Ten hands and twelve... no. Eleven feet. Three kidneys, a fraction of liver and, pay attention here, ladies and gentlemen, half of the womb. Amazing creatures, women. Complete loss of her reproductive function doesn't cause as deep an emotional turmoil as the removal of the womb does.
"Don't remove all of it, let me keep my cervix," this woman kept telling me while we were waiting for her anesthesia to kick in. "You can cut off my tongue or my toes, but let me keep my cervix."
She was forty-two. Her son, a marine, was crushed under a tank during disembark. She was in command of a marksmen' squad. And she needed her cervix.
It was an interesting case, actually: the bullet went in at thirty degrees through the small of her back, touched her kidney, tore through her bladder, her womb, and went out at her pubis. She was lucky her nerves were intact (otherwise her legs would be sausages and soap material). She was lucky to be alive at all. She lost 1.5 liters of blood and the protocol was not to waste time on such cases.
"Count from ten to one," I asked her. My anesthetist got shot three days ago so I had to manage alone. Soft music was playing in the operating room. Heavy rain was raging outside the window.
"Let me keep it," she gave me a stern look refusing to fall asleep.
"From ten to one."
My name is Shockwave.
I was called differently before, but that was before the war. I remember nothing from before the war. Nobody does. This is the law. They say, those who feel nostalgic get their balls ripped off by Megatron personally.
No, I'm not a medic, I am an engineer, however funny it may sound. Yes, I work in the operational room, I wear a white uniform, but I cut healthy limbs off of healthy people and replace them with metal ones. Sometimes I perform urgent surgery that is vital for the patient, but mostly my trade is cosmetics.
Once there had been doping and steroids, now there's metal. It's very trendy to be made of metal today.
My work only seems interesting, in truth I am an ordinary craftsman, but I like it. A human body is simple machinery for me - a milling machine for a miller if you wish.
I've got my own cabin in the medical wing, enough money and no personal life. I'm married to my work. And, as by any exemplary husband, my feelings toward it are conflicted at best.
I also have colon cancer, but only my test results file and Knockout know this. I despise Knockout. An uneducated, ignorant medic on the post of chief army medic that he is. He sucked Chief Marshal Starscream off for this promotion, or so Breakdown, his less clever, but goodhearted tank trooper friend told me. He disapproved of Knockout because of it and called him an army whore.
When the reason for my constant constipation and regular retching had been explained, Knockout didn't feel sorry for me, and I was glad. I was fragging happy that this piece of shit felt nothing for me, especially nothing good.
"Metastases in your liver and right lung," Knockout told me in his office, lighting a cigarette. It was prohibited, as half of his actions were. "You know what I can offer you."
I kept silent. Being my age, you don't really care which cells grow where. I'll live the rest of my time.
"Surgery, chemo," he drew a smoke, "radiation, maybe."
"I'd like to hear your professional verdict."
"Cancer." He spread his hands as if saying "what can I do?"
"How much time do I have?"
"With chemo?"
"Without chemo. Without irradiation." I grinned. "With a sandwich and a prayer."
"A year." Knockout threw a glance at a large electronic field that served him as a desk. There was all the info about me - age, height, weight, how long I served and where, maybe even whom I fucked and how many times I urinated this week. His rank allowed him to know everything about his subordinates and unfortunately, I was one of them. But, I repeat, I am no medic and I will never be one, I am just an engineer. "One year, maybe a bit longer. Definitely longer with chemo."
"May I be dismissed?"
"Go. But think about it, Shockwave." On his lips my own name didn't please me.
There was nothing to think about. Maybe in ten months I would look like a skeleton or a balloon and I would be so disgusting that they would fire me and I would sleep for twenty hours a day and eat my full of rations. It would be an ideal ending, a delightful closure.
I'd let the woman keep her cervix and she'd been happy. Even if this redundant piece of flesh started festering and poisoned her, this wouldn't happen too fast and for now she was happy.
Please remove one meter of my colon, I rehearsed my speech mentally. But let me keep my rectum. You may remove three pairs of my ribs or my patellas, but my rectum has to die with me.
The next day there was a squad of volunteers and I installed them prosthesis hands, then there was a connoisseur, whose
auditory ossicles were shattered by vibration. In a week, Soundwave came.
I swear, the boy was no older than twenty, but naturally, I knew who he was. It was a sin not to know our Lord's Chief Communications Officer.
Soundwave was a genius - a real wonder-boy, and everyone knew it, including Megatron. When Soundwave turned fourteen,
Megatron had already recruited him. At sixteen, he was allowed to manage communications and protection system for the entire communications department.
Megatron didn't give a damn about stereotypes. He didn't mind sex, age or religion of his soldiers. Operational excellence was all he cared about. If you are ready to work till you sweat blood and deliver the results - welcome to the army.
Soundwave had been ready. He had been an orphan with a suspicion for autism and Megatron was his only chance to achieve anything.
A month before that there had been a fire in the accommodation wing he occupied, and Soundwave had suffered from a severe throat burn. Knockout performed the surgery, and now only my work remained. A trifle really.
I had to replace a certain something. Nothing big, just two small pieces of a cartilage, each no bigger than a pin's head. However, if I screwed up, Megatron's Chief Communications Officer would remain mute forever.
The boy came to me alone, without a dozen of guards. This made me feel respect for him, since our chief Marshal Starscream never went anywhere without convoy - not even to eat.
Soundwave smiled at me and I realized how delicate this work was going to be. In an hour his snow-white vocal cords were looking at me. They looked much like a newborn's girl labia.
It was strange, but after this...we sort of became friends. With Soundwave. With the genius serving the devil.
"How am I doing?" I paid Knockout a visit in a month. By my will or against it (I never understood which one was it), but I was put on a record as a potential death case.
It was a very funny list. I saw it a couple of times - a full register of all "employees" of the main headquarters with their rank and their health coefficient. The coefficient formula consisted of two constants and two labile numbers. If your coefficient was between one and one and a half, you were able to go naked into the deep space or sit on the burning coals without any repercussions - you were a titan. If it was between one half and a whole, you were fit for service. Less than one half, you were a lost case.
I got 0.3. Which meant, I was, to put it very mildly, thoroughly screwed. People like me were called "death candidates", "cannon fodder", "doomed" and most often simply "desactives". We didn't have long, and we were obliged to visit the chief medic, get free drugs and free treatment - all payed for by the state, oh, the ultimate justice. This was an inexplicable act of mercy on Megatron's part: he allowed us losers to drag on our lives a year or two longer and even die a relatively comfortable death.
On the topic of the day, the Great Lord always had one and a half. Other people's coefficients might fluctuate and vary (tenths and hundredths changed from time to time), but Megatron had always been the most healthy person on the planet. Well, having a sturdy leader is like heaving a hard and healthy dick - it's fragging good and never hurts.
My tumor had a thick, one meter long dick. Freaking irony, what can I say.
"Could be better." Knockout was turning around idly on his chair. "But stable for now."
Soundwave's coefficient was seven tenths; I stole a peak. I was glad, because it meant that my work was done - if not primly, then at least well. His adorable throat hadn't rejected the metal beads that I'd been soldering into it for four hours. I'd managed to deceive his throat into thinking everything was alright.
I'd spent my whole life sewing living things to nonliving, and vice versa. This was my only vocation. People dance, sing, paint and I played doctor Frankenstein. But it was my ability to lard living people with metal that made me distinguishable from any other technician with cancer out there - I had a purpose in my life, I had my passion.
Speaking of passion: One time Soundwave sucked me off.
He came to me to express his gratitude for good prosthesis (this happens a lot), and when I closed the door to my cabin he ordered me to sit on my bunk.
It had been the first time for me to hear his voice, first time at all. His voice was soft and moderately high, not girly.
"Take them off." He sank to his knees, holding steady by his hands on my hips. "You pants. Take them off."
I undressed. What could I do? He was at least twenty five years younger than me if not more, but the difference in our ranks was too big to even mention. By a flick of his finger I could be killed, quartered, castrated, poisoned or buried alive - such was the power of his fingers.
He bent down and took my sad flaccid dick into his mouth, a dick that got hard last time a month before that, when I decided to jerk off out of boredom. He wasn't too good at sucking, he wasn't too bad either. Better than nothing, so I was thinking while I was watching him. Soundwave felt my gaze upon him, I could tell, but he didn't react.
I had no woman for a year. For a year my dick had been grieving without a sensual female body. Last time I had simply hired a hooker, the one that had slept with half of the cadre by the time. Her vagina was fucked broad and wide, with soft rigid muscle walls, much like the wet wool sock that helped me part with my virginity when I was thirteen (you never forget the sensation, trust me). She had no lubrication whatsoever, this veteran whore, nothing can cause arousal in the likes of her. Soundwave's mouth was much more pleasant than a vagina that had serviced half of the headquarters.
When I came, he wiped his lips though there was nothing on them to begin with, stood tall and smiled his angelic smile at me. There was something of a puppet in the curve of his lips. I felt ill at ease.
"I hope it wasn't bad," he said.
"Not at all. It wasn't." I was lost.
Do you wanna stay? Talk, smoke, eat, or had the sperm your swallowed already settled in your stomach so you want more? A lot of these questions had been roaming around my mind. If I voiced a single one of them, I was afraid, I'd be fed my own tongue.
"You would make a wonderful medic, Shockwave," he said and fell silent.
"Thank you."
That night I got drunk. I drank a whole bottle of whiskey all by myself and watched some of the old movies that were still allowed. Two of them had been about highlanders, the third was about a retarded Spanish sculptor called Garsonio. He sculpted hideous ceramic pots.
"Your leukocytes seem to have sensed something is wrong." Knockout intercepted me in the hallway. The day immediately started to taste like warm yellow clay in Garsonio's retarded hands.
"I'm flattered you give a damn."
"The more people die here, the smaller is my reward. I don't think it is too much trouble for you to take pills for a year."
"But I will still die."
"Yes, but not so fast. And, after having received an adequate treatment."
Arm-less and feet-less Breakdown was lying on my operational table. I knew him well, he knew me not so well, but it didn't matter. He was lying there and sobbing softly, pitifully, having turned his head away from me so I wouldn't see his huge red nose and watery snot that was flowing. He never liked fashion, never liked metal and now only metal could save his life. His social life, at least.
Only one hour and a half passed since Knockout had cut the remnants of his limbs off and he looked like freshly cut pork ham when I removed his bandages.
"I'm allergic to Novocain," he croaked.
"I know." His electronic case-record contained a lot of details, even including his peanuts allergy. "That's no big deal."
"I think I won't feel it, even if you hammer bolts into me as is."
"Try to relax." I turned his head a little to put the inhaler on his face. "Count from ten to one."
"Will I walk?"
"Yes, you will."
Breakdown closed his eyes. His eyelashes were stuck together and trembling. It's a rare case for me to feel sorry for anyone.
"Ten...Nine.."
Will I shit?, I imagined myself asking another, unfamiliar engineer, while lying just like this on the operation table. Yes you will, of course, you will, they would cheer me up and I, as hundreds of my own patients before me, would fall asleep with my lungs full of xenon. I would fall asleep a cripple, I would wake up a cyborg, with a metal colon.
Soundwave visited me several more times. Sometimes we had sex and then he asked me how my day had been. Me? What about me? I'm no medic, there is no medical secrecy in the engineer's work, no need to watch your tongue so carefully.
His tiny pink anus constricted my pulsing, hard dick like a ten times folded rubber band. It was not very pleasant, but closer to the end of our animal couplings Soundwave managed to relax and I was ready to cum just because of that.
"When you cut me open," he asked me one day, snuggled to my side, "what did you feel?"
Cold. It had been cold in the operational room that day - the ventilation had been broken for a while and they hadn't fixed it yet.
"Interest, I guess." I wasn't lying, I was glossing over. "It's not often I have to replace something like that."
"How did I look?"
"Same."
"And on the inside?"
"Your blood is red and you have very little fat. Your vocal cords are very tender."
"And you touched them?"
"Yes."
"That is more intimate than sex." And he laughed softly - a pinch of coziness thrown into the empty pot of my tidy corner cabin.
Life with cancer is very unusual. You start to think you have a Siamese twin, or some kind of internal voice. You tumor starts talking to you, telling you what to eat, what to drink, where to go, wich panties to put on. You become a servant to your own tumor - its page-boy. You fall asleep thinking about it, what does it look like, how big it is, how much it weighs. It becomes your essense, your constant stumbling block.
Once I had a dream and in this dream my tumor came to me as a duck. I was sitting on a rock, the crimson glow of sunset spread before me, and beside me there was a fat smug duck. It talked.
"You haven't really seen nature for many years. Isn't it beautiful?"
"You live inside my colon."
"And you live inside the war's colon." The duck turned to me. "You are a metastasis. And Megatron is a tumor."
Knockout reminded me a few times that there's a lot of poison available and they really can spare drugs for me. But I just wanted to wait out this tiny residue of my life's span, and to let no one, least of all Knockout, lay their hands on me.
When Soundwave found out about my fat evil duck he said that he could order me to undergo the surgery, it was not too late yet. The technology allowed it, the time allowed it.
I smiled and kissed the top of his head imagining that I was kissing his vocal chords.
The Chief Communications Officer of our fallen legion wanted to keep me.
I became his cervix. He needed me.
For what - he had no clue.