Darrow 1

My life becomes agony.
My Sigils are attached to the metacarpus in each hand. Mickey removes
the old Red Sigils and cultivates new skin and bone over the wounds. Then
he sets to installing a stolen subdermal datachip into my frontal lobe. I am
told the trauma killed me and they had to restart my heart. I've died twice
then. They say I was in a coma for two weeks, but to me it was nothing but
a dream. I was in the vale with Eo. She kissed me on the forehead and then
I woke and felt the stitches and the pain.
I lie in bed as Mickey tests me. He has me move marbles from one
container into other containers coded by colors. I do this for what seems a
lifetime.
"We are forming synapses, my darling."
He tests me with word puzzles and tries to make me read, but I don't
know how to read. "You will have to learn that for the Institute," he giggles.
My dreams are cruel things to wake from. In them, Eo comforts me, but
when I wake, she is nothing but a fleeting memory. I am hollow as I lie in
Mickey's makeshift medical cell. An ion germ killer buzzes next to my bed.
Everything is white, yet I can hear the thumping of music from his club. His
girls change my diapers and empty my piss bags. A girl who never speaks
bathes me three times a day. Her arms are willowy, her face soft and sad as
when I first saw her sitting with Mickey at his liquid table. The wings that
curl outward from her back are bound with a crimson ribbon. She never
meets my eyes.
Mickey continues to make me develop synapse connections as he repairs
the scar tissue from my neural surgery. He's all laughs and smiles and
lingering touches on my forehead as he calls me his darling. I feel like one
of his girls, one of the angels he sculpted for his own pleasure.
...
The scarred tissue on my back is peeled away with a laser and then the
raw flesh is sown with cultures of my own skin grown in tubes, which is
then irradiated to promote molecular bonding. It grows fast on my body,
like some sort of living creature apart from myself. It itches like a demon.
Mickey replaces the skin of my back and the skin of my hands where Eo
applied bandages to my burns. This, he says, is not to be my real skin. It is
only a homogeneous baselayer.
"Your skeleton is weak because Mars gravity is zero point three of
Earth's, my delicate little bird. Also, you have a diet deficient in calcium.
Gold Standard bone density is five times stronger than naturally occurring
bone density on Earth. So we will have to make your skeleton six times
stronger; you must be of iron if you want to last the Institute. This will be
fun! For me. Not you."
Mickey carves me again. The agony is beyond language or
comprehension. I watch videos of it afterwards to distract me from the
residual pain. He uses a vibroScalpel to slice the flesh of my thigh down the
middle. He parts my muscle and skin with clamps to expose the bones of
my legs. Then he peels off layers of the bone with a bonepeeler and paints
new layers with his improved-bone recipe.
"Someone has to dot God's i's."
The next day, he opens my arms. Then he does my ribs, my spine, my
shoulders, my feet, my pelvis, and my face. He also alters the tensile
qualities of my tendons and inserts biocultures to increase the density of my
muscle tissue Mercifully, he does not let me wake from this last surgery for
several weeks. When I do wake, I see his girls around me applying new
cultures of flesh and kneading my muscles with their thumbs. I wonder
what will happen to them when we have finished with me. Then I fall back
asleep.
I sleep in a tubular machine in which a specialized blue light crosses my
body to solidify the calcium formula beneath my flesh. Slowly, my skin
begins to heal. I am a patchwork fleshquilt. They begin feeding me
synthesized protein, creatine, and growth hormone to promote muscle
growth and tendon regeneration. My body trembles in the nights and itches
as I sweat through new, smaller pores. I cannot use pain medication
sufficient enough to numb the agony, because the altered nerves must learn
to function with the new tissue and my altered brain.
...
When I am ready, he inserts a forceGenerator into my sleeping tube to
simulate increased gravity on my frame. I've never known pain like this.
My body aches. My bones and skin and muscles scream against the
pressure and the change till I'm on medication that turns the scream into a
dull forever-moan. Before my skeleton is finished, Mickey replaces my
teeth with straight ones taken from some lab or corpse; I don't know. My
tongue plays over them. They are so slippery. Like cold tiles in my mouth.
I sleep for days. I dream of home and family. Every night I wake after
seeing Eo hang yet again. She sways across my mind. I miss her warmth in
bed beside me, even though they give me an HC immersion mask for
distraction.
Gradually, I am weaned from the pain medication. My muscles still
aren't used to the density of my bones, so my existence becomes a melodic
ache. They begin to feed me real food. Mickey sits on the edge of my cot
stroking my hair well into the nights. I don't care that his fingers feel like
spider legs. I don't care that he thinks I am some piece of art, his art. He
gives me something called a hamburger. I love it. Red meats and thick
creams and breads and fruits and vegetables make my diet. I have never
eaten so well.
"You need the calories," Mickey coos. "You have been so strong for me;
eat well. You deserve this food."
"How am I doing?" I ask.
"Oh, the hard parts are over, my darling. You are a brilliant boy, you
know. They have shown me the tapes from the other procedures where
other Carvers tried this. Oh, how clumsy the other Carvers were, how weak
the other subjects. But you are strong and I am briliant." He taps my chest.
"Your heart is like that of a stallion's. I've never glimpsed one like it before.
You may not know this, but its so large because you were bitten by a
pitviper when you were young, I assume?"
"I was. Yes."
"I thought so. Your heart had to adjust to counteract the effects of the
poison."
"My uncle sucked most of the poison out when I was bitten," I say.
"No," Mickey laughs. "That's a myth. The poison cannot be sucked out.
It still runs through your veins, forcing your heart to be strong if you want
to continue to live. You are something special, just like me."
"Then I will not die in here?" I manage.
Mickey laughs. "No! No! We are beyond that now. There will be pain.
But we are past the threat of mortality. Soon we will have made man into
god. Red into Gold. Even your wife would not recognize you."
That is all I've ever feared.
When they take my eyes and give me ones of gold, I feel dead inside. It's
a simple matter of reconnecting the optic nerve to the "donor's" eyes,
Mickey says. A simple thing he's done a dozen times for cosmetic purposes;
the hard part was the frontal lobe surgery, he says. I disagree. There is the
pain, yes. But with the new eyes, I see things I once could not. Elements are
clearer, sharper, and more painful to bear.
...
Mickey takes my hair next, ripping out the follicles and replacing them
with golden strands that itch like little golden weevils burrowing into my
scalp. Everything is changed.
It is weeks of physical therapy. Walking slowly around the room with
Evey, the winged girl, I'm left to my own thoughts.