A Robotic Heart

[Rose]

Interesting....very very interesting. Keep up the Good work.

“Doctor, will he be all right?” What do they mean, will I be all right?

“No one can be for certain about that, ma’am. We can only wait for him to wake up.” Wake up? Then why can I hear you?

“We’re here to run some tests on him, just to make sure he’s still alive.” I am alive. Why do you think I’m deceased?

I heard these voices and more as I lied on a flat yet elevated surface, my eyes closed. I could hardly remember anything that happened. All I know is that I was someplace different than what I was used to.

Over the next few days, I slipped in and out of consciousness, only listening to the voices and sounds around me, until one day when I managed to open my eyes a little. All I could do was look around the room. I was in a hospital room with machines all around me for some reason. It was apparently in the isolated part of the hospital because there were no visitors coming to see me at the moment.

Immediately, numerous questions flooded into my brain. What happened? Why was I in this place? Why was I surrounded by machines? And why was I picking up radio signals all of a sudden?

A nurse entered the room as I was pondering. “Good morning,” she said with a smile. “How are you doing?”

I tried to sit up more and answer her, but it hurt to move. I let out a moan in pain.

“Ah, don’t move around so much,” the nurse said as she helped me lie back down on the hospital bed. “You’re in the hospital, sir. There was a chemical explosion at the school, and we found you among the rubble. You’re lucky to have survived that blast.”

Chemical explosion? I suddenly realized that the experiment that I was doing had something to do with this. What went wrong, what went wrong...?

What appeared to be a television screen suddenly turned on and started to visualize my thoughts. I saw myself grabbing the necessary equipment, the chemicals, and-- wait a minute!

The “movie” immediately rewound and paused. There was a name on a chemical container that could hardly make out. My... illa... gersol...

My eye sight immediately refocused to read the words. Myamila gerisolite! Of course! That was a very explosive chemical that, even under the best circumstances, was very dangerous. How could I’ve been so blind as to pick that one up?

“Amazing!”

I looked over at the nurse. She was studying some printouts that appeared out of a printer. “Why, you’re adjusting to your new gifts very well, young man.”

New gifts? What did she mean by that?

“I’ll tell the others that you’ve woken up and run these printouts to the doctors,” she said before she left the room, leaving me alone.

For several days after that, the doctors all came and ran several tests on me. Tests, of memory, tests of knowledge, tests of skill, all while I was still in the hospital bed. Of course, I had no clue what the tests were about, yet they seemed to please the doctors so much that they were calling me “a medical wonder”.

When the doctors weren’t in the room, I was left alone to my thoughts. I couldn’t move around well just yet, so most of my time was spent lying in bed, thinking to myself and listening to TV and radio broadcasts. Actually, the receiving of the broadcasts further puzzled me. Was I some kind of transmitter person now? What was happening to me?

One day, everything was running well. I was listening to a radio melodrama about a woman, a man, and a jealous suitor when a few doctors came in.

“Hello,” I said in a weak voice, somewhat surprised that I could still talk after what happened. Judging by the doctors’ reactions, they were surprised as well. “Are you here to do more testing?”

The two doctors exchanged glances between each other before one of them spoke to me. “You’ve come a long way since you’ve arrived, young man,” he said to me. “If you don’t mind, we’re going to operate on you some more.”

I involuntarily sat up in the bed. “More operation?” I asked through the pain. The other doctor was moving closer to me, reaching his hand out to something on my chest. “But why? What were the first operations for?”

All I got in reply before I blacked out was, “We’ll tell you everything when you wake up again.”

~~~

I learned later that a team of both scientists and doctors operated on me so that I could have a better life support system. That makes sense to me now, but at the time, I didn’t know what all of that talk meant. For all I knew, they were treating me like some piece of machinery more than an actual person.

Anyway, after I woke up again, I realized that I finally had full control over all of my actions. I could finally sit up by my own, move my hands around, and my head could turn.

In all of this rejoicing, my mood turned to concern when I noticed that my skin seemed pale. Actually, it seemed paler than that of a regular human’s skin. Very suspicious…

Stranger than that was what appeared to be a control panel on my chest. It had all sorts of buttons and switches on it, including one for the master power. By now, I know how to operate it, but back then I was wondering why I even needed it.

I scratched the top of my head, wondering what was going on. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I had no hair on top of my head but what felt like wires growing. By then, I was beginning to freak out a little.

Curious to see whether I could control the movement of my lower half as well, I carefully scooted over to the side of the bed until my legs dangled off the side. I cautiously stood on my two feet and started to take my first few steps. As I walked around, I noticed that my movements were accompanied by a soft whirring sound. At first I thought that the noise was all in my head, but judging from all the other things that had happened to me, I knew that something was up.

Quick a I could, I rushed over to a mirror to examine myself. When I turned on the light, the reflection that I saw made me scream in shock.

No more was I human. I was now part-human, part-robot -- what the sci-fi community would later define as a cyborg.

 

[LamangoNumber2]

Oh man. I remember reading this.