Repair and Replace

I sat in the waiting room for my name to be called. My body was due for service months ago, but this was the first they could get me in. There wasn’t much that needed to be done, I was sure, but maybe they could find out what was binding in my left shoulder, limiting some movement there.

A technician opened the door, looked at me, back down at the pad she carried, and called out, “Alexis?”

As I was alone in the waiting room, I knew she meant me. I stood. “Alexi,” I said, “no ess on the end.”

“Ah, sorry Alexi, I’m Kendra and I’ll be your body technician today. Right this way.” She kept glancing at me as we walked.

“I know that look,” I said “You’re trying to figure out why I don’t look like a forty-year-old man. The same reason I’m here for a service. I mean — do enough experiments on a kid, he never has a normal puberty, right? He ends up like me with a baby face, so people assume I’m a woman.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Don’t sweat it,” I cut her off. “I’m just in a foul mood today and shouldn’t be taking it out on you. I apologize.”

Kendra instructed me to strip and lie back on the exam table and began plugging in all the diagnostic equipment. “Any specific complaints?” she asked.

“Reduced mobility in my left shoulder…like something is binding in there.”

“Any pain?”

“No more than usual,” I told her. The constant, low-level pains that come from age and wear-and-tear had turned into little more than background noise.

She spent some time going over the readouts of the machines before adjusting the table to where I could sit upright. “You probably already know, but your legs are well past their expected functionality, and long out of production. They’re working for now, but if something would happen, we don’t have any way to repair them. No parts available anymore. I would recommend replacement as soon as possible.”

“Yeah, I figured. Might as well do that now. What about my shoulder?”

“Looks like part of the binding for the AC joint pulled loose at some point. We can pull that out, replace the AC joint binding, and that should restore full motion. Your clavicles, scapulae, and arms are still under extended warranty for another eight months, so we caught that just in time.” 

She took a breath, but I already knew what she was about to say, so I said it first. “While we’re doing the left, we might as well do the right, since we know the most likely failure point, now.”

Kendra gave a pleased nod. “It’s nice to see someone take their maintenance seriously.” She did some typing on her tablet then looked up at me. “We don’t have the same model — of course — but we have the same manufacturer, if you wanted to keep things from being too different.”

I shrugged. “Different is fine. How about whatever has the highest rating, longest service life, and best warranty?”

One of her eyebrows raised. “That would be the Nakimara Y-73, combat-rated. Do you still need—”

“I’ve never needed combat-rated, I just get them because they last longer. So, yeah, those.” I couldn’t quite read the expression on her face, but I guess she didn’t expect to hear that.

“I thought, given your overall conditioning and the current limbs…,” she stopped and focused on entering the order in her pad. “It doesn’t say in your record how you — I’m sorry, I should shut up now. Oh, and the pelvis looks fine, no wear. Those Hendriks Titan-Steels seem to last forever, especially with the mil-grade number four standard socket.”

I don’t talk to others without a purpose — ordering at a diner or explaining symptoms to a body tech for instance. Then again, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who made me want to. There was something about the way Kendra kept tripping over her own sincere concern and curiosity that made me think she was someone I could open up to.

She was interrupted by an orderly wheeling a cart into the room with a pair of legs and several bags of parts. She thanked them, closed the door, and prepped herself to work.

As the table returned to a flat position, I said, “You’re going to explode from trying to hold the question in. You want to know how I ended up with quad-replacements, including scapulae, clavicles, and pelvis, plus the spine and sternum reinforcements, right?”

She had a momentary flash of stunned shock on her face, then relaxed. “Yeah, but if you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to. I can start working here, and we can talk about anything or nothing or I can shut up and let you rest. Your call.”

“I wish I could handle memories the way I handle my cybernetics; repair and replace.”

She cleaned all the areas she was going to work on, changing her gloves often. Then, she laid out the hermetically sealed legs and assorted parts in the order she’d need them, along with the tools she’d need. Each of the four areas she’d be working on had their own, sealed tools lined up.

In spite of how much this trip was going to cost me, I found my mood improving. “How do you feel about your childhood? Primary school, secondary school, family. all of that?”

“I had a pretty normal childhood, I guess.” She unplugged the diagnostic leads from the ports on the inside of my thighs, sprayed a topical anesthetic around my hips, then proceeded to wash and glove up yet again.

“Do you ever find yourself thinking back on those times fondly?”

Kendra smiled. “I do. Especially secondary school, but time does that.”

“Does what?”

She made a quick, clean incision where my skin and the synthetic skin met and peeled the synthetic down and away from the hip socket. “Blurs the edges on things; the bad doesn’t seem so bad, and the good seems better than it was, maybe. Rose-tinted glasses and all that.”

I heard my old leg drop onto the disposal cart and shook my head. “I don’t. I mean, I think about those times more than I would like, but never fondly. I don’t think there’re any rose-tinted glasses for me. More like shit-tinted, but even when I take them off and take an impartial look at my past, it was objectively shitty.”

“What does that have to do with—”

“I’m getting there.” I let out a deep sigh. I hadn’t talked about this with anyone in years…ever since my last therapist gave up on me.

“When I was six, my parents signed me up for a medical study being run by ‘Dr. John’ — I don’t know what his real name was. They said the money would be set aside for my college. It didn’t last the week that I was in the study.”

“What did they spend it on?”

“Probably booze and drugs. I know it wasn’t the rent because we got evicted right after that.”

Kendra shook her head. I could tell she was trying to avoid the pity face, as most of us in the shop would have no desire to see that anymore.

“About a month later, we moved into a nicer apartment, and they dropped me off for a month-long study with Dr. John. They didn’t even pretend the money was for me that time. I spent my seventh birthday there.

“Over the course of the next year, I was in study after study, until just before my eighth birthday. I was told that I’d become too difficult to care for, and that my new home would be with Dr. John. It wasn’t so much a home as a cage in a lab. I spent my entire childhood being poked and prodded, injected with questionable substances and hooked up to even more questionable devices.

“By the time I was sixteen, it was obvious that I’d never mature physically. Dr. John pumped me full of hormones, but I’d developed — or always had — an insensitivity to them. This was followed with direct injections of some pale blue liquid into my bones, in an attempt to get them to mature, but they never fully did.

“I had a couple growth spurts, put on a few inches, but my arms and legs, pelvis, scapulae, and so on were so weak and stunted, Dr. John decided I’d be better off having them all replaced, then he beefed up my spine with the same sort of permanent supports you’d use for severe scoliosis, and added a layer of poly-bone to my sternum to help protect my ribs.

“I’ve been outfitted with combat-grade cybernetics since I was seventeen, and Dr. John used to parade me around for defense department types to get them to buy into cybernetics for soldiers. He used to say he had treated me for a ‘rare birth disorder’ that required the extensive work, even though he caused all of it. My only birth disorder was the parents I was born to.”

I looked up to see tears welling in Kendra’s eyes as she was attaching the electronics in my new left leg. “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring you down. I just thought that maybe you’d understand.”

“I don’t understand why your parents did that to you, but I think I understand why you don’t put all that in your history when you come in for service.” She wiped her eyes with her arm and chuckled. “Don’t want to get tears in there, the salt would corrode the connections.”

She finished up the second leg and re-glued the skin to the synthetic. It would heal together in a week, long before the glue wore off. She sprayed the anesthetic on my shoulders and asked, “Have you tried to contact your parents since then?”

“Yeah. It was the first thing I did when I left Dr. John’s. Found out my mother OD’ed when I was ten, and my father drank himself to death a couple years after.”

“Watch your eyes. What about Dr. John?” she asked.

“He disappeared shortly after I left. The second thing I did was call the cops. By the time the cops got there, he was gone. Left all the equipment but took his experimental drugs and records.

“I don’t know what happened to the three younger kids that were there, and I wasn’t right in my own head at the time to help them.” I closed my eyes as she used the UV light to cure the new AC joint binding.

We were silent while she finished both shoulders, then had me sit up, move my arms and legs, and go through range of motion exercises.

“I’m sorry all that happened to you,” she said, “and I hope someone catches that so-called doctor.”

I smiled at her. “I hope it’s me,” I said. “To be honest with you, I haven’t kept paying for combat-ready cybernetics just for how long they last.”