Without the pain, would she wake up one day and find herself replaced, entirely replaced?
Regardless, though, the nanotechnologies — that was her only guess as to what was causing all of this — seemed to be learning, seemed to be engaged in some kind of trial-and-error process. After her foot, this — whatever this was — had developed a new process of find and replace, something less painful or intrusive or physically stressful.
She had no idea what happened to the organic material once it died. She had no idea what happened to the pieces of her that had been her and had since been replaced.
She half expected to find a bevy of toes or other patches of herself gathered at the foot of her bed, tangled in the sheets and duvet like socks kicked off during sleep, but there was never anything there.
80
She showed the doctor her homegrown foot but didn’t show him anything that came after. It was a shame, really. Before all of this, he had finally become a little more comfortable around her. Had apparently forgiven her for crushing his leg so long ago, for destroying his lab. Now he avoided looking right at her, and she felt each day more strongly this need to have him removed — from his position, from the Regional Office entirely.
He had been there almost from the beginning. Mr. Niles had brought him in on their second meeting together. Mr. Niles had told her, I can help you with your problem, but you’ll have to be willing to help us out with ours, too, and when she had offered to pay whatever price he would charge, he had waved that away and told her, That’s not exactly the kind of help we need right now. Then he’d called the doctor into the office, introduced the two of them, described for her the work the doctor had been doing — cutting-edge nanotechnologies, beyond joint or bone replacement — and then explained to her that she would have access to the entire Regional Office if she would be willing to act as a test subject for a new mechanical arm the doctor had devised.
“You won’t be able to tell a thing,” he’d told her. “No one will be able to tell.” Then he’d held up the doctor’s hand, held it by the wrist, and said, “See this, see this hand? Mechanical, the whole thing.” She’d been shocked, amazed. She had seen high levels of robotic technology on campus, some of the highest, but nothing had ever pointed to something so advanced as this. She asked if she could touch it. Mr. Niles offered it to her, the doctor standing there like a living doll, and it felt warm and pliant and so very real.
“Okay,” she’d said. “Yes, okay, yes, I will do this.”
Only later, long after her own surgery, after being given her own mechanical arm, had the doctor told her, in whispering, confiding tones, that his hand wasn’t mechanical at all. He waved his hand in front of her. Shook it, really. Told her, “Blood, bone, nerves.” Then he chuckled and she barked out a chuckle of her own, and then he laughed a loud and only-barely-on-the-edges-of-sanity laugh, and she laughed with him because it was too late, by then it was way too late, and they’d been right. Mr. Niles and the doctor had taken a risk with her and her arm but it had paid off because you couldn’t tell. You looked at one arm and then the other and they looked the same, exactly the same.
She hadn’t always liked him, the doctor, but she had always respected him, and now she was going to have to kill him.
81
She is the one who first brought you here. Did you know that? Your mother? She brought Mr. Niles to you when you were still a girl and he brought you to the Regional Office, but it might as well have been her leading you there by your hand. Might as well have been her opening the door to Mr. Niles’s office for you, moving Mr. Niles’s mouth as he offered to change your life forever.
And she brought us to you.
So here we are.
We are at your door and we are not empty-handed. We are offering you a way out, and once out, a way forward. They have lied to you and manipulated you and for too long we have stood by silently and watched this play out, but now we are here, speaking out, reaching out to you, to tell you this:
Stay home. For a week, for two weeks, for a month or six. Or better yet, leave. Cape Town or Nova Scotia or Taipei. That is your way out. And when it is time, we will find you, and we will show you your way forward.
82
Sarah didn’t, though. She didn’t kill the doctor.
He killed himself. He left a note but it didn’t say much but that he was sorry, but not what he was sorry for.
It didn’t matter anyhow. Her plan to kill him had centered around her plan of keeping her transformation a secret, but now so much of her was inorganic or some strange mix that there was no way for her to hide the mechanical parts of her anymore.
It had been six months, almost seven months now, since the assault. Oyemi had not been found, and when she was honest with herself about this, Sarah would admit that Oyemi was probably dead, or had been so compromised that she might as well have been dead. No matter. The Regional Office was operating again, not at 100 percent, but not far from it, either.
And no one had asked her to step down or to begin the search for her own replacement, not even now that she was in the middle of her own replacement of sorts.
She missed Henry, would find herself some mornings seeking him out in his office or the break room, and then would wonder what had happened to him, how his cards had fallen, but she found she missed Mr. Niles most of all, and most mornings, when she came into work and made her way to his office, she forgot he was dead, that the office was hers now.
She was thinking about him now, in fact, sitting at his desk, now her desk. She couldn’t make herself comfortable sitting there, so she stood up and walked around the room and then made her way to the bathroom. She turned on the light. She looked at herself in his bathroom mirror, at the two mechanical arms, at how obviously mechanical they were, and then thought about how sad that would have made him.
She pushed against the soft parts of her, but this didn’t satisfy her, whatever it was she was trying to satisfy.
Pushing against the soft, organic parts of her with a mechanical forefinger, all she felt was the cold metal against her warm, squishy skin. Something inside the mechanical finger, some bit of sentient technology, sent a reading to her still-organic brain that determined for her, almost as quickly as if that finger had still been a human finger, that she had touched living skin.
A readout scrolled through her mind in a strange and unsettling way. Her brain was still her brain, but everything came in as a readout now.
Looking in the mirror, she wanted to cry because it was all so beautiful, the thing that the thing had created, the thing that the thing had made her into, all shining chromes and swooping tubes and artificial ligaments, so beautiful and flexible and powerful that if she’d seen it in a tech conference showroom, she’d have wept at the beauty of it. She wanted to cry, too, because it was her, not some showroom prototype, and she was afraid and she didn’t know when it would stop.
She didn’t know if it would stop.
How long? she thought. How long will this go on?
Which piece? she thought. Her very next thought: Which piece of me will go next?
She thought this thought, or rather this thought popped unbidden and unwanted into her head, and before she could whisk it away, before she could bury it deep in the darkest recesses of her mind, she felt it, she felt a soft but urgent pressure in her chest.