Arms

Hair was the secret.

Our bodies replicate and build the dead cells into keratin that squeeze slowly out of us like time-lapse toothpaste to form hair and fingernails. They have markers that tell them when to grow and when to stop.

Markers that we’ve found. Markers that we can manipulate. We’re hoping that later on, we can manipulate living flesh. Right now, though, we’re giving the gift of regeneration to the world.

A ‘toupee’ of scalp tissue is grafted onto an amputee’s arm. The hair is ordered to grow in the shape of a human arm. It takes five weeks for the arm to grow.

It’s grey like the horn of a rhino and stiff to the touch, like a fingernail in the shape of an arm.

With our command over neurotransmitters and nerve arrays, we can install a robotic armature inside the arm that will respond to the patient’s mental commands. It takes a lot of practice but it works. The flesh is technically dead so it doesn’t reject the implants.

Also, we can split the nerve cells from a few points around the patient’s body and bury them around the new limb. That way, while they won’t have the complexity of feeling that you and I take for granted, they can at least feel rudimentary pain and pleasure.

The new limbs can be painted to match the skin tone of the patient. Nail polish, we call it amongst ourselves.

The army is talking to us about giving soldiers back their arms and legs to send them back into battle. We can picture them, grey skinned and patchwork, going back into the hell they’d been taken from. They’ll be augmented in ways we never thought of.

It’s going to be great. We’re going to be rich.



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Not sure

I had a notion of war orphans being owned by the state and experimented on to become super heroes but that maybe a few of them became WAY more powerful than the scientists had predicted. So now they're in dark prisons with crazy security FAR under the Earth waiting to escape. But it occured to me as a poem. See what you think.

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Mom played the harp, Dad played the gun.
He was a soldier, I was their son.
Mom left for Heaven. Dad left for hell.
He fought in the war, and he fought well.

Now I’m an orphan, one amongst few
Kept from the world, stuck here with you
The orphans of war, kept by the state
Kept from the papers, behind a gate.

They work on us here. They give us names.
My name is Cobalt. Your name is Flames.
We, too, are soldiers, I read your mind
I’m in the next room, hoping to find

A way out of here. A door. A hole.
A crack they forgot. I am a mole.
You burn the planet. I’ll kill the brain.
Together we’ll be. We’ll rule the rain.

Monarchs of new Earth. One king and queen.
Eaters of planets. Reigning obscene.
For now, though we wait. Here in the dark.
I am the petrol. You are the spark.



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