Around me, monitor is hanging at angles from the ceiling. A robot torso in the shape of a human leans forward from a wall, its arms limp in front of it, head bowed. Other Augmented parts is lying in neat rows arrayed by limb on counters opposite me, all the forearms in a row and, next to them, hands with their fingers separated and positioned in front of them.

On almost all of the tables lie blueprints. Random bits of gear litter the floor at the base of reclining chairs. Hornets buzz out from beneath the table I am on and spray misty alcohol onto me and I am wanting to be waving my arms, but I am seeing why I cannot.

I am having no legs and am having only one arm. But I am not being nervous, for some reason. This memory is in full colors. It has my colors, but it is sometime having blue-green on the edges. And it is having these edges when Chinese man with silver beard and doctor’s cap is smiling in my face. The colored edges fade in and out, in and out when I say, “Am I alive,” and he is chuckling.

“Yes, quite,” he is telling me. “Though dinner won’t be ready for a few hours. I don’t think hunger will be an issue for you yet, however.” He is looking at me like he is remembering something or reminding himself of something, like how to have proper manners, but I am reading the way his body is speaking and I am knowing that he is looking at me and he is seeing the rememberings I am holding in my head before I am winding up with one arm left on this table. He is seeing that I am inside mech that is being shot down because I am in battle, then mech is plummeting into lagoon. He is seeing that I had been a pilot in the war, and when he is first seeing my body in the lagoon, I am just a mangled mess of flesh and metal. But he is saving me somehow.

“Your name is Onyii, right?”

“How do you know my name?”

He smiles. “I’m your doctor. When we’re finished, you can meet some of the boys.” He looks at his hands, then up at me again. “I think they’ll be happy to have a big sister.”

CHAPTER

35