Extensis Vitae

Chapter 6



It was morning, and they were in the med bay again. With the decision having been made, Reznik had fallen into a peaceful, dreamless sleep for the rest of the night. After he had woken up, he and Myrna had eaten breakfast together in the lab, as that was preferable to the dining hall and the uncomfortable stares that Reznik received from everyone they came across.

He now sat on the metal table where he had first awoken, legs dangling over the edge as he watched Myrna typing on the ancient computer terminal. Her hair shimmered under the harsh glare of the overhead lights.

After a few minutes, she stood up and unwound a cable from the terminal and approached Reznik. Their eyes met, and he found himself returning her smile. “All right, time for your big test drive,” she announced. “If you could just turn your head…”

Reznik did so and felt her fingers probing around the base of his skull. She pulled the cable for more slack, and then there was a click, and she stepped away. He couldn’t resist the urge to reach back and feel the back of his head. Somehow, she had plugged the end of the cable directly into his skull.

“Let’s see if I can get this to work,” she said as she sat back down at the terminal. “This command line code is so ancient—I hope I have it right…”

She continued typing as Reznik pondered the fact that he had a port in the back of his head. Just when he was coming to grips with that, his vision suddenly washed out into a greenish tint, as if he were looking through night-vision goggles. The Heads-Up Display—or HUD—looked like the information feed from a surveillance drone’s sensors. What appeared to be targeting information scrolled across his vision. He looked around and was astonished at what he saw.

“Whoa!” he exclaimed. He turned his head and tried to absorb all of the information displayed in front of him. Awesome…now I have Terminator vision, he thought.

“How’s that?” she asked, evidently pleased with herself. “I just activated your Datalink system, so you now have your Heads-Up Display and comms. Your vision and hearing are augmented, as well. I don’t have any familiarity with this military spec stuff, so you will have to figure out the interface on your own.”

“Very cool…this will work nicely, doc.”

She smiled. “Just wait for the rest to come online.” She turned back to the console and typed some more commands.

Reznik noticed that when he concentrated, his vision returned to normal and the HUD overlay faded away. When he focused on his hearing, the booming of his heartbeat became audible. He tried to ignore that and pushed outward until he could hear Myrna’s heartbeat. The taps of her fingers on the keyboard were almost like gunshots. He could hear a faint, electrical buzzing sound from somewhere overhead and the whirring of the computer’s case fan. He consciously pushed the sounds to the background and his hearing returned to normal.

He focused over her shoulder on the blurry CRT monitor and, after a second, the words snapped into clarity. She typed: “NANO-AUGMENTATION/ALL/SET TO–ACTIVE.” He looked around and focused on the dim hallway outside the room. The room grew extremely bright for a split-second and then dimmed, almost like the suppressor circuit on night-vision goggles. The murky details of the hallway became as clear as the brightly lit room.

“Well, that should do it!” Myrna announced. He looked back around and his vision returned to normal. Myrna looked pleased. “Just let me remove this,” she said, and unplugged the cord from his head. When he reached back there again, he couldn’t feel the port.

Myrna rolled up the cord again and tucked it next to the monitor. She walked over to one of the cabinets and dug around in a drawer for a moment. “Time for a demonstration,” she called over her shoulder.

She turned and her arm whipped around as she slung something toward Reznik. Before his brain realized what was happening, the targeting system display snapped back over his vision and immediately began tracking a flat object that was spinning through the air. Time seemed to go into slow motion as the object was highlighted and started to slowly turn end over end. The system identified it as a surgical knife. Without thinking about it, his arm shot out and neatly snatched the knife out of the air by the handle. It was all over before he had even realized what had happened.

“Not bad,” Myrna said. “But can you handle two?”

And then two knives were flying towards him. Just as before, his body and augmentations worked faster than his brain could keep up with, and he nimbly snatched both blades out of the air while maintaining his grip on the first one. He examined the four-inch blade on one of the knives.

“What are these things used for? If you have to operate on a rhinoceros?”

Myrna chuckled. “No, they are used for autopsies. They don’t get much use, though, I’m afraid. I have one more test for you: open your uniform top,” she instructed. He complied, unzipping the suit and pulling it open to reveal his bare chest. “Now, this time, let it hit you.”

“Let it hit me? That’s going to cause some damage!”

“It shouldn’t. Not much, anyway.” And then she tossed another knife.

This time he was ready for it, and as the targeting information flashed over his vision, he ignored it and had to force himself not to react. The knife was a good throw—it hit point first and should have stuck right below his sternum. Instead, he watched it bounce off. His skin had somehow hardened just beneath the surface—it was almost as if a small metal plate had momentarily pushed against his skin from the inside and then pulled back. He touched the skin, and there was only a tiny bead of blood on his finger when he examined it.

“How—“ He was speechless.

Myrna looked pleased. “It’s mid-century advanced nanoaugmentation technology developed by the military. You have billions of nanobots traveling through your body. Microscopic machines, if you will, that are holistically linked together through all of your augmentations and tied into your central nervous system. When the skin and nerves sense physical trauma, the nanites bond together and form a protective barrier—dermal plating, it’s called. Much more advanced than some of the crude early types, which basically consisted of sewing metal plates into the body.” She frowned in distaste. “According to some of the documentation in your file, this system should be able to stop a round from light arms fire. I wouldn’t recommend standing in front of any bullets, though—it does have its limits, but it should buy you enough time to get out of danger.”

“This is amazing!” He was still probing his stomach where the knife blade should have been buried. He looked at her, wide-eyed.

“You have the best tech that the military of the time could create—circa 2050, I think I read. That was just before the central government of the United States finally fell apart from crushing economic and ideological woes and the military became privatized. Corporate research divisions, naturally, were more than happy to swoop in and poach as much of the technology from the defunct military as they could. The corporations continued to make advances in nanoaugmentation technology and genetically engineered clones after that, but you could consider your new body one of the crowning achievements from the glory days of the old United States military. And that’s why we have such faith in your abilities, sir,” she said, and gave him a mock salute.



***



“Will you tell me how I got here?” Reznik asked. It was later in the day, after they had grabbed a snack at the dining hall and returned to Myrna’s lab.

“I don’t know all the details, but I’ll tell you what I know. You’ll have to ask my father about the rest,” she said. Reznik nodded.

“My father was a businessman as well as a doctor prior to the Cataclysm. He had done pretty well for our family and was one of the partners in a firm that specialized in bio-mechanical devices—artificial organs, pacemakers, implanted injection systems, and the like. He received some information that Extensis Vitae had planned to unearth an old military base in the desert and use the location to build one of the Colonies. Through his connections, he had heard rumors of the secret facility and the cutting-edge biomechanics research that had been performed there. Cutting edge for its time, anyway. An old colleague of his was an executive with Extensis Vitae, and Father reached out to him and requested access to the facility. The request was granted, as the corporation’s only interest was in using an already hardened site to build the Colony—they cared little for what research the military had performed there.”

“So eventually, my father went to the site, and, according to him, he found an area that was sealed off behind a vault door. He talked the foreman into having his men use a plasma cutter to get through the vault door, and inside was a laboratory where the military had conducted their research on cloning, cryonics, nanoaugmentation, and even more radical stuff. The place had been abandoned for years, but everything was just as they had left it—as though they had just left for the weekend. He said it appeared that the scientists would have been able to get right back to work again as soon as they returned. He must have greased a few palms, because he managed to recover a couple of the cryogenic vats, some storage drives containing research data, and other miscellaneous equipment. Somehow, he managed to get it all trucked out of there and stored in the basement of his office building. I’m not sure how much he played around with the equipment back then, but it sat down there until our admission to Colony 12 was approved.”

“As a physician, he was allowed a lot of latitude to bring what equipment he needed, so he had some of the old military equipment brought down here. Over the years, he had tinkered with the idea of continuing the military research and even experimenting with a neural transfer, but he was called away on the expedition to Colony 13. I was fortunate that he left detailed enough notes so that after he was gone, I was able to perform the procedure he had set up. And voilà—here you sit!”

Reznik was trying to process all the information. The part about the underground research facility and cryogenics seemed to ring a bell, but the details were foggy.

“So how did I get from my old body into this one? Where did it come from? And what happened to my old body?”

“I’m sorry. Your old body was damaged beyond repair. The military had you cryogenically frozen. I don’t know if the intent was to repair your old body when medical tech had caught up or not, but they suddenly started making some huge breakthroughs in cloning technology. It was all Special Access stuff—super secret, since cloning was officially banned by the United Nations.”

There was a long silence as Reznik combed through the fragments of the past that he could remember. His memory was getting much better, but he still could not recall anything more than bits and pieces of the details of his participation in the DARPA project. She was watching him intently, and he shook his head in frustration. “It isn’t coming back to me yet… It’s still a jumbled blur. I remember getting put into one of those cryo-vats and then seeing a face through the window, but that’s about it.”

“Give it some more time,” she said. “Most of your memory has been filling in, right?” At his nod she reached over and squeezed his hand. Their eyes met and she smiled that sad smile of hers again. “I saw you, you know—the real you. I was just a little girl at the time.”

Reznik’s eyes went wide. “You saw me in the cryochamber?”

She nodded. “I wasn’t supposed to. Father had taken me to the office one day and he got called out to a meeting or something, so I was left behind with Nancy—his secretary—to watch me. She went down to the basement to get supplies and I snuck down after her. Not knowing that I had followed her down there, she went back up while I poked around like the curious little girl I was. I remember seeing a mouse run under a large tarp in the back of the room. I went to follow it and pulled up the tarp. When I did, it slid down and I saw a large metal and glass tube with a frozen man inside it. I screamed and ran. Nancy tried to calm me down, and when Father returned, I thought he would yell at me, but he didn’t. He explained that the man had gone to sleep because he was hurt badly and he was waiting for a smart doctor to come along who could make him as good as new when he came back out.”

“Well, I definitely feel as good as new, that’s for sure.” Realizing she still held his hand—not that he was complaining—he squeezed hers. “Where did this body come from?”

“That, I’m not too sure about. My father doesn’t share all of his secrets. I would assume he either recovered it from the same site where he found you, or he got it through his connections in the medical field. Black market, maybe. All I know is that high-quality genetically engineered clones are VERY expensive, and your body had all the military tech already built in.”

“Why did they abandon us in that lab? I think I remember others that were frozen, as well—what happened to them?”

“I’m not sure about that part—you’d have to ask my father about the rest. It’s likely that the military ran out of funding and the program was shut down sometime prior to the bankrupting of the central government. From the state that he found the facility in, I think it’s pretty clear that they had shuttered it with the hope and expectation that they were going to get funding restored in the near future. As for the rest of your question, Father told me that the life support backup power systems had failed on the other cryochambers, and yours was close to failing when he found you. When they announced the impending impact event and Father made arrangements for us to join the Colony, he knew he wouldn’t be able to smuggle in the cryochamber with your body inside. You were in pretty bad shape, and there weren’t enough time or resources to try to fix you up, so he was forced to make a hasty neural transfer.”

“Neural transfer? What is that?” he asked.

“I don’t know a whole lot about the field, but a very simplistic explanation is that your brain activity essentially boils down to electrical impulses firing through neurons. The goal was to translate brain activity into ones and zeros—basically in order to copy the essence of a unique person into computer code. There was a very advanced area of neurology research that experimented with translating that into applications such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and cloning. The military and corporations performed extensive research in the field for a decade or two prior to the Cataclysm.”

“How is that even possible?” he wondered aloud. When she was about to reply, he waved her off. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter, since, like you said, here I sit. I am glad that your father has such a brilliant daughter to be able to pick up all the pieces and put me together again, or else I would have still been on ice—literally.” She blushed prettily at the compliment.

“I’m happy that everything seems to have worked out pretty well in that regard,” she replied.

They were both quiet for a while as Reznik reflected on everything that she had told him. “It’s just weird not really being me,” he finally said. He studied his left hand—the one that had been amputated from his real body—and slowly flexed it.

“Are you not happy with this body? I’m sorry that the choice was taken away from you by us putting you in this one…” She trailed off.

“No, it’s fine,” Reznik said with a quick smile. “That was kind of the point of joining the DARPA program—I had pretty much given up on my old body. I didn’t know if I would come out of there looking like the bionic man, or if I would even come out of there at all.”