Tal climbs the steel ladder, nervously conscious of the looming metal wall of the neighbouring barge at yts back. One eddy in the mingling of waters around this point and the closing walls of steel would burst yt like a dropped egg. A face peeps over the raiclass="underline" it is Nanak, the good doctor, disreputable as always in a pair of cargo shorts three times too big, a clingy mesh top and big tank-girlie boots, grinning like a holy monkey.
They embrace. They touch. They kiss. They stroke emotions of joy and presents and childhood stay-up-lates and the first bread of the morning and glissandos of baroque into their subdermals, those same neural keys Nanak’s robot surgeons fused into the nerve fibres of Tal’s flayed body. Then they break and smile and make silly, joyous noises and are happy all over again.
“The style got you, I see,” Nanak says. Yt’s small and a little shy and coy, and bowed a little lower by gravity but yt’s still got the kindest smile. Yts skin is ochre from the sun.
“At least I make an effort,” Tal says, inclining yts head at Nanak’s dock-wallah gear.
“You just watch your heels around here,” Nanak warns. The deck is a fashion assault course of cable ducts and hatch dogs and pipes any of which could send the careless nute crashing against hard steel plate. “You will stay for tea, won’t you? Careful here.” They scale a steep ladder to the wheelhouse. One step before the top Tal pauses to look out over the city of boats. It is as busy as any bazaar. Beyond making money, there is always work to be done on any ship: painters and deck-swabbers, gardeners, water-engineers, solar power experts, com riggers. Music booms, bass amplified by the copious hollow metal.
“So, what is it?” Nanak asks as yt shows Tal into the wood-panelled, cedar-scented reception room. The smell evokes as powerful an emotional reaction in Tal as any neural keyed response. Yt is back in the wood-lined womb. Yt remembers how the leather sofas creak, how Suniti on the desk hums filmi hits when she thinks no one else is around.
“Just a routine check up,” Tal says.
“Well, we’ll certainly do that for you,” Nanak says and calls the elevator to go down into the empty heart of the ship where yt carries out yts transformations.
“You busy?” Tal asks to hide yts apprehension. The elevator opens on to a corridor of mahogany and brass doors. Tal spent a month behind one of them, crazy on painkillers and immunosuppressives as yts body came to terms with what the robot surgeons had done to it. The real insanity had come when the protein chips wired into yts medulla unpacked and started overwriting four million years of biological imperative.
“I’ve two in,” Nanak says. “One waiting—cute little Malay, really nervy, could bolt at any time, which would be a shame—and one in post-op. We seem to be picking up a lot of old-style transgenders so our reputation is spreading outside the scene but I’m not that keen on it. It’s just butchery. No finesse at all.”
And they will pay for it, as Tal pays for it still; ten percent down and monthly repayments for most of the rest of yts life. Full body mortgage.
“Tal,” Nanak says gently. “Not that one, in here.” Tal finds yts hand on the door of the surgery. Nanak swings open the clinic door. “Just checking you over, cho chweet. You don’t even need to take your clothes off.”
But Tal does kick off yts boots and slips out of yts cool coat before lying back on the white, softly padded table. Yt blinks, self-conscious, up into the lights as Nanak bustles about recalibrating the scanner. This is when Tal remembers that Nanak, the sweet doctor, doesn’t even have a nursing qualification. Yts just a broker, a stevedore of surgery. Robots dismembered Tal and put yt back together again, micromanipulators, molecule-thin scalpels guided by surgeons in Brazil. Nanak’s talent is in bedside manner and a nose for the sharpest medics at the keenest prices wherever the global market opens an opportunity.
“So, baba, tell Nanak, is this a purely medical call or are you checking out the Patna scene?” Nanak asks as yt slips a ’hoek behind yts large ear.
“Nanak, I’m a career nute now, don’t ya know? I’ve moved up to section head in three months. A year from now, I’ll be running the show.”
“Then you’ll be able to come to me to buy whole new sets of emotics,” Nanak says. “I’ve got some new stuff, fresh from the mixers. Very good. Very strange. Right. Ready. Just breathe normally.” Yt lifts a hand in a mudra and semicircles of white metal slide out of the bed base and join in a ring over Tal’s feet. Despite Nanak’s injunction, Tal finds yt’s holding yts breath as the scanner begins its pilgrimage up yts body. Yt closes yts eyes as the ring of light sweeps over yts throat and tries not to imagine that other table, beyond that other door. The table that is not a table, but a bed of gel in a tank of robots. Yt was lain on that table, anaesthetised to within a glimmer of death, autonomic responses wired to a medical aeai that kept yts lungs pumping, heart beating, blood circulating. Tal cannot remember the top of the tank descending, locking in place, filling with more pressurised, anaesthetic gel. But yt can imagine and imagination has become memory, a claustrophobic imaginary memory of drowning. What yt cannot—dares not—imagine are the robots moving through the gel, blades extended, to flay every centimetre of skin from yts body.
That was the first part.
As the old skin was incinerated and the new one that had been seeded three months before from a sample of Tal’s DNA and a egg sold by some basti woman grew ripe in its tank, the machines went in. They moved slowly through the viscous, organic gel, driving in under the muscle armouring, peeling back fat, detouring around blood tines and engorged arterials, disconnecting sinews to get to the bone. In their Sao Paulo offices, the cheap surgeons operated on air with their manipulator gloves and opened up intimate, bloody vistas of Tal’s body on their visors. Osteobots sculpted bone, reshaping a cheek here, widening a pelvis, shaving slivers from shoulder blades, dislocating, relocating, amputating, substituting plastic and titanium. As they worked, teams of GUMbots removed all genitalia, replumbed ureter and urethra, and respliced the hormone triggers and neural response pathways to the array of subdermal studs embedded in the left forearm.
Tal hears Nanak laugh. “I can see right inside you,” yt giggles.
Three days in that tank Tal hung; skinless, bleeding constantly, a whole body stigmata, while the machines worked slowly, steadily, shift after shift dismantling yts body and rebuilding. Then their task was done and they withdrew and the neurobots went in. Different doctors guided these, a team from Kuala Lumpur. In the three days of Tal’s passion, the market had shifted in neurosurgery. This was a different, more refined science than cutting and pasting gobbets of meat. Clicking crab-bots fused protein circuitry to nerve fibre, spliced nerves to gland inducers, rewired Tal’s entire endocrine system. While they grafted, big machines took the top off Tal’s skull and micromanipulators crept between the tangled ganglia like hunters in a mangrove swamp to spot-weld protein processors to neural clusters in the medulla and amygdala, the deep, dark root-buttresses of the self. Then, on the morning of the fourth day, they brought Tal back from the edge of death and woke yt up. The aeai hooked into the back of Tal’s skull now had to run a full autonomic nervous system test that the chip grafts had seated correctly and that the neural firing patterns yt had previously associated with gender would trigger the new, implanted behaviours. Skinless, muscles hanging like sacks from disconnected sinews, eyeballs and brain naked to dermal trauma gel, Tal woke up.