Chapter #5Meanwhile... by: Yote   Doctor Mandeville placed both palms on the doors and pushed, bursting in to the family waiting area with his surgical gown billowing about him. The family looked up in alarm and pale-faced worry, but that quickly turned to joy at the Doctor's cry of "success! The surgery was a complete success!"
The daughter, whatever-her-name-was (he never bothered to learn the patients' names, there were so many of them) rose from her seat and came to grip his hands in her own, wrinkled own, thanking him profusely. Doctor Mandeville assured her that her gratitude was needless, that he only got into this line of work for the selfless act of helping others, and could she redirect her praise to the clinic's facebook or twitter pages where other clients could see it.
The granddaughter, a far more comely girl in her 30s, asked "when can we go in to see him?"
"Hm? See who?" Mandeville beamed.
"Uh, grandfather. The man you've just been operating on."
"Oh, right of course!" the Doctor beamed, spinning on his heel. He stared down the corridor, confused for a moment at its emptiness, before remembering the remote in his pocket. It was the size of a TV remote and covered in buttons that governed all sorts of functions - except instead of 'volume' or 'channel', these buttons controlled things like 'pace' and 'gait'. He pressed the 'home' button.
The swing doors at the far end of the corridor swung open. A silver-haired old man in a surgical gown emerged and walked towards them, his gait unsteady, a little mechanical perhaps, but remarkable for a man who, until yesterday, had been so riddled with arthritis as to be bedbound. "Remarkable! Truly remarkable!" crowed Bernard, staring at his own legs with incredulity.
The family erupted into cries of surprise and awe. "Bernard, you're walking!" cries the man's elderly wife, looking like she might collapse.
"That I am, my dear! Why, I daresay I could dance if I wanted."
Mandeville beamed. Happy to oblige, he thumbed the 'Dance' button on the remote. Bernard suddenly broke into an animated jig, skipping and jumping about the clinic's corridors like an Irish dancer. He finished with an acrobatic leap. Bernard could barely believe his own eyes. He clutched his chest, wheezing from the exertion, even though it was the servomotors in the joints that had done 95% of the work. "Warn me next time you do that, Doctor," Bernard puffed.
"How is this even possible?" the granddaughter cried.
"Oh, it's nothing really. Jesus was making the lame walk two thousand years ago, I've just improved on his work is all," Mandeville said humbly. "It's really not much more than a standard hip and knee replacement really. The only difference is that we replace the entire joint, not with a prosthetic joint but with a servomotor equivalent. It's useful in cases where the muscles have atrophied beyond the ability to manipulate the joint - really the motors are doing all the work, your grandfather is just along for the ride."
"And what a ride it is! I've never seen him this happy. We can't thank you enough. Are you sure you don't want any payment?"
He waved away her comments. "The only payment I need is the joy on my patients' faces. Aaand of course we will be housing your grandfather in our facility for the next few months while we perform tests to judge the efficacy of this groundbreaking treatment. In exchange for waiving the $320,000 fees."
"Of course, we completely understand. What sort of tests will you be doing?"
"Seeing how the patient adapts. Checking his mobility, and balance more importantly. These devices are to be fitted in very frail patients - we can't have them falling over due to improperly calibrated motors or glitchy software." He pressed a button to make Bernard swivel on the spot, and gestured to the gap in the surgical gown where a gnarly, fresh surgical scar could be seen running from the old man's coccyx to his lower thoracic vertebrae. "We had to take out most of the lower spinal column to replace with the motors and computer hub that detects and maintains balance. That is the main section we're concerned about - how it interfaces with the legs and how it compensates with the movement of the limbs of the natural body." He sucked air through his teeth, like a plumber about to add an extra zero to a tricky job. "That's the tricky part - having only half of a mechanised skeleton. The machine half has to compensate for the unpredictability of the human remains. There's a possibility we might need to fully replace the shoulder and elbow joints if that becomes a problem."
"Is that likely to happen?"
"Who can say," Mandeville replied, the flicker of a wicked smirk tweaking the edge of his mouth. "Who can say."
"Are we able to visit him at least?"
"I'm afraid that's out of the question. The clinic is completely sealed to outside eyes. This is cutting edge work we're doing here after all. You understand, yes?" The grand-daughter looks crestfallen at his words, but fortunately Mandeville has never been burdened with an excess of empathy. He claps his hands sharply, and jabs the remote at Bernard like a parent switching off the children's TV at bedtime. "That's enough for today. Our patient needs his rest after all. Say goodbye, Bernard!"
"'Ere, I 'adn't finished talkin' to them yet," Bernard remarked indignantly as his legs began to frog march him down the corridor, away from his family.
"Oh, I'm sure you'll see them again, Bernard," Mandeville lied, walking a few paces behind his patient. After they turned a corner, he eagerly tapped a few settings on the remote.
The servomotor skeleton of metal and plastic whined as the joints that had once been the old man's hips shifted into a new configuration, switching the previously stiff gait into a smooth, swaying motion, the old man's saggy ass cheeks sashaying from side to side with each mincing, feminine stride. The ramrod straight spine angled forward into a smooth curve, forcing the backside to jut out proudly. The ankle servomotor joints tightened, lifting the feet on to tiptoes, as if the man was wearing invisible stiletto shoes.
Bernard twigged immediately that something is different, though naturally he had no way of guessing that his doctor had given him the gait of a broad-hipped catwalk model, and he would have been powerless to do anything about it if he had - the motors were 10x more powerful than anything the geriatric's atrophied muscles could muster. Mandeville relished the intoxicating feeling of power watching the unfortunate man strut himself for the Doctor's personal enjoyment.  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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