Jupiter Hawk

“Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.” The genetic surgeon stated this matter-of-factly as the third needle entered my spine. My screams continued anyway.

“Usually, when they say that, they’re referring to the cries of the poor pilots that get stuck out there when their comms go down. But it’s just as true here in this little pod. It’s nice, actually. I just turn off my earpiece when you get too loud.” It was clear that Dr. Tran had probably already switched her earpiece off.

My screams faltered as the initial burn lost some, but not all, of its intensity. I wanted to ball up my fists instinctually in response to the pain, but I had already lost all muscle movement in my limbs.

“Lot less mess in a vacuum too,” Dr. Tran continued. “Blood mostly stays inside you, thanks to your suit, and the equipment stays sterile.” The seal around the injector device opened once again and the needle slid out of my spine as painfully as it went in. The searing hot sensation coursed through my entire body, every nerve on fire. The screams would have been ear-splitting if it was possible to use my vocal cords while under the influence of the paralytics.

“Not to mention, no spectators,” Dr. Tran continued. “Too many curious ears used to listen at the OR door back on Base-20. They asked far too many questions about the screams when we finished.”

I looked towards the only door in the tiny surgical pod. The small glass window on it showed past the airlock to the long tether keeping the pod in tow with the rest of the vessel. Why did I ever walk through that door?

“'Is my baby in pain?’ The mothers would ask. ‘Are they going to be okay?’ Blah blah blah blah blah. Of course your baby is in pain! I’m rewriting the script of life inside them; you think that’s a peaceful process?”

As she spoke, I started to realize that I never saw anesthesia on the surgical contract I signed - I had assumed those details would come later. I had heard about numbing injections for those who still gave live birth and presumed that spinal surgery, genetic or not, would mandate such anesthetics. I was wrong, it turns out, which only confirmed for me that this decision was made in too much haste, and now I would have to lie in agony for who knows how many hours. This decision - not that I had much choice in the matter - would be worth it in the end as long as the plasmids took.

“As for the question ‘will they be okay’, the answer is always…” Her voice trailed off as she tightened my back and neck brace, nearly to suffocation. “No! They will not be okay! They will be more than okay!”

Suddenly, I saw the injection device floating above me, still attached to a cord on the wall but free from Dr. Tran’s grasp. When did she turn the gravity off?

Dr. Tran herself floated over my immobilized body to a place just outside my field of view, and when she returned, she held up a small gyroscope with an IV bag inside of it. She connected my peripheral line to the bag, spun the gyroscope to stabilize it in the space above me, and then turned a knob that pushed a sickly blue concoction into the vein port in the arm of my suit.

“My patients are more than okay when they leave my table. They have never felt better - they are ascendant!” Dr. Tran’s voice was triumphant, but I felt less so as my nerves slowly caught fire again. I squeezed my eyelids shut, as it was probably the only muscle group left that I could move.

Suddenly, I felt a slap across my thigh. I opened my eyes to Dr. Tran, who then patted each of the nodes taped to my helmet. “Good, no muscle movement but still sensation,” she said. “I left your eyelids functional so you can still communicate and feel some sense of control. We need you awake, stimulated, and ready to train your new reflexes, even as the plasmids begin their invasion of your neuromuscular junction. Soon enough you’ll have the quick nerves of a Jupiter Hawk.” A Jupiter Hawk?

Dr. Tran checked the IV bag still suspended above me in the gyroscope. “Excellent, it seems you’re tolerating the faster infusion rate. I’ll be back once you reach steady-state. Just hang on until then.”

Perhaps my pupils dilated, or maybe they darted from her to the door too many times, but somehow Dr. Tran noticed my concern. “Hey, I haven’t left this room since last night! You think you’re the only new pilot getting stimmed this week? Even surgeons need to eat sometimes.”

Dr. Tran moved through the door and into the airlock chamber. As she stored her surgical gear, she strapped a spare oxygen tank to her spacesuit. She paused to look through the window again and spoke through her earpiece to mine.

“Don’t worry. You’re not a sick patient that needs this surgery to fight their way back to normalcy. You are well on your way to exceeding normalcy! You are transhuman, Mr. Leon.” And with that, Dr. Tran strapped herself to the pod tether and exited.

I shuddered as the word ‘transhuman’ registered in my mind. Or at least, I would’ve shuddered if I could. When I signed up for this expedition, I had no plans to become ‘transhuman’ myself. But apparently, it’s a job requirement now for all pilots on board. I would’ve never done this to myself if it were up to me. But time was of the essence, both for me and for the company. And if getting ‘stimmed’ is what it took to achieve our goals quicker, so be it. Stab me until I scream loud enough to pierce through the vacuum of space; just make sure my sister gets her cure.

As I contemplated the transformations occurring within me, my eyes automatically darted to something beyond the window. At first, I saw nothing but the pod tether, clearly motionless against the black of space. But then, I saw it. The tether was actually vibrating, almost imperceptibly. Why was unclear - it’s not like there was wind catching on it. Then, it clicked. There’s a current running through it from the mothership. And if that current is strong enough to be causing a vibration…

I tried to move my arms, but the paralytic was still wearing off. I scanned the room for any cameras, hoping that somebody would witness what was about to occur. None could be seen from my point of view, though my eyes did land on the overhead lamp. It was flickering - faintly, but flickering nonetheless. If I couldn’t stop it, the overloaded current was likely to blow the fuse for the whole pod.

Slowly, I felt my jaw move. Then, my tongue. “Doc-er ‘ran, Doc-er ‘ran…” It seemed my T’s didn’t work yet. “Ca’ you hear me? Hewo!” Though my numb mouth slurred terribly, I was sure that she would’ve heard me if her earpiece was on. If she was forgetful enough to leave her earpiece off, did she forget anything else during the procedure?

After minutes that felt like hours, fingers were starting to wiggle. They felt for the restraints around my wrists but couldn’t quite reach them. As the paralytic wore off and the muscles moved more and more, the burning in the nerves returned. Now, I felt I could move everything - except for the fact that a back brace, neck brace, wrist restraints, and ankle restraints kept me strapped on the operating table. But, was the table restrained?

Though I couldn’t turn my head much, I felt around the edge of the table as far as my fingers could stretch. There! I felt a smooth bar protruding from the table. If I could recall from entering the room, the bars extended wall-to-wall. That meant that, like the IV bag floating in one stable position in the gyroscope, the pod itself was probably a gyroscope keeping the table steady. Good. If it could spin, perhaps I would be able to grab the cord of the injection device and cut myself loose. I just needed a little inertia.

At first, the only object I could push off of in any meaningful way was my pillow. I shrugged my shoulders until it floated out from under my head. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to get the gyroscope of the table in motion. The cord to the injection device was itself in motion, but it would take minutes for it to even collide with my table. The only other object I could use was the IV bag gyroscope – but, by the looks of it, there was still more infusion to go. I refused to go through this all over again - I had to get the full dose.

The lights began to flicker violently and the pod tether outside was vibrating frantically. Did no one onboard notice this? “Dr. Tran, can you hear me? The pod tether has an overloaded current, it could fry the whole pod. Get help now!” Still, no response came from my earpiece, despite my now perfect annunciation.

As I looked around the room for anything else I could possibly do, I couldn’t see much of anything as the lamp was now at a strobe-like setting. Yet somehow, the flickering slowly became less jarring, and I was almost adjusting to the lighting changes as fast as the changes occurred. It was like my pupils were dilating and contracting in sync with the light’s rhythm. Was that possible?

With my greater visual clarity, I spied a fray in the cloth restraints around my right wrist. Though still out of reach from my fingers, I began to rapidly shake my hands worse than any Parkinson’s patient I had ever met. The rotation of my wrist was so fast that the friction of my glove seemed to tear the fray further until finally my right hand was free. In an instant, I was untying the knot on my left hand, and now both hands were quickly undoing all the latches on my neck brace. My hands almost seemed to do the work for me.

Suddenly, a spark ignited beyond the door. The lamp went out, and just as it did, I saw that the pod tether had snapped. The pod began hurtling away from the mothership and spinning fast. Now, the inertia I had been wishing for was here, and the injection cord began to rotate with the wall it was attached to. It was going fast – too fast. Just as my neck brace snapped off, the cord began wrapping around my legs and torso, blocking access to the latches on my back brace. In a few seconds, the cord would constrict me until my suit popped. I could grab it to stop it, but another thought entered my brain. Had she remembered to cap the needle? I couldn’t tell by looking at it in this darkness. A prick to my suit now means death. If she had forgotten to turn on her comms, how could I trust that she capped her needle?

“Hello! Is anyone listening? The OR pod has detached, I repeat, my pod has been detached!” I realized then that Dr. Tran was right: In space, either no one can hear you scream, or no one cares to listen.

With no time to waste, I trained my eyes on the end of the cord where the needle was. Just pretend you’re staring at a fan, I told myself. You need to catch a fan blade. You stared at plenty of fans at your sister’s appointments, this is no different.

I traced the spinning needle until I felt the cord squeeze around my stomach – it was now or never. I jabbed my hand into its trajectory and grabbed for it. My hand clasped around the base of the needle - no puncture. In fact, it was capped after all.

I snapped off the needle with one hand, uncapped it, and used it to help tear through my back brace while my other hand unwrapped the cord. In a couple of moments, the brace was off and so were my leg restraints. All that was left was for me to jump at the pod door and make it into the airlock chamber. Still, the room was spinning fast, and the bars of the gyroscope table would break my arms if I took more than half a second to open the door. I had to slow it down.

My eyes went again to the IV bag. By now, the bag was almost empty – almost. If it was empty, I could use it to snag the gyroscope and stop the spinning. Did I risk leaking the last drops before I got the full dose?

I had heard the stories about the plasmid trials that went wrong. These gene-altering therapeutics were created by my new company, Plasmark, which extracted useful genes from alien life forms across the stars. Patients desperate for a cure to their ails signed up to try injecting these alien plasmids long before their administration protocol was rigorously tested. If there was one clear result from these preliminary trials, it was that there was a very narrow dose range where things didn’t go horribly wrong: disfiguring mutations, destruction of the immune system, and sometimes death within weeks to name a few. I had read enough of the headlines at Base-20 to know I’d never use these plasmids myself. And yet, here I am. I was in too deep; I had to finish the dose.

I grabbed the IV bag and squeezed it like toothpaste. I winced as the blue liquid shot into my bloodstream even faster. At this rate, there couldn’t be that much left. I began lining up my throw, and for just a nanosecond each time the pod made a revolution, I caught a glimpse at the increasingly distant mothership. “Mayday mayday, Pilot to Ark, I am quickly exiting the magnetic range, do you copy? Turn on the magnet harness now or I’m gone.”

Finally, the bag emptied. I squeezed the tubing for the last drops of this blue poison and spun the gyroscope like a lasso. My eyes, just as before with the needle, tracked the spinning bars with inhuman precision. I launched the gyroscope right between the bar and the wall at just the right time, and the spinning came to a sparking stop. There – the door!

I jumped for the door, let myself into the airlock chamber, and rifled around the storage closets until I found a spare oxygen tank. If I remembered anything from my time as a cadet, it was how to find a makeshift jet pack.

Opening the exterior pod door, I pulled myself out slowly and positioned myself to push off. I looked at the mothership, now quite a distance away, and jumped. I watched the spinning surgical pod hurtle off into the darkness as I slowly floated towards the Ark. Pulling the tubing out of the oxygen tank, I ripped it and pointed it behind me. The pressurized oxygen gave me just enough acceleration to hopefully get me back into magnetic range.

“Ark this is Pilot 21 requesting a magnet harness; I have exited the pod. Please confirm that the magnetic harness is on.” A pause. “Please confirm!” The last words came out a little less calmly than intended, but at a fraction of the volume that they deserved to hear them. Finally, a voice responded.

“Very good Pilot 21, engaging magnet harness. Congratulations on a successful operation.” It was Dr. Tran.

The magnet towed me toward the nearest external airlock, where I entered without issue. Once inside I finally took off my helmet and breathed a long sigh of relief. I emerged in the main lobby of the medical wing of the Ark, where I saw Dr. Tran finishing a bowl of ramen. To my surprise, standing next to her was none other than my old captain - Captain Wilding. By instinct, my hand shot up in a salute, with my back straight and feet together. “Captain Wilding sir.”

“At ease, Leon.” Captain Wilding smiled and shared a sly look with Dr. Tran. It was the first time I had seen him out of uniform, though the polo with the signature Plasmark logo was tucked neatly into pleated khakis. “You’re off the force now, Pilot, this is the private sector. You can just call me Lance.”

I dropped the salute and smiled, mostly out of embarrassment. His casual demeanor did little to put me at ease as I remembered the drills he used to run at Base-20. Then, I looked at Dr. Tran, and my smile dropped. “Captain… Lance, may I have a word alone with Dr. Tran?”

“Of course,” said Lance. “Meet me in my office when you’re ready to talk. We have a lot of catching up to do. Dr. Tran?” Lance handed her a small envelope and walked off. Of all the people I was actually glad to leave behind, he would have been near the top of the list. I suppose today just wasn’t my lucky day.

Meanwhile, Dr. Tran smiled smugly, slurped up her last noodle, and pulled out her earpiece. “Don’t worry, I heard you screaming the whole time - never turned it off.”

“Then why the hell didn’t you respond? You know I could’ve died in there?” I could tell I was losing my calm again.

“All surgical pods have a backup generator, full oxygen reserves, and thrusters,” she said. “In fact, my pod is on its way back right now.” Dr. Tran laughed mischievously as she pointed out of the window where a small white dot was growing bigger in the distance.

I shook my head. “So, what, this was all some big test? You know, I almost stopped the dose early. I don’t think you need me to tell you what could’ve happened to me if I did.”

Dr. Tran chuckled. “All of our research indicates that the infusion can be paused and restarted within an hour without any consequences – and we’ve tested plasmids on hundreds by now. That’s about the worst it could’ve gone; anything else and we would’ve turned on the pod to intervene. But, we didn’t have to, did we?” Dr. Tran grabbed my arm to check where the infusion went in. There was something familiar about Dr. Tran now that we were both out of our suits.

“No, I made it out,” I said. “Barely. But that’s because of basic training, not this hawk juice you-”

“You made a series of quick decisions that secured your safety” interjected Dr. Tran. “Those instincts came from your training, that is correct. We don’t give our ‘hawk juice’ to just anyone after all. But those decisions may have been impossible to make without your quickened reflexes.”

I thought back to my pupils, my quick hands, and my uncanny sense of timing as I was escaping the surgical pod. “So, that’s what happens while I’m ‘stimmed’?” I said.

“Precisely,” she said. “Twitch muscle capabilities are enhanced, perception is more focused, coordination and even recognition are all improved while under the effects of the nervous stimulating plasmid, or stim for short. All these enhancements are vital to the survival of the Jupiter Hawk, the species where the genes for the stim are derived. Coincidentally these same enhancements are also vital to the success of an Ark pilot. You will navigate many undiscovered and alien spaces, and at quite high speeds too. Those high speeds don’t allow for a human to navigate safely without a stim.”

“So why not fly slower?” I asked.

“The faster we can fly, the faster we discover new genes. The more genes we discover, the higher the chance we find cures for all of humanity's diseases. Finding cures gets me paid, and if we’re lucky, it gets your sister her brain back.”

That’s it – that’s how I knew Dr. Tran. She said she used to work on Base-20, probably at the same hospital where Lily has basically lived for the past five years. I would’ve seen her in passing at some point. And no doubt she had heard about my sister’s infamous case - one of a kind, the doctors always said.

“You know Lilly?” I asked.

“I do,” she said. “On rounds, the docs would always recommend that Lilly be seen by me for a genetic consultation. But her primary physician…”

“Dr. Costello,” I said. I kissed the back of my hand in remembrance.

“Yes, Dr. Costello, may he rest in peace, would always tell me that Lilly and her family would never agree to plasmid therapy. So, I never touched her case. But when I saw you on my schedule, I couldn’t resist confirming your history with your supervisor. It was Wilding that set this whole test up, and I’ve got to admit I like his style. You are transhuman now, after all – I’m glad you were able to prove it on your first day aboard.”

I stood for a moment, taking it all in. It had worked, I could give them that much. Slowly, the side effects that had been explained prior to surgery to me were starting to set in. Muscle aches, drooping eyelids, fatigue – I could feel it all now. I took a seat in one of the lobby's many empty chairs.

“So, if you know Lilly, then you know why I agreed to it all this in the first place, why I let you poison my DNA,” I said.

Dr. Tran nodded.

“I have to find it,” I said. “I have to find the thing that brings back the Lilly I used to know. If that thing is a plasmid… so be it.”

Dr. Tran smiled and handed me the sealed envelope from Captain Wilding. “Then welcome to the Ark, pilot.”