Silhouettes

***Remmi shaded his eyes from the mid-day sunlight for several silent moments as he looked at Flint and then beyond him to the strip of asphalt that was his driveway.  “Is that all you came here to ask me?”  He shifted his weight from one prosthetic leg to the other, tiny servos spooling and absorbing and dampening microscopic measures of incremental movements.  The first time Flint saw Remmi’s bare legs he was astonished at how well Remmi was able to handle himself, having no nervous contact with the Earth beneath his feet from the middle of both of his femurs on down.

“Of course not.”  Flint glanced down at the matte black, vinyl taped, carbon fiber limbs and then at the white and candy red striped boxer shorts loosely draped over distributor coils and genitalia.  He brought his eyes back up to Remmi’s.  “The project needs you back, Remmi.”***




“You can’t stay here forever, Remmi.”

“There are some who would disagree with you.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“As long as it has-”

“-nothing to do with Coral, of course.  Are you going to put some pants on or is that ruled out entirely?” Flint crossed his arms, but the disapproving down turn at the corners of his mouth felt to him more comical than austere.  Remmi, bringing a thoughtful index finger to his chin, considered Flint’s question.  He scratched the patchy hair on his pale chest.  The muscles he cultivated at the project grounds were shadows of what they were, but an innate flame of instinct still took to shreds of whatever was left of the right stuff still buried deep behind his eye sockets.  “Can I at least come in?”

“No.”  Remmi came out instead.  The home Remmi owned was the usual prefabricated stock erected throughout the acres upon acres of closed off proving grounds.  A cottage dropped by Hercules helicopter onto a concrete slab.  The outside was tidy, the lawn reasonably kept up to where it abut the thin, needley, conifers of the woodland preserve.  Exempting a half filled baby pool, and a partially dismantled, partially rusted, engine beside a piece of Detroit muscle, the plot was indistinguishable from dozens of others around the compound.

Remmi shaded his eyes from the mid-day sunlight for several silent moments as he looked at Flint and then beyond him to the strip of asphalt that was his driveway.  “Is that all you came here to ask me?”  He shifted his weight from one prosthetic leg to the other, tiny servos spooling and absorbing and dampening microscopic measures of incremental movements.  The first time Flint saw Remmi’s bare legs he was astonished at how well Remmi was able to handle himself, having no nervous contact with the Earth beneath his feet from the middle of both of his femurs on down.

“Of course not.”  Flint glanced down at the matte black, vinyl taped, carbon fiber limbs and then at the white and candy red striped boxer shorts loosely draped over distributor coils and genitalia.  He brought his eyes back up to Remmi’s.  “The project needs you back, Remmi.”

“I know it does,” his smile was askew, seemingly from a turpentine doused cloth swiped across his features worthy of canvas portraiture, but in actuality from a section of double twine filament that snapped loose and gashed his cheek decades ago; long before plastics and carbon were hard pressed to find something they couldn’t mend.  “I would tell them to go find a land mine and swallow it, but,” he pointed to his temple where a steel plate was screwed into the bone of his skull and partially reclaimed by his scalp, “ my phone doesn’t work too well these days.”

“You didn’t have to remove your communications node.  We would have simply blocked access if you didn’t want to be reached.  You know that,” the afternoon heat forced Flint to unzip his black, yellow trimmed, jump suit to his waist.  He fanned himself, tugging on his gray undershirt with the Hortha logo emblazoned in white ink across its chest.

Remmi grimaced at the sight of Hortha’s stamp.  The stylized vacuum tube joined to  the end of a detonator fuse encircled by a streaking meteor was enough to bring the taste of blood to his lips.  “I’m not going back, Flint.  I have a pension.  I have a home.  I had,” he restrained himself as his voice began to rise.  He sat on the short concrete steps in front of his plastic moulded front door, propping his chin up with his hands and resting his elbows on his plasticised bent knees.

“Look,” Flint attempted to restart, though frustration knit his brow.  “Things have stalled since you left,” he took a step closer to Remmi whose entire body exuded a seething aggression and confidence he only felt from the executive officer in charge of field tests.  The wiry muscles in Remmi’s shoulders twitched.  Flint resumed his original distance.  “We aren’t going to make the production ship date.  Right now it’s looking like it won’t even make the close of the decade without your help.”

“Things seemed alright when I left.”

“They weren’t,” Flint snapped against the greater forces of reason within him.  “Remmi, they weren’t.  The data rates are no where near close enough to approximate what you can do at the controls,” his voice grew small and his eyes widened at the thought of Remmi’s Hortha GO8 cutting through the air course like a bat dosed with enough stimulants to rupture the atrium walls of a whale’s heart, the active variable geometry wings shifting and changing with grace unparalleled in nature.  Flint shook his head back to the now, his fingers grazing the millimeter deep geometric grooves in his forehead where the microfilaments of the link visor grafted to his skin and read his electrochemical outputs.

Remmi touched his own forehead, idly, unconsciously.  His fingers traced the series of stainless centimeter wide link phases, fourteen in total, drilled and grafted to his forehead.  Within each was carbon micro-weave webbing, allowing the filaments of the link visor to worm their way into direct contact with his pre-frontal lobe, and also allowing “the light” to be pumped into his body, hardening his weak tissues to resist pressures that would crush a man under any other circumstances.  The GO8 was poised to revolutionize automated air travel, combat, propulsion, submersibles, supersonic sub-aqueous transport and every piece of technology that relied on fluid dynamic interactions inbetween.  To test its boundaries, a selection of pilots were given “the light,” alloys suspended in saline fluid that hardened when a current was passed through it.  The g-suits of the jet age were rendered meaningless overnight.  The invasive nature of the procedure and its repetition from one test to another corroded subconscious and emotional centers within the brain’s deeper tissues.  Back then, the adventure was enough to motivate Remmi to skip the fine print.

“Remmi, the GO8 isn’t ready for full automation; hell it isn’t ready for remote testing yet either.  Not at the edge of the envelope where you took it.  We need you.”

Remmi considered the voice of another time.  “I need you to take this a little more seriously”  Coral saw what was happening to him years before he could understand it.  Years after things began to crumble outside of the cockpit.  The year when the medical authorization came down to allow the incisions and tamped down rings that would allow the microscopic needles to make him the best damn pilot to ride lightning across the sky was the year her need vanished; the year she squeezed his hand and his “light” corrupted subconscious brought him rage instead of tenderness and her kiss brought a measure of pressure and little else.  “Don’t you feel?”

“I’m obsolete Flint,” he got to his feet and turned his back to the day too bright.  “They don’t make them like me anymore for a reason,” he knocked on the side of his head, before turning back to face Flint.  “You should know that, being that you are married to the best expert on the physiognomic frontiers committee.”

“Remmi, hang on.”  Remmi, stepped backward inside his front door and closed it to a slit.  “Remmi, I didn’t mean to take her away from you.  I swear to you.”  He closed the door still further.  “I came down here to try and convince you to come back because you’re the only one left who can take that thing up and push this forward for all of our sakes, but I also came to apologize to you for taking away the last thing that truly mattered to you.  I understand that now more than I could have possibly known before,”  The door closed, “and I’m sorry.”