i urgently require more information on the cyborg pancreas
Oooh, so this one is a sort of prequel story to Waking Up, the post-apocalyptic story I wrote for Jukebox last year. I wanted to explore the backstories of the three main characters, so this is about the one we get the least about in the original story. (It’s so far back that they aren’t even using the same name, in fact!) Small spoiler, but the “cyborg pancreas” thing is basically because I wanted to explore ways to write illnesses/disabilities that aren’t always obvious on the outside into this setting where lots of people do have obvious ones. Since the main story has two characters with a total of three metal arms, I wanted the other character who looks “healthy” to have something...less obvious. A few exerpts:
Darna’s house sat with its back to the Wall, small and rough in comparison to the smooth metal stretching upward. On the roof, Tag always felt like half the sky was missing, hidden away on the other side. They sometimes wondered what it was like in the Forge Quarter, if there was someone on the other side regretting the loss of Tag’s half of the sky.
Two of the others moved to block them, both reaching for Tag’s arms. “Not so fast! You gotta pay for what you did to Ancho, he’s mad now.” The hulking kid on the right was too slow--Tag slapped the reaching hand away. But the other one, with the big mouth and shrill voice, gripped them tight above the elbow, and grinned. “Got you, scum.”
Tag allowed themself the faintest smile. “Nah.” Their reach was longer. Easy enough to grab a handful of the gabby one’s shirt and pull them forward to meet Tag’s fist. “Got you.”
After staring for a long moment, Tag noticed the tubes coming out of the machine, clear as water but solid, far too flexible to be glass. They followed the tubes with their eyes until they reached the end--the tubes disappeared into Tag’s arm, held to the skin with some sticky fabric. The pain hit all at once. Bruises on their arms and legs, the nose One-ear had not quite broken. A smaller, pricking pain where the tubes met their skin. A sharper pain right below their ribs, throbbing in time with their heartbeat. Tag lifted their shirt--that was different too, more smooth cloth in a washed-out dusty-sky blue--and found a tiny cut along their left side, neatly stitched closed.
That was new. No one had hit Tag there. They were pretty sure they would have remembered getting stabbed. They touched the stitches carefully and shivered, though the room wasn’t cold.
