A cold drink, after the operation - Part 1

Junk mail has piled up around the letter boxes in my apartment like a clogged artery.

 

The one apartment where I have no strata fees, and it's a dilapidated junk yard. 'Where were the spiders, whilst the flies tried to break our bones?'

 

Well now, I have no idea why that song is in my head. It's that eerie melody, it's always floating around in there. The soundtrack to my life. Wait.... No... I'm thinking of 'Ashes to Ashes', that was 'Ziggy stardust and the spiders from Mars'. Oh well. Both great songs. Junk. Junk. Junk.

 

Maybe humans were wrong with all our revolutions, d'y'think? Maybe we need beauracracy. Maybe we need the rich to order around the poor. A hierarchy. God knows, a king would never have allowed a mess like this to build up in his kingdom. Now, there's some fascist thinking for you, my mind always tends towards fascism when I am feeling second rate. Amazing how easy it is, when the world is full of complex problems, for the brain to seek out easy answers and final soutions, well..I guess I'll get over it.

 

The doctor said the operation went, 'as good as it could have.' I suppose that's a good result. Bill. Junk. Spam. Seems to be tinged with some rather dubious optimism, that sentence. 'As good as it could have.' I can't quite pin point what I don't like about that. Sometimes I think all most of us want is for someone to lie to us and tell us everything is planned out. Just to stop us from thinking. Maybe someone ought to teach the doctors at medical school that, in all their decades of schooling. Everyone's really just looking for a father in the sky to say 'everything's going to be ok.'

 

Maybe it's not going to be ok. Have you ever considered that?

 

My arm feels ok. I mean the pain's not so bad. The medication helps. You know what will help even more? Whiskey. Screw the mail for now. I'll sort out this mess later. I've only been in hospital for two weeks and the first thing I have to come back home to is this mess. Ill pop round for a quick couple of drinks at 'Gerry's anchor', (my local). It's only two streets away, Doc Brunner told me I shouldn't drink on the medication, but screw it, he doesn't have to deal with the difficulties of having a new arm..... ...worse...

 

...Of becoming something that people despise.

 

They managed to succeed in salvaging all the nerves, except the 'primary sense replacement connection', (whatever that is). Apparently there's only ever a fifteen percent chance they would succeed with that part anyway, so it was to be expected. It means I can feel things I touch, and feel pain when I bump the new arm, but when it's still .... (When it's stationary)..there's no sense that it's there at all. The opposite to a phantom arm, or a ghost arm ...kind of an atheist ---dead arm. I do notice it when I'm sitting still. That strange absence. That feeling like there is nothing there at all.

 

The birds are chirping in the trees along the street in a cacophony of shrill sounds. 'Who are they calling out to? What are they saying?', I thought to myself. It sounded meaningless, like nothing. Like they were just whispering 'I'm here. I'm here.' Over and over again. Just in case some passing god ...or wise old bird might flow past and tell them what they were supposed to be doing. Perhaps to lead them onwards to some bigger, grander tree, where the bird songs were louder and more melancholic, ...more beautiful, like the bird songs of the ancient days. I walk along the gravelled footpath, as the sun slowly goes down on a twilight dusk.

 

I would never have opted for a prosthetic arm. Could you call it prosthetic? ....If ....it was my choice, i would have just kept no arm after the accident, but the law states, that sickness at the cost of the state legally cannot go without treatment. Not having the operation could cost the state more later, that's what they told me. (I wasnt allowed to have no arm.) Human beings had two arms, and so I had to have the goddamn replacement operation. Simple as that. Sign this form with your good arm. Now take these pills and we'll see you in five hours with your new metal arm. Worst damn kind of devil-alien contract that.... I feel like ....I know better now....how it would feel to be 'mentally ill'. (Forced into treatment for something you don't acknowledge is there --forced like a square peg into a round hole, just because you have to live up to the high expectations of 'being a human being'.) (Whatever that is). What does it mean in context of the unbearableness of 'being' itself. They keep you on endless medication, experimenting until your 'normal' again. The truth is, no one even knows what that is.....'normal'. Listen to those birds, chirping away like mad people. Birds are lucky. No one ever comes to them to tell them what a bird 'should' do. What a bird 'should' be like. If they lose a leg, they just learn to hop. A bird just is.

 

I can see 'Gerry's anchor' already.

 

Should I walk the shortcut through the old church yard on Darling Street? May as well. I usually feel a bit uninvited on church grounds. Not that i'm some 'demon' or 'vampire' or anything. I mean, I just don't feel anything here, but I feel like I'm supposed to. Like i'm obligated to, I mean.

 

I look at the old sandstone of the colonial gothic church. Of course, I can appreciate its beauty. I always expect some cosmic voice should call out to me when I'm near a church ...and....Say, 'Harrick...you know there's a life after death! Come in and live forever. It's easy.' But the bricks say nothing. They just sit there ... Sit right there where human beings put them with toil and labour all those years ago. All the half-arsed Christian signs don't persuade me either -- (lame jokes and awkward bible quotes written on placards with awful typography). The church ads are less convincing than the worse corporate ads on television for life-insurance or some new car. But the building itself IS beautiful. Probably built by goddamn slaves, but the building definitely speaks something. It speaks about a time when humans cared about architecture. When beauty was important. Before humans started worshipping the steel cube of modernism. Before the operation.

 

That's all the bricks say to me. Nothing about a life after death.

 

Transhumanists. They believe in a life after death, never could stand them honestly-- but now that I've had the operation I suppose I better start getting used to ideas like those. People are going to put me in a category now either way, I may aswell accept it. May as well find friendship within circles of those who are 'like me'.

 

Here. The beckoning door of the old pub. The pub also tells a story ...of beautiful architecture from a bygone time....But it tells a more interesting story than that. A story of life being lived. Right now. I haven't had a drink since before the goddamn operation! Goddamn thirsty as hell, I would sell my own mother for a drink. Half the guys in here probably did just that.

 

The air conditioning. Slight musty smell of dried hops, unclean bar tabs is welcome. I miss the old days. I miss the pubs dull stink of cigarette smoke, with no random alcohol checks or cut offs. I'm old enough to remember before the health freaks ruined everything, holding my grandfathers hand when he came in to get a pint. Men were scattered about filthy ...and drunk out of their minds. Sleeping on the couches. Slowly dying, anaesthetising their dead end lives with endless binge drinking. There were the old lonely men who sat by themselves, shivering from alcohol poisoning, but every now and again a fight or a song would break out and they'd get the only spurt of joy left in their fading lives. Before the shadow of death completely devoured them.

 

Damn it! Theres a group of technophobe yobbos over at the pool tables. Nationalists. Humanists. (Not the good kind of humanists you read about it in books-- before the meaning of the word turned bad.) Theres nothing noble or peace-loving about these pricks. They've noticed my arm now. They're scowling and spitting. Hopefully they'll be satisfied enough just cursing at me from the corner... If I sit out of the way.

 

As I order my drink I can hear the disgusting 'humanists' calling me names and cussing. 'Fucking toaster' one guy says, 'piece of junk.' 'Scab', 'sell out', 'tin can piece of garbage' I hear the others chant. 'Yeah... just a whiskey. Single malt on the rocks.' I say to the bartender. I've got my good arm on the bar, my metal arm is down by my side. I suddenly feel more ashamed of it. The grief comes back.

 

Maybe I am a freak. A cyborg. A 'fucking tin can' just like the yobbo-swine are calling me.

 

I take my whiskey and sit down in the corner --on a small dark table by the jukebox. I think about putting a quarter in, finally get Bowie out of my head, but ....I don't want to draw unnecessary attention to myself. Don't want to give those bastards any greater reason to hate me, than they already do.

 

Don't ask me how the whole 'humanist' verse 'transhumanist' thing got so out of control. Seems like there is always some ideological war going on in the world... Ya know?...some issue which is like the most important thing in the world for a decade, then a decade later people move on to some other damned thing. Nazism. Capitalism. Communism. Terrorism. It's like these evil promethean flames are planted in our minds by a bored trickster god. Ideological seeds which cause senseless wars, violence, hatred, torture and worse. A Pandora's box of miserys, and for the last 15 years or more ...that box has had 'humanism' carved on it.

 

I can barely remember a time before the humanist conflict. I remember when the guy with the electronic brain schussed out on live television. ..That was a sight that stayed with people!! That was the end of the optimism, and the talk about how great robots were, how great the future would be because of technology. Suddenly, negative quotes you'd never even heard ....from famous people throughout history.. seemed to pop up everywhere --like history was being re-written before our very eyes. I can't count every day I hear about how Stephen Hawking, the brilliant scientist warned: 'creating artificial intelligence will be the greatest mistake humanity will ever make'. Albert Einstein, it's drilled into us that even in his time believed 'our technology has exceeded our humanity'..... Then there's Rubenstein, (the discoverer of the relationship between two circles). The formula which changed the world, specifically about human robotics he said 'if man should continue to alter his body he should be --like a cliff knocking out its own base.'

 

Suddenly all the positivity and love of technology is just gone, in a cloud of smoke. People start throwing bricks in the store windows of apple computers, synthetics are lynched on crowded streets in broad daylight.

 

There were the religious extremists of course, who said the whole idea of fixing humans like automobiles was against god and would inevitably end in our damnation. But surprisingly even worse than the religious folk, were the augment-media driven maniacs. It was all like mass hysteria ....the rage against becoming 'unhuman' was everywhere. Any kind of trans-humans began being shamed and barraged with messages of hate, (usually until they withdrew from Augment-media altogether). Messages like: 'why do you hate humans?' 'Why are you trying to kill us garbage can?'. 'Theres only one solution. Rape and kill the robots.' 'They don't want life ....so take it off them with force.'

 

Richard Johnston, that was the guy who went crazy on live television. The guy who 'schussed' (as they call it now). African American guy. He had already done the tour of talk shows: Eileen Ferris' today show, and Jackie Allman. People we're calling it a miracle before his appearance on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show. I'm trying to remember the whole story around him. What was it? That's right. He'd been fatally injured in a low-flying car accident. Or was it a construction site injury? Anyway...the...uh...HIS... Brain was irreparably damaged, but the paramedics managed to keep him on ice, and some Doctor Tsu was given a chance at an experimental brain tissue replacement operation. They replaced the entire inside of his skull and brain, and transferred all his thoughts and memories onto silicon chips. (It wasn't the first time someone's thoughts had been downloaded of course). There were already plenty of people living post-life contemplation in computers by then. Nobody cared about that. They thought it was weird, of course. Not many people saw the idea of a bodiless mind sitting around in a tin can with nothing but your thoughts as a very functional alternative to life, but it didn't really upset many people either. Didn't get under their skin.

 

Johnston was the first guy with a metal brain, still in his original body. It seemed like a god sent miracle. Like human beings WERE gods now. Kind of. At least --masters of their own body. Then he started babbling to Jimmy Fallon. And that was the start of it really. That was the start of the humanist conflict ...even though we didn't know it back then.

 

I guess it doesn't seem as scary anymore. Now the whole things been kinda normalised. Schizophrenia was taboo once. At least that kind of madness just seemed like an error. Like a horrible mistake. But with Johnston it was the organisation of what he was saying that was so damn scary. The colloquial term for it was 'schussed' but I think 'Over-order' is what they officially call it now. Jesus Christ. 'Thought over-order' ---there is still something about the idea of it I just don't like.

 

There were precedents for it. I always wondered what it was about autism and similar diseases which scared people so much. I mean, here you have a child who's smarter than most children, they're inability to communicate 'normally' as we humans perceive it is really irrelevant. In another more enlightened species they would probably be viewed as the cream of the crop. The top minds, put straight to use at the centre of the hive. Who needs emotions when you've got genius? In a collective sense, I mean. What a strange species we are. Is it tall poppy syndrome? Or is it just inevitable that a certain level of intelligence actually becomes a hazard for an animal.

 

I can't even remember what Johnston said now. I don't want to remember. I know that it was against every grain of humanity in my body. Mocking life on earth and all we held precious. Knew it was utterly repulsive. Sparingly...now --the footage is illegal, completely destroyed. That was the first time we had to face up to the culture of 'erasing' too. I can still remember a time when the whole world was under observation and we couldn't have EVER forseen that would change. We were all in control of the sharing of information. It was a self driven panopticon. What I never understood....Augment-media never got seen as suspect by the bigots and 'humanists'. They were too dependent on it. It was still the last bastion of what we could safely call 'our technology', rather than what many would soon call the 'enemy'. Our vast library of collective knowledge, interconnected and driven straight through the technological machine to our eyeballs.

 

I'm getting myself worked up, when what I should really be doing is just drinking my whiskey. I order another single malt...and augment-text Regina, telling her to just come and meet me at the pub, rather than going to my place.

 

The whiskey is already working, washing away all that needless anxiety and thought. Fuck all the bullshit conflict anyways, ...like ...maaaaannnnnnn....it'll always be some damn thing. The bullshit never ends, in one way or another, you can quote me on that. I take another deep swig, and stare down at my metal arm.

 

It sure is an eyesore. With all it's external veins and wires. I could've opted for a more subtle one, hell I could've hidden it altogether and gotten a flesh covered prosthesis if I had an extra million Repaus-marks sitting around. This piece of shit was expensive enough.

 

2000 repausmarks would mean I had to take out a loan or not be able to cover my rent. Of course having private health insurance would've helped ...but I wasn't born in a silver cot, y'know? Yeah, so I opted for this cheap piece of shit, it's my fault if I get the undesirable stares and personal attacks. So what if I wanted the most practical model I could for the price? At least now I can still go fishing. I can ride my goddamn jet bike, and afford to drink a beer on the weekend.

 

For a moment the glass of whiskey is still in my hand, and I get that feeling - an absence of sensation.

 

I hold still considering it for a moment, analysing what it really is. I can feel the cold of the glass, but I can't feel my arm. Just that coldness. A chemical reaction and an impulse in my brain. Coldness. Metal.

 

I start to think about the 20th century existential philosophers, and how they didn't really know shit. But I bet Sartre would have killed for an experience like this. Reflecting on his nausea and wondering wether he was holding the glass ---or the glass was holding him. Berrenger didn't really know what it was like to be in the midst of death either. Not like this. Camus might understand, if I told him that staring at my own arm was like ---staring --- staring at the man the outsider has just killed. Feeling nothing. 'I'm alive. I'm dead. I'm the stranger, killing an Arab'. Maybe I will use the jukebox... Nah, those guys are still staring at me.

 

Have you ever had that feeling where you walk into a busy factory or a workplace, and the walls oppress you? Like the whole building screams out your insignificance? We'll imagine that feeling of claustrophobia being localised to your arm. That's kind of what the 'cold arm sensation' feels like.

 

I remember when I was young I used to look forward to a day trip to 'the city' when grandad gave me a handful of spending pocket money. It had this allure .... Hexton city. It was the centre of all the fun in the world, all that was interesting. Then, when I was a young man ...all I was interested in was --girls-- the city seemed like a smorgasbord, a buffet of beautiful women, and all you had to learn was the right combination of smooth words and they could be yours. Now that I'm older ---there's nothing particularly alluring or mysterious about the city. If anything it's oppressive and daunting, billions of lives I'm not connected to, sensations I'll never have. It's a big empty void, and the towers stare down at you like malevolent giants. Mind you, I would rather blow my brains out than live in em the monotonous desert of 'the country'. Anyway. Now, that feeling of realising your irrelevance -- of feeling like a nobody In a big steel void--was localised to the thing on the table in front of me. I feel like there's a black hole attached to me,.... no it's less impressive than that. It's more like I'm attached to a shopping mall.

 

It makes you wonder though. I can feel the cold of the glass through my synthetic fingers. A chemical reaction triggering nerves in my brain, and yet, the bubbles in the glass aren't a part of my body. Of course the glass isn't either. (But then, the silicon and metal in my arm wasn't part of my original biology anyway). Now it's part of my, ..Jesus ..have I always been the parasite in the host that is the universe? Or am I just foolish for acknowledging my connection to the city, to the world? Does my arm really end at the ugly metal tubing there, or is that just the start of the labyrinth of un-me which stretches out across this city.

 

I start to think about being back at the hospital before the operation. I remember having the morpheine drips, and all the other wires, and bullshit connected up to me. It felt like when I pumped the morpheine --I relaxed, but more than that, I was one with everything, I became part of the hospital. Part of the furniture. Everything is just a process of chemicals transferring quantities to each other. What really differentiates my body, my nerves and tubes from the wires and machines in the hospital? Or this pub? Or that old sandstone church? What really seperates my arm from any other machine? When our umbilicle chord is cut we have the happy delusion that we are some independent organism, a delusion which is eluding me at this present moment. I take another swig of whiskey. Jesus Christ I hope I'm not Schussing out, I need to stop thinking about this shit.

 

My ears prick up to the noises in the room around me. The 'humanists' are swearing at me again. Their insults are getting more threatening. I hear one asking me questions directly, yelling across the room as if I am expected to answer him, 'if I cut your throat will you get your little tin can doctors to put on a new head? Answer me tin-can! Well? Answer.'

 

I look down --and away --as I If I can't hear him.

 

Regina will be here soon. Hopefully that will calm them down, they don't seem like the type to harass a regular human girl. (Time will tell I suppose). Hopefully Regina's in a better mood anyway. Last time we spoke our fight ended in her hanging up on me and deleting my profile on augment-media. She only added me back yesterday ...but her messages suggest that she's cooled off a little bit.

 

She's obsessed with the idea that we can 'make the relationship work'. She's not the clingy sentimental type, but... Well, we've been through this so many times before. It's not one sided. Relationships. They're like a mouse trap you just can't help walking into over an over again. You let your emotions out, wear your heart on your sleeve, and love and passion pulls you down, into a semi-blissful dead end. We trap each other with our emotions, we trap ourselves, we are not capable of true independence, all of us are unwittingly connected, tied together with invisible strings, ...fated and damned to some random end, the snap of the mouse-trap finally breaks our necks when we press that unseen trigger by some curiosity, just when we think we've finally gotten the cheese. The shadow of death devours us all.

 

Say... She's here.

 

I can see her outside the pub window having a cigarette. She looks beautiful actually. Why do women always look beautiful when you've broken up with them? Is there some unknown chemical reaction in the male of the species to be repulsed by the female when you are in the cave ...but attracted to them as soon as you are outside? Maybe it's just our bodies telling us to get off our asses and go out hunting? Bah. Now I just have to stand here and watch her in this beautiful private moment, like a voueur. It'll be five minutes before she finishes her cigarette. By the time she's in here I'll want her again, want to kiss her. I'll have lost my strength to be alone. I'll have lost my independence... All because of this moment.

 

Try to focus back on my hand. I want the absence. Want the hole in me again. Because that's the truth. Bunch of pop culture running through my head...quotes from films and other junk. Do thoughts actually mean anything? I think of..The Evil dead----Bruce Campbell getting the 'badness' in his arm ...so he cuts it off with a chainsaw. I know exactly how that feels now. Wasn't there a bible quote about arms too, 'it's better to cut off your left arm that causes you to sin, than to sin with two arms in hell'.. No...I think I'm making that up. It was about plucking out your goddamn eye, or some bullshit right? Anyway, who even cares. Do you ever do that though? Your brain tries to tie all these similarities to your own life from various random sources of input? Your brain tries to make these patterns. That's all life really is --ya know? Patterns.

 

Christ, I'm getting those nerves you get before you meet somebody. Those jitters where you start to over absorb your environment. Chrissakess it's only Regina.

 

My eyes are dancing around the bar, taking in sights I'd not seen properly with more pessimistic eyes, the little bearded man antique on the bookcase. The tea lights hanging over the cocktails menu, the hand painted sign probably made by the bargirl (who's training to be an artist). The auburn colours of clinking beer in the dull bar light. Regina, sitting down right in front of me.

 

'Hello.'

 

'You want a drink?' I asked her.

 

CONTINUED IN ---'A cold drink, after the operation' -- PART 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/sffstories/comments/41masc/a_cold_drink_after_the_operation_part_2/