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Becoming

By H. A. Kirsch

Copyright 2014

Part 4 of "Full Transfer"

This is a novel I'm posting. Please use the [insert method for perusing the collection of stories] to start at the beginning with "Attachments".

"Do people usually freak out in this thing?"

Leo spoke as soon as the words came to him. A split second later, the rest of the room appeared again. He had been sitting up, then lying back, but now was trying to roll over inside of a plastic tube. It had seemed like the perfect thing to say, only after having uttered it, Leo realized what was going on. He was still coming out of anesthesia. "Tetanizing", where his body was rendered paralyzed electronically, although it also made his brain feel like radio static.

A black, leathery, fur-less lupine face appeared over the isolator's cover. "It doesn't really matter if they do. That sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? But it just doesn't. You can't move. Am I right?" The voice was professionally distracted and casual, until the end.

Leo tried to lift his right stump. It quivered with the buzzing crawl that came from a sleeping limb. "Wait, is it already? I can't, you did it? The surgery? I don't remember it-" As Leo burst inside with fear, the memory hammered back. Delirium. The cloud of painkillers. The hypnosis of the integration hardware training videos. When had he had the surgery? Just now? Hours ago? Days?

No, this was just limb fitting, weeks later. He'd been given a twilight sedative and tetanized to make it easier to be stationed in the isolator. Many people found it claustrophobic. He now knew exactly why. His blood pressure dropped back to near normal.

"Oh," the fox let his head sink back. "Oh, yeah."

"Let me know if you feel anything different," the black canine said. He was wearing a blue and orange Hawaiian camp shirt with a Davidson Biotechnology Medical Department badge. Everything that was not shirt, at least on his torso, was black leathery skin.

The fox didn't feel anything different yet, just a strangely calming body-buzz of paralysis. "You're one of those things," Leo said, and ratcheted up another emotion: embarrassment, as his mind came further back online from the surgery. "Shenaus."

"Kenneth Waleman, Chief Medical Technologist. Your chief medical technologist, to be specific. Call me Kenny. You sure you don't feel anything?"

Leo's heart started to race. "Huh? No, I don't feel, is something wrong-"

Still, perfectly droll deadpan from the black canine. "Just kidding. That wasn't it. This is it."

'It', was a sudden, desperate need for Leo to curl his left arm up. And he did, as it throbbed and buzzed from the loss of static numbing. It reminded him of phantom limb pain, except now it was backwards. "Oooh, ow! Ha-HAH! Rrgh, that's awful, it's like when your leg falls asleep!" Leo slapped at his ribs with his left hand, reflex for instinctively shaking out a waking limb still present. Then he realized his hand was slapping at his ribcage. He had no left hand; it had been amputated after the train accident. "Fuck. Let me see. Let me see let me see! Oww! Fuck! I can't move my head! You asshole let me look at my arm!" Leo's voice quickly escalated in both loudness and pitch until it was the shriek of a fox in the forest, so strident that it could curl the bark from a tree.

"Why don't you lift it up and look at it yourself?" Kenny said, voice still almost mockingly casual as he stood by and watched through the distorting curves of the isolator dome.

Leo banged his hand against the clear plastic, froze for a moment, then slapped at it again. "Nrgh, this really fucking kills!" The fox heaved his arm up and splayed his hand against the isolator. It was indeed a hand, black-furred, with black clawnails that were neatly, but not perfectly, trimmed. Perfect for a red fox.

As his arm tried to buck, Leo pushed up harder, leaving the muscle to twitch underneath the fur. Only there was no muscle, because Leo had no left arm, nor a right arm, both cut off at the elbow. Likewise, he was missing his feet and lower legs, his tail, his manhood.

"You swear a lot," was Kenny's only reaction.

"This is impossible. I'm still asleep. Sleep paralysis, right? You feel like you're being shocked? I used to get it before. I used to get it all the time, when I was sixteen or so, and it really messed me up some nights!" Leo continued to stare at the hand. It wasn't his own hand. It couldn't be.

Kenny stepped closer. "Tap your index finger three times."

Leo tapped his finger against the plastic four times, but two taps were a twitchy, uncontrolled double tap. He felt it each time. "Oww, it still hurts! It still hurts!"

Kenny turned away and Leo's arm fell to his side. The fox tried to move again, but all he could do was will it. The flesh never responded. "That's a good start. Usually you guys slap your face or flick me off or something," the Shenaus said. "By the way. We're assigned to you as long as you're a patient. Hope you enjoy my sense of humor. Oh, also, I'm not just a spokesperson." He stepped back. Below the waist, cargo shorts. Below the shorts, complex metal and plastic for legs, overtly rugged, perhaps even military.

A warm, pleasant fog drifted in between Leo and the industrially medical terror of being electrically restrained inside of an isolation box by half of a canine foot soldier.

Inside the fog, Leo finally admitted it. He had a new body part. And it was so, so awesome.

-

Leo's feelings had several hours to temper, as he relaxed in bed up in Davidson's rehabilitation center. Its inpatient ward was very different than the hospitals he'd been in before. Instead of the jammed emergency room with its barely-concealed critical cases, all sick and injured, or the rows of private rooms holding yet more sick and injured, everyone at Davidson was otherwise healthy. As many patients were in lounges as in rooms, and all of them were in some state of mechanical repair or implant recovery.

His right arm felt so strange. Actual sensation was like a memory of touching something that he was experiencing again. He'd had those recall moments so many times over the years, but now, they came with the actual touch of things against his fur, of a thump against something he wasn't looking out for, the subtle crinkling of flesh when he curled his fist.

There was no flesh, no fur. Metal, composites, cybermuscle, nerve matrix, faux fur, heat exchanger fluid, silicone rubber waterproofing. A computer translated what sensors in the nerve matrix felt and fed the resulting stimulation to his actual nerves. Sometimes it felt shifted off, as if he was feeling through the wrong fingers. Index would touch ring, but he'd feel it in his thumb or the side of his hand. Then with an electrical shimmer, the feeling moved to the proper digits.

And the sight of it! For so long, since he was nine years old, Leo had looked down and seen a stump just short of his elbow on his upper arm. He still did see them on his arms and legs, although his left arm seemed longer than before, a mechanical joint set in at the elbow to provide strain relief in case something hit his arm too strongly. Otherwise, the upper bone would shatter and leave him potentially crippled once more. The discussion of it with his doctor had left Leo remembering "Flowers for Algernon", and shuddered at the thought of once more ending up a quadruple amputee.

Now, his arm faded from red to black and extended off into a similarly black hand. He lifted it and his fingers came up. He waved them, and like a giant electronic centipede moving inside his hand, they lifted and dropped as those strange prickles told him that his fingers were really moving in space.

During one such moment of reverie, someone knocked on the door. Then they simply barged in. None of the doctors would even think of doing that at Davidson, barring an emergency. The newcomer was no doctor. He was a barrel-chested fox, dress shirt tucked into his bluejeans and sleeves rolled up to his elbows, cowboy boots, and a distinctly middle-aged expression.

Dad. "Well Leo, I gotta congratulate you on pickin' the fanciest damn hospital you could go to. You sure this ain't some kind of spa or-" and then the vulpine actually saw Leo. The younger fox waved his new hand. It was easy to make a blustery movement like that, and it quelled the reverse phantom pain tingle.

Leo's father froze and stared, ears still up forward, gray and charcoal muzzle drooping to show some teeth. Not in a threat. "Well, shit."

Leo curled his hand into a fist, unflexed it, twisted it around, and smoothed the sheets down over his right stump. "This is the most amazing thing ever. I can't believe they can do this! Dad, this is a HAND! Stop staring and come over and look at it! I'm serious!"

Brian creeped forward like a wild animal, then slowly hunched down in. His eyes stayed wide as he came in closer and closer, and finally turned down to give a sniff. He backed off and made a simply disgusted face for a second. "Smells like some kinda new plasticky thing from China. That thing made in China?"

"No, it's not full of lead and radium or whatever you think they're putting in stuff these days," Leo said, rolling his eyes. Of all the times for his father's politics to come out. "They make them here, I think. Or in one of those other buildings. Gimme your hand! Stop being a baby." Leo was now old enough to talk to his father like an adult.

The older fox reached and grabbed Leo's right hand as if for a handshake. Then he let go and immediately petted over the top, then actually went in for a real shake. "Oh hell, that's somethin'," he huffed, voice an exasperated whisper, but exasperated by awe. "I, I guess I can see why the hell you'd get this stuff drilled into your bones. When I saw that wolf a few years ago, that one who came over? That was too much. That was like I was in some kinda nightmare. But this is a real damn thing, huh?" Mr. Cutler's expression started to turn back to pained surprise.

Leo returned the shake heartily, clumsily. He imagined it felt like shaking someone's hand whose arm had fallen asleep. It sure felt that way to him. Then he took his hand back and his father didn't reach for it again. "Yeah, it's a real damn thing."

Mr. Cutler grunted and reached down to give Leo a rub to the upper arm, a fatherly scruffle. "I think you've done okay with this. I gotta... I gotta go get some air."

"It's okay," Leo shrugged. "Like, I understand. I'll be fine." Then he waved as his father nearly darted out of the room.