**** Elysium 1986 ****

The sun had long since set and the rain had slowly stopped during their drive into the Wild West. The lights of the city reflected on the wet and steamy streets as Ralph parked the agency car unerringly in front of the target address. The district was as dangerous as the North Quarter at this hour, and they had been careful on the drive. He turned the key and killed the engine. From where they stood, they could see that there was a large fight going on at the end of the street, involving about 20 people. Harry, sitting in the passenger seat, watched the scene appraisingly, running his hands through his hair. The people were preoccupied with themselves and hopefully wouldn’t pay any attention to them.
“Don’t worry about it, kid,” Ralph grinned as he chewed on a toothpick. “If the brats try anything, I’ll just drive away. You guys call me on the radio.” He tapped the walkie-talkie he had placed over the gearshift with the index finger of his right hand. The chains on his leather jacket jingled.
“Don’t take any chances,” Harry nodded to him as his hand instinctively moved to the handle of the knife he had tucked in his boot. The fact that he wasn’t completely unarmed reassured him. He would not be able to take his sword on this appointment, but it was in the trunk just in case. Then he turned to the back seat where Yanny sat. She was wearing a long, breezy black summer dress with short sleeves. A carefully wrapped white bandage on her left forearm stood out. She hadn’t bothered to hide the display built into that forearm. Wearing oversized digital watches and other tech gadgets as accessories was all the rage right now, and it didn’t make her stand out. She smiled happily at Harry when he looked back at her.
“I’m ready,” she said in a bright voice, then put her hand on Ralph’s shoulder from behind. “Take care of yourself, will you? I hope it won’t take too long. We’ll hurry.”
“Sure thing, Madame, no worries,” Ralph said with a thumbs up. Meanwhile, Harry had already left the car and was opening the door for Yanny at the curb.
“Thank you,” she whispered to him as she got out of the car. “You… are a real gentleman…” Harry cleared his throat sheepishly and was about to launch into an evasive response when a loud bang thundered through the street from the direction of the fighting mob. Someone in the crowd had thrown an incendiary device at a parked car, and the blazing flames covered the vehicle in an instant. Yanny and Harry looked somewhat alarmed in the direction of the action, while Ralph in the car laughed like a bleating goat.
“Hot stuff over there! If I’d known those idiots were having a barbecue, I’d have brought sausages. Well, I’ll park further back anyway,” he explained calmly. Then he started the engine, backed the car up slowly and looked for a parking space with a larger safety distance. As he did so, an obviously homeless old woman staggered toward them from behind with a rusty shopping cart in which she seemed to have piled up all her belongings in plastic bags. She was muttering unintelligible words to herself. As she passed Yanny and Harry, they could clearly see that the woman did not have a single tooth left in her mouth. Seconds later, the burning car exploded at the end of the street. Startled, Yanny jumped forward and clung to Harry. The homeless woman, on the other hand, just pointed in the direction of the explosion and started laughing madly, while the fighters there didn’t even think about stopping their fight and continued to beat each other merrily. This city was obviously a real madhouse, and yet there was no place Harry would rather have been at that moment. Completely surprised, he held Yanny in his arms and his heart began to beat faster as he felt her warm body against him. She blushed slightly and the two of them slowly pulled away.
“I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly, looking down uncertainly.
“I didn’t know you could get scared,” he replied, smiling but definitely a little confused.
“This body, with all the emotions that seem to come with it, is still …. a little difficult to control sometimes. I apologize again,” she spoke so softly in Japanese that he could barely hear her over the shouting in the distance and the squeaking of the shopping cart wheels as the babbling homeless woman moved on.
“No need to apologize for anything,” he replied in a soothing voice, looking at her gently, and she smiled tentatively, tucking a strand of hair behind her right ear. Yes, sometimes emotions were hard to control, he was no exception despite his years of martial arts training. Reluctantly, he looked away from her mesmerizing eyes, which had an almost mystical glow in the darkness, broken only by the streetlights. Then he examined the row of houses in front of them.
“Here,” he reported, pointing to a polished metal plaque with ornate letters bolted to the front of the building. It read >Dr. Frank Stein, Specialist in Cutting, Sewing and Fitting – Treat Yourself to an Implant of Your Choice Today<. When they had received the contact information from the arms dealer Harris D. Bonzo, Harry had at first thought the name was a bad joke. He was familiar with the old book by Mary Shelley about the reclusive young man who created an artificial human being that everyone ended up calling a monster. How different reality was from that old classic.
“Dr. Frank Stein…” Harry sighed as he read the sign and shook his head slightly.
“Is something wrong?” Yanny asked in a soft voice, looking at him expectantly with her big purple eyes.
“Uh, no, everything’s fine. Let’s go inside,” he replied, opening the front door of the house for her.
“Thank you…” she said with a smile and slowly entered the building. Dr. Stein’s office was in the basement. As she walked down the stairs, there was hardly an inch of wall that wasn’t plastered with advertisements for implants of all kinds. It seemed you could get anything from a bionic eye to a new set of teeth screwed into your body here, as long as your bank account allowed it. Some of the posters even had ads in Russian and Japanese. After a short walk, they reached the door of the office. Before ringing the bell, Harry hesitated for a moment.
“Are you nervous at all?” he asked her. Yanny ran her hand over the bandage on her left forearm. If she listened carefully, if it was quiet enough and she concentrated, she could hear his heartbeat through her high-powered artificial hearing. From the speed of the beats, she could tell with great accuracy how well the spoken words matched the physical reactions. Little was hidden from her eyes. Did the other person’s pupils dilate, or did they begin to sweat? All of this made her, if she wanted to and if the situation was favorable, a pretty reliable walking lie detector. The TRAP members knew about these abilities, and it hadn’t bothered any of them. Still, Yanny had promised not to use these analysis techniques on them. And now she had found herself listening to his heartbeat for a few moments. She had done this because in some situations she was not sure how people meant the things they said. Because she was still studying all the levels on which humans communicated with each other. Words alone were not enough, all in all it was a very complex process. Because of this, a quiet feeling arose in her, a feeling she had experienced from time to time in the past few weeks. It was called a guilty conscience. She had not meant to eavesdrop, but she had. His heart always beat faster when they talked alone or looked into each other’s eyes, she could hear it. And even now he was worried about her. She knew she had to stop her curiosity once and for all, and she couldn’t even explain what had triggered it in the first place.
“Yes,” she breathed, “I’m a little nervous. But… Not as much as I was in the lab…” He nodded slowly and adjusted his trench coat a little, clearly a gesture of embarrassment. He would never forget the image of Yanny on that examination table in the Taiyō Electrics lab.
“It’ll all work out,” he said encouragingly, smiling at her. After ringing the doorbell, a loud buzzing sounded and they were able to enter. Dr. Stein’s office was about what you would expect from someone who offered his services in the medical field without official government approval. His main clientele were probably runners and mercenaries working for wealthy clients. The doctor patched them up when they were injured or provided them with synthetic parts when their own body parts were lost in this dangerous profession. Everything was done as discreetly as possible, and Stein was well paid for his discretion. To that end, TRAP had successfully completed a number of smaller jobs in recent weeks and had collected enough money for this visit.
The two waited in an anteroom with a few chairs and a round table with a stack of tattered newspapers on it. The one on top featured Fabio Stanford, the incumbent and extremely toned mayor of Elysium, bare-chested and with a flowing blond mane in a victory pose. As he admired his shapely muscles, he seemed surprised by his own fitness. He was said to regularly receive 95% approval from female voters, but such rumors left much room for doubt.
A pool of blood, still wet, was visible under one of the chairs. It took about five minutes for the doctor himself to enter the room. He must have been about 40 years old, with brown hair cut short in the front and long in the back. A yellow cigarette was stuck in his frog-like, wide mouth, from which a neat cloud of blue vapor emanated. He wore a turquoise smock stained with a few splashes of blood.
“Ah, there you are. We spoke on the phone yesterday, didn’t we? The TRAP agency, if I’m not mistaken?” he said in a raspy voice as he wiped his hands on the dirty gown. “You’ll have to excuse the mess here, the last patient was bleeding all over the place. It’s amazing how some people can’t follow the simplest rules of hygiene, isn’t it? Suddenly coming in here and splashing his blood all over the place, what kind of impression does that make on other customers?” Then he coughed, and you could clearly hear the mucus rattling in his lungs.
“Um… yeah, sure…” Harry replied, looking at the doctor extremely skeptically.
“Then we’d better get started. You already told me on the phone what it’s all about. Come along, come along. We don’t want to waste any time, do we?” grunted Dr. Stein and left the room. Harry looked at Yanny and she just shrugged. Of course, it was her first visit to a doctor in her life and she had no comparison, but at that moment he was more than happy that she couldn’t die of blood poisoning or something like that. The two of them followed the doctor into a larger treatment room where all sorts of medical equipment was set up. On the western wall was a locked cabinet with all kinds of mechanical body parts of varying quality. There was also an oversized freezer in the corner. After telling Harry to sit down on a chair in front of a desk covered with a transparent, extremely dirty plastic sheet, he looked closely at Yanny, who had stopped and was waiting in the middle of the room.
“Hmm… it really is a rarity to have such a pretty young woman among my customers,” he murmured, wiping his hands on his smock again. “So this is about your hand, isn’t it?” he finally asked, pointing to her left arm.
“That’s right,” she replied, holding up the bandaged forearm.
“Hmm… well…” he spoke thoughtfully. “Your colleague told me on the phone that you already have prosthetic arms on both sides?”
“Yes,” Yanny replied quietly. She and Abigail had come up with this lie to avoid telling the doctor that she was a cyborg. The components of ancient technology built into her would surely have attracted too much attention. Even for someone for whom discretion was part of the business model, such valuable technology would have been a hard temptation to resist.
“I must say, excellent work. You can’t see the slightest trace of surgery from the outside. No scars, no stitches, nothing,” Dr. Stein remarked as he began to probe her arms with his thick fingers. Then he pulled a scalpel from his coat pocket, and Harry, whose skepticism had already increased noticeably, focused on him even more intently in response. “I’m just going to cut the bandage,” the doctor explained and went to work. As the cut gauze fell to the floor, he looked closely at her forearm and the stump on her wrist. “The wound is already completely closed. How long ago was this injury?”
“About a year,” Yanny lied again. She could speed up the healing of her tissues to an extreme degree when she was injured, but it required a considerable amount of energy. When attaching a new hand, she would need an external power source to grow her flesh over the mechanical bones. Her own generator built into her torso was quite powerful, but such a regeneration would take several months without additional energy.
“So my plan would be that we x-ray the other hand, measure it, and then create a mirror image,” the doctor said confidently. “That’s the usual procedure for making prostheses. Of course, I also have an X-ray machine here.” He pointed to a larger machine with a black panel on a swivel arm and a large white back panel. Then he looked at Yanny again and the corners of his mouth twitched briefly, which Harry didn’t miss. “Why don’t you take off your dress and I’ll take an x-ray of your entire torso.”
“You want me to take off my dress?” she asked, “It’s only my right hand, isn’t it?”
“Yes, well…” Dr. Stein replied, unable to hide his slightly lustful look for a moment. “After all, this is all about symmetry, isn’t it? It’s always important to include the whole body in such procedures to ensure balance…” Yanny shrugged and was about to comply by lifting the skirt of her one-piece dress when Harry interrupted with a cold voice.
“I also have a very private question, Stein…” he began, his hand slipping to the knife handle in his right boot. He drew the blade in one swift motion and rammed it loudly into the doctor’s desk, making him jump in shock and draining the color from his face.
“… Are you circumcised? If not, we can have it done right here and now,” he said. You could tell he wasn’t kidding.
“Now that I think about it, it’ll probably be enough if we just do a scan of the remaining hand… …. Then… uh… we’ll have the connection to the intact joint and can… get the appropriate parts or… make them ourselves, right?” Dr. Stein croaked nervously, then walked over to the X-ray machine.
“Isn’t it amazing sometimes how quickly medicine advances?” Harry remarked with a smug smile.

Categorized as: Novel 2 (EN) | Novel Chapter (EN)

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