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Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY
IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I
generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family
rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to
write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration
(quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind.
These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat,
irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if
anything comes of them.
SF Trope: body
transformations/cyber implants/the Borg…
Current Event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2qPWc32LS8&feature=related,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIqAnrjqb0Y,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWTE97GteZA
[NOTE: STAR TREK’s
Borg still creep me out and while they ended up defeated, compromised and
hardly implacable by the end of all the series, I wonder if the writers did
that to make themselves feel safer. When they first appeared in ST:TNG, they
were anything BUT beatable…and they still creep me out…]
Hajnal Nagy stared
at her lab partner. “What do you mean, they ‘creep you out’?”
Voytek Jankowski
shook his head. “It doesn’t bother you that Ms. Hawkinson’s substitute is more
machine than human?”
Hajnal shook her
head. “Why should the ratio of Mr. Yakovlev’s flesh to metal and plastic bother
you?”
“Didn’t you ever
see the old movie, ‘Terminator’?”
“Duh. I like old
movies as much as you do, so yeah, I saw it. But what does a time-traveling
robot have to do with our substitute? He looks Human.” She glanced at the man
where he was working with another student at the front of the chemistry room.
While he certainly did look Human, the left side of his face was augmented by
non-flesh implants. He’d told them he’d been in a car accident and they’d
rebuilt his eye, ear and replaced the left side of his jaw with plastic bone
and teeth. His hand was also partially prosthetic and, he’d added, even though
they couldn’t see it, he carried a pacemaker to keep his partially damaged
heart beating and had an implanted TENS unit to take care of his pain. He’d
finally added that TENS was an acronym for Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation
unit.
He’d written that
on the white board, smiling and saying, “Isn’t this one of those ‘teachable
moments’?”
“You didn’t think
him talking about ‘teachable moments’
was sort of creepy?”
“Why would that be
creepy?” Hajnal asked.
“I want to know
what he thought he was teaching us.”
Hajnal rolled her
eyes and got back to the work on the page of problems. Voytek said, “But...”
Hajnal waved him off half a dozen times before he left in a huff. Once he was gone,
she found herself looking up at Mr. Yakovlev. He was leaning on one elbow,
pointing to a worksheet and trying to explain something to a student.
She muttered,
“Stupid Voytek!” and got back to work. But she couldn’t help it. Her eyes were
drawn back to his face. The plastic skin was identical in color to his real
skin. The eye had a white sclera, but the iris was silver and the pupil wasn’t
exactly round but a vertical oval, almost lizard-like. The fake skin on his
hand was also a perfect color match and – she noticed with interest from where
she sat – there were hairs on both of his arms. “Stupid Voytek!” she muttered.
She turned in her stool so her back was to the front of the room.
She was sitting
like that, hunched over the worksheet, when a voice said, “Do you understand
orbital notation…” the voice paused, rustled paper, then said, “Ms. Nagy?”
Knowing that she
was blushing crimson, she didn’t turn or look up, but hunched farther as she
said, “Uh, yes, sir. It seems pretty straight-forward.”
He hummed,
“Perhaps you’d like to come up to the front of the room and demonstrate your
methodology for the rest of the class. Few of them seem to understand why you
do not fill in the 5s1 orbital until after you’ve filled in the 3d5 and 4p3
orbitals.”
Someone from the
class called out, “Hajnal gets it!”
Someone else
started pounding on the table, “Let Hajnal teach us! Let Hajnal teach us!”
She finally turned
around. Now that she was thoroughly embarrassed, she looked up at Mr. Yakovlev
as he said, “This is a teachable moment, Ms. Nagy.” He smiled and she noticed
then that his teeth, instead of being white, were silver. And as she looked, a
tiny red light lit up on each one, while at the same moment, the vertical oval
glowed blood red…
Name Origins:
Hungary, Poland
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