Part Two: Fighting My Way Out
That's a pretty decent picture of the kid I was, and my family as it was. Third and youngest in an affluent family which belonged to the Imagist faith.
For those unfamiliar with the precepts of the Church of God's Image, among the usual stuff is the tenet that humans are made in God's image. Whoever you are, you are an aspect of God, and therefore holy. It's not bad, as beliefs go. All-inclusive, on the surface of it. But the sting in the tail of this faith is that any unnatural alteration is wrong and sinful. God's image shall not be degraded! That means, in practical terms, that cosmetics and hair-dye are forbidden, intoxicants and mind-altering substances are out—even medications for mental conditions like depression and schizophrenia.
Genetic modification is a crime, cosmetic surgery is evil, blood transfusions are an abomination—and surgery is sinful. Not even for life-threatening illnesses will an Imagist allow the touch of a medical laser. If they're in an accident, that's a different story. They'll let a doctor patch them up—as long as they don't need any replacement parts or a top-up on the ol' body fluids. And they mean it, just like any martyrs throughout history. The League for the Defense of The Rights of Minors makes sure that the children of these deluded Luddites are not denied treatment for any life-threatening conditions, although…. that I'll get into later.
At one time, when that sudden drop in the cost of cosmetic surgery caused a huge trend in self-modification, the results of cloning all still had progeria, and people were afraid that genetic engineering would produce a super-race against which mere mortals could not compete, I'm sure the Church of God's Image was a great comfort. But that was two hundred and fifty years ago!
It's all very well for people like my mother and father to believe in that. Mother is a natural beauty. Marvelous bone structure. Even at her age, she needs little enhancement, but she does use a dusting of face-powder, 'to keep the shine down.'
Father was a professional long-distance runner before he took over the York Directorship, and he was voted one of the Most Beautiful People five times during his prime. My brothers favor him. I was not like any of them. I was alone.
My usual contacts with other children were unpleasant. Girls, especially. I mentioned that we were affluent; therefore my parents hired people to do the actual childrearing. Those two dozen or so care-providers, mostly women, who came and went throughout my childhood are probably the reason I didn't become an out-and-out sociopath. No, really. I didn't. I became more of an occasional sociopath, instead. They were kind and caring, even loving—but they were hired and paid and fired.
I was home-schooled. So were my brothers, until they were ready for high school. I didn't go to high school. I realized at a very tender age that early matriculation would be my fastest and best way out. I was eight, then and from that time, I poured my life into learning—everything.
Being home-schooled didn't make things much easier. It wasn't as if our parents did the schooling; there was a group of children with whom we shared professional teachers. It was more like a very exclusive private school taught in our houses. The children in our circle were all from families who shared my parents' faith and socio-political standards. They had money, too.
There were eight or nine of them, half boys, half girls. The boys were crude and obvious. Unable to bully me with the conventional method of fists—after all, they couldn't hit a cripple— they turned to words. I absorbed their verbal blows and returned them with more imaginative and barbed retorts. But the girls were different.
There were four of them. Two sisters, Isabelle and Daenne Neville, then there was Kirby Ingram, and Rejoice Stanley. Rejoice died young, murder-suicide at age fourteen, with a stranger she met cliking. Collectively, humanity isn't getting any brighter. The girls cut me into pieces, just because they could. I didn't know how to defend myself then. I was vulnerable to the girls because I wanted to love and be loved. Everyone does. The desire for the exchange of love is in humans as the tendency to grow toward the source of light is in flowers, a matter of instinct, not of free will.
My ex-wife has accused me of being a 'heartless, lying user', and a 'vicious, oversexed spider.' That is not true, although she had a point, as I was lying to her and using her, but she was a special case. Actually, I've always been very much a romantic. Girls and women have always been mysterious, wonderful, distant creatures—as long as they're distant. Up close, they seem to bestow affection only when they have something to gain from it, like my mother, or in an impersonal way as part of their job, like the many care professionals, nurses and doctors who've done their work on me and moved on to the next patient.
There are exceptions, of course, and when I have met with genuine, spontaneous caring matched with the kind of mind that shares my sense of humor, I have formed deep and lasting emotional attachments.
When I first made my plan to get into college as soon as possible, I was already ahead of George, partly due to greater intelligence, and partly due to my enforced physical inactivity. I pulled even farther ahead. It didn't hurt that George has a serious neurohormone imbalance, one that interferes with his concentration and decision making abilities. Again, because of their Imagism, our parents didn't have him treated for it. I've got a neurohormone imbalance, too, but in my case, oddly enough, it's an advantage. I can focus like a laser on something I'm interested in, to the point of obsession, learn about it, and remember it in microscopic detail.
I soon needed an individual tutor, partly to keep me from answering every question asked. My relationship with my parents was very good at that time; I got high marks and behaved myself. What more could two parents, who were always off running around, want of their youngest child? It wasn't until I was thirteen that I drew their serious, undivided attention. That was how I got to college, where I began this story.
It was only a little while after that day with Primavera that everything came to a head. I was applying to various schools that year. Secretly, of course. I didn't let them in on what I was planning. Some of the applications should have been filled out by my parents. Those I forged, using their electronic signatures. I, in my mother's name, wrote very moving letters about how sincere my desire to attend x----fill in the blank college was, and how I would need accommodations for my disabilities, and wasn't there a grant I could apply for? And because of this-that-the-other thing, I would be living on or near the campus with a care provider who would be acting as my guardian. Did they know of any place which would be suitable, on the first floor or with an elevator, complying with all the various Accessibility acts? Mom could have been proud of them. They were as good as, or better than, the ones she would have written.
Eventually, though, I needed one of my actual parents to show up and sign documents and talk to the college officials. I waited until I had five acceptances and five comprehensive scholarship subsidies to go with them. Between my academic qualifications and my disabilities, everything was covered financially, and I wouldn't have to take out a loan or depend on anyone. I didn't want to be supported by my parents. I had all I needed. I was ready to go to college.
Provided, of course, that I got their permission. I waited until the right moment to break the news, a moment which came when we were having one of our rare family dinners. Months often went by before we would have another of them. That night, Mom was home from legislating, Dad was back from hosting the Olympics, and Edward was home from college.
We were having eight-treasure eggplant over rice. All our meals together were designed to be eaten with only one utensil, so that I wouldn't have to struggle with a knife and fork in my clumsy, one-handed way. Edward finished his account of a spring break trip he took somewhere, when I seized on that as my opener.
"I've been giving some thought about which college I should go to," I said, as casually as I could.
"Reed," said my mother, naming our local liberal arts school—not one of the better schools, and not one which I bothered to apply to. "And clik-commute." Meaning that it would be easiest and most convenient for her if I went somewhere close to home. I would not be permitted to run around loose, frightening small children and making her look bad.
"It is rather early for you to be thinking about that." Fatherly wisdom from the other end of the table.
"No," I pretended nonchalance. "I ought to let them all know by next month, it's only considerate."
Mom put down her glass. "What?"
"They may need to make alterations to accommodate me, after all," I said, as lightly as I could, and took another forkful of eggplant.
"They wouldn't need four years for that," said Dad, and stopped, having caught the sudden lion-has-padded-into-view tension that had fallen over my mother and me. It set off a hot, stinging, droning ache in my head. She and I were engaged in our first stare-down. We might still have been sitting there, mute, the next morning, but George broke in.
"You can't go to college. You're younger than I am."
"What do you mean?" asked my mother.
"I'm starting this fall. I won't live in a dorm and can't live on my own, but there are full-service apartments for the handicapped."
"This isn't happening," she said, blankly.
"And since you'd be paying for care providers for me anyway, they could act in loco parentis there just as they do here. I have a full scholarship package, whichever offer I go with—." I continued.
"I do not believe it."
"—be taking the basic pre-professional courses for the first year." I was going to continue until I was through. If I stopped, I might not have been able to start again.
"No, it's….This is too much."
"All I need is your permission. And you'd need to talk to admissions people, things like that. It's not unusual anymore, that I'd be so young, since so many parents are having their children's genes optimized before implantation. Twenty-three percent of all entering students are sixteen or younger. Seven percent are under fifteen."
"It is out of the question."
"I'm going to college this fall. I need your permission. If you don't give it willingly, I have already spoken with an advocate from the League for the Defense of The Rights of Minors and another from an organization for the rights of the disabled. They have confirmed that I have grounds for a legal emancipation, involving the termination of all parental rights—."
"On what grounds!" she cried.
"On the grounds that anyone who would condemn their child to disability and deformity has such lousy judgment that they can't possibly tell what's in his best interest, let alone act in it. I would also bring a lawsuit for enough money to cover all the corrective surgery I could ever want, plus damages for all my pain and suffering. It's not a hollow threat. They're waiting to hear how you reacted."
"You do not sound like my son. You don't even sound like a kid! You're thirteen. There you sit, and come down on us with—threats and ultimatums—like you're my political opponent! Where are you getting this from?"
"Machiavelli. I read him last year."
"Mach--! Is that how long you've been planning this?"
"No. I've been planning it for the last five years. Ever since you began talking about Edward's college plans, and I realized that going to college could mean getting out of here."
"Eight. You were eight. It's—."
"Grotesque? Monstrous?"
Round two of silent staring. She caved.
"For so many years, you've been good. I've followed all your progress reports. You have an incredible brain, Richard. I truly believe you can do anything and everything—."
"No. I can't do everything. I can't run in a marathon, or play a piano. I can't ask a girl to the digitals. Oh, theoretically, I suppose I could, but the thought of her reaction wakes me up at night in a cold sweat. And I haven't been good! I've just been well-behaved." I may have sounded cool, but I was shaking.
We were on round three of the stare-down. The Greek Chorus, meaning Dad, Edward and George, took the silence as their cue. George said, "If he's going to college, I'm going, too. Why are they giving him a scholarship, anyway? He can't play sports!"
That was my second favorite line from the whole evening.
"This is humiliating. Edward is twenty-three, and he's nowhere near graduating!" added Dad. That was my favorite line.
"I have more than half my credits! Anyway, he has nothing to do but read," protested Ed.
I snapped at him. "So studying is secondary to hanging out and getting laid, to you? I'll sweeten the deal, Mom. I'll use a different last name, and you can tell the administration that it's to keep enemies from targeting me. Your permission. That's all I really need. I'll attend summer sessions, too, and only come home for breaks. When I do, I'll be well behaved, I promise you that. And good grades, too, of course."
She was pale. She was trembling. I felt a great rush of pleasure, seeing that. This was power, and it tasted like lemon curd, sweet and painful at the same time.
They gave their permission, partly on the advice of their lawyers. I even got a living allowance, most of which I put in the bank and later invested. I had a succession of care providers, paid for by my parents, until I turned eighteen and decided I could live independently. I managed no worse than most eighteen-year-olds. I did smell fairly rancid for a few weeks, until I got myself together on stuff like laundry.
I went home for my breaks until I turned twenty-one.
Just to show there were no hard feelings.
That's a joke, by the way.
While I was home that last time, Mother sorrowfully asked, "What aspect of God are you?" It was intended to be rhetorical, but I had an answer.
"When two sports teams face off in the finals, and the winning team gets emotional for the cameras, and say, "God heard us. God was with us," I'm the aspect of God that hated the other team, and didn't hear their prayers. When there's a disaster, and the survivors say, "God had his angels looking out for me. God spared me for a reason," I'm the face of God that looked away from all those who died, the aspect of God who had no reason to spare all the other poor bastards. When a little girl gets kidnapped, violated and murdered, I'm the part of God that let it happen. When there's a war, I'm the double-agent, double-crossing God who's on both sides. I am an angry, ugly, bitter laugh at everything there is. Good-bye, Mom."
Not a bad exit line, huh? I had it all thought out. I worked on it over the years. But at that moment, the perfect moment, I choked on it. I muttered, "I don't know," and left.
Slunk away, actually.
Wanting to be loved is a terrible craving. It's an addiction that gnaws.
From age thirteen to age twenty-one, I was in college, getting various degrees, in law, among other things. I spent the time between twenty-one and oh, say seven years ago, making money. I needed a lot of it. I needed enough to get all the corrective surgery done, plus enough to live on while I did, and then a nice sum for my future endeavors. I had plans.
Why didn't I sue my parents for the money? Because….I forgave them.
Another joke.
They were expecting me to sue. In their encrypted files I found all sorts of panicky correspondence to and from their lawyers, who were advising them to settle out of court the moment I mentioned it. Father even anticipated a possible tell-all book, and wanted to know how to block it. How trite they thought me. How unimaginative. Therefore, I didn't.
I will skip over the details of my money-making endeavors. They were successful, and not relevant to this story.
When I judged that I would soon have enough, I began looking for a doctor to head the massive project of making me into a normal physical specimen. I had very specific criteria. I wanted an XD, a physician with a comprehensive medical degree which qualified him or her to diagnose and treat practically anything in the animal kingdom, someone who could doctor an entire ecosphere. He or she would be surgeon, physician, geneticist, and psychiatrist, all in one, backed by lesser votaries of those orders. And I wanted a recent graduate, someone who knew all the newest treatments and technologies, someone green, someone who wasn't yet hardened and practical.
Someone I could play like a harp, in other words. I knew what I wanted done, and I had an idea of what was going to be in store for me. I wanted a doctor who didn't have the face to say "No, I can't do that," when I said I wanted to be two meters tall, with the sexual capacity of a lion in mating season. You should look up what a male lion normally does at those times. Awe-inspiring.
I also wanted the pick of the litter. 99.9th percentile of all XD's graduating that year, world-wide, those were the ones I was combing through, when I came across a name I knew. Primavera Visconti.
Doctor Primavera Visconti, the adopted daughter of Hugo Visconti. Doctor Primavera Visconti, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize for medicine this year, and so young, too. Not even thirty. How many people go on to become what they said they would when they were six? She had. She really did become a doctor.
I'd have a power over her that I could have over no other.
Not that the memory of that afternoon would have influenced me, had she become only an MD or an indifferently good XD, but since she had such high grades, and was on my short list, I grinned like a shark, and planned our reunion.
She had just received her license, and was all lined up to join an ecological engineering team that was headed for Africa. It was one of those career-making opportunities, as the next step after that was promotion to the Mars Project. Then the word came down that she was bumped. I was in no way responsible. It was because her father was famous and powerful. They said it would look like nepotism and influence. Next time, they said. It was an opponent of her father's, getting a jab in at him through her. All the typical bullshit they say in such cases.
She was blocked from the next eco-engineering project as well, the one to Alaska, but she was on the waiting list for the one after that—five years in the future.
So she went back to the university hospital and began a contributory residency, volunteering her services for those with only the bare basic citizen's coverage. Very commendable of her. She has a social conscience. Of course she comes from wealth, so she could afford to do it, but I still think it showed her heart was in the right place, don't you agree?
I gave her a few months in which to get thoroughly bored—a mere medical residency wouldn't be a challenge for an XD—before I made my move.
One cold, wet afternoon, I limped into the waiting room for emergencies and walk-ins, and asked to see her. I knew she was going to be there, of course. I leave as little to chance as I can. I was determined to wait and not go away until she came out and saw me. It didn't take as long as I thought it would; only half an hour. I stood up. I am always gentlemanly. Or almost always. Or I am when it suits my humor and purpose.
I stood up and greeted her, my soul naked in my eyes. "Doctor Visconti, I don't think you could possibly remember me, but many years ago, when we were both children—."
She interrupted. "I remember you, Richard Genet-York. I remember you very well."
And I knew I had a doctor. However, things did not go quite as I planned them.
She didn't have an office. We sat in a staff rest area, and she brewed tea for us, bringing out some home-made cookies. We made small talk while she got everything ready. She told me about the ecological engineering, and I sympathized with her. The cookies were lemon-cardamom, with raisins in them. It was very nice and cozy.
I took a moment to look her over before I went into my pitch.
She was almost certainly the result of successful genetic optimization. She had turned out so tall that I glanced at her feet to see if she had on platforms. She was wearing flats. A woman with the name of Primavera should have hair like one of Botticelli's goddesses, and she did, dark red-gold, bound back in a braid. She had good skin, but her features were otherwise almost ordinary.
There was one very important thing about her face—it was her own face. I am the last person who would look down on somebody else for having work done on themselves, but I don't like completely fake faces. I hate to see Audrey Hepburn reincarnated through surgery, or those 'ideal beauty' computer composites made flesh. I keep wondering who that person really is. If Primavera had had any cosmetic surgery, it was undetectable. That pleased me. She had enough confidence to wear the face she was born with.
I knew from her transcripts that she had started college in her early teens. Between that and her grades, I should have known she was going to be very intelligent, but I had grown accustomed to being the smarter person in any given conversation. It was a blind spot.
She stole my opening. "I know why you're here. You want me to fix you."
"Yes."
"The ink on my license is still wet enough to smear."
"I see that as a plus. Everything is still fresh in your memory, and you are up-to-date on the newest developments. Also, you still haven't seen…." I paused. "The limits of what can be done. I am beginning this late. It should have been done before I stopped growing. It should have been done before I was six. The result won't be as good as it could have been, and I won't recover as swiftly or as easily."
"True. Do you have, or can you get, the funding?"
"I have it."
"It will be excruciating. It will be much worse than you imagine."
"I understand."
"The degree of success will depend on your degree of commitment. You will have to work for it, just as surely as I will. Physical therapy cannot be done for you, bought for you, or faked by you. Nor can you disregard the warnings and restrictions I give you."
"I will do what I must."
"Then tell me what you want."
"I want a straight back. I want…." I began and went on for some time. She took notes on a Powermod and asked a question now and then. Her co-workers looked in from time to time, to see if she needed rescuing from the frothing madman, but she waved them away. I was worked up by the recitation of my heart's desire, and at one point, I had to get up to limp up and down the room. I told her about everything, what I wanted and what I could live with, in great and graphic detail.
Why I would be so candid? She was going to be my doctor. Besides, the care professionals I've known have almost all been very sincere and dedicated. Much less screwed up than my family.
When I had done ranting and she had done taking notes, I sat down, winded. She read over what she wrote down, read over my medical files, and looked at me.
"Essentially, you are asking to be normal."
"Yes. I will settle for being normal."
"If you have enough done to you to make you look and function within the human norm, you will, and I am fairly certain of this, have had more corrective surgery and treatment than has ever yet been performed on an adult who hasn't been in an accident. I'm not including purely cosmetic surgery. Most corrective measures were developed either for children or accident victims. This will be a problem. We won't be trying to repair fresh injuries; instead we will be cutting, shaping, and removing abnormally formed, but essentially healthy, bone and tissue. Counter-intuitive. We'll be inflicting the damage.
"There are special ossified polymers developed to replace bones, if it should be needed, but not on such a scale…Your ribcage will be the worst part of that. A few vertebrae can be replaced, there are regenerative treatments for the nerve fibers of the spinal cord and elsewhere, but as yet, there is no truly satisfactory replacement for cartilage. If your back is to be remade, one will have to be found. That will take time. While you're waiting, I would recommend that you put on forty kilos of lean muscle mass. Your muscles will atrophy while you're immobile, and as you are now, you can't afford to lose any more. I will have to have a contract."
I had one with me. She read it. "This clause prevents you from firing me."
"I have an impulsive and unpleasant temper at times. I will have dark and angry moods. The clause is there to protect me from myself."
"Yet I can resign. Conceivably, you could make yourself so unpleasant that I would quit. But I suppose I have been warned."
"I'm not worried about that. You made me a promise, a beautiful promise, that afternoon. That day is one of the most valued memories I have. It's like a bright yellow butterfly—."
"Humanely snuffed out in a killing jar, or collected after a long and happy life, meeting its end from natural causes, before being pinned on a board with a specimen card?" Her glance flicked around the ceiling before coming to rest on my face.
"I would say, rather, alive in my memory. It wasn't out of sentiment that I chose to come to you for this, I'm not that much of a fool, but since you—."
She was playing an imaginary violin. She stopped, and said, "You will have to forgive me. I am one of the world's worst smart-asses. When I come across another of my tribe, I can't help but break into our native tongue."
That set the tone for the next several years.
That was how it began.
I'm not sure how much to include about my actual treatment and hospital stay. That would take too long. I'll just recount a few of the more significant or amusing details.
For example, after I'd been following an exercise and diet program to build up my meager muscle tone, and had put on twenty-six kilos, Dr. Visconti had looked at me with a 'tough chess problem' expression on her face, and said, "When I told you to put on forty kilos of lean muscle, I didn't expect you to actually do it."
"Then why tell me to?"
"I hoped you would put on at least twenty. Most patients are not as dedicated as you are."
"This is important to me. This is one of my major life goals."
"I can see this. If I tell you what I really expect of you, will you just do it without slacking off or killing yourself with overwork?"
"I think I could about manage that, yes."
"If you can, you'll be the most remarkable patient in my admittedly limited experience. Not that you weren't already."
Then there was the spine and brain surgery, for which I had to remain conscious, with only local anesthesia. There was more than one operation, and they tended to be long and boring from my point of view. To shut me up and keep me entertained, someone was assigned to play gin rummy with me while Dr. Visconti directed nano-manipulators in threading invisibly thin fibers through my grey matter.
Somewhere in that first year, Primavera Visconti and I became friends.
In more than four years as my physician, and thousands of hours spent in my company, I never made her flinch at anything I did or said. Or made her fed up with me, or revolted. Then again, I had never grabbed her crotch or flung feces around, so I hadn't really pushed it to the limits. I had cursed her, sworn at her and reviled her, mocked her and thrown things, and she replied in kind. Once, when I threw a cup of juice at the wall, she responded by throwing my bedside pitcher at the ceiling, showering the room with ice water.
By the time my transformation was through, I would have unhesitatingly named her my best friend. It had been a long process—the transformation and the friendship both.
Hugo Visconti came to see me in the hospital, about two and a half years into my treatment. He was in his nineties then. I think he wanted to see the patient/project that was taking up so much of his daughter's time, attention, and conversation. I found I liked him. He is—was— one of the most intelligent people I've ever known. He was not the father of Primavera's physical being, but he was certainly the father of her intellect and her character. He said something very significant about their relationship while we were talking.
"I could not be prouder of her. Most people would attach 'if she were my own flesh and blood'. I do not. To add such a qualifier as that belies the statement even as it leaves the lips." He paused. "I could not possibly be prouder of her."
I believed him.
I wish I had such a mentor in my youth. I'm glad she had him.
She was devastated when he died.
It was about a year later. I was in a mobility chair then, recovering from the work on my legs, the last major part of my rebuilding. She came in not long after she got the news. Her grief was terrifying. It was immense. She was silent, distant, and dead-eyed. She could not eat or sleep or cry.
I was afraid she would wind up dead out of careless apathy. That would not have suited me at all, so I appointed myself her caregiver. I made the travel arrangements, went along, saw that she got to, through, and back from the funeral. I prodded her into looking after herself.
It was one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do. I felt helpless and clueless—and I loathe feeling like that. My father had died, but he had not been half so dear to me as Hugo Visconti was to her. I didn't know what to say or do in the face of such tremendous suffering. So I asked myself what I would say or do under the circumstances if I were doing it with an ulterior motive, or as a duty and obligation. I found I knew what needed to be said and done, and then I found I could actually do what I ought to while feeling what I should, feeling concerned and caring about a friend.
I didn't realize it at the time, but it was important, it was really good that I could do that, that I could be genuine, even if it took some effort. It saved our friendship later, under other trying circumstances.
Remaking me took almost exactly five years. The results were better than could have reasonably been expected, with the negative factors that worked against them. I can go to swimming pools now; people think I was in a not-too-serious accident.
It's funny, but it took a while before I realized that I really was different.
I was riding home on the Transit one night that last year of treatment. No new work was being done, but I was being monitored in case something went catastrophically wrong. Nothing did. I had been to a museum, bought an exhibition catalog, and was reading it. I glanced up for some reason and saw him down at the other end of the train car.
A movement he'd made had caught my attention. He looked like me, at least superficially. His hair and skin were a few shades darker than mine, and he was a little shorter than average. The expression on his face was intelligent and intense. That was where the resemblance ended. He was young—just a kid, really— and good-looking, and he looked like he was in decent physical condition. Describing my impression of him takes a lot longer than forming it did. It took only a moment's glance.
He was the sort of person I had always wanted to be. Lucky him. I felt a stab of envy and resentment. There was an itch at my hairline, and as I reached up to scratch it, he reached up, too…
I was looking at my own reflection.
I was looking at myself. The dark mirror panel at the other end of the car was unexpected. It had fooled me.
I closed my book, got up and slowly walked down the aisle to see my reflection up close.
I was now the person I wanted to be.
Yes, this was my goal, my dreamed-of outcome, the result of all my pain and all the sweat and blood I'd shed and bled. I had observed every stage I'd passed through, but somehow it hadn't registered, not even when I stood naked in front of my mirror, or looked at digitals with Dr. Visconti.
I walked closer still. Three years of surgery, medication, braces, splints, casts, physical therapy. I had suffered agony every hour. My heart and lungs were replaced by artificials, on the advice of my physician. She has artificial lungs herself—quite a story, but not mine to tell. They're better. Superior O2/CO2 exchange, won't absorb toxins, immune to carcinogens, able to take in oxygen in conditions which would defeat meat lungs—and this heart will probably go on beating long after I'm dead.
The cartilage problem was solved; I was told that salamanders were involved somehow. I didn't want the details. I wore a series of neck and torso braces for a year and a half, to retrain my body into its new shape. I still wear one at night. I gained eighteen centimeters of height from the work on my spine alone. Part of the time, I lived in a pressurized chamber, based on those used for deep sea workers. That was to help me put on muscle without undue exertion. The pressure was increased gradually, so I got used to it. I'm built pretty solid now; a side benefit. I'm stronger than I look.
I gained another ten centimeters of height when it came time for my leg to be lengthened. Primavera and I fought over what was going to be done. She just wanted to make the left match the right; I wanted both of them to be let out. She said it was unnecessary, and I was enduring excessive trauma as it was. I said I was the best judge of that, and after a lot of spit flying—we were both screaming, at one point—she broke both my legs.
Which was what I wanted. It was the first step toward making them longer. We compromised on ten centimeters. She warned me that I might never walk normally. But I do. Better than by my former standard, at least. I still, and will always, limp. And I'm 170 centimeters tall now. I will never reach my brothers' height. I can live with that.
Then I'd spent a year as an outpatient, having smaller surgeries, adjustments, more therapy. I felt better. The pain subsided to the level I had lived with all my life, and then lessened still further. I had progressed from using a mobility chair to using crutches, then only one crutch, then a cane, until I needed nothing at all.
I woke up in the mornings to find that nothing hurt and everything worked. That alone was a miracle. I never got tired of it. This, looking at my new self, realizing that this person was me was another miracle.
I went closer still, until I was looking myself right in the eyes. I was still quite pale, as I'd not gotten much sun over the last few years, and my hair was only a little darker than when I was in my teens. Still thick, too. I'd escaped male-pattern baldness completely by means of having a gene fragment spliced in—both my brothers had thinning hair, and our father went bald. I did look younger than I was, maybe ten, fifteen years younger. My eyes were light blue. The tinted mirror glass darkened me out of recognition, at first glance, anyway. I had a high, wide forehead, but fortunately I had enough chin to balance it out. I was still thin, but now I was muscular, not bony. Wiry was the word for me. I was in decent physical condition, and I meant to stay that way.
Intelligent and intense? Yep, that was me. Good-looking? I had been convinced I was ugly; I'd even talked about cosmetic surgery with Primavera. When I brought it up, her response had been, "Don't blame the wall for the wallpaper you picked out."
"What?" I asked her.
"The ugliest thing about your face is the expression you sometimes hang on it. I can, of course, make any changes you want, but you'll have to be more specific than 'I'm ugly, change everything.' Hah!" She made a sound of pure exasperation.
She refused to discuss the subject of facial reconstruction until I could provide her with digitals and a written explanation to justify why I wanted it done. I hadn't made up my mind about it as yet.
Now it seemed as if even I thought I didn't need it. Once I stepped out of my skin for a moment, I'd thought I was good-looking enough. I never had imagined that.
I'm somewhat ashamed to say that the first thing I did after that amazing revelation was to go out to find a woman to pick up. Look, I was then thirty-two and still a virgin. What else would anyone —anyone male—have done, under the circumstances? And yes, I managed to lose my virginity shortly thereafter.