The Strangers of Kindness by Terry Hickman Read Free Book Online Page B

extensions into his fingertip jacks. When he was done he held up his hands and rippled his fingers like a pianist. The extensions flexed and extended as nimbly as a Horowitz arpeggio. The tips were tiny, bullet-shaped, and covered with spongy pads.
    “So what good are those things?”
    “Micro-surgery.” Surgeon pulled the sponge pads off the tips and told Jennifer, “Lean over here, shake your hair down.”  
    She leaned over and Surgeon combed his “fingers” through her straight honey-colored hair. He locked eyes with Theo, and without looking he manipulated a strand of her hair for a minute.  
    He withdrew one hand with the tips of the artificial thumb and forefinger pinched together.
    “Ouch!” Jennifer said, then stared at his hand. He was holding a single hair. “Good Lord! How’d you do that?”
    “By feel. They’ve got pressure sensors in the ends and feedback loops.”
    “They must be worth millions!”
    “Probably.”
    “Why’d you run away? You could be making a fortune in medicine!”
    He smiled a grim smile. “Not me. I was just their guinea pig. They wouldn’t do this to anybody who already had his surgery training unless they knew it would work. Stupid me, I thought like you did, I’d be a doctor. But I’m just a kid, I’m still growing. I should have thought of that. It’d be too costly to keep re-fitting, and then I’d be competing with them. No, once I succeeded in an actual surgery—a spinal tumor—I was dead meat. The next day I was informed I’d be going to Georgia to dig peanuts the rest of my life.
    “So, I broke into the lab and stole these, and I took off. Stupid them, they were used to dealing with the drugged-out electrode-heads they did their psych experiments on. Security was laughable. I imagine they’re still looking for me. If they don’t intend to kill me, they’ll probably call these units my ‘debt’ and put one of those things in my neck, like yours, and sell me off.”
    He looked at Theo’s neck curiously. “I bet I could get that out of there.”
    “Then what?”
    “What? You could go underground.”
    “Like you? I suppose I could but they’d just catch me again. There’s nowhere to go. Besides—” he glanced at Jennifer. “You’re forgetting my owner. If she didn’t want it out, we’d have to separate her from the control unit somehow and keep her from interfering, and from calling the cops as soon as I took off. Do you have a taste for that? I don’t.
    “If she was willing to let you do it, then she’s left holding the bag. They’ll be checking up on us and when they found me gone she’d go to prison as an accessory. That’d be nice, too, wouldn’t it?”
    Jennifer finally stuck an oar in. “Would you like me to leave the room while you two discuss it? Christ, everybody’s busy deciding my future, even my, my chattel—” she flung this at Theo, who winced. Then she felt bad. “I’m sorry—”
    “It’s just the truth.”
    “Just don’t anybody be deciding what I think and do, okay? You forgot one option, though. If Surgeon could get that thing out we could ditch it and the control and I could go with you—or away, anyway.” She suddenly ripped the thing off her wrist and threw it on the table. “There sure isn’t any future for me here.”
    “None out there, either,” Theo said. “There’s still the problem: Where the hell would we go, singly or together?”
    “Nevada.” The new voice startled them. It was Curt, sitting in his p.j. bottoms on the last stair step. He grinned at them slyly.
      “Sneaky little dickens,” Surgeon said with affection. “Nevada, huh?”
      “Sure. They’d let you in. It’s free there, freer than here anyway.”
      “That’s just rumors. Since they seceded in the ‘04 election nobody ever runs any news out of Nevada any more. It might be a radioactive hell, for all we know.”
      “I think we’d have heard about that,” Theo laughed. “But there’s no way in there, is