The Rotten Beast (Jenna Fox Chronicles 1.50)

Move your fingers.

I have no fingers. I’m dead. Go away.

Move them.

They’re gone. Long gone. I am only stumps and spirit. Go. Leave. But the voice circles back, a rabid dog that keeps biting at me, tearing at flesh I don’t have.

Move your fingers, dammit!

A sharp stab pierces my right index finger. Pain shatters my fog. A finger! I have a finger! Light floods the darkness. Colors, more sounds, a screaming voice.

“She’s awake!”

And then Jenna. I blink my eyes. Jenna. Her face looms not far from mine. I lift my hand. Fingers. Not plastic, engineered, removable fingers, but flesh-and-blood ones. Permanent ones. Real fingers. One with a small drop of blood where it has been pierced. I bring these fingers close, running them along my lips and feeling the barest touch, tasting the blood on my tongue.

And then the frightening sensation of toes curling on sheets. Not just the memory of toes, not just stumps and phantom movements, ghosts trying to remember the feel of fabric, but toes attached to feet…attached to legs…attached to me. I think of the horror the first time I woke and saw four stumps. A new horror fills me.

My god, what have they done?

I know what they’ve done.

How many times had I read reports filed by the Federal Science Ethics Board? Violations? Abuses? Scientists pushing the limits? Scientists creating things in labs that were barely human?

I try to get up, but I’m weak and easily pushed back down by Jenna.

“How could you?” I ask.

“I didn’t. It was your parents.”

“You mean your parents.”

“Them too.”

“It’s wrong. It’s illegal.”

“Illegal, yes. Wrong?” She shrugs. “Who’s to say?”

Fury surges through me. I reach out and swing, fingernails digging and scratching, making contact with her face. She pulls back, holding her cheek where I’ve left marks. She stares at me, her face dark and disturbed, and I wonder if she’ll strike back.

“I know you’re angry,” she finally says. “I certainly was.” She walks around to a chair on the other side of my bed and sits. “I called your parents. They’re outside. They’ll be here any second.”

I look up at the ceiling. I’m in a strange room that I don’t recognize, a bedroom, not a hospital room. Surely a secret room. A hidden one. “How long did it take?”

“Eleven months. Record time. Of course, my father already had a blueprint to work from.”

I glare at her. “You.”

She nods unapologetically.

“How much?”

“Replaced? Eighty percent is new. Maybe a bit more.”

I look away. I don’t have to add up the numbers. I’m well beyond the FSEB’s legal limits for replacement parts. It wasn’t just my limbs. My whole body was turning on me and shutting down at the end. Kidneys, heart, liver, lungs. All my organs were moments from death. The infection had ravaged nearly everything.

My last weak breaths were to my parents, telling them to report Jenna. I had found out about her. I wanted the world to know too. It didn’t matter that she was my friend. This was bigger than our friendship. What she, her father, and his mad stable of scientists did was illegal. And now they’ve made me a part of it too.

I hear noise, hurried clumsy footsteps getting closer, louder, and then I see my parents rushing in, their anxious faces filling the doorway. My father looks at my open eyes and cries, too overcome to move forward. My mother steps closer, a thin shadow of who she was.

“Allys?”

“Who else would I be?”

She stumbles toward me, falling to the side of my bed, so we are eye-to-eye. She opens her mouth to speak again, but I cut her off. “How could you do this to me?”

She recoils, as if I have slapped her. “How could we not? You’re our daughter.”

“No. Not anymore. I’m a thing. You now have a thing.”

I manage to send both my parents from the room sobbing, only to have Jenna’s father replace them. He tries to act doctorly, as if he’s checking on a patient. He’s a quack and I tell him so. He’s not affected by my accusations, but when he comes closer and reaches out to touch my wrist, I scream for him to get away.

He smiles. “You’re a stubborn girl, Allys. You should have woken up a week ago. I suspected the delay was more in here.” He taps the side of his head. “You have a strong will, but that helped us in many ways.” He steps closer again, and I tense, pressing into the mattress. He stops.

“Allys, I know this is—”

“You don’t know anything, Dr. Fox. You know nothing about me.”

“I know that you blame scientists and doctors for what happened to you—”

“Not just me, Doctor. Millions have suffered because of people like you. You experiment with things you can’t begin to understand and the rest of us pay the price. You’re not going to get away with this.”

He bends forward and grabs my hand and roughly shakes it in front of my face. I try to pull it away, but his grip is firm. “And millions would give anything to have what we’ve given you. Biogel made this possible and I’m not going to apologize for it.” He doesn’t try to hide his anger, but he lets go and steps away. So much for his bedside manner. “I’ll give you some time,” he says. “This is a lot for you to take in right now, but we will talk later.” He leaves.

Jenna stands silently at the side of my bed, staring at me, and finally sighs as if she’s annoyed and walks to the door. Just before she leaves she pauses and then turns to me. “Give in to it, Allys. It will make it easier for you. You’ll give in eventually, anyway.”

Give in to what? Being controlled by all the computer chips stuffed into his Biogel? “I’ll never give in. I’m stronger than you, Jenna.”

“No doubt about that. It’s what I always liked about you—your strength and determination. But you’ll give in. You’ll get taken over. It will come when you let your guard down and you’re least expecting it.” She walks out, shutting the door behind her.

Taken over. I’m chilled by the way she speaks of it so matter-of-factly. What does she mean, taken over? Are the biochips waiting to snatch away the last bit of free will I have? Are they going to wring away that little piece of me that still holds some scrap of my humanity? How long can I hold out before I’m more robot than human?

I close my eyes. Maybe it’s too late. Only twenty percent of me is still original. The rest is bioengineered, created in a lab, loaded with computer chips telling what’s left of my body what to do. Maybe I’m not me at all already? I try to feel the changes. I press my hand to my chest and try to feel the biochips clicking away inside, but all I feel is the strong steady beat of something mimicking what was once my heart.

After two more days, I’m allowed to go home with my parents. Dr. Fox comes once a week to check on me. Jenna comes every day.

“You needn’t bother,” I tell her.