by J.R. Blackwell | Jun 22, 2006 | Story
“I am never going to get laid with this plumage.” said Gruick, picking at his feathers. “It’s so dull, people are going to think I’m a girl.”
“Oh Gruick, you’re not brown, you’re just a deep maroon.” said Jason, scratching his goatee and leaning back against the violet Lurilura tree.
“What would a human know about grooming?” asked Gruick in his lilting contralto.
Jason shrugged. “Not much, which is the reason I came here to study your people.”
Gruick fixed one black beady eye on the anthropologist. “You humans have it all reversed, with your females in bright colors and your males as dull as sand. Humans always do things downwind, advertising your fertility with manufactured coverings rather than your natural colors. You are always manipulating your environment, something that has lead you again and again into trouble.”
Jason thought about the recording device in his head and the synthetic boots that were protecting his feet from the biting insects of the forest floor. “Maybe, but it’s given us benefits too.”
“Oh yes. I know. Your whole species is just so proud of its opposable thumbs.”
Jason chuckled. “You are just cranky because it’s mating season and you aren’t getting laid. Aren’t Greeb worms supposed to help your feathers change into a brighter color?”
Gruick ruffled his feathers in frustration. “I have eaten enough Greeb worms to make myself sick in the hope of turning scarlet, but it hasn’t worked.” Gruick folded his slender legs under his downy belly and trilled a sigh. “I’m just naturally brown, and I’m never going to attract a girl. All of them are so shallow, they would never even approach a dull male.” He stuck his head under one of his four wings.
“What if you used a dye?” asked Jason.
“A dye?” croaked Gruick, his voice muffled by his feathers. “What is that?”
“It’s a coloring that humans use to make their clothes different colors. I bet I could order some dye and we could color your feathers.”
Gruick pulled his head out from under his wing. “You could do that?”
Jason shrugged. “Sure. I bet the opposable thumbs might even come in handy for applying the dye.”
Translucent eyelids batted over Gruicks beady eyes. “Wait. Do you think the girls might be able to tell if I dyed my feathers?”
“Maybe.” said Jason “But by the time they get close, I’m sure they will be utterly seduced by your charming personality.”
“That’s a good point. Fine, we will try it the human way. Order your dye and we’ll see what your little thumbs can do.”
by J. Loseth | Jun 20, 2006 | Story
“Silver hair is in this season,” the technician suggested helpfully. Mary made a face.
“Won’t that just make me look old?”
“No, no,” the technician assured Mary with a laugh. “It’s silver, dear, not white. Definitely unnatural,” she added. Mary signed and fingered the swatches. Silver wasn’t exactly what she was going for.
“How about blue?” Mary asked, flipping to a new ring of swatches. “I’ve always liked blue hair. Why don’t more people have that?”
The technician pursed her lips and shook her head, eyes skimming the computer screen in front of her. “Blue is very hard to get,” she explained. “Your genetic makeup wouldn’t allow for it.”
Mary pouted and the technician moved the swatch ring aside, bringing out a thick book instead. “What about eyes?” the woman asked. “Eyes are very popular too, and there’s so much you can do with them. And unlike the hair, the change will take place within an hour. You don’t have to wait for it to grow in.”
Mary perked up at that, flipping through the book with growing interest. There were so many choices, and the procedure price was about the same as the hair. Still, she had some doubts.
“Is it safe?” Mary asked, eyeing the technician dubiously. “I mean, a bad hair job is one thing, but if there’s an accident during the eye procedure, couldn’t I lose my sight?”
The technician laughed indulgently, shaking her head. “Oh, dear, no. The radiation isn’t applied directly to your eyes.” She smiled. “All of our procedures are perfectly safe. The doctors have isolated the genes that produce eye and hair color, and they only need a control cell to instruct your body to change the pigmentation. The radiation will be applied at the base of your spine, just like the hair changes.”
Mary’s smile was bright and sunny as she looked at the book again, this time with a purpose in mind. “And I can have any of these?” she asked, mesmerized by the reds and golds, greens and purples and shades of orange.
“Sweetheart,” the technician said with a grin, knowing she’d just made a sale, “You can have any one you want.”
“Any one?” Mary asked, casting the technician a sly, sideways look. The woman faltered. “I… well, I can go check…”
When Mary left the clinic late that night, her eyes were seven different colors.
by Jared Axelrod | Jun 19, 2006 | Story
Marco can leave the hospital bed, and for that, he is grateful. His balance is unsteady, but with a cane and time, he should be able to get around much the same way he used to. Dana smiles when he moves his hand to touch her cheek, the way she did for him for so long, and, that makes him smile in return. Marco wishes, however, that he could feel her face when he touches it.
His titanium and plastic fingers are flexible , and Marco has been told that they give him 90% of his original range of dexterity. Which was a hundred-percent improvement from before, when the accident had left him numb from the waist down. He knows he is gripping a glass of water due to the weight and texture and resistance his new fingertips sense and he recognizes now the way those sensors tell him the glass is wet with condensation. But he cannot feel it. It’s not the same as being in the hospital bed, but it’s not the same as before he was forced into it either.
Most frustrating, sex is out of the question.
Marco spends a great deal of time on the beach, watching the teenagers splash in the surf, showing off their developing bodies. He watches them laugh and amble about, unused to larger hips or feet. Marco watches the games they play, the ones from their childhood and the games they will continue into adulthood.
One day, Marco is surprised to feel weight and pressure against his back, and when he turns his head, he sees Dana leaning against him. She has a lazy smile on her face. “Are you comfortable? I must be pretty cold…” “Oh, I’m fine,” she says, and snuggles herself in the crook of Marco’s plastic elbow. “You out watching the jailbait, you perv?”
“No, I’m just…I don’t know what I’m doing.” “I like watching the waves break,” Dana says. “The way they crash and slip back. The way they reform.”
“I’m not a wave,” Marco says.
“No, you’re not. But I love you just the same.” Marco feels the pressure of Dana’s arms around his neck, and he touches her arms with his fingers, taking in the texture of the fine hairs on her arm, the rhythm of her pulse. He feels pressure on the side of his face, and when he touches it, his fingertips tell him his cheek was wet.
“You kissed me.”
“Well , I’ll be,” Dana says, her eyes sparkling. “Even a man in a prosthetic body can blush.”
by J.R. Blackwell | Jun 15, 2006 | Story
Gabriella Hawk limped though the skywalks of The Hall. She could have slung her body into her metal skeleton to move quickly and easily, but Gabriella was determined to make use of her waking hours when she could. She wanted to make her body move under her own power. There was no use in being Awake if you couldn’t take advantage of the limitations of the body.
The metal walkways glowed with the soft green light of the thousands of tanks that hung suspended on giant hooks, linked to each other in marvelous chains. When Gabriella first started working in The Hall, she had been amazed at the silence with which the machines could move the great chains of people around in their glass cylinders. She could call any particular person to her, to inspect their pod personally for damage or computer errors. There were never any problems; the system had been automated perfectly for almost a hundred years.
There used to be thousands of Halls, but now, with everyone within the Halls, there were only eight. Eight halls for three billion sleeping people. Gabriella knew all the other caretakers by name. In the World, everyone knew her name, Gabriella the Martyr, giving up ten years of her life to watch over The World.
Inside their cylinders, everyone dreamed a communal dream of The World, where they lived in palaces, worked on art and literature and science, where they sculpted their own bodies and modeled their own sensations. Gabriella found herself trying to adjust her own body for its aches and pains, but the limitations of being Awake meant that her sensations were not under her control.
She noticed things, being Awake, like how dust settled in the metal edges of the walkway and how her hair looked much more fluid than in The World. She learned what bile was after eating some food that didn’t agree with her, and how boring regular bowel movements were. These little things make the experience seem surreal. Most things felt like they were the same, her fingertips still felt the same textures, and he feet were still shocked by cold floors and comforted by soft socks.
Gabriella called the cylinder of the young man to her station. Calling his cylinder was part of her daily ritual. She checked his diagnostics, and compared his time to hers. In her time, she had moved six months; in his it was five years. She watched a day tick by for him on his timer.
She could have called up a video image of what he was doing, but she didn’t have to look to know. He was with his wife and their child, a rare thing in The World, the fact that children were always planned made them more of a rarity, and the birth rate had plummeted.
Here, on the outside of The World, she did not have to watch him be happy with someone else. Gabriella folded her heart up and left The World to be Awake, cold, weak and losing years of life. To the people in The World, she was a saint, giving up years of her mental life to care for them. Their adoration afforded her a strange comfort. She did not need to touch his skin or smell his boy smell or sleep with her head on his chest. Saints do not need dreams. Saints were for sacrifice.
by Kathy Kachelries | Jun 14, 2006 | Story
“How much money are we talking?” Jake asked.
“Fifty thousand dollars.”
Jake couldn’t see the doctor’s face, but he’d developed a mental image of the man over the past few days and was certain that he had grey hair, a white jacket, a mustache, and an utterly blank expression. His voice carried as much energy as a hypoderm of sedative, and he made a shuffling sound when he walked.
“And what’s the interest rate?”
“Our reports say that your credit isn’t sufficient,” the doctor said.
“But I earn twice that every year!”
“As a graphic designer.”
Jake was silent.
“Your credit line is dependent on your projected income,” he continued. “Without your eyesight, you won’t be-”
“I’ll have my eyesight back, if I get these implants.”
“Unfortunately, that’s a technicality.”
Jake inhaled slowly, smelling the still air of of the room. He’d only been blind for nine days, but he already felt that his other senses had heightened. Beneath its antiseptic tartness the hospital concealed thousands of odors: chemical, human, and several that could have been either. Right then, the room smelled like body odor, bleach, and metal.
“There’s an alternative, though,” the doctor continued. “Are you familiar with bio-ads?”
Jake shook his head.
“Jenson Pharmaceuticals has been working on it for years, and they’re in the final stages of testing. The display would take up less than an eighth of your field of vision.”
“I don’t have a field of vision,” Jake said.
“You will. The display is embedded in a top-tier implant, which they pay for in full. All you’re responsible for is the aftercare.”
“They’ll just give me fifty thousand dollars worth of hardware?”
“In exchange for a captive audience.”
For the first time since the accident, Jake grinned. “And all I have to do is watch their ads?”
“That’s it,” said the doctor. “About forty years of them.”
