CHAPTER ONE
THE REVELATION OF RUBY O’CONNER
The postman stared straight into her sad green
eyes as Ruby O’Conner signed off for the plain cardboard package in his hands.
Even in the rainy Irish winter weather, he could see where she had wiped tears
from her face. She was no ordinary girl, and the postman knew that. He knew
strange people when he saw them; hell, he saw one in the mirror every day. He
knew who Ruby was, even though he had never spoken to her. The postman knew
everything about this sad, pretty little girl just by looking into her sad,
pretty little eyes. He knew not of what would happen to her when she opened her
package and he knew not of what would happen to the world, but he felt sorry
for her all the same. He gave her a sad, almost apologetic look and handed her
the package, thanking her for her time. All the postman really hoped was that
she would be a little happier with whatever was in her parcel; he knew those
sad green eyes deserved at least that much.
As she closed the door behind her, Ruby
wondered who would be sending her packages. It wasn't her fathers; her name was
written next to the address. She had long since broken contact with any of her
friends, be they from school or otherwise. Ruby had once been a devout
Christian, but the sudden death of her mother five years earlier had changed
her. She lost faith, and with that she lost her will to live. She managed to
get through school by growing out her black hair and ignoring all approaches
from other people; they talked about her for a while but eventually got the
message. With her anti-social, almost nihilistic behavior her grades began to
drop and she stopped eating regularly, losing weight rapidly and becoming
extremely weak. Ruby couldn't really fathom who would send her a package and
why, but she didn't feel the curiosity. She hadn't felt anything for years. As
she shuffled into the kitchen to fetch a knife, Ruby felt a tear fall down her
cheek. She didn't know why they fell the way they did when they did, but they
just did. Wiping the single tear from her face, she pulled a knife out of the
drawer, using it to cut open the tape. As she pulled at the lid of the box,
whatever was inside made a strange sound, like a sort of humming. She peered
inside, and felt the first feeling she had felt in the years since her mother
had died; shock.
Inside the small, unassuming cardboard box was
the one item in the world that could possibly make Ruby feel again. Inside the
box was something special, it was something unique. Something unlike anything
Ruby had ever seen. She had seen documentaries on the television about prosthetic
limbs and such, but had never taken much interest. The limb in the box however
was completely hollow, almost like a glove. It was the exact length and width
as her own right arm; seemingly tailored specifically for her. Ruby knew for a
fact this was no ordinary glove and she knew full well it could be extremely
dangerous, but she also knew that she had nothing to lose. She slowly reached
her right arm inside the box, being careful not to touch the strange indents
and marks covering the gloves exterior. Ruby was extremely careful in the
action of placing the glove over her right arm; she wasn't sure why but she
knew it was extremely volatile.
Just as the shoulder piece went over her
forearm and reached its correct resting place, all of the marks along the glove
evened out along its surface and an incredible white hot pain laced along the
full length of Ruby’s arm. It reached her shoulder and throbbed out towards her
chest; but she wasn't focused on that. The agony she felt was blinding. Her arm
was burning up and being replaced with white hot metal. Ruby’s entire body
collapsed under the literal weight of the excruciating pain. In her mind, all
she could think of was her current experience; what was happening there and
then was the most important thing in the world. As she quickly lost
consciousness, a voice in the back of her head asked her if she had felt
emotion like this in her entire life, and at that point Ruby understood what
was happening.
The loud, shrill sound of the fire alarm in her
father’s kitchen and the noise of fire trucks outside her window made Ruby wake
with a start. She had been unconscious for maybe fifteen minutes but it had
felt like a lifetime. Ruby smelt smoke, and looking around she saw the heat
from her new arm had started a raging fire. As she sprinted through the house,
she could hear the firemen breaking down her front door and shouting commands
at each other. One of them grabbed her and threw her to the nearest uniformed
man. Breaking free of the man’s grasp, she ran for the door, feeling tears
rolling steadily out of both her eyes.
Staggering outside into the icy winter rain,
for the first time in a long time Ruby O’Conner actually felt something. She wasn't sure if it was love, hate or anything in-between but it was something.
The thing she felt shook her until she could shake no longer. The thing, it
sent a chill down her spine that didn't stop until it covered her entire body.
The shaking and the chill, they both emanated from Ruby, literally shaking and
chilling the air around her. As Ruby O’Conner turned into nothing more than a
blur, she felt just how it felt to be alive, and she really felt it. Only hours
before, she was contemplating death with nothing to live for. Now she realized what she had. She had life. Something that seemed as trivial as the cold winter
rain pierced her heart and replaced the black loneliness with an insurmountable
will to live. The rain not only woke her to the world; it inspired her. Her own
personal revelation had finally hit her, and it had hit her harder than
anything possibly could.
***
Sitting on a gurney in the back of an ambulance
covered in a large woolen blanket, Ruby O’Conner was continually falling in
and out of consciousness. The paramedic tending to her wounds (or, strangely
enough, her lack of wounds) quickly strode to the back of the van and slammed
the doors closed. Banging his closed fist against the back of the cab, he
shouted “Let’s go!” and made towards Ruby with a roll of bandages in his left
hand and a strange looking contraption in his right. As the vehicle began to
move, the man swiftly grabbed Ruby’s right arm and with a few deft movements of
his fingertips, the arm sprung open with a cloud of steam.
Inside the arm was the most unsettling
mechanism Ruby had ever laid eyes on. Where the limb was combined with her
shoulder, the standard bone and muscle was replaced with a strange, vertically
angled threading that connected the arm to the rest of her body. In the centre
of that threading was a sort of glass tube beginning at a pressurized plug,
working as a singular large artery that gradually got smaller as it progressed
down to her fingertips. Running either side of this glass plug lay hundreds of
super-thin fibre-optic cables that branched out from a small processing unit in
the shoulder, linking up with Ruby’s body’s nervous system. The CPU was powered
both by the electrical currents running through her nerves and the flow of the
blood through the glass tube. So as to not be wasted, the plasma from Ruby’s
blood was being drawn into a small vacuum-sealed container; it was currently
being used to quicken the healing of the burn wounds on her right shoulder. Sitting inside the palm of her new arm sat a
small black device Ruby could not recognize. Replacing all the muscles were
small pumps, powered by the water drawn from the blood pumped into the arm.
Grabbing the outer shell of the limb to steady him, the paramedic plugged the
device he held into the last remaining outlet located on the small motherboard inside
her shoulder, the purpose of which was to lead the veins and nerves though to
their appropriate locations. The little
screen on the device booted up and started spewing out numbers, all of which
Ruby didn’t understand. After another good fifteen minutes of this, the van
came to a sudden stop.
With a few swipes and touches of the screen
plugged into Ruby’s arm, the man dressed as a paramedic powered down the limb.
Unclipping the artery, nerve bundle and CPU, he left only the small motherboard
hanging from Ruby’s shoulder. Taking a good five minutes, he unwound the thread
of the now lifeless limb and carried it carefully to the back of the van.
Reaching out his right hand, he opened the door, to be greeted by a tall,
muscular man Ruby could not recognize. “Alright Joe,” the paramedic began,
“What do we do now?”
“We do what we've waited to do for our whole
f*****g lives my friend,” the big man, Joe, replied. The paramedic man looked
confused. “And what would that be?” he asked.
“We make history tonight Aaron,” Joe said, a
grin spreading out across his face.
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