At a motel, “God’s Gift” Jeremiah vastrix lays on the bed while at the desk in the room, a Hammer Industries technician by the name of Qiao Yang is working on taking apart two of the latest smartphones.
Jeremiah Vastrix: Are they about ready yet?
Jeremiah has a bandage wrapped around his head where his eyes are to cover up the fact that he has two empty eye sockets. Qiao Yang mutters something under her breath and Jeremiah just laughs.
Jeremiah Vastrix: My father did not teach me manners. Unless you mean how to dodge assassination attempts when his paranoia thought that I was going to do that to him. Are the phones ready yet? You’ve been awfully quiet over there and I can’t see anything.
Qiao Yang: I am not a miracle worker. You want the cameras extracted undamaged. These things will take some time.
Jeremiah Vastrix: Alright. I know I have to be patient, but I have little perception of time while blind. How are you putting the cameras in?
Qiao Yang: I have a pair of glass eyes that I’m going to use a dremel on to glue the cameras into place. Now, you understand that this is jury rigging of the highest order. You should be having cybernetic eyes put in and not rigging smartphone cameras to be eyes.
Jeremiah Vastrix: There is a shortage of cybernetic eyes. Not like there were a whole ton of them to go around in the first place. I need to get a pair to be able to see properly. What will be the limitations of the cameras?
Qiao Yang: For one, they won’t have the resolution of the cybernetic eyes. For two, you will have to move your whole head to be able to move your vision. These glass eyes will not have the capacity to be moved. For three, you won’t have any weapons. I mean it goes without saying here that these are cameras and not cybernetic eyes. They will be able to take pictures and video to download into your internal memory.
Jeremiah Vastrix: My cybernetic eyes did that and more. I wonder if I could bring down one of the cybernetic people that had attacked me and my…friends…at the last show. I could use my sight to rip out the eyes of one of them and get those installed.
Qiao Yang is silent as she operates on the smartphones, removing the hardware for the cameras from the phones. She picks up a glass eye and sort of holds up the camera to it as if measuring how much she will have to drill out of the eye to get the camera to fit.
Jeremiah Vastrix: I will definitely need both eyes working as best I can get them to go in this upcoming match. We face Huckleberry, Lulu Biggs, the Reaganator, and some guy named Lionel Montebar. Huckleberry took one eye, Lulu hit me with a car, the Reagonator tried to kill me, and then there’s the knight in shining armor. My allies aren’t much better. This Wende cyborg took my other guy to make me blind and then Kara and Kronin. I mean those two are alright. It’s Wende that I don’t know that I should trust as far as I can throw her.
Yang nods, not that Jeremiah can see that motion, as she marks out the glass eyes and begins to gently put one of them into a vise to hold it so she doesn’t dremel her fingers. She begins drilling out the glass eye so that the camera will fit into it, shaping the hole. Essentially drilling out the iris.
Qiao Yang: You lead a complicated life, Jeremiah. I’m glad I’m just a lowly tech in your service instead of something more.
Jeremiah just chuckles.
Jeremiah Vastrix: A miracle worker if you ask me. Also “lowly tech” isn’t the term that I would use for the girl in charge of my cybernetics research team. Just a pity we don’t have any eyes in stock.
Qiao Yang: If I had known that you were going to have an ongoing issue of having them yanked out of your head or otherwise destroyed, I would have held some back as opposed to selling to the President when we were on good terms.
Jeremiah Vastrix: Yeah, we couldn’t have known that he was plotting a robot army until it was too late. Though, I suppose I should have known that he was going to do something stupid with Atalar Robotics when I gave him the company.
Qiao Yang: Yeah, that was a stupid move. You gave a gibberish man-child one of the most high tech companies in the entire world that he outfitted with slave talent to crank out his robot army to suppress the American people with. I’m glad I’m a Chinese citizen.
Jeremiah Vastrix: Yeah, they just use tanks to suppress the people.
Qiao Yang:…point taken.
Yang continues to work on the glass eyes. Drilling out the holes and then buffing out the edges so that they are smooth. She inserts the cameras with a little bit of specialty glue. A perfect fit.
Qiao Yang: We just need to wait for the glue to set before we wire them into your head. In the meantime…you want to knock one out like the old days?
Jeremiah Vastrix: No?
Qiao Yang: No? Am I so ugly to you?
Jeremiah Vastrix: I can’t see you, but I recall you as being a gorgeous girl. I would be a fool to turn you down, but I am engaged to be married.
Qiao Yang: How is God’s Gift to Women going to be engaged to one woman?
Jeremiah is quiet for a long time before he finally laughs.
Jeremiah Vastrix: Good point. I should see about changing that nickname since I am no longer God’s gift to all women. Just one.
Qiao Yang sighs. She’s not happy, but not mad either.
Qiao Yang: Never would I thought to have seen the day that Jeremiah would turn down a casual fuck, but it is a whole new world. Well, once the election hits anyway.
Jeremiah Vastrix: I’m hoping my friend, Thomas Mills, wins, but I’m not too sure about his campaign slogan of “legalize everything” when it comes to drugs and such. I’m not even sure that the election will happen as I would wager if the President saw his numbers declining that he would declare martial law to delay the election as long as possible.
Qiao Yang: And that is exactly why I’m glad that I’m a Chinese citizen. They pretty much leave us alone outside of the cities. Well, I’m going to sit by you and watch tv. You sit there and listen, yeah. We’ll get you wired up in about an hour or so.
Jeremiah Vastrix: I like it.
