Thirty Four Minutes DEAD (31 page)

As Vain’s stretcher was wheeled out of the room, Diana Fearston attempted to follow her front-line mentor, but Marcia Levene intercepted this route of loyalty. Levene had the advantage of surprise and her initial words were uttered in a soft tone that was alien to her usual form of sharp verbal delivery.

“Let them go, Diana. The medics will look after him. We love him for all that he has done for our project, we love him for his scientific brilliance, and some of us love him for his
naiveté
- Christ I should know! Leif and David were right though, if we arrest progress, we let ‘yesterday’ blight our tomorrows. Nice to see you in the ‘action’ girl, he needs that”.

The sensitivity displayed by Levene halted Fearston in her tracks, and whilst she didn’t fully trust the woman whose specific project role always seemed shrouded in grey, she had detected genuine care in the words, despite Levene’s predominant sense of duty.

Gregory Vain had been oblivious to the inter-unit fighting that had taken place after he had attacked Tavini. His rage had made him blank out the American’s ‘return-fire’ but he was totally unprepared for Wheeler’s onslaught, and the butt in question rendered him unconscious for several minutes.

The MC-Project medical unit tended Vain with great care in the ensuing four days. His shattered cheekbone was reset through a wire mould, despite the fact that surgeons would modify Greg’s face in a matter of days. The MC medics liked the front-line leader, and yet they felt sure that he was going to be a project individual that would have the
full
Rochaux treatment performed upon him. By wiring up Greg’s face, they hoped to preserve his angular features - it was a small mercy they felt he deserved.

When Vain was led to the Rochaux wing four days later, his thoughts weren’t true to his name. As far as he was concerned a new face would be an adventure, something that was beyond his control. When his eyes started to close after his anaesthetising injection two issues dominated his thoughts - the robotic reliance of Belinda and the egocentric idealism of Tavini. As Vain started to sink into a medicinal netherworld he voiced a phrase that epitomised his disillusionment.

“She’ll laugh at your fire.., burn in your fire..., die in your fire...”

Vain saw the door handle turn. At last he could see his new face! He had been in a state of bondage for the initial seventeen days since his consciousness had returned, being denied a mirror or a verbal description concerning the facial changes that had been performed upon him. His surgeon had promised him that day eighteen was to be his visual revelation. The Rochaux surgeon was going to be true to his word, as Vain could see that an assistant medical officer carried the mirror that Gregory had awaited for, for what seemed like a lifetime. Before Vain was given the mirror, the surgeon Monsieur Garron had some choice words for him to digest. He proceeded in perfect English.

“Mr Vain, you have endured quite a change. Since my team first started modification work thirty-seven days ago, your face has undergone a series of Rochaux adjustments which were responding to a seventy-percent alteration brief requested by your superiors. They didn’t specify beyond the percentage. We were the decision-makers behind your effective remould. Our work has involved tissue adjustment, bone reshaping and colourised iris modification. We have cut in part, we have tucked to a minor degree and we have utilised a series of plastic toning stratagems to render the finished product. The reshaping was speeded up through our most advanced fixing agents and in short, your new face arrived nine days ahead of our predicted delivery date. We will leave you alone to survey our work”.

The Rochaux surgeon handed Vain the mirror, and the pair left Vain to contemplate his reflection. Greg had turned the mirror on its face whilst the pair remained in the room, but when they departed he turned it back to meet it face-on.

A pair of dull yellow eyes stared back at Vain. The selected colour hue had a deep lustre which intensified the blackness of the pupils. The ‘favoured’ bottom lip had been retained, but the top lip had been tightened, cut through to half the previous volume. The cheekbones had been altered after Jess Wheeler’s deliverance, and the Rochaux team had echoed his demolition with contours of gauntness that remembered the suffering and yet retained a haggard attraction. Vain’s dark hair had been kept in spirit, but a jet-black colour modification added a sharper dimension. The hair had altered in terms of texture feeling coarse now, dropping out of symmetrical adherence. The most noticeable alteration feature save the eyes, involved the colour of Vain’s skin. Before modification, Vain had retained a tanned complexion that survived the seasons, but the surgeons had chosen a very pallid alteration. Vain’s skin was now closer to a Scandinavian-white in comparison.

Vain reflected on his new image. He knew that the changes made to his face were permanent. The yellow iris dye was a ‘living’ pigment that would reproduce itself over time and he also knew that the black hair was fixed as his roots had been tethered by another Rochaux longevity chemical. All Rochaux alterations had been devised to last, and Greg knew that his old appearance would never return.

Later that evening Vain was allowed to leave his medical unit, and then he surveyed his facial changes in relation to his whole body. He carelessly shed his hospital robe and confronted himself naked in front of a full-length mirror. Whilst the Rochaux surgeons primarily specialised in facial changes, the toned pigmentation change into the neck and chest regions with a receding treatment. In Vain’s case this meant that the ashen white facial skin was modified by reduction from his neck downwards. Because of the sliding pigmentation scale the changes weren’t blatant as far as tonal comparison was concerned. Vain only noticed radical hue difference if he compared his face to the skin colour below his naval region. His surgeon had told him that within six months his tonal skin colour would all be consistent with his face. The new living pigmentation would in time permeate downwards to colour his whole frame.

Greg was relatively impressed with his avant-garde metamorphosis. He was pleased with his new eyes because he had only met two people with a similar colour in his life thus far, and he subsequently felt that the alteration added a rarefied quality to his countenance. The other changes added a gothic dimension to his character, and although the sum total made him appear a product of malnutrition he felt that a ‘wasted’ rock-star type status had washed over him!

All MC Project staff in the Washington Designation were set to meet the following morning and the occasion would evidence the Rochaux work in its entirety. Vain had been provided with a lapel badge bearing his name and his new divisional identity. He and Tavini had obviously now been separated, and he and Fearston were going to be aligned to a unit that Vance Fray had been entrusted with. This was an obvious demotion for Fray, and Greg wondered how it would alter the former security figurehead.

Greg was still reflecting on his new appearance and unit placement when he tried to sleep later that evening. Tanya and Levene also crept into his thoughts. He wondered if his wife could possibly get used to his new face and he tried to envisage the Rochaux changes that would have consumed Marcia. Sleep eventually claimed him.

When he entered the meeting room the following morning he was initially surprised at how few altered faces were in evidence. MC Project staff had been encouraged to stand and mingle in an informal fashion. All wore the lapel name badges, but there was no need for the vast majority of those in attendance. Vain saw Voight unchanged, Carson unchanged and Leif Denison - unchanged! Eventually he decided to move away from the doorway and walk amongst his colleagues. This prompted a uniform silence to come over those who witnessed his new countenance, and he walked around for a full two minutes before anyone actually spoke to him. In effect he was regarded as an artistic display, a living sculpture!

Vain felt like a leper, and just when he was about to exit the arena of embarrassment, a friendly, familiar voice from behind him changed his mind. He turned expecting to see Diana Fearston, but he hadn’t bargained for the alterations which had been performed upon his understudy.

“The price for knowing me I suppose - the bastards!”

“Not your usual charm, Greg!”

“Sorry Diana, I didn’t mean it to sound like that, you know”.

“I know Greg. It’s okay, really it is. I mean we all knew a few ‘cave-ins’ might occur didn’t we? You look wild though, I wouldn’t have recognised you without the badge!”

Vain was horrified. Some of the early Rochaux treatments had cruelly been branded as ‘cave-ins’ by the American press, because the victim suffered a reaction, which involved skin tissue rejection and brittle bone formation. Unfortunately Fearston had suffered both side-effects with her skin turning a sickly jaundiced yellow, and some of her facial bones had collapsed, ageing her a good ten years. She had retained her noble demeanour despite her ill fortune and Vain placed his arm around her, hugging her to him, expressing how glad he was that the two of them would retain their working relationship.

Whilst the pair conversed, Mr Fray entered the room, and it didn’t take the onlookers long to realise that the Rochaux treatment that this individual had received was a revenge-edict for his Sinquiry outburst. The MC Project lost public face in Britain during that instance, and now Fray was paying for it in private, losing his own ‘established’ face.

The changes performed upon the former main-player bore out the visual hallmarks of Denison’s directive vendetta. Fray had been metaphorically ‘tarred and feathered!’ The sleek white hair of old was now totally absent, shaved out of existence and never to reappear - Rochaux’s follicle-blocking agents would ensure that.

Fray’s piercing eyes had been radically altered, with the iris injections draining the vivid blue lustre and replacing it with a dull grey colour that had a lifeless tonality in comparison. Vance Fray’s facial skin had been ‘tucked’ very tightly to his cheekbone contours, and the man winced in pain if his mouth registered any expression that deviated from poker-faced neutrality. Already new pain-derived wrinkle lines cut tracks across the mouth region and a smile or laugh would invite the highest pain threshold. The selected pigmentation involved blotches of the white hue which cast Vain’s face and more dominant outcrops of tissue colour that had a more ruddy complexion. Fray’s face looked blemished and unnatural.

He said little to the assembled ranks, preferring to stay close to the back wall. After a few words with Denison, Fray exited the room. He was a twisted shadow of his former self, looking out of place in the company of the high ranks that he had once been part of. The unaltered face of Jess Wheeler sneered as he watched the broken man depart.

After witnessing the radical alterations to Fearston and Fray, Gregory Vain temporarily forgot to look out for Levene, but shortly after Fray’s departure she entered the room - a typical late entrance. Levene knew that she looked good, different but still beautiful. The long hair was now cut short in a wrap-around bob. The raven black colour of old had been altered significantly to a uniform dark burgundy and the pert nose was now pierced with a small diamond stud. Levene’s eyes had been changed to a dark green colour hue, but her ashen pallor had been kept. There was little evidence of any cuts or tucks. Marcia purred her greetings, fixing Greg’s yellow eyes with a stare of sensual intensity.

“Nice show Greg, off the wall, but cool in a rebel way! I guess there’s a cyber-punk spirit running through some of the Rochaux guys. Your eyes and my nose kinda bear that out, don’t they? Are you pleased with your changes?”

“The alterations are reasonable, but others weren’t so lucky, were they? Have you seen Diana and Fray?”

“I’ve seen them, but they’re not me or you are they, Greg? I mean, I’m not going to lose sleep over them. I was so damned pleased that I could live with my own changes! You haven’t said anything yet Greg, what do you think of the new me?”

“You mean the ‘book cover’. Oh you’re still beautiful, Marcia”.

“You’re pretty true to your surname yourself, Mr Vain. You can skip the false humility!”

Greg’s book cover line had annoyed Levene, making her feel that he was implying that she let a superficiality mould her character. The spiky exchange would probably have developed further but David Tavini cut in. Neither Levene nor Vain had seen the prerogative three controllers watching them, but that gave Tavini the chance to mentally rehearse his chosen words to Vain.

“Well I know that those yellow eyes weren’t chosen to signify a cowardly streak, Greg! You pack quite a butt, Mr Vain - helluva rumble my friend, wasn’t it?”

Vain accepted Tavini’s handshake, but he couldn’t forget the robotic form of mind control which had accounted for Belinda. The pair continued to talk for a while, but Vain made an excuse to leave when Levene addressed Tavini’s further prerogative three responsibilities. She had congratulated Tavini for being made honcho of the said MC unit, but Vain couldn’t verbally engage in that subject and he took his leave. Tavini turned his attention to Marcia.