"Sleeping, I dream about my cyborg half, that it's a
monster that has half-devoured me, its teeth sunk in the right
half of my body. Or it's a forest I've wandered into, and I'm
lost amid its mazy pathways, deep pools, strange trees whose long
fronds brush my shoulders. In the center, there's an enchanted
well I can never quite reach. Night falls and the sky shows
strange new constellations. Waking at night, the world glows in
wireframe.
"Tonight, I have a whole long dream
about a list of assembler instructions and their possible uses
and then about the team that wrote them, a bunch of engineers in
the 1980s. It turns out to be obsolete documentation that got
left on an install disc for a chip series three generations
before mine, made by a Protheon-owned company out in New Mexico.
Just before waking, I catch a glimpse of red earth and a
storefront office window in an Albuquerque strip mall, the smell
of air conditioning and bad office coffee, the glass door
swinging shut, as if whoever made me has only just left the
building."
-- Austin Grossman, from his novel, Soon I
Will Be Invincible. The novel tells the story of Fatale, a
cyborg who joins a group of superheroes known as the
Champions.
