The Eternal Flame

part of his brain was insisting that some kind of parasite had invaded the flesh, and its alarming twitches could only presage the likelihood of it burrowing even deeper. As he struggled to understand precisely where this revulsion was coming from—focusing his attention on the stretching of the skin, the tension in the muscles, the disposition of the joints—he couldn’t identify any one thing he hadn’t felt when he’d performed the same movements willingly. But he couldn’t separate that raw sensation from the context and declare that it was as innocent as before. Flesh that moved of its own accord simply could not be treated with equanimity.

When the playback stopped, Carlo shuddered with relief. The illusory parasite lingered for a moment, a fat dead thing trapped under his skin, but when he crooked his finger a few times it vanished. He realized that he hadn’t had the presence of mind to check his movements against the original script; he looked to Amanda for her verdict.

“The mimicry was pretty close,” she said. “A few gestures were dropped or ambiguous, but most were repeated accurately.”

Some of the onlookers offered congratulatory cheers. Carlo felt drained, but as his nausea faded he managed a chirp of satisfaction. As primitive and unpleasant as the whole demonstration had been, it had established an important principle. All the more so if they could repeat it with one more twist.

Amanda had already started rewinding the tape. “Give me a lapse or two,” he told her.

“You don’t have to do the second stage today,” she replied.

“I’m not wasting that spike in my wrist.” Carlo turned from her and saw Tosco watching him in silence, then he shifted his gaze slightly and addressed the man’s students. “You can mark this day as the birth of a new field,” he proclaimed. “The light recorder will revolutionize the study of the brain’s signals—and light puppetry will be the best way to compare those signals in different species.” Once they refined the equipment, they could replay the instructions from one vole’s brain in a distant cousin’s body and see which parts of the signal were interpreted the same way in both species. Not every nuance would be the same, but flesh was flesh, it all shared a common ancestor. With time and patience, they could take this language apart and uncover all its subtleties, as surely as scholars of ancient writing had decoded old engravings by their own process of comparison.

He nodded to Amanda to proceed. She uncoupled the connecting arm from the first probe, and swung it over toward his right hand. Carlo resisted the urge to pluck the needle out of his left wrist immediately; sometimes the extraction went horribly wrong, and he didn’t want to vocalize that much pain in front of an audience.

With the player connected to the right-hand probe, Carlo spent a moment preparing himself. It hadn’t been so bad the first time, and now he knew exactly what to expect. His gut had settled, he wouldn’t disgrace himself.

“I’m ready,” he said.

Amanda engaged the drive.

The finger they’d targeted with the probe remained motionless. “What?” Frustrated, Carlo moved his forearm slightly, just enough to feel the bite of stone against his flesh. Suddenly his whole right hand sprung to life: all six fingers flexing and waggling, turning and twitching, wriggling like worms with their heads in a trap.

With one word he could have had the signal shut off, but Carlo wanted to see this final stage play out; even with the probe misaligned it could tell them something useful. His sense of violation was more acute than before, but he could tolerate it for a couple of lapses. He glanced at Amanda; she was diligently observing his contortions, trying to judge how well they conformed to the script. Carlo could only be sure of one detail: some of his fingers were moving differently than others, so they couldn’t all be doing the right thing.

He heard the gentle thud from the player as it halted. His relief was short-lived; his fingers kept squirming. “All right,” he muttered. If his first recording of a twirling finger had revealed the potential for fleshly autonomy, this shouldn’t be entirely surprising or alarming. He just needed to tell his wayward hand to stop, firmly and clearly.

He commanded his fingers to be still—but this edict was completely ineffectual.

Carlo let out a hum of frustration, hoping to convince himself as much as the onlookers that he was more irritated than afraid. He tried to clench his fist, but his body had news for him: the burrowing parasites owned that flesh, and they weren’t taking instructions from him.

“I think his hand’s giving birth,” someone joked from the back of the crowd.

“Could you take off the connector, please?” Carlo instructed Amanda, each polite syllable a proof that he remained unflustered. When she’d complied, he swung his arm away from the bench, mapping out the degrees of freedom he still controlled. He could move his arm at the shoulder, at will. He could flex and extend the limb at the elbow joint. He pictured the vast territory subject to his rule, pictured the tiny rebellious province, pictured the inevitable reconquest. But all of this stirring martial imagery remained nothing more than a fantasy. Beyond the wrist, he might as well have had a brood of angry lizards grafted to his flesh.

He drew his arm back and slapped the bench, trying to bash some sense into his hand. Again, harder. The third blow drove the probe’s needle deeper into his wrist; the pain was excruciating, but it felt right, it felt necessary.

“Carlo?” Amanda wasn’t panicking yet, but she wanted him to tell her how she could help.

“I haven’t lost control of my arm,” he assured her, struggling to get the words out. His actions were entirely voluntary—at least by the standards his rogue hand had set—even if the urge to damage the thing was becoming increasingly compelling.

But the blows weren’t helping, they weren’t changing anything. His battered hand was squirming as energetically as ever.

“Just cut it off,” he said.

“Are you sure?” Amanda looked to Tosco.

“Cut it off!” Carlo repeated angrily.

“Can’t you resorb it?”

The suggestion made him recoil in disgust. Bring these squirming parasites into his torso, into the depths of his body to go where they pleased?

But there were no parasites. His hand was merely damaged and dysfunctional. It needed to be reorganized, the way he would have dealt with any other injury.

Carlo began drawing the flesh in at his shoulder. He managed to shorten his arm by about a third before his body rebelled and halted the process. The prospect of bringing the afflicted hand any closer felt like ingesting something rotting and poisoned. And for all he knew, his body was right. What if it couldn’t reorganize this flesh, any more than it could subdue a virulent parasite?

“I can’t do it,” he said finally. “It has to come off.”

Amanda said, “All right.”

Tosco sent someone to fetch a knife. Carlo rested his forearm on the bench, resigned now. So this was the way to make biparity safe and easy? Even if he found the right signals… how many years, how many generations of refinements would it take before any sane woman would let a machine like this near her body?

The knife was passed through the crowd until it ended up with Tosco. As he approached the bench, Carlo said, “Amanda’s my assistant.”

“As you wish.” Tosco handed her the knife.

“Where exactly?” she asked Carlo. He gestured to a point a couple of scants above the probe.

Someone behind Carlo whispered sardonically, “Welcome to the age of light.”

Amanda rearranged her harness to allow her to exert more force against the bench. With one hand she pinned Carlo’s forearm in place, then she quickly brought the knife down.

Carlo contracted the skin over the fresh wound, almost sealing it, then he drew the remainder of his arm into his torso as rapidly as he could. By the time the full force of the pain hit him, it belonged to a phantom limb. The loose, punctured skin around his shoulder still stung, but his severed wrist no longer existed, and the message of searing agony it had sent to his brain dissipated into irrelevance.

On the bench, though, his lost fingers were still twitching.