Teaser for The Face in the Mirror

Here's the first few pages of my book The Face in the Mirror: a transhuman identity crisis available from Amazon.

Chapter 1

I have heard about people who can't remember being in a major accident. Usually, a minor concussion or something messes up their short term memory and they wake up in the ambulance or hospital, wondering what happened. I wish that was how it had happened for me, but I remember every painful detail.

I was driving back from a meeting with a supplier and there was a semi pulling a load of scrap metal slightly ahead of me in the next lane. My car alerted me to be ready to take over manual control, pulling me away from the e-mails I had been working on. I saw the reason immediately. An accident a couple of miles ahead. An ambulance and other emergency personnel were already on site. That probably saved my life. I remember thinking about how someone with an old autopilot-less car had probably fallen asleep at the wheel or something, when the semi next to me had a blowout in the front wheel. Some debris in the road I suppose. Autopilots are good, but they can't handle an emergency like that and, before the operator could take over, the semi jerked into my lane, clipping the front end of my car. As both the semi driver and I tried to get control of our vehicles, the load shifted in the trailer and the side broke open spilling the scrap all over my car's front end. The airbags protected me from the sudden stop, but not from the scrap that crushed in the front of the car and poured in through the windshield. I thought I was going to die as the metal crushed my torso. I remember having asthma attacks as a kid, before gene therapy cured it. Being crushed under all that scrap reminded me of that. All the air was forced out of me and I couldn't get another breath. Then I felt my ribs start to crack. I don't think I can describe the pain I felt. Take the worst pain you've ever had in your life and multiply it by a thousand and you'll have an idea. I think almost every bone from my shoulders down was broken, most in several places. I was surprised that nothing had hit me in the head. If something had, it would probably have killed me instantly, although at that moment instant death seemed like a good idea. As my vision started to fade into a gray tunnel, I looked to the side and saw a paramedic rushing toward me from the other accident. My last thought, before losing consciousness, was that I would probably be a perfect candidate. God help me.

If your wondering, “A candidate for what?” That may be because I haven't properly introduced myself. My name is Todd Herschel. You know, the “freak.” Of course, before the accident that led to my “alteration” I was a robotics engineer. That's kind of how I got involved with the project and how I knew I'd make a good candidate and how bad that could be for me. I was in charge of designing and refining the cybernetic bodies we tried to use.

I'd had plenty of experience with cybernetics before, from working on the Cerberus project. No, the Cerberus weren't purely mechanical. They don't advertise that we used brains from attack dogs to control them. We have enough trouble from animal rights activists without publicizing exactly what we did. As for why we used dogs, like I said before, despite all the years of people promising computers that can really think for themselves, we still don't have an AI that can react quickly in a crisis. An attack dog's brain on the other hand was already trained for a fight and just had to get used to the new super sized body. Don't let the bleeding hearts fool you, either. The dog's weren't mistreated. Putting them in the cyborg bodies generally doubled their life expectancy, minus combat casualties of course. Furthermore, when they aren't on duty they spend their time in an idyllic simulation, scarfing steak, chasing squirrels and getting their belly's rubbed. By all indications those dogs were some of the happiest animals I've ever seen.

What we didn't understand is why it didn't work for humans. We've been able to repair all kinds of spinal cord injuries for years now. I don't think anyone has ever been put back together after being decapitated. Despite the urban legends to the contrary. That's more due to not getting them medical attention quick enough, rather than lack of technical ability. There are, however, occasional cases, like mine, in which a body is catastrophically damaged but the brain is intact and so “fortunate” as to live long enough to be put on life support. We can put such unfortunates into simulations and let them access the Internet like normal people can with an interface cap. However, their ability to interact with the real world is minimal. I've heard people ask, “Why can't we just grow new bodies in the lab? Like we do replacement limbs and organs. After all,” they say. “We can grow neo-people in an animal surrogate. Why not replacement bodies?” What they forget is that it can take a month to grow a major organ like a heart or lung, and several to grow a complete limb. The fastest growing neo's reach maturity in six years which is a long time for your patient to wait for his new body.

On top of that, ask anyone who's been unfortunate enough to need a limb transplant about it. You have to relearn how to do everything with the new appendage. It's what they call muscle memory. Normally you think your memories are stored in your brain, right? That's true for facts and ideas, but for physical skills, like sports or walking, the nerves in your limbs, and the muscles themselves, grow into patterns that store how you do things. That's why a highly trained combat vet can react so quickly in a crisis. His body knows what to do before his brain has even finished assessing the situation. Now take that muscle memory and expand it to a whole new body. Your patient has to relearn everything, walking, feeding him or herself. Even toilet training.

Others have suggested transplanting the brain into the body of a brain dead individual. After all, we used to harvest the organs of such unfortunates before we could grow them in the lab. The trouble with that is organ harvesting needs the consent of the donor or his next of kin. Back in the day, they got people to sign what they called “organ donor cards” in case they were ever in such situations. Even then they had a hard time finding compatible organs for people. These days, we don't need to do that sort of thing. The only ones who have signed donor cards are way too old to be donors, and finding someone willing to let their brain dead next of kin be used for an experimental procedure is next to impossible. For humans anyway. Hence the desire for a cyborg body, which won't need to relearn everything.

For some reason though, it didn't work. Oh, we could connect the brain to the robot body and life support system, and everything worked from a technical standpoint. We'd done it three times so far. For reasons no one was sure of though, each of them went some sort of crazy over the next few weeks. Our first patient, Li Chow, had been stuck in V.R. for over a year before volunteering to be the first human trial. He committed suicide a week later. We thought at the time that, perhaps, he'd been suicidally depressed before getting his new body and just hid it well until he actually got a chance to finish himself off. Two years later we got another test subject, Lt. Jason Chambers U.S.M.C.. He became psychotically homicidal after three weeks. He killed two people and injured several others, including my future wife, before police could bring him down. We spent the next five years going over every micro meter of our technical design looking for defects, toxins, anything that could explain it. The medical end of our team spent the same time going over the patients medical histories and psychological profiles looking for a cause. We made tweaks, changes, improvements and thought we were ready to try again. It took three more years to have a suitable candidate who was willing to try. Karen Gomez didn't become suicidal or violent. Instead she developed a delusion that she was still in V.R. and had to be unplugged from her new body and actually put back into a simulation, where she couldn't accidentally hurt herself or anyone else. As far as Karen knows, nothing has changed. Despite four years of medication and therapy, she's still blissfully delusional.

So, now you know why the thought of my accident making me a perfect candidate horrified me. I had signed paperwork, early in the project, saying that if anything happened that made me a candidate I would be willing, as a show of faith in our work. In the seeming eternity of pain after everything went black, I was regretting that decision and rather hoping my wife would try to prevent me being used. Coleen and I had met through the project. As a rehabilitation therapist she had seen the breakdown of our previous patients more closely than anyone but Dr. Shimada, the project psychiatrist. No way would Coleen want anything like that to happen to me. I hoped.

I remember rousing slightly as the paramedics got life support equipment attached to my neck to keep oxygen going to my brain. I think I tried to scream but couldn't get any air in to make a sound. Then I felt painkillers hit me through the life support and everything went black again. I spent what seemed like another eternity in a drugged haze. When I could think through the fog, I expected to wake up at any time in a simulation or in a new machine body. I certainly didn't expect what really happened. As the drugs wore off, the first thing I was really aware of was feeling the sheets and hospital gown against my body. I could tell this wasn't a V.R. Some people say a good simulation is indistinguishable from the real thing, but I've always been able to tell. Oh, they can make the visuals look right and the sound is always good but the tactile feedback and smells are always off. Surfaces are always too smooth, or too rough. Smells are always slightly metallic. As I began to rouse, I felt none of that. Perhaps I had not been as injured as I feared? Had they managed to repair the damage? I took an experimental sniff and realized my nose felt funny. The normal hospital antiseptic smells were all there, so strong in fact that they must have just cleaned the room, along with a few odors I couldn't identify. I was also tasting some of the funny tastes you get in your mouth from IV medication and the residue of medical nanobots. Reflexively, I moved my mouth, trying to get the taste out and realized there was also something strange about my teeth. I opened my eyes and rapidly closed them again against the bright light in the room. I moaned in pain. My voice sounded strange in my ears.

I heard a button click nearby and a strange voice said “Get the Doctors in here, he's waking up.”

I tried to ask “Who's there?.” I got through the word “Who” and stopped because I didn’t recognize my own voice.

I felt someone take my hand. I think that was the first time I noticed the restraints on my wrists and ankles. “It's me, Coleen, honey,” I heard the voice say. It couldn't have been my wife's voice, it was feminine but much deeper than hers. The hand felt too small to be hers too.

For a terrified moment I thought they really had wired me up as a cyborg, but a machines sensors wouldn't be good enough for me to feel the bed under me the way I did. I opened my eyes again, just squinting this time, to let them adjust. Looking to my side I did, in fact, see my wife looking at me with a strained smile. She looked almost as I remembered from seeing her at lunch the day of my accident, but her hair style was completely different. How long was I out? I opened my eyes wider as they adjusted to the room, which wasn't as brightly lit as it had seemed at first. My eyes were just extremely dilated, from being closed for a long time.

“Do you remember what happened to you?” Coleen asked.

“Was in an accident.” I replied. My voice was sluggish, due to drugs in my system, but that didn’t explain the change. I sounded like a different person. “Thought I'd been crushed and would wake up in V.R. Guess it wasn't that bad.” I tried to turn my head more toward Coleen and realized it was strapped down too. “How bad?”

She looked away for a moment, a pained expression on her face. “It was that bad dear,” She told me, strongly emphasizing the words “that bad.” She turned back and took a deep breath. “You were completely smashed from about your shoulders down. If they had been a few minutes later getting to you . . .” She shook her head. “Transplanting your brain was the only way to save your life.” My fear at turning into a crazed cyborg must have showed on my face. “Not into a machine though. We found an alternative.”

“What?” I asked, confused. She looked about ready to tell me, when the door opened and Dr. Walter Chapman, the head of our experimental project, walked in, followed by a nurse that I didn't know.

“How is he?” Walt asked, walking up to stand beside my wife.

“He remembers the accident,” Coleen replied. “and seems fairly alert, but a bit sluggish.”

“Confused.” I added. “What did you do? how long?” My throat hurt.

Coleen squeezed my hand reassuringly. “I had just told him we found something other than a machine to put his brain in.”

“We were quite lucky there.” Walt told me as he grabbed a folding chair and crossed around to my other side. “Dr. Shimada wanted us to keep you in a medically induced coma, till we could put you in a new body. She hypothesized that the switch from original body, to simulation, to machine, might contribute to the problems our other patients experienced. Your wife, though, was quite adamantly against cyberization. Can't say that I blame her, after our failures.” He sat and leaned close. “About a month after your trauma a neo in the Caliphate conflict took a sniper bullet to the head. Completely brain dead but the body kept going. The neo was government property obviously and they were conducting an experiment to see how long the body could last without higher brain function. It was still going quite well when we found out about it a few weeks later. After some legal wrangling, we were able to get custody of the neo for our project.”

“It's a felis,” Coleen interrupted with a half smile. “You always did like cats.” The way she said it had the air of an old joke, even if it was new to me.

“We considered just putting your head on the new body,” Walt continued. “but, in addition to the aesthetic problem of a human head on a felis body, there would also have been tissue rejection to deal with. By transferring your brain alone the blood brain barrier guarded against most of those issues and we devised gene therapy to take care of the rest. So, we don't have to worry about long term medication.”

I was in shock as I took all this in. I'd been in a coma for months and was waking up in a body of an entirely different species. I tried to remember what I knew about neo's and felis in particular. All neo species were genetically engineered from a mix of animal and human DNA. Legally, any neo couldn't have genes that included more than forty percent of uniquely human sequences, more than that and they couldn't be considered property. Felis were humanoid felines, fur, claws, tail, specifically created to serve as soldiers. They could see in much dimmer light and hear a greater range of sounds than a human. Which explained why everyone's voices sounded different. They had first been created a couple decades ago. Then I remembered, they were expected to have a shorter than human lifespan. “How long will I live?”

“You're forty-seven and a typical life expectancy is about ninety years or so.” Walt explained. “Your new body was only eleven years old and hit physical maturity at about seven or eight. No one knows how long a felis will live naturally, yet. We expect somewhere between fifty and sixty years. You probably had another forty years to live on average and your new body should last about as long, perhaps longer.”

That was some comfort but a million other questions were coming to my mind. Unfortunately, before I could ask any of them, I started coughing uncontrollably. Despite my new body having been kept hydrated intravenously, my throat was extremely dry. Talking had been worsening the problem. Coleen hurriedly offered me a straw from a water bottle that was on hand. As I was regaining my composure Walt stepped aside and told the nurse to remove my IV and check my vitals. While the nurse was putting on her gloves Dr. Shimada walked in. “How is our patient?” She inquired.

“Probably as well as can be expected, under the circumstances.” Walt replied.

I added “Overwhelmed, and full of question . . . Yeooowwwl!” That last part was forced out of me by the nurse removing the bandage holding my IV in place. Although I suppose it's a poor rendition of the sound that actually came out of me. The sound I made was somewhere between an embarrassingly girlish shriek and the yowl of an injured house-cat. You know how it hurts to have your body hairs pulled out by tape? Imagine the sensation of that on an arm with fur.

“I'm so sorry,” the mortified nurse said. “They were supposed to keep the hair under the bandage shaved. The last person to change the dressing must have slacked off.” She held up the hair covered bandage to illustrate the problem.

“The last few times, by the look of it.” Shimada scowled. “Bad enough having to deal with the bombshells you've been dropping on him, without inflicting actual injury.”

“I'll go get some topical anesthetic for that.” the nurse said, patting my hand as she finished her work and made a hasty exit from the room.

“Bombshells?” I asked. “What's plural about putting my brain in a neo body?”

Shimada grabbed Walt by the arm. “You didn't tell him the rest?”

Now, Walt looked embarrassed. “We haven't had a chance yet. With all Todd's been through I was trying to ease into it.”

“Ease into what?” I asked, looking back and forth between Coleen, who was looking quite uncomfortable, and the two doctors. If I hadn't been strapped down, I'd have been trying to sit up to face them on more equal terms.

Walt came back and sat down by me. He was stalling. “You see Todd, getting a body for you we had to take what was available. That, or wait god only knows how long.”

“Oh, just spit it out man!” Shimada exclaimed. Then, on seeing Walt's discomfort, “Your new body is female.”