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the fourth round of surgeries was all about increasing surface area.
it’s an open secret that the generations iterate in messy, grasping lurches—first was spaghetti at the fucking wall. utterly neurotic. everything bagel of pancreatitis and anti-pancreatitis meds and necrotic tissue and the kind of grey matter that withers to a pale yellow and overexposes all the photographic film in a suitcase a room and a half away. first was a brain in a jar and that jar was made of stuff that had once been a person but had, through the triumphs and glories of science, been transformed into an unplugged refrigerator full of dripping meat.
second was an architectural feat. brute physicality. maintaining structural integrity despite the jet fuel melting through the smooth muscle of what may have been veins once but had long since amalgamated into their stented nitrile linings. no more dripping in the second generation. watertight. not a drop wasted.
third wanted to be subtler. simpler. all about the thinky bits, the subtle intricacies of a brain drugged to the nines on coral, the rest of the meat refrigerator be damned. who needs ‘em.
(lobotomies. third gen was mostly lobotomies.)
and the fourth generation—yours—was all about increasing relative surface area. christ knows why. more skin to feed tubes and wires into and out of, you’d bet. less living matter to wrangle beneath it. better bang for the buck. sweetened condensed corpsfodder.
they split your shins and forearms right down the middle, knee to ankle, elbow to wrist, bowing apart and meeting back at the ends, just a narrow coating of flesh wrapped around the twinned bones beneath. they called you quick and dirty. that’s technically true. you’re certainly cheap. most of you can’t ambulate. guess you’re lucky. lucky, lucky you. you don’t walk so good, not like proper humans do, but you can lurch and slink and prowl like nobody’s business for a good thirty, forty seconds out of the day.
you’re also missing the right hemisphere of your brain. got in the way. brilliant innovation, the hemispherectomy—after that, they only needed half the coral for each gen-four. apparently ol’ leftie’s enough to compensate. that, or they just needed you to stop having seizures, and didn’t care much what it took to make it happen.
god help the fourth generation. god help the patron saint of desperation. heaven knows he’ll need it after watching over you.
crrrr-nch. another staple. damn cockpit fucked up your thigh to high hell a couple days ago, and no matter how hard you hoped and dreamed, your body just wouldn’t close the damn thing on its own. you ain’t dextrous enough to suture, so—crrrr-nch.
“the hell are you doing?”
the honest answer: what you’re told. incredible how often that gets you in trouble.
the long story, though… your heme is bound to a compound that lets off beta particles. legalese for “your blood is radioactive”. not the cool kind of radiation, though. the pathetically mild pain-in-the-ass kind. alphas are stopped by paper, gammas will fuck up your whole day—but beta particles? just weak enough to be rendered more or less harmless by a single layer of human skin, and just nasty enough that you probably shouldn’t eat, breathe, or bathe in them anyways.
you point at the handbook, closed and on a high shelf. standard policy says that fourth gens have to do all their own medical care when there’s any skin breakage except in the case of emergencies, in order to minimize hazardous exposure risk to human practitioners. not that he’s read the damn thing.
you dig your docked tongue into the gap between the surgical staples, letting the sharp taste of your own muscle lull you. the throbbing ache dulls under the warm pressure.
“knock that shit off,” walter says. “that’s unsanitary.”
is it? your body doesn’t have a microbiome. too irradiated. too chemical. runs too hot—insert dog metaphor here. living systems don’t typically recognize you as also-living. at least not as animal. your body can still be infected, sure… not like a human gets sick, but like a basement grows mold or a tree suffers heart rot. maybe somewhere inside you you’ve got a bit of that radiotrophic fungus that tends to land gen fours in the cardiac unit when it embolizes off their vessels’ inner walls and blocks important bloodflow. but that ain’t exactly a tongue issue.
hell, maybe if you lick your wounds enough, you’ll breed a resistant strain of some fucked bacteria tailored perfectly to your physiology. something that’ll spread like wildfire across the galaxy and put your whole damn generation out of its keening misery. what can you say. you got lofty ambitions.
you tug the wound open with your split-nailed, emaciated fingers until the staples strain against their holes and a fresh batch of brackish black fluid weeps from the aggravated vessels. you lap it up meekly. the squared corners of your tongue burrow between the metal bars. you’re aiming for as sexual an approach as possible without being the slightest bit sexy. you aren’t sure what reaction you’re looking for, but you’ll know it when you see it.
he yanks you back by the shoulder to get you to stop. it’s maybe the first time he’s ever touched you. you don’t remember. his glove is wetted by a bit of liquefacted flesh that has, at some point, sloughed off your body and soaked through the black fabric of your flight suit. he stares at his fingertips in disgust and tries to shake them clean.
“jesus christ, 621,” he says. “we have a washing machine, you know.”
you glare. roll down the ruched pant leg and try to reach for the zipper at your nape one-handed. not because you’re fucking listening to his taunts—you need to check if it was just old residue or if he actually managed to rip the sloughed sore back open. if it’s the latter… staples ain’t gonna fix that.
he hesitates. reaches. maybe to help you with the zipper. you growl like the engine of a burning car and flash your blunt grey canines so fast it surprises even you.
(oh, thank you, patron judas, and all your little hospitals, for letting you keep your pretty teeth.)
“down, boy,” he jokes.
you kick his bad knee out from under him and revel in the solid crack that rings out as he falls flat on his ass, cane clattering to the side and palms scraping against the concrete. you maybe break your toe. it feels like an itch.
he’s quiet now. looking up at you. ain't that a sight.
you stand, lurching, from the cargo container you’ve been seated on. your bifurcated calves shudder and wail under the sudden burden. you bite it down and shamble towards him.
is he impressed? he looks impressed.
you reach down. make a little come-hither gesture. he scoffs, then realizes you’re asking for his cane and not his hand, then looks all in all a bit sheepish. god knows why—maybe, like you, he’s just curious to see where this train goes—but he hands it up to you without another word. makes no move to remove himself from his humbling position on the floor.
the cane ain’t your fit. he’s a head taller than you, even if you did manage to stand up straight, and the grip is sized wrong under your fingers. for a moment, you contemplate tossing it from hand to hand, getting a read on its weight the way you might with a new rifle for your ac. (its name is humility. ice blue and glinting. cleft-legged and rawboned. just like you.) but with your numb flesh, you’d probably just drop it, and god doesn’t love you enough to make walter to hand it back to you a second time.
he blinks up at you. you jab him with it full-brunt in the sternum, and pray it leaves a bruise there, where you’ll never even get to see it. in the split second where it connects the two of you, you admire the shadow, cast in a drooping bridge from your hand to his ribs, like a leash.
he falls onto his back. you steady your weight on his cane and press your boot into his throat.
he waits.
you drag it down to his bruised sternum. feel him breathe, feel it rise and fall. down further. solar plexus. let your weight dig in, however slight the sum total. by now, your joints are threatening to unionize. down further to his navel. your leg strains like the steel of a cheap carnival ride. down further. your heel snags on his belt. a pause. down further.
he grabs your ankle with both hands.
“down, boy,” he repeats. the whites of his eyes flash like your grey teeth.
satisfied by the low rush of a marginally-less-uneven playing field, you limp off and collapse back onto your beloved cargo container, letting the cane roll somewhere in his general position.
he makes it back up and over to you, eventually. does a little twirly thing with his pointer finger to match your come-hither . you squint up from your fetal curl, confused, and he rolls his eyes.
“you need help with that?”
you shrug.
“you’re useless to me sick,” he says, which is verifiably untrue. “useless to me dead,” he self-corrects.
you force yourself upright. shut down your fight-or-flight long enough to let him at your napes. the zipper hisses, or maybe it’s you. the flight suit peels, crackling, from your shoulder and down around your abdomen, a caved-in mess of knotted scar tissue more or less divested of its obsolete mass of organs. the once-flat expanse of your back is snipped apart like a paper snowflake. nearly every square inch of stretched, flayed, and convoluted skin along the jutting points of your vertebra has half a dozen of a grabbag of iv ports, drains, electrical leads, and conductive wires jutting out of it, mostly bundled together in little braids and clumps, all presently unfastened to your usual bulk of machinery and hanging fluids. no longer compressed beneath the flight suit, they trail down your spine like a ridgeback’s mane.
walter, bless him, resists the very stupid urge to run his fingers through them and tug.
gen fours don’t eat, can’t eat, but your mouthstuff still needs somewhere to go after it drains into your throat. your esophagostomy bag, usually crystal-clear with saliva, is spattered with some of the blood you lapped up earlier. it catches walter’s gaze the way your forearms used to—like he was always battling off a compulsion to snap a padlock around your ulna. you start to gather that none of his dearest dead dogs have been of your particular pedigree.
his eyes trail up, and his brow furrows at the disintegrated state of your shoulder.
“you’re injured,” he notes, not bothering to hide the irritation.
you glare again. no shit.
he shuffles over to the cabinets, looking for a rag that isn’t already covered in mech drippings. you wait until he’s looking your way to lick a long, disgusting stripe through the dark reddish sludge beading on your shoulder. again, trying to pool it on your docked tongue. a slow swallow. stringy blackness drips into the bag. he steps between your legs. you’re tired. the sitting upright is getting harder. you picture him licking your wounds clean.
your forehead drops against his jaw. he tries to wipe your shoulder with the rag. you drag your tongue along the upper seam of his throat, leaving a streak of irradiated blood in its wake. maybe you can kill him with cancer, instead.
the rough texture of the cloth rips your scabbed skin further open. he’s making it worse, but you let him. it seems to make him happy.