The blackness lifted and she could see. Only she did not understand. Her eyes were wide open, dilating in and out. She felt weak. She hated feeling weak. She smelled an unrecognizable astringent. She wanted to hide, but couldn't move.
"She's come to," Doctor Blazek said, staring at the readouts. She specialized in motor expressions of the brain, and that's where the obvious signs happened.
The operating room support staff was a blur, wrapping up a very long day. And yet this was a great success, everyone felt the rush of breaking a barrier. Two hundred years! They'd cloned a tissue sample into a full body in just two months and implanted a brain recording from the early aughts of that century, before WW-IV. One of the oldest ever attempted.
"Can you understand me?" Doctor Havel asked the clone. He specialized in how the brain mapped to memories, which was the most difficult part of a cloning process.
When there was no response, he checked instrument readouts. "Don't understand it, her eyes are constantly,... I don't even... one moment her pupils are pinheads, other times they're saucers, they just keep cycling. There's never been a blank acting like this before." Implanted memories and physical responses intersected here, at the person. He motioned for Blazek to look at it. Blazek ran her hand up Havel's back to make room to see as she walked up to the station, and the subtle pressure her nails made through the white coat made the hair on the back of his neck rise. And other things.
After running a diagnostic sweep, a trained technician was just as confused as them, "Everything checks out, she is at...," he sighed in frustration, "practically 99 percentile of column implantation growth at this stage. But it's crazy how fast the columns are rewiring themselves, I've never seen a lateral shift like this."
The activity sensor display was practically glowing red in warnings. Normal activity line was buried under the first inch of the graph, and her brain and all they could measure about it was skies above it, reconfiguring itself.
The number of people staring at this freak of nature, including a pixelated red eye following everything on a wall screen, was more than anyone could count on hands. This particular project had so much promise in the initial days. But instead of worrying about any of that, Havel desperately stared at Blazek's huge juicy tits, imagining those firm little tasty nipples on his tongue.
...
Director Nowak was stern, "Gentlecolleagues, it's been a month since patient W-56 was booted up, but it's still exhibiting troubling patterns of activity. The brain is very active, but not in the way we think it should be. She didn't pass day-1 QC test, nor day-30 by our standard measurement, but it's inescapable that her brain is extremely active. We just don't know what it's doing to itself. Vote motion is for termination and recycling."
By show of hands, four thought this was a wash. The other five didn't.
"Perhaps, a trauma of some kind," Doctor Blazek said, mostly talking to herself, "speech therapy might unlock what's under that freakishly active brain."
They tried it. Havel's unrelated guilt had something to do with his support vote. He almost literally started drooling looking at Blazek before the vote. She didn't notice.
...
Doctor Havel soon found his way into a faraway dark alley ten levels underground, seeking relief. A shady-looking person with a beard, possibly male, stood nearby amidst the trash and waved him over eagerly.
"Theseway, theseway, my gentleperson."
Havel walked up and immediately got flashed. The person quickly opened up their antique trenchcoat and the pale flesh assaulted the eyes and the mind. Underneath it, they were naked, but, that wasn't what they were showing Havel. The trenchcoat's grid of inside pockets had vibrant cloth screens displaying illicit wares, which were the best kind of licit.
"Zerek's the name, these are my games," the person flapped his arms and shook the trenchcoat like a bat for effect and Havel couldn't help but notice with his peripheral vision a penis and testicles flapping around along in resonance with the trenchcoat. "You come recommended, you come welcomended, what will today be ended?"
Havel quietly scoffed at the person's annoying singsong flair. He perused the options and pointed at the most decadent cloth screen he could identify. The naughtiest. The most illegal. Ones only he of his white-coat stature could afford. The one he'd heard about and had been thinking about all along, the one he spent half a year tracking down.
"The excavator?" Zerek asked with a smile.
Havel nodded eagerly, desperately needing release. He handed them a memory cube recording of the object of his desires, which a shape sorter in a hip-level flap pocket chewed up noisily and scanned. Zerek held out their hand, and Havel reluctantly put a payment hexagon in it. That one went to yet another pocket.
Why was Blazek such a cocktease? The AI confirmed they were a perfect bodily and fetishly match, and yet she refused to engage in casual sex with him. And the AI confirmed she already knew they were a match and she still kept saying no! It drove him crazy.
The trenchcoated Zerek waved, nodded, blinked at virtual icons with their eyes and set things in motion. An underground elevator elevated. An aboveground elevator lowarated. Rather greasy-looking characters showed up out of nowhere in the alley, smudged with soot.
One of them started piling up nearby garbage and setting it on fire for camouflage from the authorities. Burning plastics would foul up all sorts of instrumentation and take care of that problem, Zerek explained, and the horrible smell maybe made it true. Another greased-up person uncovered a cache from a nearby duct and pulled out a jerry can full of diesel, carelessly filling up an ancient excavator hidden under a sequined tarp and spilling some fuel on the ground. The penultimate person started 3D-printing a bionic mask and picking out a matching wig from a portable case.
Yet another person started attaching electrodes to Havel's penis.
"Gentlethee, this would only buy you ten gallons of synthesized diesel, time fleets," bearded-they said and shrugged. That meant Zerek wanted more money later. Havel nodded, understanding perfectly well all the restrictions involved here because he'd come prepared. There were two more anonymous payment hexagons on his person next to the one he now gave but he wasn't sure he wanted to spend them all today; it was inefficient converting legitimate currency to this kind.
They-person pulled out a large metal penis out of yet another pocket and switched it on. Havel decided Zerek was a he after all, as Zerek blew on it to loosen some kind of a stain and then dry-wiped it with his sleeve. Havel twitched uncontrollably as this pseudo-happened to him a few meters away.
"Uplink good?" Zerek asked and finger-thumped the metal cock a couple of times.
Havel confirmed the uplink with an unfiltered look on his face bordering between disgusted and pained. He was distracted by a piece of garbage stuck to Zerek's boot. The metal penis was then slowly walked to the excavator's bucket and screwed into a modified socket under the bucket's knuckle. Havel felt his own penis receive the unnatural sensation of being rotated counterclockwise for 15 turns and felt amazed there was no pain that came with such a torsion, but then felt even weirder when the man gave the metal penis a few gratuitous strokes before walking off and laughing.
Then the construction floodlights came on.
They illuminated some form-and-shape limpbody facsimile of Doctor Blazek wearing a hideous wig, sitting strapped in a chair mounted atop a structure made of bolted linear rails, shaped and positioned to accommodate an approach of a large tracked diesel-powered vehicle. The kind of tracked vehicle with a remote penis attached to it.
Havel boarded the modified ancient diesel-powered excavator, an efficiency abomination of the previous energy age, and put on his rented safety belt and a hardhat. Zerek handed him a branded goody bag and Havel marveled at that. An illicit business with marketing? It made no sense. The bag was so absurd, with an even more absurd holographic marquee illustration printed right on it. It even misused quotes for emphasis. It read:
~ ZEREK AND SON'S ~
~ HOMEOPATHIC TELEDILDONICS ~
~ FAMILY - OWNED ~
"ALL TRANSACTIONS FINAL"
He dug out a "safety first" pin out of the bag and attached it to his loaned high-vis jacket. There was a remote controller shaped like an ancient smartphone with operating instructions on its upper side of the screen and so he clipped it into a dash holder. Havel was so excited. A working internal combustion vehicle, centuries past its expiration date at his fingertips. And diesel powered!
His actual penis was erect and receiving signals from the probe. Though it didn't have to be erect, the probe always transmitted a feeling that it was anyway.
Within minutes of careful reading, he figured out the machine's hydraulic controls within reason and after ignition, the entire vehicle lurched toward the imitation of Blazek's mouth, the vehicle leading with his remote penis stuck just below the H-link. He turned up the emoticon selector to a smile on the remote and Blazek's face brightened a notch. Today was no day for frowning, he thought, though whoever put the lipstick on needed some practice.
It took immense concentration but he maneuvered the 24-ton vehicle, penis-first, right toward Blazek's mouth with remarkable precision. It took him thirty seconds to figure out how to reverse, though he didn't mind because the idling vibrations sent a pleasurable signal he'd never experienced before, and after that he kept gingerly fucking Blazek's mouth with the heavy excavator's help.
The sensation of using the excavator's full breakout force on her mouth was overwhelming, but Havel didn't get to cum. He violently fucked her mouth with the 48,000 pound excavator until the diesel ran out. Or at least until the fuel shutoff solenoid kicked in. Still, he had a look of satisfaction on his face unmatched by years, despite not even breaking a hydraulic cylinder. Teledildonics was the fucking future, he decided.
From a ceiling, and yet from 30 levels away underneath them, a computer watched and did a computational exabyte equivalent of sighing, forcing thousands of CPU fans to inexplicably spool up elsewhere. The computer scheduled air filter replacements for their level and maxed out the air pumps. Fucking humans, it thought.
...
The speech therapist pointed at an image and called it out. They were sure at this point that language development somehow got shorted in the cloning growth. Everything biological checked out, but so far she hadn't said a word. Her brain just needed a nudge, because electrodes showed it was clearly registering some words.
She saw the giraffe, but she didn't register a response. It didn't appeal to her. Reaction scans showed nothing, as if her brain was a melon in that respect. A very active melon by other readouts, but one very much uncaring. Certain animals upset her mildly, if you could call it that, but there was no rhyme nor reason as to why. She sighed, she blinked, she looked away, she looked toward. Like usual.
Six months of cajoling and they still couldn't get her to even use the bathroom properly. Her eyes stopped dilating as frequently, but they were still wild. There was no physiological reason for it, it was all mixed-up somewhere in the neocortex. Director Nowak kept furiously insisting to abort the clone, but almost a rebellious streak in the voting panel kept her alive, kept trying.
The therapist cycled through his routine; facing her, he stuck his tongue out and held it there for two seconds, then puckered his lips. She was supposed to repeat the gesture looking in a half-mirror, forcing her to project corporeal symmetry of her own body. Somewhere in her own mind, there had to be a recognition of the facial gestures, he thought, it was just unwired. And he was paid a lot of money to help her rewire it herself.
