Extensis Vitae (8 page)

During the tough months of recovery and physical therapy that followed, he tried to find a reason to stay positive. More often than not though, he found himself wishing he had died with his comrades in the crash.
Why should I be spared?
he wondered.
What kind of life is this?
This is more of a curse than anything
.

Besides the fresh pain from the breakup with Amanda, he was always haunted by memory of the face of his longtime friend Nash as he pitched out the door of the Black Hawk, his eyes wide and his hand reaching out. He knew that it wouldn’t have made a difference if he had been able to haul his friend back in the chopper —they had all been doomed, anyway. But that truth never prevented the recurring nightmares of that fatal day, along with the horrible, powerless feeling that he had let his friend die.

His serious injuries combined with the loss of his friend and his breakup with Amanda all propelled him into a deep depression. He was put on Prozac to help with the depression, but the cocktail of drugs he was on made him physically ill most of the time. On a good day, he would simply feel numb to the world.

After several months of rehab, Reznik was waiting to go down to lunch on one of his good days, when a knock sounded at his door. He turned his wheelchair and called out for the visitor to enter.

The door opened and a well-dressed man in an expensive suit entered. He was clean-shaven with his hair combed back. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses was perched on his nose. The face, however, was familiar to Reznik.

“Mr. Reznik! I was so sorry to hear the news about you and your team. Such brave young men—what a tragedy. Truly our nation’s finest. I will never forget the day that you saved my life in Afghanistan.”

“Mr. Black, was it?” Reznik asked.

“Ah, yes…it was Black, but I’m Mr. White now.” He grinned. “Reassigned to a new project, you see.”

Reznik couldn’t help but smile at the man’s infectious charm. Whoever this mysterious man with the powerful connections really was, Reznik appreciated his visit. “What can I do for you, sir? As you can see, I can barely even help myself anymore, let alone anyone else.”

He saw genuine sadness in White’s eyes. “Well, my friend, I once vowed that if I could ever repay you for saving my life, then I would do whatever was in my power to make it happen. A life for a life. I’m just sorry I can’t offer the same to the rest of your team.”

“Sir, I’m not sure what it is that you think you can do for me. Unless maybe get my discharge paperwork pushed through. I’m just waiting for the Army to get around to finishing up my paperwork so I can go rot somewhere when I’m released.”

“What if I offered you the chance to continue serving your country?” White’s eyes sparkled mischievously behind his glasses. “You might be thinking ‘I’ve given enough for my country already,’ and you wouldn’t be wrong. This nation owes you a debt as much as I do—one that can never truly be repaid. If you will just hear me out, you might be interested, though. You see, we’ve been making some truly incredible breakthroughs in my new program, and the world will soon see that the true worth of a nation’s fighting men and women lies in the warriors’ hearts and minds more than anything else. This will be a total game changer in the field of biomedicine! Not to mention the history of warfare. Come, join my team, and you’ll find out for yourself.”

***

When Reznik awoke, the room was silent except for the ubiquitous hum of the distant machinery. He realized it was dawn from the faint light coming in from the window projection in the other room.

In the dim light, he looked down at his strong, unblemished body, and wondered for the hundredth time what the hell had happened to him.

Amanda
, he thought.
Where are you now?
But then the truth from his flashback began to settle in.
She’s gone…she left you broken and alone in that hospital
, another voice said in his mind.
Even if she hadn’t left you, she’s been dead for well over twenty years now.

He lay there in the dark, trying to face the new reality of his life.
What do I do now? My whole life is gone
. As he thought of things left undone, he slowly came to realize that virtually everything of meaning in his life had died in that helicopter crash. His fiancée, friends, career, goals in life—everything. All of it was just a memory now.

Just think: this is a chance for a fresh start. Remember, your future is a blank slate—it has yet to be written. You can leave all of this in the past and make of your future what you will. Think how many people get a chance like this.
The voice was something he remembered from his past, but any details of the memory eluded him.

He tried to recall Amanda’s face, but it was hazy now. The only thing that came to mind was another face—a kind one, with deep green eyes framed by chestnut hair.

And with that thought fresh in his mind, he knew what he had to do. He called for the light, and in the soft illumination, went to the intercom panel and called Myrna Kane.

She answered quickly, voice heavy with sleep. “Yes—is everything all right?”

“There’s nothing left for me up there on the surface any longer,” he replied. “I’ll do it.”

Chapter 6

I
t was morning, and they were in the med bay again. With the decision having been made, Reznik had fallen into a peaceful, dreamless sleep for the rest of the night. After he had woken up, he and Myrna had eaten breakfast together in the lab, as that was preferable to the dining hall and the uncomfortable stares that Reznik received from everyone they came across.

He now sat on the metal table where he had first awoken, legs dangling over the edge as he watched Myrna typing on the ancient computer terminal. Her hair shimmered under the harsh glare of the overhead lights.

After a few minutes, she stood up and unwound a cable from the terminal and approached Reznik. Their eyes met, and he found himself returning her smile. “All right, time for your big test drive,” she announced. “If you could just turn your head…”

Reznik did so and felt her fingers probing around the base of his skull. She pulled the cable for more slack, and then there was a
click,
and she stepped away. He couldn’t resist the urge to reach back and feel the back of his head. Somehow, she had plugged the end of the cable directly into his skull.

“Let’s see if I can get this to work,” she said as she sat back down at the terminal. “This command line code is so ancient—I hope I have it right…”

She continued typing as Reznik pondered the fact that he had a port in the back of his head. Just when he was coming to grips with that, his vision suddenly washed out into a greenish tint, as if he were looking through night-vision goggles. The Heads-Up Display—or HUD—looked like the information feed from a surveillance drone’s sensors. What appeared to be targeting information scrolled across his vision. He looked around and was astonished at what he saw.

“Whoa!” he exclaimed. He turned his head and tried to absorb all of the information displayed in front of him.
Awesome…now I have Terminator vision
, he thought.

“How’s that?” she asked, evidently pleased with herself. “I just activated your Datalink system, so you now have your Heads-Up Display and comms. Your vision and hearing are augmented, as well. I don’t have any familiarity with this military spec stuff, so you will have to figure out the interface on your own.”

“Very cool…this will work nicely, doc.”

She smiled. “Just wait for the rest to come online.” She turned back to the console and typed some more commands.

Reznik noticed that when he concentrated, his vision returned to normal and the HUD overlay faded away. When he focused on his hearing, the booming of his heartbeat became audible. He tried to ignore that and pushed outward until he could hear Myrna’s heartbeat. The taps of her fingers on the keyboard were almost like gunshots. He could hear a faint, electrical buzzing sound from somewhere overhead and the whirring of the computer’s case fan. He consciously pushed the sounds to the background and his hearing returned to normal.

He focused over her shoulder on the blurry CRT monitor and, after a second, the words snapped into clarity. She typed: “NANO-AUGMENTATION/ALL/SET TO–ACTIVE.” He looked around and focused on the dim hallway outside the room. The room grew extremely bright for a split-second and then dimmed, almost like the suppressor circuit on night-vision goggles. The murky details of the hallway became as clear as the brightly lit room.

“Well, that should do it!” Myrna announced. He looked back around and his vision returned to normal. Myrna looked pleased. “Just let me remove this,” she said, and unplugged the cord from his head. When he reached back there again, he couldn’t feel the port.

Myrna rolled up the cord again and tucked it next to the monitor. She walked over to one of the cabinets and dug around in a drawer for a moment. “Time for a demonstration,” she called over her shoulder.

She turned and her arm whipped around as she slung something toward Reznik. Before his brain realized what was happening, the targeting system display snapped back over his vision and immediately began tracking a flat object that was spinning through the air. Time seemed to go into slow motion as the object was highlighted and started to slowly turn end over end. The system identified it as a surgical knife. Without thinking about it, his arm shot out and neatly snatched the knife out of the air by the handle. It was all over before he had even realized what had happened.

“Not bad,” Myrna said. “But can you handle two?”

And then two knives were flying towards him. Just as before, his body and augmentations worked faster than his brain could keep up with, and he nimbly snatched both blades out of the air while maintaining his grip on the first one. He examined the four-inch blade on one of the knives.

“What are these things used for? If you have to operate on a rhinoceros?”

Myrna chuckled. “No, they are used for autopsies. They don’t get much use, though, I’m afraid. I have one more test for you: open your uniform top,” she instructed. He complied, unzipping the suit and pulling it open to reveal his bare chest. “Now, this time, let it hit you.”

“Let it hit me? That’s going to cause some damage!”

“It shouldn’t. Not much, anyway.” And then she tossed another knife.

This time he was ready for it, and as the targeting information flashed over his vision, he ignored it and had to force himself not to react. The knife was a good throw—it hit point first and should have stuck right below his sternum. Instead, he watched it bounce off. His skin had somehow
hardened
just beneath the surface—it was almost as if a small metal plate had momentarily pushed against his skin from the inside and then pulled back. He touched the skin, and there was only a tiny bead of blood on his finger when he examined it.

“How—“ He was speechless.

Myrna looked pleased. “It’s mid-century advanced nanoaugmentation technology developed by the military. You have billions of nanobots traveling through your body. Microscopic machines, if you will, that are holistically linked together through all of your augmentations and tied into your central nervous system. When the skin and nerves sense physical trauma, the nanites bond together and form a protective barrier—dermal plating, it’s called. Much more advanced than some of the crude early types, which basically consisted of sewing metal plates into the body.” She frowned in distaste. “According to some of the documentation in your file, this system should be able to stop a round from light arms fire. I wouldn’t recommend standing in front of any bullets, though—it does have its limits, but it should buy you enough time to get out of danger.”

“This is amazing!” He was still probing his stomach where the knife blade should have been buried. He looked at her, wide-eyed.

“You have the best tech that the military of the time could create—circa 2050, I think I read. That was just before the central government of the United States finally fell apart from crushing economic and ideological woes and the military became privatized. Corporate research divisions, naturally, were more than happy to swoop in and poach as much of the technology from the defunct military as they could. The corporations continued to make advances in nanoaugmentation technology and genetically engineered clones after that, but you could consider your new body one of the crowning achievements from the glory days of the old United States military. And that’s why we have such faith in your abilities, sir,” she said, and gave him a mock salute.