Heartland - Part Seven

“Mark?”

A voice pushed through layers and layers of fogginess. Consciousness was an idea too far out of his grasp at this point. The sound waves buffeted against his sleepy mind softly.

“Maaaark, come on, we need some verification here.”

Mark didn't really know if he even had control over any of his limbs, let alone his eyes. But somewhere, a cell in his brain told his eyelids to open.

Horrific white light blinded him promptly. The pain still thrummed in his insides, threatening to close his eyes for him. In fact, his kids started to drop again.

“Ah ah ah, no no, you can't rest yet.” The disembodied voice said, clearer to him this time. It was American, almost snarky. A hand pressed at the base of his spine, sitting him up manually.

“We need you to pay attention, Mark.” A different voice. His eyes desperately tried to adjust, pinpointing the people who were speaking to him. He made out three shapes, so far.

“You with us? Good - Mark, how many fingers am I holding up?”

Mark focussed on a man right in front of him who was holding his hand out. He counted one, two, three - but it took more effort to speak than to count.

“Three?” he finally said, his voice wheezy and quiet. The man nodded and grinned, then disappeared behind another man, this one with wilder hair than the first.

“Mark, are you at all aware of where you are?” he asked, clipboard in hand. A woman scurried behind him, busy with a selection of tools in her hands.

“Not in the slightest.” he said. Mark tried to sit up again, but the man pushed a hand on his chest. He squished back into a pillow.

“Mark, you’re experiencing liver failure as well as the corruption of a few of your other internal organs, including your heart.” the man explained. The severity of his words resonated in Mark’s foggy head, and he snapped to attention.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The man smiled. “We’re going to be your doctors today - and we need a stamp of approval from you to do what we need to in order to salvage your insides.” He turned to the other man. “Arin? Give your fastest explanation possible, please.”

The other one smirked. “What we’re going to do is implement some mechanics to replace what’s failed inside of you. It’s safe and harmless, as soon as your body adapts to it - the system will wire through your liver, kidneys, and through various vessels into your heart. Because the chips and wires we’re going to put in will go to your heart, it will change how you function overall. Do you give us permission to do so?”

The gist Mark received from all of this was that instead of human organs, he was going to have robot ones.

“Will it save me?” he asked.

“The woman spoke up as she was faced the other way, preparing a needle of some sort. “Yes - it’s the only method of saving you, at this point.”

Mark only nodded. “Do it, then.”

The woman turned around, smiled sweetly, then told him to breath. He did - then the needle splunged into his arm. In mere seconds, everything went black.

---

His dreams were weirder than any he had ever experienced. It was like he was still awake, still aware, but completely under the influence of the drug they had administered him.

He could feel no pain, but something in his brain told him that his body was being violated like crazy. His subconscious told him kindly that his entire front was probably cut open and his insides currently being removed and replaced with foreign metal ones. But Mark’s drugged brain also told him that it was keeping him alive. So he allowed strangers to go at him with their scalpels and syringes, and at one point, he even thought,

Do your worst.

---

It was a strange sense of deja vu. The bright lights, the burbling voices pushing through to his head. Except now, the pain was greatly subsided.

“Awake so soon?” a female voice said.

Mark focussed his eyesight. Some kind of painkiller, he was sure, was messing with his senses and his thought process. But if it kept whatever pain he should be in away, he was alright with it. Mark turned his head slowly and met the eyes of the girl from earlier. Her hands were flying along a keyboard, a large screen in front of her.

She had long, black hair with one stripe of yellow-blonde on the right side. Her makeup was dramatic, sharp and angular. In fact, her face as a whole was quite sharp and judgmental. Her scrubs were black and baggy, covering every inch of her.

“How do you feel?” she asked, fingernails clicking.

Mark’s voice came out in a whisper. “Like hell.”

She smiled. “Good - that means we did something right.” Mark noted that her smile brightened all of her features. Her voice was light and lilting, and Mark gave a small grin back at her.

“You need to rest. None of us expected you to be up so soon. We’ll consult with you after the painkillers have worn off a bit.”

Mark nodded, but opened his mouth. She looked at him expectantly.

“Who are you?” it was the second time he had asked the question, and the second time he got an indirect answer.

“No one important right now. Rest.”

Mark dozed off to the sound of a monitor beating in time with his heart. As he slipped away, he thought about how much of his real heart he had left.

It was like some sick groundhog day. Mark kept waking up to the blinding lights, to the muffled voices. And there was so much that he didn’t understand. The lack of knowledge on what had happened to him and what these ‘doctors’ had done to him was worse than the steadily increasing pain as he woke up each time.

Keeping track of each awakening was pointless to him. Instead, he waited for the acme of his pain, the worst his body had to offer. He knew, then, that he would be truly awake, truly aware. That time came on what must have been the sixth time he had opened his eyes.

Everything was crystal clear when he looked around the room, now. The time it took for his eyes to adjust was seconds compared to minutes. He had no interest in the surroundings - he had no care for any of the tech hanging on the walls or the crinkly paper beneath him. He cared about answers - and there were two people in the room that he could get those from.

Mark coughed, the action making him grimace horribly. But the sound caught the attention of the men, who were both hunched over some tablet. One of them clapped his hands together and gave a patronizing smile.

“Aha, so you’re up. Are you going to stay awake this time? I’m sure you’ve just got buckets of things to ask us.” he said. Mark raised his arms and propped himself into a more seated position.

“No shit.” he said bitterly, but the effect was weak since his vocal cords were so underused. The other man laughed as they both pulled their wheeling chairs up beside him. They each stretched.

“Alright, alrighty aye, now -” the one with brown hair cut around his chin cracked his knuckles. “Pleased to finally meet you, Mark, my name’s Arin. I’ve just spent three days monitoring how many times you’ve needed to pee - I think we’re on a good enough level to shake hands, yeah?” he raised an eyebrow expectantly. Mark almost laughed as he took his hand and gave a small shake.

“And I’m Danny - perhaps not as idiotic, but idiotic all the same.” the opposite one said. He had wild, curly brown hair that framed his face and a wide smile.

Mark blinked. “And you two are the guys that just cut me wide open?” he asked. Danny laughed.

“Hard to believe we’re certified, right?”

A door swung open and that woman walked in again. She jumped at seeing Mark up, and Arin and Danny surrounding him. But then she sighed.

“About time, then. Ready to get to work on explaining what we’ve done to poor Mark over here?” she asked.

Arin swung around in his chair and grabbed a monitor attached to the wall. It followed him as he faced Mark, extending on it’s long retractor. The woman tapped some keys on a port and an image of a man came up on the screen. Arin pointed at the shape.

“That’s you.” he said calmly. The image zoomed in on Mark’s abdomen, highlighting oblong shapes.

“And everything colored yellow is made of metal.”

Mark couldn’t identify what was what in his body, but he could see that almost half of his insides were now made of metal. He swallowed.

“Alright. Well - I’m alive, that’s well and good, but what is all this stuff doing to me?” he asked. Danny cleared his throat.

“We had to repair some major damage in your liver and kidneys. As it turns out, you cannot process alcohol. That has nothing to do with your liver - it just so happened that you were drinking a beer while your internal organ systems failed. So while we were in there, we also had to patch up your heart.” he pointed at an intricate spider’s web of wires that threaded through various chambers of Mark’s heart.

“What all of this is doing it allowing everything to function normally, as a unit again. Mechanical valves and on-off systems are making what’s left of your actual organs do their job. When everything shut down, we couldn’t just restart it. Think of all of this as a permanent jumper cable for your insides.”

“I don’t think that’s very helpful, Dan.” the woman said. Dan scoffed.

“Pardon me, Suzy, but I’m just trying to make this all more comprehensible.”

“Anyway, thank you, this also means you’ve got some… other things that are new.” Arin continued. “Besides the scars and new additions, you can probably do some trivial stuff that’ll impress your friends. For example, you can hold your breath extra long or go a super long time without having to pee.” he shrugged. “Just for funsies.”

Suzy tapped a key. “Oh, and, another thing. Your brain is still in control of all of your new technology. But for it to be able to grab a good signal and continue to make everything work, we needed to do a bit of...rewiring.”

She showed another image of a long cord that travelled up the length of Mark’s spine and delicately wove its way into his head. Mark blanched.

“You put wires in my brain?” he said exasperatedly. Arin shrugged.

“Hey, you gave up permission. And we saved your life, so-”

“Arin!” Suzy smacked his arm. He merely raised an eyebrow.

“That… also added some fun stuff.” Danny explained. “For instance - what’s 1,800 times 2,387?”

“4,296,600.” Mark answered instantly. Then he froze.

Arin smirked. “Welcome to the freak show.”