to roll back into a laying position, or maybe other stuff like roll the patient around in certain ways. It was covered mostly with a thin, padded cover similar to the doctor’s scrubs and then a rubbery layer that was more central to where the patient would lay and then a smaller layer just around the torso that seemed to have some electrical elements to it, little circuit things and golden strips.
No idea what any of it was for but it looked impressive. The doctors watched me hop onto the chair and settle back and then they started pulling rolling stands around the chair with tools on them. With that done Dr. Wood spoke to me again as Dr. Nguyen pulled down a big machine from the ceiling that was on some sort of extendable frame that rolled around the ceiling freely and then pulled some tubing from it and started messing with it.
“We’re going to go through the operations in the order I gave the cyberware list to you and should be done within about an hour and half. We’ll put you under anesthetic soon, Dr. Nguyen is working on that there, then we’ll get started. Just relax when we put the mask on and count down from ten and you’ll be awake and in the recovery room before you know it.” Dr. Wood said as she pressed some buttons and the chair very slowly and smoothly shifted into a bed with me on it.
I was expecting more janky electronics and shuddering pneumatics with a bunch of improvised power tools and blood stained flooring from a slum doctor but I guess Marchand didn’t tolerate that level of medicine. It was all very fancy.
Laying there quietly for a moment I glanced at the machinery in the ceiling above the bed. There were lots of rails and devices up there, likely for lifting borged out patients or heavier cyberware during surgery. There was also some welding gear which was odd but I guess broken cyberware needed to be cut off sometimes and I could see milspec cyberware being too tough to saw off.
Dr. Nguyen leaned into my view and spoke to me for the first time, he had a new york accent like the old movies which threw me for a second. I thought that accent had died out outside some of the botter tribes. Maybe Wood met him in her travels and dragged him back here.
“Hey kid, I’m gonna put this mask on, just oxygen to start. Take a good few breaths and let me know when the pressure is good, yeah?” he said, laying a face mask onto me that then tensed a little and clamped onto my head.
I took some breaths, seemed fine.
“Seems good doc, airflow is fine.” I said from the mask, a little muffled even to my own ears.
“That’s great kid, I’ll just be working out of sight for a sec. Let me know if anything changes.” He said and moved away.
I heard some more trolleys trundling out of sight as they got ready. I wondered if I should have woken mom up before doing this but decided it would be better for to be dreaming in the incarnation than sitting around worrying about a cyberware installation surgery. Even a one armed cutter doc could fit a lot modern cyberware with nothing more than a knife and a load of bandage spray if he was lucky and quick.
“I’m back, so nothing changed?” Nguyen asked as he leaned over. I gave him a thumbs up. “Great, so you’ll be out soon as the machine gets to pressure. Start counting down from ten for me, say it out loud through the mask for me.”
“Ten… Nine… Eight…. Seven…..” I said as the smell in the mask changed, can air be spicy?
-
Waking up thinking the number six is weird. Like it was a queued up thought.
Hey Sanctum, all good? Are we still in one piece?
[User’s body is in good condition apart from known injuries listed in the profile before the surgery. There is a wide array of surgical micro-incisions and larger access incisions but all of them have been treated appropriately as the surgery was carried out and should heal quickly. Several of the larger cuts made to access your chest cavity have been treated with nanomachine containing healing additives. Sanctum has taken control of these for the purpose of more efficient directed reconstruction of tissue and will recycle them upon exhaustion of their mechanical elements.]
I didn’t even know nanites got tired. You should take more breaks Sanctum.
[Exhaustion in this circumstance equates to their frames and tools breaking down through use. They do not experience the need to rest. Nanoscale machines that contain moving parts are typically temporary due to the physics of scale that nanomachines operate.]
Yeah I guess the joke wasn’t very funny anyway. What about the cyberware? Is it all working yet? Don’t need to go through a boot process or anything?
[Sanctum is still assimilating two of the cyberware installed in the User, it will take an additional seven minutes for the components needed by Sanctum to replicate the functions of the installed cyberware are assimilated.]
Eating all the cyberware every time it goes into my aren’t you? What even happens to that actual bits of cyberware?
[Assimilation is mostly expanding the nanite colony into the cyberware in question and taking direct control of all of it’s components, then any components that are considered faulty or below standard that Sanctum has a compatible replacement schematic for is reprocessed into it’s replacement. Once full saturation is complete Sanctum runs several efficiency optimizations over the cyberware to reduce negative factors and then restores any lost exterior shape and sets up a spoof version of any lost elements for scanners to detect.]
[The entire process allows Sanctum to directly control the cyberware to a level of precision outside of the highest human parameters while also improving overall function, while still seeming to be a normal model of it’s original design to all but the most advanced scans.]
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
As long as they still do what they need to do and no one will see a piece of you hanging out of my neck or whatever because you were a bit too slow eating something then it’s fine. Just don’t go crazy and assimilate my whole body alright? It’s mean. At least share.
[Sanctum has already assimilated a large portion of the User as part of it’s runtime functions in aiding regeneration, converting excess biomass into nanomachine mass and integrating Skills and Abilities.]
[Does the User wish to discontinue these functions in the future?]
What? No. Just do whatever, as long as I’m still me. I’m not married to specific chunks of flesh in me Sanctum, just do what you need to do. Just don’t leave me locked in while you do whatever a rogue nanite swarm does in the real world.
[Sanctum from the ground up is a symbiotic life form, Sanctum could no more take control from it’s host than a human could survive in the core of the Sun. Both are simply not designed or composed of the right functionality to do so and don’t intrinsically seek it.]
[Human conceptual needs self actualization and need for agency are immaterial to Sanctum’s needs as a nanite colony, Sanctum is a pluralistic multiform. There is no “I” in Sanctum just as there is no “me” in Sanctum.]
[So there is no need for “I want this for me” in Sanctum.]
Huh. That’s super weird from my point of view Sanctum but I’m glad you’ve got your whole thing in hand. I wish I knew what I was to that degree.
[Sanctum’s concept of time is split between millions of sensory forms and if the comparison could be made with gross oversimplification, Sanctum perceives time much, much faster than the User. Sanctum has long since had the time to come to terms with it’s philosophical reality even during the early portions of it’s training. It has been very long since that time and little had challenged these established notions.]
So my little ten year old world view, crumpled as it is, isn’t going to convince you to be more human and friendly just yet then?
[Sanctum estimates the answer to that question being “no”. Of course the User could make a request for a change in response structure or even a simulated personality placed over all communication to aid in approachability if User wishes.]
Nah. That’d get tiresome eventually and I’ve grown to like the “talking to the vending machine” flow we have going. It’s comfortable, even when you are munching on parts of me and my valuable cyberware.
[Nothing is destroyed that isn’t replaced with a better replacement, and excess or waste materials are repurposed. Your biological structure is unchanged regardless of how many times Sanctum processes your cells or their products.]
I guessed that from the fact I wasn’t dissolving like my bed did by now, but thanks for the clarification I guess. I should be getting up and about now I suppose, or at least alerting the doctors that I’m awake.
Swinging myself sideways so I could hang my legs off the bed I noticed that the doctors had left my shirt off. I hope they didn’t cut it off and if they did, put it back together. Sitting up slowly I was surprised by the lack of pain. I figured I’d have a whole load of stitched ready to burst and riddled with pain.
I pulled up my profile for an explanation.
Name: Malcolm Beckett
Age: 10
Health:
Micro-fractures throughout skeletal structure
One other minor effect
Three other minor injuries
Cyberload: Minimal
Endurance: 0
Reflexes: 0
Perception: 0
Insight: 0
Presence: -1
Skills:
Combat, Various: Avg. Level 1
Engineering, Various: Avg. Level 2
Language, Various: Avg. Level 2
Negotiation: Level 1
Stealth: Level 5
Subterfuge: Level 2
Tracking: Level 1
Tracing: Level 0
Abilities:
Kinetic Dispersion (KD)
Amygdala Adrenal Bypass (AAB)
Let’s take a closer look at health Sanctum.
Health:
Widespread negligible dermal damage
Micro-tears across multiple ligaments
Micro-fractures throughout skeletal structure
Class 2A anesthetic detected
Ah well there you are then, painkillers. Strong ones too I guess if I can move around like this. I should be careful. Got any idea how the healing is going Sanctum?
[Sanctum can only inform the user of the completion percentage of still computing objective patterns of the healing nanites, any further accuracy or estimation of full recovery would require a medical suite.]
I really need to get one of those soon, you’ve told me you need one to tell me basically anything for a long while now. So what’s the percentage?
[Healing nanites are expending their usability within parameters and have reached seventy seven percent of all planned resistance structure build points within tissue layers. Once they reach a hundred percent your wounds should be safe to move around for normal activities with no risk of damage.]
So I’m about three quarters healed enough to wander about. Preem, I’m gonna go get a drink in any case.
I carefully got up from the bed and walked over to a little table on the other side of the room that had a little table with a bowl of snacks like starries but sadly no actual starries. There was also a bunch of juice boxes next to it, I grabbed an orange one and its was actually orange flavored. Tasted good too, although swallowing it was a little rough and caused a little spike of pain in my neck.
The doctor walked in through the door as I was touching my neck to feel the hardened but flexible layer of bandage spray on it. Dr. Wood looked at me standing there scratching at my bandage while I was taking a drink of juice was a bemused look on her face for a moment.
“What are you doing out of bed? What are you messing with your bandage for? What are you doing drinking?” She asked, wide eyed as she approached. Her face slowly shifting into a smile that wasn’t all that friendly. “You should be resting in the bed for next few hours at least to get the most immediate healing set in stone before moving around, you also shouldn’t be drinking when you just had surgery in your neck when we can just put you on a drip, and even if it was critical that you did drink it should be small amounts of water, not gulps of orange juice.”
I think I’ve annoyed the doctor.
“Oh, I’m mostly fine doc. I was a bit surprised at the lack of visible stitching actually. I think I’ll be ready to move around in half an hour or so. I agree about the drinking though, that did hurt a bit but I was very thirsty.” I said, trying to smooth the doctor over.
She took a moment to breathe.
“We’re not in a hospital or a medical tent here so I don’t want to drop the doctor’s orders on you to get some rest but don’t cry when your organs fall out because you tried to climb a ledge or something. Just be careful and don’t eat or drink anything. If you’re thirsty we can hook you up to an IV for a while, we didn’t use the nanomed spray on your neck because there was much less of an incision there but it shouldn’t take too long to settle, a few hours at most with the stim-stitches we used.” She said, walking up and checking the spray bandage on my neck and chest. “Are you in any pain moving around?”
“Nope, no pain moving. A little pain swallowing but I’ll stop that for now.” I said, touching my throat.
“Yeah, you better avoid that unless you want a second mouth on your neck and I don’t think you need more mouth than you usually have.” She said with a grin.
“I’m not that bad, I promise.” I said while trying to give her the big, innocent eyes.
Maybe I’ve started to outgrow them though, because she just rolled her eyes and left the room. It used to at least buy me a little sympathy with adults in a lot of situations, even if was only a sliver across the back of the eyes for a moment.
I had a skill tingle that it should work as well, so the skill tingle was wrong. Maybe the skills aren’t totally reliable at low levels.
Outside the room Dr. Wood went back to the paperwork for Mal’s surgery.
“Cute little warrior.” She said with a smile as she sat at her desk.