== Trigger warning: ==

This chapter contains depictions of anatomy and surgery which are inspired in real human anatomy, and this content may be triggering to some people.

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I didn’t make it to the police station.

I had just come out of my first afternoon class when I got a call from Helena.

“Hey, Lucia?” she asked me. She sounded nervous.

“Hi, dear,” I told her. “Is something the matter?”

“Umm, yes, kinda,” she said. “I need to see you. I mean, I really need to see you, like, right now. It’s important. I’m outside the modern art museum. You know where that is, right? Can you come?”

“Helena?” I asked, shocked. “What happened?”

“It’s… I have some bad news. This can’t wait. Please come.”

“All right, all right, I’ll go.”

I told Abigail and the rest of my friends that I was going home for the day, then left the campus. I was about to call a car when I realized it: was it really a wise decision to do that, right now? Suppose I got the same car from that morning? Considering this might be Cyan’s work, and that they had access to the data in most of my devices, that was a real possibility.

So, instead, I walked up to a passerby, and asked them to call me a car instead. I told them that my lens was acting up, and kept on crashing. I didn’t need to insist much for someone to accept helping me out.

Twenty minutes later, I was at the bay area, near the entrance of the museum, where Helena said she would be.

“Hey! Luce!” she called me, and ran over to me from the other side of the plaza. She hugged me. “Thank god you’re here,” she told me. “Come on, I need to tell you something.”

She took my hand, and led me around the plaza to a newish building I knew to be the aquarium.

“Um… Helena? What are we doing here?”

“You’ll see, just come!” she said, simply.

We paid for our tickets, walked in, and Helena immediately took me to the stairs. The underground was where the larger tanks were, and there was a section where you could walk through a tunnel under a huge tank, which was actually not really a tank but a grated part of the bay. We went through that. And then, I saw Helena look around her, and pull me through a service door into a small room on the other side.

She turned the light on, and locked the door.

“What’s going on?” I asked, confused.

“Shh, don’t be loud,” she told me, keeping her voice at barely more than a whisper. “My brother lost the lawsuit.”

“What?!” I whispered back.

“The Federal Justice who was assigned to my case didn’t accept Jayme’s appeal. He just messaged me about it. With this, Cyan can legally shut me down.”

I felt like crying again. Helena noticed it.

“Hey! Hey!” she took my face in her hands. “Listen, I’ll be okay. But I need your help.”

“What? Why? How?”

Helena chuckled. “Yes, these are all valid questions. Look, you’ve built a replica before, so you know how it goes, right? You know how our bodies work.”

I nodded. “Roughly,” I told her.

“And you’ve seen my input diagram, so you can tell if you spot anything that feels out of place, right?”

I nodded again. “Yes, but… Helena, what do you mean with—”

“So if I asked you,” she said, interrupting me, “to find the R-Unit inside my body, and take that out, you could do it, right?”

“What?! Are you serious?”

“Yes, I’m serious,” she told me, looking me in the eyes. “I have to run away, but I can’t hide from Cyan Four with that thing inside me. They’d find me, wherever I go. I even suspect that thing has a GPS tracker in it.”

I was shocked. “But… to take that out…”

“You’ll have to cut through my skin and search,” she told me.

“I can’t do this!” I protested, feeling the weight of the responsibility Helena was placing in my hands. I started to shake. “It will hurt you, and what if I don’t find it? What if I make a mistake?”

“Lucia, calm down,” said Helena, sounding very serious. She held both of my arms. “Listen, I can’t force you to do this, but I need you to. I think Jack Cyan and his crew are already coming for me. Right now we’re under the bay, so there’s no signal here. But the minute I walk out of this place, they’ll see what my eyes see, hear what I can hear, and they’ll find me. And once they do, they will kill me. Do you understand?”

“Of course I understand, Helena, but what you’re asking me to do is—”

“If you take the device out, I’ll have a chance.”

Shit.

I hugged Helena, and started crying. We stayed like that for a couple of minutes, while I gathered the courage to do what had to be done.

“I’ll do it,” I told her, eventually, between sobs.

Helena wiped my tears with her hands, and smiled at me. I smiled back, though I was crying, and she gave me a kiss.

“Thank you,” she told me. Then she took off her backpack and handed it to me. “There’s a knife in here,” she told me. “There’s also a lantern and a mirror, because I think you may need those. I have no idea what people in labs use to close wounds in our skin, so the best I could do is duct tape.”

“You really thought this through,” I said, looking at the stuff in her backpack. Beside the things she’d mentioned, there were also a few clothes, and all of Helena’s spare battery packs.

“I had years to plan it out,” she told me. “Originally, I had thought that if it came to this, I would cut myself up and try to find the unit on my own. But then you showed up, and seriously, I think my chances are a lot better with you.”

“I agree,” I told her.

I got the knife from her backpack and thought about the best place to do an incision. Replica bodies were designed to mimic organic ones. Obviously, however, they didn’t need muscles like an organic’s to move, their entire skeleton was already capable of moving on its own, upon receiving commands from the connectome. But they had artificial tissue everywhere in the body, to match the shape and consistency of human bodies, and that includes bones as well. This meant that whatever little knowledge of human anatomy I had acquired in high school would be put to test, now.

On the other hand, there was an aspect in which a replica’s body was very different from an organic’s. While in organic humans, the central nervous system is located only inside the head and spine — well protected locations —, that’s not how it works for replicas. A replica’s processors, chipsets and other electronic parts are spread throughout their body. I had absolutely no idea how Helena’s body was designed. If I cut at the wrong spot, I could severely damage her, maybe even kill her. I had hopes that the most crucial parts of Helena’s system were in more protected places than the rest (after all, you don’t want a replica to die because they cut their finger), but that wasn’t nearly enough. I’d be cutting into a body which I knew very little about, and that was dangerous. Even if Helena had all of her replication diagrams, right then I had no time to go through them.

I knew the R-Unit was supposed to be located somewhere inside Helena’s chest, because that’s the impression I got from her input diagram. But I couldn’t cut her chest or upper back, because there was a fake ribcage underneath which would block the access to anything else. My best bet was to cut right under the sternum, then try to locate the R-Unit from there. I also figured that if I cut right along the edges of fake bones, the chance that I would damage an important structure would be smaller.

“Okay,” I told Helena, “I’m starting.”

I felt for her costal edge, and pierced through Helena’s skin. Her face immediately contorted in agony. I knew she was in severe pain. I was cutting the very fine sensitive mesh inside the replica skin, and the damage was being signaled to the connectome as pain. But there was literally nothing I could do about it. You can’t give a replica anesthesia, and I didn’t have the tools or the skill to tamper into her connectome and “numb” those signals.

“Please bear with it,” I told her. Without being able to open her eyes, Helena nodded.

I felt horrible for doing this, but then, there was no other way to go about it, and we both knew that. I went back and made two incisions, one on each side, running from the xiphoid process along the costal edge up to the midclavicular line. This opened up a triangular flap of her abdominal skin. I put the knife aside.

“How are you feeling?” I asked her.

“Miserable,” she said, grinding her teeth.

“I’ll look for the unit now,” I said.

I got the lantern, and illuminated the inside of Helena’s abdomen. I found out that, thankfully, I was right about cutting along the edges of bones. It didn’t seem that I had severed any important structure. I made a deeper incision in the protective tissues with the knife (which fortunately did not add to the pain, because replicas have no pain sensitivity outside the skin), and illuminated it again.

The electronic components underneath her tissues were all very foreign to me. Technically, any of the structures I was seeing could be the R-Unit. I felt really scared, looking at those. This had been a horrible idea from the start.

Still, Helena was counting on me. I couldn’t give up.

I took the mirror, and started to illuminate the upper structures, inside her chest. Then I saw a small square-shaped device. I had seen one like this before, at Timothy’s place. I breathed a sigh of relief. I knew what an R-Unit looked like, and it looked exactly like that.

“I found it,” I told Helena.

“Thank god,” she said. I could hear the pain in her voice. “Please take it off.”

I took the knife again. It wasn’t exactly easy to work my way through Helena’s circuits, particularly since my incision was about fifteen centimeters lower than the R-Unit, and there were other components along the way. My hand didn’t fit. I improvised, binding together the knife and the lantern with duct tape, and I almost didn’t manage to reach. But I did, and with great effort, I was able to detach the unit from the nearby structures. I wished I had pliers, that’d have made the task easier.

The unit came out in my hands. I recognized it: it really was exactly the same as the one Timothy had shown me at his place. And Helena was still alive.

“Fucking pain,” she whispered.

“I got it,” I told Helena. I placed the fold of her skin back in place, and sealed the incisions with duct tape. “What do I do with the unit, now?”

“Destroy it,” she told me. “Smash it against a wall or something.”

I got the knife and stabbed the little square device, until I’d opened several holes in it, and the inner components seemed damaged. Then I got my own water bottle, from my backpack, and poured water in it.

“I guess this will do. What are you going to do now? Do you have a place to go?”

“No,” said Helena, shaking her head. She had opened her eyes, but still seemed to be in pain. “I’m just going to go anywhere. I never really thought I’d manage to get to this far.”

“I think I know a place,” I told her. Then I got up on my feet. “I’ll take you there. Let’s hurry, Cyan will be here any moment, now.”

“Lucia?” said Helena, not moving from her place. “There’s just one problem.”

“Hm?” I asked. “What is it?”

“I’m blind,” she declared.