NOVEL WEB Opening Short Story - Prologue
“Perform the SURGERY NOW!” Meredith Koarden screamed, clutching her ruined chest where the car door had crushed her ribs. She was the owner and one of the chief scientists of Koarden Industries, a leading company in cybernetic research and development. “I’ve already lost my husband tonight. I won’t lose my son as well.” Blood stained her lips as she forced each word from her ruined body.
All around her, the research department of the company was being transformed into a makeshift emergency operating room. The white walls and shiny metal surfaces were already splattered with blood and debris, creating a stark contrast to the pristine environment they usually maintained for their research experiments.
But now they needed it for something else. Something more urgent. Something more desperate.
“But ma’am, he’s far too young! It’s never even been attempted on a human before, and you want us to perform the cyber-body operation on your son?” Doctor Lee, one of the many doctor’s slash researchers in the room, protested.
He looked at the small body of the eighteen-month-old baby boy in the center of the room. The boy’s body was surrounded by wires and machines that beeped and flashed in rapid fashion. The baby’s name was Deckard Koarden, and he was the only child of Meredith and her late husband, David.
He had been the one driving their car when they were hit by three autonomous vehicles at the same time. He had died instantly as his side of the car crumpled like a tin can under the extreme speed of the other cars.
No matter what anyone else tried to tell her, it had been no accident.
“Then perform it on me first, if you must!” Meredith snapped at him, her eyes blazing with determination. Every word she spoke stained the floor around her, red with blood. Her own broken and bleeding body was the only thing that kept her from attacking the insolent man. She was lying on a stretcher next to her son, hooked up to similar life-support devices.
“But I want my son being prepped and readied for his own operation at the same time. Whatever you learn from performing the operation on my body, use it to do a better job on him. Just make sure you save him. Is that understood?”
She glanced at the two metal crates that had been brought in from the storage room. They contained the test bodies they had been using for their cybernetic experiments. They were crude and unfinished, but they were all they had on hand. They would have to replace them with proper bodies later, but for now, they had to make do.
“I know we have a couple of test bodies we have been using for other projects. Bring them here,” she ordered.
Everyone in the room collectively swallowed and nodded nervously as they followed her instructions. They knew the risks and the challenges of what they were about to do.
Meredith and Little Deckard Koarden had been rushed in only a few minutes earlier. Where she was facing life as a quadriplegic, he was much worse. The only thing keeping him alive at the moment was the mass of machines he was hooked up to. He had more tubes and wires coming out of his body than should have been possible.
If this accident had occurred even a couple of years earlier, then he would have already been dead. It was by no means a stretch of the imagination to say the research and work his parent’s company was performing had quite literally already saved his life.
Now it was time to see if they could do it again and make it a little more permanent this time.
At the moment, as soon as even one of those items was unplugged, everything would begin to fail. His life quite literally hung in the balance.
Unfortunately, there was absolutely no chance that his natural body would ever recover. Not after what it had gone through and the beating it had taken. It was more than a minor miracle he had even survived long enough to reach this room. Whoever had saved him, and the boss lady, had truly earned their pay that night.
Transplanting a human brain of any sort, baby or otherwise, into a fully cybernetic body had never been done before. Cybernetic augments of any sort had only been on the market for a few years, and they were still somewhat controversial and very expensive.
Pushing the development of the technology and their medical applications this far, this fast, felt dangerous and more than a little exciting.
It was as though they were all on the precipice of something groundbreaking. Or something potentially catastrophic.
“We understand, and we’ll be careful. Permission to record both surgeries, ma’am. They will be the first of their kind. No matter their outcome, what we are about to do is something groundbreaking,” Doctor Lee said, his voice trembling slightly.
“Granted, but make sure all the proprietary information stays off screen and out of the recording. You know the drill,” Meredith said, coughing heavily, blood flying from her mouth. “Now, get to work,” She told them weakly, before losing consciousness.