This last sensation was certainly responding strongly.
“Thanks, Clyde.”
Duncan opened and closed his fist, squeezing away the worst of the postsurgical throbbing. This wasn’t his first time to the rodeo. Each of his ten fingers had similar slivers of magnet in place, and every now and then, they had to be replaced.
“How does it feel?” Clyde yanked down his mask, revealing a nasal stud through his septum and a thick steel ring through his lower lip.
Not your typical doctor.
In fact, the man had been a dental hygienist in a former life. In his new profession, operating out of a warehouse near the Ronald Reagan airport, he was the local biohacking community’s best grinder, someone who designed and installed body enhancements.
Clyde preferred the term evolutionary artist.
Myriad other professions shared the industrial space, each separated by opaque plastic curtains: a tattoo artist who had developed a luminescent ink, a piercer who inserted tiny bits of jewelry into the whites of a client’s eye, another who implanted RFID chips into bodies as wearable storage devices.
Although most patrons came here for the novelty or the thrill, a handful had turned biohacking into a new religion, and this was their church. For Duncan, it was simply a matter of professional need. As an electrical engineer, he found this particular biohack a useful tool, a new way of perceiving the world.
“Want to take the new magnet out for a spin?” Clyde asked.
“Probably too sore, but let me see what you’ve sculpted.”
He knew that’s what Clyde really wanted to show him.
His surgeon waved him over to a neighboring table wired with circuit boards, spools of exposed wires, and stacked series of hard drives of varying heights.
“I’m still fine-tuning my latest bit of art.”
“Power it up.”
Clyde flipped the toggle. “It’ll take a few seconds to fully generate the field I created.”
“I think I can wait that long.”
Despite misconceptions, the magnets at his fingertips couldn’t pick up coins or even demagnetize credit cards. Even airport screening machines failed to pick them up. But what they did do was vibrate in the presence of an electromagnetic field. The minuscule oscillations were enough to excite the nerve endings in his fingertips to create a unique sensation very distinct from touch, almost a sixth sense.
With practice, he had discovered that EM fields triggered a variety of sensations, each uniquely different in size, shape, and strength. Palpable bubbles surrounded power transformers. Microwave ovens cast off rhythmic waves that pushed against his hands. High-tension wires pulsated with a silky energy, as if running his fingertips over the smooth skin of an undulating snake.
He also used the magnets for more practical purposes as an electrical engineer. His sixth sense could discern the level of power running along cables or judge if a hard drive was spinning properly inside a laptop. He’d even once used it to diagnose a problem with the distributor cap in his 1995 Mustang Cobra R.
After discovering the rich complexity of this hidden electromagnetic world, he never wanted to go back. He’d be blind without his magnets.
“Should be ready,” Clyde said, waving his arm over the table of carefully manipulated electrical appliances.
Duncan lifted his hands over the table. The energy generated by Clyde’s assembly seemed to push back against his fingers, giving a haptic sensation of form. He ran his magnetic fingers over that surface, discovering the unique shape artfully sculpted by Clyde through the judicious placement of hardware and flow of current.
He felt upswept wings of energy spreading wide to either side. Beneath the wings, his fingertips grew warmer the deeper he probed, even turning hot as he neared the table’s surface.
As he probed, his fingertips gave form and substance to the invisible. An image grew in his mind’s eye, as real as any sculpture.
“Incredible,” Duncan said.
“I call this piece Phoenix Rising from the Ashes of the Digital Age.”
“Ever the poet, Clyde.”
“Thanks, Dunk.”
He paid the man for his services, checked his watch, and headed across the warehouse floor.
He could have had someone at Sigma perform this for him. Monk Kokkalis, with his background in medical forensics, was certainly skilled enough. But he’d known Clyde and his friends from his prior life, back when he thought he was going to rule the world as a college basketball star with La Salle. His muscular arms still bore sleeves of tattoos from the elbow up—and he still wore a silver stud through his upper left ear, in the shape of a tiny eagle, a memorial to friends lost in Afghanistan during a firefight in Takur. He’d ended up in the U.S. Marines after his rising basketball career imploded following a series of injuries that sidelined him, forcing him to forfeit his scholarship.
By the time he was twenty-four, he had served six tours of duty in Afghanistan, the last two with Marine Force Recon, but after Takur, after he failed to reenlist, Painter Crowe ended up at his doorstep. In his prior life, he had been studying engineering in college and must have shown enough aptitude to be approached by Sigma. Now, after a fast-tracked education, he had a dual degree in both physics and electrical engineering—and was about to go on his first official mission with Sigma.
To find a crashed satellite.
Wanting to be fully prepared, he had come here.
He opened and closed his fist. The pain was already receding.
As he stepped through the warehouse door, he noted a pair of shadowy figures crouched by his parked Mustang. The black Cobra R was family, a muscular piece of his past, as much a memorial as the stud through his ear. He had originally bought the used car for his kid brother, back when Duncan believed his future was a spinning orange ball. Cancer finally caught up with Billy at eighteen, taking away forever that shit-eating grin. But the car remained, full of happy memories of two brothers ruling the world, along with grimmer recollections of loss, pain, and good-byes said too soon.
He stalked toward the men by the Mustang, anger building inside of him. Up on his toes, keeping to deeper shadows, he crept until he stood behind them, both clearly stymied by the locking mechanism he had specially engineered for the car.
They remained unaware of his presence—until he cleared his throat.
Surprised, one swung around with a tire iron.
Really?
A moment later, the two were fleeing, bloodied and limping.
Duncan reached to the door’s handle. It unlocked before he touched it, triggered by the tiny glass-encased RFID chip implanted in his upper arm, another bodily addition like his magnets.