Iy life becomes agony My Sigils are attached to the metacar- pus in each hand. Mickey removes the old Red Sigils and cultivates new skin and bone over the wounds. Then he sets to installing a stolen subdermal datachip into my frontal lobe. I am told the trauma killed me and they had to restart my heart. I've died twice then They say I was in a coma for two weeks, but to me it was nothing but a dream. I was in the vale with Eo. She kissed me on the forehead and then I woke and felt the stitches and the pain I lie in bed as Mickey tests me. He has me move marbles from one container into other containers coded by colors. I do this for what seems a lifetime. "We are forming synapses, my dar- ling." He tests me with word puzzles and tries to make me read, but I don't know how to read. "You will have to learn that for the Institute," he giggles My dreams are cruel things to wake from. In them, Eo comforts me, but when I wake, she is nothing but a fleet- ing memory. I am hollow as I lie in Mickey's makeshift medical cell. An ion germ killer buzzes next to my bed. Ev- erything is white, yet I can hear the thumping of music from his club. His girls change my diapers and empty my piss bags. A girl who never speaks bathes me three times a day. Her arms are willowy, her face soft and sad as when I first saw her sitting with Mickey at his liquid table. The wings that curl outward from her back are bound with a crimson ribbon. She never meets my eyes. Mickey continues to make me develop synapse connections as he repairs the scar tissue from my neural surgery He's all laughs and smiles and lingering touches on my forehead as he calls me his darling. I feel like one of his girls.
one of the angels he sculpted for his own pleasure. "But we must not be satisfed only with the brain,"' he says. "There is much work to be done on this Ruster body of yours if we want to make you into an iron Gold." "And that is?" "The golden ancestors, they call them the iron Golds. They were hard men. They stood lean and fierce upon their battlecruisers as they laid waste to the armies and republic fleets of Earth. What creatures they were." His eyes go distant. "It took generations of eugen- ics and biological tampering to make them. Forced Darwinism." He's quiet for a moment, and it seems an anger builds in him "They say Carvers will never dupli- cate the beauty of the Golden Man. The Board of Quality Control taunts us. Per- sonally, I do not want to make you a man. Men are so very frail. Men break. Men die. No, I've always wished to make a god." He smiles mischievously as he does some sketches on a digital pad. He spins it around and shows me the killer I will become. "So why not carve you to be the god of war?"