The grinding grew ever louder. As it turned the corner just behind me I could also hear the whirring, whining and clicking of its various parts as it bore down on me. It released an agonized moan. I rammed the doors with my shoulder and burst through.
But into what? The scene before me was a surgical theater. “Naughty boy! If you’re going to spectate, at least be clean about it.” I took a mask, hair cap and sanitary wipe from one of the six spindly articulated limbs of what I figured for a surgical robot of some kind.
“This is indeed where the magic happens. I thought to kick you out at first. But to permit an outsider such an intimate view as I work really is electrifying!” The grainy intercom voice now came from the robot as it methodically weaved fine fiber optic cables into the metal spinal column of a man’s upper body.
“Do you know what I did before I became a surgeon? It won’t surprise you. I was a puppeteer! My great love was to give things the appearance of life by putting myself into them. But my dream was to truly give life to something I built.
Not a simple robot but something which fears, which searches for nourishment, which tries to survive! The elan vital. Spark of life alchemists searched so long for. It’s the organism itself, isn’t it?
Bolt enough of those into any old pile of scrap and I guarantee it will start moving. Because it wants to live. And because it is in pain, but who is to say that pain isn't as valid a mode of being as pleasure?”
I held my head in my hands. Cold, plastic hands. So many things I could have said to it. Would it listen? Who was I really talking to? It continued prattling on as if that’s what I’d come here for. “Bring a living organism into it. That’s when it gets interesting for me. Real moral weight! That’s the value the soft squishy bits bring to the table. They just get in the way aside from that.”
The lower body of the creature was wheeled in through the same double doors. It resembled an angular metal skeleton with moist red muscle tissue linking the pieces. As I watched, the spider like robot expertly joined the lower spinal column of the existing upper body to the legs and pelvis.
“Let’s get a few things out of the way, shall we? It should be clear to you, at least, that I am technically skilled. I can absolutely restore function resembling stock human configurations. That’s what I did for you.
There was never any frostbite to speak of. As with artists who stray from anatomical norms, it is expected that they first demonstrate mastery of those norms. I assure you it was painful for me to perform such a trite procedure. Perfect symmetry, restoration of original function only.
I was sorely tempted many times to add in a spinning blade, or hydraulic claw arm. I can still do that for you! I say it’s just as good an arm for the money. No, better! It’s miles better than the one you have now!”
The completed creature was wheeled out by some obscene amalgam of a human torso and head, a three wheeled motorized base and a small crane of the type used to work on car engines. I doubled over, struggling not to vomit.
“I admit some fairly large trespasses against conventional ideas of decency. But then, even recycling everything, I often want for quality parts. Many of the pieces you’ve seen were cobbled together during dry spells. Creative dark times for me I’m afraid.
Your shipment of top shelf myoelectric prosthetics was supposed to liven things up, but you shit the bed on that one didn’t you. Still, my babies salvaged quite a bit from the wreckage, and now I have a healthy new specimen to showcase my work to. Do you even begin to understand how privileged you are? How exclusive access normally is?”
I was wedged into the far corner, quietly repeating the Lord’s prayer. Was the voice the surgical robot? Was he the armored guard from my room? Still, it continued. “By what right do I do all of this, you ask? Voice filled with righteous indignation, fist held to the sky? What did any of these poor wretched primates do before this?
Vagrants, drifters, junkies. What society digests human life, sweeps the remains under the rug and then tells me I cannot make something new and beautiful from it? But I am not here to agitate against the system which put me here. I am now exactly where I belong. I just ask that when it is done tearing the modern man apart, let me have what’s left.”
A new monstrosity entered view. The base of a powered wheelchair, a skull with a single eyeball constantly hydrated by a little motorized mister, and a casio electronic keyboard with a single human finger duct taped to the far side with wires trailing from it. “Oh hello Jeffrey! That’s my delightful little muse. One of my first creations and faithful companion after all these years.”
The bizarre little mountain of parts began to play a sporadic melody consisting of just one tone, the key within reach of the single finger under its control. “He was so happy when a plane went down with a keyboard! Jeffrey so loves to play keyboard, you see. Even if it is just the one tone. I tell him it’s a new genre! He is a pioneer in his field, like his proud papa! If Jeffrey can find happiness in this world, there surely must be something to it all.”
It scooted by me and out through the double doors, hammering happily on that same key the whole way. Or was it sadness? No way to discern. Perhaps that was the point of it. The next subject came in screaming. Non-stop terrified shrieking, though the voice was evidently already quite hoarse. Until her vocal chords were severed.
“Too many are like her. No sense of sacrifice for art, or appreciation for what they have the opportunity, through me, to be a part of. Look at this! The delicate juxtaposition of life, and mortal danger, within a single figure!”
While he talked, he’d cut her ribcage open and installed a spinning blade a centimeter or so from her heart. “Who else but me could make it work? You are too kind. In her case, I doubt she will last more than a day. But all life is transient. And each of us has a whirling blade of obsession in our chest which grinds at us, slowly destroying everything in us which does not serve it. When she expires I will recycle whatever is recoverable and burn the rest.”
He removed the woman’s eyes and mounted a scrolling text screen to her face instead. With the addition of a ribbon cable attaching it to a freshly implanted brain interface, words began to appear. “Michael….Michael….Michael….Help me Michael. Help me Michael. Help me.”
I creeped along the wall as he spoke until I felt the edge of a doorway, then bolted through it. I heard the voice trail off behind me, continuing to absentmindedly narrate its grim work whether or not anybody else was present to hear. I didn’t get far.
The abstract creature dragging itself along the corridor had a human head, albeit missing the jaw and fitted with a combo feeder/respirator. The rest of it was a tangled jumble of arms, legs and torsos.
The bulk of its body, insofar as it could be said to have a single body, was supported by a sort of mesh sling attached to a wheeled metal framework from which an IV drip bag was also suspended. The piteous mess scraped along, dragging itself with whatever hands were closest to the ground, quietly whimpering.
“Consider the Dragalong” bellowed the scratchy intercom voice, now coming from the beast before me. “The strength of a dozen men, but put together differently than nature recommends. Grabbing blindly at the earth, desperately pulling itself towards warmth and nourishment, as do we all. This piece started simply as storage for excess limbs. They stay fresher this way.”
I doubled back, now simply looking for my room. From there I assumed there was passage to the surface. I’d long since seen enough to prefer taking my chances in the snow. “You know why they sent me here? Cheap cold storage for the parts. They could not justify the expense otherwise, not to support such a notorious figure. But my work was altogether too revolutionary to dispense with!
Instead they permit me to continue in secret. I send them useful findings, they send me care packages, as it were. New materials, new possibilities for expression. Sometimes prosthetics. Sometimes warm bodies.
No distinction exists, soon after they arrive. It all flows into the ever-fresh, self-rejuvenating exhibition. Fueled by the new meat, sustained by it until it expires, then recycled into something original! A second chance at the spotlight.”
The cacophony enveloped me. The familiar distant grinding. The squeaky wheel of the creature behind me, dragging itself. The whirling blade. All of it surging, pulsing, an otherworldly rhythm. Echoing down the frozen corridors and out into the ice. I headed for the next door I saw with light on the other side and, upon barging through, immediately regretted it.
I don’t know what I expected. What I’d seen so far would be impossible to sustain otherwise. But I had to really see it, to put a name to the dread I’d felt until that moment. The room was just endless rows of pregnant women’s torsos. No head or limbs. The stumps capped off with tubes and wires trailing from them. Next to each, a monitor displaying a continuous sonogram of the developing fetus.
“Do take note, I am not without mercy. Their heads have been removed and put to better use elsewhere. This is a career I would not wish on my harshest critic” the staticy voice explained. “The ones born here are increasingly of inferior intellect. Too degenerated, after many years of recycling the same seed. I need them more as a self-replenishing supply of arms, legs, organs and other filler than anything else.
The core must always be a well formed brain so that it understands what life was before, what has happened to it and what life will be for it going forward. This authentic psychological anguish and struggle for survival is the indispensable core of a triumphant piece.”
As I watched, an insemination machine on rails stopped dutifully beneath each torso, inserting the long metal proboscis and conceiving new life which could never imagine what was in store for it. The torsos furthest along in their pregnancies were being cut into by row after row of identical surgical robots like the one I’d seen earlier.
A cry pierced the air as one delivered a newborn into the world. It laid the quivering, bloody pup into an incubator on wheels topped with half of a human head with part of a smartphone where the eye should be. Its mouth haplessly flopped open and shut as it motored away, like a fish out of water. The whine of the electric motor driving it fading into the larger tapestry of sound, set against the distant grinding I now realized would truly never stop.
“The development of the young is accelerated with the same growth hormones you presently use on cattle, as well as steroids to promote muscle development. This often confuses the body with respect to gender, such that sometimes surgical corrections are necessary.
From what limited information about the outside world I receive, I understand that’s become quite a popular procedure! I’ll have you know I was doing it before it was cool, culturally acceptable, or voluntary.”
“But the real problem is genetic degradation! It affects the brain first, and that directly impacts my craft. What’s needed to restore balance is an infusion of new DNA from a rugged, robust donor. That’s you, my friend! Enough material was taken while you slept for the next decade, easily. That will be your lasting contribution to my always growing body of work.”
I stumbled from the room, stunned and nauseous. When I felt I could stand, I ran. I can’t say for how long. I only stopped because the still fresh sutures joining one of my stumps to the prosthetic leg split.
Blinding pain followed as the metal brace from the prosthetic leg, bolted directly to bone, split that bone into fragments and tore at the nerve as I collapsed into a blubbering heap. The abomination with the incubator for a belly lazily wheeled past. As it did, I looked upon the face of the infant inside with new understanding.
Above the ice, the storm had long since abated. The emergency beacon, activated when the plane first impacted, managed to get a signal out as the atmospheric conditions became more forgiving. “If you’re listening to this, stay close to the plane. If there are any fuel fires, put them out, but burn anything else away from the plane to stay warm. I had some colleagues at McMurdo pull some strings so I could be on the first flight out to your location. Hang tight daddy, I’m coming to save you.”
The End