For sixty seconds, I was a god.
The burning hadn’t set in yet. A low-grade warmth, like a server room humming at capacity. I stared at the ceiling, but I wasn’t seeing it for what it was. I was seeing the architecture of the world.
Micro-fractures ran through the steel beams hidden behind the drywall. Hairline cracks spreading like frozen lightning. The electrical current pulsed through the copper wires inside the lights, glowing like blue veins carrying liquid fire. I could count the oscillations. Sixty cycles per second. Perfect. Mechanical. Beautiful.
My head turned. Slow. Like moving through honey. But the data kept pace. The nurse. A red targeting box snapped around her torso.
SUBJECT: FEMALE. EST. WEIGHT: 140 LBS. CORTISOL: NORMAL. IMPLANTS: AUDITORY SHUNT (CLASS 2).
I could see the faint glow of the shunt beneath her skin, a tiny circuit board pulsing in rhythm with her heartbeat. Aris. Another box. Larger. Hotter.
SUBJECT: MALE. HEART RATE: CRITICAL. DIAGNOSIS: PANIC.
His pupils were dilated. I could measure the dilation in millimeters. 4.7mm. Fear response. Adrenaline dump. I knew his body better than he did.
“It’s beautiful,” I whispered.
My voice sounded different to my own ears. Crisper, filtered through the auditory dampeners linked to the eyes. Even the air tasted different. Sterile. Processed. Like breathing through a membrane. The sound waves visible as concentric rings in the air, like dropping a stone in still water.
I can see why they throw us away. Why would anyone settle for broken when they can have this? I understood it then. The arrogance of the Splicers. The way Miller looked at me. When you see the world as data, you stop seeing it as life. You see it as a math problem. And you are the calculator. The judge. The god measuring creation and finding it quantifiable.
“Silas.” Aris’s voice cut through the stream of data. “Listen to me. We have a window. Maybe two minutes before the local anesthesia metabolizes. How does the interface feel? Any lag? Any ghosting?”
“No lag. I can see the dust, Aris. The heat coming off your hands is visible.” My hand. Alien. High-definition ridges on the fingerprints. The scars I’d earned over a lifetime were magnified into canyons. “Maybe you were wrong. Maybe I can hold it. Maybe I’m compatible.”
My breathing slowed. Steadied. For the first time since the surgery, I was calm. Aris didn’t answer. He stared at the main monitor. The line tracing my neural sync was steady. Green. Perfect. I could see it too. The data streaming from my own brain, translated into a sine wave that looked like a calm heartbeat. I was stable. I was integrated. I was upgraded. His hand moved to the edge of the console. His knuckles went white.
Then it happened. The glitch.
It started small. A single pixel in my left peripheral vision turned red. Just one. A dead pixel, like an old screen beginning to fail. I blinked. The pixel didn’t move. It pulsed. Once. Twice.
Then it heated.
It wasn’t a flicker of light. It was a pixel of heat. A single, hot needle pushed into the center of my brain, right behind my left eye. The sensation was impossible to describe. Like someone was branding the inside of my skull with a grain of sand heated to the temperature of the sun.
“Warning,” a mechanical voice spoke inside my skull. Not through my ears, but vibrating against the bone, resonating in my teeth. “Thermal spike detected. Ocular nerve 1.”
“Aris.” The word came out as a gasp. The data overlay flickered. Numbers scrambled. The perfect precision turned into static. I tasted metal. Copper. The warning before the hemorrhage.
“I see it.” His fingers flew across the console. “It’s a minor fluctuation. I’m adjusting the voltage.”
The pixel turned into a line. The line turned into a spreading heat map.
“Thermal spike detected. Ocular nerve 2. System cooling failure," he said.
The warmth in my skull turned into a fever. Then the fever turned into fire.
“It burns.” I groaned, clutching the sides of the chair.
“Stay still! Nurse! 50cc of coolant to the cranial port!”
“We can’t.” The nurse’s voice was bored, bureaucratic. She didn’t even look up from her datapad. “Protocol dictates we let the system stabilize for three minutes before intervention.”
“Screw protocol! He’s cooking!”
The data overlays tore. The perfect, clean text fractured into jagged red lines. The room warped. The ceiling bent like melting plastic. The nurse’s face elongated, her eyes sliding off her cheeks. My body wasn’t just rejecting the metal. It was attacking it.
“CRITICAL FAILURE. FOREIGN OBJECT DETECTED. INITIATING IMMUNE RESPONSE.”
That was the joke. The punchline. My body didn’t recognize the eyes as ‘Upgrades.’ It recognized them as splinters. As shrapnel. As a virus. And my blood, that ancient, stubborn, Baseline blood, rushed to the site to kill the invader.
“Get it out!” I screamed, thrashing against the restraints.
The pain was white. It was absolute. Someone had poured molten lead into my eye sockets and was stirring it with a spoon. I could feel the metal heating up, expanding, pressing against the bone of my skull.
“Aris!”
“I’m trying!” He appeared beside me, wrestling with the clamps. “Hold him down! Stop thrashing, Silas, you’ll tear the nerve!”
“It’s eating me!”
“CONNECTION LOST. REBOOTING... REBOOTING... ERROR.”
My vision went red. Not a digital red, but the organic red of hemorrhage. Blood flooded the anterior chamber. I was crying blood.
“Type-4 Rejection.” The nurse logged it on her datapad, her stylus moving with mechanical precision. “Total incompatibility. Hardware is being corroded by the subject’s biochemistry. Look at the smoke.”
I smelled it then. The smell of burning meat. My meat. And beneath the smell, a sound. Soft. Wet. The sizzle of tissue cooking from the inside.
“Salvage protocol. Extract the units before they are damaged beyond repair. Those are Helios’ property.”
“He is a patient for God's sake!” Aris shoved her aside. “Not a container!” He grabbed my face. His hands were cool, but they couldn’t stop the fire. “Silas.” His voice trembled. “I have to take them out. Now. Or the heat will cook your brain.”
“Do it. Please. Make it stop.” Tears streamed down his face.
“I can’t put you back under. The interaction with adrenaline would stop your heart. I have to... I have to do it live.”
I went still. The horror of those words froze me colder than the liquid nitrogen they used to store the parts. The hiss of the cryogenic chamber in the corner. Waiting. Ready to preserve the salvage.
Live.
“Give me something to bite on.” My voice came out as a whisper.
Aris jammed a roll of gauze between my teeth. It tasted like chemicals and cotton. I bit down. My jaw ached. My molars ground together. I focused on that pain. The small, manageable pain that was nothing compared to what was coming.
“Don’t move.”
He wasn’t Aris anymore. He was the machine again. He had to be. The clink of metal on metal. The selection of tools. I couldn’t see them. My vision was a fractured mess of red warnings and dying pixels. But I could hear them. The speculum. The extractor. The cauterizer, warming up with a low electric whine.
The smell hit me next. Ozone. Burnt circuits. The prelude to cauterized flesh. The speculum widened the eyelids. Cold metal against the tender rim of skin. It spread me open. Exposed. Vulnerable. Air hit the surface of the eye itself. The eye that was no longer an eye, but a burning foreign object my body was trying to kill.
Cold steel slid in, scraping against the orbital bone with a sound like nails on slate. Every millimeter of intrusion catalogued. The pressure against the optic nerve, the violation, this was the price. Not credits or my badge. My humanity, measured in millimeters of severed nerve.
“Forgive me.” He whispered it. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe I needed to hear it.
He pulled. I didn’t scream. I couldn’t. The gauze muffled the sound, turning it into something animal. The sound that came out of me was a guttural tear.
"Cranial nerve avulsion in three, two..." Aris’s voice was a countdown to the end of the world.
The world dissolved into prismatic suffering. "Extracting!" The connection severed. Not with the clean click of hardware, but with the sensation of roots being ripped from the earth.
"Hemostasis! Clamp the artery!"
I didn't feel the clamp. I only felt the silence where the light used to be. Fiber by fiber. Nerve by nerve.
Pop.
The left eye was gone. Cold air hit the raw socket. I felt the emptiness. The void where something vital used to be. Blood ran hot down my cheek, pooling in my ear. But it didn’t stop. The blood kept coming. Hot. Wet. Trailing down my neck in a line that burned.
Something had torn. Not just the eye. Something deeper. I heard Aris curse, a sound of pure panic. "The artery retracted! I can't reach it!"
I felt the cold bite of a scalpel against my throat. No warning. Just a long, jagged tear from my jawline down to my collarbone. He wasn't saving my sight anymore. He was cutting me open to find the vein before I bled out.
"Got it!" Aris yelled.
I felt his hands pressing gauze against the side of my face. The pressure ran from my ear down to my collarbone. He was trying to stop the bleeding. Trying to hold me together. He wasn’t succeeding.
“Nurse! Clamp the bleed! Now!”
Her hands replaced his. Cold. Clinical. She pressed down hard enough to make me gag. Aris moved back to the eye. I heard the extractor reset. Felt the clamp slide into the right socket before the left had even stopped bleeding.
There was no time. The second eye was still cooking my brain.
Pop.
The right eye followed.
Darkness crashed down. Absolute, heavy, and suffocating darkness. But the pain didn't stop. It echoed. It throbbed in the empty spaces where the sight used to be. I felt the phantom weight of the metal, the ghost impression of numbers and text trying to brand themselves onto severed wires that led nowhere.
"Stabilize him! Pack the sockets! Get the bio-gel!" Aris's voice moved away. Then closer. Urgent.
"Wait. The organic eyes. Bring them. Now!"
A cold sensation. Pressure. The wet sound of tissue being manipulated.
"What are you doing?" The nurse's voice, flat and bureaucratic.
"I'm splicing what's left of the nerve. It won't be clean. It won't be perfect. But if I can reconnect even ten percent of the fibers..."
His voice cracked.
"Doctor, the salvage protocol—"
"Damn the protocol!"
More pressure. A sharp, thin pain like a needle threading through my skull. The sensation of something being woven back together, strand by fragile strand.
"Stay with me, Silas."
"Units recovered. Light corrosion on the casing. Cleaning required." The nurse's tone never changed.
“He’s going into shock. But the splice is holding. Silas! Stay with me!” Aris’s voice came out flat. No comfort in it. Just the tone of a man delivering bad news he’d already listed.
Aris's voice moved away. Fading. I tried to stay. Tried to find an anchor. Something to hold on to in the black. I thought of Elara. I tried to picture her face. The way her nose crinkled when she laughed. The specific shade of brown in her eyes. The scar on her left hand from the broken hydroponic valve. The exact pitch of her voice when she said my name.
I reached for it. My phantom hands clawed through the void, grasping at nothing. But I couldn’t see it. The memory was there. I knew it was there, the way you know the shape of a room in the dark. But the details… gone. Stripped. Overwritten. For sixty seconds, she was data.
SUBJECT: FEMALE. HEART RATE: 72 BPM. EMOTIONAL STATE: CONCERN.
I had measured her. Quantified her. Reduced her to numbers. And the numbers had eaten the truth. I reached for the memory again, frantic now, trying to reconstruct her from fragments. Brown eyes. But what kind of brown? Honey? Mahogany? The color of wet earth? I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember. The data overlay had scrubbed it. For that brief minute of being a god, I had overwritten the analog memory with digital perfection. And now that the digital was gone, I had nothing. Not even her.
I floated in the black. My throat now tasted the blood I’d swallowed during the screaming. The wet slap of gauze being packed into my skull. The beep of the heart monitor slowing down. The nurse’s voice, devoid of pity, delivering the eulogy for my career.
“Mark the file. Subject is incompatible. Designated: Lemon.” Her voice flat and detached.
I drifted away, down into the silence, clutching the terrifying realization that I had not kept my promise to Elara. It wasn’t me looking back anymore.
There was nothing looking back at all.