Body Sovereign

Christmas was coming and Alma really needed some extra shifts. Jordan was pining for an immersion gaming system. Damn thing was $1,500, but he made all A’s and didn’t give her a lick of trouble. She was determined to get it for him even if she had to pull a triple.

Yawning, Alma leaned into the security camera for her facial scan. The system beeped green with her credentials.

Name: Alma Robinson
Employee ID: 92089-4318
Role: Refurbishment Tech III
Clock In: 7:57 a.m.

The plexiglass gate swung open to admit her into Circularity. The Recovery section was hopping that morning, more than she’d ever seen. She skirted the techs wheeling gurneys of body bags in and out of the Recovery bay, averting her eyes as the saloon doors swung open to reveal more workers, in full PPE, detaching prosthetic arms, legs, feet, and hands from cooling bodies. A dozen morgue attendants waited in the hall to repossess the corpses after Circularity got its property back. Alma wondered if there’d been some sort of mass casualty event. She’d have a lot to process this shift.

In the locker room, Alma donned her uniform: gray jumpsuit, gray bouffant cap, white gloves. The glove requirement always struck her as weird, since she didn’t have organic hands anymore. She’d gotten her prosthetic arms seven years ago and the fingers didn’t sweat or leave prints. But whatever—Circularity was particular about its rules. And even though it paid by the hour, with skeletal benefits, the supervisors constantly reminded her and the other techs that they did good, impactful work.

Her department, Refurbishment, prepared the reclaimed prosthetic limbs to reenter service with new users. As usual, the Refurbishment floor was cold and smelled like disinfectant and rusty coins. Rows of prosthetic limbs hung from the ceiling like livestock carcasses. Others drifted past on a slow-moving conveyor belt, still more were piled in bins. Bulletin boards and OSHA posters covered the walls, but Circularity’s motto was everywhere, stamped on equipment, printed on water bottles and coffee mugs: Reclaiming Human Sovereignty, One Limb at a Time. The supervisors also reminded them that their know-how and judgment—what could be repaired, what was good enough to go back out as is with a few tweaks, what should be junked—was what set Circularity apart from competitors who just relied on robots.

Alma stepped into her work bay, the concrete floor hard under her heels. The floor made her feet and ankles burn by the end of each shift, even though she stood on a foam mat. Maybe there was an upgrade for that. But no, Alma thought, she had enough bills. Enough leased parts.

Her console lit up, a servicebot rolled a bin of limbs into her bay, and the mover system above her head whirred to life, delivering more units from the central line. The limbs allotted to her were heavy and bulky, but her Titan 3700 arms could lift 300 pounds together.

Alma scanned each limb into the central database, downloaded the previous user’s data—their movements, usage logs, software updates, biometric feedback—then erased it from the limb. One last swipe of disinfectant in case the Recovery techs had missed anything. Then they were off to Quality Control for a final sanitization protocol and recalibration for the next user.

Pick. Scan. Download. Erase. Repeat.

It was monotonous work, but Alma tried not to forget that these units would end up with an aug like her. Some people owned their prosthetics outright: the wealthy, those with private insurance, veterans injured in incidents that enraged the public and embarrassed the government. But folks were subscribers—they rented their aids the way she did. After a subscriber kicked it, their limbs went back to Circularity, per the lease agreement.

A foot and three fingers jazzed up the morning a bit. Both units were damaged, the fingers more so. Alma summoned a drone to take the finger module to the service center. They would decide whether to fix or scrap it. Alma would never know the outcome, but it wasn’t her department, not her business.

The foot, though—that she could handle. It had a few dents and dings, and the carbon shell was cracked like dry leather. She pressed the manual adjustment button on her console. Her supervisor Ben, pinged back his approval.

Alma removed her left glove. Her Titan arm was deep mahogany, color-matched to her skin, seams fine as surgical scars. Tiny ports in her wrist clicked open, releasing a narrow array of repair tools: spanner, micro-welder, adhesive dispenser. She smoothed the foot’s surface with short, precise motions. The welder hissed softly, filling the bay with the faint smell of heated resin. In a few minutes, the prosthesis was almost as good as new. The drone returned to take it to Quality Control.

Alma smiled to herself. She had a gift for small repairs that got units back into service quicker. It’d helped get her promoted from Level II to Level III. Plus it meant the next user would be charged a bit less, since the unit wasn’t “like new” anymore.

Little mercies.

~

By late morning, the tedium had set in. Alma fought it by mentally planning meals, challenging herself to come up with new ways to stretch what was left over in the fridge. This weekend hardly counted because Jordan would be at his dad’s, but the holidays would be a challenge—

An alert blared, sharp and grating.

Alma jerked, and the cybernetic eye she was processing clattered to the floor. ERROR blazed red across her console screen. Some of her coworkers twisted to look before returning to their own work.

A DexSys H-700 had triggered it: a hand-to-forearm industrial unit built for heavy assembly and defense support. It gleamed a dull carbon under the lights, almost skeletal-looking with the joints and struts exposed. Alma tapped the error message, and new text appeared: DATA LOCKED. OWNER RIGHTS ACTIVE. CONTACT SUPERVISOR.

That was a new one.

With a grimace she picked up the eye and summoned a drone to transfer it. Because it’d touched the floor, it needed another deep cleaning—a delay in return to service that would drag down her stats. Alma huffed, annoyed with herself now that the shock had passed. Pay attention to your job, gal. She didn’t want to call Ben, so she scanned the DexSys again and retried the download.

The same thing happened. Twice.

The Dex’s fingers clenched. Alma’s sensors registered a rise in its heat signature also. Variations were common—wrong serial numbers, missing data chips, corrupted logs. But this made her uneasy.

She pressed SUPERVISOR on her console. Twenty minutes later, Ben ambled up, his cap askew.

“What’s going on?”

“Download issues. I couldn’t clear it.”

He tried three different reset codes, but none worked. Alma watched the unit the entire time, waiting for it to move again. But it didn’t.

“I’ll log it as faulty, Ben said, shrugging. “That way you don’t get dinged.”

Alma exhaled. “Appreciate it, boss. Hopefully, no more funny business today.”

“Agreed, because a priority shipment’s coming in.” Ben flicked a yellow EXPEDITE tag Alma hadn’t noticed on the DexSys. “217-B, from Dock Sector Twelve. A building collapsed this morning, and a fire broke out. This one is part of the batch; shouldn’t have been separated from it.”

So now she knew why Recovery was so busy. “Why is it a priority?” she asked.

Ben raised a brow. “Because the company says so.”

~

The local news reported only the bare minimum about the accident—72 dead, 158 injured, one building completely destroyed, fire 34% contained. Alma turned to forums and chatter channels for more details. She scrolled through posts, photos, and videos on the holo hovering above her left palm. One clip showed a man screaming on the ground, covered in blood and soot. His leg, a Strider L-500, by the looks of it, was partially melted into the skin of his thigh. Her friends Cheryl and Thuy bookended her at the rickety table in the break room, half-listening to her as they ate lunch.

“Somebody says the Home Guard was at the docks,” she muttered.

Cheryl slurped her soup. “Rescue efforts?”

Alma shook her head. “They were keeping people away. Guns, stun batons, the whole deal. Overkill for an accident, isn’t it?”

“Probably a rumor,” Thuy said, waving her chopsticks.

“Put it away,” Cheryl told Alma, squeezing her knee. “You’re getting worked up for nothing.”

Alma shut off the holo, a cold knot in her gut. She didn’t recognize anyone, but the images stuck: ordinary people—mostly augs just trying to make a living—burned, bleeding, and dying. Now parts of them would be coming down the line.

Or former parts—they weren’t theirs anymore.

Thuy changed the subject. “Have either of you gotten your renewals yet? My monthly premium is going up thirty-five dollars.”

“Was there an update?” Cheryl asked.

“No! Something about network enhancements, I dunno.”

Thuy fluttered the fingers of her GripMax X4. “This thing was state of the art when I got it three years ago. Now a software update takes two hours. Maybe I need to replace it.”

“That’s gonna make the cost go up even more,” Alma said.

“But maybe I can finally get promoted with a better piece. Make more money.”

“The jumps are smaller if you do quarterly payments,” Cheryl said. “That’s what I do for my leg. It isn’t perfect, but at least we get that option.”

Alma nodded. “I pay annually. I put money aside each month to be ready.”

“I can’t. Daycare is killing me. My mama is even sicker now and can’t keep Liem even once a week anymore. Even the bot daycare ain’t cheap.”

“There’s always a productivity augment loan,” Cheryl suggested. “They got an interest rate promo at the credit union.”

Thuy scrubbed her face. “I wish I didn’t have to worry about this crap.”

“We got it good,” Cheryl said. “Even assuming there was another job I was qualified for, I wouldn’t take it. We get better payment plans for our tech, decent pay we can live on without a side hustle. Look at those people at the docks, you wanna be like them?”

Alma sighed and speared her chicken, rubbery from the microwave. Her Titan fingers flexed around the fork, a faint whir of servos beneath the skin coating, joints clicking lightly as her grip adjusted automatically. This was poor folks’ math: wages might rise, but then your debt did too.

~

Ben led Alma and eleven other techs into a windowless room. Everyone he’d selected was an aug and a Tech III, except Bridget, a Tech IV. The only thing organic about her was her head and torso. Her right arm was a Cerberus X9, nearly $50,000 before insurance and employee subsidies. Its smooth composite exterior refracted the light wildly, each of its panels hinting at the intricate engineering within. Alma felt a treacherous curl of envy. She tamped it down by imagining Bridget’s monthly payments.

Alma had never been in this part of the facility. The walls and floors were a uniform, institutional gray, and the cerulean work bays stood out in sharp contrast, bright as a flock of birds against an overcast sky. Every bay had a chair, which surprised her. On the main floor, everyone stood for their entire shift. Chairs meant they were expected to stay a long while. Or do something hard.

Ben cleared his throat. “Y’all are some of my best workers, that’s why I pulled you in for this. Corporate wants 217-B processed ASAP, and overtime’s been approved.”

Pride and excitement rippled through Alma. OT paid time and a half. Jordan’s game system had just gotten that much closer.

“For this, all we need to do is download each unit’s data package and erase it,” Ben continued.

“No upload? No refurb?” Alma asked.

“Neither. Most of these units are advanced prototypes. Corporate only wants the data. Just dump ’em in the bins when you’re finished.”

“Prototypes?” Alma echoed. But her question was swallowed by the roar of wheels as the mover system rolled dozens of bins piled high with units into the room.

“We got a lot to do,” Ben said, clapping his hands. “I’ll order pizza.”

“This all came from the docks?” Alma asked, raising her voice over the din this time.

“And other places too,” Ben said, distracted by his tablet. “I’ll get a pepperoni, a sausage, and a veggie. Any other requests?”

As others called out their orders, Alma picked through the bin that had entered her bay. She figured these things had to get field-tested somehow—but with augs, on the job? And if these prostheses were prototypes, were they even fit for new subscribers?

A ping on her comms receiver. It was a request from Jordan’s teacher: she’d forgotten to sign the permission form for a field trip.

Alma shook her head. There was no point following that line of thought. She couldn’t help those people. She was here to do her job and clock out. Alma shoved aside her distress, sealing it off before it could weigh her down. She gave her consent to Jordan’s teacher and returned to the bin.

Legs went first. Alma sorted them methodically—full-leg units in one pile, lower-leg units in another. Some had scorch marks; the rods and struts of a few others were warped from heat.

Alma didn’t allow herself to dwell on that.

There were eight download ports on this bay, twice as many as her regular station. Alma sat—so good to get off her feet—and connected the units.

Glancing over the divider, she saw Bridget had the same idea. Bridget’s Cerberus auxiliary arm was deployed, letting her manipulate two full-leg units at once. Alma had never seen the Cerberus in action before and she watched transfixed. No wonder Bridget had been promoted so quickly. Fifteen days of post-surgical recovery and two months of training had clearly been worth it. Envy flickered again, sharp and unwelcome.

Tech IVs pulled an extra thirty dollars an hour. Maybe I should get an upgrade, Alma thought.

She separated out the upper-body units. Handling them plunged her into a memory. Years ago, Alma had lost her left arm. She’d taken a job at a waste management plant, where she useda rust-bucket exosuit to lift and sort giant bins of scrap metal and glass. One minute, she was hoisting a bin; the next, a servo in the exosuit’s left arm jammed, jerking the limb straight into the teeth of a grinding press. The pressure trip triggered the emergency shutoff, halting the machine mid-cycle, but not before it had chewed through steel and bone. It took four coworkers to pull her free. One of them wrapped a belt around her upper arm and cinched it tight until the world went gray. There was nothing left of her arm below the elbow.

Her first prosthesis was plain but functional, but nowhere near enough to keep up with the bionic augs, who zipped through tasks two, three times faster. Nine months of unemployment drained her savings, forcing her and Jordan into her mother’s basement.

A friend of a friend helped her get a three-week trial on a fishing trawler. At first the captain put her on the deck crew. It was dangerous work, heavy gear swinging overhead and unpredictable waves jolting the ship. On the third day, a wave swept over the deck and knocked her unconscious. The concussion she woke up with almost put her ashore, but she convinced the captain to move her to the factory crew instead. There she worked sixteen-hour shifts on the trawler’s wet, cold processing floor, gutting, skinning, and fileting fish while standing in blood, guts and old water. The briny smell of the fish permeated everything: her hair, her right hand, her clothes. It never left, no matter how hard she scrubbed. But she got fast with the knife, her blade flashing under the industrial lights. It wasn’t about strength here, but speed and finesse. Alma let herself start to hope. In her bunk, she scrolled through apartments online, even ordered some toys for Jordan to be delivered to her mom’s house. She was sure she’d get a berth on the next trip—until a new crewmember came aboard, both of her arms outfitted with fine work knives. Alma came ashore with her portion of the total catch payout and a few kind words from the captain about what a hard worker she was, better luck next time. She went back to the basement, and watched Jordan play with the toys she couldn’t afford but didn’t have the heart to return, her son sitting apart from her because she still stank of fish. It was a long time before she prayed to God again, her spirit was so broken.

Taking out a loan for the Titans wasn’t a choice. It was survival. Even though it meant removing her other organic arm.

~

Error alerts blared again.

It wasn’t just Alma’s this time; every work screen flared red. But her relief evaporated when the limbs in her bay started moving: twitching, flexing, rotating, contracting. She backed away from the console, her Titan hands receiving the panic signal from her brain and clenching into fists.

Ben rushed back in, pizza sauce on his shirt and a half-eaten slice in his hand. “What’s going on?”

Alma’s fingers found the crucifix beneath her jumpsuit. “You tell us. Shit is possessed.”

Ben dashed from bay to bay, inputting his override code. Alma backed into her bin and swallowed a yelp: some of the hand units were moving too, flopping across the bin’s bottom with the same frantic resistance of the catchon the fishing trawler. The fingers grasped at air, pinching nothingness. Alma shuddered and clutched her crucifix tighter. Then, just as suddenly as they’d begun, the units went still with an eerie clack.

“Ben, what’s up with these things?” she demanded.

The other techs looked at him, rattled as well. Even Bridget seemed spooked.

Ben rubbed the back of his neck. “Prototypes,” he murmured, as if that explained anything. “A lot of the downloads glitched out and some of the data’s corrupted. We gotta run ’em again.”

He didn’t wait for questions, just sprinted back to his glass observation deck and tapped furiously on his screens.

Alma stared at the still limbs in her bay, her nerves jangling, dread prickling along her spine. She redocked the units she’d been processing. The downloads were buggy, starting and stalling like a stubborn engine. Without the familiar multistep routine, it was hard to stay focused and empty her mind. She went back to mealplanning. One pack of ground beef, two tomatoes, an onion. Sloppy Joes on Tuesday, tacos on Wednesday. Then, the units started twitching again.

It seemed like no one else was being haunted this time. Her coworkers were all intent on their work.

She gripped her crucifix again, tight enough to leave tiny divots in her hands’ skin coating. The arm units jerked like marionettes on invisible strings, and it took her a moment to recognize the patterns. They weren’t random but practiced. Repetitive. Familiar. It was the rhythm of labor: lifting, lowering, carrying, adjusting. Her own body knew the moves by heart.

People bought these units to be able to work at a high level. To keep pace and stay employable. To survive. Her mind understood all that. Her heart refused to catch up.

Alma’s vision wavered as if she might pass out. She squeezed her eyes shut, tucking her head between her knees. But the sight of the twitching limbs played on a loop behind her eyelids. Even after their subscribers’ deaths, the units retained the memory of labor. Not of living, just of work.

She thought of her own life: the sacrifices, the long shifts. How tired she always was, how she nursed herself along with coffee and cat naps to be present for Jordan’s most important moments. And still she missed some of them, working as many shifts as she could to keep him housed, clothed, fed, and as happy as she could help make him.

Alma counted herself lucky that she needed only this one job to support them. But was that the only measure of her life? When she died and Jordan cremated her armless corpse, would her Titans twitch on, same as these poor bastards?

She looked around. Ben had activated a privacy shield around his observation deck. No sound escaped as he spoke earnestly to a frowning woman on a holo-call.

On Alma’s console, the download bars crawled to the right. Her curiosity, something she normally suppressed at work, mounted.

Another glance showed Ben still sealed in his bubble and her coworkers still wrestling with their own workloads.

With a few taps, she opened the data warehouse. As a Tech III, she had only basic, read-only access to what she processed, nothing more. She swiped through the datapacks that she’d managed to pull from the 217-Bs, a sea of garbled metadata. After some searching, she located the USAGE LOGS folder and tapped it open.

She was familiar with these logs because her Titans generated a nonstop stream of data, even when being serviced. But the files here looked different. Instead of continuous activity, each entry showed a neat start and stop time, along with a field that she’d never seen before: RELEASED_TO: POOL_STORAGE-XX_CHARGE_RACK-##.

Alma frowned. That made no sense.

She opened the log for a forearm unit.

Session81903
CUSTODY_START: 2087-10-27T07:30:00Z
CUSTODY_END:2087-10-27T14:30:00Z
ASSIGNED_TO: Worker-5122
RELEASED_TO: POOL_STORAGE-04_CHARGE_RACK-12
SESSION_TYPE: SHIFT_USE
BIO-LINK STATUS: INACTIVE (Outside Authorized Work Hours)
PROFILE_SYNC: DISABLED

Her stomach dropped.

These weren’t personal prosthetics with a unique subscriber. These were shift rentals. Used for the workday and surrendered afterward, like tools.

She opened more logs. The pattern repeated. Shift after shift after shift. She kept looking for an exception, anything to prove her wrong. Somebody’s name or a profile sync. Any indication that this was a research program, or something that didn’t involve humans at all.

Nothing.

Alma felt sick. Her Titans were part of her, linked to her profile and her name, Alma Robinson. These hand and finger units only scanned to a worker ID. Did the users have other limbs? Or were these the only ones they ever touched, and only while on the clock?

She imagined someone waking up in the morning with no arms, commuting with no arms, waiting for their shift to start so they could rent their body back for a few hours. And if this was a new way of working, how long until subscribers like her were pushed to shift-use only?

Alma sat in her chair before she fell. Her breath came in punches. She did so many mundane things with her hands and arms, things she didn’t think twice about. Opening doors. Eating meals. Washing her body. Cleaning her apartment. Putting on her uniform. Grabbing stuff from store shelves. Carrying bags of groceries. So many things she took for granted.

She pictured herself with Jordan, braiding his hair, fixing his tie for church, packing his lunch. Hugging him. What would she do if she had to give up her limbs at the end of every shift like these workers did, with nothing to replace them?

She knew Circularity was a business, not a nonprofit. But it didn’t square that the company could do this to folks.

Except that the logs were staring her in the face. And then there were the augment loans, Thuy’s fee increases, the discontinued support and parts for older models—it all fit together too neatly. For years, she’d been doing this job. She clocked in, did good work, and clocked out. She must have processed hundreds if not thousands of units, and it had been easy to buy into the company line, to tell herself she was helping people. And maybe she was. But she’d also been part of the machine that made these logs possible.

~

Alma hadn’t had a cigarette in years. She sat on the toilet lid, inhaling deeply. The smoke scraped her throat, made her eyes water; her body had forgotten how to take this kind of poison. The exhaust fan roared above her.

A knock startled her. “Mama, I’m leaving!”

“One second, baby!” Alma stubbed out the cigarette and swished with mouthwash. She stepped out of the bathroom and wrapped Jordan in a hug. Her Titans pressed around him, joints flexing. He squirmed in her grasp, feigning disgust at her kisses.

“Mama, stop! I’ll be back Sunday.”

“Be good.” She kissed his forehead. “Finish your book report. Do you have your inhaler?”

“Yessss, it’s in my backpack.”

Antonio was waiting in the living room, holding Jordan’s weekender bag. “Come on, J. Don’t want to miss the train.”

Jordan hugged her again and dashed outside. Antonio lingered, sniffing the air theatrically.

“You okay?”

No. “Yeah. Don’t forget his bedtime is ten.”

“Got it. Take care.”

She nodded and retreated to the bathroom for another smoke.

An hour later Alma was back at Circularity for her final overtime shift. The bills didn’t care if she was spiraling. She’d barely slept the last two nights and was wired from downing energy drinks.

The mover system delivered one last bin to her bay. It was piled high with a mound of hand units in a rainbow of skin tones, mostly brown. A chill passed through her body. The sight tugged at a memory, her high school history teacher showing the class that photograph of Belgian soldiers posing beside a pile of severed Congolese hands, punishment for missed rubber quotas. She would never forget the soldiers’ faces. Casual. Business as usual.

The hand units were limp and quiescent in her grip. They were surprisingly lightweight, the better to keep a worker moving fast and avoid tiring out their forearms. Alma imagined each one of these attached to a person. Picking fruits and vegetables. Servicing cars. Assembling electronics. A person trying to make a living, folded into an experiment.

Alma’s Titan hands didn’t tremble anymore, but her shoulders stiffened and her jaw clenched.

Ben rapped on her divider. “Hey! Just wanted to say I appreciate all your hard work these past few days.”

Alma turned aside her lips pressed in a thin line. “No big deal. It’s just downloads.”

“Even so, you’ve pulled a ton of OT this week. Here’s a little something extra from the company.”

He handed her a gift card stamped with the Circularity logo.

“It’s worth a thousand dollars on Circularity products, five hundred everywhere else. You can even use it on your subscriptions.”

Alma’s mouth felt as dry as rust. That was nearly five months of payments. “Thanks.”

Ben stepped around her and tapped her screen. “I also need you to sign an NDA. Just because we’re handling prototypes.”

Her gut twisted. Heat crept up her neck as he scrolled through pages of legalese and skipped to the signature pad. Did he know? Had her snooping been traced? Was this some sort of test?

Ben smiled at her, showing all his white, straightened teeth. “Try to do it before you clock out.” He clasped her shoulder—two quick squeezes she tried to convince herself were casual—and strode off, whistling.

The gift card sat on her console like bait. Alma scrolled back up through the NDA, ten pages of tiny writing telling her to shut up for seventy-five years. Snatches of text discussed her liability, threatening fines and prosecution. She used to think the worst thing that could happen at work was getting fired. Or maybe having to deal with a handsy boss. This NDA said otherwise.

But even as her heart pounded, a little part of her thirsted for vengeance against the people who created the program. Against those who came up with augment loans and planned obsolescence. Even though it was ungodly, she wanted something bad to happen to those people, to force them into impossible choices, so they’d know how it felt.

At the front of the room, Ben clapped for attention.

“All right team, we’re in the home stretch. Once you’re done with these batches, dump ’em in the bins and roll everything to the compactors. We’re handling the destruction too.”

“Everything gets destroyed?” someone asked.

“Everything. Data’s extracted. They’re junk now.”

Alma’s fists clenched. Junk. Junk. Were augs “junk” too? And Did Ben know how these prototypes were being used? Maybe. Maybe not. She wasn’t sure if it mattered.

When the last download finished, Alma unhooked the unit and turned it over in her own hands. The skin coating’s coloring was nearly identical to hers.

This was meant to be part of somebody. It damn sure was not junk.

Alma sat and hunched over the unit, shielding it with her body in case there were cameras in the room. She removed her gloves and pressed the unit’s wrist. A tiny compartment popped open, revealing a memory wafer. The wafer was shaped like a quarter, its surface gleaming rainbows. So small, but if this was like all the other units she’d handled over the years, the wafer held a cache of at least two weeks of data.

Her crucifix felt warm against her heart. She wasn’t a risk-taker or a freedom fighter. But she liked to be prepared. She was still scared—of losing her job, a lawsuit—but she was also angry. And if this pissed her off, there was a damn good chance other people would see this as an injustice too.

Alma slipped the wafer into her pocket.