Chapter 8

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‎ Darkness and stillness. The only thing his eyes detected is the absence of light. Sound eluded him. Flash blindness? A stun grenade? He was aware, at least. A flicker. And suddenly he was back in Iraq. He saw Sam. Sam!

“Look, you’ve got to go!” Sam said, as multiple rifles popped far off in the distance. The rounds biting into the hardened alloy of the SUV around them.

“Sam, what the hell is going on?”

Confusion flitted through his mind as he tried to stitch events together in his mind. Wasn’t he just outside fighting a cyborg?

“Something big, Jon. Here.”

Sam handed him a data chip, but when Jon took it, his hand came away bloody.

He glanced down, confused, and Sam smiled weakly. “They got me on the way over. Not sure how they knew to come after me. None of this makes sense.”

Sam...no...

“It’s not your fault. I stuck my nose in where it didn’t belong.”

“I’m not leaving you behind.”

Sam smirked, his complexion losing color. “You and I both know I’ll just slow you down, and they want what’s on the stick, not me. Go. Or we’re all fucked.”

“What is it?”

“There’s no time to explain. Just don’t trust anyone.”

Sam, I’m so sorry.

The memory blurred, and the darkness returned. Failure and loss pressed heavily in on him. He lost his friend and now he couldn’t even make it right. The bastards got away with it.

“Jon?” a voice said, fuzzy and distant in his ears at first. Like someone stuffed cotton balls in his ears. “Jon.” It resolved clearer this time. It was a woman, and familiar. Her voice was soft, but nearby.

“Jon, it’s time to wake up. Stand up, soldier.”

Sensations began settling into Jon’s consciousness with a slow consistency. Then, the darkness fled as light cracked the dark expanse horizontally, and he was aware of a dull ache in his head. Jon’s eyes started adjusting to the light, and a pained groan eased over his vocal chords. His eyes clenched shut again, trying to clamp out the light and pain it caused.

“Hey, shhhh, easy. You still with us? We thought we lost you there for a while,” Raven said.

His eyes cracked open again, and she was standing beside him, and leaned over into his view. She looked blurry, though, like he was looking at her through a plastic bottle. He squinted, trying to focus on her, but she didn’t resolve any sharper. He tacked it up to visual atrophy. He’d been out longer than he realized.

“Everything hurts.”

She smiled at him, but it looked pained. The way you offered someone a smile if they’d lost a pet and inquired about it. “You took a bad hit. We lost you a few times, but the doc saved you. What’s the last thing you remember?”

He leaned his head back to rest on the bed as he struggled to pry up the memory from the foggy depths of his mind. “I’d just dealt with Masri. There was a merc outside. Price? And then everything exploded.”

“Well, you aren’t wrong,” a man next to Raven said.

“What happened to me?” he asked her.

“You exploded too. Mostly,” she did her best to conceal the wince, but he observed the expression enough to catch it. He leaned his head forward enough to inspect his body, which was under a sheet draped over him. He turned back to Raven, squinting, “What happened to me? What aren’t you telling me?”

A mousy woman with round glasses approached from opposite Raven. She had dark brown hair and green eyes with flecks of grey in them. “They hit you hard. Tactical drone strike. Looked like an Air Force Panther drone from Haltech. Most of your limbs were total losses. It smashed the bones in both your legs and arms to gravel. You had multiple internal bleeding sites. The MedBed struggled to keep you stable for most of the operation. But we used up all our organic material to clone you new organs. The heart, lungs and digestive system we saved, but we lost most of your limbs and skin. We avoided needed to do a full reskin by a narrow margin.”

The thought of those gold and silver skinned Toranaga hotel staffed flashed through his mind, and he flinched reflexively.

“Operation? What operation?”

He turned back to Raven. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Raven’s gaze fell to the deck, and as it did, Jon’s stomach fell away like it melted through his back and the bed to fall to the floor with it. “They hit you so badly that if you didn’t receive emergency augmentation, you were going to die.”

He blinked, more from shock than trying to focus. “You what?” A flush of panic settled in as memories of his father collided with consciousness. His heart slamming in his chest and a sudden need to not be laying down and a general sense of unease set in.

“I’m sorry, Jon, we had to set you up with augmentations or you were going to die. Your condition was just that bad.”

He continued his struggle against the restraints on the bed and the metal bars holding him down give slack against his protests. Jon jerked harder and harder, rocking his torso side to side as he threw his shoulder and arms into the slack space until the metal bands holding him down cried a last protest of torn metal as Jon spilled onto the floor unceremoniously.

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Getting the first solid look at his body, or rather his new body, his stomach lurched, and he threw up on the concrete floor next to the MedBed.

“Told you he’d pop,” the man standing next to and behind Raven said. He glanced up with a half scowl as he wiped bile from his lip. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the guy that led the team that peeled you out of the glassed over sand your boss left you for dead in.” He paused a beat. “You’re welcome,” he added.

Raven cleared her throat and stepped forward, gesturing to the man, “Jon, this is Ben Snyder. He runs a small private outfit I used to help pull up the rear guard on my operations. He and his men saved your life.”

“You should have left me for dead,” Jon said, still in a crumpled heap on the floor.

“Hey pal, no complaints from me, but the boss insisted. She swore up and down she couldn’t lose you out there,” Snyder said.

“Raven asked that we take any measures necessary to save your life. She’s the one who signed off and paid for your augmentations,” the doctor said.

Jon squinted still, blinking several times. “What did you do to my eyes? Everything is so fuzzy.”

The doctor kneeled down next to him, holding his face steady while she adjusted something on the side of his head with a small tool. As she twisted the tool, his eyes focused. The sensation was like someone pulling a semi-opaque towel from his face, and his vision cleared. He glanced next to her, part of him thankful for the change, and the other part resenting her for needing it to begin with.

“Your eyes were flash burned and your v-lenses had fuzed the cornea, so we had to give you replacements. These are Hioshi’s. A Miltech line. It links directly with your implant, can highlight explosives, interface with police and agency databases for ID scan recognition, and we can use them to track and mark threats.” She nodded after a silent beat, and stood up, leaning against the MedBed.

Jon pushed himself up from the floor and stood up. He noted that below his waist was completely prosthetic. Scarred skin ending at black carbon fiber and flex-alloy. His arms were artificial up to the shoulders. Only his torso and head remained natural. There were several healing scars on his chest he could see. The tissue was dark red and swollen in some locations. He traced his black fingers over the scars, one at a time.

He instantly realized several things. First of which being that he had haptic feedback, every sensation felt across his skin. He also noticed that he could perform cursory scans and retrieve basic data as well, like what something comprised and sometimes how dense it was, depending on the material being scanned.

He looked up at Raven with agony in his eyes. “Why?” he asked, his voice trembling.

Raven took a step forward, reaching out to him, but he stepped back, recoiling. “Jon. Look, I’m sorry. You’re the only one who knows more about what’s going on than the rest of us. Losing you would have meant losing everything. You, Sam, all of it. Gone for nothing, and whoever set all this up gets to just walk away. Like you said, I need all this to be worth something. But I can’t do it without you. This is your fight.”

The doctor stepped up next to Raven. “I didn’t have the resources to clone replacements for all the damage you suffered. I’m a miracle worker, but I’m no god.”

He looked down at his hands, the internal heads up display highlighting his hands, and his current bioelectrical charge levels. His face twisted in remorse. “I’m just some mechanical husk now. Whatever humanity I had, it died on that table.”

“You’re still you, Jon,” Raven said.

“Am I? Because I don’t recognize me at all. There isn’t much distinguishing me from a combat mech.”

“That’s actually a bit of hyperbole. I’ve tangled with those plenty. And shutting up now.” The man next to Raven said, lowering his pointed finger under her withering gaze.

Raven gave the guy a sideways glance before she turned back to Jon. “I know this isn’t how you wanted things to go, but be honest for a moment. Would you really have been ok with dying there in Iraq? Letting Sam’s murder go unanswered? Letting your own go unnoticed?”

Jon’s gaze fell to the floor for a moment, his expression twisting with the thoughts that rolled through his mind. His memory raced back to his last thought before unconsciousness swept over him. He felt like he had failed Sam. He wanted to do more. He wished he had.

“No,” said Jon.

Raven nodded, letting the fact that he agreed with her decision to keep him in the fight longer hang a moment. “Ok. This is probably going to take you a bit to adjust to. And that’s ok. It’s a lot to take in. So take the time you need. We’ll be in touch with next steps, alright?”

“What about my family?” he asked.

Raven’s expression saddened. “Unfortunately, they think you’re dead. It was necessary to get Director Wilson off of your six to think you died in the attack. Ben and his men moved in dressed as locals picking through the wreckage of the blast so they wouldn’t draw attention to the fact that they were rescuing you.”

Jon glanced up. He needed to get back and see what Polanco scrubbed from Sam’s chip. “I have to get back. I left something important working while I went on the mission. I need to let someone know I’m still alive.”

Raven grimaced, but it’s not like Jon to break a cover nonchalantly. If he said it was it important, she knew better than to question. Eventually, she gave him a stiff nod. “Alright. But only this one time. The more people outside of those in this room who know you survived, the more complicated your life will get. How good is your german?”

He gave her a hurt look, and she nodded with a wave. “Alright. I had to check. You’ll be going back home on your own. I’ve already had your place cleaned of your stuff. We moved it to a different location. You’ll get the address when you land in Dulles,” she said.

He turned and found a tall mirror, approaching it with his back to the others. As he went about looking at himself, Raven gestured the others out, whispering to them as they left. He didn’t care that he didn’t hear them. Jon’s attention remained locked solely on what he saw in the mirror. He looked at his hands. Both there and not like phantom appendages. He flexed them, clenching them into fists. They were his hands, and yet, they weren’t. Expensive artificial mockeries of memory.

Frustration, sadness, disgust and rage bubbled and swirled in his chest. Wrapped up in a giant bow of lack of control over his life. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, ramming in his ears loudly. The sounded was deafening, like large war drums banging a steady beat. He punched the mirror. The sound of the shattering glass re-centering him, drawing his attention to the noise as the pieces fell to the concrete floor.

He left his hand in the ruined mirror frame for a moment as he focused on his breathing and trying to control his rampant emotions. Trying to cope with so much death going on around him and then his own loss of body, self, and soul? It was adding up too quick.

“Jon?”

He turned to reply, wanting to say he was fine, but he wasn’t fine, was he? No, he felt like a turbulent mess and had no actual way to cope with that. How could you prepare for this through something mundane, like training?

“This will probably take you some getting used to. If you have any issues, go to Roth Industries’ Corporate office in D.C. You’ll be able to request Dr. Rebecca Preston by name. She’s the one who fixed you up and saved your life. She’s also the Lead Biocyberneticist. That’s how we could get you fitting with limbs and other vitals so quickly.”

Jon turned to Raven from the shattered mirror. “How long was I out?”

“8 months. A lot has changed. That’s why I’m encouraging you to ease back into it nice and slow. You no doubt figured out we can’t bring you back to the Agency, which means no longer being able to lean on them for support. We’re on our own now. Technically, that makes us mercenaries.”

Jon nodded, frowning at the thought. He resigned himself to trying to stomach his new existence. “Alright. So what’s next?”

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