Work Text:
“Doctor, we’ve got a new one in.”
The voice comes from a woman standing by the door, short in stature and wearing a white doctor’s coat that’s far too large for her. She holds a half-eaten sandwich in her hands, containing what looks like tomato, lettuce and ham. Her mechanical eyes survey you expectantly.
You sniff and place down the padlock you’re tinkering with. It’s a fascinating device, taken from one of the most secure banks in this part of the solar system: you’ve been picking at it for hours. Small screws and wires litter the workbench. “Who’s the patient?”
“Human, adult male.”
“And what’s the operation?”
“Full-body, with the exception of the facial features.”
You’ve done a lot of these operations, so many that they’re practically second nature, but even you pause when you hear this. You turn around to blink at the doctor in incredulity as if you’ve misheard her. “A full-body replacement?”
“I tried to warn him off it,” admits the doctor, “but… he appears to be set on it.”
You kiss your teeth, shaking your head. “Wonder what he must have gone through,” you sigh aloud. “Poor wretch.” Your patients, you have realised in this line of work, fall into three categories: the greedy, the physically injured, and the broken. It’s only ever the broken who ask for more than one replacement. Only somebody with nothing left to lose would have the mind to believe their own body is worth giving away.
But whatever happened to him is not for you to know. You may discover it soon enough anyhow, regardless of whether you want to or not. No, your job is to provide your services to whoever comes knocking.
“Have you gone through standard procedure?” you ask.
“Yes. He believes I am the one who will be operating on him.”
You push yourself off the chair, snapping on a pair of plastic gloves from a dispenser set in the wall.
“Perfect.”
The operating room is cold. It always is. Your breath steams in the lemon-scented air as you enter. On the operating table lies the patient, already looking so far removed from human. Tubes connect his body to hungrily buzzing machines, ready to pump out hot red blood so there is space for the new, cold, blue liquid which sits, quietly waiting, in a humming container on the floor.
On the wall opposite the operating table hang all manner of components: scalpels and saws for flesh and bone, as well as wenches, drills, laser torches for welding metal. Mechanical pieces, arranged in size order from large sheets of metal to intricate, delicate pieces no longer than a few millimetres which will replace the valves in his veins.
You double-check that all the necessary equipment is there before approaching the patient himself.
Under the anaesthetic, his breathing is steady, his eyes closed; yet there is a dark crease around his brow and a frown on his lips which tells you he’s far from at peace despite his slumber. You look at him with sympathy. The lack of scowl lines around his mouth tells of a joyful disposition, yet you find yourself wondering how long it’s been since he last smiled.
No doubt too long, if he’s ended up here.
It’s a pity, really: beneath the network of scars criss-crossing over his skin, which would heal (mostly) given time, he looks perfectly healthy. Well-built and with a good physique, you barely have to think for a second to come up with a list of people who would be willing to pay a fortune to have a body like that.
Again, you wonder what compelled him to give it up.
“Hang in there,” you tell him, though you know he can’t hear you, and brush almost tenderly a strand of dark hair from his eyes. “This is going to take a while.”
As expected, the procedure is long, and arduous. You have to take it piece by piece, replacing every limb one at a time.
First, you take measurements. For this operation to succeed, you need to know every length of his skin down to the millimetre. This takes over four hours.
Then, you begin to tinker with the mechanical parts, cutting them down to size, making sure they will fit where their organic counterparts were removed and that they will bend at the right angles when he moves, and that they will not break or loosen in the years he is to use them for.
This happens, of course, all before you begin planning how to actually implement them in the operation.
With mechanics prepared, you finally turn to the human side of the matter. With a pen, you mark out on his flesh where you will make the incisions. You detail which parts will go where when the flesh is burned away, prepare the chemicals which will prevent excess blood loss.
At last, half a day later, you can begin.
You start with his torso and move upwards. First you use the scalpel and the saw, then reattach what was lost in its new shining casing, melding metal into place with heat. You wear a mask and over the mask a welding helmet, changing your gloves each time between handling blood and handling oil. It must be hours that you’re bent over him for, extracting organic matter and tinkering with pieces with excruciating precision, but your concentration leaves no room for worrying about things like the growing cramp in your back. Time always gets lost in here, anyway.
The patient mumbles occasionally, not conscious enough to be in pain, but speaking names and words you do not recognise. You block this from your head and focus only on the whirr of your drill, the soft hiss as laser cuts into steel, the whisper of your own breathing. You want to get this over as soon as possible. He probably does, too.
Your manner may be cold, but that doesn’t mean your heart is shut off to your patients. Rather, it’s almost the direct opposite: as an empath by birth, you catch glimpses of their memories with each operation. The gloves help, but never quite stop the emotions leaking through.
It’s what makes you so good at your job. You know why your patients want these adaptations, what they’ll use them for, and therefore how best to design what they’ll receive. This is a procedure which could never be perfected by an automaton, because it requires an understanding of the human body as intimate as that of machinery.
It’s also what makes your job agonising. There are only so many of your people in the universe, and you’ve seen what happens when the rich and the greedy get their hands on them. You’re wanted for the emotions you can detect as much as those you can manipulate. Empaths have such a wide range of uses, after all: coercing businessmen into unlikely agreements, identifying criminals through reading their guilt, treating the insane, torturing prisoners until they break into giving information. It’s why your people are so wanted. So expensive. (You were bought, years ago, for seven hundred million.)
The exchange, of course, goes both ways. An empath will always reap the emotions they sow. You will feel the insatiable greed of the businessman. You will experience every drop of guilt in the criminal’s conscience. You will share in the mania of a shattered mind. You will break a prisoner’s will only for that torment to be reflected back on yourself.
(You have sealed those memories tightly away beneath a vault wrapped in padlocks formed through effort and time. Only one vague impression remains from that period of your life: the words Interastral Peace Corporation, Marketing Development Department, stamped like a brand into your memory.)
(They had wanted you to change the minds of the worlds who resisted the Corporation’s intervention, you see. It was selfless, you were reassured, because “they don’t know what’s best for them.”)
Now, you conduct your operations in secret, surrounding yourself with only those precious few who will not sell you for your talents. There’s a cruel irony to it: being an empath means hiding the heart which makes you human, yet you still can’t bring yourself to abandon those who come knocking. That’s why you tend to stick with machines, when given a choice. There are only so many people you can take apart and put back together before your own seams begin to fray.
Your gloved fingers brush his bare skin as you apply the anaesthetic to the area above his heart, where you will make the incision. The brief contact sparks a fire of emotion which leaps up your arm and blazes inside your chest before you can clamp it down.
(You smell charring which doesn’t come from the tools. It singes your nostrils.)
(Grief, heavy and choking, wells in your chest suddenly; grief for friends and smiling, elderly faces. For a little girl who only recently learned to walk.)
(Stronger than anything, shining through it all, you feel hate. Hate which smoulders bright as a star, hate so blinding and so acute that it burns away all the other emotions and becomes the Sun around which his continued existence revolves. Hate towards the words Interastral Peace Corporation, Marketing Development Department.)
You jerk your hand away.
In the cold air of the operating room, your hyperventilation is pluming in quick, quivering clouds. You take a breath to still your trembling hand. You cannot afford to tremble. Not now.
You look at the marked-out lines crossing his chest which tell you where to cut. This is the last part, you tell yourself. Almost there. Just the heart to go.
With a steady grip, you lower the scalpel.
You take the plunge.
“It’s finished.”
The doctor, about to take a bite into her sandwich, looks irritated that her lunch is about to be interrupted. It’s a different sandwich from last time: the operation took over a day to complete. When she sees you, she pauses. The emotion shining in her mechanical eyes could almost be called concern.
“Are you alright?” she asks.
You smile weakly. “Tired, is all.” You gesture in the direction of the operating room. “The patient should be waking up from the anaesthetic soon. Wrap it up and escort him out.”
“Of course.” She dons a set of gloves artificially stained red for this very purpose before rising and walking out into the corridor, taking her sandwich with her.
You slump back down into your chair. There is a dull pulsing in the back of your temples. Your throat feels dry, the taste of ash still on your tongue from the operating room. You grab your water flask from the workbench and down its contents in one gulp. Too late do you remember it’s not filled with water.
Well. It’ll numb you for now, anyhow. You can deal with the headaches later. You fiddle with the bottle cap, turning it over in your fingers. You think about the fire, and the grief, and the hate which sprang from them.
Seized by a sudden impulse, you call the doctor’s name. She hesitates and appears back in the doorway. “Yes?”
“Wish him luck.”
She looks confused, but nods all the same. You hear the following conversation floating into the room from the operating room.
“Congrats,” says the doctor. “You’re pretty hard to kill.”
The patient all but growls, “Ya thought I was gonna die?”
“Most people would have died, and it won’t be because I’m bad at my job.”
One doesn’t have to be an empath to hear the bitterness in his voice when he replies, “Well I hav’a piece of good news for ya: I’ve been dead for a long time.”
Your fingers tighten around the neck of the flask.
“What’s your name?” asks the doctor.
A brief pause. No doubt he wants to leave the past in the past. You can’t blame him.
“Boothill,” he answers at last. Your lip twitches with a faint smile. That’s the name he came up with? “Where I come from, that’s what we call gunslingers who end up bite’n the dust. But this is just the start, doc. Of all the prices I hafta pay to get ma revenge, this here’s the lightest toll.”
“Then happy ‘Hunting’, Boothill the Galaxy Ranger!”
You hear the uneven mechanical clunk of his footsteps as he hauls himself up from the operating table, and as half-walks, half-stumbles out of the clinic.
You made more than just replacements, after you glanced into his memories. Another body wouldn’t be enough for what he means to do. No, you’ve made him into a living weapon. Sharpened steel teeth, guns hidden in his arms… You’re certain he will enjoy your gifts when he finds them. You hope he will put them to good use.
“Happy hunting,” you whisper to the empty room, listening as the mechanical footsteps grow slowly softer and surer as he grows confident in his new body, “‘Boothill.’”