“Regenerate! Then—” Ming gasped.
“That’s right. Don’t panic, though. There’s nothing here that can’t be restored. Still, at the moment, you both are basically just heads and torsos. Really great-looking torsos, I might add, but that’s about it. Wallinchky will be in to see you sometime today or tomorrow. When he does, he’ll— well, outline the options. Believe me, though—I’ve seen worse than you in here, and they looked fine when all was said and done.”
“You mean like Wallinchky’s two lethal airheads?” Ming asked.
“No, only some here-and-there stuff had to be done to them. Hell, I’ve had an arm replaced here, and another time a toe.”
There was a buzzing sound from Ari’s direction. Then they heard a clicking, and a moment later he said, “Yes, sir?”
The muffled rush of conversation was too scrambled to be overheard, obviously through a communicator, and Ari responded, “Yes, sir. Right away. Yes, they’re both awake. Yes, I’ll be right there.”
A moment later he was speaking to them again: “I’ll have the medlab give you whatever functions you may feel better having, but I have to go.”
“Yes, don’t forget to wag your tail when you lick your master’s ass,” Ming responded acidly. “As to what we want, how about a nice, big bomb?”
Ari sighed, and they could hear him walking out.
Almost immediately robotics within the infirmary started to click and whir into action. Angel felt something come over her head, a helmet, it seemed, with clicking and whirring sounds inside. A membrane that came across her face briefly, let up before it caused any real discomfort, then rose back up again, freeing her.
“What was that?” Ming wanted to know, but in a short while the same thing happened to her. After it was over, they could only compare notes and some feelings about Citizen Martinez. Ming was far less charitable; she’d never been all that religious.
It didn’t take long to discover what was happening. The machinery snapped back into action again, and Angel felt something being placed over her eyes and held by a band on her head. They were more like goggles than glasses, and extended out a bit, but after a bit of disorientation they snapped on, and for the first time since coming to she could more or less see. Her vision was limited to straight ahead, and it had little color, but the detail was quite sharp. She was able to look over and see Ming for the first time, and watch a similar but not identical procedure, employing artificial hands and thin prehensile tendrils from above. Ming’s eyewear resembled a rectangular dark piece of plastic or glass in a welder’s frame, with an elastic strap to hold it to her head.
Ming was set in a metallic box about a meter square, and appeared to emerge from it about at the navel. Her naked form was apparent the rest of the way, but her arms had been cleanly amputated just below the shoulders and even tapered in. Her face was fine, but as hairless as Angel’s, and she didn’t seem to have eyebrows.
Angel realized that she must look essentially the same, and in the same kind of outfit. She had a long enough neck to be able to get at least some sense of herself.
“So, we’re talking heads,” Angel said.
Ming gave a dry chuckle. “Well, at least we can feel assured that nobody is going to rape us, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Mister Big didn’t try and ensure that we felt entirely helpless and victimized. He gets off on that.” She sighed. “I’m sorry you got sucked into this. I’m sorry I didn’t get on that boat myself. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do, but I just never expected Ari to blow me away like that. I’ve known him since university, for Heaven’s sake! Of all the people I might have thought would be my enemy, he would be just a bit higher than my own family.”
“I know how it must hurt,” Angel told her. “Still, I sense the conflict in him. Who knows how he might be if he were ever outside of that evil man’s influence?”
“Fat lot of good that’s going to do us,” Ming noted. “He didn’t need to do this to us. We weren’t going anywhere. He did it deliberately, not only to leave us helpless, but also because he knows how people like me are trained, and he saw the video of you outmaneuvering Tann Nakitt—who, I must tell you, is in trouble himself here someplace because he decided to cast his lot with you, although I think he might have in any event. I wonder what happened to him?”
“Probably being defanged and declawed,” Angel guessed.
“Do not underestimate him. Still, what can any of us do here? Where would we go?”
Angel thought about that. “What do you think they will do with us?”
“Play with us. Terrorize and victimize us if we give them any satisfaction. And then they’ll try and break you. Me, I think, they’ll just go directly for a mindscrub.”
“You mean like the Rehabilitation Centers?” Angel was aghast.
“Yes, the ones for the worst offenders and those who cannot be let back into civilized company. They wire up your brain, send in their signals and probes, download what they find in your thinking parts, and then they erase. Then you get reprogrammed by uploading a very simple routine, after which you’ll be happy and smiling and totally obedient and do and think and believe everything your trainer tells you. You’ll have no memory of who or what you were, and no curiosity about it, either. If you have anything valuable and unique, or might be useful as your old self, they might take the download and create a virtual mind in the computer, then catalog, categorize, rearrange, pick and choose. It is tricky to do, but it’s done all the time. It’s known as a ‘turnaround’ in the psychiatric trade. I doubt if they’ll try it with me, though. We’re regularly tested each time the passwords and authorities are changed, which is often, and it has never been undetectable.”
“It sounds like killing the soul but leaving the body intact. It is the most immoral thing I have ever heard,” Angel told her. “How can we stop this?”
“Honey,” Ming said sadly, “look at the two of us, look around, and remember what that son of a dung dealer Ari said about where we are. There is no way to avoid what will happen. None. The only hope I have is that, somehow, I can either kill myself or at least take some of them with me before I disappear.”
It was impossible to tell the passage of time in the infirmary, with just the two of them there. They spoke almost nonstop, until it seemed to Angel that she’d told Ming everything about herself, and that Ming had told her much the same. The closeness they felt at the end of it belied their radically different backgrounds, traditions, and experiences; they felt a bond closer than sisters.
The medical cubes, or whatever they were, provided all they required; neither felt hungry, nor, after being awake for a while, was there any sense of thirst, let alone dehydration.
There were long gaps, though. When the medical computer wanted them to sleep, it simply injected something and they went to sleep, often in mid-sentence. Awakening later, there was clear evidence that work was being done on both of them, although it was difficult to tell what, save in the eyes. Ming’s vision was clearing, so that enhancement was no longer needed, but she found it impossible to focus. In fact, her vision was excellent, but she seemed locked in to a fixed focal length of infinity. Things far away to about two meters were fairly clear; closer was a blur.
Angel had a different treatment. Although damaged eyes could be replaced or regenerated easily, one of the things they took for granted, hers were replaced with artificial eyes that appeared normal, but retained the fish-eye vision and poor peripheral vision. She could focus, but it was like focusing a telephoto lens by willing it, rather than the natural sort of focus she’d had.