Titanium (Bionics) (8 page)

I get flashes, things I think are memories, like the cries and moans of people around me, the wailing of babies and helpless children, as well as the resulting violence that ensued due to looting and riots after the blasts. I have seen all of the
news reports about the chaos that engulfed the country after the explosions, and even though I was there for it all, I remember very little. Though, there is the face of a girl in my mind constantly, a brunette with a dirt-streaked face who was trapped beneath the same truck. I can remember holding her hand when I was conscious on that first day, watching as blood poured from her nose and ears. Even as I watched her bleed to death right in front of me, I looked her in her hazel eyes and lied to her.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” I said. “Someone will come. They will save us.”

By the time they show up with cranes to sift through the wreckage, it is too late for her and by then I know I’m going to die too. More than that, I want to die as I know that nothing can possibly exist from my hips down. I am mangled beyond repair and I’d rather die than live the rest of my life as half a man.

When the withdrawal finally begins to fade, I am able to pick up on the conversations happening around me as doctors and people wearing government badges come and go. I realize that I’ve undergone several surgeries and that these people are actually attempting to put me back together. Seeing as how I am too weak to lift my head, I have no way of inspecting their handiwork. I honestly have no idea if I’d even want to.

Eventually, a man I’ve never met before comes to visit. He sits beside my hospital bed wearing a worried expression, despite the many cuts and contusions across his face and the sling holding his arm against his body. As he gazes down at me and cries, I know without having to ask that this man is the father I never knew.

I ask him why he is here now, when he didn’t think twice about abandoning my mother nearly twenty years ago. He tells me that the blasts caused him to realize that he’d lost everyone he ever loved in the world.
His parents, his siblings … all dead. In a mad search for anyone he could call his own, he found me bleeding to death in a city hospital. That’s when he gives me the news that changes my life forever.

To save me
he signed me up for the Healing Hands Initiative, a branch of the new government project created by then Senator Christopher Drummond called The Restoration. This man would soon become the president that terrorizes people like me.

He tells me about the titanium bones they’ve created to replace my ribs, part of my spine, pelvis, legs and feet
, as well as the never-before-used machinery that will enhance me in ways previously never thought possible. He says that it was the only way to save me from being a cripple for the rest of my life, or even possibly dying. I ask him how he could dare to make decisions about my life without consulting me, as if he knows anything about me other than the fact that we share DNA. What the fuck does he want me to do, give him a hug and call him daddy?

He says that he just wanted to know that he hadn’t lost everyone. I tell him to get the hell out of my room and not to come back. I haven’t seen him since
…

Two years have passed and I am finally accustomed to my new life as a sideshow freak.
After months of physical therapy, I now know how to use my prosthetic limbs as if I were born with them. With clothes on, no one even knows that I’m different, yet I know that I can’t get too comfortable. Not all of the Bionics are able to hide, and the climate is slowly changing when it comes to people’s attitudes about us. President Drummond won his election in the year 4006 by a landslide, effectively gaining his status as America’s savior. His rhetoric against the Bionics begins after a man with a bionic arm was recorded robbing a fueling station outside of Las Vegas. With every day that passes, the hatred and fear spread more and more, and I know it’s only a matter of time before the government starts rounding us up and performing mass executions. As we’ve all legally registered for the program, they now know who each and every one of us are and where we live and work. We are no longer safe.

I’ve given up my life as a drug dealer; being sober feels better than anything I’ve felt in a long time. The pay I earn hauling furniture for a moving company is barely enough to keep food in my belly and pay to rent my room in a boarding house, but it’s an honest life. Almost dying
has taught me the value of living.

One day,
I am approached by a woman named Jenica Swan. All she can tell me is that she works for the government; her exact profession is privileged information. She’s come to warn me, she says, about the firestorm headed our way. Soon, not even she will be safe in her government job and we will all have to go into hiding. She gives me Professor Neville Hinkley’s card and tells me that when the government starts cracking down on the Bionics, they will go after those with a criminal past first. That means I’m in deep shit.

I carry the Professor’s card around in my pocket for days, torn between calling him to see what he wants with me and tearing it to shreds and throwing it down a gutter. After
awhile I shove the card deep into my wallet and forget about it. After all, Professor Hinkley was the ringleader of the Healing Hands initiative; I have no reason to trust him. I never think of him again until the M.P.s come crashing through my front door, guns set to kill.

As I run for my life
, I pray to God that I don’t blow some kind of gasket in my machinery. I’ve never run so fast in my life. Weeks of traveling and hiding in the most obscure places while scrounging and—to my shame, stealing—in order to eat and survive find me on the outskirts of Atlanta. An old friend of mine knew of a monorail operator who would smuggle Bionics in the middle of the night for a fee. After promising to pay him back when I’m able, I boarded the train on my friend’s dime, surrounded by a rag tag bunch of outcasts, many of whom looked as scared and uncertain about their futures as I did.

Would we even survive the night? For all I knew, the M.P.s were waiting at the end of the line to cart us all off to
Stonehead. The maximum security prison, formerly home to America’s most dangerous convicts, has been cleared out to make room for Bionics with criminal pasts. In some areas, there are rumors that the M.P.s are targeting non-criminal Bionics, and even showing brute force toward those family members harboring them.

Naturally, people were fighting back, but no one ever wanted to hear about the desperation of those poor souls backed into a corner by the trigger-happy Military Police. All anyone ever saw were the news reports, which filled the airwaves with images of Bionics acting violently toward M.P.s. No one seemed to care that we acted in self-defense. All they could
see was that people with robotic limbs and organs were capable of things other humans were not. They saw us as weapons, and feared that we would turn on them. The proposals calling for the immediate arrest and disassembly of all Bionics were coming from all sides of the political spectrum, and President Drummond’s rhetoric was growing more and more inflammatory.

By the time I reached Atlanta—after several stops and days spent hiding in the baggage car of the monorail—the manhunt for every man, woman and child who’d ever received a Bionic limb from the government was on.

I met Blythe on one of the hottest days of the year 4008. Even though we’d just had snow the day before, the temperature was now a blazing 110 degrees in Atlanta, and Georgia’s characteristic humidity was at an all-time high. It is a sign of the times we live in—melted snow streaming down the street in slushy chunks as people in tank tops, shorts, and sandals walk the sidewalk covered in a glistening sheen of sweat.

I’d give anything to be wearing shorts right now, but I can’t let my legs show. The linen pants I’m wearing are thin, but everything feels like a turtleneck and a pair of corduroys in this heat. I’m walking through a well-to-do neighborhood in Northern Atlanta, heading toward a safe house for Bios I’m sharing with about fifteen other people. The safe house is run by an old man we call Pops, and he is not one of us. He lost most of his family in the blasts and just wants to help in any way he can. Little do we know that on this day, the hottest day of 4008, we will lose our only friend and protection from the world in a
raid.

It is because of this raid that I encounter a girl with a Bionic eye, who sits on the lawn in front of a sprawling, three story house with a white picket fence, crying as she stares down the barrel of a gun. Somehow, everything else ceases to exist in that moment. The groceries I’m carrying fall to the ground and the paper sacks rip, spilling the contents across the pavement. I faintly register the smell of fire and smoke coming from deeper in the neighborhood and in my mind I know they’ve discovered our safe house and possibly several others.

Families line the street, many of them crying and screaming as M.P.s cart off their loved ones, shoving them into the back of the hovercrafts lining the street. These crafts are headed for Stonehead and everyone knows once you go in, there is no coming out.

Why this one girl should pull on my heart strings when there are others suffering nearby, I am not sure. Maybe it’s because of the three bodies strewn across the lawn behind her; two adults and a child no older than five, all dead. Maybe it’s because instead of arresting her for due process, three jackass
M.P.s  are taunting her over just having killed her family, and threatening to kill her for fighting back as they dragged her from the house.

As I run to her, she looks up and her eyes connect with mine. I know I have to save her.

It all happened so fast, but within the span of a minute, I’d kicked loose one of the boards of the white picket fence and used it as a weapon against the three M.P.s. Despite my broken past, this is the first time I will ever kill. I feel no remorse as I shove the pointed fencepost through the face shield of the last officer standing, feel no pity as his blood bathes my neck and shoulders. I feel only primal satisfaction for finally fighting back.

I am tired of running.

The girl is in the fetal position on the ground, clutching the little girl against her chest and sobbing in a way I’ve never heard anyone sob before. The sound will haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.

By now we’ve caught the attention of others, who have seen what I’ve done. A riot breaks out on the street, with Bios fighting alongside their families, desperate to save themselves and each other, tired of taking shit from the government.

In the midst of the fray is Blythe, broken, beaten and grieving, lying in the grass like a kicked puppy, waiting to die.

I won’t let her.

I scoop her into my arms and lay her over my lap as I straddle the seat of an unattended hover bike. Somehow we make it out of the neighborhood alive and to another safe house I know about across town. Blythe sits and stares off into space for two days without moving or speaking. The woman who runs the safe house, Mae, bathes Blythe and changes her clothes. She tries to coax Blythe to eat or drink, but she won’t. She doesn’t speak. All she can tell us is that her name is Blythe and that her family was murdered right in front of her.

It is on that third day, when the M.P.
’s raids sweep the city in our direction, that I remember the Professor’s card in my wallet. There is talk of a revolution, a resistance, an organization started by the very man who created us. I don’t know if the rumors are true, but if Jenica Swan can be believed, contacting the Professor will provide me with a safe haven.

On the third day after Blythe’s family was killed, I smuggle her out of the safe house and into the trunk of Mae’s car. She’s agreed to get us as far West as she can, to get us as close to our rendezvous point with
Jenica Swan as she can. We arrive in Oklahoma without incident, where we meet up with another group of Bios headed in the same direction. Weeks later we arrive in Nevada, where we meet up with the co-founder of the Resistance. She ushers us on board a hovercraft with twenty others and flies us out over the painted dessert.