Dangerous Metal

Chapter 1

I laid my hand on the lock for the door to my attic lab and waited for the lock to seal before heading downstairs to open the front door. In my internal interface I swept away the security notifications. Bumping into the table for the millionth time, I scanned the external monitor and opened the door. You found it!

Found is a good word. Terk raised his eyebrows at me and grinned. In his arms he had a large orb. He nearly dropped it on the couch.

Don’t drop it, I could have gotten it out. I called for the little transport bot I had. This was hardly the first heavy piece of equipment we’d brought in. The door closed and locked with a swipe of my third hand, I rearmed the security as the vehicle pod he’d used to get here zipped off.

I know, I just didn’t want to hang around outside too long with this. It’s pretty hot. Eva, you need to clean it up quick. He took the protective cloth off it and patted it proudly. This was a hard one to get.

I know, it’s taken months. I grabbed my cleaning gun and looked at my shiny new toy. It was big enough to fit my head inside, I wanted to start testing right away. I shifted my visual input to scan for RFID tagging and any outgoing signals. The last thing we needed was for it to phone home. I started killing the tags on it with the cleaner.

So do you have time to run it now? I looked up at Terk and his metal lit up inside my interface, I shook my head and looked back down at the orb. It was designed to run a huge range of scans and worked well with electronics, which was exactly what I needed to scan my metal filled brain.

No, sorry, I need to be back at work. The whole I was never here, this never happened thing? He laughed as I set the cleaner down we picked the orb up and set it on the transport bot’s cradle.

I suppose. I sighed and shifted my visual input back to a normal spectrum. I just really want to run some tests to see what it looks like, what kind of outputs it has. I guided the bot with the orb toward the sealed basement lab. In my interface I pulled up the command to unlock the door. It hissed open and I smiled.

You want to take it apart and make it 30% better by tomorrow. Terk jabbed at me and lead the bot down the stairs into the operating room space.

Come on, I’m sure I couldn’t get more than 25% improved performance by the end of the day tomorrow. But that’s mostly because I’m going to have dinner with my folks tonight. I hadn’t set aside space for it or done inventory, Terk had just called a couple hours ago to let me know he’d likely be dropping it off today. After cleaning up we put it away in the storage area.

We really do have more stuff down here than most hospitals. Terk puffed out his chest proudly, he’d been responsible for acquiring a significant portion of our equipment. Speaking of which, how’s my next toy coming?

I’ve been working on it today, since you asked. It should be done next week. I’ve got a few parts to print first. I shrugged. I’d been working on it earlier. It was a custom piece that was a little outside my speciality. I had to make it a perfect fit for him so it wasn’t something I could throw together and replace with an upgraded version when I figured out what would work better. I’d already made and set aside one version. I usually made 3 or 4 before I got one I really liked.

Do we have to wait for Jen to be back in town to put it in? I can help with the implant, you and I can totally do it. He secured the orb inside the storage space. Besides it’s way more legal if I do the implant than if she does it.

I rolled my eyes. You just found a half a million dollar piece of medical equipment and you’re worried about the legality of your implants? You’re kidding me right? The implants themselves weren’t illegal, yet, but putting them in anyone else without extensive medical sign offs was. It was sort of the least of my worries living in a house with millions of dollars of stolen equipment and a head full of implants that kept me alive.

He posed against the background of a storage room full of stolen goods. Obviously, just hurry up! I want my new toy. He chuckled and we headed back up stairs. Sometimes, Eva, that uniquely lovely head full of metal makes you way to serious. Anyway, I have to get back to work. I’m supposed to be in surgery in 20 minutes. You may love me, but they don’t quite understand how awesome it is to have an amazing and handsome nurse who can lift a truck on hand.

You have fun with that. I locked up behind him as he left and headed back up to the attic. I had a few hours to work before I needed to change to go see my parents. I hadn’t had dinner with them in a long time and I was looking forward to a nice quiet evening to catch up.

Last time I’d seen them I was in the hospital. I’d managed to make myself a national name, end up in a hospital, get legislation named after me, and my favorite part, get diagrams of what people thought my brain might look like splashed all over the news. Most of it had died down in the time since, I really just wanted to go back to being invisible and working in my lab, helping The Library, and receiving stolen property.

I grinned and headed back up to my attic. I stopped on the stairs, as always, and pulled my long, dark hair down from around the power pack at the base of my skull and brushed it out, carefully wrapping it back around the power pack to conceal it, but at home mostly to keep the hair out of my way while working in the lab. I unlocked the space and went back to work on Terk’s latest toy.

Chapter 2

My parents’ house looked neat and clean as always. Mom had clearly been in the small garden out front earlier in the day, the dirt was still freshly overturned. I inhaled deeply and reached my third hand into my interface to clear away some of the information. It would be nice to have dinner with mom and dad, I hadn’t in quite a while. Though they had been at the hospital they hadn’t visited me at home while I was recovering. The big public scandal where my secrets were laid bare and several weeks of recovery had taken a toll. I was glad I was getting back to my own life.

I rapped on the back door and entered, it never stopped feeling a little strange to knock on the door of the house you grew up in. I smiled at dad in the kitchen and took my shoes off before going in to give him a hug. Hey, dad! Thanks so much for having me.

Oh you’ve gotten so big! He laughed and hugged me with the same greeting he’d been giving me since I had grow taller than him at fourteen. I was the tallest in my family at 5’7" and I enjoyed that dad stood on his toes in every family photo since.

And you’re still not bald! It was so nice to not have to pull up information from my database to remember him. My long term memory and my emotional memory were strong, but I still had trouble with faces. I had the internal memory stores to handle it, but I really liked not having to use them with those I was closest to, family, and the friends I saw often could be pulled by just memory. I inhaled deeply at the delicious smelling food on the stove top. It smells wonderful.

Eva! Honey! I heard mom calling from the living room and gave him one more quick hug before I ducked out of the kitchen to find mom.

Hi mom, thanks for inviting me! It’s been a long time since I’ve had one of dad’s amazing meals, and this smells like a record breaker. I stopped in my tracks as I came into the room the words finishing only because they’d already started. Everything else stopped. The world around me came to a standstill.

Look who dropped in to dinner. My mom sat on the couch next to Ernie, my ex, the man who put a hole in my head big enough for my brain to start to come undone and for a computer to get stuffed inside to replace it. My internal monitors started flashing, heart rate racing, unusual brain activity. Spots appeared in my vision for a moment and I reminded myself to breath.

Eva, Ernie got up and came over to give me a big hug, I was too stunned to move. I was remembering to breathe and I felt like that was an accomplishment. It’s so good to see you again, it’s been so long. And your mother here was so very wonderful to invite me to dinner when I called to see how you were after that incident.

I had no idea how to respond, run, punch him, scream, something anything. But my body and my brain weren’t working in conjunction tonight. Incident, getting splashed all over the news taking down the head of a major corporation who was killing people with his technology and ending up in the hospital under the wing of a purist politician. Sure, it was an incident. Having people call me a monster because I had some implants that saved my life, and having them want to make those same implants illegal, to take them out of me. Just an incident, no big deal. I breathed.

Oh yes, dear, I know that you and poor Ernie, didn’t end well, but he’s here and he wants make sure you’re ok, because he cares dear. My mom came over to give me a hug. I stepped into the hug with her and put my head into her shoulder inhaling deeply smelling her perfume. Maybe this wasn’t real. Maybe I was having another hallucination from the drugs. I’d been on some really horrible drugs after the hospital for a few days that made me hallucinate, often about Ernie, maybe I was still there. We were all so worried about you after the whole thing and lets not talk about that debacle tonight.

I wanted to speak. I willed my lips to form words, no mom, lets not talk about how I ended up on plenty of watch lists for whatever they were calling it, corporate espionage, terrorism, whatever. I showed the truth to people the only possible way I could come up with at the time. Or how I ended up in the hospital after with a damn purist politician as my guardian. Or how I have a computer in my brain because the man you invited to dinner beat me until I couldn’t survive without it. Nothing came out, my brain refused to relay anything to my mouth.

Mom wrapped her arm around Ernie and smiled. I’d somehow managed to forget how much my folks loved him, but that had been why I’d never told them. I had never told my parents why I’d left him, or what he had done to me. They didn’t know the accident that had created the need for my unique implant wasn’t an accident at all. Tonight, I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t make trouble here, they’d hate me, they’d turn on me. Ernie turned on his brilliant smile. I used to love when he turned his smile on. Now it only churned my stomach.

Yes, that whole mess, it happens, got in a little over your head. He smiled brightly. I reached out my third hand to send a message. I didn’t even know who to send it to. I felt paralyzed. But that’s what family is here for, to support you after something like that. We are all here for you. I still love you very much and wanted to make sure you were ok.

My mom reached out and guided us toward the living room chairs, Oh, you’re ok dear, you still look a little tired though. She reached up and brushed a strand of hair off my face. Her fingers ran across my hair to the bun at the base of my skull it contained the power supply that ran part of my brain, my visual and auditory receptors, my internal interface, my data storage. All of the things that made me a monster to part of the world. All the things that made me able to function. She quickly pulled her hand away from my head and put it onto my shoulder. She sat with me on the couch and Ernie sat in the chair across from us.

I was so surprised such a very conservative politician like Gina came in to help you out. That was such a shocking and generous move for her to place you under her care. After you fended off those guards with that taser. Ernie looked pointedly at my hands in my lap. He clearly wasn’t going to let it go. That was fine by me, it would only help to keep me focused on the present. When I was free of him, when I didn’t love him anymore, when other people loved me, and when I didn’t have to fear him, but I was still too terrified to speak.

Luckily, he was still happy to dominate the conversation, Oh, but let’s not talk about that. I was just saying to your mother before you got here how amazing you were with all the very nice little toys you would make in our basement back home. You were always wonderful with your hands, developing the tiniest little remarkable pieces of machinery.

Just a few years ago I yearned for that kind of praise from him and now it made me cold. I’d developed a fucking replacement for a not insignificant portion of my brain. It was a revolutionary piece of equipment and it was a part of me. Little, he kept saying little because he thought that it wasn’t impressive, or because he knew that both my parents were always more impressed by larger engineering projects. They were both engineers, but they worked on a massive scale. I’d taken after them, just smaller. Little didn’t mean bad, it just meant little. My third hand dragged through my interface unsure what to do, I didn’t know how to fight back.

My mother reached for her wine glass and took a sip. Oh, dear, let me get you a glass.

No, I, an escape, I could go talk to dad, I could come up with an excuse, I could move outside the orbit of Ernie and break free. She patted my hand and stood up fast, she was out of the room before I could even move. I was still moving slower than I’d like. Which also meant I needed to be careful. Could I manually induce an adrenaline rush? I added it to the list of potential future upgrades. Maybe if I had it right now I’d be able to get out of this paralysis of fear. I could have it stimulate the correct neural centers and then my body would release the adrenaline naturally.

Ernie came over and sat down next to me, I wanted to stay inside my head, thinking about my brain. He wasn’t as close as my mother had been, but a hundred miles was too close, a planet between us wasn’t enough. You look really good. He gave me a warm, confident smile. I’ve missed you so much, and when I saw the news about you, I was so worried. He didn’t even pause to let me respond. I felt like this was a conversation we’d had a thousand times. He could be so incredibly kind and nice after he’d done something horrible. This one had just been delayed by nearly four years since I’d escaped.

I inhaled to respond, but before I did he continued, the words I’d been putting together in my head melted away. "It is so nice to see you. I've been trying to give you the space you needed to sort things out,