Which Flesh is Your Flesh?

Chapter 11

Raven had started eating again, slowly. He still spent most of his time in his depressing room or the medical center, but Iguazu had managed to start coaxing him out for his food and medication. His handler was starting to ask questions, which Iguazu was choosing not to answer. He was quiet. That was the most concerning part. Even at his lowest point Raven had at least made jokes, but for the moment he was quiet. He had a faraway look in his eye most of the time that Iguazu hoped was contemplative. They had managed some small talk. Just an awkward “So how’s Pluto?” “Cold. Where are you from?” “Europa.” “Oh, how’s that?” “Wet,” before the conversation fizzled out. Raven hadn’t even been talking to himself lately. His silent mouth remained still.

Iguazu took a few jobs while Raven was out of commission. He was careful, staying off the comms and replacing his own decal with Raven’s. Michigan didn’t need to know he was back in fighting shape yet, not when Raven still needed him. They weren’t difficult missions, just a few MT squad clean ups, but he was already noticing the difference in his combat capabilities. Among the scant few words Iguazu had gotten out of Raven was a recommendation for a weapons load out.

“You fight like you’re expecting your kit to do way more damage on a first hit than it actually does. If you had any sense you would’ve doubled up on Ludlows and ditched the shield for a better punish option. Here’s what you’re going to do, you’re going to load a laser handgun on your right hand, a light wave blade on your left, and then toss a laser orbit and a laser drone on your back. Anubis is specced to work best with energy weapons, and that combo should give you a good amount of flexibility and consistent damage. You shouldn’t expect massive damage, but it will be consistent.”

Consistency was good. This load out didn’t tickle the part of his brain that pushed him to place one last bet or take stupid risks in combat. It was also incredibly simple, almost brain dead simple to use. The only thing he really needed to do was manage weapon cool down. It let him focus on motion, on learning when to dodge and when his generator would suddenly refill after red lining. There was a push and pull to it. A rise and fall. Like breathing, like a heartbeat. It was almost meditative, his certainty bringing him to a state of calm. A state in which the self was absent and nothing but the rhythm of death remained.

Iguazu was doing well enough to trick people into thinking he was Raven with nothing but a decal and a borrowed license. Though he knew he wouldn’t fool anyone who actually knew Raven. Iguazu was fighting in a way that was detached, almost mechanical. Raven fought like a cornered animal. If ACs could bite he would’ve already taken a chunk out of someone by now. Maybe if Iguazu was cornered he could manage to fool someone into thinking he was a particularly advanced AI pilot. He had a particularly janky TTS voice bank downloaded that he thought might let him pass for something Raven had made, though he didn’t trust himself to hold up too long under close inspection.

There was a small group of people that knew what was actually going on. Raven, his handler, and Carla over at RAD. He and Raven had managed to convince Walter that this was just a training exercise and for some reason Walter had reported it to Carla so that she could collect R and D data.

Iguazu didn’t think he liked Walter very much. For one, Walter called him 616 and Raven 621, which ground his gears more than he cared to admit. This was less rational, but he could also swear he recognized his voice from somewhere. He couldn’t remember where he’d heard it before, but it was familiar. While once again it was completely irrational, Iguazu had a theory. He was friends with Michigan and known for almost exclusively using gen 4s. Coral based augmentation was only done by Dosers and back alley doctors these days. It was too much of a coincidence. Why Walter pretended not to know him and insisted on calling him by his fucking designation though, Iguazu had no idea. Michigan had all of the Red Guns and their MT squad members go by river-based call signs. It was a psychological tactic, a way to enforce group identity over individual identity. Maybe Walter’s use of designations, not even call signs, designations, was an attempt to dehumanize him. Iguazu didn’t feel particularly attached to humanity but he knew an insult when he heard it. Luckily Walter didn’t seem to like him too much either, so they only really spoke for pre and post mission briefings.

Carla constantly wanted to talk to him though, “Hey corp, how’re you doing in there? Your brain fried yet? Hey corp, draw a picture of yourself in thirty seconds and show it to me. Hm, you’re really making me rethink my hypothesis here.” He started turning off his comms after a certain amount of questions. She could just ask Raven how he worked if it was so god damn interesting. Though then again, most of her questions seemed to pertain to his psychology rather than any actual R and D related concerns.

Iguazu knew he was an unusual case, most people that underwent severe body modification, even if it was elective like his, tended to experience some form of long term dysmorphia. It was treatable, but it generally took years to fully shake. He figured what Carla was trying to find out was why that hadn’t happened to him. For the moment he had an idea, but he did not share it with Carla. After Michigan had beaten the living shit out of him and paralyzed the left side of his face, Iguazu had a lot of difficulty recognizing himself in mirrors. The combination of his bad eye, the cornea having been knocked loose when LIGER TAIL shot him down, the drooping half of his face, and the loss of his hair, which had been shaved to keep it out of the way of his ports, all of it had turned him into a stranger. At this point he was used to looking in the mirror and seeing a mangled ghost of his former self. This non-human version of himself, this hybrid of machine, animal, and insect, was far more recognizable to him than the still half human thing that he was before. That was a good enough reason not to say anything in his eyes. If Carla really was after him for R and D purposes, telling her that the key to making a stable cyborg was modifying a human whose sense of self was already destroyed sounded like a shit idea. He hoped she would give up after realizing it would be difficult to reproduce the same mental state naturally, but he didn’t know her. It was more than likely she would start breaking perfectly good pilots by force to make more like him instead.

He didn’t want there to be anyone else like him. It would lessen what Raven had done to him if it just became a new standard form of augmentation. He wanted his body to remain a source of shock, something that let others know at a glance that he was Raven’s bitch, to a degree so complete it inspired fear and disgust. It wouldn’t have the same impact if he was just a prototype of something mass produced. He was starting to realize he’d become a bit of an exhibitionist. Being able to make people uncomfortable around him with so little effort on his part was deeply satisfying. He couldn’t wait until he could actually start showing his face in public again.

After a few jobs Iguazu had noticed something strange. He was starting to hear things. That buzzing in his head was starting to come in clearer. Like a radio being tuned, every once in a while he caught snatches of conversation, the sound of a woman’s voice, a burst of red at the edges of his vision. Must’ve been coral burn in finally starting to get him. It was an inevitability for an older gen like him, especially one that had been kicking as long as he had. Seven years was a long time in dog years, it was a miracle he hadn’t died or gone crazy already. It was weird though, as it faded in and out, sometimes he could’ve sworn it sounded like the voice was talking to Raven.

If he got his augments removed it would solve the problem, but he was in far too deep to ever do that now. He couldn't give up being a killing machine now that he knew how it felt. Now that he knew what if felt like to crush a tank with his bare hands, now that he knew what it felt like to have so much adrenaline coursing through his brain that everything tasted like iron, now that he knew what it felt like to fly, to really fly, his own body racing the wind, anyone who tried to remove his augments would have to tear them out of him.

Looking at the pieces of himself, Raven didn’t know what to feel. Iguazu had gotten them back for him, true to his word but looking at the pieces of him suspended in preservation gel he didn’t want to recognize them as his. Still, he did. He knew the scar at the corner of the lips of the limp flayed skin in the tube, he recognized those reddish brown eyes, even redder through the lense of Iguazu’s perception. It was just confirmation of his dehumanization. These pieces of him that he could read his whole history from, even his heart, suspended in a tube, all of it reduced to spare parts. His life, reduced to spare parts. He knew that the fact that he was looking at them meant that he was getting them back, but it still turned his stomach. Especially considering who was performing the surgery.

Ayre didn’t have hands, and Raven was still recovering from the aftermath of the last time he went under Walter’s knife. That left him with one option, Iguazu, who had only won out because the last time Raven went under his knife had not been nearly as traumatic, but the bar was somewhere close to Rubicon 3’s core. It had still been awful, but at that point it was an awfulness he was used to. He left his pain sensitivity on during the surgery because he had wanted to remember it this time. Raven had wanted to carry the pain with him so that he could make Iguazu understand what he did to him. Though he figured tearing him limb from limb made it even, he still didn’t like the fact that Iguazu was his best option. Maybe if he had a decade he could’ve made a robot to do it, but the longer he waited, the worse his surgical outcomes would be. They already weren’t great. There was no guarantee that his nerves would reconnect properly or that his face would heal straight. More than likely it would just look like he was wearing someone else’s skin like a mask. Still, it was better than nothing. If he let his skin heal naturally, it would be a mass of inflexible scar tissue, and the subscription for his artificial heart was fucking expensive. It needed to be done, he would just need to come to terms with the fact that he would never be the same as he used to be. Ayre would’ve wanted him to append a “and that was okay” to the end of that, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t okay, it would never be okay, he would feel the wounds of what had been done to him for the rest of his life. The best he could hope for was eventual resignation, a state in which the open wounds in his psyche became ragged scars.

At least the build he made for Iguazu was working out. That was how Raven dealt with what he’d tried to do, he kept himself busy, and refused to think about it. Sending Iguazu out on test missions helped, it was sort of disturbing to watch in a way that didn’t make Raven feel like shit. He’d never seen Iguazu so, gleeful? Was that the word he wanted? While he moved with cold efficiency as he tore apart the MT squads he’d been asked to clear out, Raven could hear him laughing over the coms. He was pretty sure Iguazu didn’t realize he was doing it, but it really freaked Walter out. Raven had checked the data from his mood stabilizer, it hadn’t conked out again yet and Iguazu hadn’t been manually fucking with his adrenaline or endorphin levels. The bloodlust he was developing was all natural. It was a little unsettling, but it was also a little hot at the same time.

Raven maybe enjoyed having a dangerous man obsessed with him a little more than was strictly safe. Especially when it was one like Iguazu, who would just as readily crush a man’s head in his hand as fall to the ground and lick Raven’s boots. He was a rabid dog, but Raven was the one that held his leash. That was enough to distract him a little, like how he used to jack off when he was depressed as a teenager. It was easier than dealing with any of his bullshit, especially when he knew no doctor would know how to help him.

What could any doctor say that could make him feel anything but the sheer weight of cruelty outweighing the joy he had fought to find in life. Shit, what could anyone say. Ayre had tried to help in her own way by getting him in contact with the RLF, but the scales were still unbalanced. How could he live knowing the cruelty humans were capable of inflicting on eachother, that he had inflicted directly or indirectly on other people? It was better not to think, to lose himself in the tangle of wires and the coral flooding his brain and just become a machine like everyone wanted him too. It made him sick, but so did everything else. He was never getting out of it. Even once Iguazu had finished what he started and cobbled him into something that looked like a person from a distance, Raven knew he wasn’t human anymore. He thought he had come to terms with that, but a small part of him had clearly been holding onto the hope that when he paid his debts he could go back to his old life. His fingers were stained too dark with blood and oil. Iguazu wanted to make him a god rather than a machine and Raven knew that was worse, but he was going to let him try anyway. Why not? If no one would let him die, why not try becoming Iguazu’s idea of a god, even if that idea was a bull run through with hundreds of spears, kneeling to accept the sword that would pierce his heart.

He registered the base’s systems telling him that Iguazu was docking ANUBIS and tracked him with the scattered cameras and motion sensors as he made his way to the med center. Iguazu knew he would be here. Raven was always here. Always staring at the ruin in the jars.

Iguazu figured today was the day. He’d finally worked up enough nerve to do it. Raven didn’t want to know when he was going to go under the knife. If he knew in advance that it was happening it would only give him more time to work himself into a frenzy, or in Raven's own words, put him into a state where he was likely to chew his own leg off rather than go through with it. He had something about doctors apparently. So, the plan was, Iguazu would knock him out, pump his stomach if he’d eaten anything so that he didn’t drown in his own vomit, and then do the surgery and have nanobots take care of most of the post op. Aside from the anesthesia, and the surgery itself it would be relatively safe, no chance of rejection, no need for Raven to take immunosuppressants, it would be fine. There was just the psychological element. If Raven had a breakdown after he woke up, Iguazu wouldn’t know what to do. His current plan was to just hope he didn’t.

Raven didn’t turn as Iguazu entered, but it would be a mistake to assume he was distracted. He could hear the low whir of camera lenses following him all the way here.

“You didn’t try to make me have breakfast this morning,” Raven accused. Iguazu knew he’d been caught out so he just jabbed the hidden syringe he’d prepped into Raven’s spine. He whipped towards Iguazu and grabbed his arm. There was fear in his eyes, caged animal fear at what was about to happen to him, and then he went completely limp inside his exoskeleton. Iguazu stained his hands with blood as he brushed his fingers along his cheek.

The reason he had failed to fix him the first time was because he hadn’t had Raven’s consent. That had to be it. It was because he had tried to force himself onto Raven rather than give Raven back what was his. Raven had made Iguazu his now, this skin and these organs in their tanks were his, he was just putting things back where they belonged.

Iguazu disengaged the locks on Raven’s exoskeleton and gently pried his hand from his arm. Then he brought him over to the empty operating room. This would be more complicated than the previous surgery he’d performed. His systems would handle it for him, so his own knowledge base was not a factor, it was just, he would have to cut Raven open this time. He’d need to replace his mechanical organs with his original ones, and put back the “non-essential” ones, like his kidneys, that had just been taken out without being replaced. This was far more intimate, with far more possibility of fatally screwing up, but he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t help Raven any other way.

The tools he had prepared in advance seemed far too impersonal for the intimacy of the task, the sternal saw he would use to crack open Raven’s rib cage resembled a power drill more than anything. He felt like the task should be done with his bare hands, the ribs cracking beneath his fingers, but this wasn’t about what he wanted or felt was most intimate. It was about what Raven needed. It had to be about what Raven needed. He couldn’t do it for himself this time. He took one last look at Raven’s body, the port that took up his left eye socket, the bleeding muscle covered in small patches of half healed skin and torn open scabs, and the arms and legs Iguazu had grafted to him, the burn from where he’d cut off his tattoo still healing. Then, he made his first incision.