LACERATION

I wake up aching in every millimeter of my flesh, with the freezing pressure of a slab of metal on my back. I must be lying down.

I try to open my eyes, but find them locked shut.

Feeling sick, I rub at them. The texture is sharp and crumbly—sleepy seeds. Gobs and gobs of hardened sleepy seeds. As I massage them, gradually working through the prickly seal, I notice my hands are shivering. It's freezing, and there's no layer of clothing between me and the metal table.

In the blind darkness, I check the clock on my implant. 2,261 hours have passed since I went into cryo. More than a quarter of a year. My security program shows that there have been cyber attacks. 19,527 of them. I exhale slowly. Remain calm. I've been in tighter spots.

I have always considered myself a stable, coolheaded person. I inhale slowly, straining my ears for any shuffling sounds, any breathing beyond my own. But there is only the deep gurgle of bubbles, the soft rasp of a ventilation system, the steady pumping of my heart.

No audible threat. But I feel sick, feverish, and there's a bitter gunk in my mouth. I call up a biometrics report.

Charts and graphs glow on the red backs of my eyelids: there's an EKG recording my heart rate (slightly elevated), a body map showing nerve and arterial activation (minimal, over most of the last three months), a readout detailing my blood chemistry, etc. etc.

Scanning through the records as I rub at my sealed eyelids, I spot a moment, only four days ago, when a sixteen-centimeter incision was made between my shoulder blades, the nerves flashing bright red with pain. No telling what might have been removed… or inserted. The biometrics record that I was thawed out of cryo about one week ago, and I've been sliced into daily ever since. No wonder I feel weak.

I take a moment to absorb the reality of my situation, steeling myself, trying to prepare for the real possibilities of torture, mutilation, and death. The antidote to panic is to forget yourself, forget your fragility, and focus on what needs to be done.

I turn my attention back to my security program. All the cyber attacks had occurred before the thawing; all the incisions occurred after. Seems like hacking my implant was plan A, and when that failed, surgery was plan B. The question is, Why am I awake?

Once I feel ready to confront the biometrics again, I bring up the graphs, trying not to notice that the beeping of the heart monitor has sped up, and the levels of stress-hormones have steadily increased. Instead I focus on the rest of the blood data.

Barbiturates are in my system, drugs I recognize, designed to perpetuate a coma. I track the fluctuations over time, watching my body being drugged and redrugged, but the doses make no sense: I've been dosed by medical idiots. These quantities wouldn't keep a thirty-six kilo child asleep for long. It's like they thought, for some reason, that I weigh twenty five.

Probably, I'm not supposed to be awake.

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Licking my fingertips and rubbing the saliva onto my eyelids, I finally manage to dissolve some of the crusted mucus, and peel open an eye.

A cloud of vapor leaks from my mouth into the cold. My skin looks sickly in the blue-green gloom, and my arms are pebbled with goosebumps. I blink upward into the light. A bank of triangular windows glows in the curving ceiling, and beyond them, the black silhouettes of strange squid dart and writhe before bright patches in the water.

I am alone. This is a storage room, cluttered with broken lockers and discarded junk. As I peel my other eye, I see that the floor is a ruin of smashed security cameras, shattered glass, and pools of stained water that ripple beneath leaks in the ceiling. Me and my surgery table are off to one side, hastily crammed in here amid the clutter, the stainless-steel surface slightly tilted, crusted with dried blood—presumably mine. Worse bloodstains have splattered over half the wall, so that's… informative. It's all just information, just information, something I can use.

Sitting up, I find that a dirty knife has been discarded beside my neck. Hesitantly, I heft it. It's useless against a ghost.

But, if my enemies are human…

I retch violently.

I retch, and retch, and retch until I'm gasping for breath.

This always happens, whenever I think about hurting human beings. I raise the knife, fighting the urge to stab myself, and then realize I don't have to fight it—I need to check inside the new incisions anyway, to see if I've been microchipped.

Forcing myself to go slowly and carefully, I slide the edge against a fresh scab on my chest and slice in.

I think everyone has parts of themselves they don't yet understand. I consider myself coolheaded and psychologically stable, but I dissolve around human-on-human violence. When I think about hurting others, I become possessed by self-destructiveness. I can't get through most action films without biting my cuticles until they bleed.

By the time I've reopened the first incision, my heart monitor is beeping worryingly fast, so I stop and clear my mind, breathing deep until my acute stress hormones drop back to a level that is concerning, rather than stupefying.

Then I dispassionately spread open the cut and poke inside, feeling for anything hard.

There's only flesh and blood. Not even the stitches or sutures I would expect from a normal surgeon. It's like I was cut up by a slasher. Maybe all these lines of pain on my body aren't someone's plan; maybe they're just someone's anger. I often fall into the trap of thinking that people choose their actions for rational purposes. It isn't true.

I can’t quite resist the urge to dig into one more cut. It won't kill me; my blood is exceptional at clotting. Most hunters take hemocoagulants to keep their blood syrupy, and Soto says that my implant starts up a drip-feed of the substance whenever I feel threatened.

Even after the third cut, there's still the nagging sense that I haven't atoned for that thought about using a knife on human beings, and I want to slice one more, just one more, but the compulsion has weakened to levels that I can control. If there are microchips concealed in any of my other wounds, I'll have Soto's drone-arm cut them out when I get home. Assuming I get home.

I ease myself off the surgery table, setting my feet carefully on the broken glass.

The room has only one door. I signal it with my microchip. It's locked, but the tiny security program is laughable. I overmaster it almost without thinking.

Before venturing outside, I rummage through the jumble of the room, and find several outfits of ripped and spattered coveralls. I belt on the one that's least soiled by the blood of the dead. The clothes of corpses always have a sense about them, a faint, eerie smell of a life that's over, but it's better than venturing into danger undressed.

I signal the door to open, and creep out into the dark.