How much have I told you about the whole "becoming a cyborg" thing?
Just that it happened, I guess. And some of the abilities you get from it. Quick, what's my body temperature right now?
36.8 degrees celsius. Your blood pressure is 109 over 65. Your weight is--
That's enough.
Just wanted to see if I could get away with it.
Maybe if you weren't such an asshole.
Don't think I can help that at this point. What were we talking about?
Cyborg.
Right.
I was in a coma for weeks after the escape pod from Earth hit an Alliance ship. The number I've always been given is that I lost 38% of my body in the catastrophe. Whether that's weight or volume, no one's ever said.
Asking the big questions.
No, my big question is a little lower.
I will vomit all over your shoes right now.
Tough crowd.
Dr. Agon was a nut. I think I told you that. He had a budget because he knew somebody. His family was some big shots, they were able to get him some government contracts, blah blah. Boring normal corruption stuff. He'd been experimenting on animals for years, with mixed success. For some reason, nobody thought a cyborg rat was a good use of research money, except for him. But he was nothing if not quick on his feet, so once the War broke out he knew it would just be a matter of time before he got a good guinea pig, er, volunteer.
Now, we're only a few days into the War. But things have gone so badly he's starting to think there won't be a humanity to experiment on, so he gets desperate in a hurry. Then he got lucky. The damaged Alliance ship put in at the Lunar base with a comatose me in its medical bay. They were happy to unload me and he was happy to get a prospect.
Yeah, I think I know all this stuff. Get to the bits I haven't heard before.
This is my story, all right!?
Fast forward to when I woke up. This would've been weeks after the surgeries that put me back together, so to speak. My brain, nerves, and muscles couldn't "talk" to the cybernetic parts, at first. He told me right away that that would improve, but you can imagine that wasn't comforting, because the first thing I had to learn was that my body had been eviscerated by an accident I didn't even remember. Truthfully, I hardly had memory of anything since the War started, at that point. When I asked about June, of course he had no idea who I was talking about. I was weeks into rehab before he was able to get any information about her, and you already know the outcome of that.
The War was over fast, I should say. By the time I was up and moving, the fighting was done and they were just negotiating the final touches of the accord that would combine the Confederation and the Alliance. I guess there's a whole other story in the fact that the Alliance started the War and won it, to the extent anybody can "win" a war that wiped out a third of humanity. But they had the last word and they got to keep the name. Alliance forever, right?
Anyway, Dr. Agon got worried that his little experiment would be put to bed because the War was over, so at first he hid me from everyone but his closest aides. That was a weird feeling, knowing I was a dirty secret. I was young enough that I didn't quite grasp what it all meant--that he was worried I would be seized and killed. I'd seen June die, of course. I saw lots of people die in that brief but brutal flare-up. But my frontal lobe wasn't developed enough to understand it the way I understand it now. Plus, a lot of it felt like a dream. I'd lost part of my fucking brain, after all. Life in general felt something less than real for a while.
The thing that caught me off-guard the most was mirrors.
Mirrors?
Yeah, you know, you walk past a mirror and you don't give it a second thought, right?
Well, sometimes I check myself out...
OK, fair enough. I wasn't someone who did that. But there were a few mirrors in Dr. Agon's facility, and whenever I walked past one I'd have to stop and do a double-take. The first couple times, I paused and then kept on walking. I felt unsettled, but I didn't want to dwell. Eventually, it became too hard to ignore. I'd just stand there and stare at myself, seeing someone who looked just like me, but somehow wasn't.
Don't get me wrong: the synthetic skin was astonishing. You'd never know the difference unless you got real close and started poking at it and noticed the subtle ways it didn't quite act like real skin. Theoretically, I shouldn't have been able to tell anything was different by looking at myself. But somehow, I knew it wasn't me.
Is this like the Procyon thing?
No, it's not a murder-mode thing. I wasn't dissociating. I was experiencing... dysphoria?
... What, like gender dysphoria?
Not exactly. Gender wasn't the issue. My body, as such, was "fine," to all appearances. I don't know. Maybe it's a little like that. Because if someone looked at me, they saw a perfectly normal 16-year-old boy. When I looked at me, I just saw something wrong. I'd never felt that before. I'd never thought that much about how I looked in the first place, honestly. But something about how I looked now was just deeply, deeply wrong, in a way that made me increasingly distraught.
I tried to explain it to Dr. Agon who chalked it up to post-traumatic stress. I'm sure that was part of it. I had plenty of trauma to ex post facto stress about. But that wasn't the whole thing, I'm sure of it. I think, as normal as my body looked, some part of my mind just couldn't accept it. I think about how people who've lost limbs have ghost sensations where they can still feel it tingling even though it's not there anymore. Maybe this was a little bit the opposite. I knew a big part of my body was supposed to be missing, but it was there. Except it wasn't really there. It was a fake, a fraud. My mind was having a hard time accepting it.
So what did you do? Or what did Dr. Agon do?
After I broke a mirror, he put all the mirrors away.
That's not exactly solving the problem.
From his perspective, it did, but yeah.
I just had to power through it. My body was different, and I was the only one who could tell. What were my options? Live with it, or die. So, I got on living with it.
That doesn't sound like you... coped, exactly.
Coping? That's a good one.
I'm not joking, dude. I'd ask if you've talked to a therapist about any of this but I know the answer.
Yeah, never voluntarily. Look, I can only change so much. Besides, what's the use picking my brain apart at my age?
Being happier?
I'm happy! My whole body hurts and I live in a run-down apartment above a coffee shop, but I'm happy.
I know for a fact money isn't the problem.
True. Money can't fix me being old. Not yet, at least.
Oh yeah, is there some reason you can't just timeline-merge yourself into a younger body?
If I still had a working timeship, I could do that.
Are you saying you still have a timeship, it just doesn't work? Or that you don't have one at all?
Only my stylist knows for sure.
Is that a reference to something?
...No.