Chapter 49
VANGUARD
The question hangs in the air, and I don’t like the way James is looking at me. Like I’m not a person anymore. Like I’m a problem to be solved.
How is my pain tolerance?
“Pretty damn high,” I say carefully. “Why?”
“Because I need to do something that’s going to hurt.
” He’s already moving around the imaging suite, pulling open drawers, gathering instruments.
Scalpels. Clamps. Pointy things I don’t have names for.
“The scans are showing me something I need to verify. Something I can’t verify without seeing it, well, directly. ”
“Seeing what directly?” I ask, the pitch of my voice getting higher.
He doesn’t answer. Mia is standing in the doorway, her face pale, her eyes darting between me and her father.
“Dad,” she says. “What’s going on? What did you see?”
“I’ll explain everything. But first I need to confirm.” James turns back to me, a syringe in his hand. “This is a local anesthetic. It’ll numb the area, but you’ll still feel pressure, possibly some discomfort. I can give you something stronger if you’d prefer to be unconscious for this.”
“Unconscious for what?!” Now I’m sounding positively shrill. “You’re not cutting into me until you tell me what the fuck you’re looking for!”
James pauses. Sets down the syringe. Takes off his glasses and cleans them on his lab coat, a nervous habit I’ve already noticed.
“The scans are showing anomalies,” he says slowly. “In your bone structure. In your neural pathways. In your…cellular composition.”
“Anomalies like what?”
“Like nothing I’ve ever seen in a human body.”
I shake my head. “That shouldn’t be a surprise to you. I’m genetically engineered. I’m unlike any other human in this world.”
“I’m aware of that, Nate, but…”
My brows shoot up, impatience rattling me. “But what?”
“I’ve accounted for all of that.” James meets my eyes, and there’s something almost like pity in his gaze. It reminds me of the same look the man with the mustache gave me. “There’s something else. What, I’m not sure. But I intend to find out. If you let me.”
I think about all the tests Julia ran on me over the years. All the scans, the bloodwork, the examinations I was never allowed to see the results of. I always assumed it was standard stuff—monitoring my powers, making sure I was functioning properly. But what if it was something else?
What if she was hiding something from me all along?
“Fine,” I hear myself say, rolling up my sleeve. “Do it.”
“Wait,” Mia says. “Maybe this is something Nate isn’t supposed to know.”
“Doesn’t matter. If I’m not supposed to know something about my own fucking body, then I really need to know what it is.” I give her a steady look, holding her gaze until she relents.
James nods. “I was hoping you would see it that way. Now lie back. I’m going to make an incision on your forearm. Just a small one. Just enough to see what’s underneath the surface tissue.”
My blood runs cold. What else would be below the surface tissue?
I lie back on the exam table, though I hate how vulnerable it makes me feel.
James approaches with the syringe, and I feel the sting of the needle, then a spreading numbness in my left forearm.
While I have an extremely high pain tolerance, I’m grateful that my body still has the ability to take on anesthesia.
“Can you feel that?” He presses a finger against my skin.
“Sort of. I can feel the pressure but not really anything solid.”
“Good.” He picks up a scalpel. “Try to stay still.”
Mia moves closer, her hand finding mine on the opposite side. Her fingers are cold, trembling slightly, and I squeeze them once. A silent message that tells her that I’m okay. Whatever happens, I’m okay.
I have to believe that for now.
The scalpel touches my skin. I feel pressure, like James said, but no pain. I watch his face as he works, watch the concentration in his eyes, the way his brow furrows as he cuts deeper.
And then I watch his expression change.
“My god,” he breathes.
“What?” Mia leans forward, trying to see. “What is it?”
James doesn’t answer. He’s staring at my arm with an expression I can’t read—horror, fascination, maybe a combination of the two. He reaches for a set of retractors, spreads the incision wider.
“Dad, what—”
“Look.”
I sit up slightly, craning my neck to see my own arm splayed open on the table.
At first, my brain refuses to process what I’m seeing. It looks wrong. The layers of tissue, the muscle fibers, everything looks normal at first glance. Pink and red and glistening, the way flesh is supposed to look.
But underneath…
Underneath there are wires.
Thin, delicate filaments running through the muscle like veins, glinting silver under the surgical lights. And deeper still, where bone should be—
“That’s not bone,” I hear myself say. My voice sounds far away, like it’s coming from someone else. What the fuck is happening?
“No,” James agrees quietly. “No, it’s not.”
He probes deeper with his instruments, and I watch him expose something that looks like bone but isn’t.
The color is too uniform, too metallic. And the texture, when he scrapes it with a tool, produces a sound that no human bone should make, making me shudder all over, a wave of nausea rolling through me.
“What the fuck,” I whisper.
“It’s an alloy of some kind. Incredibly sophisticated.” James is in full scientist mode now, his horror giving way to clinical fascination. “The muscle tissue appears organic, but these filaments—they’re integrated throughout. Like a neural network made of wire.”
“I don’t understand.” My heart is pounding against my ribs, pins and needles surging over my skin. “What are you saying?”
James finally looks up at me. His eyes are sad behind his glasses, and when he speaks, his voice is gentle.
“Nate, your body is synthetic.”
I stare at him, trying to find a way to process. “But I know that. I know they’ve reinforced my bones, they’ve added stuff to my body to make it better.”
“I don’t think you understand,” he says. “Your body is entirely synthetic. I can tell your heart is racing right now but…you don’t have a heart. At least not an organic one. Your body has been made from scratch in a lab.”
The words don’t make sense. They rattle around in my skull like loose change, refusing to settle into meaning.
“That’s not—that’s impossible. I bleed. I breathe. I feel pain, I—”
For fuck’s sake, I ejaculate. I’ve come more times than I can count.
“You feel what you’re designed to feel.” James sets down his instruments.
“And they’ve given you everything you need to keep believing that you’re a human.
But your body is synthetic. Engineered to be indistinguishable from human tissue on the surface, but underneath…
well, you’re something else entirely. Something manufactured, care of Global Dynamix. ”
“No.” I’m shaking my head, pulling my arm away from him, not caring about the incision still gaping open.
“No, that’s not right. I have memories. My parents, they weren’t made up, why would anyone make that childhood up?
My sister, Emma. I had a sister. She was real. I had a life. I was in the army, I—”
“Nate.” Mia’s voice cuts through my spiral. She’s moved around the table, her hands on my shoulders, her face close to mine. “Nate, listen to me. Breathe.”
“I can’t—I don’t—”
“Breathe.”
I breathe. In and out. In and out. The air fills my lungs—my fake lungs, my manufactured lungs—and I want to scream.
I bet I don’t even need to breathe at all.
They always told me I could hold my breath for ten minutes and I never pushed it past that, never tried, just accepted. I bet I could hold my breath forever…
No, no, this isn’t happening. This is all a mistake. Maybe they fixed your body too much, but you’re still you. You’re still human.
“The consciousness transfer,” Mia says, looking at her father. “Project Prometheus. Is that what this is? Did they—did they somehow take his consciousness and put it—him—in a synthetic body?”
She said it before she said him…
“It would appear so.” James is watching me with that same sad expression.
“The technology is decades beyond anything I’ve seen, but the principle is sound.
Transfer a human consciousness into an artificial vessel.
Preserve the memories, the personality, the sense of self, while replacing the biological components with something more durable. ”
“More controllable,” I say, and my voice sounds dead even to my own ears.
“That’s what Julia always said. That I was hers.
That she made me.” I look at them. “She meant every word, it wasn’t hyperbole.
I was hers, because I belonged to Global Dynamix, because I belong to a company. She made me as a…as a fucking product.”
“She didn’t make you. She made…this.” James gestures at my body. “The vessel that was designed to be exactly the same as your previous body, your real one. And whoever you were before, whoever Nate Whitaker was—those memories are real. That person existed.”
“Existed.” I laugh, and it comes out broken. “Past tense.”
Then I stop, and ice-cold darkness washes over me like sickly tar.
I existed.
Oh god. Oh fucking hell.
“When?” I say, looking at James. “When did they do this to me? When did they—when did I stop…being human?”
James hesitates. “I don’t know. The technology required for this kind of transfer would have taken years to develop. Based on what I know about Global Dynamix’s research timeline, I would estimate—”
“March fifteenth.”
The words come out of me before I realize I’m saying them. Both Mia and James go still.
“What?” Mia asks.
“March fifteenth, 2038.” I can see it now, the memory surfacing from deep within. “They told me it was a routine procedure. Enhancement protocols, they said. One last procedure. I went under and when I woke up, everything felt…different. Sharper. Stronger. I thought it was just the upgrades, but—”