Against the Tide - A New Elysium Story [Complete]

26. Heartsick and Homebroken

Cyril Harper was a somewhat unfortunate man.

He had wanted to become a neuro-cyberneticist for as long as he could remember. His parents were not exactly thrilled about the perspective of their oldest son becoming a doctor instead of a senator, or an ambassador, or at least a council member. Understandably, they were even more frustrated when he failed the university entrance exams twice.

In the eyes of Cyril Harper, the modality of the exam was wrong. Neuro-cybernetics was not something you could learn by heart and regurgitate in a multiple-choice test. It was an art. Surely, it required knowledge of human medicine, neuroscience and nano-engineering, but in the long run, it required creativity and finesse – things you could not learn by heart and regurgitate in a test.

In the eyes of the university council, Cyril Harper was just an idiot.

On his third try, he passed the entrance exam by a small margin. But he had sacrificed everything for it, spending day and night studying, until he had lost twenty pounds and gained dark shadows under his eyes. His fiancé, a girl from a wealthy upper class family with expensive clothes and a loud voice, had been fed up with his late night studying, canceled dates, and overall absent-mindedness and neglect. So she broke off the engagement.

His parents were less than thrilled when they heard about it. In their eyes, he had missed his last chance to redeem himself by following their wish for that arrangement. So they cut off all financial support for their useless renegade son.

Now Cyril was facing a new problem. All the other prospective neuro-cyberneticists were getting augments to help them with their work – enhanced eyes that would help them to see the microscopic structures of the human body they were working on, advanced scanners, and tiny robotic servos in their hands that would facilitate the fine micromanipulation of the equipment required during surgery. But Cyril had no money. He couldn't afford them.

He came to the conclusion that is was better like this. He had found that most neuro-cyberneticists were quite useless anyway. Most of them had learned everything by heart and regurgitated it for tests, and forgotten most of it after graduation. He would not let his hands be cut open by those bumbling brutes.

So he graduated without augments – on top of his class, nontheless, to everyone's surprise.

Not that that did him any good, because soon after that, there came the Purge.

Among his colleagues, some refused to have their augments removed, and they were taken away. They disappeared and were never heard from again. Others panicked, and began to rip their augments out from underneath their skin in a hurry, damaging muscles, nerves and sinews in the process. Their hands would never heal, and they would never perform a surgery again. Not that that mattered, because once the Purge had begun, nobody had any use for neuro-cyberneticists any longer.

Cyril's only fortune was that he had no augments himself.

He also had a good heart, so he began to help people. First in deserted factory halls, damp basements or on kitchen counters, later on strange colonies and remote space stations. He would help them by removing wires from underneath skin, tetrodes from brains, plug-in connections from arms and backs, enhancement modules from organs. He felt like he was living his life in reverse, as he did those surgeries in the opposite way as he had learned them. It was also very different to do it all outside of a clinic. His patients didn't always survive.

Once the Purge was fully underway, Cyril realized that despite his attempts to help people, he had been doing the wrong thing. Because the right thing to do was not to remove those augments. The right thing would have been to go right up to those elitist bastards and stuck up military assholes, and strangle them with some subcutaneous wire.