The Navigator

I'm a navigator. Or I should say Navigator, capital N.

Yeah, you read that right. I'm a cyborg.

Before you turn away from me in disgust, know this: I was born 26 years ago just as human as you are. No metal and plastic exoskeleton fused onto my skin and organs, no neural netting injected into my brain. Just a bawling mass of baby.

Except, unlike you, I was more mass, less baby. Thanks to a combination of bad genes and environmental contamination in utero, I barely resembled anything human, baby or otherwise. Aside from my brain and my heart, both of which developed normally, the rest of me that did manage to form was ready to go kaput within minutes of being sliced from my mother's womb.

Normally I would have been aborted, but you might remember that around the time I was born there was a sudden uptick in interest and advancement in the technology of cybernetics and bio-mechatronics.

Well, I wasn't technically "born" since I wouldn't have been viable even if I hadn't been a malformed aberration of nature. I was all of 22 weeks when they took me from my mother's body.

No matter, they had something better to cook and hatch me in, and there I finished what would have been my third trimester, encased in a warm, pulsing fluid that mimicked my mother's womb; they even recorded my mother's voice, crooning lullabies and reading Dr. Seuss books to me. Like I said, there was nothing wrong with my brain, and they wanted it to be as ship-shape as possible, and research has long shown the cognitive advantages of reading to your baby in utero.

So that was part of the deal they cut with my mother: Along with this thing you were probably going to flush down the toilet anyway, give us your voice. In return she received an undisclosed sum of money.

No one volunteered that information to me, of course; that was all because of Gregor and his single-minded obsession with uncovering the truth. My truth.

Actually, Gregor kept trying to find out how much money they paid my mother, until I finally had to tell him I didn't want to know, not really.

That man. He is like a dog with a bone when he gets it into his head that something needs to be done. Something fixed. Something uncovered and held up to the bright light of day.

Sometimes I wonder if any part of me, the original wetware part I mean, has ever felt the warmth of sunlight. My stunted, malformed body has been encased within various iterations of an exoskeleton since I was old enough to toddle but lacked the legs to do so. But I like to think that before they finished making me, the new and improved cyborg me, one of the attendants who helped raised me eschewed the Sun Room and snuck me outside so I could wiggle and mewl beneath the rays of the real deal.

***

Don't get me wrong, I don't feel sorry for myself or anything.

Like I said, I'm a Navigator, a great honor in and of itself, never mind the fact I am considered one of the very best. Some might even say the best. Sure, my exoskeleton doesn't look like much, especially if you compare it to the ones encasing Class A Infantry Cyborgs, all shiny titanium and deadly, humanoid design. No one ever wants to photograph me for glossy magazine spreads about the future of warfare or space exploration (or both), or trot me out for meet and greets with the occasional journalist or politician who feels a twinge of concern about our treatment, or the ethics of our existence. Better an army grunt flexing her bionic muscles and thanking God, the military, and whatever corporation that subsidized her birth, survival, and "enhanced lifecycle."

Me on the other hand? To the uninformed observer I am nothing more than a metal cocoon connected to a lower limb exoskeleton so I can do my daily movements and keep what few muscles and joints I do possess from atrophying. I certainly don't appear human from the outside. And some are arguing that I am less than human on the inside, but Gregor tells me to ignore that kind of thing, that "haters are always gonna hate." He says I am so smart that even if I had been "normal" people would have still felt threatened by me.