Except me. “It’s perfect!” I gushed. They both looked perturbed. “Perfect for what?” Alejandro scoffed. “Are you moving to China?” Meant as a joke presumably, because he just about keeled over when I nodded. Dad just sat there perfectly still, processing all of it.
“I’ve got some contacts there, buddies I used to race with and a guy that used to fence for me. I warned him about the heist, so he didn’t lose anything. Last I knew before I was locked up, he’d moved his operation to Shenzen.”
Dad wiped a nonexistent tear from his eye and hunched over. I asked him what the matter was. “It’s just...you only got out of the big house today. I get to see you for all of a few hours, now you’re disappearing from my life again.” I hugged him, metal scraping on metal, and promised it would be different.
“China isn’t prison, Dad. I’ll keep in touch. Haven’t I always kept in touch with you, even when you were living out in the boonies?” He slowly nodded, still mopey. Alejandro interrupted the two of us, tapping his watch. The hell does he need a watch for? Then again it was hardly the only antique I’d seen down here so far. Soon my old body would join them, gathering dust in this rusty old tub.
A droplet of water landed on my shoulder. I glanced up at the ceiling. “Should it be dripping? I feel like that’s bad. It shouldn’t be dripping, should it?” Alejandro hurried me to the operating table, ignoring my questions about the leak.
I eased my considerable weight onto the dentist-style reclining chair. The leather restraints did not escape my notice. Alejandro gestured at the panel mounted to the ceiling, and it flickered to life. Oh rad, just what I need right now. The Bible Network.
“Now I know many of you have been hard hit by the increasingly nasty gas storms lately” the man in the thousand dollar suit with the immaculately groomed hair says. “But that’s no reason to stop sending in as much as you can. Don’t be afraid of the storms, be afraid of God. There is no storm bigger than God!”
The audience cheers. I can feel Alejandro plugging hoses into my waist that will circulate oxygenated blood while my body’s offline. “The secular media wants you to believe the gas storms are because of so-called climate change” the suited preacher sneers.
“But didn’t they predict the storms would start twenty years sooner than they actually did? Their models are always wrong! You know what’s never wrong?” He held up an ostentatious gilded Bible, and the audience cheered louder than before.
“That’s right, my dear friends. The Bible doesn’t say anything about climate change. God would never allow us to unbalance the Earth so severely. You know what the Bible does say though? More times than you can count, there were tribes who defied God’s will.”
The audience booed. Some in the nearest rows of the gargantuan floating megachurch had on foam fingers, but the finger was shaped like a crucifix. “That’s right! They didn’t live the way God demands of us. They were homosexuals! They were prideful women, seeking to feminize the church! They were men who believed themselves wiser than the Bible, or who lusted after the metal!”
More booing. The camera briefly cut away to an elderly hispanic woman, weeping and holding up a sign reading “Repent, you final generation.” It then cut back to the stage, which was designed something like an inside out palace. The walls and part of the ceiling of an opulently decorated room, albeit made from painted fiberglass.
Even through the screen, it made me feel included. It made me feel like the tremendous wealth of the preacher was also my own. Like I’m on the inside with him looking out, rather than on the outside looking in.
Of course the seating for the attendees was considerably more bare-bones. Plenty of it, but made from welded steel with bare rafters overhead, like at a wrestling event. When the preacher finished, they would all go home, many of them to subsidized housing.
For all his ranting about the prosperity God would grace them with, proportional to their own generosity when donating to the preacher’s ministry, none of his wealth would go home with them.
Instead the money would only ever flow in only one direction, from bottom of the pyramid to the top. It reminded me of something Dad once said: “Sheep spend their whole lives in fear of wolves, only to be eaten by the shepherd.”
He suddenly grew more animated, striking a dramatic pose. “So he sent fire upon them! He sent plagues, and earthquakes, and storms! Does that sound familiar to you? It does to me! Are we not living in times such as those?
These days sin is everywhere you look. Those who have turned their back on God live however they please, disregarding His plan for their lives, and for society! What have been the fruits of their disobedience? The Lord God has sent gas storms upon them!”
I recalled him mentioning not so long ago that his audience was especially badly hit by those storms, but seemingly nobody in the audience remembered or cared. The preacher himself just kept rolling, not missing a beat.
“They want to place the blame on us! They say it’s because we voted down every preventative measure, the Satanic Communism they tried to foist on us under the pretense of environmental stewardship. But we knew better, because we see with spiritual eyes! Eyes which see clearly whose fault the storms actually are!”
The display behind him, comprising the entire wall around which the gaudy stage was built, now depicted a rapid slideshow. A man with his fullmetal girlfriend. A dome covered mosque in Dubai. A gay pride event in some VR lobby I didn’t recognize. That fuckin’ dolphin ambassador to the UN that’s on the news sometimes. A Church of Scientology. A child receiving her first prosthetic. Some children’s cartoon about a monkey, for some reason.
“Do you think God smiles upon this depravity? He is long suffering, but do not mistake patience for approval. Don’t you pay any mind to those mockers and scoffers who say the law of God is “bigoted” either, that men of God like me are “prejudiced” and other Marxist code words. I don’t make the rules, people! It’s all right there in the Bible, plain as day! If you don’t like it, if it’s not “tolerant” enough for you, don’t come crying to me. Take it up with God.”
I never went in for this religion stuff. Certainly not Scientology. Living with Audrey acquainted me intimately enough with the consequences of being raised in that crowd that I never bothered taking a closer look at what it’s all about.
I always figured that if the biggest religion on Earth wasn’t for me, then neither were any of the others. To be fair that’s assuming too much, they’re not identical or anything, it just seems improbable to me that one of them would have real answers if none of the others do.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on this stuff. In fact I’m probably more ignorant of spiritual matters than the average mug. But from where I’m sitting, it sure seems an awful lot like the God of the Bible is just a big scary puppet they use to terrify everybody who believes it’s real into behaving the way they think society ought to be. Then again, at least it’s not Scientology. That’s not saying much, but it counts for something.
My thoughts begin to blend together, and the room starts slowly spinning around me. That’ll be the drugs I assume, the only part of surgery I look forward to. For funsies I try counting backwards. I only make it to triangle.
The next thing I knew, I was struck by a flood of nostalgic sensations. The feeling of cool air against my skin, all the little hairs standing on end. Itches. Back pain. Even sleep crust in the corners of my eyes as the lids parted, permitting the harsh overhead lighting onto my retinas.
Yet as familiar as it all felt, there were also differences. Your first body is like your first car. The seat slowly molds into the shape of your ass, back and shoulders until it fits you so perfectly that it feels weird and wrong to drive somebody else’s.
These aren’t my arms. Despite Alejandro’s protestation, I wave them about, just to test the quality of the connection. This isn’t my chest. Those aren’t my legs, and...Sweet baby L. Ron, that penis! That’s not my fucking penis, I didn’t think about this going in.
It’s one thing to drive around some meatloaf’s body. I don’t have to get attached, it’s just a mobility appliance. But having some other dude’s jizz blaster swinging between my legs is a different animal entirely. Didn’t sit right with me, so I asked Alejandro about my options.
“You don’t want to go crazy with transplants. It’s like plastic surgery, you can’t do much of it before scar tissue build up and shit start to fall off your body, or you forget how to add.” Whatever. It’s not like I can’t get an exocortex plugin for math.
I press the matter, but he reminds me this is the only body fitting my criteria he has on hand, and that I have to let my brain heal for at least six months before I could safely have it transplanted again. I sigh, look in the mirror and pat my new beer belly. “Looks like I’m stuck with you for a while. You better not have any STDs I don’t know about.”
It isn’t just the sensations which differ. I can feel a distinct, immediate change in how people look at me. Before they either admired me from afar, or made a point to steer clear. Now all I get are momentary glances, followed by indifference or the occasional sneer.
Fine by me. Hidden in plain sight, every borged up lowlife unwittingly doing me a favor by turning their attention elsewhere as I saunter past. On my way through the lobby, various small fish swimming past the curved windows, I soaked in the obnoxiously everpresent ads.
Most of ‘em are for aquatic implants like the ones I jacked the data center with. Chest cavity O2 tanks. Bloodstream CO2 scrubbers. Prosthetic mermaid tails, hands with octopus style suckers on them, and a dizzying variety of underwater weaponry.
One of the ads, a lenticular thin film poster that ran up the side of the cylindrical metal module onto the ceiling, promoted some sort of race. That caught my attention. How I’d like to be racing again! But instead of motorcycles, they appeared to be...torpedoes?
No, not quite. Rocket powered, and with a cockpit. “Supercav Grand Prix.” The sleek, menacing submersible craft then began to animate as the ad detected my eyes looking at it. Bubbles formed around each sub, from tiny gas jets around the nose.
They sped frantically through the sunlit waters of the continental shelf, diving, rolling, ducking under coral arches. Dad came up behind me, perhaps noticing how wistful I looked, and put a hand on my shoulder. “You’ll be back in the saddle before you know it.”
I wanted to believe him, but I’ve never been this broke. Another borged up mermaid appeared in the ad, swinging the checkered flag and then winking. That’s the other thing that’s everywhere in all these fucking ads.
Tits. Ass. Abs. Legs, lips, eyes. The composition never focusing on the complete person, but framing them as a collection of marketable body parts. Which I suppose most of us technically are these days, but still.
Everywhere I looked, even on ads for mundane shit like chewing gum or implant crust remover, there would be some titties just hanging out in the corner or whatever. They don’t even try to have it make contextual sense for a woman to be in the shot. My dick’s not complaining, but my brain feels somewhat patronized.
The men don’t bother me as much, but then I don’t process images of men the way somebody attracted to them does. If I pay attention, they’re nearly as well represented as women, washboard abs inexplicably the background for an algae paste promotion.
A man’s tanned biceps and shoulders support a tray bearing all manner of cosmetics in another. I remember when I was a kid, there was a big push to remove stuff like this from ads because it was sexist. Instead they just sexed everything up equally for men and women alike. Profit always wins.
A haggard looking man nursing a cigarette sits slumped over in one of the wall mounted chairs just outside the brothel. Through the entrance I glimpse some sort of eight-limbed human cocktopus, each of its arms a prosthetic penis, whirling about as lusty bitches tuck money into its various jiggling folds.
“I think I’ve seen enough. You ready to go topside?” Dad turned this way and that. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “I haven’t been down here in awhile” he confessed. “I think I got us a little turned around.” Somewhat worried about the prospect, I asked if he meant we were lost.
He took umbrage to that. “Lost? That’s rich, I know this tub like the back of my own hand!” He held out his shiny red hand for effect, seemingly newer and in better shape than most of his other parts. He then stared at it and picked at a loose bolt. “Wait, what the fuck is this? I don’t remember it being that way.”
I smirked, once again capable of facial expressions and somewhat pleased with that. The busted up dude outside the brothel was watching us closely now. I tried to scan his face and compare it against the footage of those gawkers from topside only to realize I could only do that with my old body.
Little by little the changes were piling up and becoming real for me. A few of them pleasant pangs of nostalgia. The rest unwelcome shortcomings which made me realize why I’d been so eager to go fullmetal in the first place.
The aches in particular. In the spot where the prosthetic leg attaches to bone. At the elbow of my prosthetic arm, where skin meets metal. I can feel every vertebra in my spine, every rib in my ribcage moving as I turn or bend my torso.
Stay Tuned for Part 4!