Raymond Long: author of fiction and non-fiction
Extracts from More Than Human:
"Cyborg chic - being a machine is suddenly sexy"
Simon looked up sharply. 'There's something - maybe you should see it. We can look at it after breakfast.'
'What?'
'A singer. Called Pris. She's - she's just launched her first single. She's - she's been enhanced. By Idogba Biotech. Looks like they're backing her -'
'Who are they?'
'Medical company, based in Kisangani dome in Africa. Done a lot in Africa - not well known in the rest of the world - up till now. Looks like this is their bid for world attention. You want to see it?'
'See what?'
'This girl's music video. It's just broken on the Swiss networks.'
'Can't we wait till we've finished breakfast?'
'Sure.'
They ate in silence for a while, and Simon seemed absorbed in himself. After a while Rachel spoke. 'What's so special about this girl that's got you so bothered?'
'It's all showing off - they're showing off their technology with this. I've been telling my people to find out as much as possible about what they've done to her. She's a real - a real advert for their technology. Everything out in the open. She's got metal legs, even. Not even artificial skin over them. And artificial eyes... Rachel, you've got to see these things to believe them. And her dancing - it's impossibly perfect. Must be implants - legs, hips, spine, I guess, probably coordinated by an implant in her brainstem and spine, wired to the motor cortex for superior comms speed, faster than nerves -'
'Simon, how can you tell all this? You haven't seen her dance yet.'
'I have.' He tapped his head. 'In here.'
Rachel sighed. 'Simon, however many years it goes on, I'm never going to get used to you having this thing in your brain.'
'You should get one yourself. Then we'd be - closer -'
'No, Simon.'
'Come on, Rachel - think about it at least. You can't imagine it - the new world that opens -'
'No, Simon! I'm not having a brain implant! I like having an old-fashioned human brain.'
'Okay, okay. No pressure.' Rachel sat silently staring at her husband as he finished breakfast. He was gazing straight ahead, eating mechanically while his brain was engaged elsewhere, running the business, issuing orders and drawing plans. Suddenly Rachel burst out in a gasp. Did he do that while they were making love?
'Rachel? Are you alright?'
'Yes - yes, it's nothing. Just a - something went down the wrong way.'
'Went down the wrong way? You mean into your breathing system? That should be impossible with your lung implant. Your last implant checkup - implant maintenance and review - was... a hundred and forty-two days ago. Let's have a look at the reports - I can't see anything wrong with your implant at that time which might suggest -'
'Simon, it's just a figure of speech! I didn't mean it went down into my lungs - my implant.'
'Right. Sorry. But you're okay?'
'Yes.'
Simon nodded, and resumed his fixed stare. When they had both finished breakfast he said, 'Do you want to see this girl's video?'
'Yes. Alright then.'
A panel slid back in the wall, revealing a screen. Simon touched Rachel's face and said, 'Goodbye, beloved Queen, until this evening.' Then he left her. As he went out, the screen lit up to show a girl who looked about eighteen wearing nothing but an indecently short pink skirt, and a top of the same colour that barely covered her breasts. Her legs were glimmering chrome, sculpted into graceful curves that were almost those of an athletic woman, with just a hint of the artificial symmetry of machined metal. On her cheeks, her breasts and her bare belly were flashes of silver, long thin crescents curving gently to delicate points. Her eyes were completely silver too, but they were normal-shaped eyes behind her eyelids, not eye-covers like Simon wore.
A dark rectangle slid sideways onto the bottom of the screen and then words appeared in it: Pris. Silver Metal Lover. Bleeding Edge. Then the music started, and as the information box faded Pris began to dance. For a moment the dance was quite conventional, but then she turned sideways and kicked the leg nearer the camera up into the air. She went up onto the toes of her standing leg and bent back so far that her long black hair whipped against the back of the standing leg. The kicking leg shot up until it was almost vertical and perfectly straight, and above the swishing micro-skirt the join between unyielding chrome and soft pale pink flesh was revealed in a flash. Then the leg came down again and she straightened up, effortlessly landing and turning back to the camera. Simon had been right: this dancing was completely beyond anything a normal human dancer could have done. Inside, her body must be at least half machine.
Pris went on with her impossible dancing, and sang a song about a silver metal lover who could do more for her than any mere man of flesh and blood. 'They say his body is cold and hard, but they don't know how it feels inside...' From time to time there were close-ups of her face, and her eyes changed from blank silver to displaying swirling patterns of colour than moved almost too quickly to follow.
Toward the end of the song a silvery robot, shaped much like a man but rather larger than most, came on and they danced together. Pris rubbed her body obscenely on his while he remained apparently impassive, dancing with mechanical precision but with no passion or flair. His - its - body was sculpted with heroic muscular ripples, but it had no face, just a blank oval. The dance ended with the robot relaxing back into a neutral standing pose. Pris approached the machine and put her hands flat on its belly. Then leaning forward to push her bottom out she brought her face to its unmoving chest with an exaggerated show of desire. She started to place breathless kisses on its chest, her face and body suggesting that she was melting with passion, and then the screen faded to black.
+ + later in the same chapter + +
A wave of 'cyborg chic' hysteria quickly broke across the Swiss media. Cyborgs were suddenly the thing to be. Leaders of Swiss business who had quietly had brain implants to enhance their performance were suddenly fashion icons. Pris was at the forefront of it all. Bleeding Edge Entertainment quickly released more of her music videos: Love Me Like a Machine, then Drill Me Harder. After that came Blade Runner in which she had metal arms as well as legs, and danced whirling two Japanese swords with superhuman precision. And the media were full of her wildness, the parties and the endless stream of young men whom she used for momentary pleasure and then cast aside. Pris said that none of them had what it took to satisfy her.
Then after a few weeks of media saturation came the shock exposé: Pris, full name Priska Franck, was forty-eight years old and had been a middle level executive in a manufacturing firm before starting her musical career. She had had a brain implant years before, but her recent treatment from Idogba Biotech had rebuilt her body. Pictures were published showing how she had looked before: dumpy, unattractive and ageing. Now she looked like a stunning eighteen year old beauty.
'In my dreams I always wanted to be a dancing girl,' Pris told the press. 'But I never had the coordination. I couldn't dance to save my life. I did pretty well in my career, so I could afford it, and the technology had reached the point where they really could change me into what I wanted to be. So I thought, well, why not? You only live once. And I've already made more money back than the treatment cost me.'
The day after that article came out, Idogba Biotech launched a major advertising campaign featuring Pris, offering rejuvenation and full body transformation into a young beauty. The media frenzy grew more intense than ever, and more people jumped on the bandwagon. Before Pris, people with implants had wanted to stay normal-looking on the outside, and many had been embarrassed to admit their machine components.
Now, suddenly, cyborg chic was everything. Metal in place of skin was sexy. Rich old people took the Idogba treatments and were launched into a new life with young-looking bodies, some all in natural skin but others with metal showing like Pris. An old lady named Dorothea Frei underwent the rejuvenation treatment and had the same treatment given to her dog, Samson, saying they had grown old together so they should be rejuvenated together. Samson appeared in the media, shown with gleaming artificial legs alongside his newly young and metal-decorated owner. Meanwhile, young girls started to wear stick-on metallic patches on their skin in imitation of Pris.