Nerves Into Circuits

By Lyra Meurer

Metal arms descend to press skin-soft conductor strips over my shoulders. The Neurasuit has been in warming mode for a few minutes–my overwrought senses accept the lines of heat like a gift. Despite my anxiety for the fight, my trapezius muscles relax, creaking in the silence. Released from the tension, my vertebrae settle into place with small snaps, one or two with each breath.

Wires snake through my hair, massaging the scalp pain I didn’t notice was there. More swirl around my neck, tickle between my toes, seeking the overabundant bristles of my nerves. The Neurasuit folds around me with a hiss and a click, shutting out the cold night air. Before the systems launch, before the fight begins, I have a moment of perfect comfort in a little space built for me.

Jolt. Systems connect. I am the Neurasuit, the metal is my bones, the forcefields my flesh, the hydraulics and wires my muscles and nerves. I am hard, my new limbs pressurized cannons of potential energy, my skin a web of humming electricity. (My actual skin hums too, but in a different way, protesting its own existence.) The lights flick on in lines, onetwothreefour, onetwothreefourfive, plosions of sensation rolling up my back, down my limbs, splaying into my clawed hands and feet. An exhilaration of wind curves around my artificial body. (It doesn’t hurt–for now.) My breathing tube conveys the stink of our enemies–like sulfur, like rain upon burnt ruins.

Imri’s voice crackles over the comms, “Should’ve known they were coming tonight.” (Too loud. My ears echo every syllable with a repulsed spasm. I wince and the suit reads my discomfort, turning the sound down.) “Those clouds at sunset. Unnatural. Looked like the sky was full of tomatoes. Wish I’d realized and taken a nap.”

“Doesn’t matter to me,” I say, “Couldn’t sleep anyways. At least we have something to do now. Trying to shut my shoulders up was getting boring.” (I’d rather be sleeping, despite my bravado, but we must work within our limits, must we not?)

“That’s the spirit,” says Espen. (A wince in his voice. Seems we all are suffering from the change in air pressure this evening.)

Imri is crouching already, the piston rods in her legs driven deep into their casings, waiting to spring. Espen and I sink down on either side of her.

The metal, wires, and solder transform us into beasts: sharper, bigger, faster, stronger, with razor claws and ruthless jaws. The lights delineate our shadowy bodies, flickering like the rainbow cilia of comb jellies.

We are the only people who can control the Neurasuits. Our over-communicative nerves will scream that a rough pants seam or an ice cube in the palm is pain, so they flood the gap between neurons and circuitry with abundant commands, compelling the suits to follow our impulses as if they were our own bodies.

Imri discovered our latent powers some five years ago, when we were mere roommates, trying to make a dingy, too-small house suit our diverging needs. At the time, her nighttime tinkering in the cramped shed was an oddity that Espen and I envied–where did she find the energy after her nine-to-five as an engineer? We hadn’t guessed it was a bid for survival, for our city and for our struggling bodies. We didn’t know those robot skeletons would be the bond that would cement us as a unit–fighters, friends, comrades.

Espen’s head lifts, jaws opening to take in more scent. “Which direction are they coming from?”

I turn my face to the clouds boiling in the night sky. Lenses twist and stack in front of my eyes, magnifying a blur of motion. “There,” I say, pointing with a talon. (Such a smooth movement! My actual fingers are dry and stiff, curled tight against my chest. I stretch them, but they’ll fold back before long.) A flash of light, falling like a shooting star. There, then gone. Another, and another, winking in and out of sight.

No further words. Metal knees bunch and shoot straight. (My actual kneecaps twinge, though they are motionless.) We gather into a tight triangle, Imri at the front, Espen on the left, me on the right. Close enough to hear the clicking and whirring of each others’ Neurasuits, not close enough to damage each other as we charge through the sky, gathering the wind under us with wide sweeps of our airmetal claws. (My skin protests the buffeting crosswinds of our ascent, says the air scrapes like a razor blade. The nerve pain will come soon. I’m not in the best shape tonight, fighting in the middle of a flare and already sore in a dozen places, as if I’ve been punched all over. But who else will protect this city from the Nightmares?)

A nest of lights appears ahead, a falling mass of squirming rainbow threads. From afar, they seem as small and inoffensive as a tangle of flatworms, spreading towards their food. We fly closer, and within seconds can see the truth: centipede monsters as long as a person, their rows of armored legs backlit by a rainbow of sickly colors, from bruised purple to piss yellow. Cruel mandibles scissoring from flat, carapaced heads, sized to clench around a human skull, to inject it full of horrors and suck it dry of the resulting slurry of emotions. Ethereal monsters that only we, our senses conducted by our Neurasuits, our claws lined with force fields, can see, hear, and hurt.

Imri’s laughter buzzing in my ears. My heart throbbing full and deep in my chest. Mirth building in my diaphragm. The Nightmares twirling and uncurling, twisting towards us, drawn to our scent, to our shields spun from irresistible pain.

Espen whoops, soars through the air, and collides with one, catching and wrangling it like a thrown rope. Then Imri, then I, talons latching around glossy dream-chitin. A Nightmare’s mandibles snap inches from my Neurasuit’s skull, but I wrestle it away and tear the beast’s head apart like a bread roll. Cloudy gas gushes out, a humid spray of venom, stinging but harmless against my fields. (Nonetheless, a splash of nightmare, an image of me drawing the aching bones out of my fingers as if they were splinters. Weaksauce. I shake it away.)

Another slams against me (my chest seizes against the line of impact, but I breathe steady), tries to constrict me like a snake. I struggle my foot into its loops and straighten my leg, grasping either end to break its body like a branch. (Aerosolized venom goes kss kss against my shields, sting sting, against my nerves.) I snatch another as it whips past, crush its middle in my jaws, and fling it away. Its body plummets towards the distant lights of the city, dissolving as it falls.

A wave of Nightmares rises and breaks against my mechanical body. Ripping, tearing, flying, falling, I am awash in the delightful frenzy of killing an objective enemy (instead of the slow war with my body, which was supposed to be my ship through life, sturdy and reliable, but which instead keeps me from sleeping when I am exhausted, which can neither sit nor stand nor lie down without pain, which–), entranced by the power in these limbs, which run and jump and grasp and slash and throw without protest (though Neurasuit fatigue is hitting already; my nerves scintillate, insisting that they are there, in my body and in my suit, that they must tell me so).

An alarm whirls in my ear: Imri’s panic sequence. I twist in the air and see her plummeting, a flashing arm sticking out of a mass of Nightmares. Espen and I leap over (my left leg twinges ominously) to pick the beasts off and fling them through the sky. They pile off Imri and onto us.

In this chaos of shining chitin and flashing light, my nervous system chooses its moment. Lightning pain shoots up my leg, branches through my groin, up my side. I have borne stubbed toes and wasp stings without blinking, but this– this–

I convulse in my pod and the conductor strip pops off my left shoulder. My senses slam back into my body. The pain’s aftershock is fading, but the mistake has been made; I am detached, panting, aching, and aware of my entrapment in this tiny space. My suit’s movements lose cogency, limbs flailing through the air as I struggle to reconnect myself, elbows bumping into the frame.

Vicious mandibles strike my force fields. Wafts of dreams: the long drop to the earth, my body decaying as I live, my flesh blackening and swelling, pus-filled cysts burrowing into my brain, my bones bursting through my skin. My training beats with my frantic pulse: Focus on what’s real. Focus, focus. My body intact, Imri and Espen nearby, in battle or in the other room, ready to help me out of the bath, bring me food, accompany me through sleepless nights, as I am for them. But the Nightmares’ psychic assaults turn their comfort against me. Imri and Espen contorting and crying, masses boiling under their skin. Imri and Espen rotting on either side of me, liquifying into the grave.

My eyes, rolling around trying to see right, see nothing. Phantasmagoria gallop through my brain, a Danse Macabre around the grave of my still-living body. The Nightmares’ venom strikes like a cruel joke: I live like I am dying, battered by my own senses from waking until sleeping, sometimes even in my dreams. Every day, every night, forever and ever, until–

–death. Now that it is close, do I welcome it or fear it? Half-dreaming, I accept it. I will leave my comrades, my city, the world, behind–so be it, if I can have a break for once.

In my dreams, I wade into a crystalline ocean. A glass wave rears above me, furling like a cobra’s hood. I kneel in the water. It is frightening, this calm resignation, but this is it, nothing to be done. I float on my back, a shadow spreads across me–

The hammering on my Neurasuit stops. Imri and Espen tear off the last few Nightmares and devour them to pieces. I return to my own body, aching but alive. As I fall, I find purchase on the conductor strip. I slam it into place and my nerves explode outwards, possessing the Neurasuit in all its overstimulation. My robot hands snatch a Nightmare and twist it apart. Free again, I soar through the clouds to my next fight.

We descend an hour later, bodies simmering with sensation. We plant our suits in the soft earth (too cold, it bites at my bones). The wires retract (tingling trails, almost unbearable), the conductor strips lift, releasing their pressure (relief strikes as hard and heady as pain). My senses shrink to my own body. My skin, my muscles, my poor confused nerves, are my own again, if more agitated. I know, from many post-battle conversations about the effects of the Neurasuits, that the others feel the same: Imri’s back will be killing her by now, and the tinnitus in Espen’s left ear must be headache-inducing.

The suits hiss open and we stumble out, aching but smiling. Imri and I fall into a hug. “Thanks for helping me out back there,” I mumble into her shoulder, trying not to drool.

“No, thank you for helping me!” she says, pressing her warm fingers into my shoulders–she knows well how sore they are after a fight. I reciprocate, finding the knot in her lower back with the ease of practice.

Espen wraps both of us in his big arms. “We all help each other,” he says, his voice sloppy with overstimulated delirium.

“Ugh, you’re so cheesy,” says Imri, and we laugh.

We retreat to the complex, Neurasuits marching behind us. As they fold themselves into their charging stations, we flick on the electric kettle and break out the herbal tea. Exhausted and silly, but suffering too much to sleep, we collapse into the broken-backed furniture in the rec room and talk nonsense while we wait for our nerves to settle.

The heat from my mug relaxes my brittle fingers, radiates into my arms. I press it to my chest and feel my heart beat against the ceramic. Outside, dawn rises fresher and prettier than I ever will, tender light creeping down the wall behind us. Imri nods off into her hand. Espen wraps his heating pad around his shoulders like a shawl.

Looking out the window, at the city that, by our efforts, has slept peacefully for one more night, I can’t hold back one last ridiculous joke: “Guys, we did it. We saved the world. Again.”

Imri wakes enough to laugh. Espen pats my knee, then Imri’s, saying, “That’s it, bedtime for you. For me. For you.”

We share a last few giggly, stumbling hugs and split into our bedrooms–all in the same hall, shouting distance from each other.  While the rest of the world wakes, I pile my bones into bed and listen to the soothing rustle and murmur and occasional groan of the others getting ready for bed. I smile and, for once, bless those thin walls.

Sensations sink through me like sediment. I roll over once, twice, then finally lose track of what my nerves are trying to tell me. Sleep claims me, sweeping me into dreams in which I feel no pain.

Host Commentary

By Valerie Valdes

Once again, that was Nerves Into Circuits by Lyra Meurer.

The author had this to say about their story:

Due to fibromyalgia, I am in constant pain: every waking moment, sometimes even in my dreams. It is a misery, but also a strength in a way that I struggle to verbalize. It is easier sometimes to write a story, to expand an idea through narrative. So I wrote this story in an attempt to capture something about the experience of chronic pain, which can manifest with such vivid variety, and which can be parenthetical most times, then dominate your attention at others. From there, I found myself exploring the complex relationship one can have with pain: the way it can be both a weapon and a trap, the way it can drive you towards action and bravery even as you fight despair, and the way you can find community with others who know pain and illness well.

The idea that a disability can be a super power is one that can sometimes be applied in problematic ways, especially in science fiction. It can erase the real struggles of humans and replace it with a sanitized narrative that favors cures over accommodations, triumph over endurance. It can fetishize experiences, turn suffering into a virtue and impairment into inspiration. Stories like this, by contrast, examine one kind of disability through a clear lens, in which the pain is not removed, but rather transformed temporarily. The characters’ heroism is one facet of their reality instead of simply an escape from it. Their bodies are expanded, not eliminated. As a particular subset of society pushes for genocidal models of eugenics that dehumanize disabled humans, it’s more important than ever to push back with stories of the myriad truths of disability, told by the people living them. As the trio in this story discovered, they are not alone; while each of us is fighting a different battle, if we work together like they do, we can all change the world for everyone in it.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

If you’d like to support Escape Pod, please rate or review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite app. We are 100% audience supported, and we count on your donations to keep the lights on and the servers humming. You can now donate via four different platforms. On Patreon and Ko-Fi, search for Escape Artists. On Twitch and YouTube, we’re at EAPodcasts. You can also use Paypal through our website, escapepod.org. Patreon subscribers have access to exclusive merchandise and can be automatically added to our Discord, where they can chat with other fans as well as our staff members.

Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Alice Wong, who said: “When something can’t be fixed then the question is what can we build instead?”