[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 22

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I recognized the micro air scrubber however, same model the prosthetic vendor in the subsea labor platform tried to sell me. Apparenly he wasn’t lying about the quality. One of the hoses protruding from it led to the prosthetic lungs, the other to the air intake in the neck.

Armed with this knowledge I was able to fashion a janky mess of a respirator mask out of it, running off my prosthetic power supply through the nano USB cable. It meant I’d run out sooner, but it also meant I could be outside during a gas storm.

More importantly, it meant I could recharge my prosthetics every night without fear that an unexpected gas front would asphyxiated me in my sleep. It felt gratifying, like a small but important step.

Towards what, though? It got me no closer to civilization. I set out into the jungle and circled around the crash site in larger and larger loops, foolishly hoping I’d run into a village or something in the process.

Just more jungle, with yet more beyond that. As I explored though, I noticed a strange, exhilarating sensation. Here I am, fish out of water, climbing over fallen logs in a sweltering jungle...but I’m not tired. Having secured a means of charging my arm and leg, traversing the terrain was not only easy but pleasurable.

I brought my metal foot down on a small boulder, hands on my hips, sucking air in my nostrils. “I’m going to make it through this”, I thought. “I’m no mere animal. I am not even just a man. I have the strength of modern machinery behind my every step.”

The hydraulic piston in my leg hissed loudly as I finished stepping over the boulder and set about climbing up a steep embankment. “Well, alright” I thought. “Nearly modern.” Once again, climbing over the obstacle was trivial. It felt good to put my prosthetics through their paces, and get the full intended benefit from them.

When I found a fallen coconut, I was able to quickly crack it open with my prosthetic hand, a feat which otherwise would’ve been exhausting. I drank eagerly of the juice, then began eating the solid white innards.

An unorthodox meal, but it filled my stomach. Besides which the increasing commonality of coconut palms suggested I was getting closer to the coast. From there, I might be able to flag down a passing container ship or something.

My mood immeasurably improved by food other than peanuts and renewed hope of rescue, I forged ahead, brushing ferns out of my path as I made my way through the jungle. Despite my body being in relatively poor shape, I felt lean and powerful.

Shock absorbers flexing, metal foot sinking into the soil, I felt like a force to be reckoned with. Back in Shenzen, I was at the very bottom of the food chain. Out here, I was at the very top. Bigger, badder, stronger than any living thing I was liable to run into.

Just desserts, then, that I was humbled by microorganisms. About an hour later my meat leg began to itch. I ignored it until it grew intense enough to warrant closer attention. There was a scrape I’d overlooked when assessing my injuries after the crash. It was now red and swollen.

Fucking awesome. I’ve got an infected wound in the middle of ass fuck, nowhere. I became much less worried for my life when, upon returning to the wreck, I found a first aid kit stashed behind my seat. It saved my leg and perhaps my life, but did nothing to make the following forty eight hours any less miserable.

I suffered alternating hot and cold flashes, and coughed up what seemed like a liter or so of mucus. Do I need that inside of me? I hope not. I scolded myself for not searching for the first aid kit immediately after the crash. The tireless, insensate nature of my prosthetics made it all too easy to ignore what bad shape the rest of my body was in.

Those chickens had finally come home to roost, and for the next two days I could do little else besides weakly writhing in pain while I rode it all out. In the end my immune system successfully fought off the infection, but it left me in a dangerously weakened state.

I’d lost more weight than should be possible in that timeframe, my eyes looked sunken in and in all other ways I appeared on the verge of death. No more hanging around the crash site, I decided. If GPS is really down worldwide, there would be no help on the way. The only people who know my location are the last people I want finding me, least of all in this sickly condition.

So I set off into the jungle, stumbling feebly along with the help of a branch I’d stripped into a serviceable walking stick. Being a conshelfer, the previous owner of the body had an implant for recycling his own urine, salt water or any other grey water back into a drinkable state.

I could reuse it only a couple of times before needing to replenish from the stream, however, so I resolved to walk alongside it this time. As I did so, it soon occurred to me that I should have been doing that anyways.

The stream would necessarily lead me to the ocean, wouldn’t it? How I wished I knew more about how to navigate wilderness. The only information along those lines still loaded into my system was all related to open ocean survival. Not much use at the moment.

My second post-crash stroke of luck came in the form of a metal crate, roughly four feet to a side. Air dropped by the looks of it, surrounded by a bunched up parachute blanketing the forest floor. There only outwardly visible markings on the crate were unintelligible strings of numbers and letters.

The chute, however, turned out to have an enormous InterNourish logo on it once spread out enough that I could tell what it was. Don’t tell me...I used the screwdriver as a chisel and the wrench as a hammer to pry one of the sides loose.

Inside was the answer to my prayers. The revolting, chewy, flaky answer, in the form of perhaps a thousand InterNourish mealbars. Never thought I’d be the one choking these down, but even moreso here than in Shenzen, beggars can’t be choosers.

It sated my hunger at last, and I felt some measure of comfort and security knowing that I had a few months worth of food here...provided I was willing to keep eating this crap. A tough sell, even when the alternative is starving to death.

Pretty soon my color returned, and much of my strength with it. I had nothing like a map, but at least my body included some sort of compass equivalent, such that I could tell I’d been following the river East for the past hour or so.

I expected it to lead me straight to the ocean. What I didn’t expect was to find a five inch thick cable in the way. Grid related? Some sort of power line? But then wouldn’t it be up on supports, or buried if that were the case?

I studied it more closely, zooming in with my optics, and discovered the black material was neither rubber nor any sort of metal. Instead it looked to be carbon fiber. “No fucking way” I muttered to myself. “It can’t be.” This close? It must’ve fallen nearly on top of us.

Once the shock wore off, I reasoned that the cable would’ve wrapped itself around the equator as it collapsed. That helped narrow down my probable location. It also meant that besides whoever sent those enforcers after Dad, I could expect government spooks to arrive at some point.

Hard to say which is worse. I didn’t especially want to run into either, so I doubled back the way I came and resolved to explore in the opposite direction. On my way back to the crash site I began inwardly bitching to myself about this and that.

I needed to complain, but there was nobody else to listen. “I want ramen” I thought. “I want a hot shower. I want freshly steamed dumplings, and snow pear tea.” Instead, lunch was another bar of processed lard and some water recycled from my urine.

Is this my life now? Fat bars and pee water? Even my first day in Shenzen wasn’t so miserable. “On the other hand, at least I’m no longer sick” I thought. “At least I’ve got food, water and shelter.” That’s something. However bad it gets, unless I’m dead, it could be worse.

At least that’s what I thought until the diarrhea. Something in the water, has to be. The implant filters out salt, ammonia and nearly everything else I might want it to. But viruses are tiny. Viruses make it through, which unfortunately hadn’t occurred to me.

In fairness it could also be these nasty fucking mealbars. Or the infection’s last hurrah? Whatever the cause, I spent a solid hour hunched over, grunting and wiping tears from my eyes as I emptied out my insides all over the unfortunate plants behind me.

I want a shower. I want hot food. And now, I want toilet paper. Add that to the list of wishes that this beggar would ride, were they horses instead. Now dehydrated and light headed, my water purification implant went into overdrive replacing what I’d lost.

I wound up having to drink from the stream again. There’s just no alternative, at least not until it rains. If I could rig up some means of catching and storing rain water...then again, by that time my body will probably have adapted to the local microbes.

Wishful thinking maybe. But it kept my mind off the ugly reality that in all likelihood, I’m being hunted by highly paid corporate assassins. It gave me reason to question the wisdom of returning to the crash site.

However I could do nothing else if I wanted my prosthetics recharged. I settled into the springy pleather seat and relaxed as the coils activated, a notification popping up beneath my eyelids to inform me that the charging cycle had begun.

How precarious, this little bubble of technology. Of civilization, half crushed, buried partway in mud. My only lifeline. What would I do if the solar film stopped working for some reason? Or if the amenities battery were to catch fire after all?

The sort of problems I never gave any thought to back in Shenzen. Why would I? Technology surrounded me there. Immersed me, up to my eyeballs. That’s the ecosystem my prosthetics are designed to thrive in. The rest of me, not so much.

Out here’s a different story. The next day, having gotten over the worst of the infection and with a belly full of convincingly food-like biomass, I could feel my body starting to wake up. I can think of no better way to describe it. All my pores opened wide, my skin tingled with unfamiliar sensitivity and the fresh air invigorated my every muscle.

I could feel myself getting stronger. The illness must’ve been something like a biological system shock. A consequence of abruptly transplanting myself from the sterile world of machinery back into the lush, living wilderness. Yet in spite of the heat, in spite of the humidity, I began to feel outrageously, powerfully alive.

How similar it was to the way I recalled feeling on my ebike. No longer relying on my prosthetics to pull my weight, but cooperating harmoniously with them. Making full use of my meat leg, calf and thigh muscles flexing alongside the pneumatic pistons in my prosthetic as I trekked through the bush.

Something in my body was definitely reacting to the environment in a manner I’d never felt before. Like I could somehow absorb energy from my surroundings. Some kind of communication seemed to be taking place on a chemical level, though I couldn’t work out what any of it meant.

Has it always been like this? Has this feeling always been waiting out here for me, in the wild? I can’t think of any time in my life when I was away from civilization for this long. Field trips in school, visiting Dad out in the country back when he lived in that trailer, sure.

But I was always back home within a few hours at most. Back within range of a charging field and fast internet. It felt scary and humbling to be stranded this deep into what was, in many ways, an alien environment. Scary, but nourishing.

With every passing hour, more color returned to my cheeks and more of my strength returned. My posture improved, the skin around my eyes tightened somewhat, and my pulse slowed. The more I actually used my muscles, the less tiring it became. Is that how the human body normally works? Seems backwards to me.

So enamored with this feeling was I that I didn’t notice the figure creeping out of the jungle until he was right on me. In a flash, I had my gun out and trained on the short, wrinkly old man. Brown skinned, black hair in a bowl cut. Indigenous? If he were a Remnant, he’d be white. But then, I’m too far south for that.

The frail looking fellow held his hands up, but didn’t appear frightened. Instead he smiled warmly at me, and patiently waited until I put the gun back in my waistband to lower his hands. His face paint and haircut suggested indigenous, but he wore a faded yellow InterNourish t-shirt.

He noticed me studying it. “The clothes are fine. You can keep sending us more clothes if you want. No more of those bars, though. They’re terrible, we don’t eat them.” I laughed, taken aback. Apparently whatever dialect he spoke, it was included with my translation software.

“I don’t blame you” I replied. “I’d rather eat my own face than choke down another one of those.” The software dutifully translated it into his own tongue and a moment later, it was spoken in a synthesized voice from a speaker embedded in my arm.

He looked at my prosthetic arm. Then at my leg, then back up at me. Slowly, he shook his head. What’s that about? Am I really that unfunny? Aubrey always used to laugh at my jokes. He gestured for me to follow him down a well worn path through the undergrowth I’d only now noticed.

Should I really follow some random old indigenous man I just met? For all I know, this is how they hunt. For all I know he was sizing me up and working out the choicest cuts of my body to serve his extended family.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 23!}