Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful - Arwen Dayton Elys

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back the bus, the theater, my accident, everything.

      “If I’d died, then I really would have been a martyr,” he went on, as if the idea pleased him. “Or even a saint. You’d have to light candles to me and memorize my life story, Milla.”

      “Hagiography,” I told him. “That’s what you call the life story of a saint.”

      “Yeah. I think I knew that,” he said around another mouthful of burger. “You’d have to memorize my hagiography and ask for my help warding off evil and interceding with God on your behalf and finding your lost keys and stuff.”

      I smiled at that, and then, setting down my sandwich, I declaimed, “St. Gabriel. A true warrior of faith. Succumbed to temptation and slept with a cyborg, then became one himself.”

      He laughed.

      And there was nothing more to say about what had happened between us.

      “Want my fries?” I asked. “I’m not that hungry.”

      “Yeah.” He dumped the fries on his napkin, squeezed ketchup all over them. He ate the fries with an expression I recognized. He knew he liked fries and the taste was good, but they didn’t provide him with quite the same feeling he was used to. “Ugh. They’re like fry-flavored Styrofoam,” he said, his mouth full. “But coffee’s different now, isn’t it? It’s, like, way better.”

      My eyebrow quirked up almost lasciviously. Coffee. “It tingles around the edges,” I told him, hearing dreaminess in my own voice, “like the coffee is eating the mesh, digesting it so—”

      “—so it blends back into everything else,” he finished for me, in the same rapt tone. “Like the fake parts are starting to become real again.”

      Yes. That was exactly what drinking coffee felt like now. It was why I’d been in that coffee shop in the first place.

      “Have you had the coffee at Go Get ’Em Tiger since …?” I asked him.

      “No. Is it special?”

      “It’s like what you were describing,” I told him, “but ten times more.”

      “Hm. Maybe we could go there sometime,” he suggested casually.

      I snorted at that, sounding less like a barfing dog than usual. Laughs, snorts, coughs—they were all getting better. Was he really asking me out?

      “Sure, we could get coffee,” I told him, “but don’t think that I’m going to have sex with a robot.”

      It’s a popular myth that the most deadly animal in history is the human, because murder and war and genocide can be laid at the feet of our species. However, the deadliest animal is of course the mosquito.

      Fortunately, both species can now be significantly improved.

      —Erik Hannes Eklund, Chair of Bioethics and Species Design, Columbia University, in his opening remarks to first-year medical students, 2041

      Let’s leap ahead a little more …

PART THREE

      Elsie Tadd woke up in a room she did not at first recognize, with a dry throat, a throbbing head, and aches and pains all over. It appeared to be nighttime when she first opened her eyes, but when she sat up on the edge of the cot with the faded patchwork quilt, she noticed a hint of sunlight coming in through the window up by the ceiling.

      “Church basement,” she whispered, identifying her location.

      This was the spare room of her father’s old church, where he would sometimes sleep if he stayed late to speak with parishioners or to work on a sermon. Elsie knew the room well, though she hadn’t seen it in a long time. Besides the little bed, there was an old desk and a couple shelves full of dusty books—mostly rare versions of the Bible. One wall was covered by a rather beautiful mural that had been painted by Elsie’s own mother. The painting depicted God, in radiant robes, up near the ceiling, and below him was Jesus, healing the ten lepers who had called out to him on the way to Jerusalem. In the Bible, the men had said, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” but Elsie had always wondered how they’d been sure it was Jesus and whether they might have started out with something like “Excuse me, young fellow with the beard. Are you that Jesus everyone’s been talking about?” or maybe they’d called out “Jesus!” really quickly and waited to see if he looked around. When she was younger, Elsie had spent hours in this room, drawing and doing her homework, and she’d imagined painting speech bubbles over the lepers’ heads and filling in their words.

      “But how am I here?” she whispered, because her presence in the church basement didn’t make much sense. Elsie’s father had been the minister of the Church of the New Pentecost for all of Elsie’s life, until a year and a half ago. Since he’d lost his ministry, no one in their family had set foot in the place. Yet here she was. “Did I dream about Africa?” she murmured.

      No. Africa was there, in her mind, though it was like a mirage that lost its shape when you tried to look directly at it. Still, she recalled details—the city of Tshikapa in the Congo, the feel of thick cardboard in her fingers as she held up her protest sign; wet, miserable heat; everyone chanting.

      The church was silent around Elsie, but she could hear the distant whoosh-whoosh of auto-drones commuting across the city. Her little brother, Teddy, used to run around this room saying “Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!” while pretending that he could fly.

      Teddy. The image of her curly-haired, seven-year-old brother brought other images along with it: Elsie’s mother sweating in her blouse and skirt, her green eyes alight with energy, leading the chant. Teddy holding a sign as big as himself that read I Am GRATEFUL For The Hole In My Heart!

      Elsie swallowed, which reminded her of her sore throat and by association of every other part of her body that hurt. She felt her face. There were no bandages, only several spots that were painful to the touch, including all the skin around her right eye. The eye itself felt uncomfortable and strained, though she could see out of it perfectly well. She pulled up her long skirt to find bandages covering both of her knees, with scabs poking out beneath the edges of the gauze.

      Another trickle of recollection came, as if through a haze of painkillers: A fall on a rocky patch of ground. A trampling of feet. Her father on a makeshift stage, singing and lifting his arms. Teddy, singing next to Elsie with all his heart: I was made this way! Oh, I was made this way! And the sensation in Elsie’s chest, the feeling that came over her whenever she thought about Teddy’s birth defect—the hole between the chambers of his heart that made him tired and one day might kill him—the sense that a giant had taken hold of her and was squeezing her ribs.

      Maybe there had been painkillers, lots of them.

      Elsie let her skirt drop.

      “There really was a hospital,” she whispered to God in the mural on the wall. She imagined a speech bubble above His head that said, “No argument here.”

      More images crept out of the shadows. There had been a clinic in a small building of decaying plaster on the edge of amuddy town square, a banner announcing Malaria Prevention and Treatment for Birth Defects. A line of Congolese women and children, waiting to be seen. Aid workers watching with irritation as Elsie’s father ushered his followers out of trucks to take places in front of the hospital.

      More. A little Congolese girl, with beautiful dark brown skin and a sad face, standing stoically while a doctor gave her an injection beneath her belly button. Elsie knowing what the injection was: Castus Germline, the reason her father had dragged them to the Congo. Save the Third World, even if the First World has been lost. Once inside the body of a young girl, Castus Germline would edit diseases out of all her eggs and edit in protections against malaria and other infections, so that her children’s and grandchildren’s health

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