The Horizon of Veronica Smart

[vixengrl]

The speedboat named The Horizon, owned by one Veronica Smart, was an unsalvageable mess after plowing uncontrollably into a less-fortunate speedboat, which had no salvageable persons onboard. But The Horizon had Veronica Smart, and her insurance was very good and rescuing her was like salvaging gold bars with little rubies worked in. The Coast Guard picked up what remained of Veronica Smart and, after finding that she was in no way responsible for what happened, left it to the doctors to figure out how to make the most out of what they pulled out of the water.



Veronica was young, healthy, 28 years old, the daughter of a politically-influential billionaire. She was attractive, headstrong, athletic, and missing quite a lot, but the doctors were reasonably sure that they had the technology to keep her mostly intact and functional.



Of course, there was the issue of consent. What they were proposing was a bit dramatic. But when they explained that her body, such as it was, could either undergo dozens of operations and months if not years of physical therapy to regain a portion of her original functionality, or could be restored to even more optimal functionality by a full replacement of her damaged limbs with the most advanced cybernetics, she was intrigued. Having though about it for a bare minute, and understanding full well that money was no object--she consented. Getting right back to what she considered her business, without any major hiatus, seemed a fully reasonable decision.

Of course, it didn't go quite as well as was expected.
The problem was where to leave well enough alone, and there really hadn't been a very good well-enough. Her legs were shot, but they led to her brittle and shocked hip-sockets, which could be rimmed with steel, but then, what of the rest of her pelvis, and then, her spine had several fractures, but figuring out where to put a rod in was a bit delicate. And well, her arms were broken, but where does one stop? 3D printed clavicles, breastbone, steel-reinforced bones, and then, well, the nerve-damage caused a bit of a confusion about the opportunistic infection that affected her fingers, because having about 40% of her body replaced had triggered a bit of a shocky insulin response. So they went with the hands, too.

She had quite a few more surgeries than she thought she would, and coming out of the epidural fog she wondered really, what was her and what wasn't. But when she got the hang of the commands and how to integrate the replacements with her thoughts, it was really more like relearning how to use a part of herself, and not like mastering a tool at all.

All in all, she was about 60% new. Her teeth were already implants from an unfortunate horse-riding accident. Her jaw was enhanced.

She took off before her therapy was complete, because she had things to do. She got a PDA hardwired into her left temple, because of course she did. She was a living WiFi hotspot. She could hit up search engines at the speed of thought. She downloaded mods to her cybernetic limbs to enjoy VR games. She acquired a peripheral robot servitor to do little errands that sent her date via a remote cam.

They weren't sure what to make of her when she went back in to ask if her diaphragm wasn't right. What she meant was--her breathing wasn't optimal. She coughed. She presented an ungodly green sputum. What she assumed was a wares issue was a biological concern--pneumonia. Quite a bad case, too. And she rather innocently signed a request form to see about getting artificial lungs. It was the Plague years, after all, and lungs could not be simply replaced from donors if needed. And the tech to get cloned lungs wasn't as on-demand as the meat-vatters insisted in their investment paperwork.

She got the pneumo-works and a stainless steel heart. It clattered in a charming way that made her think of teapots. This motivated her to really sink herself into her chosen work--

Charity. It always struck Veronica that she had been uniquely blessed in her life, after all, with money, and looks and all that. It also always occurred to her that she had hovered near-death more than a few times. So she built a few hospitals that performed, if not the same high-tech therapies that kept her running, reasonable technologies that allowed poor people to live a bit longer. She raised money--but that was for sponsoring the unfortunates who benefitted from her hospitals. Otherwise, she made a profit from people who had Brand X, Y or Z insurance and could sort of aspire to her ideal, which she put in her biography and all her charity literature. To be remade, healthy and new.

The digestive system was replaced with stainless steel and PVC after all her necessary medications took a toll on stomach, intestines, bladder and spleen, to the extent where she demanded they come out, or everyone on the staff of her premier hospital get sacked. And her actual nutritive requirement was so low, anymore, that she required ergs more than calories to go on. Her skin was replaced with a flexible solar-cell sheath.

Her first face lift was an actually lifted face. Her epidermis couldn't handle the heat of her various cranial implants anyway. The pseudoskin with solar cell inlays would never wrinkle, and the pores allowed optimal ventilation. Her eyebrows and hair were real. Ish. She kept abreast of all innovations in the body-mod arts as she led her father's business to capitalize on a hundred or so amazing new things to do with a human base model.

Her eggs were stored at thirty five and frozen because they were doing no good in her ovaries, and those little bastards had to come out because menstruation was ridiculous, and so did her uterus because she would hire a mother for her kids, anyway, and fallopian tubes were just iffy little pistols up in her junk, right?

Her eyes and ears were basically sub-optimal. Having downloaded wares that persuaded her of the enhancements to her senses (along with a guarantee of no decline in sensory experience) she bought in for the top-of the line optical and auditory implants. She could see ultra-violet and infra-red. She could hear dog-whistles.

She came at last with some profound sensory dysphoria and seizing to the crack medical team that had been advising her all this time. She wasn't hitting her targets. She was missing words sometimes. There were gaps in her holographic memory of her chronological life.

They did a CAT scan. The tangerine-sized thing that was all that remained of her original wetware processing was sick. It was dying, in fact.

They tried to be very circumspect and gentle. "Your brain is nearly dead," her GP explained.

"I remember who I am and I know what I want to do--so it can't be my whole brain, right?" Veronica replied.

"Well, no, you have processors for all the tech that make up your body, but your original birth-body brain is falling apart. Your parts work, but the organic 'you' is not working. It's dying."

She gave it a moment's thought. "Would I process more optimally without the wetware?"

Her doctors conferred. It was possible. Her various processors for the different parts worked well enough together. The wetware was human, but was it necessary?

"It is probable," one of them ventured.

"As I suspected," Veronica replied, and accessed her cell phone. "Execute estate protocol, fig. A corporate personhood, fig. B contract to serve corp. That is all." She then instructed the doctors. "I would prefer you remove the malfunctioning wetware so that I can continue performing optimally."

One of the surgeons gasped--"But that is the last part of you that is fully human!"

Veronica regarded him mildly. "I was Veronica when 75% human, and 50% human. I was Veronica at 90% factory parts. Why would the smallest part of my brain make a difference, now? And besides, I'm getting married in a week." She grinned and added "A church wedding."

Hardly anyone did have church weddings anymore. The alarmed doctor gulped and asked--"Does your intended know?"

And she replied "That is between me and my doctors! Just get my brain out of here, can you do that? My groom awaits!"

And the wedding was purely lovely, the cathedral, glorious, the groom, totally nervous, and of all too many human parts.

But that, of necessity, could be corrected.

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[vixengrl]

1. Empress of Maladies

Raymond woke from an alcoholic stupor in a puddle of confusion, thinking on that stupid urban legend that wasn't anymore, the one where a guy awakes from an alcoholic stupor to find that he's sitting in an ice bath and has a row of sutures where one of his kidneys has been removed. He knew he didn't have any of his kidneys removed. He knew he probably brought this particular blackout on himself, but that pulling feeling in his side wasn't right.

Then he looked. And that didn't look right. Actually, it looked like bad news that probably set in hours before. His right side, mid abdomen to hip, was violently red-streaked with a fairly gaping four-inch sore. It was scabbed and infected, but not actually running. His stomach turned.

What the fuck, the fuck, the fuck?

He did a quick scan of his options. The best guy he know for operations was Sylvan--but nobody had seen Sylvan for a couple of weeks. Sylvan gave him a few numbers of his associates. He didn't recommend these people, but he didn't say to never call them, he only said they were people you could call on for access to necessary drugs. Black market docs. But the only guy he actually knew was Sylvan. He decided to call the name on the top of the list. G. Fowler.

He was expecting a voicemail.

"Hello?"

"Hey--is this G. Fowler?"

"Genevieve. Who's calling?"

"I'm a friend of Sylvan's. Do you know where he might be?"

"No. I had to give him some bad news regarding his mom a little while ago--I think he's probably blowing off steam somewhere."

Raymond considered that. Sylvan's mother was basically his business in a way, but she was also his mom. He thought carefully about how to proceed.

"I have a client who could use Sylvan's kind of services pretty desperately."

The voice on the other end was direct. "Are you the client, and how bad is it?"

"I am and I don't know."

"Which is probably bad enough--you have a name or do you want to end this call?"

"Raymond, and I really do need your help."

"Raymond--got you. Write down this address and turn up here as soon as you can. I'll try to figure out what to do with you."

His eyes widened when he heard the address--he knew that big-ass house and had wondered what kind of Ritchie-rich asshole lived there. He was going to find out. He stared at his clothes on the floor. He reached for an undershirt and cut the bottom half of it with scissors, and then sliced it into a five inch by thirty-six inch strip. He folded the rest of the shirt into a mound that he pressed against the wound, and then wrapped the strip around his midsection, and then hobbled to the kitchen junk drawer for duct tape. It wasn't a great job, but it kept his yawning bits together for the time being.

****

The woman who came to the door was business-only. "Raymond?"

"Ma'am."

He never said "Ma'am" and didn't know why he "Ma'am" 'd her, but it seemed right. She grabbed his arm on the side where the wound was and dragged him inside. The door closed with a sudden sweep.

"Look, I have this...wound thing..."

"I see the body language, I think you need to strip."

"Um."

"I don't have Sylvan's knife skills, but I am a diagnostician and I do some lab work. I want to see the wound before I try to figure out what to do with you--got me?"

He complied, hardly thinking how to try and hesitate. He shucked off his shirt and unwound his makeshift t-shirt bandage. He lifted his arms, scared out of his mind.

"Christ Jesus," she sighed, in the way that no one ever wants to hear someone say anything when viewing one's wounds. "I think I should swab. I have a lab downstairs and it won't take me a whole lot. But that sure looks like the new thing."

She added "Come on."

And he followed, to the little room off the foyer. He was taken downstairs to the basement, where he saw a finished...surgery. She guided him to a stool to sit on.

And he grit his teeth when she dragged the cotton-tipped swab she grabbed from a shelf against his rottenest part.

"Stay there. I think I know what I'm looking for." She paused, and then pointed to a cot. "Maybe you want to rest, there. You look like crap. I'd offer you a drink, but I don't know how...you...are?"

And with that, she disappeared into a little side-room. He dozed while she developed his negatives--or maybe, he just went unconscious while she sorted out what the infection was.

She shook him. "I'm so sorry, but it's the new thing. I really hoped it wasn't."

This was Sylvan's pharmaceutical contact. She was the one who was supposed to have her hands on the good shit. He gripped her wrist--"Can you do anything?"

"Look, there is no standard of care for this--no drugs have been approved, and surgery to cut out the infection is..."

"Genevieve... Fowler. Evatech." It made sense to him. He couldn't reconcile this girl with that business, but how else to explain why Sylvan always had the right drugs? This was the source. The actual primo hook-up.

"Guilty. Look there is one thing, but it's really not altogether ethical, or easy to explain. I have a therapy that might be a cure, or might be a curse."

"I don't know what you're talking about, but I can let you explain."

And what she presented was a ridiculous thing to unload on a dying man. "So, you probably know what telomeres are. The length of the telomeres of a cell relate to the life cycle of the cell--the longer the telomeres, the longer the lifecycle. So anyway, I have long telomeres. I mean, all of my cells are mutated so that they are essentially immortal. I could be cut but my skin heals quickly. My skin turns over in a way where I don't wrinkle or spot. I am, physically, not a person subject to the vicissitudes of entropy. In other words, I'm just about impervious to all the things. And I have a way to share my gift--I think, it's not perfected, but I might be able to give my quality to someone else."

She sighed, and looked dejected.

"I never wanted to impose this on anyone without their consent."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying, you are my perfect test subject. Even if you said 'No' to my offer of a very unique cure, I might be tempted to transform you according to my condition, anyway."

Suddenly, Ray was gripped with the horror of the idea that the woman was completely insane. He tried to see if anything about her made her more or less plausible in his eyes. Her deep red hair tucked in a careless bun, her dark blue eyes, and that not-any-age face. "Prove it--the thing you're saying about being immortal."

She shook her head. "Not immortal. Just my cells. But I do heal quickly." And she found a little scalpel, and slit her thumb, and bled, and then didn't.

And he was more horrified about what was happening to him than what was happening with her. "Genevieve, do it."

"It's not a simple process. I'll need to bleed you, and I will give you certain drugs so that your immune system doesn't reject the telomerase..."

"Telomeres. Wait. Your telomeres don't shorten--you are...cancer? Am I right? Like.. what were they called, HeLa cells?"

"I'm not saying you're wrong, just that it's complicated."

"I can't consent."

"Do you want to die?"

"No."

"I don't have anything else for you. I can make you like I am, or well, you are already screwed."

He thought about it.

"And you know what you are doing?"

"I have more experience with this than anyone else alive."

He had to try.

"So I'll be your guinea pig."

"No."

"Your Frankenstein's monster."

"I don't like the idea of monsters, but if you think you'd be a monster--well, I'm a monster, too."

He suddenly understood something. She wasn't even not young.

"Evatech. You do business with Smartcorp."

She rolled her eyes. "Ray, what are you getting at?"

"You're more human then her, anyway."

"Shh. She's no dummy, and her firewalls are military-grade. Also, she's twenty-percent partner in many of my more interesting pursuits." She tilted her head. "And anyway--who is anyone to judge what humanity means, these days?"

He couldn't even with what she said. It was going to happen.

*****


"Wakey, wakey--I need to qualify your consciousness."

"I am...alive." He became suddenly frightened, as her presence seemed to engulf his senses and he seemed to feel things very differently. He looked under his blanket as if expecting his body to appear differently.

"So, everything worked very well. Grab my hands."

He reached with both of his hands to grab hers. She searched his eyes for something.

"So Dr. Frankenstein, how am I doing?"

"You'll very probably live."

"So says the Black Market Mahoff?"

"Don't tempt me, youngster, just because you figured it out. I am the black and the straight market for most things. But as for you--I want you to be assigned to my straight business."

"What is being a medical mafiosa like?"

"Ray, I didn't save your ass to gain a conscience. I have one, and it's just about right-sized. Anyway, I get the best hotel rooms at every trade show. Glad you asked?"

"And salary?"

"You'll be made in the shade. But our business is fixing things."

Raymond looked at her.

"What I do doesn't fall off a truck. I'm not running a black market pharmaceutical operation to save random humans to make me feel good. This planet is fubar'ed. There's only so much time left. And a lot to do. Reclaim land, water. Unfuck the epidemiological landscape. I need smart people."

He didn't feel so smart. But he realized he had a lot of time on his hands now, after all. And maybe there was much to do.