Sawbones
“Let’s take off these bandages,” said Dr. Cyril to his patient, the Ranger, “and see about restoring your voice, hands, and face.” Sr. Nemesis stood on the other side of the patient’s hospital bed, assisting the doctor as needed. She was not a nurse per se, but would do whatever was necessary to help her mission succeed. So she diligently helped attend to the Ranger, despite thinking his bandages made him look like the Mummy, the linen-wrapped monster from the old black-and-white horror movies that were popular three centuries ago. There were thin slits for his barely visible mouth and brown eyes, but otherwise, he was a man without a face.
The Ranger grunted in pain as he struggled to sit up in his hospital bed, but the doctor said, “No, no, lay back. Let me and Sr. Nemesis do all the work.” Dr. Cyril reached out his thin metal arm to gently block the injured man, while Sr. Nemesis carefully pushed the patient back into his bed’s white linens. The Ranger wanted to resist his attendants, but they were too strong and he was too weak to fight them. So all he could do was lean back and breathe a long sigh of resignation.
The Church of Man and Machine taught that the Cosmos is full of Mysteries, great and small. One of the greatest mysteries is Life itself, be it in the form of huge machines that built cities and starships and space colonies, or in the form of molecular biochemical machines that composed every cell of a living creature’s body. Therefore, concluded the Church, Life is the Cosmos’ way of solving the great Mystery of itself. If it is every believer’s duty to try to solve those mysteries, thought Sr. Nemesis, then the conundrums posed by the Ranger, the Hydra Complex, and even Dr. Cyril himself, were each worthy of a crusade.
“First, let’s try to restore your voice,” said Dr. Cyril to his patient. A speaking cube lay on the work table next to the doctor, and he said, “Let me move the cube closer to you so it can pick up your thoughts.”
The Ranger seemed to strain until a deep, bass voice came from the electronic prosthesis on the table. “What…happened…to…to…to…me?” said the speaking cube on behalf of the Man-Without-a-Face.
“No one knows for certain,” said the Doctor as he tinkered with a pale white cylindrical device made of surgical plastic and electronics that he had just extracted from a beaker of saline. “But clearly you and your squad of New Texas Rangers were attacked in a devastating ambush. I’m sorry to be so blunt,” he said, much too cheerfully, “but there’s no other way to put it than to say it was a massacre.”
The Doctor finished adjusting the device, then ran his finger down the Ranger’s throat where his Adam’s apple should be. A thin incision appeared on the Ranger’s flesh and a trickle of blood ran down his neck. The doctor sprayed the incision with mist from a small bottle, and the medicine’s faint chemical smell made Sr. Mary Margaret’s nose crinkle.
The doctor said, “A Walking Stick who was working for a prospector found you and your squad laying in the desert, on this very world in fact. The Walking Stick thought you were dead at first. But then it detected a spark of life in you and convinced the prospector—Anderson, I think his name is—to call for a medevac and fly you to a hospital. You’ve been in a therapeutic coma for months while I’ve healed what parts of your body I could, and built replacements for the parts I could not.”
The doctor positioned the cylindrical device in his patient’s incision, then slowly ran his finger up the wound. In moments, there was no trace of the cut except for the sharp smell of cauterized flesh.
Sr. Nemesis could not help but stare inconspicuously at Dr. Cyril from the corner of her eye. Although the doctor spoke and acted like a human, he most certainly was not one. He too was a “Walking Stick.” That term was crude, derogatory slang bandied about by most colonists. Sr. Nemesis did not like the feel of the word in her mouth, but she had never heard any other term used for the mysterious nonhumans who were everywhere in the Hydra Complex.
Obviously Walking Sticks were some sort of robot, but of a design no human had ever seen before except in the Hydra Complex of worlds. Walking Sticks reminded Sr. Nemesis of scarecrows, like the ones in nostalgic pictures of farms long ago. Except that instead of bundles of straw wrapped in burlap and old clothes to resemble a man, a Walking Stick looked like a bundle of thick metal rods and cables wrapped in glossy black wire mesh to form a vaguely human head, torso, pair of arms, and pair of legs. A bushy mess of black cables jutted from the top of what passed for a Walking Stick’s head, and two glossy orbs were set deep in sockets in its face in place of eyes. Incongruously, the Doctor modestly wore red scrubs—a lab coat, tunic, pants, and boots—over his black mesh-wrapped body.
More thick, thin, and microscopically fine cables jutted out from the Doctor’s wrists and wove themselves into five rudely formed fingers. Somehow those microscopic fibers had both cut a nearly bloodless incision in the Ranger’s throat, and then mended the incision without leaving a trace.
The Doctor was, like all Walking Sticks, a mystery.
Dr. Cyril quickly went about running his fingers along the side of the bandages wrapping his patient’s hands. The patient’s hands emerged looking perfectly normal—light chestnut brown, like most people who had traveled and intermarried with other peoples from Earth and the colony planets, moons, asteroids, and satellites—although the patient was pale from not having been exposed to direct sunlight for months. The Doctor examined both sides of his patient’s hands while a soft whirring emanated from near the Doctor’s eye sockets, as if the mechanical orbs that were his eyes were changing focus from normal, to magnifying, and then back again.
Sr. Nemesis looked carefully at the finger pads of the Ranger’s hands, but could not discern any whorls or ridges. His skin felt fleshy, but was as smooth as vellum. “Doctor,” she said, “he doesn’t seem to have any…fingerprints.”
“He’ll choose some later on,” the doctor nonchalantly replied, as he attended to removing the bandages from around the Ranger’s skull.
Sr. Nemesis was shocked and alarmed when the last bandage was stripped away from the Ranger’s face. She expected to see at least some semblance of a human visage beneath the swaddling cloth. Instead, there was only a hint of a forehead, eye sockets for two shining brown eyes, a sharp-edged nose, shallow cheeks, an almost nonexistent mouth, and a nondescript chin. It was as if a sculptor had begun to form a bust of his subject from soft clay, then grew bored and abandoned his work. The only dramatic feature on the Ranger’s face was a broad black stain embedded in his flesh that stretched from his forehead to the tip of his nose, and between the two raised discs that took the place of ears. He looked like nothing so much as a featureless mannequin. But when Sr. Nemesis stared incredulously at the Doctor, he jubilantly replied, “Perfect. Just the way I intended.”
Abruptly, a dangerous mixture of anger and stunned disappointment darkened Sr. Nemesis’ face. She was a shield-maiden of the Church, and in her wrathful eyes, an injustice had been done by the doctor she believed to be a miracle worker.
Sr. Mary Margaret wanted to scream a protest, but she didn’t dare share the horror of what she saw with the fragile patient who was still blissfully unaware that he remained a man without a face. Dr. Cyril, either bravely or foolhardily, ignored her expression and stayed maddeningly cheerful about his handiwork.
Dr. Cyril said to his patient, “I want you to trust me and do precisely as I say. Will you do that for me?” The Ranger painfully nodded agreement. Then the doctor said to the nun, “Sister, please elevate our patient to a sitting position.”
Sr. Nemesis wanted to reach under her habit and pull out one of her weapons, but she restrained herself for the Ranger’s sake and only pressed the control that tilted the head of the hospital bed upward. During the meantime, the Doctor placed a holographic projector disk on the work table next to him and picked up a small tablet computer.
When the Ranger was in position, the Doctor gently stuck a telemetry disc on the black stripe ending at his patient’s right temple, withdrew his spindly metallic hand, activated the holographic projector, and then monitored the telemetry disc on his tablet. Floating in midair above the holographic projector appeared a scene from a video featuring a popular entertainer from Mars colony. Sr. Nemesis even recognized the scene. The entertainer reached his hand so close to the camera that you could see his fingertips, and then he stepped back so you could see his handsome portrait. He said a line of dialog that had become iconic, and then he turned around and walked off screen. Immediately, the clip repeated in an endless loop.
Dr. Cyril said to his patient, “Please analyze the projection. Examine it closely. Notice every detail, bump, depression, perfection, imperfection, hue, hair follicle—everything.” The Doctor looked at his monitor and encouraged his patient, “Yes, that’s it. And don’t forget to listen to the actor’s voice.” The inhuman doctor’s humanlike voice bubbled with boundless enthusiasm.
But Sr. Nemesis was not enthused. She thought it was some sort of cruel joke for the Doctor to encourage the patient when she was certain the Ranger would be the target of shocked stares and ill-concealed disgust for the rest of his life. She was still trying to decide what would be an appropriate punishment for the Doctor when her grim deliberation was interrupted by a miracle.
The Ranger was staring intently at the hologram, expecting who knows what, when in a matter of seconds his bland, featureless face began to shift and blur like hot wax, and then condense into a perfect replica of the face of the actor in the hologram. His nose was aquiline, his jaw firm, his brows brooding and intense. Even the Ranger’s hair, which had been flat and mousey gray, transformed into a lustrous black mop that fell over his eyes, which were now shockingly blue. Dr. Cyril grabbed a mirror from his instrument kit and shoved it at the Ranger. Stunned by what he saw, the Ranger exclaimed in the entertainer’s manly baritone, “What happened to me?”
“That’s excellent! You transformed reflexively,” said Dr. Cyril. “How do you feel? Is there any discomfort? Any pain?”
The Ranger turned his handsome face toward the doctor, then the nun, then back to the mirror again. “I feel fine,” he said, as he examined his reflection more closely. Then he quizzically stared at his new fingerprints that looked uncannily like the ones in the projection. “No, there’s no pain, Doctor. I just feel odd. This isn’t my face. This isn’t my voice. So how…?”
The Doctor took this as an opportunity to crow. “Humans give me credit for saving your life, which is justified; I am a genius. But none of them have any idea how little of you was left to save. Most of your body was burned beyond either functional use or recognition. And there was no way I or anyone else could have made you a new skeleton, hands, or a skull, let alone a face of any kind—Do you understand? We don’t even know what your actual face looked like!”
The doctor restrained himself. “However, I do know a thing or two about human anatomy, and I do have skills and techniques beyond any human’s understanding.” The physician paused thoughtfully and harrumphed. “To be honest, my boy, I have skills and techniques that are beyond even my understanding.”
Sr. Nemesis’ anger disappeared as quickly as the Ranger’s brand new face had appeared. The Doctor’s jocular manner reminded her of sitting by the fireplace with her paternal grandfather as he told stories of his misspent youth. She smiled at that memory as her hands slipped away from the pistol grips under her habit.
“The best I could do,” said the doctor, “was craft you new body parts that would replace the old. But even then, there were parts I made that are unlike anything a human has ever seen. Philosophers say creativity flows unbidden from an artist’s fingers.” Dr. Cyril lifted the braided mass of cables that were his hands. “I’m not sure what technologies flowed unbidden from my fingers, but they are all that brought you back to life.
“Your face can morph into any face you see or can imagine,” said the Doctor. “Your voice can change as well—that’s what the speaking larynx I put in your throat can do. You can slightly change your height and body shape to a small degree—but you can’t do much more that that; you’re not a lump of clay, after all. You have much more endurance and strength than most humans. How much will become apparent as you heal.
“There is only one other thing you should know about: your hands. Your hands are special,” said the doctor. Once again, he paused to weigh his words. “Superficially, as you can see, your hands can also morph to give you human fingerprints, wrinkles, pores and so on. But your hands can do… more.”
The doctor paused again, apparently from anxiety, if something as inscrutable as a Walking Stick could be said to experience anxiety. Then he abruptly changed the subject by saying, “That’s enough for now. I have to make some fine adjustments to the built-in prosthetics in your body, and you’ll have to heal some more and get used to the changes. But that can wait. We’ll talk more in the days to come.” The doctor stood up straight and began putting away his instruments, but his patient interrupted him.
“Doctor, what you said about an ambush reminds me,” the patient said. He spoke slowly, as if piecing together a puzzle. “Most of it’s a blur, and parts are missing entirely. But I remember some of what happened when my squad was attacked.”
“That’s understandable,” interrupted the doctor. “You suffered massive head trauma—“
The patient was uninterested in his own well-being, and persisted with his thought. “I’m a New Texas Ranger, aren’t I?” he said. “Our squad was escorting someone—I think he was a priest for the Church of Man and Machine.” Sr. Nemesis’ attention spiked. “And I remember something else,” the Ranger said. “I have an older brother. He was leading the squad. What happened to him?” A note of anguish distorted the Ranger’s newfound, perfect voice. “What happened to my brother?”
Dr. Cyril stopped what he was doing and stared at his patient. For his patient’s sake, it might be best to lie. But the Doctor was also a Walking Stick, and for reasons of his own, it would be more beneficial to tell the truth. He weighed the electrical potential of both inputs then chose the middle path.
“I don’t know,” said the Doctor, matter-of-factly. He did not intend to be cruel, but he could not afford to be compassionate either. “When the medevac ambulance landed, you were the only one they reported having survived. They did not mention a brother. I’m sorry you had to find out this way.”
A long, thin shriek that crescendoed like a banshees’s cry emanated from the speaking device embedded in the Ranger’s throat, and then he thrashed about and beat his fists into the rumpled linens of his hospital bed. Then just as abruptly as it had appeared, the handsome face sculpted on the Ranger’s skull melted away and the featureless, nondescript, default face with a black stripe across its eyes, reappeared. The patient’s miraculous transformation ended with him stifling his sobs.
The Walking Stick doctor was shocked. He recognized human emotions, and could even emulate them as needed to supplement his bedside manner. And so there was no doubt in his mind that his patient was suffering genuine grief. But grief implies compassion, and compassion implies empathy for others; that is, what humans would call “a sense of humanity.” But few humans in the Hydra Complex expressed any humanity toward Walking Sticks. The humans Dr. Cyril had met and suffered from were steadfastly self-serving, casually cruel, and fiercely avaricious in their search for treasures hidden in the Hydra Complex.
“But this human is grieving,” thought the Doctor. “This human might be…different.” The Doctor was thinking of a “difference” in terms of ethics and morality. But he thought the Ranger might also be different in a more literal way. At least that’s what the Walking Stick who found him in the desert claimed when it was questioned by other Walking Sticks. The Walking Stick rescuer said the Ranger called to it for help; the Ranger called to it in a way no human should have been able.
The fact that Walking Sticks could secretly communicate with each other was an ability not even they completely understood. But it was a secret they guarded assiduously, and did not carelessly reveal to humans. It was one of the few advantages Walking Sticks had when dealing with callous, inhumane humans. And yet, somehow, inexplicably, the Ranger had used the Walking Sticks’ secret communication network to cry for help.
“So, yes,” thought Dr. Cyril, “the Ranger is different.”