Of Neuromancy and Iron Wills 14 (Patreon)

In retrospect, the attack was a blessing in more ways than just the vibranium, though that alone would pay out big time. Because not even a week later, Toni, Yinsen and I were all pouring over a holographic design of a high end cybernetic arm. CFU let me cheat a little (okay, a lot), but neither Toni nor I really knew anything about medicine, our specialties were more focused on the mechanical and material sciences rather than the biological. Which is why Yinsen was here, looking over the design that Toni and I had jointly made.

After a thorough examination, Yinsen sighed and said, “I can’t say that I understand the mechanics of what you’re making, but from what I’ve been able to understand, I think it should work without putting undue stress on the rest of your body. Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

I nodded, “I’m sure. I need more than my, admittedly awesome, antique rifle for the next time something like this happens. And considering what we’ve got coming down the pipeline, this is most certainly going to be happening again, because even ignoring the vibranium, the amount of resources we’ll be pulling in from asteroid mining are going to make a lot of people very angry.”

Toni didn’t say anything, a frown on her face. She didn’t like the thought of me being cut up to have bits and bobs added in, mostly out of concern for what would go wrong, but as well as the home invasion had gone, there was still the fact that the attackers were suspiciously lacking in basic information. The surviving attackers hadn’t even known whose house they were breaking into. Ten men break into a place, and the only one who knew anything was dead before he reached the hospital.

By itself, that was concerning. But what really had me and Toni worried was the fact that, according to the reports I’d read while hacked into the hospital’s database (before said reports mysteriously vanished), he’d died from poison, and it was determined that one of his teeth was a false tooth. So whoever had orchestrated this hit (or whatever it was, because it was too sloppy to be an actual, serious assassination attempt), not only didn’t want the only person who knew shit talking, but they’d managed to get said person so loyal that he committed suicide before he could be questioned. Yeah, this was some serious spy shit. I don’t care what had been said a few weeks back, I was getting me some cyberpunk upgrades.

Yinsen was going to be the guy in charge of cutting me open and removing the required meat parts, while Toni and JARVIS would help him in making sure that everything connected to the right parts in order to be integrated smoothly with my nervous, cardiovascular, and muscular-skeletal systems. The first surgery would be the bigger and, ironically, less risky of the two currently planned.

My left arm would be removed, along with the muscles that went from it to my torso. The replacement arm had been a joint design by myself, Toni, and JARVIS. Toni’s primary arc reactor had been supercharged by melting down the vibranium ring (and separating the silver) to use the super-metal in place of the palladium, so I was getting one of the older models incorporated into the arm. The arm’s basic functions didn’t need the reactor, it was designed to run off my bioelectricity as well as incorporating miniscule reactors that, to the shock of Toni when JARVIS and I unveiled it, could basically run off food.

Okay, not run off food like Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future, but it was essentially a miniaturized version of the biological processes that converted food that animals ate into energy. It doubled the amount of calories I needed to eat, but considering that in doing so it gave me a grip strength strong enough to warp metal, on top of a few other tricks at the expense of no longer needing to worry about fat pants, I’d call it a fair trade.

Without the arc reactor, my arm had enhanced strength, durability, and a hidden blade as a last ditch weapon. All of it worked with just the inbuilt mini-reactors. The arc reactor was there for one thing, and one thing only: a repulsor built into the palm. That was at Toni’s insistence, and one that I was more than willing to include. Because shooting lasers is fun, anyone who says otherwise is a boring stick in the mud.

Anyway, the second surgery planned would have to wait until we were sure that there weren’t any complications from the first. Once that was done, Yinsen would be cutting open the back of my neck to install the Neural Cyber Bridge Implant I’d made the day I asked Toni to be my girlfriend. That was going to be fun to play with once it was running properly.

In any case, we settled on the day for the first operation, and then it was time to follow that age old military tradition: hurry up and wait. Yinsen had some other stuff scheduled that he couldn’t put off, and both Toni and I had stuff going on with Stark Industries. So the operation to chop off my arm would be on the first Saturday in October. If all went well, and neither Toni nor Yinsen could find any issues in the following month, the second cyber-surgery would be just after Halloween. I wanted to do it before, so I could do something special for my favorite holiday without needing to worry about the tags coming off, but Yinsen shot me down. He was officially a balding buzzkill.

Soon enough, the big day came, and we had a setup similar to when Yinsen took the last of the shrapnel out of Toni’s chest. I got a shot in my arm, an oxygen mask over my face and… suuccchhhh ppprrreeeetttttttyyyyyyyyy lllllllllliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiggggggggggggghhhhhhhttttttttssssssssssssss…

[hr][/hr]

I blinked, sitting up with a groan. My head was filled with more fuzz than a sheep before shearing, my mouth felt like it was full of cotton balls, and my left arm felt like it was made of lea…

My gaze snapped down to my shoulder, which was wrapped in bandages, but below it was gleaming chrome. I brought my arm up, the metal limb moving as smoothly as my old flesh and bone arm, and examined it. External plates moved and shifted, giving a similar range of motion to skin as I bent, twisted, and flexed the ceramic-polymer faux muscles. Forming a fist, and flexing my upper arm just so, I grinned as the metal blade popped out of my forearm, passing over top of my hand. Edward Elric, eat your heart out.

Flexing a different set of muscles, the blade returned to its housing within my forearm, and I shifted my arm around. Palm facing the ceiling, I looked at the dull white disk in the center of it, a lot smaller than the ones on the Iron Maiden armor, since it didn’t need to support my weight in flight. We’d agreed that the repulsor and arc reactor would wait a few days, to give my body a chance to adjust to the shift from meat to metal and see if there were any signs of rejection.

“Glad to see you’re up,” Toni’s voice made me jump, and the extra weight on my left side threw off my balance as I turned to look at her. Combined with the bedsheets, and let’s just say I managed to make myself look like an extra on the set of a Three Stooges flick. I lay there on the floor, my ears filled with the sound of Toni’s amused giggles with my legs sticking up into the air as I tried to untangle myself from the sheets.

“My vengeance will be swift, powerful, and legendary,” I grumbled as I managed to remove myself from the wicked bits of fabric. Turning to face Toni in her chair, still giggling, I asked, “Anything unexpected during the operation?”

Toni got her mirth under control and answered, “Fortunately no. Everything went exactly as we planned and hoped for. No signs of rejection and the implantation and connections all went smoothly. To be honest, it was rather anticlimactic.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I teased her as I walked over and bent down to kiss her. Kissing Toni was always nice, especially when she wrapped her arms around my neck and clung to me like a limpet. I don’t know why, but something about being able to hold her in the air just by standing appealed to me. We broke the kiss, pressing our foreheads together, simply enjoying the other’s presence. Of course, that’s when the balding buzzkill decided to interrupt.

“William, Toni,” Yinsen said with an amused smile from the doorway. “I do need to check the implant site, so I’m afraid you will have to continue that later.”

If Yinsen weren’t responsible for implanting my dope new arm, I’d use said arm to flip him off.

[hr][/hr]

A week later, and there had been no signs of complications with the new arm, so we were going to try out the onboard repulsor blaster thingy. The huff and stomp of her foot that Toni did when I used those exact words was so adorable. So, Toni had I had rented the entirety of an outdoor shooting range for a few hours, I had drones keeping a lookout for anyone or anything nearby, and Toni was in her armor.

“Implanting arc reactor,” I announced, sliding the deceptively small wonder-generator into the previously hidden compartment near my shoulder. I immediately felt the rush of power flowing through my arm, and it took me a moment to adjust. Dayum that was some good shit; anyway, refocus. I pointed my arm at the target, a little something I’d grabbed from a Bass Pro Shop on the way here. “Preparing to test the repulsor blast in three. Two. One.”

The shot packed a much bigger kick than I was expecting, sending my arm flying back and pulling painfully on my shoulder and torso. But I hit the target, a foam deer used for practicing with bow and arrows. And…

“Congratulations Will,” Toni snarked from within her armor. “Despite not hitting the intended target area, you successfully decapitated Bambi.”

“Blast intensity was a bit too high,” I noted, ignoring the Bambi comment and the foam deer head on the ground as I walked to the target to set it back upright. “Next test, I’m cutting down the output by fifty percent.”

By the time our allotted practice time at the range was over, I was actually hitting the intended target area, and we’d found a sweet spot in the intensity of the repulsor blast. High enough to do damage, but not so high that I had to be concerned about the arm coming loose from its housing. The target was also, kinda… obliterated.

“I’d say that was a successful test drive,” I told Toni as we headed back. “And not a single glitch to be found!”

“Is this how you felt during our paintball date?” Toni asked as she turned to look at me, her armor on the floorboard in the back seat. “Waiting for the other shoe to drop and then nothing happens?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” was my answer, with an accompanying shrug. “Gotta say, I was kinda expecting something to either go wrong, or come up, or what have you.”

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Toni warned, but didn’t elaborate. Not that she needed to. Southern California was far from being the safest part of the country, and after the last attack both of us kept our guard up whenever we were out and about. Plus, no sense in tempting Murphy

Despite our nerves, we made it back safe and sound, and the chemical cocktail I’d left simmering under JARVIS’s careful watch was finished. Now I could start painting the synthetic skin coating onto my cyber arm.