By Luca Nobleman
Having my brain poked and prodded while I’m awake is a surreal experience. Prick one part, and I feel like thick goo is running down my left arm. Boink another, and I can hear my aunt Patel singing the 1995 Indian hit, “Oruvan Oruvan Mudhalali.” My favorite is when they stimulate my taste buds.
“Can you make me taste my mom’s coconut chutney?” I ask Surge as he operates on my head in our warehouse hideout in Long Island City, New York.
“Hold still, Zero,” Surge growls.
Surge is special, like me. Most of my limbs are robotic thanks to a jobsite accident while working for the corrupt Solutronics Corporation. Surge, on the other hand, figuratively and literally, has only three fingers, and nothing beats his stunning yellow, cat-like pupils. Solutronics experimented on his mom while she was pregnant with him. Hence… Surge.
I still trust him to fix my cerebral-circuit interface, even with his less-than-ten-finger complement and the fact that he’s a teenager trying to grow peach fuzz on his upper lip.
Why? Cause he’s a bona fide genius. I once saw the kid hijack a Camaro with the highest digital security system ever made. So, if anyone can figure out why my right robotic arm has a mind of its own, it’s Surge.
“I mean it, Zero,” Surge’s voice is slightly muffled. He has a mask on so he doesn’t sneeze boogers on my brain. “Stop moving.”
“My head is locked in a vice,” I argue. “I’m not sure I can hold any more still.”
“You’re fine, Zero,” Jay says in his deep, old-timey cowboy accent. “Surge is the one shaking.”
Jay, currently Surge’s medical assistant, acts like our grumpy grandpa, but he actually runs our crew. He brought us together to get back at Colin Ricci, CEO of Solutronics. We’re going to steal his darkest secrets and post them online—starting with the illegal drug trials on pregnant women.
So here we are, trying to fix my robotic arm so I can perform my part of the heist. As I said, my arm has a mind of its own. It likes to cause trouble. And we can’t afford trouble with this job. Especially because I’m sneaking a one-of-a-kind EMP I invented—Mjölnir—into the parking garage of the Solutronics headquarters to shut down the tower’s primary power supply so the rest of the crew can get inside and steal stuff. If that goes wrong—the whole gig is off.
“Found it,” Surge exclaims.
“Are you sure that’s it?” Jay sounds worried.
“It’s gotta be.” Surge adjusts the neural stimulator and zaps something in my brain.
“Whoa.” I blink. The room blossoms with rhythmic and iridescent lights.
“What?” Surge stops moving.
Jay runs around to face me. “Are you okay?”
I somehow see the sound as it escapes behind Jay’s white handlebar mustache and surgical mask. The kaleidoscope of sound waves glimmer biochromatically as they disperse radially, bouncing off every object in the room. Hard surfaces reflect it, while the ragged sofa in the corner absorbs it.
The world around me ignites in a rainbow of undulating shimmers. Water dripping from the old pipe on the wall explodes into blue expanding bubbles, rocketing outward as each drop slaps the puddle on the ground.
“I’m seeing sounds… I think.”
Even the words from my lips spray forth in a beautiful array of gyrating rings. They flow in and out of each other at incredible speed.
“Shoot. Wrong circuit.” Surge zaps something, and the laser light show disappears.
“Wow… that was—” I cut short as Surge stimulates a different circuit. A cacophony of grating sounds ignites in my ears.
“How’s that?” I think Surge asks, but it’s hard to hear him over the tinkling of glass from the disinfectant bottle Jay opens.
Am I hearing smells?
Jay walks around again. He’s yelling something at me.
“What?” I can’t hear him over the obnoxious jazz ensemble of trombones and saxophones emanating from his cologne.
“Your Old Spice is too loud,” I yell back.
His eyes bulge, and he disappears behind me. Surge apparently does something to my brain because my robotic arm jerks upward, and the noise dissipates.
“What are you guys doing up there?” I ask.
“We’re close. Just one more…” Surge trails off.
The smell of my mom’s sweet yellow curry blooms in my nose. I close my eyes and sniff, but the smell disappears. When I open them, it returns. I look toward the kitchen to see if she’s cooking. A bright blue light illuminates it, and the smell of vodka rushes in. I blink, and it vanishes momentarily. I glance back at the yellow light above me, and the delectable curry fragrance envelops me again.
“Ummm, guys, I think I’m smelling light.”
“I thought you’d done this before?” Jay asks Surge.
“I have,” Surge says it in a tone I’m not quite sure I trust. Although, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I were stuck smelling curry every time I looked at a yellow light.
“There, I think I did it.” Surge muffles a sneeze.
The smells evaporate. I report that light seems normal now, and my arm now seems to comply with my simple demands.
Surge spends forty minutes putting my head back together.
As we make our way to the counter, I sit on the hardwood stool to look over schematics of the Solutronics headquarters and start tasting wood-fired pepperoni pizza. I stand up, and it goes away. I shift to a cushioned seat and taste strawberry Pop-Tarts.
Surge eyes me. “What?”
“Oh, nothing,” I say, thinking there are worse things than tasting my favorite foods every time I touch something.
I reach for a pen with my supposedly fixed mechanical arm. It twitches. I focus. It hesitates, then misses the pen, instead stealing Jay’s coffee and pouring it into Surge’s cereal.
“Hmmm, guess we didn’t fix that arm, did we?” Jay frowns.
“Well, at least the barstools taste good.”
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