The New Prometheus - EBOOKS

1.01

“Diagnostics complete, Doctor. All systems nominal. The prosthesis is ready for implant and activation.”
Doctor Xenox furrowed his brow in frustration and sighed. He ran this test every day, and every day he got the same answer. His masterpiece, his work of art, hanging there before him was ready, finished, and yet... incomplete.
He’d never had this trouble working at the corporations. There had always been a surplus of brains from willing test subjects that he could choose from to implant into his creations.
It had been the one thing that had frustrated him since leaving. It wouldn’t have changed his decision, of course, but maybe he could have worked something out using corporation resources before he’d left?
Whatever, it was too late now.
Much like he did most days between clinics, Xenox wondered how best to find the right person to be his willing test subject.
He saw several people every day. They came to his clinic with their failing cybernetics and whatever pittance they could afford, wanting him to fix their arm or leg.
He did it, often just removing the prosthesis, taking it as payment, and selling it. It helped him fund this project. Each time he had a visitor, he made mental notes about them, saving the data to his neural net for later access, hoping one day to find someone who might be a suitable donor.
Too many of them had a drug addiction or issues with their nanobots that made the procedure basically impossible. Besides, most probably wouldn’t survive the operation.
The cybernetic body hung before him, held in place by straps of flat weave Kevlar webbing, hooked up to the doctor’s network and support systems by innumerable cables and wires.
He’d made the body female modelling it after that young woman who had visited him a few times.
She said her name was Frankie. Probably short for Francesca.
She was beautiful, driven, and matched him in his hate for the corporations.
He’d met her a few times for a chat. He enjoyed her company but didn’t commit to her request that he give away free surgery for the needy. Although he sympathised with her mission, he needed the money for his project, and that was more important.
After stringing her along for a while, she’d stopped visiting. She must had realised he was wasting her time.
That was when he chose to model the look of his cyborg on her.
As a young woman, with an almost entierly natural body, she’d make a perfect brain donor, he was confident of that. But he also felt fairly sure she’d never agree to it. She wasn’t desperate enough and seemed to shun cybernetics, anyway, despite helping others who had them.
For weeks he’d tried to find her, never really getting very far due to her having no presence on social media, or almost anywhere online. There was nothing recent, anyway. He had found the record of her birth, and who her parents were. He wondered if their position and job had contributed to her mission in the Undercity, and decided it had.
But as for where she lived now? There was nothing.
Would he find someone else? Would he need to remodel her looks?
He didn’t want to. He really didn’t want to.
Looking up at the lithe, feminine form, he admired its beauty. He’d never gotten to choose what he made while at the corporations. The specs of the bodies were always pre-determined, and he had to follow those directions.
But no more. No more creating big ugly cyborgs for Psytech’s military contracts with their built-in weapon systems, arms that turned into mini guns and all the stuff that he found brutish and without finesse.
He saw himself as an artist, and this body before him was his Mona Lisa, his masterpiece. She was beautiful.
But it taunted him, hanging there, immobile, its eyes closed, silent and still.
He needed a suitable brain to bring it to life, but where would he get one of those?
A harsh buzzing sound rang throughout his lab, waking him from his reverie.
“Shit, who’s that?” he muttered to himself and used his neural net to log into the security system. In his field of vision, a video feed from his surveillance camera opened up to show a man standing outside, stabbing the buzzer with his finger. At his side, his metallic cybernetic arm shook and quivered, glitching like someone with a severe case of Parkinson’s.
Xenox sighed, opened up a link to the intercom, and with a thought, sent a message to the speaker. “I’ll be there in a moment.”
“Hurry up. This arm’s gonna…”
He closed the connection before the dirty looking man could say anything else.
“LUCI, shut down the prosthesis and lock up the lab behind me,” he said aloud. He didn’t need to, but he preferred to communicate with his system AI in that way.
“Of course, Doctor,” said the slightly too perfect feminine voice that emanated from the speakers connected to his mainframe.
Xenox walked from the private lab at the back of his ground-floor apartment he had taken as his own, and walked into the main living area, a large open space with a kitchenette, a few mismatched chairs, and his bed in the corner.
He sometimes looked at the dishevelled space with its old furniture that he picked up from anywhere and everywhere and lamented at how the mighty had fallen.
It was worlds away from the large, spotless apartment he’d had at Psytech with its clean lines and modern furniture. Even if he went back now, he doubted he’d get that same treatment. He’d shown himself to be a liability, after all. A recidivist, a rebel who wasn’t to be trusted.
The thick metal door to his private lab slid shut behind him with a satisfying hiss, followed by the sound of powerful locks slamming home.
He made his way to the front of his living space and the security door to his workshop. This one, apart from the electronic lock, wasn’t powered. He sent the pass key to the lock from his neural net and watched the small LED light flick from red to green as the lock opened. He walked through the door, closing and locking it behind him, and turned on the lamps in the room with another quick command.
A grubby looking gurney was in the middle of the room with lights, medical equipment, and cybernetic instruments arrayed around it. He started to power up the electronics by issuing commands from his neural net while moving to the front door and the security panel beside it.
He reopened the video feed from the cam outside to see the same man waiting outside, his arm still glitching about and out of control.
He opened a channel to the security panel again.
“Are you alone?” Xenox asked.
“Yeah, man. Let me in. This thing’s gonna kill me in a minute,” he said, an element of panic in his voice.
“Are you carrying any weapons?”
“Nah, man. I’m clean.”
“Let me see, lift up your shirt and turn around,” he said, checking the video feed to make sure this man wasn’t armed. He seemed not to be, as much as the crappy video could show him, anyway. Feeling about as secure as he ever did with these visits, he unlocked the door and swung it inward part way.
The man gave him a nervous smile.
“It’s going crazy, man. I don’t know what’s up with it,” he said, glancing at his own arm.
Xenox regarded the arm. He had seen a few like this. It often happened when the links between the brain and the prosthetic started to fail. The signals to it were getting scrambled. He could fix it, but it would be costly.
“Looks like your connections have been misfiring. I can fix it for you, but it’s not a quick procedure, and it won’t be cheap.”
“I can pay you. Whatever it takes. I just need this thing fixed before it strangles me or something,” he said. “Can I come in?”
Xenox opened the door a little wider and allowed the man to step in, his spasming arm hitting the door frame as he stepped inside.
“Thanks, Doc, I’d heard you were the one to come and see around here, is that right?”
“I don’t know, we’ll see, won’t we,” he said and pushed the door closed.
Before it clicked home into its frame, something hit the other side and knocked Xenox back as the door hit him in the head. He stumbled, dropping to one knee. His vision flashed and pixelated for a moment from the impact. He stayed upright as another man with a black mohawk jumped into his lab and pointed a handgun at him.
“Whoa, gave you a little jolt there, hey. Fuck, I bet his vision’s glitching like a motherfucker,” Mohawk joked to his friend. They both laughed as Xenox noticed Glitch’s arm suddenly lost its shake and returned to normal.
He was a decoy, sent in to get the door open. He cursed under his breath. He’d been careless.
“Right then, Gramps. We want some of those sweet prosthetics we’ve heard about. What you got for me?” Mohawk asked.
Xenox steadied himself and rose to his full height, and with a quick thought, icons blinked in his field of vision.
Mohawk never saw it coming, so when the figure emerged from the darkness behind the two men, moving quickly and decisively, Xenox couldn’t help but smile slightly.
White limbs moved in a blur, catching Mohawk in a headlock and grabbing his arm. The pale figure yanked the man’s gun arm up. Mohawk harmlessly discharged a few rounds into the plasterboard ceiling. Glitch yelped in fright and backed away from the shiny android doll as it twisted Mohawk’s arm. Mohawk screamed in pain before a sickening crack of bone sounded loud and clear.
The doctor moved slowly, reaching behind his back to draw the pistol he always kept tucked into his belt.
“Hey… hey, man, we’re sorry. It was nothing personal, you know? It’s just business, yeah, we can work this out…”
Xenox heard the man, but it was the usual crap, and he’d grown bored of it early on. These days, he took no prisoners and never gave anyone a second chance. Why should he? They wouldn’t give him a second chance.
So, he levelled the gun at Mohawk’s head and, without preamble, pulled the trigger. The gun's report echoed around the room as the back of Mohawk’s head exploded over the torso of the doll.
A relatively standard model, the doll was an android. A robot, just like the countless millions in the city and beyond. They had a humanoid appearance but were obviously synthetic with their shiny skin, mechanical joints, and cable sockets.
At Xenox’s neural command, the doll dropped the dead body of Mohawk and turned to look at Glitch with its shiny, black, shark-like eyes. An intimidating sight if ever there was one.
Glitch looked at the doctor, fear in his eyes and dropped to his knees.
“Sir, I’m sorry, we didn’t mean…” he pleaded, raising his hands in surrender.
Xenox turned to face him and pointed the gun at his head.
“You never do…” he sighed.