Work Text:
Building up
1.
John's first cybernetic implant was planted when he was six, the same one most kids got planted with at that age – the language implant. It was the most memorable piece of cyberware of his life, and of all the additions to himself he got later on, it was that one that he remembered the best. Not the implantation itself – he was asleep for it, naturally – but the going from being unimplanted to implanted.
Going from only knowing his Mother Tongue, to knowing them all.
Up until that point, he had only had a vague understanding what implantation even was – it had been a distant thing, chucked off into the same niche as the questions about what he wanted to be when he grew up and what did his parents do for a living. Cyberware a was part of life; an obvious, every day part and of course he had always known that he too would have implants – and he had even dreamed of things like memory-ware and visual-ware, the sort of things that made it so that you never had to study but instead could recall things after a single glance. All together, he hadn't thought of it much at all. It was just a future thing that would happen one day and that was that.
Well, maybe he had been a bit eager about it, since Harriet had a annoying habit of talking in tongues just so that she could exclude him, and his parents could always understand her and he couldn't – and then there were the kids in the upper years who too could start spouting Italian or Swahili or Japanese, and he couldn't understand a word of it. He had wanted to, he had been eager to, but it had been a similar sort of want as that for Christmas to come sooner, or that there would be more birthdays in one year.
When the time came, he didn't really think much of it. He had never, at that point, heard the ghost stories – he had feared going to the dentist more than getting his skull opened and a micro chip planted into his brain. So, going to the hospital had been exciting, but not world changing – everyone did it, after all, and if he was nervous, so was everyone else. It was no big deal. He just lied down, breathed in and out of the mask they fitted over his nose and mouth and slept.
And then he woke up in the recovery, with his mother singing that old French lullaby, and for the first time he understood the words. There was an announcement playing outside the room in strict medical Latin, and he understood that too. He could read the words in the hospital wall – also in Latin – and the subtitles on the telly that hung in the ceiling corner of the room - German.
It felt like he had been blown open, like the world was suddenly fuller than it had been before, like there were things out there that had been covered before, and now all the blinds had been torn off.
"Mum," he had said – in Latin because it felt like the thing to do at the time, and he liked the sound of it. His mouth couldn't quite keep up with his brain, and the words came out a bit clumsy, but they came out. "I want a ton more cyberware. I want millions of them!"
She had laughed, patted his head and told him hold his horses. Later Harry had laughed at him and called him an idiot – all most people ever got was the language implant, and that only because it was government funded – the rest people got for themselves, the rest were expensive and he would never, not in a million years, have the money.
"Besides, what would you do with more 'ware? You're six," she snorted.
"I won't be six forever," John answered, already planning what implant he would've liked to have the next.
2.
John got his second piece of cyberware after approximately fifteen years of saving constantly, whilst in his first year to his Ph.D. program. He always knew he was going to – he knew his stats, knew that he was in the percentage of people with high compatibility with cybernetic implants. It was never a question of if, but what. Though over the years, and after starting his decade and half of saving, he had considered many implants, the one he eventually got wasn't the one he expected.
There were several kinds of cyberware a person could get, aside from the obvious prosthetic ones. Memory modifications, sense enhancements, organ control implants, and so forth. When he had been younger, he had wanted a memory chip so that he wouldn't have to study. When he had decided that he wanted to become a doctor, he had considered sense enhancements – a lot of doctors had one or both eyes replaced with an artificial eye, the richest ones going with the MicroEye, which allowed them to see as well as the average microscope could, an invaluable ability for a surgeon. It was in the end a OC-implant he got, after careful, long consideration – and not only because he didn't have the several thousands it took to get biomechanical eye replacement and memory enhancement required for the artificial eyes so many doctors had. Especially not the hallowed MicroEye.
No, it was because several times, he saw his fellow students lose their nerves, their concentration, get too excited or distracted. Because he saw them cut too deep in their excitement, or too low, because they would glance away to answer a question and if they had been cutting into a living person, that person would have died.
So, at age of twenty one, John got his second implant – one that controlled his hormonal activity, an Endocrine Gland Control implant, or EGC, which took charge of the part of his brain that controlled all his hormonal glands. He got the cheapest sort – nothing like the ones high athletes got, which they used in minute shifts and adjustments to enhance their physical fitness. It was the sort that worked on automatic, by taking records of the hormonal activity of his moods, when he was excited, when calm, when frightened, when angry, and using those as settings. Once those had been recorded, he could shift from one mood to another. The implant couldn't affect his emotions, stop him from getting angry, but it could regulate his hormone levels so that he wouldn't get the after effects of being angry, or distracted, or anything else.
All he had to do is switch the implant to a calm mode, and nothing could affect him physically – emotionally, yes, but it never reached his body. A bomb could go off in the surgery, and he wouldn't bat an eye. The corpse he was autopsying could start screaming, and he wouldn't jump. A woman could walk past him, wearing nothing but a garter belt, and he could ignore it as well as he could ignore his mate on the other side of the table, with his horrible attempt of a moustache and horrid haircut.
"It must be nice," Mike mused after John had gotten the implant. "With that you'll never get depressed. Or anxious. Or anything. I wish I had the money for 'ware like that."
It wasn't precisely true – John could get depressed, anxious and sad, and worse. It was just that he had the choice to switch that off. The down side of it was that it was a bit… disconcerting. And scary. Because he couldn't only decide not to get depressed, but he could also decide to be happy, ecstatic – orgasmic too, if he wanted to – and it was fucking terrifying, when he tried that. It was a fine thing to be momentarily happy, even deliriously happy. It was another thing, to be that for hours.
And the one time he set the implant on orgasmic and experimented… well. He wouldn't have given the experience for anything, but his body took nearly two weeks to forgive him for it, and he decided never to try again.
And it wasn't exactly emotion that he controlled. No, his emotions were still free; there wasn't cyberware out there that could really control emotions anymore than there was one that could control thoughts. It was just his reaction to emotions that he could regulate, and it was often a very hollow feeling – like there was a shouting going on in a canyon, but no echo. It got a bit unnerving, at times, especially when he felt depressed but switched it off – which left him feeling… empty, more than anything else. It left him feeling like a fake, somehow.
Of the EGC-implants, there were ghost stories. Millions of them. Stories in which the cyberware were implanted in mentally ill people, fixed on a certain setting, and then those people never felt properly emotional for the rest of their lives. And if they did they didn't react to it. Then there were stories about people whose cyberware malfunctioned, and they kept on producing certain hormones, on and on, until the 'ware was either removed or something much worse happened. There were people who consciously abused their EGC-implants, trying to make themselves grow stronger, lose weight, become more masculine, more feminine, something. The consequences of those attempts could be extremely… bad.
There was once a report in the papers of a man who somehow managed to set his cheap Endocrine Gland Control implant to extremely high excitement for a marathon – he had a heart attack after less than half an hour due to epinephrine overdose.
After getting his second piece of 'ware, John rarely used it for anything else than to affect/induce the calm state, in which his heart beat would stay level and his breathing would be calm. His body would be perfectly comfortable; neither hot nor cold regardless of the weather, and nothing could alarm him. He became the best in the surgery class after that – if not in skill, then in sheer unflappability.
3.
It was as much the promise of government funded cyberware as the general concept of military service that prompted John join RAMC shortly after getting his doctorate. Soldiers were generally fitted with implants – GPS namely, which put the whole databank of known maps into their heads, as well as allowed a wireless link with certain satellites. Some of them were also fitted with WiCy, Wireless Cybernetics network adapters, which allowed nonverbal communication between people with same 'ware, or technological telepathy as some called it. Officers above the rank of captain even got a high class WiCys, the sort that allowed them to link with computers and such.
Of course, the higher the implant rate you took, the longer you had to serve, but that didn't worry John in the least. After getting his EGC-implant, the excitement of fighting death on an operating table hadn't been enough, and considering how determinately he avoided ever setting the excited setting for his implant, he knew he was an adrenaline junkie of the highest order. The idea that he could be out there, god only knew where, with scalpel in one hand and a gun in the other…
It wasn't the only thing/reason, of course not. John had a streak of patriotism wider than the Thames, thanks to his dad – who had been in the Navy, whose journals and photographs from this or that base still cluttered his parent's house. The idea of doing his duty for queen and country, as Harry put it, was as gratifying as getting his Ph.D., as the idea of carrying a gun, as the idea of wearing a uniform.
But of course there was the cyberware too.
"First and foremost, you will be getting Retinal Nano implant all soldiers get," he was told by the RAMC technician. "Which will give you night vision. It is removable, of course, should you choose to at the end of your service. On top of that, there are some additional possibilities that you might wish to consider. Seeing that your starting rank will be Captain, you have the possibility for memory implants, EyeCam as well as WiCy implants right from the start, though very few RAMC officers choose them. However, RAMC surgeons have certain other possibilities that others in the service don't get. Namely, the armed forces are prepared to pay up to seventy percent if you choose to get a MicroEye…"
The recruiter had told him about the MicroEye, dangling the offer and the fact that John was one of the twenty percent of population with high compatibility with implants in front of John like bait, as if John hadn't already been sold on the idea of going to the military. There was always some danger with implants, a possibility of rejection, of surgery going wrong, but John had high rates of chances with whatever implantation he chose being a success.
The MicroEye was tempting, god, it was so tempting – he'd be set for life as a doctor with it. But… "Even thirty percent of the price is a bit too high on my wallet," he admitted rather sadly.
"Well, the offer is open so if your situation changes later on, we'll look into it again," the technician said. "Do you have any other ones you might want to consider? The military is willing to compensate if the implantation offers to increase your abilities significantly and if that increase will show in your service. WiCy perhaps, or regular EyeCam…?"
John shook his head. The MicroEye is the only one a surgeon would want, and he already had the hormone control implant, so he was set there. Maybe an implant that would increase hearing but… it probably wouldn't be as useful for him, as it would be on some other soldiers.
But he was definitely going to start saving, just to see if he could get enough to get the MicroEye at some point.
"Well, just the RENA it is, then," the technician said and turned to draw the papers.
The retinal implant was the easiest to get, John found, if somewhat terrifying. His eyes were both paralysed, and a needle was poked through the cornea and into the pupil, through the lenses and into the vitreous humour, where the injection of nano machines was released. It took couple of hours for those machines the settle into his retina, where they enhanced the light sensitivity among some other things – and that night, he found the dark barracks to be as clear as day, once the lights had been turned out. It was incredible, fascinating, and more than little exhilarating.
He later figured why all soldiers slept with sleep masks – RENA implants were the sort that couldn't be turned on and off by choice, and while the iris kept things from getting too bright in the day, in the night the implant and that very same iris worked in perfect harmony to make the slightest pinprick of light as bright as possible.
He also found out why so many soldiers lamented the night sky, once he was shipped to Afghanistan – with the implant, the Milkyway was blindingly bright and terribly beautiful.
4.
John reconsidered his options after mere six months into service – it was not what he had expected, and though with his hormone control implant he was maybe half a step ahead of the events thrown at him, he wasn't always on top of them. Things happened faster, the patients were rushed in quicker, the fight for their survival bloodier. And then there were the times when he'd be forced to abandon the table and the scalpel, and grab a gun. Sometimes it was quiet, of course, sometimes days and weeks could go by and nothing particularly remarkable happened, but sometimes something seemed to happen every minute of every day.
There were others in the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers who were cyberwared too – and despite the fact that John had one additional implant to what most soldiers started with, he found that it was actually very little. There were 'wared ones like him, with just one or two, and then there were those who had everything from WiCy to prosthetics and bone and muscle supports, some with grafted biomechanical skin here and there, a few with even some obscure things like sonar implant – one was actually a walking talking link to a satellite. Complete with plug-in-screen. They were wired to high heavens. And of course it wasn't like their side was the only one with some technological advantages. Often, John found he couldn't keep up.
So he met with the technician of his infantry, and was scheduled for implantation. A mere few days later he was shipped back with some of the wounded, to spend couple of weeks in London to get his 'ware surgery – for high class WiCy, EyeCam and a memory implant – about twenty terabytes or so – and of course a processor to work the programs he would need to get, but that went into the base of his neck, not into his head. The surgery itself took about six hours, and was the most terrifying cyberware procedure John had gone through yet – getting WiCy and memory implant at the same time was a bit riskier than anything he'd done so far.
The EyeCam was the one that proved most risky, though, because there was always a forty percent chance of blindness in the eye to which the EyeCam was implanted in – not that it would matter, the eye could still see through the EyeCam, but not quite as well, not with same degree of control and, of course, he'd loose the night vision in that eye.
But John was nothing of not willing to take risks, and even after everything, he still wanted the implants – he wanted to be better than he already was, more efficient at what he was, at what he does. He wanted them even more because now he knew better than ever what a difference they made. And if he lost the eye and the EyeCam proved not to be as good as one might wish, he could later on just replace the eye with MicroEye. Provided that he saved the money he needed for it, of course.
The surgery also required him to be fitted with an outlet, but that was standard procedure with memory chips and processors, even without WiCy. It was a slightly uncomfortable concept. It was necessary for information transfer between a memory implant and computers and whatnot, but it could also be used to jack into the internet, and it was often all it was used for. And browsing internet with your brain, well... There were activities with better reputation. People with outlets with internet connections tended to get some not so good reputations, and John didn't want to become known as a wirehead or anything like that.
But aside from that, he didn't mind, and he entered the surgery room with only the mildest worry, and that for his left eye. He had pretty high rate of success as far as cyberware generally went and with this surgery in particular. Seventy four percent chance of perfect success, with nine percent chance of mild loss of eyesight in his eye, seven percent chance of mild brain injury and the usual ten percent chance of mild psychosis afterwards but that was all.
He didn't expect the WiCy to go online before he regained consciousness, though. A recently implanted WiCy was naturally offline, and protected with the highest of wide walls, but that didn't stop it from scanning the vicinity of other Wireless Cybernetic links – and being aware of four soldiers, most of them higher ranking officers, one non-commissioned officer and two doctors before he even woke up was… unnerving. And with his WiCy being the higher class, not only was he aware of the people, but the computers – of which there were fifty eight in the building, and on top of that there was a WLAN connection somewhere so near, that he could almost hook into it.
"Congratulations," a voice not quite said when he woke up, and blinking blearily John looked up to the technician who had been his attending surgeon. "The implantation was success and though your retina suffered mild scarring, it will heal itself in time. How does your eye feel?" the man said all of that, without ever once opening his mouth.
John's eye felt odd, and he saw… weirdly – it was rather like there were two visions in his left eye, like he was looking at two pictures all at once, one of them sharp and clear and looking as it should, the other slightly blurry and focused very differently. It was his mind, though, which felt the weirdest, because of all the technological awareness he wasn't used to, the unseen links he had always known existed ringing in his head like small bells, peeping out open connection and insert password right into his brain.
It took him a couple of months of therapy, to get used to the WiCy and the EyeCam – the memory was easier to handle, because it just was there did what it was supposed to do like memory did. The wireless linking was weird, though, weird and magnificent, not quite what one would imagine telepathy to be but very nearly. Of course, John could only talk mentally with those with similar links, but there was surprisingly many of those, and it was… pretty damn brilliant.
And, by the end of his therapy and training, he could read his emails without ever getting near a computer, given that there was a WLAN running where he was. It took some getting used to – and internet in your head wasn't quite the same as internet on a computer screen, it was in 3D for one and figuring how to read things with your mind took some learning. But once he managed that…
He wasn't going to hook himself into broadband, though. WLAN connection was slow and hard to handle and tended to give him a head ache – he didn't even want to imagine what would happen, if he had broadband in his head. Not to mention about the things people downloaded into their heads, knowledge, skills… It made him shudder just to have the necessary operating system and programs installed, GPS and so forth.
The EyeCam proved a very interesting advantage, though, aside from the knowledge that he'd never again forget a face – once the technicians had installed all the necessary programs, he could see target signs in his eye, and his 'ware could calculate how off mark he was, when aiming. He basically had a targeting system in his head. After getting used to that, John never missed the bull's-eye again.
5.
The last piece of cyberware John got from military, after years of service and one mission gone completely FUBAR, was his arm. An armour piercing round tore right through his shoulder, severing his arm almost clean off, taking a chunk of the acromion with it. There was no hope of re-attaching the arm, even if he had been anywhere near a hospital, and it was it was a small wonder he didn't lose his life. Why he didn't instantly lose consciousness, he didn't know, but he only managed to wrap his own shoulder with a single hand and lot of screaming with the power of his EGC-implant set to the highest rate of epinephrine production he could manage.
When he later woke up, in some field hospital and in mind blowing agony, the only thing he was asked and the only thing he managed to do was to hear the question and give the consent – to a reconstructive surgery.
He woke up later in hospital bed, feeling feather light and completely high and like he had been screwed into the bed with ten inch bolts. When he looked at his shoulder, he was and wasn't entirely surprised to find his shoulder looking more like piece of plumbing, than something a human had. His arm was gone, there was no replacement, and most of his shoulder had been reconstructed and repaired, bones continuing into metal, skin ending into a metal frame. Of course, he couldn't see the bones, but he could see the metal, and he could see the wires and pipes and the socket where, eventually, the metal frame work of his replacement arm would go.
How long he stared at the wiring in morbid fascination, he wasn't sure. It was a long time, though, because his eyes felt dry and his neck had a crick when the doctor entered. What he was told didn't surprise him much – his arm had been beyond saving, he had nearly died before they had managed to stabilise him, he had lost a lot of blood, the reconstructive surgery for his shoulder had been long and difficult, but they had managed to reconstruct what they could. His replacement arm was still in the works, it would arrive within the week – the connections would be made the next week.
"Depending on how your physical therapy goes, you might make full recovery," the doctor added with a smile, and John almost smiled back. Things like the loss of a limb no longer meant the end of one's career nowadays– replacements oftentimes worked even better than the originals, after all.
"That's nice. What's wrong with my leg, though?" he asked. "It's killing me. Did I get hit by shrapnel?"
The doctor merely blinked with surprise at that.
It turned out there was nothing wrong with John's leg, except for the fact that it hurt and he couldn't walk without support. In the week before his arm was finally delivered, he was examined over and over, and then finally a therapist came to see him – talking to him not about his injuries, but his experiences, what he had seen during the attack, what he had been doing – saving a life, trying and failing at it.
The therapist told him that he was shell shocked, that he had seen more combat than he had been expecting to, that it had caught him unawares – that the shock had enabled him to save himself, but with consequences. Now he felt guilty because he had seen so many die in the attack, and because he hadn't managed to save the patient when he had been hit. His body was manifesting the psychological pain as physical pain in his leg.
"It picked a fine time to do that," John grumbled, running a hand over the connections of his open shoulder. One would think that his brain would be busy with handling the loss of an arm. But now that he was no longer high on pain killers – and under strict orders not to activate his hormonal control implant, the scenes from before he had been shot flashed back to him. Distant, blurry images of a nightmare, except real.
And then, without his conscious choice, the images cleared themselves out and turned pristine. The EyeCam had seen it all; the memory chip had recorded it – every sordid second of the action perfectly preserved in his head. And John remembered, with cold sweat breaking out over him in a way it never had, even before the EGC-implant, the young sergeant he had been treating – who had had a bullet wound in his leg, a wound which had torn open his femoral artery.
John didn't need to be told that the sergeant had died. The kid had probably bled out when John himself had been high on a burst of implant enhanced adrenaline, and too busy tearing his jacket apart with teeth and bloodstained fingers to use it to stop his own bleeding.
The leg pain was his constant companion through the attachment of his new, mechanical left arm. It was a sleek thing, once it was finished. The shell along the arm was white polycarbonate plastic, and the hand was mirror the reflection of his right, done in latex and almost convincing. Except for the fact that it felt nothing like skin. The connection of nerves was the worst thing about the entire operation, and even then the constant pulsing of the pain in his leg went nowhere.
It took him a month to learn how to move the left hand like it was his own. A week after that, his therapist wrote the damning words: psychosomatic limp, intermitted tremor on his prosthetic arm, caused by PTSD.
Recommended for honourable discharge, effective immediately.
6.
First thing John did in London, was shutting down his WiCy. There were too many connections – libraries, cafes, houses, offices, people with laptops, all with WLAN, and his WiCy had a wide enough range to read as many as twenty uplinks in one turn. And there were other people with WiCy's, dozens and dozens of them, and it was apparently part of the general WiCy community to greet passing WiCy's with a mental hello – which unnerved the hell out of John, after getting used to the strict control of the WiCys of military.
Next he shut down the EyeCam, and emptyed his memory chip – which meant the unnerving connection to a laptop and the disorienting feeling of being connected to that laptop with his brain. After that, though, things eased a bit – the double vision of his left eye let off, and he no longer recorded everything he saw – he actually forgot things again, faces, name tags, places, and it was rather refreshing.
Because of the orders by his therapist, his hormonal control implant was already turned off – apparently it was unhealthy trying to regulate emotions like that, who knew – so he didn't need to do anything about that. It didn't help, though, because the military had taught him how to subconsciously blame himself to the point of causing himself physical pain – self control wasn't maybe as good as the 'ware, but it got damn near close.
The only piece of cyberware that was still running, aside from the arm, was the language implant – but he didn't really even consider it a piece of 'ware, it had been part of him so long that it was, well… part of him. He doubted he could've turned it off even if he had wanted to. Not that it made much difference – people tended to talk the language of the land, despite how many they knew, and in the UK everyone spoke English. John would've understood that with or without implant.
And after all was said and done, it was just him, in a small room; a bed-sit, with a leg that thought it was injured, a prosthetic arm that refused to work properly, and over fifteen thousand pounds worth of hardware in his brain which he didn't use. And, of course, a Sig Sauer in his bedside drawer, sitting there, waiting.
And for the life of him, he couldn't figure how he had gotten there – how he had gone from having his dream career in the military, having the 'ware he had always wanted, having his life as perfect as it was humanly possible to make it, to… to this? Whatever this was, it didn't feel like much, it didn't feel like anything really. It felt hollower than faking emotions through the manipulation of hormones.
"I knew this would happen, you know," Harry crowed at him through a haze of early afternoon intoxication, when he had run out of excuses to avoid it. "I told you, didn't I, when you joined military – I told you they'd stuff your head full of shit and then send you back half the man you were."
No, she hadn't actually, she had told him uniforms were hot and that he ought to try and score some hot chick in a hot uniform. John didn't tell her that though, because mean humour was Harry's way of managing, and after walking out on her wife, she was only barely doing that. Mean humour, drinking, and denial, and even after that she had to push away all the things that reminded her of Clara, give them away.
When he accepted the phone, wondering if he could learn to use it – wondering if it had Bluetooth capabilities and if he could connect to it through WiCy if he turned it on – he also wondered if it would do him some good too, trying some denial.
When he got back to the bed-sit, he bundled up his uniform, his tags and everything else from the military into as tight a ball as he could manage. He almost threw them into the garbage chute, but in the end couldn't do it, and the uniform and everything else went into a plastic bag in the bottom of his duffle bag, to be forgotten. The Sig stayed where it was, though. He couldn't part with that morbid concept just yet.
That following day, after a morning spent in agony, both mental and physical, and sheer helpless frustration, he took his cane and levered himself up. Damning his leg to hell, and his helplessness, stupid mental difficulties and the implants which even now made it hard to forget the things he had seen to go along with it, he went for a walk.
It was about time he started to sort out his life, his new, poorer life. To start with, he needed a permanent flat.
7.
Bart's brought back memories, most of them better than the ones he had of the times since. It was different from the way he remembered it to be, true, but not by much – what had changed the most were the students. It startled him a bit to see many of students that wandered about the halls had outlets on the sides of their necks.
"You wouldn't believe the strain on campus servers," Mike snorted as they walked through the halls, John limping. "We've had to put 'net walls into classrooms to keep the students from surfing in class time – not that it makes much difference. Everyone's a hacker these days." He glanced at John, who said nothing. "Have you got WiCy? How does that feel?"
"A bit like having wireless connection in your head," John answered, absently tugging the collar of his shirt to cover the outlet, still looking around. He felt old, all of sudden. There was new paint in the walls, the paintings on the walls had changed, the plants were different, and the students were all so young. Had he ever been so young? God it felt like it was years ago – it felt like it was yesterday.
"Well, here we are," Mike said, and opened the door to one of the laboratories which John remembered using himself during that one damned project about cell division, or whatever it had been. The room had gone through a complete refurbishment in the mean while, the tables were new, the curtains were gone, the equipment gleamed.
"A bit different from my day," John muttered, and felt even older than before. One of the microscopes, he noted, boasted a wireless connection with a sticker on its side. Bloody hell.
There was someone in the classroom, a man younger than John with black hair and black jacket, working with a Petri dish. He seemed to fit the place perfectly, all sleek lines and neat design in clothing, hair and bone structure and everything - he too probably had outlets beneath the collar of his dress shirt.
The man asked to borrow Mike's phone, claiming no signal on his. "Ah, here. You can use mine," John said, after Mike confessed to having left his with his coat. John wasn't all that worried about letting the man, whoever he was, handle his phone – he hadn't had it long enough to add anything more than couple of phone numbers to it, and if Mike knew the bloke well enough not to be surprised by demands to borrow a phone…
"Afghanistan or Iraq?" the man asked, making John pause. Mike smiled knowingly on the other side of the wide lab table, and John got the strangest feeling that he was about to be played with.
And he was. The bloke went from asking a shockingly personal question to, "How do you feel about the violin?" and to "Potential flat mates should know the worst about each other," and then to, "I know you're an army doctor and that you have been recently invalided from Afghanistan, I know you have a brother who's worried about you but to whom you don't go for help, possibly because he's an alcoholic – and I know that your therapist thinks your limp is psychosomatic quite correctly."
Very soon after that Sherlock Holmes from 221B Baker Street dashed off – to get his riding crop from the mortuary.
"Yes, he's always like that," Mike answered, before John could ask.
John considered what he just experienced – and experienced was really the only right for it. "Huh," he then said, and turned to mike. "You set me up. You owe me a coffee for that, you bastard."
Mike grinned widely, pushing himself up from the chair he had sat in, watching the show. "Alright. But you're going to check out the flat, right?" he asked. "Sherlock's a bit, hm - but I figure you'd like that sort of things. You always were the type."
"The type?" John asked, frowning.
"The type who gets an EGC-implant at twenty one, and then goes to war after getting his Ph.D. Sherlock should be right up your alley," Mike answered with a carefree shrug. "Come on. I'll show you the cafeteria – they decorated, it's actually pretty nice now."
8.
Somehow checking out the 221B Baker Street flat ended up with John at a crime scene of all places, looking down at the corpse of one Jennifer Wilson, who had died dressed in violently pink jacket and skirt, with pink shoes and nails and everything. There were police officers and forensic specialists about, and John felt very uncomfortable in the blue jumpsuit they had told him to wear.
Sherlock, on other hand, seemed to be in his element. He had whisked out a head set from somewhere in his coat, fitting the focus lens over his right eye, and then more or less crawling on the corpse, with the lenses whirring and clicking as it zoomed in and out. "She has memory 'ware. Has the memory chip been downloaded?" Sherlock asked, while feeling around the woman's collar with gloved fingers, eying his gleaming fingers.
John shifted awkwardly, smothering the urge to touch his neck, having a harder time smothering the memories. Back in Afghanistan, he had lost count of how many times he had needed to download the memory bank of a dead soldier to his own chip, for safe keeping. God only knew how many last words, unsent emails and goodbye notes he had carried in his head.
"We're waiting for the licensed technician," the officer, Lestrade or something, answered while watching Sherlock with mild curiosity.
"You know, this would be all so much faster if you would get a post mortem download licence," Sherlock said irritably. "She could have a note in her memory chip, and here you are, wasting time."
John shifted a bit where he stood, but refrained from saying anything.
In the end, Sherlock didn't seem to need anything more cybernetic to figure everything about the woman out. She was media worker, had been recently in Cardiff, cheated in her marriage repeatedly, and so forth. John was just processing that, when Sherlock started going on about her case, asking where it was, where the police had put it. The next thing John knew, his potential flatmate had rushed down the stairs, yelled something about serial killers and pink upwards at them and then he was gone.
"Aw, great," Lestrade muttered, and turned to John, who was wondering what sort of enhancements Sherlock must have, to have a brain that fast. Had they developed some new cyberware when he hadn't been looking? And where could he get one?
"So, a serial killer?" John asked, trying to catch up.
"Well, if Sherlock says it, it's pretty certain to be right. Where is that damned tech guy?! I want her chip downloaded," Lestrade yelled at someone – Anderson or something. Sherlock had been fairly unpleasant to the guy when they had entered the crime scene.
"He's not coming," the man said with a grimace. "Something about a family problem. I'm trying to get hold of someone else."
"Damn it. We need her chip downloaded before we lose the data," Lestrade muttered, touching the ports at the side of his neck and John frowned at the man and then glanced at the room where the dead woman lay. The body had been lying long enough for rigor mortis to not only set in, but to pass – a few more hours, and the cybernetics would run out of juice, and the data would be corrupted.
And if it was a serial killer… it was probably pretty important to get that data.
"Er… I have a post mortem download licence," he offered finally, making Lestrade turn to face him with disbelief and suspicion. John remembered that Sherlock hadn't deigned to introduce him at all, and sighed. "Hi, I'm Doctor John Watson, late of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers," he said with a grimace.
"Honestly?" the forensics bloke, Anderson, asked with disbelief.
"I got my licences in my wallet, if you don't believe me," John said.
Lestrade hesitated, but nodded – John's card was checked, and a cable was fetched for him. It felt a bit odd to turn his 'ware on after a long break, but it was like riding a bicycle – he just wished there weren't other WiCy's around, and someone had set the place for WLAN too, damn it. But he had ignored all that before, and could do it now too, in favour of helping out.
There was almost fifty gigabyte's worth of data in Jennifer Wilson's brain, the transfer of which took almost twenty minutes. Transferring from person to person was always tricky, but when one of those people were dead, it was especially so. John had had to train for nearly four weeks non-stop, before he had gotten the hang of holding the link up without damaging the data, or the support from the other end. Thankfully, Jennifer Wilson had no fire walls or passwords in her chip, and the transfer went more or less smoothly.
Once he was done, John transferred the data into a lap top – at which point they found that most of her data was recordings of her trysts, meetings, some videos and some four hundred documents that dealt with her work. She had also made a note just before dying – a text file with almost ten kilobytes worth of Rachel Rachel Rachel written over and over and over again.
"Well, that was handy. What does it mean, though?" Lestrade muttered and then shook his head, turning to John who gratefully unplugged the chord from his neck. "Thank you for your help, Doctor Watson," the man said, and then switched to private WiCy, "If you don't mind me asking, though, what are you doing with Sherlock Holmes?"
"Honestly, I have no idea," John answered out loud, powering his own WiCy down quickly. "It was nice meeting you. Now if you don't mind, I think I'll get out of this rubber suit."
9.
After that he was kidnapped by a woman with prosthetic antennae in place of her right ear and a man claiming to be Sherlock's friend – or arch enemy – who seemed to know everything about John's private records, including the notes his therapist had written, and the notes of his past cyberware surgeries. John was starting to wonder if he had fallen into a coma before his prosthetic surgery, when Sherlock sent him a message demanding that he come to 221B, and he decided that no coma dream could be this irritating.
He was doubly sure of it, when he found that Sherlock just wanted him to send a message – and not just any text, but a text to the dead woman's phone, because since the phone wasn't anywhere else, it must be with the killer, or something like that. Despite having his processor running, his memory chip recording every word, John couldn't keep up with the explanation, and trying only made him grow all the more irritated.
"What's wrong with your own phone?" John asked finally with disbelief.
"The number might be recognised."
"Then send a message through the internet! You must be set for WiCy."
At that Sherlock paused, glancing at him and then away. Shaking his head, John did send the message as requested, sitting down after wards and sighing, as the ache of his leg started getting to him.
"What sort of 'ware do you have anyway?" John asked, rubbing at his leg and giving the other man a curious look, never having met anyone like the man. "I mean, the deductions, the observations… I've never heard of anything like that. You must have a really high class processor," he muttered a bit enviously – his was good, but nowhere near the best.
"None," Sherlock answered.
"I'm sorry?"
"I have none," Sherlock said, and then jumped out of sofa, as John's phone begun to ring. John didn't get the chance to process that cryptic statement, before Sherlock was dashing about again, without the intention of calling the police because apparently there wasn't any time for it. John wasn't sure why he went with the man, especially after Sherlock had said that he had only explained anything because he had no skull to talk to, but god help him, he still did.
"Sergeant Donovan, she says you get off on this, you enjoy it," he pointed out, while limping after the man.
"And I said dangerous and here you are," Sherlock pointed out. John had to give him that.
He did pause for a moment to turn the EGC-implant on and set himself on the calm setting, just in case – he had an odd feeling that if this kept on, he'd end up punching Sherlock Holmes before the night was out. Who cared what his therapist thought – it was probably better at this point to regulate, than lose his temper completely. And besides, Sherlock's bribe-happy kidnapper of an arch enemy thought John should fire her, anyway.
Between popping into a restaurant – where the manager somehow came to be under the impression that they were on a date – running after a cab with a Californian passenger and dashing back to the flat, John forgot his limp, his prosthetics stopped shaking, and he could run for the first time in what felt like eternity. His lungs were burning and he was giddy with delight once they finally stopped running, and somehow hearing Sherlock laugh just made John giggle all the more.
Then Lestrade was there, had been for a while judging by the way the man had made himself comfortable. "It's a drugs bust!" the man informed them happily, and John had to take a double take because, seriously, drugs in this day and age? It was much more common to get high on broadband and downloads and god only knew what programs, than on recreational drugs - and Sherlock?
"Oh, yeah, we found out who Rachel is," Lestrade said after a while, glancing at John and explaining that Jennifer Wilson had had a daughter, while Sherlock looked between them confusedly.
"Rachel?" the man asked, making John realise that in the rush of events, he had forgotten everything about it. The look Sherlock gave him wasn't entirely happy, but John just shrugged – after everything, he felt justified in keeping things because Sherlock had made him text a murderer.
"Why would she lament about her dead daughter in her final moments? It's been fourteen years!" Sherlock said with disbelief. "Ten kilobytes worth of Rachel, that must be hundreds if not thousands of repetitions. She wouldn't have done that, couldn't have done it, if it wasn't important – if she putting every ounce of will she had into it."
Sherlock did figure it out, and when he did it was as magnificent as it had been before, to see him come to a conclusion, to see his brain work. Before John knew, Sherlock had the woman's email address, the phone's GPS coordinates and… then he was gone, again, leaving John trying to catch up, wondering what had happened, wondering how anyone could have a mind like that. And no cyberware at all?
Then the laptop left behind was dinging, and John was watching the location of Jennifer Wilson's phone move. His brain wasn't like Sherlock's, his processor wasn't designed for analytical reasoning, but he wasn't an idiot.
Less than twenty minutes later, he was falling back to his old army routine. The EyeCam whirred on with familiar, awkward double vision, and the cabbie that had taken Sherlock – who was somehow convincing Sherlock to take something – was marked with a red target in John's vision. The prosthetic hand was steady as it supported his flesh one, the processor estimated the wind, the distance, and the barriers of glass in between, until the target flashed red, and John fired.
10.
Later, after a murder, escape from a crime scene, and a confrontation with a man/kidnapper who turned out to be Sherlock's brother – and his human computer, which was what Anthea was according to Sherlock – they had an excellent meal of Chinese and long, leisurely walk back to Baker Street. There John watched how Sherlock went from neat suit into casual shirt and dressing gown – and saw that there were absolutely no outlets in the base of the man's neck.
"You really have no cyberware?" he asked, still surprised, fingering his own outlets just above his right collar bone.
"None," Sherlock answered arranging the collar of his dressing gown more comfortably, and very plainly revealing the complete lack of any sort of hardware in his neck – he had no surgery scars either. No outlets, no wiring, no processor and John was finally starting to believe that there were no chips, no sense enhancements, no organ controllers, nothing.
"Wow," he said, as all he had seen Sherlock do settled in. Not just the thinking, the observing and the recalling, but the running too –going the whole time without food or drink. John had seriously thought that there'd be a plethora of implants in Sherlock, enhancing every aspect of him – he just seemed like the sort who would have everything and of the latest, most expensive model.
Then he remembered what Sherlock had said. None. "You don't even have the language one?" John asked with surprise. He could understand being a purist. There were some who believed that cyberware was harmful or dangerous or sinful or some such, but even those tended to have the language implant – it was usually implated so young, that most people didn't have purist thoughts yet.
"CIRS," Sherlock said, as a way of explanation, and looked away. "Mycroft is the same – that's why he has that woman, she does all his cyber-linking for him. Though honestly, I rather doubt I would have any implants even if I was compatible. I do have some purist tendencies and at this point I rather doubt an implant could in any way improve what is already there. If there was an implant that could delete boredom, well, that would be a different thing."
John blinked. CIRS – Cybernetic Implant Rejection Syndrome. Well, it explained it, he supposed. It was very rare – usually people had at least some compatibility, however low the percentage was, but CIRS… none. They couldn't even have the language implant, as safe as it was, their bodies would reject it almost instantly. And usually with very bad consequences.
"I suppose you're right," John murmured, running a hand over his shoulder, where the flesh and mechanics connected. He had always thought that cyberware was necessary, a fact of life, something everyone had, something everyone needed, ever since the language implant – and that knowledge had only firmed the older he had gotten, the more implants he had gained.
Even after all he had done, and lost, and gained, he still thought it. He would be lesser without his implants – without the languages he would've never managed so well in Afghanistan, nor without the EGC-implant. The memory chip, the EyeCam and the processor were just as important – and he would still sell his soul for a MicroEye. And after the armour piercing round had taken his arm, well, he was damned glad neuroscience had enabled the creation of the prosthetic that had taken its place.
But it was oddly humbling to see a man like Sherlock, without any of it – still somehow better than the rest of them.
"So, what do you think?" Sherlock asked.
"About what?" John asked back, flexing the latex covered fingers that felt nothing, but still moved like they were his own.
"The flat, the work, the… everything," Sherlock said. "I could use someone who has a post mortem download licence. And a WiCy, though I can normally manage with regular old WiFi in most situations. The EyeCam could come in handy; I could name five cases off hand, when an eye witness with EyeCam would've been enough to solve the whole thing – how big is your memory chip anyway? Ten terabytes, twenty?"
"You can think of uses for that too?" John asked and lowered his prosthetic hand to the thigh that no longer felt like it had a bullet inside it. In less than twenty four hours, Sherlock Holmes had proved him wrong, cured his limp and tremor, and turned his life upside down. How had that happened?
"Many uses, yes. How's your processor? Did you know that there are programs for cyberware, that automatically record faces, name tags, licence plates…" Sherlock trailed away, looking thoughtful. "Which I can of course do myself, but it would be useful to have at hand a file that can be printed out at any moment.
"I'm not going to be your human computer," John answered, narrowing his eyes a bit.
"I was merely suggesting," the world's only consulting detective said innocently, and John snorted.
∞.
It took John only a week or so of coexisting with Sherlock, to jack himself into the internet, and download the program Sherlock had mentioned – after they had witnessed an incident with a robber and then been left with no evidence of the robber's identity. A few days after that, John added another program – one that, through the EyeCam, constructed 3D images of rooms, complete with furniture, decorations and whatever. That one he got in self defence, because Sherlock could always remember every detail of every crime scene he saw, and beside him John felt hopelessly slow and dim-witted.
That feeling remained, though, growing ever more pronounced as time went by. John knew that while his cyberware wasn't exactly the latest and the best – his memory chip had nothing on the more expensive hundred terabyte models, and his processor, well, there were faster ones. However he was, on a scale of bad and good, the better side of average – most people didn't have processors at all, definitely no EyeCams, and the RENA implants were military-only. So he had things pretty well sorted out, as 'ware went.
Beside Sherlock, though… he felt positively low-tech.
"Oh, come on, John. You have eyes – hell, you have EyeCam! How can you miss this?!" Sherlock would ask, pointing at some minute little piece of evidence that John hadn't noticed and even if he had, he would've never considered important – it of course solved the case. Then there were, "You saw how he was, perspiration, pupils dilated, fidgeting – not to mention the burns on his fingers and the stains on his collar – it's obvious that he's the thief," and after that, "Naturally he's going back to the scene of the crime – where have you been for the last hour and half? It's his ritual, his moment of victory, going back without anyone knowing," and so forth.
It still blew John's mind that Sherlock had no cyberware at all. Especially after the start of the case of Sebastian Wilkes – the break in to the vault that was watched over by four cyber-brains, in a building filled with WiCys all hooked into the same network, with their eyes and ears in every computer. And despite all that hardware in his disposal, all that sheer computing power, it took Sherlock's perfectly organic brain to deduce who the break in had been directed at.
That wasn't to say that John didn't have his own slight advantages on Sherlock, though – like seeing graffiti only to have it vanish the next moment, but having every detail of it recorded. And, once he had managed to sneak Sherlock's phones GPS code, he never lost track of the man, given that he kept the thing on him. And of course, John could see in the dark, which was something he privately gloated over every time Sherlock had to pause in the dark to see which way to go.
But the further they went on, the more John became aware of the differences between them. And, as Sherlock proved to be better than anyone they met, cyberware or no, John found himself wondering how badly he would've been left behind, if he hadn't had any 'ware. Would he have been able to understand anything the man said when he went off into his thousand-words-a-minute tirades about how this clue led to that, and that to this, all to form a complete picture that no one in their right mind would've been able to see.
For the first time since his very first implant, John wondered what it might've been like if he had been a purist too. Of course, Sherlock had no choice in the matter, it was a medical issue and he wasn't cyberphobic or anything. If anything he knew more about cyberware than most people with most of their brains riddled with it. And John knew that if Sherlock would've had the choice, he'd at least have a MicroEye and more, but… John wasn't sure if it really would've been that big of an improvement. Sherlock wasn't exactly perfect, but… he certainly had a once in a lifetime brain.
That was a bit harder to remember, though, when Sherlock wanted to experiment on his.
"Oh, come on, John. It's just one program," the detective tried to wheedle, holding a keyboard, screen and couple of cables towards him with eager expression. "It's perfectly safe - they're testing it at Scotland Yard as we speak! It would be useful."
"You are not installing anything into my head, definitely not a program that builds character profiles!" the former soldier snapped, backing away. "I pass through a crowded street and find myself with dozens of gigabytes worth of useless information in my head, no thanks! And didn't I say something about not becoming your human computer?"
"I'm not saying that you would be. I’m just saying that it would be useful," Sherlock said.
"Then why do you have a plug in screen and keyboard?" John demanded to know, pointing at the items in his flatmates hands.
"Ah, well… they were just lying around."
"You bought them yesterday," John rolled his eyes. "No, Sherlock, you're not installing anything into me. Now get away from me before I flip a switch – you don't want to mess with a man in full control of his testosterone and adrenaline production."
"I think that would be the best sort of man to mess with," Sherlock said, giving John a considering look. "Maybe just a test run?" he then suggested. "You can always uninstall it."
"No, Sherlock."