Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You…
Chapter Two: Genesis
Bronx Veterans' Hospital, day thirty-two
It's nine-thirty in the morning, and I still get no fucking service. Fucking typical…
David sat in his bed and watched a particularly large rat skittering across the floor. His sheets hadn't been changed for weeks, and he desperately needed to piss – and he'd been clicking his handset button for attention for hours, with no success. Next to him, he could see a paralysed man being given a shot of what he assumed wasn't medicine (or even vaguely legal) by another patient. He wasn't surprised. Most of the patients here had shot up with something at one point or another – he'd even taken a hit or two of smack himself when he'd been at his lowest ebb. The way it freed him from his crippled shell made him feel that much worse when he came crashing back down to earth and realised that he would be stuck that way again. The scars criss-crossing the stumps of his wrist and leg, where the doctors had stitched the ripped lumps of meat closed, reminded him even more of that nasty fact of life.
"Help me!" he screamed at the top of his voice, feeling his vocal cords almost tearing with the strain. "Will somebody please fucking help me?!"
"Wrong place for that, man," said the guy with the syringe, a burly black man with a couple of fingers missing from his left hand and a large scar circling his left eye. "Ain't nobody gonna get here until ten – they all out demonstrating against the war. Us? We just gonna have to wait, like good little soldiers."
"Shut the fuck up, Richie," David snapped. "Don't see you offering to help me, do you? All I want is to get my fucking catheter fixed, and what are you doing? Sitting there and shooting up!"
"Best way to be, Dave," Richie said, shrugging. "Best way to take your mind offa this shithole, too."
"I don't care, asshole," David snapped. "Just get me to the goddamn bathroom right now, and I'll fix this my fucking self."
Richie grinned nastily. "Sorry. Ain't part of my job description."
"Fine," David snarled, rolling his eyes. "I'll just have to go on the floor."
"Won't make this place smell much worse than it already does, man," Richie chuckled. "You go where you like. I ain't gonna stop you."
Before David could spit out a scathing response, a pretty but tired-looking black nurse appeared in the ward's doorway, and David quickly waved his one good hand to get her to come over to his bedside. "My bag's full," he said, trying not to sound too furious – and just about managing it. "I've been clicking this thing for two fucking hours – where the fuck were you?"
"Not here," the nurse said, as she removed and replaced the full bag with a fresh, empty one. "Look, chief, just because you need something, doesn't mean you the first person we have to come help. Ain't just you we looking after here." She paused to stand up, and then noticed the syringe in Richie's hand. "Didn't I tell you to quit givin' that shit to everybody?" she snapped angrily, and snatched the needle away from him before he could react, before stalking out of the ward with a steely glare fixed to her haggard face.
"Man… would I love to do her," Richie said when she had gone, barely-veiled lust dripping from his voice. "Bet she sucks dick like a pro…"
"Offer her a couple hundred bucks to do it, and see where it gets you," David suggested helpfully. "Terry Gardner tried the same thing."
"Gardner?" Richie said. "Ain't he in traction?" David watched with some measure of satisfaction as realisation flowered on the other man's face. "Jesus. She did that to him?"
"So the story goes," David replied. "I'd think twice before you try fucking her." The story was completely untrue, of course, but David thought it might put a temporary stop to Richie's constant and irritating assertions of sexual desire towards the hospital's nurses. He didn't dare hope for anything more than that, given Richie's persistent habit of bragging to the female staff about the size of his genitalia or his high levels of sexual energy, but it would be nice to get a little respite, just for a little while. Besides which, David wanted to get back to work on the idea he'd been mulling over in his mind – an idea that had swum into his brain seemingly from nowhere, almost as if it had been placed there by some outside force. Rummaging in his bedside cabinet with his one good hand, David scrabbled awkwardly for the pad of paper he'd managed to have scrounged up for him, and for one of the grease pencils that he'd been allowed to keep alongside it (anything sharper than that was considered a safety risk, especially since some of the more unstable veterans were prone to harming themselves with anything they could get their hands on), and began sketching out some more designs that were seemingly springing fully-formed from his brain. The edges of the drawings were fuzzy, ill-defined and hardly ideal starting points, but David knew – he knew – that he could build what he had just put onto the paper. All he needed was the proper materials, and he knew he'd be in business.
For now, though, he had to deal with the lot he'd been given, and he needed to get over that hurdle first – walk before he could run, so to speak…
David looked up at the sky with a broad smile on his face. It had been too long since he'd been allowed the feeling of the sun falling across his skin, except through a thick pane of wire-reinforced glass. "Beautiful, isn't it?" he said to the woman who was pushing his wheelchair, who had been provided to him to help him through his daily life by the government, almost as a penance for getting him into the situation in which he now found himself in the first place.
"Always," she said, trying hard to share his enthusiasm. David nodded towards a nearby convenience store, and pointed with his good hand.
"Can we go in there? I need to get a paper, find out what's been going on – I've been out of the loop for way too long, man."
The woman nodded silently, and David thought he detected a slight note of envy in her movements – perhaps she was jealous of him for not knowing what had been going on. She wheeled him through the doors to the store and pushed him towards its racks of papers. Predictably, the war was still splattered across most front pages, with body counts still screaming out their terrible news in shiny black print. David picked up a copy of the New York Times and scanned it quickly with a cursory glance, before a shadow fell across the headline, and he was forced to look up and see what had obscured the light. He saw a girl with long, wild hair and piercing blue eyes standing in front of him, pale yellow sunglasses clipped to the bridge of her nose slightly obscuring her face from view. "Just back from Vietnam?" she asked, pointing to the shining buttons on David's uniform.
"Yeah," David replied proudly. Whatever else he'd been in the 'Nam, he had still been proud to call himself a soldier, and he hoped he'd be able to share it with other people, too.
The girl's eyes narrowed. "Murderer," she hissed. "Baby-killer."
"Fuck you," David snarled, suddenly furious. "Were you there? You pussy demonstrators don't know shit about Vietnam. I fought for my country, you stupid bitch – I didn't kill any babies, and I sure as hell didn't murder anything that wasn't trying to murder me right back." He jerked the stump of his right wrist at the girl, and took sour pleasure in watching her flinch. "You think I got this killing kids? Fuck you. I'm as much of a patriot as you and all of your pansy-ass pothead buddies, so don't you try telling me anything else, okay? I'm not in the fucking mood." He flipped up his remaining middle finger and held it defiantly in the girl's face. "You people do this to me, I'm gonna do it right back, you understand me?" He turned to look at his companion. "Get me outta here. I'm sick of this shit."
As he was wheeled away, he saw – with some sour satisfaction – that the girl had an intense look of humiliation on her face. It wasn't often that the peaceniks got what they deserved, but he felt certain that he'd dished out enough of that today. Flag-burning assholes needed to be taught a lesson, he thought, and if he could make even a small contribution to that, he decided that it had been worth it.
David ignited the welding torch and put it close to the piece of sheet metal that he'd been working on since the morning, dripping glowing yellow fragments of steel onto the floor of the workshop. He'd managed to find himself a low-paying but stable job in a scrap-metal yard (after having had to shove "Don't forget, hire the vet!" down the throats of every potential employer he could find), where he would melt down large tangles of steel and iron for re-sale elsewhere. It meant that he could scrounge up metal for his own pet project – the yard's owner had offered him the position with no restrictions on what he could do – and as such, the early results of his fevered bouts of inspiration lay stacked against the wall, with off-centre knees and uneven knuckle joints scattered across the workshop's floor like a child's toys on Christmas morning. It had been harder than he'd imagined translating the work of his imagination to three-dimensional life, but he didn't intend to give up any time soon. If anything, every failure had only led whatever was inspiring him to further refine his vision – and because of that, a skeletal leg framework lay on a table off to one side, complete with knee, hip and toe joints. David intended to use that as his final design, and was now looking for ways to make the limb as responsive as his remaining organic leg. To that end, he had begun fitting the stump of his right hip with various devices that amplified his remaining muscles' movement and gave him almost complete control over the leg. It hadn't been nearly as successful as he'd have liked so far, but it was progressing – as was his work on the artificial hand he was also making. If he was going to be able to walk again, he had decided that he needed two hands again, too. The hand had been harder to make than the leg, if only because the pieces he needed to work with were smaller than for the other limb, but he was already confident that the spider-like creation that was lying palm-up on the table beside his new leg would perform according to his expectations.
Putting down the welding torch after melting and re-setting a small pile of steel fragments into a single smooth sheet of flattened metal, David reached for the hand and began tweaking some of the smaller components in its main body, watching the hand's fingers twitch reflexively as he did so. He almost felt like he was practising surgery on a conscious patient when it moved like that, but he never really gave it much thought otherwise – to him, it was simply a project that he needed to finish for his own good. Whatever was driving him wouldn't let him rest until he'd completed his work – that much he knew for certain.
David could feel his heart pumping faster and faster as he put the last traces of solder to the complex piece of machinery in front of him, and then picked it up. The hand was ready, and it was a far cry from the skeletal framework it had been only a short while beforehand – the fingers were as lifelike as they could possibly be, and the textures of the palm and wrist were also verging on identical to living tissue. The only way that they really differed was in the fact that the textures were made up of metal and wire, rather than flesh and sinew.
"Here goes nothing," he muttered to himself. David placed the hand into the complex interface device he had designed for his wrist in a further fit of inventiveness, and locked it into place with a click. As he did so, he could feel the wires of the hand making contact with the muscles in the stump of his wrist – and suddenly, he had a right hand again, as it began transmitting information about its surroundings to his brain, just like a real hand would do. He flexed its fingers experimentally, and could hardly restrain himself from yelling out in triumph as the fingers bent and clenched exactly as he asked them to. "Well, David…" he said, barely able to contain the surging feelings of joy in his chest, "you want to try getting two for two?" Wheeling himself over to the table where his new leg was laid, he picked it up with his new hand and brought it down to the savagely-abbreviated remains of his old one, and then clamped it into the similar interface device that now capped what was left of his hip. His leg squealed as it told him that it was fully integrated with the device on his hip, and David took a deep breath before he found the courage to grasp both arms of his wheelchair and begin pushing himself to his feet. As he stood, he wobbled for a moment or two as his new leg struggled to adjust to the unfamiliar weight being placed upon it, but then he found his balance and managed to survey his surroundings from a perspective he'd almost forgotten he'd once had.
"Son of a…" he murmured, stunned. "It's really fucking beautiful up here." He took a few steps, trying to gauge the leg's ability to move as best he could, and then looked around his workshop, observing everything else he'd made so far. In addition to the hand and leg, he had been struck by inspiration to build everything from a rifle that fired concentrated bursts of high-energy plasma to a small, squeaking pet mouse-robot that scurried here and there with an unusually high level of intelligence. And like the hand and leg, they had sprung fully-formed from his mind, with no planning or brain-storming on his part. It puzzled him how this could be, but it was nevertheless the case, so he decided that if he could exploit this particular talent, he might as well.
Anything to make his life a little easier, after all...
David sat back in his swivel-mounted chair and watched as the two gentlemen entered the room in which he had set up a small engineering consulting firm. The fact that he knew next to nothing about conventional engineering beyond what his power taught him was irrelevant. He figured it was a "need to know" thing, and his clients didn't need to know. "Good afternoon, Sakura-san," he said, as he stood and bowed at the waist towards the leading man. "I trust your journey wasn't too tiring?"
"No, it was very refreshing, thank you," Sakura replied in impeccable English, bowing towards his host as he did so, and David was instantly glad that he hadn't had to learn Japanese – his experiences with foreign languages had ranged in quality from "passable", to "awful", so this was a nice change. "May I ask who it is I am speaking to?"
"Forge," David said, smiling. "Call me Forge…"