So the next day Dr. Brenner came to talk to me and I didn't really savvy what he was on about. He kept typey-typing in his digital notepad, I guess taking notes on what was vareeting. He asked me why I felt the need to go out at night hurting people and taking things what weren't mine. I shrugged and skazat to him it was something to do, and it was something I was good at. Besides, wasn't that the way of the world, to take or have it taken, to reach out and grab the things you like, before somebody takes from you? He tsked and punched the keys on his notepad thingy. I told him at length about us 'punishing' droogs who were a little too stingy or ultra-violent with devotchkas, and our friendship with the soomkas of the night, but it was a good arrangement, see? To everyone's mutual benefit and whatnot.
"From the reports I'm gettin' it seems like you operate under your own code, twisted though it is," he said, almost to himself. "There's hope for you, little lady."
"What hope is there?" I retorted bitterly. "What hope for such as me? I can't even get out of bed!"
"That'll soon change," Dr. Brenner assured me. "You'll be getting some exercise and lessons on how to use those new mechanical limbs."
"How come when I got all mad the clockwork appendages locked up on me?" I asked, putting on my most innocent and cute face.
"That's 'cause of a special Inhibitor Chip we placed inside you that talks to the limbs," he answered. "It's to keep you outta trouble and a nice law-abiding citizen. We bypassed all the tedious drugs of Ludovico's Technique."
"That's what was used on dear old Alex, wasn't it?"
"Yep," he affirmed in his strange, warm drawl. "But you don't have to go through the 'training' or be sick—this just keeps you from doing any harm until you're more calm."
"But don't that leave me a sitting duck like our nadsat master was? At the mercy of a cruel society?"
"It ain't exactly the same," Dr. Brenner tells me, then stops and looks up from his digital notepad. "You can't be hurt or die as easily as Alex can."
"Wot's that?"
"The general population would be hard put to do much harm to you, little girl. The procedures done on you have made you…more durable."
I stared at him until I digested this bit of information. For the first time in a long, long time I was poogly, and I didn't like it, at all, at all. "What're you gonna do with me?" I asked in all seriousness.
"Why study you, o'course. And hopefully make a shit ton of money."
From the notes of Dr. Tony Brenner, ZP-22
Subject Name: Annalee Maribel Barclay
Age: 16
Height (before accident): 5 feet, 8 inches
Weight (before accident): 124 pounds
Hair: Black
Eyes: Hazel
Ethnicity: Caucasian
Bionic replacements: Left arm just below the shoulder, leg from left knee down, leg from right thigh down, right eye. Anger Inhibitor chip installed.
After getting used to the abominable weather, incessant raining, and constant fog, I got to have a look at good olde Great Britain.
Old, dingy, dirty, and did I mention, old? No competing companies scrubbing the concrete, metal and glass monuments to capitalism clean, no purified air pumped out of great generators, no brightly colored edifices advertising things for the Corporate States of America. What I found here was brick buildings, brownstones from hundreds of years past, crumbling factories converted into lodging or storage, remnants of the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. In the absence of color in their surroundings, the people here take pride in making spectacles of themselves—blue, green, purple hair, huge fake boobs, males wearing tons of makeup and piercings, outlandish, garish clothes.
The young, especially, love their plastic see-through outfits and other frippery. Which brings me to our subject, the reason Dr. Goldsmith and I was sent to this dingy place. On first gander Anni, as she calls herself, is a cute, teenager girl, or a nadsat devotchka as the young people here say. She's aggressive and violent, a delinquent like the poster child of Ludovico's Technique, Alex DeLarge. She enjoys being a sadist to the boys that are into that sort of thing, and her group of 'droog ladies' have ambushed innocent people, but by and large her violence usually serves some purpose: securing goods or money, 'punishing' males she thinks that have been bad to females, upholding an arrangement with some group or other. I'm not sure if her more focused approach to 'ultra-violence' is due to upbringing, the fact she's female, or difference in personality.
She's taken to the new appendages quite well and eats enough for four grown men. I got no idea where she puts it all, she's got what my mama would call a bottomless pit for a stomach. She's a pretty little thing, too bad she's way too young, a patient, and an important subject for two sovereign governments.
So I was slurping down some pot roast and 'taters' as Dr. Brenner calls them, and peeting some hot milky chai, when an orderly comes in and bends over me in my bed as I'm nom-nomming. I look up to see two striking blue glazzies, one dilated and one not, in a familiar face. "Alex!" I gasp.
"Shhh," he shushes me. "I've taken on some new skills since my government entanglement," he says, then smiles.
"What be govereeting?" I ask.
"That's something I'm viddying for myself, love," he answers. "Seems there's a lot of disgruntled vecks out there, gunning for the establishment. I wanted to viddy for myself what be going on."
"You best not get yourself nicked," I warned him, then sat up. He noticed my new limbs and his glazzies widened.
"Well, lookit you!" he declared. "Your arms and legs all clockwork. Interesting indeed!"
"They put this gloopy computer chip inside my plot," I told him. "To keep me from doing the ol' ultra violence and the in-out, in-out."
"Then Anni-bird, you'll have to correct that. Find some way to get around it. Meanwhile, I gots to itty, don't want to be in trouble, now do I? There's things what need doing."
"You can't just leave me in here with these, these insane vecks!"
"I'm thinking you're more than able to handle things, dear clockwork dama," he winked at me, and like that the moog was gone.