BRADEN’S CAMPFIRE TALE

AS FEATURED ON EPISODE #29

“LET ME LEND YOU A HAND” by Jordan Miller

It was a crisp January Wednesday morning and the flower of a new decade had bloomed only three weeks prior.  It was 2020 and people were electric with the hopes of a new year, new experiences, and new loves. That morning Braden had eaten a light breakfast with a single black coffee, scraped the frost from his windshield and drove to the liquor store where he assistant managed.  He was first to arrive as always, unlocked the door and began to prepare from the day. Before long the bell over the front door rings and Braden looks up to see Scott, who runs the register, shuffling inside. “Morning. How’s it going?” Braden asks. “Living the dream” Scott replies flatly as he trudges behind the counter and starts settling in. Braden looks at the clipboard.  “Did that box of new whiskey come in?” Scotts gives a yawn and a finger point to the back in of the shop. Braden walks to the back to check on the latest shipment.  It was then, from the back of the store, that he heard the front door bell ring again. Typically they don’t get many customers in the first couple hours of the day, but it’s certainly not unheard of.  Braden opens the box and investigates the first bottle of whiskey when he hears Scott call his name from the front. There was something off about how he sounded, but Braden didn’t think anything of it, that is, until he reached the front of the store and saw the man with the shotgun. He was impossibly skinny with dark bags under his eyes and a face plagued with scabbing red splotches. He was shaking and pointing the shotgun in Scott’s face. “Just open the fucking register!” Braden had actually dealt with being held up once before in the last store he worked and he knew how to talk to these people.  However, he thought, the last guy didn’t look this unhinged. “It’s okay, man, everything’s okay…” But the man with the gun hadn’t noticed him yet, and Braden’s voice startled him. Swinging around and almost losing his own balance, the man points the shotgun at Braden. “Where the fuck did you come from?!” Braden brings up both hands  “Whoah man, it’s okay… we’ll get the register open and”-- “Who else is back there??”. “Nobody, just me” The man, more nervous than before, cocks the gun. “I promise, Scott, give the man what he wants”. With the gun still focused on Braden, Scott’s hand slowly starts to move underneath the counter. Braden sees what he is doing and shakes his head almost imperceptibly, trying to tell him to stop.  Don’t do it, Braden thinks to himself, hoping in some strange way that his thoughts would find their way into Scott’s brain. Don’t. Do. It.

Scott does it. He pulls the handgun from behind the counter and points it at the intruder. He pulls the trigger but nothing happens.  Before Scott can even realize that he has left the safety on, the man with the shotgun whirls around and pulls the trigger. A deafening explosion as Scott’s head disappears into a red mist. Chunks of skull and brain rain down over the counter as the man with the gun turns again, cocks the shotgun and points it towards Braden.  With no time to think, Braden lifts his arms in defense, screams and tries to drop to his knees when the shotgun blast rings out once again. He watches as his right hand explodes into a fountain of blood and meat, then he collapses to the floor. Braden stares at the ceiling in shock, everything above his elbow now missing, and drifts into unconsciousness.  The man with the gun, unable to open the register, makes off with two six packs of beer and no cash.

Braden woke in a daze in a hospital room with his girlfriend Annelise sleeping in the nearby chair.  She had been crying, he could tell. He looks down at the stump that was once his right hand, now wrapped in bandages.  He groans, waking Annelise who rushes to his bedside. She cries and tells him how happy she is he is alive, and how lucky he is to have survived.  Deep down Braden understood these things to be true, but still he mourned for his right hand. His dominant hand. His primarily tool for interacting with this world. That night he slept a deep, morphine sleep filled with dreams of endless murdered forests with thousands of trees cut down to useless stumps.  

The next morning he woke up to find a tall man, dressed impeccably in a black suit staring down at him. “Good morning” The man smiled widely.  Still groggy from the morphine, Branden nodded. “My name is Francisco Belmont. I would shake your hand… but under the circumstances that seems rather tasteless don’t you think? In all seriousness, I heard about your… accident… and I’ve come to offer you a procedure that I believe you would find quite appealing.  Right now the procedure is still in development, but I would like to offer it to you free of charge.”  Braden stares suspiciously up at the tall man “What sort of procedure?”.  The man’s smile widened. “A new hand. How does that sound? Robotic, responsive and most of all, imperceptible from the real thing.” Braden holds back the urge to laugh in the man’s face. “You work for the military or something?” The tall man simply continued to smile, “or something... yes”.

The deal was too good to pass up.  All Braden had to do was sign some basic non disclosure forms and a few others, and he was going to be the Guinea pig for a new robotic hand.  “It’s not like it’s a heart or a brain transplant” he reasoned with Annelise. “If it doesn’t work we just remove it and I go back to how I was”.  The logic couldn’t be argued with, and a week later Braden woke up on a different hospital bed, this one in a private institution in Virginia.  He woke up with a new right hand, which was correctly described as imperceptible from his the real thing. The tall man was there when he woke and smiled his wide salesman’s smile as Braden displayed the control and dexterity of his new hand. When asked about how it could be possible, the tall man responded “Computer chips, my friend. My associates and I pride ourselves on being on the forefront of the latest technologies.”  This time it was Braden who smiled, his first real smile since the man with the shotgun had turned his life upside down.

The new hand was better than he could have imagined.  It responded exactly the way his real hand had, instantaneously reacting to instructions from his brain with absolute control.  It was strong too, that was an unexpected benefit. He was able to life and do things with his hand was never able to before. There were pain receptors in the hand, though saying they relayed pain wouldn’t be entirely correct.  It was more like conscious impulses from his hand that his brain understood as pain, but he didn’t actually experience as physical “pain”. He felt a little bit like a superhero and it was strangely easy to get used to.  

Any remaining superhero fantasies we gone a week later when Braden awoke in the middle of the night to find his new hand convulsing spastically.  It was opening and closing into a fist, then opening again with each of his fingers moving in all directions with unnatural independency. He tried to use his left hand to cover and still the movement of his robotic appendage, but the robotic hand instantly latched onto his index finger and bent it back with a quick motion.  Braden heard a snap as his index finger broke in half and he screamed out in pain. His robotic hand stopped convulsing and was at once under his full control again. 

The next day Braden was back at the hospital getting his left index finger put into a splint and thinking about the business card the tall smiling man had given him. “Any problems at all, just give me a ring”.  This is precisely what Braden did. The voice on the end of the line was most certainly the voice of the tall man, but it did not sound like he was smiling this time.  “The chip in your arm is constantly learning. Those convulsions were simply the machine reprogramming itself, as any true A.I. should do.” Braden was shocked. “What do you mean, A.I.?”  A humorless laugh from the tall man. “Well of course. It responds to your brain but in many way has a brain all its own. It learns and can help. The idea being that every piece of future man could theoretically continue on to serve a purpose, should the primary body be compromised. My employers put this goal at utmost importance. When you tried to stop the convulsions the hand perceived it as an attack and retaliated”.  “You’re telling me this thing has a mind of its own??” “Well of course, it’s all in the paperwork you signed.”

Annelise came over that night to find Branden curled on his chair and staring at his hand as he opens and closes it over and over.  She was normally a source of true comfort to Braden when he needed it, but when he told her what happened, he found that he didn’t feel any better. He found himself afraid to hug her, not wanting to touch her with his alien hand.  When at first he backed away from her embrace she seemed hurt. “Stop it. I don’t want it to touch you”. Annelise came close and drew her hand through his hair. “I love you. Every part of you, even this”. As she said this she reached down with both hands and gently took his new robotic hand into hers.   Before he could protest his hand sprung to life, grabbing Annelise hard above the wrist. “That hurts! Braden, stop!” Annelise pleads. “I can’t, I’m not doing it!” Using his left hand, he tried to pry his right hand off of his Annelise’s wrist but couldn’t budge it. His right hand moved with one purposeful jerk, breaking her arm.  Bone protruding from her skin, she screamed in agony. The robotic hand released its grip and returned control to Braden. He could only stare helplessly at Annelise’s mangled arm. It was her turn to back away, keeping fearful distance between her and Braden. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” Braden begs, but Annelise was gone. Terrified, she had run for the door, screaming the whole way to her car. 

As his girlfriend’s car swerved erratically down the street, Braden realized there was only one option for a solution.  In the garage he found the circular saw he had bought last summer. Only having used it twice since, the blade was still remarkably sharp.  He plugged it in and put his right hand down on his work table. Holding the saw in his left hand, he activated it and brought the whirling blade down towards his robotic arm. With the blade spinning a mere two inches from his forearm, his right hand burst into life again. Moving under its own command, his right hand pulled itself to safety and latched itself overtop of his left hand.  With one tight clench it broke all the remaining fingers on his left hand and dropped the circular saw onto the table. Wasting no time, the robotic hand grabbed the saw, activated it and slammed the spinning serrated blade onto his left arm. Blood sprayed in thick streams as his robotic hand forced the blade down, severing his left arm below the elbow. He tried to pull himself away from the work table but his right hand was down to important business and would not be stopped. It crawled like a spider across the table, finding Braden’s largest wrench and impaling it up into the fresh bloody stump of his left arm.  Screaming with unimaginable pain, Braden looked at his left arm which now appeared to have the top half of a bloody wrench as a hand. The right hand scurried back across the work bench and found a set up scrap wires that lay in a pile of various metal junk. Grabbing the wires and with great force, the right hand shoved them into Braden’s mouth. As the mad hand shoveled fist after fist of mechanical parts down his throat, Braden had time to consider an insane thought. Maybe the hand was trying to rebuild him - to replace his rebellious flesh with upgraded hardware. To overthrow the body politic and restore it with parts that would obey.