[Chimaera182]

Buck’s eyes fluttered open. At first, everything had a strange, yellowish tint to it. What happened?
Slowly, he moved his head to the left, then to the right. His neck muscles felt stiff, as if he hadn’t used them in a while. That’s odd. He started to pick himself up from whatever surface he was lying on; he hit the limits of his restraints, then stopped struggling. What is going on?
A strange face appeared over him. “He’s awake now,” the stranger said. He reached for the side of Buck’s head. He couldn’t tell what the man was doing, but suddenly the yellow tint was gone. “That should do it. Buck, can you understand me?”
He blinked. Of course I can understand you. I’m not stupid.
“He’s not speaking.” The stranger looked up at something unseen. Buck was wondering where he was when the other looked back down on him, a doleful expression on his face. “Let’s see if this does the trick.” Once again, the stranger’s hand dropped down to the side of Buck’s head. Buck couldn’t see what was going on, and a part of him felt like he should have been apprehensive. “There. Can you speak now?”
“Yes.” At first, Buck didn’t recognize the voice; it sounded too metallic, too artificial. What have they done to my hearing? he wondered. “I can speak.”
“Do you remember what happened?” the man asked.
Buck frowned. “No. I—“ he broke off. Suddenly, a rush of memories flooded in on him: that night at Chaz’s, the WILL, Buck eagerly anticipating the greatest high of his life. At first, he couldn’t remember past the connection between him and the machine; he struggled in vain to reconstruct the events of that night, but it seemed as if his brain had blocked off those memories.
The strange man began tapping at a keyboard on the table next to him, and without warning, everything came back to him. Buck remembered the extreme jubilation he had experienced. He remembered the WILL satiating his hunger, taking him in, comforting him. He remembered the high as it overtook him. He remembered when the WILL took him over and he felt as though he were merely a passenger in his own body.
And then he remembered the extreme fear that had gripped his heart as the WILL began to attack him. He remembered trying to tell his friends what was going on, but everything came out gibberish. He recalled as Cess yanked the connector jack out of his port with her artificial hand, her own port exposed. Then, the blue lightning that arced from the broken connection jumped from his port to hers. “Cessily?” he asked.
“Dead,” the man confirmed. “The feedback from the WILL overloaded her implants, frying her nervous system. You gave her the Bloodhound virus along with a very nasty feedback charge; combined, it was too much for her system to handle.”
Bloodhound virus? Bloodhound is a virus? “What happened to me?” he asked mechanically.
“Your nervous system took a hit, too. It fried nearly a quarter of your brain. You lost motor control functions and had to be rushed here. You died on the operating table, but we were able to bring you back. Unfortunately, several of your vital organs didn’t survive the transition; we had to replace them with prosthetics.”
A woman and a second man came into view now; he recognized the nurse’s scrubs they both wore. They began untying his limbs. “Is that all?”
The man shook his head. Once we got your artificial organs up and running, we realized that the feedback shunt had fried the nerves in your limbs. Your legs and arms were useless, so we had to replace those, too.”
A wave of anxiety hit Buck now. “How much?” he asked, picking himself up from the operating table.
“How much what?”
How much of me is still human? he thought. “How much of me is machine?” he asked instead.
“Just your lungs, liver, heart, and stomach, as well as your larynx, eyes, gallbladder, and spleen. And your arms and legs, of course.”
Buck’s legs swung out over the edge of the table. As they landed on the metallic floor, he was struck by the sound of metal hitting metal. “Where?”
“Where what?” one of the nurses asked.
Buck turned to face him and saw what he was looking for behind him: a mirror. Buck started forward, but the two nurses rushed to his side to stop him. Unaware of the strength of his new limbs, he pushed them away; the female nurse went flying over the operating table, the male nurse collided with the computer station next to it, taking the entire system down with him. And Buck stepped in front of the mirror.
What he saw should have shocked him. The person staring back at him was a complete stranger. His complexion was sallow and sickly; the bags under his eyes made it appear as though he had gone years without sleep. The intense gaze of the eyes, those turquoise orbs with their metallic glint, seemed cold, dead. A thin layer of protective black armor covered his mechanical arms and legs. He wondered about that, flexing his right arm. Inside him, he knew that many of his organs had been replaced with false, mechanical ones. As his brain sped to catch up with everything it was processing, he stared unblinkingly at the image before him. His brain came to its conclusion: sixty-seven. 67% of him was now machine. The number seemed so harsh and cold. He was now more machine than man. Dimly, he remembered his comment about Chaz several months ago—he suddenly realized it had been months since that first time he had seen the WILL—and his worry that mankind, with all its technology and implants and methods to accentuate their laziness, was becoming more and more like the Borg. What he saw in the mirror, he knew, was the absolute manifestation of that fear.
For some reason, none of that bothered him.