by Anne E. Johnson
“Did I used to be nicer?” Tina stared hard at Rob, waiting for his answer. The surgical mask over his nose and mouth emphasized his eyes, so Tina figured she could tell if he lied. His eyes, unlike hers, were still a natural hazel. “You’ve known me forever,” she said, “so you have some context, you know?”
Rob held up a small metal plate bordered with pulsing green lights. “The patella implants are ready. We should do this now, please.”
Tina grinned, pretending not to be offended by how he’d evaded the question. “Whatever you say, Doc. Gas me up.”
The last thing Tina thought before going under was, I’m sure my heart used to be bigger.
Six hours later, when she was sealed up and perked up and testing out her new-and-improved legs, the size of her heart didn’t matter to her.
“No complications,” Rob said glumly. His slight frown made deep lines in his face, and Tina wondered how long it had been since his last NovaDermo treatment. She had her own face done every month and a new skin tint too, just for kicks. This month her body gleamed iridescent mauve. Very fashionable. And very, very smooth.
Still, Rob’s facial creases suited his earnest personality. “You’re sad,” Tina said. “You’re rich and healthy. Why so blue?”
“Nothing,” he said with a shrug. “Except, you’ve been getting so many fixes.”
“Sure have!” Proudly Tina listed the cyber-surgeries she’d had just in the past year. “Femur reinforcement. Velocity digits.” She wiggled her fingers so fast, they blurred. “UroDry.” When Rob cocked his head, she explained, “It condenses my pee so I don’t have to go so often. Great for parties. And also orgies.”
Rob’s skin was naturally reddish-brown, but she could see the hint of a blush anyway. Amused, she went on. “Plus digital corneas.” She blinked slowly, sweeping her artificial eyelashes up and down. “You like my emerald eyes? The color is created from the image inside an actual emerald.” When Rob didn’t react, she went on with her list. “An ossi-rubber ribcage, which you did an awesome job on, by the way. Oh, and you did my elbows back in January.”
When he didn’t return her grin, she tried a joke. “Gotta wonder if there’s any of the original Tina Juarez left!”
“Maybe you should search for her.”
The comment was so quiet Tina didn’t trust her ears, despite her cochlear enhancements. “Say what?”
But Rob just gave her a flustered smile and changed his tune. “Um, you can run on any surface now. Even deep sand will feel like an Olympic track. Enjoy. I’m sure I’ll see you again soon, for whatever the new fashion fix is for the skeleton.”
“You bet you will, genius. I wish you did the whole bod.” Tina moved to kiss his cheek, but he jerked away, pretending to type into his tablet, the way he might shrink from someone grotesque or diseased. She told herself it was her imagination.
∞
She thought about going for a run, just to test out the new product. But after half a day in the surgical clinic, she had a more urgent need to attend to: a little exercise for her favorite implant.
“You the girl with the sex fix?” some almost-sober guy asked the moment Tina took a bar stool in Swirl, her usual hangout. “I hear you come every night,” he added with a smirk.
Major wit, this one. And he wasn’t finished. “I got a few special fixes myself, sugar. You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
Without a word, Tina grabbed her drink and walked away. She was horny, but not that horny. Leaning on a standing table in the corner, she surveyed the crowded room. If she willed her corneas to lose focus, everyone looked the same in the club’s dark red light. That was disturbing, but not as terrifying as what she realized when her eyes refocused.
“Christ, I’ve screwed practically all of ’em,” she said, her voice drowned out in the pulsing wash of electronic music. Moving her gaze from one sweaty, stoned face to the next, she could remember all of the sex, but none of the people she’d done it with.
The gynecologist who’d given her the fix between her legs had tried to warn her. The greater the pleasure-zone enhancement, the lesser the emotional response, he’d claimed.
“It’s what I wanted,” Tina told her drink as she remembered his words. “Better this way. No complications.”
“Who the hell you talkin’ to, girl?”
Tina turned to find her friend, Plastique, elbowing in next to her. “You’re jabberin’ like a meth fiend.”
“You have such a nice manner,” Tina said over the booming soundtrack. “Your mama must be so proud.”
Plastique raised her drink in tandem with her painted-on eyebrow. “Honey, the whole reason I got this sex change was so I could be my own mother. So, yeah, Mama’s mighty proud.”
Tina managed a laugh at the tired routine, but Plastique didn’t buy it. “What’s eatin’ you? I thought you got a leg fix today, and with that hot doc, too.”
The phrase made Tina oddly uncomfortable. “Rob Jensen isn’t hot. He’s practically my brother.”
“Well, I got no moral compunction against incest, sweetie, long as everyone’s consenting and of age.”
“Ugh! Stop it!” Tina said. Prancing in place to show off her new knees, she tried to change the subject. “They feel great!”
But Plastique knew her too well, and still had a man’s height and strength. With one hand on Tina’s shoulder, she stopped the manic dance. “Come with me. Now,” Plastique said, scooping Tina by the waist and whisking her into the ladies’. “Spill, child.”
Tina leaned against the mirror and sighed. “It’s not like it used to be.”
“And that’s a bad thing why?” Plastique jammed a fist above her generous hip. “Ain’t that what we pay the fix docs for? So nothing’ll be the same?”
“I mean… I don’t know.” Searching for an elusive word, Tina orbited nervously around Plastique. Then she stopped. “I think I mean love.”
“Love!” As if on cue, a toilet flushed in a stall. “Like, marriage and shit?”
“No!” Tina retorted. “I’m not a Neanderthal.”
“So, what do you mean?”
“Feeling something.”
Poking her floral faux fingernail toward Tina’s crotch, Plastique said, “You and your super-erogenous self are feeling more than the next thousand people. That’s not enough for ya?”
Glancing in the mirror, Tina ran a comb through her fuchsia bangs. “It used to be. I just want to remember what it was like to, to…”
“To care?”
“Yeah.” She felt foolish suddenly. “Never mind. I’m buzzed and tired. I’m gonna go get laid.”
She took a step toward the door, but Plastique blocked her way. “I know this guy.”
“I know plenty of guys.”
“No, I mean, he designs fixes.” Plastique leaned close and whispered, “There’s an amazing one in the pipeline.”
An addict’s lust for a hit crawled up Tina’s back. She had to know about it. And, whatever it was, she had to have it. Plastique paused while a woman took forever washing and drying her hands. Finally she went on. “It’s got some fancy science name. But he says they’re calling it Dreamwire.”
Tina felt woozy. “Sounds incredible. What does it do?” Not that it mattered.
As she answered, Plastique waggled her long fingers like a sorceress giving an incantation. “It reconnects you with your subconscious desires. So you can, like, live your dreams.” She paused for effect. “Sounds like just the kick in the fanny you need, girl. Find out what’s locked away in the old noggin.”
Tina’s heart thumped so fast, she had trouble speaking. “They put it… inside? In the brain?”
Plastique’s answer was a slow nod and an evil grin.
“Awesome. Where can I get one?” Tina’s question was carefully worded. She had not asked, When will they be available?
Plastique understood the code. “My friend can hook you up while it’s stuck in the swamps of the Effin’ D. A.” That was the usual way fix junkies referred to the government’s regulatory department.
“Prototype?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Putting a chummy arm around Tina’s shoulder, Plastique promised, “I’ll text you the deets.”
With more hope than she’d felt in ages, Tina slipped out into the sea of flesh to find a friend or two for the night.
∞
It was no mildewed shack with an unlicensed quack, but a clean, tony high-rise overlooking Lake Michigan. It was the kind of place where the one percent could pay a top-notch doc a little extra—okay, a lot extra—for an extra-special or extra-secret something.
The surgeon, Indira Chung, had skin the color of strong Darjeeling tea. Tina happened to know from a recent orgy with her that her belly was slightly darker than her face. “Hello, Doctor,” Tina said modestly, as if she hadn’t screamed out, Oh, Indira! a few times the week before.
The doc was pretending, too, or else she wasn’t any good at distinguishing faces in a lust pile. She paged through something on her tablet. “You’ve had a lot of fixes already.” It came out unnaturally flat, so Tina knew she was trying to keep the judgment from her tone. “Over thirty. Is that correct?”
“They make life super,” Tina gushed in a little girl’s voice while thinking, I’m paying you an ass-load of money. What’s with the third degree?
Or maybe she asked it out loud, since the doc answered her. “The PS-4.6 gets implanted directly into your brain, so it affects everything in your body, bio or techno.”
“Oh, wow.” Tina tried to sound like she cared. She just wanted that damn implant already. “Are all my fixes a problem?”
“Nobody knows. Yet.” Doctor Chung stared hard at Tina, an unspoken warning.
Tina stared back just as intently. “Let’s be the ones who find out.”
When the doc nodded, Tina felt that rush, like a tweaker who sees her dealer coming down the block. “What’s it look like?” she asked. She always wanted to see the gizmos before surgery, so she could picture them when they were functioning inside her.
The doc handed her a hard plastic package, the kind of casing music players came in. Across the top was a green sticker with a logo reminiscent of a yin-yang symbol. Beneath the logo was text: “Dreamwire (psychosendesi 4.6). Let your deepest desires rise.”
In the center of the packaging, a two-inch wire was suspended. “Looks like an opened-up paperclip,” Tina said, wishing for something flashier.
“I promise you, it’s not a paperclip,” the doc said drily. “But it could be just as dangerous to insert this into your temporal lobe. Still want it?”
As far as Tina was concerned, the danger doubled the fun. “Let’s do it.”
∞
“Posh” was the first word that occurred to Tina when she woke up. She was in a majestic hotel suite. “Implant,” she reminded herself. She’d been in this hotel before, more than a few times. Several of the high-end docs used it as a recovery room.
Tina’s internal ThinkChat phone rang. Recognizing Plastique’s ringtone, she rubbed the remote slider implant in her forearm to answer. “Talk to me.”
“You talk to me,” Plastique said. “How’s the gourd, sista?”
After a quick assessment for headache and blurred vision, Tina answered, “Fine, I guess. I knew Indira had skilled hands, but damn. She is good. I don’t feel anything.” She explored her scalp with tentative fingers. Just at the crown, her hair was shaved in a one-inch circle and a thin line was raised on her skin. “She messed up my haircut.”
“We’ll call it a fashion statement.”
Tina didn’t laugh, though. Something pissed her off. “I don’t feel anything,” she complained.
“Yeah, you said that.”
“I mean, I paid two mill to feel. Shouldn’t I be feeling?”
Plastique sighed impatiently. “I’m sure it’ll kick in.”
“It better. Meet for coffee?”
“Some of us have to work, trust fund girl. See you tonight at Swirl. Text if there’s an update. All your fans are dying to know.”
When they’d hung up, it occurred to Tina that she should have been left with instructions. But Dr. Chung hadn’t told her a thing. Or maybe she had, and Tina had already forgotten. She didn’t know what to expect to happen to her, or what might go wrong. Nor could she reach Dr. Chung if there was an emergency. For the first time since she was a fix-virgin, Tina regretted getting the implant.
“Don’t be such a wuss,” she said, scolding herself. “You survived that first fix.” She rubbed the left side of her belly, where the calorie burner had been implanted ten years before. “A decade of stuffing my face and staying sexy thin. That worked. This one will, too.”
Defiantly Tina tossed her duvet aside and sat up. The sudden ache in every joint pushed her back down against the mattress. Stunned, she considered what might be wrong. “I pulled something during sex?” But she’d had elasticity molecules injected into her muscles six months before, to prevent that very thing. She was really puzzled. Full-body aching shouldn’t have been possible.
Then the tears started, quietly at first, accompanied by a general sadness. As her sobs came harder, the source of her misery twisted more clearly into focus. Loneliness. Intolerable loneliness, pummeling her stomach, bruising her bones.
“If I just lie here, I’ll die from this,” she said, relieved at the option. But when the ache turned into a searing, bright, desperate pain, like a rat clawing her entrails, Tina’s terror drove her from the bed.
She was naked. “I just need to get laid,” she told herself as she pulled on her tank and short shorts with the clumsiness of a toddler. “Just need somebody’s attention for a bit.”
It was a lie, and she knew it, but it kept her from having to admit how scared and mystified she was. All Tina knew for sure was that she wanted somebody in a way she never had before.
The swank corridors, elevator, and lobby went by in a blur. She’d made it almost to the front door when her need for meaningful companionship grew so intense that it buckled her knees. “Be with me!” she moaned to whoever happened to be passing, grabbing his legs. It was some businessman, the sharp crease of his trousers pressed to her face, filling her nose with dry cleaning chemicals.
“Get off me!” He stumbled backwards, pulling free.
Tina fell forward, only to feel rough hands tugging her upright. “Miss, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
The normal Tina would have had choice words for a self-satisfied authority figure getting in her face. But this wasn’t the normal Tina. As if she were at the movies, she watched herself hug the security guard and wail, “Oh, please love me!” She felt herself lifted and hurled like a bag of lawn clippings, and then saw the sidewalk coming toward her. But the jagged sting of scraped elbows and knees didn’t lessen the pain of her longing.
Grabbing a nearby mailbox, Tina staggered to her feet. A thousand hints of thought curled through her mind, ghosted in the blinding light of her strange desire. A thousand tasks she should do, places she should go, questions she should ask. But the street teemed with life partners waiting to be ensnared, so everything else would have to wait.
One by one by one by one, approach and rejection, appeal and rebuff. Tina didn’t just offer her body. She wanted to give her whole self. Some recoiled. Some called for the cops. A few gave her hugs and the address of a battered women’s shelter or the number for a suicide hotline.
This went on all day. Even though she felt the blisters on her feet and knew she needed to rest and eat and drink, Tina lurched on. Finally, when the sun set, habit kicked in.
“Swirl.” The name of her nightly hangout felt sandy in her throat. Still, it was a relief to have a familiar destination. Maybe there was hope. Even though the stores lining the streets waved like aquarium exhibits as she weaved past, somehow she found her way to Swirl.
“Come back when you’re cleaned up, lady.”
It took Tina several seconds to realize that Sam, the weeknight bouncer, was talking to her. “Sammy, it’s me. Teeny Tina! You wanna get married, Sammy?” She lunged toward him, arms out, to embrace his barrel chest. His huge hands encircled her rib cage. The ground sank away from her feet as he picked her up. “You do love me!” she gasped, drowning in a flood of gratitude. “We’ll be together forever.” The slogan she’d read on the Dreamwire packaging floated through her mind: “Let your deepest desires rise.” They were rising, all right, and it felt like paradise.
But Tina’s ecstasy was cut short by a voice she knew very well. “Samuel, so help me, you put my girl down or I’ll snap that linebacker neck of yours like you was a giraffe with osteoporosis.” Before Tina could object, Plastique dragged her by the elbow through the club and into the ladies’.
“What the hell happened?” Plastique asked, pushing Tina firmly against the cool tile wall. “I been calling you for the past twelve hours.”
Tina heard her words, but understood only that Plastique loved her. “We would be so good together,” she said fervently. “Forever and always each other’s.”
“What did they do to you? Where’s my Tina?”
In answer, Tina stood on tiptoe and planted a wet kiss on Plastique’s lips. “Rubbery,” Tina sighed dreamily.
“Collagen,” Plastique snapped. “Let’s get you to a doctor.”
While Tina tripped behind her, grasping her sequined belt and proclaiming eternal love, Plastique marched out the back of the club and through the dark streets. Her cell phone stayed glued to her ear as she bickered with someone.
“Who you calling, sweetheart?” Tina asked in what she thought was a flirty tone. “Whoever he is, you won’t miss him now that you’re with me. I always knew you and I belonged—”
“Get in, space cadet.” Plastique held open the passenger door of her car and gave Tina a shove. “We’re going to the Vortex.”
That was what they called St. Regis Medical Center, where Tina had had most of her fixes done. Normally the word “Vortex” set off her Pavlovian drool, but tonight it made her want to retch. “No more fixes. Never again.” She pawed at Plastique’s hand on the gear shift. “We have to stay real for each other, darling.”
“Okay. I’m officially freaked out now.” Plastique floored the gas.
They came to a screeching halt in front of St. Regis’ 24-hour urgent care entrance. The moment they stepped inside, Tina started to change. Something about the weirdly white fluorescent lights ticked her off. Or maybe it was the stern, businesslike chatter among the staff, treating people like items in an inventory. “It’s all evil,” Tina murmured.
When no one looked up from the registration forms, Tina stood and shouted, “It’s all evil! You’re all evil! Fixes are evil!” She was up on the waiting room chairs, fists toward the ceiling. “Negator. I want the Negator now!” It took Plastique and two orderlies to fight her down to the floor.
Her brain roiled with the need to be cleansed. The Negator was the anti-fix bomb, a legendary room where any and all fixes could be halted with a jolt of electromagnetic energy. Every fix in every part of Tina’s body felt suddenly like a toxin, like rape. She wanted them all ripped out.
“Leave your knee alone. It’s not healed.” Plastique arm-wrestled Tina’s hand away from the slender scar at the edge of her digital patella.
“I’ll get restraints,” one of the orderlies said.
As soon as he let go of her, Tina squirmed away from her other captors, scrabbling on hands and mechanized knees faster than the other orderly and Plastique could move to grab her. Then she got to her feet and bolted. She knew where the Negator room was. Every fix junkie knew. Satan’s Neuterer, they called it, and they all stayed as far away as possible. Its destructive rays were punishment for the self-destructive and the homicidal. But to Tina’s burning brain those rays promised relief.
She could see the green swinging doors a few yards away. Her overwhelming love of everyone chasing her almost made her stop and turn to offer her heart forever to every one of them. But her wish to feel nothing was stronger than her urge for a life mate. Skidding on the tile floor, she burst into the Negator room like a sheriff in the Old West striding into a saloon, looking to clean up the town.
“Miss, you can’t come—” That was as much as the radiologist sputtered out before Sheriff Tina shushed her with a hand across the mouth.
“Clean me,” she hissed. “I got a nuclear reaction going on inside me, and I need you to throw a god-sized blanket over that shit.”
“I’m sorry, miss, but I can’t just… What the hell?” The radiologist’s frightened eyes found something else to scare them. She rushed to a bank of monitors. “What’s with these readings?” She looked at Tina like she had an alien sprouting from her belly. “What did you do to the equipment? What’s in you?”
Tina barely heard the questions through the buzzing of her brain. Her gray matter seemed to vibrate with a tornado of every emotion that could be felt.
“It’s gonna blow! Get out!”
Tina heard the radiologist shrieking. She saw her flailing her arms. It struck her as odd, in a detached way, to watch the woman in green scrubs fly past, shooing out the crew of hospital employees who’d been chasing her. Plastique’s bronze-tinged makeup glowed so prettily in the flashing red emergency lights. Tina would’ve told her that, but Plastique was busy fighting to be the first out the door.
That comical sight blurred when all the gadgets ever added to Tina’s body started to feel like they were crawling out of her skin: the patellas, the LiverGuard (drink forever!), the cyber love-zone, the ossi-rubber ribcage, the calorie burner. All of it, even the corneas. Her artificial parts seemed to rise up like parasites trying to scurry off a dying host.
With every part of her in revolt, Tina folded under the pain. She couldn’t tell whether the deafening siren and blaring repetition of “Evacuate” were real or just in her mind. And what about the red lights, turning white-gold, scouring out her soul? The walls grew brighter.
Center of the sun. God light. Nothing.
∞
Familiar face?
“…waking up…”
Darkening.
Friendly, familiar face, smiling. Rob in his white coat, smiling down at her. Her surgeon. No. Her oldest friend.
“Hey, buddy. Thought we’d lost ya.”
She tried to ask what happened. He held up his hand. He had nice hands.
“Don’t talk. Plastique told us about the Psychosendesi.”
The what? she asked silently.
“The Dreamwire.”
He could tell what she was thinking! So sweet!
“It must’ve interacted with all your other fixes. You even overloaded the Negator. Incredible that you survived. What were you—” His voice had grown louder, but he stopped suddenly and breathed, continuing in a calmer tone. “The Dreamwire wasn’t approved. Not even close. Why would you do that to yourself, Tina?”
Rob was frowning. Tina didn’t want him to be sad. It was worth fighting to speak to make him smile. “No… more… fixes.”
It worked. He smiled. His pretty fingers stroked her face. His lips came toward hers. Touched hers. She felt them. Really felt them. She’d forgotten what lips truly felt like. Soft. Warm. Moist. Gentle. Love.
When she saw love glowing in his eyes after the kiss, Tina felt a jolt of something through her center. Electric, but natural and strengthening.
Rob. His kiss was the greatest fix she’d ever had. “I… love you,” she said. And she felt like a superhero.