Rust
I was six years old when I watched my hand limply fall to my side. I had been walking past a factory when it happened. To me it was just another building but hidden within it, was a workshop and within that workshop a pressure-cutter. It’s a remarkable machine. You see, a pressure-cutter sprays water at such pressures it can cut through steel.
The point is that sometimes, if the machine is damaged or rusty or just wasn’t maintained, they can explode. Such an explosion could send out shrapnel with enough force to cut through any barrier. Any brick wall. Any little girl’s hand. It was just my luck that the shard hit me and not my family. Just my luck that it cut through the flesh of my hand cleanly, leaving the rest of my body unharmed. It truly was luck in the end, you see.
For when I went to the hospital that day that my parents were given a choice. That piece of metal had cut through my hand irregularly. The muscles surrounding it were dying or dead, but the veins, the bone, were unharmed. I would survive, though my hand would be surgically removed. I would be handicapped for the rest of my life. Or I could be given a prosthetic. My flesh would be stripped away, leaving but the veins and bones, the flesh replaced with transistor and diode and steel. Top of the line, but experimental. The first of its kind, but untested.
Oh, they were warned that it might be dangerous. That there was no real guarantee that it would work, no real guarantee it was even safe, but the idea was already set in their mind. They wanted me to be a hairstylist you see. A hairstylist needs two hands. So, the surgery was done and when I woke the next day, I saw for the first time the purity of chrome. Of steel.
They passed me a steel mug that day. To test my reflexes, they said. I grabbed it, felt its cold metal, mirrored by that of my hand. I then watched as it crumpled between my hands. They told me that they understood. That the hand would take some time to get used to. But they did not. Understand, that is.
For even before the tests, I knew my own strength. I crumpled that steel that day for the sheer joy of it. My hand felt like a superpower.
So, I was distraught to learn that it was the only such gift I would be given. You see, it felt- feels like a hand. It acts like a hand. For all intense and purposes, it is a hand. But it is stronger, harder, tougher.
Better.
I did not, do not, see why I should be limited. But that day I was given a gift. I was told that my flesh might reject my new hand. I was told to look out for bits of black, bits of rot. It was an easy enough thing to fix, they told me. In the early stages at least. For if I left it, the rot would continue up my arm and more and more of me would have to be replaced by steel.
The rot did eventually come. Tinges of black, crawling around the seam of new hand. But it would not stay there for long. Its tendrils reached ever higher, rotting the flesh around my wrist, my forearm, my shoulder. I was scalded for not telling them earlier, but they gave a new arm readily enough. Soon my entire arm was chrome, bones and veins enshrouded within steel.
Three days after my arm became fully metal, I looked at the seam of flesh and metal at my shoulder. There were the faintest tinges of black once more.
I was six when I watched my hand full limply to my side, sixteen when my organs were cut away and replaced and thirty-six when my last limp piece of flesh was finally removed. That day, I knew I was perfect.
I was completed that day and I made a life out of it. I travelled the country, the world, giving talks. I met other prosthetic users (None as advanced of me, of course). I participated in hundreds of tests; I lobbied for non-medical prosthetics and then protested the age requirement. I was there not in the crowds outside, but in the courtroom when parliament decided the legality of recreational prosthetic testing. Some disagreed with me, but they were just old fashioned. With proper regulation, prosthetics could never cause harm. Besides, most were on my side.
All the world knew me. It was glorious! I was glorious!
I was also there when the “Considering on the applications and sustainability of micro-machines” was published. I was also there when the first prosthetic-veins were invented. The first surgeries for mechanical brains.
I knew I was no-longer perfect, no longer glorious. So, I booked an appointment to get my fair share of the new technology.
I was there when they announced that due to the modifications people’s biomass underwent, older prosthetic users could not be transferred to the newer versions. That was fine for most. Barely anyone actually had given up most of their bodies replaced, to be replaced by machine. People were happy to switch to the newer ceramic bodies, giving up their steel limbs in the process. After all, new limbs could be added.
But that was never an option for me. Even so, it did not affect me much. There were always spare parts, dealers, people who knew how to repair me, to remove the rust. There were other’s like me, other’s so far gone that they were largely machine. There where even whispers of those who had parts of their brain replaced, but I doubt there were many who went that far. The law had a certain bio-to-chrome ratio, and when it was exceeded, the person was considered a machine. The technology we had back then couldn’t replace a brain.
However, I was there when the world moved on from me.
I had friends who went as far as me, or further. When the world moved on, I was the only one who accepted it. Some people denied it as long as they could, then took the short way out. Some ran away to the scrapyards and quiet places in the world, to live in solitude. I know of a few who tried to replace more and more of themselves with machine, attaching older robot parts onto themselves. It couldn’t have worked, they had no way to control their new body parts.
I don’t know what happened to them.
And so, as I walk down the streets of London I no-longer recognise it. I am pitied by the great lumbering things that walk by me, may armed many limbed things with a mechanical brain inside it. They consider me frail, old, biological. Its funny, it has not been that long (at least for them, for machine is immortal) since most became robotic, yet they already consider themselves different to biological humans.
Those I do recognise as I walk down the street, winding in and up and down and through a thousand neon advertisements, do not recognise me. Those foolish enough to keep their “Natural” bodies for religious or cultural or tradition, hate me. In their eyes, I am the catalyst for the dystopian world they believe they live in.
I belong in both camps. So, I fit in neither.
The world is changed now. We have so few children, but so few deaths. Time is no-longer a factor in most people’s lives. People simply tweak there processing speed to slow down or speed up time as they wish. We have people on mars, on Saturn, some even leaving the solar system. Some are even locking themselves into sleep, slowing down their processing power, unwilling to wait to see what the future holds.
As I walk down the street, through the fog, a hundred advertisements call out to me. They declaim they have the best ceramics, the highest quality brains and arms and legs, the newest of technology. But as I walk into a run-down antique shop, I seek the old. I feel at home among the antiques, as I wait for the clerk to give me her verdict. A rusty chrome antique among a hundred others. I see a hundred artefacts, an old phone, a dark black glove? A hand?
The clerk turn on her computer and pulls my attention. Her myriad mechanical fingers tap on a hundred keys as she enters a short calculation, merely a hundred values, into a computer. As she reads me the number on the screen, it amuses me that such a short calculation could produce such a large number. I would laugh, but the rust took that part my voice box away a long time ago.
I explain, with the use of a scrap of paper and an old pen, that there is no way I could afford those parts, or her expertise. She enters a second calculation into her screen, my other option. This time a much longer calculation produces a much smaller number.
I do not want to laugh this time.
I was six years old when I watched my hand limply fall to my side, sixteen when my organs were cut away and replaced and thirty-six when my last limp piece of flesh was finally removed. It seems I will be one hundred and sixty when I will watch the rust cut away my hand once more, and one hundred and sixty-six when the rust cuts away my head.
I appreciate the symmetry.
I nod and say that I wonder how long she will have before the same happens to her. She looks at me in confusion as I leave the store, perhaps assuming that the rust has already touched my brain.
But I know what I mean.
I was the first to become nigh-entirely mechanical. And I will be the first to die from being outdated. But I will not be the last. For they are already developing a new form of science. A biological perfection. One that a mechanical brain could simply not function within.
The machine is immortal. But its repairers, its upgrades, are not.
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