Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Sarah wasn’t going to give up.

That was what they wanted, of course. For her to give up.

Or, rather, what they wanted was for her to be captured and neutralized and, apparently, they wanted to take away her mechanical arm, all of which they — whoever They were — had achieved without much, or any, difficulty, and so her giving up might have been, in Their minds, a rather moot point.

In anyone’s mind, a moot point, actually, including hers. Especially hers.

Not giving up meant she was going to do what, specifically?

Scooch the chair inch by inch the five or so feet to the metal table where her mechanical arm now lay lifeless and possibly ruined? Fine, sure, okay, and then what was she planning to do?

Her arm. The skin — her skin — had been stripped from it in uneven patches. The circuitry showed through, sinewy and blood-smeared, and the joints and the skeleton made of steel, or rather, made of an alloy that was better than steel, unbreakable and nearly impervious.

So what if she could get to it? She didn’t even know if it still worked, and even if it did, who the hell was going to reattach it?

Her?

Tied tight in this chair and not a doctor or a surgeon or a robotics engineer or whatever the hell she would have to be to reattach a mechanical arm, to herself?

She jump-scooched her chair another inch closer. Her forehead and her neck began to sweat. She jump-scooched another inch, maybe even two inches, and then the pain in her regular arm and the pain where they had pulled off her mechanical arm and the pain in her face and skull from where Wendy — that fucking bitch Wendy — had sucker punched her were all homing in on her, waking up to her, but she didn’t care.

She jump-scooched.

She jump-scooched.

She jump-scooched.

Her foot, if her legs hadn’t been tied down to this chair, her ankles hadn’t been strapped to the legs, her foot could have touched the table now if she extended her leg all the way.

And now her ankle, she could have wrapped her ankle around the wheeled leg of the table and drawn it to her.

And now her shin, she could have touched her shin to the leg, and her leg, she could have kicked the table over by now, or better yet, she could have thrown her foot onto the tabletop itself and brought the whole thing crashing down to her if she wanted, if she’d been able.

Jump-scooch. Jump-scooch. Her knee tipped against the closest leg, shifted the table a hair. She could smell it now, her arm, the metal and the blood of her arm swirling together in a perfect storm of copper penny down her nose and into her throat.

She breathed in huffing gusts through her nose and her wide-open mouth. She had drenched herself in so much sweat that the dried blood from Wendy’s punch had loosened, mixed, had run over her lips, onto her teeth and tongue.

But she didn’t care.

She had made it, goddamn it.

And now what?

She could close her eyes. She could let her body shudder to a halt. She could faint!

She could do practically nothing she wanted!

In truth, she had harbored the notion that making it would be enough, would be trial and sacrifice enough, that the universe or her arm would recognize her effort, would reward her for it somehow — That’s it, Sarah, you’ve done enough, you’ve done more than enough, let us take it from here — so she sat there huffing and sweating and wincing and concentrating, willing the arm to do some damn thing, waiting for the universe to right itself back in her favor, but nothing.

Not one damn thing.

She closed her eyes. She slumped her head — the rest of her, too, but the ropes wouldn’t slump with her — and she would have sobbed, would have started heaving and crying, but then the door opened, and two men came inside, and she pulled her shit together.

Mr. Niles and the doctor didn’t show her the arm they’d cut off after the operation.

Sarah wasn’t sure when or how she’d devised the notion that they would have, as if her now-detached arm were nothing more substantial than a pulled tooth, but she found herself asking about it, after the incident, after crushing the doctor’s leg, wrecking his lab and the operating room, after Mr. Niles led her quietly to her room, where she could heal and recover and come to some sort of grips with everything.

“Can I see it?” she asked when Mr. Niles, just before leaving, asked if there was anything else she needed.

“It?” he said, although, even then, even that early in their friendship, she could read him well enough to know he understood her question just fine.

“My arm,” she said. “The other one,” she said.

She expected him to cough or lick his lips or fiddle with his tie or look to the left or the right, expected him to employ any number of stalling techniques that would give him time to figure out how to answer this delicate and weird and horrifying — even Sarah understood it was weird and horrifying — request, but he didn’t deliberate. He didn’t hem or haw. He said, “No, of course not.” And then he nodded once and said, “Let me know if there’s anything else,” and then he was gone and she was alone with an arm that wasn’t hers, that wasn’t even human.

When it hung there at her side, her arm felt surprisingly just like any other arm. It didn’t feel heavy or deadened. Her shoulder, where the arm had been attached, felt numb, but only for the first hour or so after the operation.

Her room was bare. She had expected a dorm room or a hotel room of some kind, with a kitchenette and a living suite, but it was gray and quiet and, but for a twin bed attached to the wall and a sink and a closet for her clothes, empty. The mirror over the sink was small, square, and only just large enough for her to see her face, her hair, her shoulders, the very tops of her breasts if she were naked, and nothing else, but she found herself staring at the mirror every morning and every night for hours on end.

She stared at her shoulders and the tops of her arms, at her biceps, or what she could see of them if she let her arms hang at her sides, or what she could make of them — or the one, at first, her real bicep, which was the only one she could lift and squeeze into shape. A tiny white line of a scar wrapped itself around her shoulder where they’d attached the mechanical arm, and another identical scar wrapped around her other shoulder, and the two arms looked so much alike that there were days when she could convince herself that she couldn’t tell, either, which was which.

That first week and most of the second week, she couldn’t move it at all, not by thinking, not by trying. What had happened in the operating room, the way she had torn it apart, must have been a fluke, Mr. Niles told her. “Muscle memory, or a knee-jerk reaction,” he told her. “Like a chicken running around with its head cut off,” he told her. Which didn’t make her feel better, nor did it make any sense to her.

“It’s a process,” the doctor, crutched and timid in her presence, told her. “The internal operating system is still working out the best way to communicate with your own neurological system. And then your muscles and your synapses all have to be retrained. But it will work itself out. Leave it to its business and it will work itself out.”

But she couldn’t just leave it to its business. It was her arm, damn it. She couldn’t not try. She tried the first moment Mr. Niles left her alone, even though he’d told her not to, not for a couple of days at least. She walked into her room and closed the door with her normal arm and then turned around and stared at the closed door in front of her and willed her mechanical arm to lift. She tensed muscles. She closed her eyes and imagined a reality. A reality that involved her mechanical arm lifting full of grace and fluidity to open the door. She pretended the arm wasn’t even there, or was nothing special, that the last thing she wanted or needed was for the arm to make some movement, operate some simple machine. She tried to trick herself into using it. She let herself fall forward, tried to sneak up on the arm, jolt it into the action of catching her as she fell. She tried this sort of thing for what must have been hours, but none of it worked, and she was tired and sore and ready for bed. She struggled one-handed with her clothes and her shoes. Everything about her hurt and wanted to sleep. She sat down at the edge of the bed, winded and unhappy, only to remember she hadn’t turned off the light. She debated lying back on the bed and covering her eyes with her normal arm and sleeping with the light on but she hated sleeping with the light on. She sighed and leaned forward to give herself the momentum to stand back up, but leaning forward, something else happened: Her mechanical arm swung down of its own volition and grabbed her shoe, and before she knew it, her arm had thrown the shoe, hard, so very hard, at the light fixture over her head, hard enough to smash the fixture and the bulb and to stick her shoe firmly into the ceiling.