Second Contact [Alien Nation #2] (#Wattys2019)

9

Avery grimaced at the sweat stinging her eyes, doubled over with her hands on her knees as she gasped for breath. There was a reason she didn't exercise, and this was it.

"All right, that's enough," Anderson called from the door at the other side of the room. The junior cyberneticists gathered around a long desk full of monitors and holograms showing her reactions to the heavy cybernetic exoskeleton he'd coaxed her into all started typing furiously on their datapads. He'd been gone for the last half an hour, claiming her cybernetic arm needed some touch-ups while she tested his new model, so her first test session for the military cybernetics Anderson and his lot had cobbled together had been overseen by students whose names she couldn't be bothered to remember.

"Are we done?" she said, hardly daring to believe it. She swayed on her feet. The exoskeleton was clearly built for someone much bigger than her, and her skull burned where the brace for her head connected directly to her brain through the panel on the shaved side.

Anderson nodded and the two students who had been hovering at the edge of the room rushed over to help her out of the contraption he'd hooked her up to. "For now."

"Thank fuck. Get these things off me!" she yelled at nobody in particular, scrabbling at the sticky heart rate monitors stuck all over her body. They reminded her far too much of her first days as a cyborg, when her every breath and heartbeat was logged.

One of the students batted her hands away and started removing them, none too gently.

"Was the exoskeleton comfortable?" Anderson asked mildly.

She stared at him as the other student unstrapped the frame Anderson had shoved her into as soon as she'd arrived. The afternoon had consisted of the scientists testing various load weights and how they interacted with her cybernetics, which Anderson wanted to somehow merge with the frame to give her more control over its movements. In theory, she shouldn't have been able to feel any of the additional weight. In practice, her aching muscles were making her feel like an old lady. "You lot have been using me as a human guinea pig all fucking day," she snapped. "Infrared vision, lifting frames, an arm that isn't even fucking mine," she said, waving Anderson's shitty prototype in his face. It had a suction cap on the palm for climbing, a different attachment in each finger, a powerful laser, and a Ghraal-designed blade for slicing through carapace that sprang out of the forearm. It was also too heavy for her, the cybernetics fused weirdly with the socket in her shoulder, and she wanted this pimply fuckwit to get it off. "You tell me how comfortable you think I am."

The student raised his eyebrows and glanced at Anderson. "You weren't exaggerating about her temper, Doctor."

Lukas merely smiled, which for some reason just made her more furious.

They were turning her into a war machine, and he stood there smiling. "Don't look so scared, Tom, she won't bite. Avery, I hope our soldiers are more coordinated with our tech than you were."

"It doesn't even fucking fit me!" she said, throwing her arm up to show how the limb dug into her skin when she did so.

Anderson rolled his eyes, holding up her old limb. The wrist flopped pathetically. "Here. Tom, take the new one off before she rips it out and slaps me with it."

Once they'd freed her from the exoskeleton and given her arm back, Avery's temper improved. Marginally.

"Please tell me I'm not gonna have to come in for more experiments," she said after the students had scuttled off to compare notes. She flexed her arm as she felt the final few connections to her nerves snap into place. She didn't know exactly what Anderson had done to it, but the joints moved more smoothly, the sensation from the breeze when she blew on her fingers was clearer than before, and the various scratches she'd accumulated had been buffed out. There was something else that was different, though. If she didn't know better, she'd say it felt a lot heavier than before.