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

  “Cross your fingers, Bill.”

  Unconscious, Bill faced the ceiling. Victor crossed Bill’s fingers for him. He had fallen asleep happy and was still smiling, anxious about possibly entering a disease-free copy of his body, living again, freed from the binds of lasolastica.

  data corruption found in array.

  correcting … no errors found.

  “Well, which is it?”

  As if answering him, the screen displayed:

  image creation successful.

  18,216,369,102,558,196.

  How large was the mind of man?

  For Bill Chevsky, the answer was a little over 18.2 petabytes. Take that number and multiply it by eight, and that’s the number of ones and zeros used to portray Bill digitally. Hypothetically, Bill was the first human being with two minds, one physical and the other digital. One of his minds was virtually and quite literally in the clouds, a data storage cloud holding all 18.2PB of him. In terms of psychology, this sort of gave Bill a dissociative identity disorder.

  Could it be done? Could the human mind be cloned?

  The answer was now yes, and Victor was the first to do it.

  He wanted so badly to wake Bill to tell him the good news, but if he did, he’d have to do it twice because he couldn’t be disconnected from the catheter cable while conscious. It would most certainly kill him. Instead, he followed procedure and disconnected Bill properly from the computers and from the cloud that now hosted a copy of his mind. Victor turned the knob again to send wake-up juice into Bill’s wrists, and he slowly opened his eyes. He yawned.

  “So?”

  Victor smiled.

  Bill cloned it.

  “Really?”

  “We did it, Bill. You have a digital twin.”

  “When can we try?”

  “Soon. I want to run thorough consistency and integrity checks on your image.”

  Bill smiled again. Looking at him was like looking at his mother the moment before she died—the eyes cloudy and distant, the smile full of effort and skeptical hope. He didn’t say anything, but nodded.

  “Tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Okay.”

  “You look puzzled.”

  “Oh ... my mind is going through some loops. Questions, you know? I’ve been thinking about it for a while. There’s technically two of me in the world, right? Me,” he said, pointing to his chest, “and then me,” he said, pointing and looking to the ceiling. “Another me is floating around out there in the data cloud, but I don’t know him. I can’t feel him. A part of me thinks I should be able to feel that connection somehow. Does that make sense? The version of me that’s talking to you is going to die, but the other gets to live. But it’s not me, is it? I mean, it is me, but not me me.”

  The same questions had been haunting Victor’s mind.

  “This body is going to die. I know that. I’m not going to be a part of it after tomorrow afternoon because my mind—with my actual brain—will be in my new body ...”

  “It’s a shell, Bill. Your body, it’s just a shell and nothing more.”

  “But you know what I’m getting at, right?”

  “Look, what makes Bill Chevsky Bill Chevsky is in here.” Victor pointed to his temple. “We’ve gone round and round about this in our preliminary consults. What we’re doing is strange, no doubt, and it’s never been done before, but we’re taking a good mind from a bad body and we’re putting it into a healthy, good body. A new shell. It will still be you in there.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “Before the operation? Of course.”

  “I mean after.”

  “You want to see your old body? I’m not sure that would be a good idea, Bill.”

  “I want to see him.”

  “Bill ...”

  “Promise me, Victor. You owe me that much. If a cloned copy of my mind is going into a cloned copy of my body, I want to at least look into my eyes to know it’s no longer me in my dead body, that what’s left after the operation is just some ... I don’t know, some soulless, brainless husk and nothing more. I don’t want a funeral or anyone to know. I want to see that diseased body cremated.”

  “Everything will be taken care of, I assure you. And please don’t refer to your body as a husk. It makes this entire operation seem so Mary Shelly Frankenstein. We’ve come a long way with science since man—or woman in this case—came up with the idea of reanimating life with a donor brain, some metal rods, and a lightning storm. This isn’t science fiction. This is life. And your life in this body will end soon and start again in another. From today on, I mean. Everything up until the image was created will be transferred to the new body, of course.”

  “What does that make me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean right now. Right now doesn’t matter much, does it?”

  “I’m not following.”

  “This image, it encompasses everything about me, from the moment I was born until the moment you woke me a few minutes ago. Every thought, every learning experience and failure in my life, and everything that makes me who I am today ... that time span of my life is what is on that image. Not now. Now doesn’t matter because now isn’t on the image you’re transferring to my new body. This conversation we’re having about this very conundrum—it won’t matter much tomorrow afternoon because it won’t exist in Bill Chevsky version two. You’ll remember it, but the new me never had this conversation. It isn’t on the image. Get what I’m saying?”

  “I do, Bill, but look—”

  “So everything I do from here on is pointless,” he said, tears welling in his eyes. “What does that make me?”

  “It makes you—”

  “Non-important, pointless—”

  “It makes you unique, Bill. We’ve all dreamed as little boys, as adults even, to have a clone. To be in two places at once; one of us to stay home and take care of the chores while the other plays. Am I correct?”

  Bill nodded. “That and to be invisible.”

  “Your situation is a little different, that’s all. One of you gets to go out and play while the other, well, passes on.”

  “I want to look into his eyes tomorrow, Victor, to know that he’s not me.”

  “Bill.”

  Bloodshot and tired eyes stared back. He was a man clinging to life, a man afraid of waking up from his operation and seeing more than his own lifeless body. Perhaps a man who once believed in souls.

  “I want to sleep tonight. I don’t want to live any longer than I have to. In fact, I need you to put me under now. Anesthetize me, or dope me up somehow and let me sleep. The thought of a pointless existence will drive me insane otherwise. I want to dream the ultimate dream. I want to wake up tomorrow in my new body. I’m tired of this one. Will you do that for me?”

  The last thing Victor said to Bill Chevsky version one: “I will, and thank you.”

  He was thanking him for more than the opportunity of performing the procedure, what could quite possibly end up being the gateway to a new treatment for patients with terminal conditions; he was thanking Bill for his mother, and for sacrificing his body for the hope of mankind and for the next generation of medicine; for the twelve-year-old girl who will never see thirteen because of the tumor growing on her spine; for the single father who will never see his son graduate because of heart failure; for the newborn born into a life destined for lasolastica or any of the other incurable cancers.

  They had started cloning the body prior to the trials. It was a heavy expense, but funding had already covered the body. It was waiting for them in what Victor liked to call “the shop,” a facility in the adjacent building. If Bill was anything like Victor’s mother, he didn’t have long to live. The night, would it be forgiving? Apparently so. He had injected Bill with enough drugs to assist him into a coma, and the next morning Bill’s numbers on the electrocardiograph revealed he had survived his final sleep.

  Victor recorded the old body vitals and signaled the surgical tea
m. He watched from behind the operating room glass with a select few responsible for funding the project. Not one stayed for the gore, excusing themselves with, “This is excellent work, Victor ... most interesting, but I need to make a noon appointment ...” or similar lines of encouragement to hide weak stomachs. One by one they left him, and soon he was alone, leaning forward in his seat, nose to the glass, eyes moving like a metronome: to and fro, to and fro, to and fro between the health monitors and his patient; the clock on the wall keeping tempo: tick tock, tick tock, tick tock for the next four hours.

  The surgery was invasive, to say the least. An ungodly sight. The key was to keep Bill Chevsky alive during the ordeal, something over which Victor had no control as he nervously waited behind glass. The thought of Bill alive as they cut away and removed the skullcap and exposed the membrane—it chilled him; the thought of a man in a coma with eyes still able to see as they detached the retinas, removing most of his face to get to the hidden cranial nerves beneath, cutting away cheekbones, removing the lower jaw, nose and upper row of teeth until there was not much remaining of his head—it repulsed him. A set of surgeons removed pieces of Bill while others worked eagerly to keep the rest of his body alive, injecting medicines, stopping blood flow, suctioning blood spill, and feeding new blood to replace that which was lost during the operation. Bill Chevsky, once a normal looking man, was now a body hacked from the waist up, organs rerouted and placed onto trays out of the way, cables and clamps coming out of a chest peeled open like a banana with the fruit scooped out. They supported the brain before removing the rest of the skull, and then they cut away all remaining and unnecessary soft tissue—as well as bone matter—to expose the central nervous system whole: brain, spinal cord, and cranial nerves. The workspace around them was remarkably clean throughout, despite the mess they had made of Bill’s body. And then they unplugged him. Three sets of red-gloved hands lifted out the one thing Victor could not clone because of the fifth stipulation of the Cloning Laws: The human central nervous system, thus including the brain, spinal cord, and cranial nerves (retinas excluded) .... They took it out of him and gently placed it onto a stainless steel tray. Bill Chevsky version one was dead. All vitals on the electrocardiogram had flat-lined.

  The lead surgeon looked over his mask to Victor and gestured a bloody thumbs-up. Nurses wheeled the massacred body out of the room—a brainless husk, Bill had said earlier. He was right. Victor would be there alongside him to destroy it. Arm-length rubber gloves were replaced on those staying for the second phase of the operation, and they held their arms to the ceiling as they waited for the clone. A doctor rinse-washed the brain and everything connected to it with bottles of clear liquid. She began placing electrical nodes onto it, which would send a minimal amount of current through the exposed central nervous system until transplanted. She finished as the new body was rolled in on a mobile operating table: Bill Chevsky version two.

  It was nice to see him whole again.

  While they were hacking apart Bill’s old body, surgeons in an adjacent operating room had prepared the cloned body for transplantation. Their precision showed; a lack of anything to show would be a better way to phrase it. Only smooth lines were visible where they had made incisions, and they were only visible when the body was flipped onto its side. The entire back of the skull was removed, but would be completely hidden after the piece of bone was replaced and hair grew. Empty eye sockets let in light from the room, revealing that the cranium was empty. Everything else was intact from the face, from what Victor could see from his perspective. The large piece of skull lay next to the body. A straight cut extended from the middle of the back to the base of the skull as a means of entry for the central nervous system. Bill would have a generous scar after they sewed him back together again. Victor wondered about Bill’s eyes, and then a nurse walked in with a small cooler, which held the cloned parts of Bill that needed to be installed after the brain, spinal cord and cranial nerves were placed into the body and reconnected. The entire process took them late into the afternoon.

  After another thumbs-up, Victor prepared “the shop” for the reimaging process while he waited for the body. Surgery had come a long way in the last fifty years. It was remarkable he could work on him the same day. When they wheeled in Bill version two, it looked as though he were simply asleep on his back, chest rising and falling without the need of a nebulizer. New lungs with auto-inflation/deflation made sure he stayed breathing while an artificial heart kept synthetic blood pumping throughout his body. Various forms of nanotechnology were used to repair damaged tissue and to keep the body in a controlled coma; to quash the coma, it would take only a small electromagnetic pulse to turn off the bots, thus forcing the body to take over.

  “Thank you for bringing him to me alive.”

  “He’s a vegetable,” said the doctor pushing the gurney, “but a healthy one, at least. The rest is up to you. We all have our fingers crossed.”

  “We’ll get you back,” Victor said, patting Bill on the shoulder.

  The electrocardiogram displayed a slightly higher than normal heart rate, but blood pressure and pleuth were regular. Bill’s image was finishing its final data integrity check while Victor readied the fifty-strand, wide-optical catheter cable and injected Bill with another dose of Pentithazine. The last thing he needed was for the new body to wake up prematurely. Bill’s eyes were motionless behind their lids this time. No mind, no REM sleep.

  image status healthy.

  18,216,369,102,558,196.

  Bill’s mind: waiting in the cloud.

  image ready … connectivity verified…

  “Ready when you are, my friend. When this is over, we’re going out for drinks. But you’re buying. Nod if that’s all right with you.”

  Bill’s body: toes up.

  proceed with image download? (y/n)

  “Fine. I’ll buy.”

  Victor pressed the key with authority.

  download initiated…

  bytes copied: 1,539,974,021,487

  The numbers farthest to the right of the screen were a blur as the byte count jumped at a rate of about 1.5 billion bytes per second. He stared at the number unblinkingly for about ten minutes until the byte count had climbed to a terabyte. It would take another three hours to download the complete image.

  bytes copied: 1,028,974,021,487,930

  Bill lay there with his mind filling with information: childhood, education, adulthood, sexuality, life experiences, downfalls, and everything else that made Bill Chevsky who he was prior to his body’s death; his first time riding a bike, first fight, first kiss, high school, college, marriage, the birth of his daughter, divorce, the death of his mother. It flooded into him as the same thoughts flooded into Victor’s mind. What would his image look like? How many bytes? How many bad sectors he wished he could erase from memory?

  image download successful.

  18,216,369,102,558,195.

  Three hours had passed, while the span of an entire life had transferred from cloud to man.

  checking downloaded image for inconsistencies…

  Something about the number didn’t look right. Hair rose on the nape of his Victor’s neck. His stomach tightened. Compared to his notes, it was off by a single digit.

  image size mismatch of 1 byte…

  “I could have told you that,” he said to the computer.

  array status healthy. no errors found.

  image status healthy. no errors found.

  size mismatch of 1 byte on downloaded image.

  retry copy? (y/n)

  He didn’t have much of a choice. Instead of retrying the copy, Victor first checked the array for inconsistencies, and once more the computer told him the image stored on the cloud was fine, although a single byte larger in size than the downloaded version.

  retry copy? (y/n)

  What could one byte matter?

  Victor pounded the key this time.

  It could be anything—a single one or a zero coul
d matter more than anything!

  He watched the screen the entire three hours, rarely moving his eyes away. His leg shook under the table, his palms were sweaty. He was hungry and tired and had to pee, but none of that mattered. He had bitten the insides of his cheeks raw and destroyed a majority of his fingernails by the time the image finished.

  image download successful.

  18,216,369,102,558,195.

  The same damn size. One single byte.

  After repeated inconsistency checks on the hosted array image and the downloaded image, the computer greeted him with the same annoying:

  retry copy? (y/n)

  “What do you think?” he asked Bill. “It’s either going to work, or it’s not going to work. If it’s the latter, we still have the image stored on the cloud and we can retry downloading using a different machine, or try something else entirely. I’m talking to you like you can actually answer me. I’m losing it. I can’t believe I’m talking to myself now and I’m losing it. What would you do if you were me, Bill?”

  Bill was as eager as Victor for all of this to work. He’d say screw the single byte and try it anyway. What could it hurt?

  He chose no after hesitating over the y key.

  image copy successful.

  disconnect before rebooting patient.

  Victor disconnected the catheter at the back of Bill’s head. It was a strange feeling, knowing he was going to reboot a human being, as if he were some kind of device instead of a living, breathing person. He remembered the term from history class at college. Bootstrapping, they used to say. It was an old term used in computer terminology, when bootstrap buttons were pressed in order to initiate hardwired programs. It derived from the phrase “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstrap,” which of course was an impossible task. Even before that, the word bootstrap meant “to better oneself by one’s own unaided efforts.” Both seemed appropriate. Bill required Victor’s help to get him out of the mud, and the goal was to better Bill’s physical self.