“Take it easy,” the Doc said. He sat up straight, his spine a fireworks display of decompression, and studied all the readouts on the monitor. “As much as you hate it, that bed is your new home for a few days.”
“I’m so thirsty,” Malory said. Her voice grated. The room spun, and she dropped back down. She wondered if she looked as frail as she felt. Probably worse.
“I’ll get you some water,” he said. The metal on his legs clicked as he stood and left the room. The chair was indented from his weight, and it was obvious he’d been there for hours waiting for her to wake. He came back a minute later with a kiddie cup. “Once you drink this, get some rest.”
“How long until I can use the net?” she asked. She choked down the contents, coughed, and it sent a spike of pain through her muddled mind. She wanted to talk to Nadia.
“The healing process depends on age,” he said. He moved to her side and inspected the bandages for any leaking or pus. “Should be about a month before the nerves are ready for the implant, and it could be up to a year or more before usage stops causing pain. Any sudden urge to vomit or difficulty following my words?”
“Just some vertigo when I tried to get up, and the pain,” she said. A month, and she could advance her programming skills, navigate the city without relying on poorly-maintained analogue controls for everything, and feel a belonging to the rest of society.
“That’s good,” he said. He picked up the discarded IV, sighed, and moved to the nearby cabinet. He unwrapped a fresh syringe, filled it with a painkiller, and shoved it in the meat of her shoulder. “This would have been easier on you if your first instinct wasn’t to remove the damn thing keeping you alive and regulated. Now, get some sleep.”
“Thank you,” she said. She watched his broad back as he went, and was glad he left the door open. She couldn’t figure out why he showed such care for a street rat like her. When she closed her eye, she did not dream.
The next few days passed in a fog. Between the doc’s hovering caregiver routine, as cute as it was annoying, and the constant influx of wounded foot soldiers, it was obvious the war had started in earnest. She could do little besides wish she healed faster. The pain and swelling was taken care of by a series of injections that left her exhausted, and she was bored enough to scream. When she wasn’t sleeping, she spent the days fantasizing about arriving at Purgatory to thunderous applause, tracking down the guard who whipped her for revenge, and riding the Luna Paradise Ferris wheel with Nadia beside her. The little demon had always wanted to spend time under their giant replica radiation dome, to see all the themed rides and attractions, and Malory vowed to make it happen. On the fifth day, she managed to sit up without the world spinning and celebrated by removing all the sensor contacts from her body. She stood and went to the bathroom by herself for the first time since installation and refused to acknowledge the bedpan the Doc had cleaned and replaced. Once she was done, she washed her hands and stared at her reflection. The bandages covered all the good stuff, and she resembled a half-wrapped mummy.
When she stumbled into the lab, the Doc was digging bullets from the guts of a guy a few years older than her who was on a street corner slinging bootleg memory chips. It was the same way Oscar died, and she felt a dormant sadness spring forth while she watched him work—she didn’t bury it. Instead, she kneaded at the raw edges until it transformed into anger. A simmering rage, ready for an outlet. The next job she went on she’d be free from the worry of becoming a killer. The forceps extracted one slug after another and they clanged into a tray. When they were all out, the Doc sutured the wounds with steady hands. Mal used the nearby counter to keep herself stable as she watched the threads mend flesh and pictured the same happening to her. Her scalp tingled and it was difficult to keep her hands from satisfying the itch. When the Doc was done, he wheeled the lucky guy to another room and flashed her a look of concern. Mal sat on the edge of his desk, careful not to let her gown spread open, and studied the ever-growing piles of reports and invoices. What a headache.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“You should still be in bed,” the Doc said. He checked the bandages for a hundredth time. It was a gentle thing, though, so very similar to her mother’s love-infused doting, and she didn’t resist. “If you try to rush things, it’ll take longer.”
“If you send me back to that recovery room, I’ll down the nearest gallon of bleach,” she said. She wiggled her bare feet on the smooth tiles and relished the sensation.
“Alright,” he said. He moved to clean the blood from the operating table. “At least put clothes on.”
“You should save one of those as a souvenir for him,” Mal said. She tilted her head to the bullets; they’d make for a pleasing necklace.
“If you start feeling nauseous, let me know immediately,” he said.
“Sure.”
Another few days passed. She spent them wandering around the lab and observing surgeries. Whenever she could, Mal studied the implants on patients and marvelled at where they met flesh as if they were born that way. Recuperation hadn’t dampened the desire she had for more, and the list of implants compiled over the years taunted her. She wanted a shower, to run her head under streams of scalding water, but was stuck scrubbing her body from a repurposed mop bucket to keep the wounds dry. It was a week before the smell of antiseptic stopped clinging to her, but even then, she tasted it when she ate. When the bandages were taken off, she couldn’t believe the bruises, the way they spread in dark fractals from the new eye. The side of her head shaved grew on her, and it made a decent undercut if she parted her hair to the side. In the growing boredom, she started to draw on the back of the Doc’s paperwork. Little cats in astronaut helmets, sunsets, and castles. None of them were any good, but that wasn’t the point—most depicted the moon the way it used to be, but the craters were never quite right.
“I want to take you somewhere,” the Doc said. He blocked out a few hours in his schedule and sent patients to other places. Another expenditure for her benefit.
“Where to?” Mal asked. She made for her jacket.
“Just a few floors down, so you won’t need that,” he said. He led the way to the elevator and set it in motion with his network.
“That makes me so damn jealous when I have my own and can’t use it,” she said. The way her eyelid moved over the implant felt like sandpaper.
“If you try to force it, it won’t take,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. He warned her over and over, to the point of obsession, not to use the implant until the software booted on its own, and it made her feel like a cyclops. Almost all the new optical models replaced both eyes, so she was grateful, at least, not to be blind.
The elevator chugged along, and when the doors opened, the Doc led her through the hall to a memory theater. He grabbed a private booth and wasted no time before he queued a moment for them to watch. On the screen, an overcrowded pier on a beach shimmered to life, all the voices drowned out by the low rumble of engines doing pre-flight checks. Across the bay, the colossus perched, waiting—it was a colony ship encapsulated by all the things humanity had given up: clean air, water, a hope for the future. As the spectators dug their hands into the wooden railing, Mal had her focus drawn to a family that looked every bit a picture of life’s regrets; the daughter, missing front teeth, boosted on her father’s shoulders to see, and the mother with tears in her eyes. Saying goodbye to a relative on board. As the loudspeakers kicked in with the ten-second countdown, a flock of seagulls scattered. Dust rolled over the water. There was a roar as the ship strained to lift its enormous bulk, and then it ripped from the gravity well. It left a trail of fire and aspirations as it went out into the black.
“My son begged me to play this a dozen times a day,” the Doc said. There was a yearning there that went back years, and he wiped his eyes. Tragedy, written on a kind face. “You remind me of him.”
