Becoming a cyborg wasn't fun, believe it or not.
I can't think of a reason it would be fun, no.
I was one of the first. A prototype. The first one to actually survive more than a week, too!
And here you are.
Yeah, maybe I would have been better off the other way, right?
There's a timeline of events. War broke out, Chicago was on fire. I didn't know where my brother was and communications were down. The school had tried to evacuate us all in an orderly fashion, but that's hard when you're being shot at. June died. I got picked up by a friendly patrol that was rounding up any civilians they could find, because the bad guys were doing the same thing. Both sides were forcing people to fight. I was a minor, and emotionally a wreck, so they decided that giving me a gun was probably a bad idea. I was shoved into an autonomous pod at O'Hare Spaceport with a few other people who too young, too old, or too disabled to fight, and we got rocketed toward Mars.
I meant to ask. Was there a colony on Mars?
A small one. At the time, nobody knew whether its allegiance would lean more toward the Alliance or the Confederation. Strictly speaking, the Colonies were international efforts and politically neutral, with "supersovereignty." That was more practical than anything, though. What are they gonna do when it takes weeks to get to or from Mars? In effect, the Colonies had to be self-governing, and if Earth didn't like how that was going, options were limited for doing anything about it. After all, the people you've bled and sweated with are going to have some loyalty to you, rather than toward bureaucrats on Earth.
All that said, Mars was as good a place as any to send civilians from a world that was seemingly immolating itself. Before we were loaded onto that pod, it was obvious that the Alliance soldiers felt like this was the end. Like, the end of humanity on Earth. There had been one horrific exchange of nukes, huge numbers of people dead, dozens of cities destroyed. The possibility existed that there might be more exchanges. It wouldn't have taken much escalation to wipe out all human life on Earth. So, the contingency plan was, send people to the Moon and Mars, have them join the colonies there, and hope for the best. It would be the last round of reinforcements the Colonies would ever get.
But it didn't work out that way for my pod. No, we passed through a shooting match between an Alliance ship and a Confederation ship, a round deflected off our hull and sent us off course, and we slammed into the side of the Alliance ship. I survived along with a toddler. Several Alliance soldiers died when we hit their ship. The three other people in the pod with me, they all died on impact. I lost 38% of my body. My vitals were marginal. I was put on ice in the ship's medical bay until I could get proper medical attention.
At the same time, the War ended up being a bonanza for mad scientists. Guys who never would have gotten their projects approved in peacetime took a very "ask for forgiveness, not permission" approach once hostilities broke out. After all, they could all be dead in a week. What did they have to lose? Enter: Dr. Agon.
He'd spent years trying to get approval to augment Alliance soldiers. He was allowed to try it on animals, though not with live weapons. The last thing anyone wanted was a dog with shoulder-mounted missiles on the loose.
I don't know, that sounds kind of fun.
You would say that. Dr. Agon had some success with animal augmentation, but the results weren't convincing enough for anyone to endorse doing it to human beings.
What about genetic experimentation? You're telling me that wasn't improved between now and then?
Oh, we'd just reached the limits, there. The vast majority of genetic diseases had all been wiped out. Of course, nuclear hell created some new ones, and that took some years to fix. But by the 2060s, soldiers having some genetic alteration to enhance muscle growth was commonplace. Nobody was getting jacked this way, not without hard work. The same problems you had with steroids, you could have with excessive genetic enhancement. What we had was a sweet spot where building muscle mass was fairly easy, keeping it on didn't require a lot of work, and it didn't have any serious side effects.
The end result was a soldier about 20% stronger than the norm of prior decades.
But Dr. Agon wanted more?
Yup. He was convinced that cybernetic augmentation was the next step. Now, he did a lot of pioneering work with exoskeletons. You could get enhanced arms or legs to improve your running, kicking, punching, lifting strength, what have you. But these weren't permanent, and learning the control interface took time. Essentially, the equipment around your limb would read the impulses moving through your muscles to determine your intentions, and apply extra force. The problem wasn't how powerful these augmentations were--it was that they were hard to control with precision. Being able to punch with the force of 100 guys is only useful if you can be sure your hit will land. So, activities that didn't require a lot of finesse benefited the most.
But Dr. Agon wanted more...
You're getting it. His ideal was cybernetics enmeshed through living issue, controlled directly by the brain and nerve impulses, with no barrier between the user and the equipment.
So, once the War kicked off, he put out the word that he was willing to assist with cases of traumatic limb loss and other massive injuries with an otherwise poor prognosis. I was one of the first to land on his table, after a week of chilling out in the medical bay of the Alliance ship. I wasn't awake for any of this, mind you. I was unconscious pretty much from the moment my pod hid the Alliance ship until I woke up, newly augmented.
My right arm, leg, and eye were all replaced. Parts of my skull, ribcage, and pelvis were replaced. Skin was able to grow over my repaired torso but my arm, leg, and the affected part of my head got synthetic replacements, instead.
I can't really tell. They look natural.
Yeah, version one wasn't so convincing. I actually got a complete workover in the future, so it's all real skin now.
Uh huh.
I know what you're thinking. Anyway. A processing suite was embedded in my head, hooked up to my new eye. This gave me a lot of new capabilities, like raw computation, plus visual input to the processing suite could be analyzed in all kinds of ways. Combined with my new arm, I was one of the best shots in the galaxy. I outranked any non-augmented human in terms of hand-eye coordination. Obviously, the new arm and leg were a lot stronger than the factory models, but there was a balance to be had there.
I have to walk on my legs, after all. Having one leg much stronger than the other meant I would have an awkward gait. So, some adjustments were made to essentially dial down the strength except for situations where it was actually required. You won't be surprised to hear I accidentally crushed someone's hand trying to give them a handshake, too. Dr. Agon was embarrassed about that one.
The technology itself was impressive. He ran wiring down along my spinal column, hooked up to the new limbs. Attached to the processing suite, I could both control them like they were normal limbs and benefit from the extremely fine control the processing suite offered. They were cutting edge, actuated microhydraulics. The only downside is that they burn through hydraulic fluid rather quickly, so it has to be replenished on the regular. IV is preferred, as you know, but there are some things I can drink that will do the job, albeit less than optimally.
Wild Turkey?
No, that's just the chaser.
Ah.
As a technical marvel, I was impressive. My body didn't reject the augmentations--Dr. Agon had an experimental electrical field emanating from them that held off immune response, though it did take some tuning.
The problem was that I lost a good chunk of my brain, and while the rest of my brain and the processing suite could compensate somewhat, having a significant share of your brain power tied up in an electronic device has weird effects.
Have you ever thought about what consciousness is?
Here we go.
Oh, don't roll your eyes like that. Come on.
It's easy to say that consciousness is just a side effect of brain activity, that it's embedded in the structural and electrical activity of the brain, with no separate being apart from that. I don't think that's wrong, necessarily, but I think it's more complex than that and has implications that are hard to reconcile.
Am I in philosophy class now?
Apparently.
First, the mind isn't entirely in your head. It's in your stomach and gut, too. If you want to follow it to its logical conclusion, your mind is your entire nervous system and everything it interacts with. Considering how all your organs and hormones can affect your mood and thought processes, there's really no such thing as a mind or consciousness separate from those.
So, adding a completely synthetic component to the mix means altering the fundamental nature of that mind. It's not quite a different organ, but if your thought processes pass through it, and pass back and forth between the organic brain matter, they develop pathways you wouldn't see in a purely natural brain. It took me a while to realize it and a long time to make peace with it, but there's really two Robert Maxwells in here, and I'm not talking about the ones from temporal duplicate merges. One lives mostly in my original brain, and the other lives mostly in the processing suite. They don't always see eye-to-eye. Sometimes, one takes over and suppresses the other.
So, what, you have multiple personalities?
I wouldn't call it that, because they're both me, and neither of them identifies as someone else. And it's not the result of psychological trauma, but the physical structure of my brain and augmentations. The organic Maxwell is emotionally centered, sensitive, prone to kindness but also flights of fancy and bouts of anger. The synthetic Maxwell is cold, calculating, indifferent, and, I admit, inhumane.
I don't feel complete without both, though. They're both me. There used to be a different me, before the War, before my body got blown up. But after I got augmented, there were two mes in there. Nobody knew how to deal with something like this, either, certainly not Dr. Agon. It was all on me, to reconcile those two aspects and not let one take over from the other. I should say, the synthetic Maxwell was the real problem, because that's the one that can kill without a second thought. Pure ruthlessness, pure logic, pure order.
I never did let Dr. Agon take out my processing unit. He wanted to give me a smaller one, thinking that would shrink the other Maxwell to the point of irrelevance. Future subjects got much smaller suites to avoid exactly this problem, so I'm one of a kind in that regard.
Is this all some kind of rationalization of all the horrible shit you've done? You're just blaming it on your computer chip Maxwell?
I'm not blaming anything on anyone. I'm responsible for my own actions. But I recognize where some of those actions come from, and the complexities of my augmentation. Dr. Agon never would have been allowed to have another subject like me--no one with quite so many modifications, nothing so extensive. That was probably for the best. Keeping my own sanity has been a struggle, and a lesser person would've gone insane, or berserk, or both.
Then who have I been talking to all this time? Organic Maxwell? Synthetic Maxwell? Both?
Definitely both. I could limit to one or the other, but I don't think you'd want to see that.
Try me.
...Nah. Not today.