Story - Plug and Play

gistfile1.txt

This short story won the 2nd place at the 2020 DEFCON Short Story contest.

This story is also available (free) on the Apple Books store - https://books.apple.com/us/book/plug-and-play/id1521590505.

TITLE: Plug and Play
AUTHOR: 247arjun

# Prologue
Elina was an adrenaline junkie. She was most happy when hurtling towards the earth’s surface, zen when scuba diving, and at peace when not at rest. She attributed a large part of her nature to her parents - programmers at large tech companies in Seattle, who introduced her to the great outdoors at a young age. Her parents were what Elina’s friends would call ‘weird’. Geeks who fully embraced the nerd subculture, routine board gamers, amateur astronomers, sci-fi aficionados. Indeed, they had named their only child an anagram of the word ‘alien’, by design - Elina was very special to her parents.

Elina was also special for another reason. She was a cyborg. Not in the Hollywood sense though. Elina was born with a rare genetic disorder that resulted in many of her organs being underdeveloped. Her heart - without bio-hacking - would beat at close to 140bpm resting. She would need to hyperventilate just to keep up. This was how she spent the first few years of her life. At that time, the science to tackle and treat her condition was just not developed enough to be feasible - it was still nascent, only getting discussed at DEFCON’s Bio Hacking Village and other such meetups. 

As she turned 7, there was a breakthrough in the field. A young pioneer at a younger biotech company was able to engineer peaceful coexistence of human tissue alongside artificial mechatronics, across multiple organ systems. While mainstream scientists frowned on the runaway success of the experiments and begin arguing the ethics of it all, the technology was quickly prototyped on species of increasing complexity - starting with mice, monkeys and eventually the young pioneer themself.

Within the year, in the unregulated borders of a large East-Asian country, the technology was ready for human customers. Say what you will about Elina’s parents and their parenting (early-adopters much?), she was introduced to the technology - very literally. As a result of the technology infusion, her heart rate was a normal 96bpm now, and she could do deep-breathing exercises that would even put a yogi to shame. 

Elina enjoyed middle and high school, and had fairly successful athletic endeavors there. Her organ-systems allowed her to run faster, for longer, than many other athletes who spent years perfecting their physiques to the art. The list of sub-systems that she was composed of could be comparable to a Formula One car at the time - Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems that allowed her to recover, store and re-use energy as she moved, brake bias systems that allowed her to turn much faster with less loss of speed and much more. 

Obviously, none of her peers were aware of the fact that she had these superpowers. There was no charging port on her neck that gave it away, no pulsing LEDs shining through her skin. Elina, to everyone outside her family, was gifted; true, there were better athletes than her, but they were also trying much harder to stay ahead.

With these enhancements, Elina’s life changed almost overnight from ‘walking at 140bpm’ to running comfortably without breaking a sweat. Following her surgeries and rehab, which robbed her of a year of her childhood, there was the longing to return to the only normal Elina knew - and being an adventurer was the quickest way there.

----

As she exited the taxi with her friends in front of The Dubai Mall, all she could think about was her plans for the afternoon. Elina and her friends were spending their end-of-year vacation in Dubai - being from an atheist family freed her of any religious obligations that tended to pop-up around that time of year, and Dubai was best visited around then, when it was neither hot nor dusty. 

Her plans for the afternoon involved a race of sorts. Sponsored by an energy drink famous for slapping their brand name on daredevils, and approved by the local government, the race - titled “Dust to Dust” - had two parts. One, a foot race from the ground level of the Burj Khalifa - at one time the tallest human-made building on the planet - up to the observation deck 124 floors up. Then, an extreme BASE jump down the side of the skyscraper, from the deck’s specially opened windows back down to terra firma. Whoever won the race would be granted a prize sum of a million dollars, and get access to a film-making crew for a year - free to travel and do daredevil things - video recordings of which would end up on the brand’s television channel, marketing etc. In short, win-win-win for everyone involved.

Dust to Dust, in its fourth year, had a small cult following worldwide that tuned in to watch the race live - there was no official recording of the event to be retransmitted later. You either watched it live, or missed it - or ended up digging through the dark web for pirated recordings. The event already had a bit of a controversial history to it - two years ago, when the event was held in the shark-infested warm reef waters of Australia, audiences were treated to a front-row seat of watching some competitors dodge sharks while also racing to the surface from the depths. There was no shark-related carnage, but plenty of competitors got the bends from unsafe surfacing, which put some of them out of commission permanently. The thrill of not knowing what you’d get drew some spectators, themselves armchair-adrenaline junkies. This year promised a similar potential spectacle.

The race was an interesting challenge this year; you had to be as light as possible for the first part - racing up many flights of stairs, but you also needed to have your BASE jumping gear with packed chute on the whole time. The rules around this were somewhat nebulous, to encourage innovation, but were basic enough to prevent suicide attempts. As Elina suited up, she looked around her at the competition she faced - there were people from around the world, some of whom had managed to snag sponsors for their attempts too, though they were mostly advertising cryptocurrency ICOs. Elina mused about the analogy between the event and cryptocurrency valuations.

Once everyone was suited up, all competitors lined up sideways at the starting line near the fountains outside the skyscraper. Instead of a starting pistol or lights out, there would be a crescendoing set of fountain eruptions culminating in one big blast from the biggest fountain to signal the start of the race. Many were jittery - either from the nerves, or from the caffeine high of the energy drinks they’d consumed, or from other substances ingested discreetly. The announcer’s voice boomed - asking if everyone was ready, not once but thrice because that’s how the human body works; humans only get ready on the third repeated ask obviously. A primal cry was the response in each iteration - they were thinking about getting ready, they were almost ready, THEY WERE READY. Once the rest of the announcements were done, an eerie silence punctuated only by the buzz of the electric motors of drones hovering overhead descended on everyone. The background music that was to culminate in the race start slowly sputtered to life. Classical music from the limited playlist of the fountain operators. Violins, cellos, pianos - you’re probably humming a tune right now that fits the bill. The song was popular enough that everyone knew when the countdown would begin. Seconds stretched into eternity as the song progressed, everyone was sweating now. First verse, second verse, ever so slowly forward. 

Then, it was time. A few minor chords away, the fountains leapt to life. The gathered crowd grew silent, recording the spectacle on their phones, recordings that most would never replay, but FOMO meant they had to capture. 3... 2... 1...

----

Elina’s heart was beating a steady 100bpm as the race took off. Her body took a little while to gain momentum, so she was already in the middle of the pack by the time she reached the tower’s entrance. The front runners were already two floors above her. Elina was not worried. She had the stamina to outlast the majority of them. As her muscles stiffened, she took the stairs one at a time - no need to risk tripping or missing a step. Floor 1 was done, and her pace increased. Around her, people were still overtaking her in the wide stairwell corridor. Floor 3 was as unremarkable as Floor 2, but she was getting quicker. She was keeping pace with some of those around her now, and ever so slowly gaining on them. At each floor, she caught a glimpse of a large drone outside - rising in altitude with the front-runners, ostensibly with cameras to broadcast the race proceedings.

Elina’s body was working like a well oiled machine by the time she reached Floor 25. She had found her stride and was only a floor away from the current race leader. Over the next dozen floors, she could see the race leader and was catching up slowly but surely. She was now in the same video frame as the leader, broadcast worldwide - her heart rate steady at 120bpm. They were about a third of the way up when she drew abreast of the leader and caught a glance at her competition. Elina was calm and composed, with rhythmic breathing in sync with her steps and with only a damp forehead from perspiration, while her competitor was staccato breathing and sweating profusely. The human body is an incredible thing, but it too has its limitations - our ancestors were not built, and had not evolved, for this definition of fight-or-flight (of stairs). Elina’s competitor - a fitness vlogger with many millions of subscribers - watched helplessly as she, over the next few floors, gained a step per floor.

By the halfway mark, Elina was almost out of eyeshot of her competition. Her leg muscles, assisted by her body’s augmentations, allowed her to lose less speed as she turned around each flight of stairs. There was less strain on her left calf muscles as she ran up the counter-clockwise flights, compared to her competitors. Soon, even the filming drone struggled to keep her in the same frame as the pack trailing her. The drone camera director, convinced that Elina would slow down soon, kept the focus on the pack. Elina was in a class of her own.

Elina was only starting to sweat when she was at Floor 90. Her heart rate was at 140bpm, her breathing a bit faster than before, and she was 3 whole floors clear of her competition - the sounds of collective grunting and panting long gone, she was in the zone. Her mind was clear, her muscles only starting to complain about lactic acid build-up, and her lungs with the slightest levels of heartburn like the kind you get from an Indian restaurant that catered to the affluent white American, whose cook had over-enthusiastically added an extra dusting of chili powder to the curry. Floor 91... inhale... exhale... left leg... right leg... repeat... Floor 92. Keep going. Almost there.

At ground-level outside, the live video from the drone played on large screens as crowds - family members of the competitors as well as casual passersby - had gathered to watch the second part of the race. The video stream was presented like a news program - a scrolling ticker at the bottom, various bits of information overload scattered all over the screen, a well dressed presenter in front of a camera providing live commentary on things nobody listened to or cared about, and an animated 3D skeleton of the skyscraper with a heat-map showing the herd’s distribution across its floors. 

Elina barely registered as a blip on this heat-map. In the frequency distribution, she was an outlier. Only a few floors away from the observation deck and 5 whole floors clear of the sea of humanity that followed, she tightened the straps on her back protector and the container - it felt like being hugged by her mother right after they... no time to think about that, head in the game. The last 2 floors were very tiring, something about being able to see the finish line. She burst through the doors of the observation deck - the volunteer crew was not quite ready for her as cameras scrambled to be turned on and trained on her. 

The observation deck was massive - on a normal day, there were hundreds of tourists up there taking in the sights of the skyline and the artificial islands just offshore. Elina ran about halfway to the windows and finally paused to take a break. This wasn’t a break for her muscles, it was to check that her BASE jumping gear was correctly configured. As she stood in place, the vibrating hum of her muscles faded away. She knew that her competition would take at least a minute to catch up, so she rested for half a minute and was ready.

By now, the video stream was a split-screen of the inside of the observation deck, and a sky cam from the drone that was hovering above the jump point. Elina was the person of the fraction of the hour. Spectators marveled at how little she was emoting pain, naively chalking it up as a result of steroids or some other chemical stimulant. The presenter talked excitedly about how many hundreds of feet about ground-level they were, making sure to emphasize the maximum velocity a jumper would attain, while another on-screen video replayed the impact of a deadweight released from that height at a test range. 

Elina took a few deep breaths, stared at the blue sky outside the window she was going to jump through. This was the part that really got her blood pumping. Like an Olympic long jumper, she increased her strides as she ran towards the azure; she wanted to put some distance between herself and the - she realized how much of an ironic pun the term sky’scraper’ could end up being. As she neared the opening, now less than 20 feet away, the air temperature visibly rose and she could feel the draft of the warm air current rising outside. She entered a different spacetime; one where an earthly second spanned almost a minute. She could smell the cheap perfume that the space reeked of, see the flicker of that one light fixture three windows away, feel the padded carpet reluctantly absorb her weight, as she approached the edge. Then, with the poise of a circus gymnast, she took one final stride and leapt forward gracefully.

----

To anyone who has ever gone skydiving or bungie jumping, the memory of leaving the safety of the point of origin and plunging along the negative z-axis for the first time, is one that is forever etched in memory. Some people refer to the free-fall as true freedom, ignorant of how enslaved by gravity everyone is. For Elina, this was far from the first time that she had ascended a building from the inside and descended from the outside.

As her head emerged past the dimensional confines of the observation deck, her heart rate spiked to 160bpm. The floor was no longer 5 feet 3 inches below her eyes, and she took in the expanse. Unlike a cartoon character that stays in suspended animation till it realizes it’s going down, Elina’s momentum from her last stride kept her body going on the arc trajectory till she was clear of the building. She was in the great outdoors now, almost 1500 feet up. In terms of her entire race time, she was well over 90% of the way there - it would only take her about 3 minutes to reach the finish line

She felt the warm dry desert air whipping against her as she reoriented her body geometry for optimal free-fall. As she fell earthward, she glanced at the altimeter she had strapped to her wrist count down at dizzying speed. It was a beautiful sunny day outside, so Elina looked around - no point looking straight down. She could barely discern the Iranian shore in the distance, which she gazed at for a few more seconds before deploying her pilot chute. This induced enough drag to slow her fall somewhat, but with that out of the way, her entire focus was on her descent now - she reminded herself to return to the observation deck later to spend some more time getting a birds-eye view.

Elina kept a keen eye on her altimeter, which was still counting down fast albeit less dramatically than before, to time her canopy deployment perfectly. This being a race, she didn’t want to pull her ripcord too early and have to float down slower than if she could wait just a little longer. In her peripheral vision, the scale of humanity grew as she descended.

Elina counted down the Mississippis beyond the recommended altitude to deploy, held her breath and pulled her ripcord to release her canopy. She was abruptly jolted, as her vented canopy deployed and slowed her descent. She tugged at the toggles to steer herself to an optimal approach, targeting a textbook short final.

The primary difference between a successful landing and an unsuccessful one is the magnitude of deceleration that the canopy generates. As she descended, Elina was suddenly swept off her glide path by a gust of a rising thermal. She pulled down hard on her toggle to correct, but it didn’t seem to have much effect. She accelerated downwards. She wasn’t free-falling, but she was coming in harder than she would’ve liked. 

Unlike in skydiving, where a diver has a primary and a reserve chute, a BASE jumper only has one chute. The reserve chute involved praying, which was not something Elina was familiar with. She watched the dial of her altimeter count down faster as she struggled to regain control. Time sped up. Her heart rate was up to 180bpm. This wasn’t looking or feeling great.

----

On the video screens - locally and globally - spectators keep their eyes peeled to the screen. There was nervous anticipation of what would happen next. Multiple cameras were trained on Elina as she was tossed around the sky like a corked bottle in the ocean. Capturing her descent from above, the drone showed viewers the flat spin that Elina was in. Mothers shielded the eyes of their children from the spectacle. Smartphone cameras were aimed skywards, hoping to capture the event but failing to do so effectively.

----

Elina was firing on all cylinders. Her systems - biological or cyber - weren’t trained for anything like this. To her systems, this was an unhandled exception. Try as she may, she couldn’t catch a break but she sure as hell hadn’t resigned herself to any ‘finally’ outcomes either. From where she was, she could see the crowds gathered below and clearly see the finish line with television crews beyond it. Her original plan of landing at or close to the finish line seemed impossible now. Another sudden gust, fortuitously helped correct some of her imbalance and she felt her speed slow once again. She was still coming in too fast. Elina started mentally packing for another trip to East Asia to heal.

----

To the gathered observers, the rate of descent wasn’t apparent - anyone who’s seen parachutists decend from a helicopter at a sporting event remembers how the descent initially seems slow and then suddenly appears to speed up as they touchdown. They saw Elina - by this time, they were all aware of her name and the fact that the nearest competitor seemed halfway up the Burj’s height - approach the ground with a path that didn’t seem simple. Very unlike an aircraft coming in to land. She also seemed a ways off from the landing zone, so maybe the other competitors did still have a shot at victory if they landed closer. 

----

The ground was rushing up to welcome her. Elina continued struggling with her toggles to correct course. Maybe she’d get lucky as she got closer. Maybe she could still land near the finish line. Maybe she’d spend the next year filming daring escapades from other urban obstacle courses. Maybe. She wouldn’t. 

A few hundred feet remained and Elina knew she’d messed up. She raised her legs till it was parallel to the ground, closed her eyes out of fear and let out a scream like a banshee. The last thing she remembered before reaching ground zero was how dry and metallic her mouth felt from the fear. Her heart rate hit 200 bpm as her body hit the ground.

----

The air was humid. It clung to everything it touched and rendered it heavy. The only sounds that could be heard were the hisses of compressed air, the beeps of equipment and the occasional sigh from a present relative. The hospital was very calm for the time of year. Past years had seen a great inflow of patients seeking treatment from the coronavirus pandemic. 

Elina could barely make out blurred moving shapes as she lay tethered in bed. Her face felt voluminous and swollen. Her body felt sore . There were tubes and wires interfacing with her body, keeping her alive and hydrated. Memories faded in and out. She remembered time spent with friends, time at school and after. She had no memory of how she ended up here - wherever here was. 

A nurse poked their head into the room and noticed Elina stirring. A doctor accompanied the nurse, as they both entered the room. Many of the cables that hung free from Elina were attached to a wheelbarrow sized machine that was rolled in. Elina saw the doctor close to her face, peering into her eyes, possibly into her very soul. She felt a comforting coolness start to slowly envelope her, starting where the wires and tubes entered her body. Her eyes grew heavy and she drifted off, joining the room’s silence.

A group of surgeons and biomedical engineers was summoned, who entered the room in scrubs, carrying gear. There was the standard surgical equipment, but also obscure things that weren’t mentioned in medical textbooks. The last thing to enter the room was another person, shorter than Elina, wheeled in on a bed, equally unconscious.

The team stayed in that room for a very long time performing multiple organ (and other system) transplants, checking and then double-checking to make sure they got it right. Finding a match like this was rare, and nobody wanted to be the person that dropped the ball on this delicate procedure. Eventually, they had one fully functional recipient and one shell of a donor. They had saved a life, and that would keep them in high spirits long past all the alcohol they would need to consume, to reconcile their life’s choices. Just before the last person left the room, the life-support systems for the donor were turned off - this was a somber moment, watching the heart rate drop off a cliff. There was no dramatic long-beep because the system was on mute, but the graphical display conveyed enough. Flat line. 0 bpm.

----

# Epilogue

A few weeks later

Elina stirred slowly that morning, roused by the chirping of birds outside. It felt like an extraordinarily restful night’s sleep even though she clearly remembered doing the dishes the previous night. Dealing with the stubborn grease at the bottom of the wok that had been used to make egg fried rice.

Her muscles felt tight. She needed to stretch them out, so she bent over to touch her toes and found that she could do so effortlessly. The ground seemed closer than she remembered it being. Her clothes seemed to fit a bit looser too - the washing machine must’ve stretched it out again. Her breathing was calm and measured. 

As she stretched, she heard the pitter patter of rain outside, muffled by the white noise of traffic. Elina’s mother opened the door to her room and asked if she was ready for breakfast or wanted to go on a run first. Elina decided to jog before eating, like she did every day for the past year, and ran a few miles. She barely broke a sweat by the end, though she felt her stride wasn’t as confident and her pace was off. 

Something felt off, though her brain was telling her everything felt the same. There! Her neighbors shied away as soon as she approached her house. She didn’t have much social interaction with them before, but she still recognized the look of confusion that their faces betrayed when they saw her. Like they were expecting to see someone else. Or that they saw someone else.

Whatever. Elina remembered her mother always telling her that it was important for her to feel comfortable in her own skin, and that’s all that mattered. She took those words to heart. 102bpm. Everything was normal.

As she sat down to eat her breakfast sandwich and protein smoothie - the same meal she remembered eating the previous day, she glanced at the front page of the newspaper. An ad in the corner caught her eye. It was an abstract representation of a sand dune, advertising a race across the Sahara desert. Looking closer, she saw that it was an international contest sponsored by an energy drink. “Dust to Dust”. Elina was in the best shape she’d ever been in, and felt the need to scratch her itch to travel. 

In her mind, there was no body better equipped for such an event. Maybe she’d take a closer look at this competition and give it a shot.