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01-06-2014, 10:20 PM
A short story I cooked up this afternoon. It's just to get practice, but I figured I'd post it for some feedback. Tell me what you think, constructive criticism is welcome. I think this story has a Vonnegut kind of feel to it, which is different from my usual work, so I'm eager to hear if it works.
My name is Mr. Catmull, and I make people better.
Men have walked into my office and gods have walked out. I have repaired broken bones and broken brains. I have saved more lives then I care to count. People come to me for everything. The athletes want reflex boosters and muscle enhancers. The academics want memory augmentations and neural sharpeners. The pretty ones want their faces torn apart and put back together anew. And, of course, there's the rich men. They always want the same thing. I give them wings. Beautiful constructs, each bio-engineered from a cluster of cells to grow into something amazing, something that robs gravity of its hold over a man. The rich men want wings, I suppose, simply because they can have them. Perhaps it's something else too; They've been on top of the world so long, they want to go higher. And my wings are not held together with wax. The powerful men can go as high as they like. The sun holds no danger for them.
Once a man, a very paranoid man came to me with a special request. He wanted microkevlar installed in his skull. It took hours to stitch him a bulletproof head. My work and his money paid off. A few days later, he survived three shots to the head, due to the shield I gave him. I still don't know who shot him or why. I do know that my work is fallible. The brain damage my client had received from his injuries drove him insane. I turned on the newscast one morning to see his face on a bulletin, next to the words, "The Bulletproof Man goes mad: Shooting spree in Daley Plaza leaves twelve dead, seven injured." The man was killed by the police in the shootout. He did not think to invest in a bulletproof heart.
People ask me if I blame myself for those thirteen deaths. I say, "I make people better. What those people do with my gift is none of my concern." I tell everyone, including myself, that this incident was not my fault. It was the fault of the paranoid man, and the fault of the man who put those three slugs into his head. Not enough to kill him, but still enough to destroy him. I tell myself this, but I will never convince myself of it.
My name is Mr. Catmull, and I make people better.
But I cannot change what we are.
Edit: Vaguely reminds me of a River Tam line from Firefly:
"I hate [my sanity] because I know it'll go away! The sun grows dark and chaos has come again. It's... fluids. What am I?"
I'm not entirely sure why that came to me, but it's a great line from a great show.
My name is Mr. Catmull, and I make people better.
Men have walked into my office and gods have walked out. I have repaired broken bones and broken brains. I have saved more lives then I care to count. People come to me for everything. The athletes want reflex boosters and muscle enhancers. The academics want memory augmentations and neural sharpeners. The pretty ones want their faces torn apart and put back together anew. And, of course, there's the rich men. They always want the same thing. I give them wings. Beautiful constructs, each bio-engineered from a cluster of cells to grow into something amazing, something that robs gravity of its hold over a man. The rich men want wings, I suppose, simply because they can have them. Perhaps it's something else too; They've been on top of the world so long, they want to go higher. And my wings are not held together with wax. The powerful men can go as high as they like. The sun holds no danger for them.
Once a man, a very paranoid man came to me with a special request. He wanted microkevlar installed in his skull. It took hours to stitch him a bulletproof head. My work and his money paid off. A few days later, he survived three shots to the head, due to the shield I gave him. I still don't know who shot him or why. I do know that my work is fallible. The brain damage my client had received from his injuries drove him insane. I turned on the newscast one morning to see his face on a bulletin, next to the words, "The Bulletproof Man goes mad: Shooting spree in Daley Plaza leaves twelve dead, seven injured." The man was killed by the police in the shootout. He did not think to invest in a bulletproof heart.
People ask me if I blame myself for those thirteen deaths. I say, "I make people better. What those people do with my gift is none of my concern." I tell everyone, including myself, that this incident was not my fault. It was the fault of the paranoid man, and the fault of the man who put those three slugs into his head. Not enough to kill him, but still enough to destroy him. I tell myself this, but I will never convince myself of it.
My name is Mr. Catmull, and I make people better.
But I cannot change what we are.
Edit: Vaguely reminds me of a River Tam line from Firefly:
"I hate [my sanity] because I know it'll go away! The sun grows dark and chaos has come again. It's... fluids. What am I?"
I'm not entirely sure why that came to me, but it's a great line from a great show.