A Study in Reintegration

The stigma against human augmentation has never lifted – not after the initial kinks in the operating software and hardware integrations resulted in some curious physical and personality…defects. Despite the lives it’s subsequently saved, the tests the procedures have passed, and the unending barrage of PR stunts and ad campaigns.

None of that matters – God, the papers still refer to the riots – which had been in protest against the expense of post-op care and maintenance – as the ‘Rise of the Machines.’

John had just been a kid at Uni when it all happened, hadn’t really been arsed to care, and then he’d swanned off to join the army. Somewhere in that time the landscape had changed, and the first recipients of botched augmentations had stopped being victims and become something altogether more sinister.

And all the while, science had marched on, blissfully ignorant – or at least willfully so – continuing to innovate and improve.

And then John had gone and got himself shot, and science had taken him in like an overbearing mother, like a charity case, and hadn’t taken ‘no’ for an answer, hadn’t wanted ‘no’ for an answer –

And John hadn’t wanted to die.