The Bionics

  ***

  Two years have passed and I am finally accustomed to my new life as a sideshow freak. After months of physical therapy, I now know how to use my prosthetic limbs as if I were born with them. With clothes on, no one even knows that I’m different, yet I know that I can’t get too comfortable. Not all of the Bionics are able to hide, and the climate is slowly changing when it comes to people’s attitudes about us. President Drummond won his election in the year 4006 by a landslide, effectively gaining his status as America’s savior. His rhetoric against the Bionics begins after a man with a bionic arm was recorded robbing a fueling station outside of Las Vegas. With every day that passes, the hatred and fear spread more and more, and I know it’s only a matter of time before the government starts rounding us up and performing mass executions. As we’ve all legally registered for the program, they now know who each and every one of us, are and where we live and work. We are no longer safe.

  I’ve given up my life as a drug dealer; being sober feels better than anything I’ve experienced in a long time. The pay I earn hauling furniture for a moving company is barely enough to keep food in my belly and pay to rent my room in a boarding house, but it’s an honest life. Almost dying has taught me the value of living.

  One day, I am approached by a woman named Jenica Swan. All she can tell me is that she works for the government; her exact profession is privileged information. She’s come to warn me, she says, about the firestorm headed our way. Soon, not even she will be safe in her government job and we will all have to go into hiding. She gives me Professor Neville Hinkley’s card and tells me that when the government starts cracking down on the Bionics, they will go after those with a criminal past first. That means I’m in deep shit.

  I carry the Professor’s card around in my pocket for days, torn between calling him and tearing it to shreds and throwing it down a gutter. After a while I shove the card deep into my wallet and forget about it. After all, Professor Hinkley was the ringleader of the Healing Hands initiative; I have no reason to trust him. I never think of him again until the MPs come crashing through my front door, guns set to kill.

  As I run for my life, I pray to God that I don’t blow some kind of gasket in my machinery. I’ve never run so fast in my life. Weeks of traveling and hiding in the most obscure places while scrounging and—to my shame, stealing—in order to eat and survive find me on the outskirts of Atlanta. An old friend of mine knew of a monorail operator who would smuggle Bionics in the middle of the night for a fee. After promising to pay him back when I’m able, I board the train on my friend’s dime, surrounded by a rag tag bunch of outcasts, many of whom look as scared and uncertain about their futures as I do.

  Would we even survive the night? For all I know, the MPs are waiting at the end of the line to cart us all off to Stonehead. The maximum security prison, formerly home to America’s most dangerous convicts, has been cleared out to make room for Bionics with criminal pasts. In some areas, there are rumors that the MPs are targeting non-criminal Bionics, and even showing brute force toward those family members harboring them.

  Naturally, people are fighting back, but no one ever wants to hear about the desperation of those poor souls backed into a corner by the trigger-happy Military Police. All anyone ever sees were the news reports, which fill the airwaves with images of Bionics acting violently toward MPs. No one seems to care that we act in self-defense. All they see is that people with robotic limbs and organs are capable of things other humans were not. They see us as weapons, and fear that we will inevitably turn on them. The proposals calling for the immediate arrest and disassembly of all Bionics come from all sides of the political spectrum, and President Drummond’s rhetoric grows more inflammatory by the day.

  By the time I reach Atlanta—after several stops and days spent hiding in the baggage car of the monorail—the manhunt for every man, woman and child who’s ever received a Bionic limb from the government is on.