Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

Machinery hums — soft, electrical. He touches a plate near my left elbow. I don’t raise my head to look at the readouts. He is silent for an uncomfortably long time. “Problem?”

“Hmmm.”

You never want to hear a doctor, an officer, or a cop make that sound. “Hmmm?” My voice is muffled by the headrest.

I hear him depressing keys. “Sit up, please. Jenny, have you been sleeping with the prosthesis on?”

“So who sleeps?” I follow directions well. They teach you that in the army, too.

He has the decency to chuckle. “Not me. I’ve gotten hooked on online role-playing games. Raise your right arm.”

I do it. He watches the monitors over my shoulder. They are arranged so I can see, too: the electrical activity reads normal. More or less. One of the long-term problems with my cyberware is that it can’t match the delicacy of normal bioelectricity.

“Lower it. Now the left.”

The prosthesis straightens ceilingward.

“Hmmm.”

“Stop that, Simon.”

“Stop what?”

“Hmmm-ing.”

“Sorry.” He walks around in front of me and taps one of the monitors — flat screens, set in the office wall at eye level. “This dip here — damn, Jenny.” He interrupts himself, finger tracing a red line farther down the graph. “How much pain are you having?”

“Some,” I admit, lowering the metal arm.

“You want something for that?”

“I can’t,” I remind him. “No narcotics. Nothing else works.” Except the booze.

“Ah. Yeah. I’ve got some different anti-inflammatories I want you to try. How’s the arthritis?”

“It’s arthritis. How’s the tendinitis?”

“It only hurts when I laugh, so it doesn’t bother me much.” We share, for a moment, an old-friends grin. He turns back to the monitors after a moment. His finger moves back over to the sudden dip on the readout. “This concerns me.”

“Is that a loss of functionality?”

“It’s a minor degradation. So far.”

“Big problem?” I find myself leaning forward, frowning.

He shakes his head. “Not yet. But — you’re a freak, Jenny. You know that as well as I do. That you’ve survived this long, with the quality of life you have…”

“Don’t tell me it’s a miracle.”

He shakes his head with a rueful sigh. “I was going to say, enigma.” A long pause. “If you notice any pins and needles, let me know, okay? I’m going to test your reflexes now.” He touches an icon, and my left hand rises as if of its own volition, clenching into a fist.

“Damn, Simon. Now that’s creepy.”

“Yeah,” he says, making adjustments. “I think so, too.”

Afterward, he makes me lie facedown while he pulls the wires out of the processors. He pauses and takes his hands off me. “You’re drinking too much, aren’t you?”

“Fuck it, Simon.” He steps away and I sit up, yanking my shirt over the lumpy contours of the machinery snuggling my spine. “I’m still off the damned speed. There’s only so much you can expect of a girl in one lifetime. Do I need batteries yet?”

“No, you’re good.” He looks at me sadly while I button my shirt. “Want to do a bloodborne test? Cholesterol? Any of that?”

“When do you suppose was the last time I had sex?”

“Ah.” He turns away to strip off his gloves before leaving the examining room. By the time he knocks and returns, I’ve buckled my sidearm to my thigh and am stamping into my boots.

Simon moves abruptly, untelegraphed, only a few feet away. Something flashes toward my head. In that microsecond

the sensed world drifts to a crawl

my heartbeat decelerating in my ears

Simon transformed into a statue as

my left hand comes up to intercept and

my right hand drops

slaps leather

comes up with a nine-millimeter leveled

at Simon’s head

the left hand closing on a round red

object strikes metal with a wet thwap and I

almost

pull

the trigger.

By the time Simon’s wide eyes finally focus on the barrel of the pistol, I’m already drawing a deep breath to steady my shaking hand, lowering it by inches. A stream of juice drips over metal fingers, spattering the speckled white tile floor. The sharp scent of crushed apple fills the room.

I swallow hard and holster my gun. “Fuckall, Simon. I could have shot you.”

White behind the rich olive of his complexion, he manages a shaky smile. “Damn, Jenny.”

“You know what I am.” I turn away, buckling the safety strap over the grip of the pistol one-handed.

“It’s still amazing to watch you do that.” His head oscillates slowly from side to side. Admiration or rue?

I drop the crushed apple into a biohazard bag in the corner by the stainless steel sink. There are still droplets of water on the floor from Simon’s handwashing. “Amazing? Yeah. As amazing as walking out of twenty years of service with a combat-drug-and-painkiller habit to dull the hypersensitivity and the hurting. So get off my back about the booze, already. I’m entitled to one or two vices, considering how many I gave up.”

He turns the water on so I can rinse my sticky metal fingers and he pats me on the shoulder. “All right, Jenny. But do me one favor?” I dry my hands on the towel he hands me.

“What’s that?”

He pokes me in the ribs. “Eat something once in a while?”

I leave Simon’s office with a head full of unanswered questions and an ache in place of my heart, having promised to stop on the way home and find something for breakfast. I could have taken surface trans — Hartford’s long-contemplated light rail never quite materialized, but electric buses run until ten o’clock or so, although not into my neighborhood. I took one much of the way to the medical building.

Hartford isn’t a big town. That’s one of the reasons I like it. The morning promises fair and cool, the first traces of autumn outlining the leaves of a few caged trees that haven’t yet choked. First time I was here, in ’35, ’36—whenever it was — it had almost as many trees as in Toronto. Tugging a black leather glove on over my left hand, I decide to walk.

I leave the buckles of my jacket open, the sidearm in plain view as I follow Jefferson Street east to Main before turning north, parallel to the river but out of sight of it. My body shakes with the aftereffects of adrenaline and my boosted reflexes. In the service, I learned to self-medicate, the way a lot of people with more organic problems than mine do. In fact, you might say I have an inorganic problem. Hah. When I got out, I couldn’t get the combat drugs anymore. The Hammer, guaranteed to make you just as invincible and focused as a dose of PCP, but without the recreational effects. Also allegedly nonaddictive. Like cigarettes and caffeine. So I learned to make do with less legal things. It took me about four years to wise up.

I was lucky to have good friends.

When they reconstructed me after the bad one, the army modified just about everything about the way I respond to threat, from my endocrine system to muscle memory. The human body isn’t meant to withstand what mine has been engineered to do. There are prices. My heart still hammers in my chest. The edges of my vision hang dark in the long minutes before the enhanced reflexes let go of my nervous system, but I force myself to breathe slowly, look calm, walk with as little trace of a limp as possible.

I’m paranoid. I’m also pushing fifty, and the two are not unrelated.

An early hour, for this neighborhood. It makes the street quiet. Park Avenue and Main Street, by ratty little Barnard Park. Here, at the edge of the barrio, I pass three gangsters in Hammerheads colors — Face’s boys — standing in the shadow of a doorway. Up late. Nothing but a house fire would have gotten them out of bed this early.