Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (39 page)

“Thank you. Is that what I should say at a time like this?”

“It may be as appropriate as anything else. You are welcome. Do your best to stay alive. We will look forward to kicking your ass at basketball.”

Biggie disappeared in an indescribably theatrical burst of light. George Lucas would have groaned, “I’ll be in my bunk,” if he’d been there to see it. Hell, I was impressed!

I didn’t get to enjoy the colorful spots in front of my eye for very long. My stomach started to cramp in that old familiar way.

Chunhua and Dr. Jenny were still asleep when I hobbled from the room. No one ever told me that losing a limb would throw off my balance like it did. Then again, it might have been the transition to monocular vision that made me lurch back and forth. In the end, it didn’t matter all that much–no one was awake and paying attention–my ego was undamaged.

During my time as a transhuman person I’ve never really known what the nanomachines wanted until I found it by accident or sensed it in my immediate vicinity. That day I knew what they wanted and exactly where I had to go to find it: the garage.

I had a date with UFO wreckage.

It took me a while to make my way downstairs and across the building to the inside entrance of the garage. No one saw me or stopped me, and I didn’t see anyone out and about. It seemed like something of a blessing, because I would have needed to explain myself–and I wasn’t quite sure how to go about doing that.

Getting down the stairs to the main floor was challenging and slow. I almost had to close my eye and edge my feet to the end of each stair tread because the world looked flat. As it was, I kept a death grip on the left railing. Falling down a flight of bare metal stairs on burned flesh sounded like a new definition of “suck” to me.

I made my way across the concrete floor of the massive workspace, and slowly lowered myself to my knees before a large panel of UFO hull. My instincts told me to touch it, but I held myself back just a bit. Who knew what alien-made nanotechnology might do?

Not me, that’s for sure.

My resistance to making physical contact with the wreckage gave way slowly. I’m just stubborn sometimes, but this particular occasion had more to do with fear than bullheadedness. I gave in.

The hull shard seemed to start falling in on itself right before my finger touched it, and disintegrated even more swiftly under the pressure of my finger. Moments later, the abominable cramps retreated and I actually began to feel a little better about my life. It didn’t last.

My right shoulder began to burn underneath the bandages covering the stump where my arm used to be. The pain was intense enough to rip right through the cozy wall of the drugs in my system. I couldn’t even breathe; I fell over onto my left side and concentrated on living through the experience.

By the time the agony faded into a pulsing throb I’d reached a state of paralyzed Zen. Everything passed around me, through me, and I couldn’t hold on to any of it. Then a black spike sprouted through the center of the bandage on my stump. I shrieked like a little blond girl from a Lewis Carroll novel.

Over the course of about half an hour an arm-shaped form grew outward from my shoulder. I was awake, and so were the new nerve endings. I would have killed for a shot of the experimental stuff they’d given me the day before. No such luck, though.

The pain of nerves forming, attaching, and branching made the sensation of being burned alive ALMOST pale in comparison. I still don’t know why I wasn’t screaming my head off while this was going on. Maybe my freaky state of Zen agony gave me some sort of buffer against squealing.

My arm was not replaced by factory standard equipment. The limb that took shape had the same surface qualities and texture of the UFO shell: shiny, black, and a combination of fibers and crystalline patterns spreading across the “skin”; if I could call it skin.

I almost didn’t want to touch it. It was a foreign object at worst, and a dream at best.

When it finished growing, I brought the new hand up to my eye. It looked like a mitten, not a five-fingered human hand. The single pad of the mitten seemed to melt, separating into five digits, just like I wished it could. Something told me I’d been given the Holy Grail of nanotechnology: conscious control of the machines themselves.

I imagined altering the shape of my hand, and it responded by conforming to the picture I held in my head. “Hang Loose” sign. Fist. Spike. Tentacle. Blade.

Swanky!

What do you do when you have a blade in your hand? You locate an appropriate target and take a swing at it.

Scanning the garage didn’t produce many choices. The theme of everything seemed to be Metal, from tools to work benches. I wasn’t entirely sure, in the foggy, “What the hell,” frame of mind I was in that I wanted to take on metal right away.

“Fuck it,” I said to the empty room, and took a swing at the metal staircase I’d come down minutes before.

“Oh. Oh. Shit,” was all I could get out of my mouth. I’d just cut through a one-inch diameter steel tube and felt no resistance at all.

Fingers formed out of the blade and wiggled at me before it resumed a typical hand-shaped appendage. Caught up in the magic, I flexed my new arm, and drummed up the courage to touch it.

It felt, and I hate using this word, silky. The temperature of the “skin” was the same as the rest of my body. I touched my left hand with the new right one, and I was amazed at the tactile sensitivity of my new fingers–it left my biological hand in the Stone Age; I could feel the wrinkles in my skin as if they were gouges in wood, not tiny lines in flesh.

Five or six minutes passed while I explored my own skin–until I touched the right side of my face, the burned side, and summoned up the courage to slide my new fingers under the gauze pads.

“Oh no,” I gasped.

No reconstructive surgery known to man could rebuild what I felt underneath the bandages into something that could pass for a normal face.

Compelled by black curiosity or in preparation for serious self-loathing, my new index finger moved upward and found the lid-less empty socket where my eye had been. It was packed with some kind of gooey gel. I was barely shocked when the chemical components of the gel came crawling up through the thoughts in my head.

Waves of emotions welled up out of nowhere, and left me sitting with my side against the metal staircase, weeping out of my one good eye. I’d never considered myself handsome, but there is still some vanity attached to simply not being ugly. The image I held of myself evaporated, replaced by the portrait of a man with half a face, a single eye, and more skin grafts than he could count.

I wrapped my arms around my middle and grieved. There isn’t another word for it.

Chunhua found me that way, weeping against the staircase. She didn’t remark on the new arm, but sat down as close to me as she could and leaned into me so our bodies touched. We remained that way for minutes before she spoke.

“People love more than what you look like.”

“Please don’t do that, Chu.”

“Do what? Remind you of people who love you?” She pulled me away from the metal poles, tugged my left arm away from my body and wrapped her right arm around it. “Should I tell you how people need you instead? Charlie needs you. Shawn needs you. I need you. Frank, it is a really long list.”

“I can’t...”

“Yes. You can. I know Biggie pulled a fast one and gave you what he gave me when I made that deal with him. Don’t look surprised. I can see the changes, and it isn’t only your new arm. I know more about what you can do now than you do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Conscious control. Your nanotechnology and mine is subject to our will. We are closer to what Biggie is than our loved ones are.”

“Why?”

“Why did he give this to us?”

“That’s a good start,” I replied.

“He gave us this because of how we love our friends and our extended family. We love them enough to put aside our humanity as we know it–and step over into his state of being–if it means we can save them.”

“Do we get a choice?”

“Yes,” she said, hugging my arm, “we always have a choice. We don’t have to take a single step closer to changing if we don’t want to. We can do our best without it.”

She leaned over and touched my new hand, and I understood what she’d said about being aware that I was like her. It was as thought the “cells” in my skin recognized her, reached out and gave her cells a hearty handshake. It was freaky beyond words, and comforting beyond measure.

“That’s worth losing one side of my face for,” I said, shocking myself.

“Now you see. The machines in your body will do what you want them to. Rebuilding your arm was a necessary repair, so they did it without your conscious thought.” She sat up a little straighter. “I’m using the wrong words. They’re not a separate entity or some kind of tool we pick up and put down: they’re a part of us. They are us, in a very real way. Treat them as a natural extension of your will.”

“I think I get what you’re saying. Stop being a pussy about it. Right?”

She giggled and punched me in the shoulder.

“Stop being a pussy about it. Grow your face back, you silly man.”

“Oh. I can do that...” I thought about it for a second, and let it happen. The only obstacle between me and the thing I desired was... Well, me. Simple.

People talk about feeling flesh crawling when they’re afraid. I can tell you that the feeling is infinitely more disturbing when the flesh is actually crawling on your face and a sizeable percentage of your entire body.

“Oh. This is just icky.” I shivered against Chunhua.

“Imagine that feeling all over your body and through your insides at the same time. That’s what it was like being rejuvenated.”

“I hope you don’t mind, I don’t want to imagine it,” I said between gritted teeth. “I want to scratch or slap or beat myself with a 2 x 4–anything to make it stop.”

“Be patient and try to think about something else, and it will be over before you know it.”

“I don’t know what else to think about. I’m going to start scooting across the concrete in a second.”

Chunhua took it upon herself to redirect my thoughts.

“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry about Omura. He seemed like a good man.”

Am I so transparent that my friends see all my emotional weak spots? I hadn’t even begun to process his death, much less the fact he saved me, only to die in the process. He didn’t deserve that kind of end.

Did Bravo Euro set the bomb or did Buttons? Were they all in it together? Did it matter? They cost us lives, loss, and, in Buttons’ case, he harmed my girlfriend. I didn’t even know how badly he’d hurt her.

I needed to know.

“What happened to Charlie? Don’t sugar-coat it.”

“Let her tell you, please. She needs to tell you herself. It is her story.”

“Chu, you are not helping by keeping this to yourself.”

“Frank,” she reached up and turned my head so we were face to face, “she asked us not to tell you. What happened to her was bad enough that I wanted to go Buttons Hunting and bring back his skin... without him in it.”

“Then why not tell me?”

“Charlie knows you. You would have crawled over broken glass, with unhealed burns and no right arm, to get to her. She doesn’t want you dead. She needs you alive, whole, and able to help her heal.”

I heard the sense in what Charlie wanted, but I was still angry about being kept in the dark–angry enough I didn’t notice when my skin stopped crawling for about three minutes. When I finally processed the new information, I reached up and peeled the bandages off my face and head.

“Well, anything out of place?”

“Nope. You look at lot like yourself. The only strange thing is your right eye; it looks like your arm.”

“What? Black?”

“Yes.”

I stood up, stretched, and let my feelings be known: “I’ll cope with that later.”

“Good. Now you sound like your old self! Go to Charlie. She needs you.”

Like a blink behind my eyes, the heads-up display I’d come to know and love reappeared. I knew precisely where to find the love of my life: upstairs in the third bedroom in Bajali’s house.

“Something isn’t right.” I said it more for myself than for Chunhua. “Her data is different. Something isn’t right.”

“Stop talking to me and get your ass over there,” she snarled at me.

I went.

There are times in your life when you don’t remember what happened between leaving one place and arriving at your destination. The night I left Scott’s house ablaze was one of those occasions; after he died and his zombie baby escaped I didn’t remember the drive from Fairfax back to Arlington.

I don’t remember leaving the garage or what route I took between there and Bajali’s front door. The only think I knew for sure was the time I arrived: 3:56:16am, and I couldn’t decide if I ought to knock on the door or just let myself in.

The door opened all by itself, or so it seemed, until Bajali peeked around the corner.