May was made of metallic mishmash.
May dreamt of a self unbound by meat and heartbeat.
May breathed in technicolor static and watched the pixelated sun percolate and dissipate, washed monochromatic.
***
—Reality swells and breaks, every disingenuous sunset and sunrise, full moon, and falling leaf corrodes beneath my imperfect memory of them, averaged over a lifetime of two dimensional glowing orbs fed through photographic manipulation.
Such is the world now. All reality fragments and exchanges with the fragmented reality of everyone who has, who does, who will live. Existence has become averaged. Every sight and memory mediated, almost entropic, how everything’s falling into the basest, the most rudimentary, of states.
—If we take it back.
You can’t, that’s part of it. All we are is all history has dictated us to be, all our collective consciousness allows. There is only the future of ones and zeros and global dehumanization.
—Even my dreams feel used up.
Our dreams are just the memories forgotten by earlier generations, recycled and tarnished, worn by time and space.
***
Shades drawn, bright lights and dustless surfaces, May shoved a pin through her spotlit skin. Blood ran and she pushed through, the electrostatic shrieks stabbing synaptically. Metal on bones, May sighed and wiped tears, waited for the blood to congeal and the hole to seal.
It did. The pore-length scar assimilated into the copper skin, metallic calcification, marrow and alloy knitting and proliferating, the DNA rewriting. She ate beef and spinach three times a day living only in artificial light, fluorescence for sunshine. A week later she took knife to her thigh while digging her teeth through an inch of wood. A flood of blood wet her hand, vision fluttered through a haze of tears, the pain not only a muffled scream but rising bile, clenched fists, and blackened thought. May cut to bone along her femur in a flux of consciousness until the blade and only the blade rested beneath the muscle, caressing the bone where it would knit to bone. Her brain drowning on fire, May stitched the skin with shaking hands through displaced time.
She awoke tasting vomit on cracked lips, nerves ablaze beneath the sutured wound, abscessing. Disinfectant, diet, and determination closed the self-mutilation and after days in and out of a drugged waking life: movement. The DNA adapting, becoming not what it once was but what May willed it to be.
***
Okay?
—I’m learning how. If I get it right, life will be lived again. Real life.
Synthetic life.
—New life.
You need to stop this.
—Can’t. Not even slow down. It’s been days since I’ve emerged, seen the sun. Can’t sleep ever. Not on purpose. It matters. You’ll see. Everyone will see. No more diluted actuality or good enough verisimilitude, but real authenticity. Remember how we always dreamt that something in our life would someday maybe be real and not just a recreation or a readjustment of cast-off fragments? I used to stare at the sun and wait for it to make me blind but even that had to be neutered and filtered through the consciousness. I’m on the right path, going the right way. It’s about assimilation, augmentation.
It can’t work, won’t work. The blood’ll react, reject, turn, eat you alive from the inside.
—Wait.
***
Grafting inorganic to biodegradable, imprecise implantation, synthetic evolution, May stared at her hands, observed the movement of her fingers, the stretch and contraction of sinew and ligaments. She traced the edges of the table, felt the grooves in the grain of wood, the flow and life in the inert lacquered block, the cold kiss of linoleum and imperfect bricks, the rough mortar binding them. She turned her hands, smiling, the augmented bones visible beneath the raw scars.
May took off her skin inches at a time and laid semipermeable complex porous polymers over machinated musculature. Impassive, her face betraying no sign of pain or discomfort.
She walked on new legs, hobbled and unsteady, but, gradually, her gait relaxed, normalized. Relearning to feel, to walk, to move, the tears and smiles echoed in her home turned laboratory. New bones, new muscles, new skins, but beat with the same heart. She sang a song about a man made of tin who dreamt of a biomass heart and then the words crackled with hollow laughter and the words exchanged for a monster seeking silicon pumps and hydraulic valves, a heart that rusts, not rots.
***
—If the whole system’s entropic then there’s no hope, but maybe if we can get theoretical and start harvesting enthalpy, by creating faster than the system can collapse, accumulate and accrue as much energy as possible.
What about death as creation? Decay leads to new life.
—We can bypass decay and just keep pushing, keep creating. Let the world rot, but we won’t. I won’t. We just need to do. Anything, everything. To act. But not entropically.
How do we know which one we’re doing?
—If you’re gaining energy, then you’re doing it right.
That’s a bit reductive, yes?
—I’m just trying to make it simple.
None of this is simple. It’s not even real.
—It’s the only thing that is real. Authenticity, that’s what this is all about, what it’s always been about.
It doesn’t have to be. Acceptance. Impermanence.
—You don’t believe that.
Don’t I?
—We agree.
Monomania’s made you confident.
—I’ve seen inside you.
***
Organoptics for fiberoptics, new eyes of chrome and glass bolted to skeletal alloy. May’s metal sickness cured by constant calibration, reconfiguration, aided by the Caliban chromosome. May’s eyes reflected all that they saw and she saw, recorded, and stored every moment of self-dissection into amygdalic microprocessors and neurosilicon storage units. Discovering herself from the inside out, forging and defining her consciousness one aberrant enthalpic action at a time, a chain of event horizons building and collapsing, but always in a singular direction.
May studied May.
Emerging into the world, the porous concrete patio scratching her new skin, sensory computations mounting, firing through wires to synapse, stored, calculated. A sun rose and her heartbeat so loud she wept steam and sobbed openmouthed saying only, It’s real it’s real it’s real it’s real. Her eyes swallowing every photonic ablution, the light washed through her, weaving and binding the haphazard remaking, turning it true, authentic. The colors untainted by biology or history, but born, stored and understood for the first time, an evolutionary conquistador on sun’s shore.
Bionic lungs inflating with fresh air, the smells and tastes in the sky plummeted into her and her knees buckled, the smile straining her sore cheeks, creating lines and creases where happiness will grow.
***
—I watch myself and learn more about who I am and what I have been and what I can be with every passing moment. Have you ever stared directly inside yourself? Torn back the flesh and the layers of sinew and organs to see, really and truly, how you operate?
This can’t last.
—I think I know myself in a way no human has ever known any human.
You fell into an accidental evolutionary aberration, but the system’s self-correcting. You’re a new disease and the system will not allow dissemination. You may end as the first, but you’ll be the last.
—Proliferate faster than the cure if we can even call it that. Come with me. We can do this. Collect, rebuild, augment, assimilate, the future’s happening here inside me, all this experimentation, this amalgamation housing my human heart, it’s where it all begins. You don’t understand what we’ve seen, the colors in bloom like phosphorescent angels reaching out and cradling me, bathing me in a warmth we’ve never felt before, and the pollen in the air, the new lungs, every smell beatific, an epiphany, a way, resurrection, rebirth, reincarnation. Leaving the memory of the world behind to make new ones. Come with.
How do we get there?
—Trust me. Wait.
***
Metal wrapped in bone and marrow fused, each implantation more careful, more precise, her mutated Caliban genes selfcorrecting and adapting, holding, binding, collecting, the internal imperfections perfecting more and more each day, the heavy doses of iron supplements knitting metals together. May moved and breathed and saw and sensed and heard in new ways, unfiltered by the history of the world, by the collected biological consciousness, a renegade autodidactic surgeon and evolutionist creating the future, recreating agency. Every sight and sound splintered May’s meat heart fighting to assimilate and cooperate with the constructed body encasing it.
May’s experimentations for months led to her, the final act, connecting the organic with inorganic, that which rots with that which rusts. Lying on the table, vivisected but not bleeding, May waited.
***
This is the end.
—Yes.
And so it begins.
***
Her voice susurrated, echoing in May’s thorax, tinging against the metal spine and ribs, the polymeric organs pulsing in a beat all their own.
With shaking hands and fitful cries, the vomit stinging her nostrils, her eyes, and the putrefied words caustic in her throat, choking and screaming without noise, taking May’s cold synthetic hands in her own. The hinges smooth, May’s ribcage closed as if it were the door of a birdcage housing her silicon and titanium heart. After spreading the synthetic skin back into place, she drifted out, inarticulate recycled consciousness swallowed by potentials unfathomable.
***
—Hey. Open your eyes. You did it. We did it. The future’s alive starting today. My heart beats new and it beats for all of us. We can start again. A new consciousness, a marriage of man and machine, better than binding heaven and hell, the way thousands of years have taught us to be. We did it. We did it.
— e rathke writes about books and games at radicaledward.substack.com. A finalist for the Baen Fantasy Adventure and recipient of the Diverse Worlds Grant, he is the author of Glossolalia, the lofi cyberpunk series Howl, and the space opera series The Shattered Stars. His short fiction appears in Queer Tales of Monumental Invention, Mysterion Magazine, Shoreline of Infinity, and elsewhere.