Bionic Agent Read Online Free Page B

doctor added, “while the surgeon’s at it, I’ll open up your right leg and put a battery under the skin.”
    “A battery?”
    “Something’s got to power all your enhancements,” she said.
    “What happens when it goes flat? Do you have to...?”
    She smiled and shook her head. “No. Once it’s in, that’s it. It won’t go flat. It’s rechargeable. It generates electricity from movement. You don’t have to do
anything extraordinary like jump up and down all the time. Just normal walking around and so on will power your arm, visual system and everything else.”
    Ben didn’t like what he was – hampered by disability – but he also worried about what he was becoming.
    Seven months after the explosion, Ben stood in front of a full-length mirror once more. Just for a moment, he had the strange sensation that the glass was a door. A weird boy
was outside the room, looking in at him. But he was wrong. The mirror was normal and he was the peculiar boy with the bald head. He lifted his left arm to prove it. His unfamiliar reflection did
the same.
    This time, he wasn’t shocked by the damage. He was astonished by the power of surgery to reconstruct a body. Maybe body was the wrong word. He was part body, part machine. Whoever or
whatever he saw in the mirror, it wasn’t Ben Smith.
    His right arm was a gadget. No matter how clever it was, no matter how many things it could do, it was attached to him and not really part of him. At this stage, the motors, metal rods and
joints were visible, but it was going to be encased in super-strong metal and covered with artificial skin. Even that wouldn’t convince him it was anything but a gadget. At least it would be
well disguised when his transformation was complete. From a distance, other people would not notice that he had a robotic arm.
    He put his left hand on his cheek. Pure plastic. One ear had been rebuilt out of silicone. His bald head was covered with scars and odd bumps. Focusing on his eyes, he could see the tiny cameras
that almost everyone else would miss. The marks all over his body made him look like a carefully constructed jigsaw.
    Apart from his right arm and ear, his body glowed yellowy-red. He knew that no one else would see the shimmering colour. His infrared vision was detecting warmth. His right arm and ear were cold
and dead. A lifeless blue colour. The patches of plastic on his face and trunk were a darker red. That was the warmth and life underneath struggling to show through.
    Taking him by surprise, Angel came up behind him and said, “Ben Smith died.”
    He spun round. “What?”
    “You look full of regret – in mourning for what you once were.”
    “Can you blame me?”
    “You deal with it by disowning that history.”
    Ben hesitated. “What do you mean?”
    “Like everyone else, you admit that Ben Smith died in the estuary blast. Your friends and relatives have had to come to terms with it. Let him go. You become a different boy. In
fact,” Angel said, smiling at him, “I know who you are. You’re Jordan Stryker. I’ve got the birth certificate, ID and passport that prove it.”
    The boy standing in front of the mirror was stunned. Yet it made a kind of sense. The explosion had happened to Ben Smith. It was Ben Smith and his family who’d died. The whole horrible
experience belonged to someone else. Someone who no longer existed.
    “Jordan Stryker,” he muttered. It didn’t sound right. It denied everything that had ever happened to him. It separated him from his friends. It separated him from Amy. Yet it
eliminated the worst thing that had ever happened to him.
    He wanted to start afresh. But it wouldn’t be simple and it wouldn’t be painless. It would be easier for his altered mouth to get used to saying the name than for his brain to accept
and become Jordan Stryker. Even so, he made up his mind to take on the new identity.
    “You’ve been through a lot of operations now,” Angel said. “It would’ve