12
Change
My life becomes agony.
My Sigils are attached to the metacarpus in each hand. Mickey
removes the old Red Sigils and cultivates new skin and bone over
the wounds. Then he sets to installing a stolen subdermal datachip
into my frontal lobe. I am told the trauma killed me and they had to
restart my heart. I’ve died twice then. They say I was in a coma for
two weeks, but to me it was nothing but a dream. I was in the vale
with Eo. She kissed me on the forehead and then I woke and felt the
stitches and the pain.
I lie in bed as Mickey tests me. He has me move marbles from one
container into other containers coded by colors. I do this for what
seems a lifetime.
“We are forming synapses, my darling.”
He tests me with word puzzles and tries to make me read, but I
don’t know how to read. “You will have to learn that for the
Institute,” he giggles.
My dreams are cruel things to wake from. In them, Eo comforts
me, but when I wake, she is nothing but a eeting memory. I am
hollow as I lie in Mickey’s makeshift medical cell. An ion germ killer
buzzes next to my bed. Everything is white, yet I can hear the
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thumping of music from his club. His girls change my diapers and
empty my piss bags. A girl who never speaks bathes me three times
a day. Her arms are willowy, her face soft and sad as when I rst
saw her sitting with Mickey at his liquid table. The wings that curl
outward from her back are bound with a crimson ribbon. She never
meets my eyes.
Mickey continues to make me develop synapse connections as he
repairs the scar tissue from my neural surgery. He’s all laughs and
smiles and lingering touches on my forehead as he calls me his
darling. I feel like one of his girls, one of the angels he sculpted for
his own pleasure.
“But we must not be satised only with the brain,” he says.
“There is much work to be done on this Ruster body of yours if we
want to make to an iron Gold.”
“And that is?”
“The golden ancestors, they call them the iron Golds. They were
hard men. They stood lean and erce upon their battlecruisers as
they laid waste to the armies and republic eets of Earth. What
creatures they were.” His eyes go distant. “It took generations of
eugenics and biological tampering to make them. Forced
Darwinianism.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and it seems an anger builds in him.
“They say Carvers will never duplicate the beauty of the Golden
Man. The Board of Quality Control taunts us. Personally, I do not
want to make you a man. Men are so very frail. Men break. Men die.
No, I’ve always wished to make a god.” He smiles mischeviously as
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he does some sketches on a digital pad. He spins it around and
shows me the killer I will become. “So why not carve you to be the
god of war?”
The scarred tissue on my back is peeled away with a laser and
then the raw esh is sown with cultures of my own skin grown in
tubes, which is then irradiated to promote molecular bonding. It
grows fast on my body, like some sort of living creature apart from
myself. It itches like a demon. Mickey replaces the skin of my back
and the skin of my hands where Eo applied bandages to my burns.
This, he says, is not to be my real skin. It is only a homogeneous
baselayer.
“Your skeleton is weak because Mars gravity is zero point three of
Earth’s, my delicate little bird. Also, you have a diet decient in
calcium. Gold Standard bone density is ve times stronger than
naturally occurring bone density on Earth. So we will have to make
your skeleton six times stronger; you must be of iron if you want to
last the Institute. This will be fun! For me. Not you.”
Mickey carves me again. The agony is beyond language or
comprehension. I watch videos of it afterwards to distract me from
the residual pain. He uses a vibroScalpel to slice the esh of my
thigh down the middle. He parts my muscle and skin with clamps to
expose the bones of my legs. Then he peels o layers of the bone
with a bonepeeler and paints new layers with his improved-bone
recipe.
“Someone has to dot God’s i’s.”
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The next day, he opens my arms. Then he does my ribs, my spine,
my shoulders, my feet, my pelvis, and my face. He also alters the
tensile qualities of my tendons and inserts biocultures to increase
the density of my muscle tissue Mercifully, he does not let me wake
from this last surgery for several weeks. When I do wake, I see his
girls around me applying new cultures of esh and kneading my
muscles with their thumbs. I wonder what will happen to them
when we have nished with me. Then I fall back asleep.
I sleep in a tubular machine in which a specialized blue light
crosses my body to solidify the calcium formula beneath my esh.
Slowly, my skin begins to heal. I am a patchwork eshquilt. They
begin feeding me synthesized protein, creatine, and growth
hormone to promote muscle growth and tendon regeneration. My
body trembles in the nights and itches as I sweat through new,
smaller pores. I cannot use pain medication sucient enough to
numb the agony, because the altered nerves must learn to function
with the new tissue and my altered brain.
He sits beside me on my worst nights telling me stories. It’s only
then that I like him, only then that I think he is not some monster
cooked up by this perverted Society.
“My profession is to create, little bird,” he says one night as we sit
together in the darkness. The blue light dances over my body,
bathing his face in queer shadows. “When I was young, I lived in a
place they call the Grove. It was what you might think of as a circus
culture. We had spectacles every night. Celebrations of color and
sound and dance.”
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“Sounds terrible,” I mutter sarcastically. “Just like the mines.”
He smiles softly and his eyes nd that distant place. “I suppose it
may seem a plush life to you. Yet there was a madness to the Grove.
They made us take candies. Candies that would take us on journeys
to hell, on pilgrimages to heaven. Pills that could make us y
between the planets on wings of dust to visit the faerie kings of
Jupiter and the deep mermaids of Europa. There was no escape to
the journeys, no end to the trips of childhood, my darling. There I
drooled on the grass as the festivals swung about. My mind always
separate from body. No peace to it. No end to the madness.” He
clapped his hands then. “And now I Carve the things I saw in my
fever dreams, just as they always wished. I dreamed of you, I think.
In they end, I suppose they’ll wish I hadn’t dreamed at all.”
“Was it a good dream?” I ask.
“What?”
“The one with me.”
“No. No, it was a nightmare. One of a man from hell, lover of
re.” He’s slient for a spell.
“Why is it so horrible?” I ask him. “Life. All this. Why do they
need to make us do this? Why do they treat us like we’re their
slaves?”
“Power.”
“Power isn’t real. It’s just a word.”
Mickey ponders silently. Then he shrugs his thin shoulders.
“Mankind was always enslaved, they’ll say. Freedom enslaves us to
lust, to greed. Take freedom away, and they give me a life of
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dreaming. They gave you a life of sacrice, family, community. And
society is stable. There is no famine. No genocide. No great wars.
And when the Golds ght, they obey rules. They are … noble about
it when the great houses bicker.”
“Noble? They lied to me. Said I was a pioneer.”
“And would you have been happier if you knew you were a
slave?” Mickey asks. “No. None of the billion lowReds beneath Mars
would be happy if they knew what the highReds knew—that they
are slaves. So is it not better to lie?”
“It is better to not make slaves.”
When I am ready, he inserts a forceGenerator into my sleeping
tube to simulate increased gravity on my frame. I’ve never known
pain like this. My body aches. My bones and skin and muscles
scream against the pressure and the change till I’m on medication
that turns the scream into a dull forever-moan. Before my skeleton
is nished, Mickey replaces my teeth with straight ones taken from
some lab or corpse; I don’t know. My tongue plays over them. They
are so slippery. Like cold tiles in my mouth.
I sleep for days. I dream of home and family. Every night I wake
after seeing Eo hang yet again. She sways across my mind. I miss
her warmth in bed beside me, even though they give me an HC
immersion mask for distraction.
Gradually, I am weaned from the pain medication. My muscles
still aren’t used to the density of my bones, so my existence becomes
a melodic ache. They begin to feed me real food. Mickey sits on the
edge of my cot stroking my hair well into the nights. I don’t care
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that his ngers feel like spider legs. I don’t care that he thinks I am
some piece of art, his art. He gives me something called a
hamburger. I love it. Red meats and thick creams and breads and
fruits and vegetables make my diet. I have never eaten so well.
“You need the calories,” Mickey coos. “You have been so strong
for me; eat well. You deserve this food.”
“How am I doing?” I ask.
“Oh, the hard parts are over, my darling. You are a brilliant boy,
you know. They have shown me the tapes from the other procedures
where other Carvers tried this. Oh, how clumsy the other Carvers
were, how weak the other subjects. But you are strong and I am
briliant.” He taps my chest. “Your heart is like that of a stallion’s.
I’ve never glimpsed one like it before. You may not know this, but
its so large because you were bitten by a pitviper when you were
young, I assume?”
“I was. Yes.”
“I thought so. Your heart had to adjust to counteract the eects of
the poison.”
“My uncle sucked most of the poison out when I was bitten,” I
say.
“No,” Mickey laughs. “That’s a myth. The poison cannot be
sucked out. It still runs through your veins, forcing your heart to be
strong if you want to continue to live. You are something special,
just like me.”
“Then I will not die in here?” I manage.
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Mickey laughs. “No! No! We are beyond that now. There will be
pain. But we are past the threat of mortality. Soon we will have
made man into god. Red into Gold. Even your wife would not
recognize you.”
That is all I’ve ever feared.
When they take my eyes and give me ones of gold, I feel dead
inside. It’s a simple matter of reconnecting the optic nerve to the
“donor’s” eyes, Mickey says. A simple thing he’s done a dozen times
for cosmetic purposes; the hard part was the frontal lobe surgery, he
says. I disagree. There is the pain, yes. But with the new eyes, I see
things I once could not. Elements are clearer, sharper, and more
painful to bear. I hate this process. All it is is a conrmation of the
superiority of the Golds. It takes all this to make me their physical
equal, all this to correct what nature got wrong. Perhaps we should
serve them.
I don’t know how long I sleep. When I wake, my body rejects the
carving of my eyes. I’m screaming and sweating. I’ve gnawed my st
bloody in my sleep and scratched the cornea of my left eye a
millimeter deep. Not my left eye. My eye is in a container
somewhere. I’ve scratched someone else’s eye and it hurts. How
could it hurt? It’s not mine. None of this is mine. My skin is too soft,
too lustrous, too faultless. I don’t know my body without scars. I
don’t know the back of my own hands. Eo would not know me.
Mickey takes my hair next, ripping out the follicles and replacing
them with golden strands that itch like little golden weevils
burrowing into my scalp. Everything is changed.
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It is weeks of physical therapy. Walking slowly around the room
with Evey, the winged girl, I’m left to my own thoughts. Neither one
of us cares much to speak. She has her demons and I have mine, so
we are quiet and calm except when Mickey comes to coo about
what pretty children we would make together. Evey sits by my bed
when I have fever dreams. I wake and she’s there, always quiet,
never speaking.
One day, Mickey even brings an antique zither for me, with a
soundboard of wood instead of plastic. It is the kindest thing he’s
ever done. I do not sing, but I play the solemn songs of Lykos. The
traditional ones of my clan that no one beyond the mine will ever
have heard. He and Evey sit with me sometimes, and though I think
Mickey a wretched sort of creature, I feel as though he understands
the music. Its beauty. Its importance. And afterwards, he says
nothing. I like him then, too. At peace. It must be so at odds with
the chaos of his childhood. What musics must they have played for
him as he ate their candies and they warped his mind?
“Well, you’re a bit sterner than I rst measured,” Harmony says to
me one morning as I wake.
“Where have you been?” I ask, opening my eyes.
“Finding donors.” She inches as she sees my irises. “The world
does not stop because you are here,” she says. “We had work to do.
Mickey says you can walk?”
“I am growing stronger.”
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“Not strong enough,” she surmises, looking me over. “You look
like a baby girae. I’ll x that.”
Harmony takes me beneath Mickey’s club to a grungy gymnasium
lit by sulfurous bulbs. I like the feel of the cold stone on my bare
feet. My balance has returned, and it is a good thing, because
Harmony does not oer me her arm; instead, she waves to the
center of the dark gymnasium.
“We bought these for you,” Harmony says.
She points to two devices in the center of the dark space. The
contraptions are silver and remind me of the suits knights wore in
past centuries. The armor hangs suspended between two metal
wires. “They are concentraction machines.”
I slide my body into the machine. Dry gel hugs my feet, my legs,
my torso and arms and neck, till only my head is free. The machine
is built to resist my movements, yet it responds even to the tiniest
stimuli. If the arch of my foot exes, resistance builds near the toe,
stressing the muscle. It cramps immediately. The idea of building
muscle is to exercise it, which is nothing more than using the
muscle intensely enough to create miscroscopic tears in the tissue
ber. This is the pain one feels in the days after an intense workout
—torn tissue—not lactic acid. When the muscle repairs the tears, it
builds on itself. This is the process the concentraction machine is
built to facilitate. It is the devil’s own invention.
Harmony slides the device’s faceplate over my eyes.
My body is still in the gym, but I see myself bounding across the
rugged landscape of Mars. The concentraction machine can pivot on
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independent axes, so when I ip o a thirty-meter ledge, I ip in the
concentraction machine. Then I’m running again, pumping my legs
against the concentraction machine’s resistance, which increases
according to Harmony’s mood or the location of the simulation.
Sometimes I venture to the jungles of Earth, where I race panthers
through the underbrush, or I take to the pocked surface of Luna
before it was populated. But always I return home to Mars to run
across its red soil and jump over its violent ravines. I learn the
planet this way, seeking the terraformed parts of the world where
rivers run from the hard red landscape into valleys of vegetation
and trees. Seas span thousands of miles, growing as great machines
powered by helium-3 thaw underground glaciers. Harmony
sometimes accompanies me in the other machine so I have someone
to race.
She pushes me hard, and sometimes I wonder if she’s trying to
break me. I don’t let her.
“If you’re not vomiting thinking about a workout, you’re not
trying,” she says.
The days are excruciating. My body is a misery of aches from the
arches of my feet to the back of my neck. Mickey’s Pinks massage
me every day. There is no better pleasure in the world, but three
days after beginning my training with Harmony, I wake up vomiting
in my bed. I shiver and shake and hear cursing.
“There’s a science to this, you wicked little witch,” Mickey is
shouting. “He will be a work of art, but not if you pour water on the
paint before it’s set. Do not ruin him!”
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“He must be perfect,” Harmony says. “Dancer, if he is weak in any
way, the other children will butcher him like a freshmade drillboy.”
“You are butchering him!” Mickey whines. “You are ruining him!
His body cannot handle the muscle breakdown.”
“He has not objected to the treatment,” Harmony reminds him.
“Because he does not know he can object!” Mickey says. “Dancer,
she has no understanding of the biomechanics involved in this. Do
not let her ruin my boy.”
“He is not your boy!” Harmony sneers.
Mickey’s voice becomes softer. “Dancer, Darrow is like a stallion,
one of the old stallions of Earth. Beautiful beasts that will run as
hard as you push them. They will run. And run. And run. Until they
don’t. Until their hearts explode.”
There is silence for a moment, then Dancer’s voice.
“Ares once told me that it is the hottest re that forms the sternest
steel. Keep pushing the boy.”
I resent two of my teachers after overhearing their words: Mickey
for thinking me weak; Dancer for thinking me his tool. Only
Harmony doesn’t anger me. Her voice, her eyes, seethe with an
anger I feel in my own soul. She may have Dancer now, but she lost
someone. The unscarred part of her face tells me that. It is as cold as
space. She is no schemer like Dancer or his master, Ares. She is like
me—brimming with a rage that makes all else so inconsequential.
That night I cry.
Over the next days, they feed me drugs to expedite the protein
synthesis and muscle regeneration. After my muscle tissue has
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recovered from the initial trauma, they train me harder than before,
even Mickey—though his eyes are underlined with dark rings and
his thin face is sallow, he does not object. He has grown distant
these last weeks, no longer telling me stories—as though he fears
what he has created, now that I’m taking fuller shape.
Harmony and I speak very little to one another, but there is a
subtle shift in our relationship, some sort of primal understanding
that we are the same sort of creature. But as my body grows
stronger, Harmony can no longer keep up even though she is a
hardened woman of the mines. That is after only two weeks. The
distance between our capabilities continues to grow. After another
month, she is like a child to me. Graceful, but a child. Small. Weak.
Quick, still. Very quick. But that is all. Even then I do not plateau.
My body begins to change. I thicken. My muscles become strong
and corded in the concentraction machine, which I now supplement
with weight workouts in highGrav. At rst it’s like I’m being
crushed by the new gravity and I can hardly move the free weights
from one side of the room to the other. Gradually, strength builds.
My shoulders grow broader, rounded; I see tendons emerge in my
forearms; a tense mass of hard muscles bind my torso, like armor.
Even my hands, which were always stronger than the rest of me,
grow more powerful in the concentraction machines. With a simple
squeeze, I can pulverize rock. Mickey jumped up and down when he
saw that. No one shakes my hand any longer.
I sleep in highGrav, so that when I move about on Mars, I feel
fast, quick, more agile than ever before. My fasttwitch bers form.
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My hands move like lightning, and when they hit the gymnasium’s
human-shaped punching bag, it leaps like it’s been struck by a
scorcher. I can punch through it now. It is dicult to exert myself,
so t do I become. Sometimes it takes thirty minutes to sweat
through my scarlet headband.
My body is becoming that of a Gold, one of the prime stock, not a
Pixie, not a Bronze. This is the body of the race that conquered the
Solar System. My hands are freaks. They are smooth, tanned, and
dexterous, as any Gold’s should be. But there is a power in them out
of proportion with the rest of me. If I am a blade, they are my edge.
My body is not all that changes. Before I sleep, I drink a tonic
laden with processing enhancers and speed-listen to The Colors, The
Iliad, Ulysses, Metamorphosis, the Theban plays, The Draconic Labels,
and restricted works like The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies,
Lady Casterly’s Penance, 1984, and The Great Gatsby. I wake knowing
three thousand years of literature and legal code and history. The
side eect is that I sometimes go spasmodic from “brain shock”
when I pass a strong electromagnetic signal. Mickey says that will
go away. All Golds go through the process as children. There are no
long-term cognition improvements. Only short-term processing.
My last day at Mickey’s comes two months after my last surgery.
Harmony smiles with me after our workout as she drops me o in
my room. Music thuds in the background. Mickey’s dancers are
going full tilt tonight.
“I’ll get you your clothing, Darrow. Dancer and I want to have
dinner with you to celebrate. Evey will clean you up.”
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She leaves me alone with Evey. Today, as always, her face is as
quiet as the snow I’ve seen on the HC. I watch her in the mirror as
she cuts my hair. The room is dark but for the light over the mirror.
It shines from above, so she looks like an angel. Innocent and pure.
But she’s not innocent, not pure. She’s a Pink. They breed them for
pleasure, for the curves of their breasts and hips, for the tautness of
their stomachs and the plump folds of their lips. Yet she is a girl and
her spark has not yet gone out. I remember the last time I failed to
protect one like her.
And me? It’s hard to look at myself in the mirror. I’m what I know
the devil to be. I am arrogance and cruelty, the sort of man who
killed my wife. I am Gold. And I am as cold as it.
My eyes shine like ingots. My skin is soft and rich. My bones are
stronger. I feel the density in my lean torso. When Evey is done
cutting the golden hair, she stands back and stares at me. I can feel
her fear, and I suer it in myself. I am no longer a human.
Physically, I’ve become something more.
“You’re beautiful,” Evey says quietly, touching my golden Sigils.
They’re much smaller than her feather wings. The circle is set in the
center of each hand’s backside. Wings swoop back along the esh,
curving like scythes up the sides of my wristbones.
I look at Evey’s white wings and know how ugly she must think
them to be on her back, how she must hate them. I want to say
something kind to her. I want to make her smile, if she can. I would
tell her that she is beautiful, but she’s lived a life of men saying that
for some gain or another. She wouldn’t believe a boy like me. And I
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don’t believe her words to me. Eo was beautiful. I still remember the
ush of blood in her cheeks as she danced. She had all the raw
colors of life, the crude beauty of nature. I am the human concept of
beauty. Gold made soft and supple into man’s form.
Evey kisses the top of my head before darting away and leaving
me alone to watch the HC in the mirror’s reection. I did not notice
her slip a feather from her wings into my breast pocket.
I’m tired of watching the HC. I know their history now and I’m
learning more every day. But I’m tired of being inside, tired of
listening to Mickey’s club thump its music and smelling the minty
leaves he smokes. Tired of seeing the girls he brings into his family
only to sell away when someone bids high enough. Tired of seeing
all the full eyes go hollow. This is not Lykos. There is no love, no
family or trust. This place is sick.
“My boy, you look t to captain a eet of torchShips,” Mickey
says from the door. He slides in, smelling like his burners. His
spindly ngers take Evey’s feather from my breast pocket and roll it
back and forth over his knuckles. He taps the feather to each of my
golden Sigils. “Wings are my favorite. Aren’t they yours? They go to
mankind’s better aspirations.”
He comes up behind me as I sit staring into the mirror. His hands
go to my shoulders and he speaks down at my head, resting his chin
upon it as though I am his property. It’s easy to see he thinks I am.
My left hand goes to the Sigil on my right, lingering there.
“I told you you were brilliant. Now it’s your time to y.”
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“You give the girls wings, but you don’t let them y. Do you?” I
ask.
“It’s impossible to make them y. They are simpler things than
you. And I can’t aord to buy a license to have gravBoots. So they
dance for me. Their bones aren’t hollow like birdies’, you see,”
Mickey explains. “There was one I made hollow, Navia. But you
know what’s what? Didn’t y. Don’t have the physics for it. But you,
you’ll y, won’t you, my brilliant boy?”
I stare at him but say nothing. His lips slice into a smile because I
unnerve him. I always have. “You’re frightened of me,” I tell him.
He laughs. “Am I? Oho! Am I now, my boy?”
“Yes. You’re used to knowing what’s what. You think like the rest
of them.” I nod to the HC’s reection. “Things are set in stone.
Things are well ordered. Reds at the bottom, everyone else standing
on our backs. Now you’re looking at me and you’re realizing that we
don’t bloodydamn like it down there. Red is rising, Mickey.”
“Oh, you’ve got far to go …”
I reach up and grab his wrists so that he cannot move. He stares
at me in the mirror’s reection, struggling against my hold. Nothing
is stronger than a Helldiver’s grip. I smile into the mirror, locking
my golden eyes with his violet ones. He smells like fear. Primal
terror. Like a mouse cornered by a lion.
“Be kind to Evey, Mickey. Don’t make her dance. Give her a plush
life or I’ll come back to pull your hands o your body.”
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