My Artifical Super-Hero

My family was doomed from the very beginning. Bad hearts, bad lungs, bad... everything. A lot of bad when we never did anything to deserve it.

My great-great... I can't tell you how many greats, to be honest... but apparently, he was one of the greats! My greatest grandfather got married when he was fifteen. Had three kids before he died at the ripe old age of twenty-two. Twenty-two. Jesus.

My dad was thirty-five when he died of a heart attack. He'd been struggling since his mid-twenties, constantly having to sit down and rest after doing pretty much anything physically exerting. He gave me plenty of warnings, telling me too not over-do it. Don't try to be Super-Man. Don't go volunteering for stuff you know you can't do. Do not participate in sports. Do something you can do... like... mathematics.

I always felt like such a failure. Kids teased me when I sat out almost every activity in gym. Even thought I had a heart condition, and numerous doctor's notes... shoot I had a "doctor's file"... The coach never looked my way with anything other than a look of disdain on his face. As if it was a conscious choice for me. As if I had control over my own body.

When Suzie Manchevowitz asked me to skip school with her in the seventh grade, I made up some lame excuse about my mom coming to "eat lunch" with me. I knew I couldn't make it a mile on foot to the nearest grocery store. Not without having to stop and rest every quarter of a mile. I was a dead man walking, and I knew it.

I took my father's advice and took every single science and mathematics course I could. If I got winded walking from my front door to the bus stop, I certainly wasn't going to volunteer for anything physical. That included anything with the word "Olympics" attached to it. Math Olympics? Nope. Science Marathon? Count me out. I ended up at the top of the class, top of my graduating class, bottom of my social class. Even the other kids in my classes, the ones who loved it when they sat at my table and rubber necked to get the right answers... they hated me too. They hated that I wouldn't join them and take the school to certain victory. Top place was $500 for every member of the Science Team. Without me, the closest they ever got was "honorable mention".

While everyone else stood up and waited to shake the hand of the principal and school superintendent, I sat in the front row... waiting. When the diplomas were handed out, people cheered and clapped and made all sorts of noise. Even for people they weren't related to... or didn't even know. When it was my turn, it was as if I was an alien from another planet, teleported in to steal the top prize from whoever had rightfully deserved it. Nobody clapped. Nobody cheered. The school secretary, Mrs. Pottingham, announced my name, and the principal and super came over, handed me my diploma, and shook my hand, and that was it. I didn't even give a speech because, according to them, they didn't want to chance me having a heart attack on the way up to, or from, the podium.

While other kids got graduation presents like brand new Mustang convertibles and college tuition rides, I got a wheelchair. My dad said I would come to love it. My mother looked hopeful, and mildly disappointed. I know she thought her side of the family genetics would overcome any inherent flaws my father's side brought to the table... It didn't. It helped, a little bit though.

Over the generations, my great grand father's legacy of dying too young, was slowly stretched out. Instead of dying at twenty, or twenty-five, we were gradually being given a longer reprieve. But losing your man at such an early age, did not bode well for the women in our family. My great grandmother remarried, and the entire family line took off from there, separated from mine after his death. My grandmother did the same. My mother, once my father died my first year in college, asked me if I minded if she remarried. I told her no. I knew she wanted to have other children. Healthy, physically able children. Maybe a daughter or another son. One she could play catch with, and show him how to ride a bike... or play tag... or wrestle.

Once everyone in my life was removed, I had nobody other than myself to rely on. Nothing more than my mind. I signed up for every government test possible. Every project known to combat a weak heart. Everything. I spent half my time doing independent research on heart transplants, heart modifications, valve replacements, gene replacement therapy, muscle scaffolding, stem cells, and eventually, the artificial heart.

My body, my family history, my genes, didn't match up with any one cardiac disorder. It was pretty much impossible for me to take any sort of physical stress test to rule something out, or definitively state that I had something the doctors said I might have. When they started decoding the human genome, I was there, wheeling my chair through the door telling them, take my blood, PLEASE! And they did... but the decoding part takes time... needless to say, I needed all the time I could steal.

I decided early on, I was not going to allow my genetic line to continue. My father wanted me to get married and have kids before he died. It was his one wish in life, and it was hard to let him down, but the truth was, I couldn't believe he'd been so selfish to put me, his own son, through what he'd gone through. He knew. His father had died early. And his father's father, before him. He knew, but he didn't care. He, like a lot of people, thought, well... if I could endure it, if this was my life, then someone else could do it too. So what if you knew you wouldn't live past thirty-five? That was the cards you got dealt. Some people, destined to live until they're a hundred and one, got killed as a child... what made me, or him, any better or more deserving of fate's fatal touch?

I wasn't satisfied though. I wasn't accepting of my fate. I bent my mind to the task, many sleepless nights, working on super conductors, super magnetism, electromagnetic levitation and suspension, contactless bearings and biomechanical research projects. I volunteered for every project. Eventually, I got accepted.

After only a week, it became clearly apparent, I was the smartest person in the lab. I was also the only wheelchair bound student/scientist. I worked endlessly. I slept in the lab, taking cat naps in my wheelchair whenever the notion to rest caught up with me. I would often awake to find the lab empty and the lights dimmed. That was "go-time", and I used the silence and solitude to make leaps and bounds while everyone else was off partying, killing brain cells, or having sexual relations... all the things I wasn't physically, mentally, or socially able, or willing, to do.

Slowly, I started directing the college and the lab, towards a specific goal. We needed to produce, a heart. A biologically acceptable heart, a mechanically efficient and operational heart. A low maintenance, low cost, heart. I touted our research as the greatest thing known to mankind, even though many people told me they already have artificial hearts. They asked why I was doing this? Some people thought I was trying to make a replacement heart for myself. I laughed. I never denied it. But I also was quick to point out, once we had a working prototype, we'd be rich. Everyone working there had a clause, developed by me, that allowed each of us to reap the benefits of anything we discovered, or made. It was a pittance compared to what the college and their shareholders would gain, but still, it was much better than nothing, and they all knew it.

Half way through the development stage, my third year in, I worked my way into a position with an engineering team who was trying to work the kinks out of a remote surgical device they were working on. Doctors in far off places, through the internet, could conduct surgeries on anyone, no matter where they were in the world. The machines were good. They weren't the best, which is what they needed them to be, and within a couple of weeks, I was well on my way to making them the very best, ever.

In my fifth year I found splitting my time between the lab and the surgical machine ended up producing issues like, independent thought and action. Someone in the lab decided a groovy selling point would be a matte black finish and silver fittings, making the artificial heart, our artificial heart, look like something out of a Zack Snyder flick. As soon as I saw it, I demanded to know who made the changes, and why, and then, without pause for consideration, I ripped apart their design changes, pointing out the thousands of reasons why, everything they had thought, was completely asinine. Completely. I never once considered, we were trying to sell the thing. The actual devices could be any color... they just wanted to impress, the buyers.

In my sixth year, I found myself stressing out. Time was wasting away. I needed to get things done. We needed approval from the powers that be. FDA, CIA, FBI, the NAACP, whatever. I didn't care who. I wanted approval, I wanted acceptance, I wanted full scale production. I wanted to live. I'd all but perfected the remote surgical device, and had silently worked in a deal with a surgeon in Malaysia, to do a couple open heart surgeries on real life cadavers, to show case both his surgical skills, and the skills of the device. Everyone was on board. Everyone except, the Cardio-Jar team.

The Cardio-Jar or "CJ" for short, was nothing short of my greatest achievement. A cylindrical shaped device with four intakes, four exports, and numerous technological advances. We designed it for full insertion into the chest cavity. Full submersion. Biologically compatible intake and export nubs allowed cardiovascular arteries to be stitched to, and then grow into and mesh with, the device. The exterior was gel within gel within gel, ensuring no inflammation and no irritation of the cardiothoracic sack. Jane... something or another, had suggested Bluetooth compatibility. I shot her idea down, but secretly, I'd advanced that design, including an encrypted passive receiver which would not actively communicate unless a specific code was transmitted at a specific frequency. Everything else was designed to work, completely independent of human interaction.

The human heart works as a muscle. That muscle contracts according to specific electrical impulses that it receives from the brain. It's a non-voluntary system which works independent of conscious thought or will. Simply put, you cannot "think" and stop your heart from beating. You also cannot think your heart into starting either. We designed CJ to work much in the same way. A rotor and a stator, a large coil of the closest thing we could get to super-conducting wire, within our budget, and we were off to the races. All we needed was an innovative way for our heart to charge up, without having to run wires through the chest cavity to an external source. In the end, we decided to put the charger, inside the cardiothoracic sack, but outside the heart. This would make the heart a bit bigger and bulkier, but at the same time, it would allow the heart to charge up, AND would work to shield the heart from electromagnetic interference, the ultimate killer for our creation.

I was working pretty much non-stop when I received a pop-up message on my laboratory think-pad, something I did not think was possible. The message simply said, "Be careful. They want to steal your creation." I immediately erased the message and then made sure to delete it off the device one hundred percent, but by the time I could try and search for it to delete it, it was gone. Whoever it was, whoever had sent me the message, was much more tech savvy than I was. It was refreshing to finally find someone on my same level.

As far as someone stealing CJ, I'd known for a while what was going on. Ever since the college divulged what the science budget was being spent on, millions and millions of dollars, they were on us like white on rice. What we were developing, was nothing compared to artificial hearts that were on the market. Our design was far superior in all ways. In ways people could not comprehend. In ways that I didn't even fully understand. From that point, I was glad to have secretly included the safety measures. It had really been a god-send.

A week before our intended time-line was up, we were finished. We ran our last set of tests, confirmed CJ worked better than we could have ever hoped, and disconnected it from the rig we had it suspended in. The next morning, we walked into the lab, and found CJ was missing. Heh. Missing is not the right word to put on an item that was observed, put away, securely locked up, and then removed by someone else without authorization. That definition is "stolen".

In the world of medical devices, a seventy-six billion dollar a year industry, our device was a holy grail, and an industry changer. Seventy-six billion dollars has a lot of zeroes in it, and that kind of money can buy... anything. Absolutely, anything.

Our entire team was crushed. Our scientific lab was shut down. An investigation was done to try and find the thieves, and all the while, I was getting sicker, and sicker. By the time I was vetted and no longer a prime suspect, it was around my thirty-third birthday. I could feel the grim reaper coming for me. It was a long slow dance; one I was not looking forward to.

My saving grace was Dr. Matsoya. My remote surgical device was going strong, and Dr. Matsoya, along with a select group of private investors, had decided to fully fund both our projects going forward. I was elated. I informed my colleagues, and together we started rebuilding our artificial heart, appropriately named, CJ1.3. We got better security, better facilities, better lab equipment, better everything.

A month later, Bio-Triad, a leading manufacturer of heart valves, disclosed that they were moving forward with a new form of technology they had recently developed, a revolutionary thing that they guaranteed would change the face of medical devices as we knew it. Everyone at our lab knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Bio-Triad had stolen CJ and they were slowly reverse engineering our device. Again, time was of the essence.

Six months later, Danopiotics, another artificial heart manufacturer, made a similar announcement. A week after that, a third medical device manufacturer made an announcement, this time, a merger with Danopiotics. They would now become the third biggest manufacturer of medical devices ever.

And then it happened. I was sitting in the lab, drinking my coffee, figuring out a small issue with the CJ1.3 interface, when it felt like a horse kicked me in the chest. I fell out of my wheelchair, clutching my chest. Coffee spilled everywhere. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Dr. Matsoya as he had rehearsed. He picked up the phone. "I'm dying," I gasped, and then I dropped the phone.

I don't know how much time expired. People were rushing around, screaming for help. Paramedics picked me up and put me on a stretcher. They searched for a pulse. At first they said I didn't have one, but then they found one, a weak one. I remember smiling and telling them, it was always a weak one. I was a weak one. My heart... the weakest link.

I don't remember much after that.

I woke up feeling as if an elephant was standing on my chest. Dr. Matsoya's face was beaming from a flat screen monitor, just a few feet away. He looked so happy.

"Analysis?" I asked, wiggling my fingers and then my toes, making sure they were all still there.

"BioMelody 628 works great!" he said energetically. "It was so smooth. I... I have to say, a few times, I felt as if I might slip, nothing serious but, the 628 counters anything like that. It's amazing!"

A smile slowly formed on my lips and I chanced pushing myself up on the bed. I cocked my head a bit and then looked back at the monitor. "What about my heart?" I asked, letting my head droop forward a bit. "Is... am I okay?"

"Ahhh, well, you know, we tried to get a real heart but the donor list is short, especially with someone in your condition."

I slowly reached up, my hands shaking, and pulled my gown open. A huge angry red slice, stapled together every half an inch, ran from the top of my chest to the bottom. two large metal points protruded from my sternum, just to the right of my middle. I let my head flop back to the bed, exhausted at the minimal movement.

"An... artificial heart," I gasped.

"It's the best we could do. It's temporary," he said, as if eager to soothe my concerns away. "And... we were able to get it on very short notice."

"Where?" I asked.

"Terzo-Medical. They're a new company. Really new but, they sent it right over. No questions asked."

"None?"

"None," Dr. Matsoya said, smiling. "They just want to see it work. It was the best I could do, especially... I mean, the fact that we could do this at all... is... amazing."

I nodded and accepted the information for what it was. I had a little bit more time. Not much but... when you've got just months or weeks left to live, a few more months, or maybe a year... is a lifetime.

I was in "recovery" for a week. Another week in observation. Doctors and nurses neglected me just as much as anyone else. In the third week of my hospital stay, I was told my insurance had made the determination that I was no longer bed-ridden. I could go home now. A technician would be in shortly to tell me about my artificial heart, the maintenance it required, and what my caregiver would need to do, to keep the device pumping. I waved the messenger, probably some nurse on the lowest rung of the hospital ladder, away.

When the artificial heart tech came in, he looked bewildered. Lost would be a better word. "The... uh... leads, need to be attached... here," he said, motioning towards my chest. "I uh... here's the power pack. You... this should be hooked up already." I watched as he awkwardly went to the wall and plugged in a thick electrical cord leading up to a briefcase sized box.

"The case holds a battery. The battery will charge up, and can charge the pump at the same time. If you need to go somewhere, you'll need to carry this case with you. Keep it with you at all times."

I looked at the man, and then the electrical leads he was preparing to attach to the nodes sticking out of my chest. "Did... did someone already do this?" he asked.

"Yeah," I lied. "About forty times now."

"Oh. I... I thought this was an emergency. They said you didn't have a charge pack."

"I don't have a charge pack," I said quickly. "They were using a temporary one but they can't keep using the one they need for surgeries so they needed me to have one I could leave with."

This seemed to placate the man enough for him to calm down. I knew what he was thinking. Liability. The hospital had conducted a risky procedure, remote-controlled open-heart surgery. Heart replacement. And nobody had thought to order a charge pack to keep the artificial heart pumping. A gross oversight if you ask me... but nobody had asked me.

"Here," I said, taking the leads from the man's hands. "Let me do it. I'll need to get used to doing it myself, right?"

"You don't have a caregiver?" the man asked.

I just shook my head.

I connected the leads, grabbed the charge pack, and flipped the switch. A gentle hum filled the air. I turned the knob increasing the voltage.

"You... you don't want to do that," the man said warningly.

"Don't want to do what?" I asked, turning the second knob.

"Please stop! That isn't a toy. Jesus Christ. That's a delicate piece of electronic equipment that's designed to keep your heart pumping. If you mess with the settings, it could malfunction or cause the pump to stop."

"I know what I'm doing," I said, turning the third dial. "You've got it set up wrong. The first dial is voltage, the second is amperage. The third is... Did you mess with this?"

"No," the man said defensively. "I don't even know what that is. It's not like any of the TAH charge units I've ever seen."

"It's something new," I said, clipping the leads to the terminals sticking out of my chest. Before the man could object, I pressed the button on the side of the activation unit.

Energy. Power. Knowledge. Enlightenment. All combine as one. The dull throbbing sensation in my eyes disappeared and was replaced with bright vivid detail. I groaned, and the man stepped back from me, as if preparing to run and get help with something he had no concept. I lifted a hand, letting him know I was okay. I sucked in a deep breath, the air filling my lungs more deeply than I had ever felt before. Finally... after thirty-some years, I was born.

"Well, this should keep me alive for how long?" I asked, feigning weakness again.

"F-f-four... four and a half years. Longer if you can't find a donor by then."

"I'm on the short list," I lied. "Can you give me some peace and quiet? I'm tired."

"Yeah, you need to rest. Someone will come get you when they're ready to discharge you."

"Thanks," I said, giving the man a half-hearted smile.

Later that day a nurse came to take my vital signs. I made sure she didn't check my pulse, and explained that I had an artificial heart. She said she still needed to check to make sure everything was working, and I explained, it was a new experimental heart. If she even checked my vitals related to such a thing, it would be a breach of contract on the hospital's part. I was discharged a half an hour later.

When I got to the vehicle waiting for me, I stood up on my own and climbed into the back seat, all on my own.

"You look like you're feeling much better," Jane said, giving me a knowing smile.

"I am. For all intents and purposes, everything is working exactly as planned."

"Good to hear it."

On the way to my new home, our vehicle was stopped by two police officers, a state trooper, two members of the FBI and then someone claiming to be with the CIA who was unusually interested in my health. I knew these officers were simply paid to get information. A sickening side effect of a law allowing our peace officers to have secondary jobs so that our government can pay them less and justify it. Regardless, they had no idea what they were looking for, and for the most part, none of them gave us too much of a hassle and sent us on our way shortly after stopping us.

"John... Do you think they know?" Jane asked as we pulled into the parking lot of Terzo-Medical center.

"No. Paid enforcers and informants. If they knew, they'd bring the big boys. The ones who broke into our lab."

"But if they don't know, then why-"

"They suspect. They've suspected what we've been doing for a long time now. You have the best intuition, I swear."

"A woman's intuition," Jane answered proudly.

"Yes," I replied with a smile. As we exited the vehicle, I felt a strange sensation come over me. A weird kind of humming was coming from somewhere close and when I looked to my left, I saw a vehicle had parked about ten spots away from us. Suspicious to say the least, considering I owned the building, the company, the parking lot, the gate guards... everything.

I watched as the side door of the vehicle opened and four men stepped out. They all wore black suits and ties, black glasses, and had com-link ear buds. As one, they walked to our vehicle and then stopped about ten feet away. "John Chessick," one of the men said in a loud commanding voice.

"Yeah. Who's asking?" I replied weakly.

The man paused. My ruse was still working its magic.

"I'm Agent Garfield. We're with homeland security." I bet they were. "We need to ask you some questions."

I opened the door and slowly turned in my seat to face the men. They watched me, every step of the way. Jane did her part too, rushing around the vehicle to help me get out of the back seat, slowly sliding my body down until my feet touched the ground. I made sure to not get dressed any further than the hospital gown I still had on. I needed them to see. Slowly, I shuffled forward.

Feigning my standard out of breath wheezing, I asked, "what can I do for you?"

"There... there are reports you might be... smuggling something. Do we have permission to search your vehicle?"

"Of course," I answered. The three men other than Garfield, hurried to the vehicle and began searching it energetically. Garfield seemed amused and suspicious until one of the men called back.

"Boss! It's clear!"

"Hmm." Garfield took a step forward, closing the distance a bit. He seemed to be focused on my person and kept glancing at my chest. "What do you have beneath your... gown, there."

"I just had open heart surgery," I said, slowly pulling the top of my gown open to reveal a ghastly red wound that looked absolutely horrible.

"Jesus," Garfield said, looking closer and then stepping back.

"Heart transplant," I said, slowly pulling my gown closed.

"That doesn't look like any normal heart transplant," Garfield said, now looking very suspicious.

"Artificial heart," I said, running my fingertips across my gown, right where the leads and the terminals were connected. Jane stood close by, holding the briefcase with the thin wire leads strung between it, and the bottom of my gown. "I'm on the short list... for a real one."

Garfield frowned. "I don't know what's going on here, but it's not smuggling. I'd say... someone wants you dead." Stoically, I absorbed the news, and Garfield continued. "You're not on the short list. If you were, they've taken you off." Garfield looked to the side and then motioned to his men. They were going to leave. "My best advice... whatever you've got on your bucket list... take care of it. And... get used to that," he said, motioning to my chest. "Looks like you'll have that a bit longer than your originally planned."

I nodded grimly.

Garfield and his men got back in their vehicle and drove out of the parking lot. As soon as they were gone, I took another look around, and immediately I saw a dark blob on the top of the ridge, adjacent to the parking lot. The blob looked vaguely human from this distance and I knew someone was there, trying to figure things out.

"Send some people up there," I said, pointing to the ridge and glancing at Jane. "Make sure they put a perimeter fence up there, and all the way around the complex. I want security cameras running and recording. Hire twenty more men for security."

"Can we afford that?" Jane asked in a concerned voice.

"We'll find a way to afford it," I said. "Come on. Let's go inside. I need to get these terminals out of my chest. They're driving me crazy."

"I was wondering about that," Jane said with a mischievous smile. "CJ doesn't need external connections."

"CJ1.2" I said as I grabbed hold of the lobby door and yanked it open. Glass shattered and Jane jumped back, yelping in alarm. I looked down at the twisted metal handle, the broken metal, and opened my hand, dropping it to the ground. Security men rushed to meet us, coming to a halt ten feet inside the lobby. "Sorry! Sorry... My fault. I... Sorry."

Jane turned and looked at me, her eyes opening wide with recognition of what I had just done. She looked me up and down, as if expecting me to suddenly turn green and grow a foot or two taller.

Shrugging, I smirked and then bent low to step through the hole in the door where the glass had been. Home sweet home.