The thing that had been called Inspector Donavan smiled. One could just barely hear the servos moving under the synth-skin. They had tried to match his color, but being of Irish stock originally, there wasn’t much color to imitate. They hadn’t bothered to try to remake the eyes. They could build so much better eyes than eyes, but they couldn’t build eyes, or anything that looked right and also functioned; at least, so far. But they could buy a pair of shaded glasses and cover up the mechanisms that now existed under the disguise.
Under the simulacrum of my old friend was an intricate system of tiny motors, synthetic muscles, iodes and diodes and all sorts of things I didn’t understand, and under that, encased, there was some flesh; some part of him, of what was him, remained. The rest was cold machine. The heart was there, that I remember, and, of course, the brain—the only part his remakers were concerned with. That was enough, they said. Still, I was glad that the heart was included.
The simulacrum of a face produced the simulacrum of a smile, strained, the new synth-skin pulled tight and stretching oddly, stretching in horizontal lines real skin never would.
“Do you feel any pain?” the surgeon-engineer asked.
This new thing turned his head, slowly and deliberately, toward his remaker.
“Oh yes!” he laughed, his teeth clicking as his mouth moved, the smile only stretching further. “I feel.”
“We have—” the doctor’s hand was reaching for the morphine button, but the sound of servos and the whizzing blur of an almost human arm shot out and intercepted it.
“I’m alive,” was all the new thing said.
“Yes,” stuttered the doctor, his eyes moving back and forth between the unrelenting mechanical grip upon his forearm and the unrelenting grin connected to it.
“I was dead!” The eyebrows, donated and, to that extent, real, went up and down in an almost playful emphasis on that word, “dead.”
“Clinically,” I broke in. “They said they could save you.”
The neck twisted the head suddenly, too fast for my eyes to see, and the new thing that was almost my old friend and his unchanging grin faced me.
“I was there beside you when they asked,” the head tilted to the side. “I was dead, but I was there. She, the doctor—they sent a she to you because they wanted “yes”—asked you, my partner.”
“I’m, I’m…” I sputtered.
The head tilted to the other side.
“You made the right decision,” his voice was like my friend, but he spoke so quickly, so measuredly, so tonelessly. “I did not like being dead. I like to feel…” he paused, turning his head back toward the doctor with a slow, motorized, unnaturally smooth motion that came to a sudden and just as unnatural halt. “…pain,” the new thing added.
Tale Told 