Chapter 1: The awakening

The next few days were... fuzzy. Consciousness was fleeting. Sometimes my waking moments would be horrendously painful, so much so that my only knowledge of having been awake was the memory of my own uncontrollable screaming. I was told going in that the worst of it would be the surgery, that afterwards I would remain unconscious and unaware until they were ready to awaken me. The unfortunate truth was that my biological reaction to the continuing trauma was uncontainable.

When the pain had finally passed, and my body had recovered enough that I could fully process my surroundings, I awoke to find that very little of myself was still biological. My first moments of controlled consciousness was filled with confusion. I was blind, but not deaf. My natural breathing had been replaced by a rhythmic pattern of automatic respiration that was shallower and occasional. Any audible heartbeat was now instead a muted "whoosh" of blood flowing through my veins and arteries, more akin to the running of a river than a pumping.

I laid still for what felt like nearly an hour, not entirely by choice, dedicating my thoughts to trying to determine whether I could tell the difference between what parts of my body were "original" and which were replacement parts. My heart, arms, and legs were the most obvious. I became acutely aware that they no longer had hair, a revelation that cued an introspection on how much the human body can be aware of changes to itself.

The inventory was curious. Hints from my nervous system indicated that although many parts of my body were still contained within my original flesh, my inner ear, eyes, and olfactory system had been tampered with or replaced. Aside from being unable to see, the most disconcerting part of this moment was the understanding that at this time, I was also unable to move voluntarily. Despite numerous attempts, I wasn't able to control my breathing, the direction my eyes were turned, the position of my head, or the actions of anything below my neck. It was like sleep paralysis, only I wasn't terrified of the implications.

My introspection was interrupted by a trio of reassuring, quiet tones from a computer just to my right. A few moments later, the sounds of approaching footsteps reached my ear from what seemed to be the hallway outside of the room I was in. In retrospect, the silence I had been sitting in was deeper than it had been in the time before the surgery. There was no longer a slow, consistent murmer of voices from outside the door, nor was the quiet hum of a distant air circulation system audible. I had become so distracted with probing at my own body that I hadn't thought to wonder about my current location. Using the only reliable sense I had, my hearing, I closed my useless eyes to try to get a feel for the room. I had, as of yet, not attempted to make any noise, forgetting that a tongue click didn't require breath control.

The footsteps were still distant as I made my first attempt at controlled echolocation. Tick. Tick. The room sounded more vast than expected. I had the sense that the surface I was laying in was soft, but narrow. The clicks of my tongue falling off quickly from behind me. One wall of the room was definitely above my head. The wall to my left was closer, maybe only a few feet. The area to my right seemed mostly unimpeded, but dampened slightly, perhaps by a curtain of some sort. Sounds of shoes on tile grew in volume. Slightly squeaky, rubber soles, likely attached to a sneaker. There was a quiet flop of laces on the shoes, and the distinct click of aglets from laces that were too long could be heard as they fell on the tile. Memories of sterile hospital rooms flooded back, recollections from the last few hours of my mother's life. My perceived idea of the room didn't match any I had seen while at Orthofutura.

When the steps were nearly at the door, they stopped abruptly. The tapping sounds of fingernails on a membrane keyboard and the clicks of a mouse echoed in the silence. After a few moments, rustling sounds of an item being pulled from a pocket replaced the melodic beat of a lifelong typist. Finger pads tapped on a glass screen, and I could hear the ringing of a phone in the distance.

A feminine voice echoed through the halls, with the voice on the other end inaudible from this distance.

"He's awake."

"Status shows green across the board, no systems in error state, and no emergency systems activated.

"Yes sir."

"Which activation plan would you like me to follow."

"Yes sir."

"Yes, I'll enable logging and ensure the feed is available for you to follow."

The sound of the phone returning to her pocket was followed immediately by the rattle of a door handle, and the metallic scrape of the door against its frame echoed off the walls of the otherwise sterile chamber.

"Hey there. Welcome back to the land of the conscious. Don't worry about replying, your respiratory system is being controlled by the connected computer, so you won't be able to speak just yet. My name is Allison. I'm a biomechanical engineer by degree, but I've apprenticed under Dr. Theodore for fifteen years."

"You've been asleep for just over a week, and your body has been recovering fairly well from the initial surgery. We had minor issues getting the brain-body interface to work, which required a few additional procedures."

"We've run diagnostics on all your internal systems, and it all looks good for the final activation, which we'll be starting here in a moment. The first thing we're going to activate is vision. You might notice some... Improvements. Just relax for a moment, as this first part may be a bit... Jarring."

There were more keyboard taps, this time from my right, in the vicinity of the computer that had signaled my awakening. An electric tingle rushed up my arms, starting from what I now understand are connection ports near the ulnar artery in each wrist adjacent to my palms.

"Tyler, during the process, your eyes were replaced with two cameras connected to an advanced video processor. This will allow you to visualize the status of different parts of your new body. In addition to using your own central nervous system, we installed fiber optic links between the transhuman elements of your physiology that allow for near instantaneous reporting from each individual element. The result of this is that as activated, you will have a visual representation of each of the systems we're going to test today. I'll be able to see these statistics as well, through the uplinks in your wrists. You may experience some disorientation, as the internal camera initialization happens late in the startup process. We've linked you to an overhead camera feed to try and help lessen the impact of the startup process."

Allison typed a series of commands into the computer to initialize the process. What was once blackness slowly faded into a midnight blue background with the familiar silver Orthofutura logo materializing onto what can only be described as a virtual screen. It had the same appearance and orientation as the virtual desktops you may find in a VR headset. White text blinked onto the screen in the upper left hand corner that explained each step of the power-on self test...

Reactor Status: Operational. Temperature and Reaction Speed Nominal.
Neuro-digital interface: Operational. Two-way link established.
Hemodynamic Turbine Status:
  Left Arm: Nominal, 12.488qpm
  Right Arm: Nominal, 12.487qpm
  Left Leg: Nominal, 18.778qpm
  Right Leg: Nominal, 18.674qpm
  Cranial: Nominal, 22.450qpm combined
Synaptic communication: Enabled,
  Testing frequency... Nominal
  Testing bandwidth... 13 Tb/s, Above Standard
  Testing latency... .8ms, within tolerance
Optic communication: Enabled,
  Available wavelengths: 1460, 1470, 1480, 1490, 1500
  Testing bandwidth: 101 Tb/s
  Testing latency... .000003ms, within tolerance

OF THDiag connection request detected
  Requested links: Port 1, Port 2, Wireless
  Testing bandwidth on ports:
    Port 1: 30 Tb/s
    Port 2: 30 Tb/s
    Wireless: 860 Gb/s
  Accepting asynchronous connections on ports 1 and 2...
  Connection established
    Port 1: Upstream
    Port 2: Downstream

THDiag Command Received: startup-visual --sequence a --EstLink Rm1Overhead --EstLinkIP 10.78.43.100 --EstLinkPort 3141
  Running Command...
  Visual System Startup Initiated...
  Internal Cameras: Disabled, Pending Startup
  External Camera Connection Details:
    Link Name "Rm1Overhead"
    Link address 10.78.43.100:3141
    Credentials Required: No
  One-way link to External Camera Successful
  Establishing control link via synaptic control port 40386
  First-time Remote Camera control status: True
  Initialize calibration protocol... Done
  Begin Calibration

"Tyler, you should be seeing a calibration window for the overhead camera now. We have it set up so that you can control the focal point. I feel like saying this may be a bit strange is repetitive and obvious, given your experience with us so far, but you should have some warning. This is the closest you'll probably ever come to an out-of-body experience... Brought to you by Science."

At that moment, the screen transitioned to a visualization of what appeared to be a three-dimensional room, more of a box, actually. It was rectangular, and I was viewing it from one end, near the "floor". Three rows of lightbulbs hung from the ceiling in neat columns, becoming blurry as they faded into the back of the room. In the center-top of the screen was a message, "Directional Calibration: Look directly at the illuminated lightbulbs," and a countdown. In the center of the screen was a crosshair that followed the movement of my "eyes" as perceived by the system. As the timer reached zero, the lighbulbs lit up in a pattern. First the foremost three bulbs, Left, Center, Right, Center, Left, Right, Center. Once I had followed the initial pattern, the words changed to "Depth and Focus Calibration." This process repeated the initial pattern, but used lights at random distances. With each change in the depth of the bulbs, the focus would shift to the depth of the light array I was looking at. At the end of the process, the room was fully illuminated, and the prompt instructed me to test focus and direction by choosing lights at random to look at, with a pair of prompts appearing next to the left and right bulbs furthest away, "Restart Calibration" and "Finish Calibration" respectively. I hovered my focus over the "Finish Calibration" option and the screen returned to the POST screen.

Visual control calibration completed. Digital and Neural link variance: .067 datapoints per minute, Nominal.

"Good," Allison said. "Diagnostics on my side show a strong link between your nervous system and the calibration utility. Your brain connects to visual controls using signals intercepted directly from your nerves just before the muscles that contol the position of your eye. If the digital link between the interface on your cerebral cortex and the implanted computer become interrupted by damage or a malfunction, the system will revert to using this interface style. I'm going to finish connecting you to the camera above your bed now."
  THDiag Command Received: adm-override --user aPeterson --password "" | ModifyVisual --activate --link Rm1Overhead
  Admin Override by aPeterson logged: 2063-06-20 13:03:58 - ModifyVisual

  Beginning video stream...

Tetherworld: H+

Most people play the lottery for money. They stand hopefully in the 7-11's and grocery stores praying that the scratch-off ticket says winner. I played a different kind of lottery. The Orthofutura Corporation ran a raffle at my school. The only cost of entry was a permission slip signed by the student's parents. I was 18 at the time, a late senior, so I was exempt. All I had needed was a pen and my own signature on the line.

It was a big school. Eleven thousand students strong, one of the last standing public schools in Chicago. I was one of the three thousand that were "entered". The corporation said the procedure would hurt. That it was a test platform for the future. Judging by my grades, I was going to need something more than just my part-time agriculture gig to be of any use past graduation. In my mind, I was buying insurance, not for "the" future... for MY future.

They told me it was going to hurt, when my name was picked. Another disclaimer saying I wouldn't hold the company accountable for anything that would happen during the testing. A rushed signature as I was hastily pulled from the ranks of my peers. The departure from that life was quicker than I had imagined it would be. It was as if the paper I'd signed had given them access to more than just my body. For the next two years I was told when to eat, sleep, drink, piss, or shit. I didn't know why. Frankly, I didn't care. What it meant was that I wasn't useless anymore. I had a purpose again. The years of my father's beatings and lectures drove home that need.

The day they walked into my room, my cell if you will, was the day my whole life changed. "He's ready." they kept saying. "His growth has stopped, his body fully matured. There hasn't been a spurt on the graph since last month." said one. The 'doctors' kept referring to me as "he", "his", "him". I'd have almost forgotten that my name was Tyler, if it weren't for the chart near the door that bore it. Little did they know, but my name was going to become the most important one of them all. For the last year I had heard the screams trailing off to nothingness in the rooms down the hall. The beeps and buzzes of lives floating away, lost in the surgery. According to the doctors, the gaggle of young faces that looked more like interns than well-trained surgeons, traveled in hordes around one. Dr. Theodore P. was the leader of the project, the man with the ideas and innovation to make it happen.

I don't know if they thought the walls were thicker than they were, or they weren't expecting the screams to be as loud as they were, but either way they made it seem as if the procedure was routine. I was kept conscious as my limbs were slowly and carefully amputated at the joints, the tissues around the area numbed by a powerful anesthetic. It was a disconcerting feeling, laying on a table as a disconnected torso. I laid on the table, wincing as some of the nerves that had been missed by the painkillers were severed by the scalpel. I laid awake wondering to myself why there were so many screams in the other procedures. They didn't really tell me what was going to happen. I almost didn't want to know.

It started from the outside. The replacement. The theory was that if they started there, the body would be more willing to accept the transplants. They slowly connected my veins and vessels into their respective slots, and began fitting in my nerves, reconnecting them one by one. They slowly took hold as the anesthetic wore off. Now I understood the pain. A friendly female face leaned over me. "This will only hurt a little bit." she said. It was only a few moments before the screaming began. With the nerves connected, the anesthetic was a fond memory at this point as my new legs and arms became a part of my body's nervous system. The ten minutes I was awake after that felt like an eternity of pain. I could feel the tears running down my face faster than water during a shower. Finally my body could tolerate no more, my brain releasing me from consciousness.

What I didn't know was that I would be the first to wake up. The first person to truly become Transhuman. H+.