Zippered Flesh: Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad! Read online

  ZIPPERED FLESH

  Tales of Body Enhancements

  Gone Bad!

  Edited by Weldon Burge

  Smart Rhino Publications

  www.smartrhino.com

  These are works of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the authors’ imaginations or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  First Edition

  Zippered Flesh: Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad! Copyright © 2012 by Smart Rhino Publications LLC. All rights reserved. Individual stories copyright by individual authors. Printed in the United States.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9847876-1-6

  ISBN-10: 09847876515

  DEDICATION

  For my wonderful family—

  Cindy, Chris, and Eric.

  CONTENTS

  BOOTSTRAP—THE BINDS OF LASOLASTICA

  MICHAEL BAILEY

  IDOL

  MICHAEL LAIMO

  UNPLUGGED

  ADRIENNE JONES

  COMFORT

  CHARLES COLYOTT

  YOU WITH ME

  CHRISTOPHER NADEAU

  THE SHAPING

  SCOTT NICHOLSON

  SOMETHING BORROWED

  J. GREGORY SMITH

  EQUILIBRIUM

  JOHN SHIRLEY

  SAWBONES

  L. L. SOARES

  WHIRLING MACHINE MAN

  AARON J. FRENCH

  SEX OBJECT

  GRAHAM MASTERTON

  THE SAD, NOT-SO-SAD, BALLAD OF GOAT-HEAD JEAN, AMBIVALENT DEVIL QUEEN

  MICHAEL LOUIS CALVILLO

  LOCKS OF LOATHE

  JEZZY WOLFE

  BY HOOK

  ELLIOTT CAPON

  CREEPING DEATH

  ARMAND ROSAMILIA

  PARAPHILIA

  LISA MANNETTI

  INDEPENDENCE DAY

  P. I. BARRINGTON

  MARVIN’S ANGRY ANGEL

  JONATHAN TEMPLAR

  CHANGE OF HEART

  ROB M. MILLER

  HEARING MILDRED

  WELDON BURGE

  THE WRITERS

  THE ILLUSTRATOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks go to Shelley Everitt Bergen for her excellent, creepy cover illustration; to Scott Medina for helping me design the cover and format the interior of the book; to Terri Gillespie for her excellent proofreading skills; to my sister, Sharon Biesecker, for helping design the Smart Rhino Publications logo; and to the members of the Written Remains Writers Guild for their support and encouragement as the project came to life!

  I must also point out here that, although most of the stories are original to this volume, three are reprints. Graham Masterton’s story, “Sex Object,” was originally published in Hottest Blood edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett. Scott Nicholson’s story, “The Shaping,” appeared in Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, edited by Vince Liaguno and Chad Helder. And John Shirley’s “Equilibrium” was published in REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY WEIRD STORIES; John updated and rewrote portions of the story specifically for this anthology.

  BOOTSTRAP—THE BINDS OF LASOLASTICA

  BY MICHAEL BAILEY

  virtual partition 242 not responding.

  adjust array parameters…

  During initial testing on Bill Chevsky, partition 242 had periodically failed over the last few weeks and Victor knew it was finally time to migrate the data elsewhere. He had the five-hundred- terabyte partition ready and waiting in the cloud. It would be simple to replace because soft drives were physically nonexistent, at least from his vantage point, yet the process was cumbersome. Storing biodrives in-house was impractical and too costly; it was much more cost-effective to rent the space at an off-site facility, which he had visited prior to starting the project. As Victor replaced the faulty partition for Bill, he wondered how much of the human mind he was replacing and how much knowledge a single partition contained. It didn’t quite work that way, however, because each was useless without the others. The 241 other partitions were figurative puzzle pieces of the Chevsky array, and it would take many more. How large was the mind of man? That was the penultimate question; the ultimate was whether or not cloning could be done on the mind.

  The last test Victor ran on Bill had filled twelve petabytes of data, or twelve-thousand terabytes. The transfer was close to completion—or so the system reported before it crashed. The fifty-strand, wide-optical catheter cable at Bill’s neck was warm from the gigabits upon gigabits of ones and zeros passing through it per second.

  Thirteen years prior, a young student at MIT and his peers had created a company called ImagEnation, more commonly known as the company responsible for founding the Artificial Knowledge Project. Victor had attended the Nobel Prize ceremony in Nepal and could still picture the kid holding up his palmtop computer to the audience. “This device,” he had said, “contains the Webster’s dictionary, the English language in its entirety,” a break for audience applause, “and the complete history of the American People. This is the future of technology. This is the future of education. This is the future of the model U.S. citizen.” The screen behind him showed a woman of Mexican descent on a hospital bed with wires connecting to various places on her head, from which acupuncture-like needles protruded. This spider web of wires coupled with a thicker set of cable plugged directly into a similar palmtop computer. When the next slide appeared, Victor laughed. With all of the advanced technology in the world, they were still using slide shows for presentations. The next slide displayed numbers and parabola charts. The next showed the crowd a progress bar, and the next a woman getting “disconnected” from the contraption. The last was a picture of the same woman holding a miniature U.S. flag in one hand and citizenship papers in the other. ImagEnation had programmed a woman to be more American than most Americans.

  virtual partition 242 not responding.

  adjust array parameters…

  While moving Bill’s data, Victor thought of the Mexican woman and how a part of her psyche had been replaced as easily as swapping a virtual partition—a Mexican programmed as an American thanks to the Artificial Knowledge Project. They had brought her onstage after the slide show and she gave a speech in perfect Americanized English, without a hint of Spanish accent. She gave her testimony on how it had changed her life for the better.

  Want to be a helicopter pilot? Victor asked himself as he established the new partition. “Why not,” he said aloud when it initialized. Trigonometry, calculus, advanced theoretical mathematics? All it took was a little programming, and money. But such things were singular applications. Victor wanted the whole shebang, an operating system, the vessel capable of running programs. Sure, some punk kid from Delaware found a way to store the knowledge and language of the American People onto a compressed two-hundred gigabytes, but no one before had pushed the limits of the human mind. No one had ever attempted to store the entirety of a well-educated mind onto digital storage.

  The facility hosting the storage space provided three six-foot-tall racks with the capacity to hold 512 biodrives, and enough power to supply twenty watts to each. This was just the storage, a small part of a larger storage cloud, which replicated to various other data farms around the world for backup and recovery purposes. A forth rack held the server farmstead, an even dozen mega computers, as they were often called, connected and clustered as one. The front display of rack
s was clean and black and filled with blinking blue and green lights, a beautiful spectacle; the back of the rack was a massive plethora of multi-colored optical and power cables. A generator connected to the multi-AC-controlled room; the device was capable of providing enough redundant, clean power to the building for outage scenarios. The project also required a sizable amount of money. Through a company generically labeled HVS, Human Vitalogy Systems, Victor was able to fund close to two billion dollars in private, short-term investments. He figured the money would last about a year.

  array status healthy.

  The display screen reported good news for once. The replacement partition was live and slowly absorbing into the array. It would take about an hour before it would be ready to accept data. Without disconnecting Bill from the programming station, Victor gently woke him. He was merely asleep. All it took was the turn of a knob, and the drugs feeding into his wrists did the rest.

  “Bill,” he said, and waited for eyes to focus.

  “Victor?”

  “Did you rest well?”

  “Yes. I could sleep for days. Did it work this time?”

  Victor sighed, put a hand onto Bill’s shoulder, and said, “Almost. Listen, one of the virtual partitions went kaput and I had to suspend data copy in order to replace it. You’re still connected, so I can’t let you up yet.”

  The restraints were only a precaution. He didn’t want Bill to wake up of his own accord and accidentally roll off the bed. That would be bad.

  “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind going a second round. Shouldn’t take more than three or four hours.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Two in the morning.”

  “Monday?”

  “Yes, Monday.”

  “I could use the sleep.”

  Victor smiled, turned another knob, which shot a dose of Pentithazine through the length of a second catheter, and watched Bill’s eyes roll under their lids. In a matter of seconds, his project had returned to REM sleep.

  He met Bill Chevsky a few years back while visiting his mother in the hospital. Both Victor’s mother and Bill had been diagnosed with lasolastica, one of the incurable cancers, which had adapted over time to the common medicines used to treat other cancers like leukemia, melanoma, and lymphoma. Laso took your life in a few months in most cases, and it quickly took his mother’s. Bill wasn’t far behind. Victor could already see cheekbones through Bill’s semi-transparent skin, the dark shadows under his eyes and the fear of death hidden behind them.

  When his mother died, Victor pledged to find a way around the cancer, a way to cheat the incurable disease. It was simple, really, logistically; the process was the complicated part. After the second Gulf War, the United Nations—or Untied Nations, as Victor liked to call them—declared a non-winnable war against human cloning. The war on terror was handled similarly decades before. But his method of fighting was legal, according to the Cloning Laws.

  There were five main stipulations of the Cloning Laws, known on the streets as The Five Cloning Commandments: (1) a license issued by the Department of Human Modification is required to clone body parts of any nature; (2) cloned animal body parts, not of human nature, may be used to serve either humans or animals requiring medical attention, if such parts are adaptable; (3) cloned human body parts may be used to serve either humans or animals requiring medical attention, if such parts are adaptable; (4) body parts of any nature may never be cloned for monetary gain; and (5) the human central nervous system, thus including the brain, spinal cord, and cranial nerves (retinas excluded), may not be cloned under any circumstances. There were many other facets to the laws, but those were the five basic principles. The Hippocratic Oath was even adapted.

  Victor’s idea was to clone an entire human body except for the central nervous system—to keep his experiment entirely legal—and then reprogram the original, which would later be transplanted into the cloned healthy version of the diseased or dying body. Sven Morrigan from Norrköping, Sweden, had attempted such a feat a few years prior—minus the reprogramming—but the patient’s mind did not properly adapt and the patient was pronounced brain-dead shortly after her body was reanimated. Further studies revealed that the patient’s brain had hard-reset, its internal memory and storage wiped clean, in other words. The doctor had rebooted the body, as well as the brain, but the brain was as useful upon reanimation as a reformatted drive, or a Bundt cake, for that matter.

  continue with data copy? (y/n)

  “Yes, please.”

  Victor pressed y and leaned back in his chair, thinking of Bundt cake.

  The copy of Bill Chevsky was at 78%.

  He watched the display for the next few hours, adding partitions when needed. Twelve thousand petabytes were used by the time the image reached 87%, an amount of storage he had achieved on his last experiment with Bill, and this included compression. What bothered Victor was that he had reached 91% by this mark on his last run. Had Bill changed that significantly in only a week, enough to warrant such an enormous amount of storage difference? Could possible data corruption be to blame ... aka brain damage? Perhaps bad sectors on drives were similar to damaged neurons within the brain. The thought of defragmenting the human mind sent shivers up his spine because it was highly possible and worth looking into with future research. He made a note of it, realizing he could quite possibly be cloning damaged sections of Bill.

  Victor had read articles comparing neuron storage within the brain to the physical storage of biodrives, and they were remarkably similar in nature. “The storage capacity of the human brain is infinite and cannot be set to a numerical storage value,” proclaimed a Dr. Moresco from Syria. “Like the universe, the brain is forever expanding.” Years ago, a Dr. Birge from Syracuse University had placed such a numerical value, stating that brain capacity ranged anywhere from one to a thousand terabytes, an amount that was quickly disproved. His initial guess was a dismal 3TB. Although he incorrectly hypothesized the storage potential of proteins, the biodrive was born many years later because of his experimental research, using genetically engineered DNA to store data rather than magnetic or metallic medium. Intel had revolutionized the microprocessor not long before by replacing traditional transistors with controlled deoxyribonucleic acids. It was estimated during his time that the brain contained somewhere between 50 and 200 billion neurons, and that each neuron interfaced with thousands upon thousands of other neurons through trillions or possibly quadrillions of synaptic junctions, with each synapse possessing a set numerical value. Long and extremely complicated story short, this equation produced an estimated half to full petabyte of potential data, which was also incorrect. Victor had disproved that theory while researching MLSP, or Molecular Level Storage Potential, while attending Berkeley. His research followed the neuron/synaptic junction equation, but added to it exponentially when his findings proved that ones and zeros could actually be controlled on a molecular level.

  virtual partition 242 not responding.

  adjust array parameters…

  A long, drawn-out sigh replaced the silence. Bill’s breathing wasn’t much louder.

  “Partition 242. Again,” he told his unconscious patient. “What is with you and partition 242, huh?”

  The display read 93%.

  “We’re almost there, Bill. We’re going to do this.”

  While replacing the partition yet again, he thought of his mother, his reason for the insanity behind the need for this type of accomplishment. Like his mother, Bill’s body was going to die. His mind, if that could be saved ...

  I could use the sleep, Bill had said to him.

  His mother had said something similar just before passing. “I’m taking the long sleep,” she had said. The longest sleep possible, one from which she’d never wake. Victor didn’t want Bill’s last words to be “I could use the sleep” because it was all too familiar.

  array status healthy.

  A sigh of relief.

  continue with data copy
? (y/n)

  “Yes, damn it. Yes.”

  Life, the waking dream.

  Ninety-four percent.

  She had looked similar to Bill while on her deathbed, with dark, sunken eyes, pale gray and slightly transparent skin, blue spider web veins underneath feeding the cancer throughout her body. He remembered holding her fragile hand as she looked to him with distant eyes. Her skin, cold and clammy. She had looked past him, Victor knew, to the other side. She could see it, and he knew by her expression that she was afraid of going there alone. Even with those last fighting breaths and her body pumped full of poison, she wanted to live; seeing that only made Victor want to die right there next to her so they could at least be together.

  data copy complete.

  checking array for inconsistencies. please wait…

  “Do I have a choice?

  He had never gotten this far before.