Chapter 514: I Want To Run Away

April wasn’t interested in going with me, so I dropped her at home.

On the way, the man-in-the-machine said he needed to protect himself and his androids. He was going to teach humans how to make the nerve-to-socket connections. Everything was going to be remote for him. Everything he used for the surgery was already available to hospitals with the latest computer-assisted surgery robots.

I got to their house and introduced myself to the boy that asked for a safe, reliable used car to take his siblings to the doctors so his parents wouldn’t have to take off work. He invited me in after calling his parents to get permission. We sat down to look at the cars he had found locally, vehicle history data, estimated car insurance, gas mileage, and maintenance costs.

His sister came rolling into the room, riding something that let her use feet-like things on her stumps to move it along.

“If you are going to buy my brother a car, do you think you can buy me the pad that goes on this trike for girls? I don’t want to sound like a complainer, but it has been rubbing me the right way, causing other problems,” she explained. “They cost a lot, and our insurance company only covers new ones once a year.”

I got down to be on eye level with her and said, “How about this? If you still need a new cushion by this time next week, I will get you one, but I think you will have something better by then. Right now, though, can you get your other brother?”

She rolled off to get her twelve-year-old brother.

“Do you think they can put retrofit hand controls on whatever car you help me buy? My sister was born two months premature. She looks small, but she turned fifteen last month and wants to start learning to drive,” he asked while we waited on his siblings.

His twelve-year-old brother came out with arm crutches and two prosthetic legs. It seems he and his sister only have one set of legs between them. He was better with them than his older sister, so he used them more often. Today was his day anyway.

“Do you mind riding on my shoulders,” I asked the girl.

She gave me a lusty look and answered, “Only if you don’t play with my butt too much.”

We went around to multiple car lots, had lunch, and went to some others. I looked over the used cars that Tony had found, and they all sucked. While not crap, they weren’t in the “excellent” shape advertised. He was a bit bummed out. After all his hard work, he only found crap.

The younger boy was trying to get around the various car lots using his crutches and prosthetic legs. We dropped him off at their house before going back out car shopping.

“This sucks,” he told me as we pulled into one of the three dealerships I owned in the area.

His parents were let in on the deal and had already picked out their new cars. They provided a list of the models and packages he could choose from. I let the eighteen-year-old saleswoman talk him into doing test drives on each of the cars his parents said he could pick from for his car. For safety reasons, we couldn’t ride with him.

I walked around the lot with his sister on my shoulders. She seemed to enjoy being about to see things from that height.

Her brother finished his test drives.

He came over to where I was walking around with his sister on my shoulders. I let the boy talk a mile a minute as he described the various cars he drove, what he liked about each one, and the things he didn’t.

“If I gave you the money to buy whichever you choose, which would you pick?” I asked.

He went for the highest miles-per-gallon one. It is a hybrid with excellent crash safety ratings.

I squeezed his sister’s legs to let her get her attention and then told the boy, “Good choice, but I’m not going to give you the money.”

“Oh,” he said, downtrodden.

I waited for him to look back up at me and say, “Ten thousand dollars or more deposited in someone’s account gets reported to the FBI. If I gave you the car costs, they would wonder why a sixteen-year-old is getting that kind of money and what they did for it. My dealerships never use the manufacturer’s floorplan loans on cars because we buy them outright. All the dealer incentives and bonus cash you hear about on TV, well, that is all that goes in the bank. When you own all the cars, you have to sign over the title if you want to give one away. The dealership has to do some paperwork, but that gets printed out, and you only need to sign on the line. Well, your parents since you are only sixteen. They did that when the dealership delivered their new cars to them during their lunch hours. All these cars you drove were pre-selected by your parents. You get to pick the paint and interior colors. Once you have that done, we will grab your brother and join your parents for dinner. New cars are the easy part.”

“Why can’t I drive it home now,” the boy asked once he selected the colors he wanted and a selection of dealer-installed upgrades.

“Because they are going to change out the seats, safety belts, and hybrid battery pack. Everything is getting upgraded to add additional protection all around. They are also upgrading the hybrid batteries to a new type of Lithium batteries with a much higher capacity and don’t catch fire when punctured. It will drastically improve the range of your driving on the battery. These aren’t available dealer options, but something people I know make to help improve safety. With the solar panels integrated into the roof, the batteries will charge while sitting out in the sun. Free power,” I explained. “Some associates of mine are going to make a significant investment in your brother and sister. I can make sure you have a safe car to take them around.”

We got his brother and went to a conference room in the hospital. I had the younger of the boys on my shoulders as his sister claimed the legs.

When we got there, the boy said, “This doesn’t look promising. I hate hospital food, and if that is how we start, it has to go downhill from there.”

A pretty nurse went to him and said, “You and your sister aren’t eating or drinking anything anyway, so no need to worry about the food.”

“I’m starving!” the girl said.

A man came over, placed both of her bionic legs on the table in front of her, and said, “You have a choice to make here, young lady. Have whatever food was cooked somewhere else and brought in here for dinner, or get new legs. Got your attention?”

“Can I eat after if I don’t like what is behind door number two?” she asked back.

“Not here,” he replied.

Oh, that is so mean. Wiggle the toes on one foot and use the other’s heel to scratch an itch first.

“Eat or door number two?” he asked her again.

“Did those legs just move on their own?” she asked.

“Make your choice, and you can find out,” was his reply.

She was too curious not to find out what was going on.

“Now that we have your attention, here is the deal,” he told the two amputee children. “You two are going to go get prepped for surgery while everyone else eats. We should finish dinner by the time they bring you both back into this room. I will explain everything to everyone then. Patience.”

Dinner wasn’t anything exciting, and the kids were back.

To the kids, he said, “You two got volunteered to be training for neurosurgeons learning how to connect a human nerve cluster to electrical contacts.”

“WE WHAT?” the girl yelled.

“Settle down,” he told her. “Someone has to do it, and they are willing to pay to learn from the experts. You, however, don’t have a choice who does what as you already agreed. Now the reason they must wire up the nerves to the contacts is so that you can use those legs sitting on the table in front of you. Getting the surgery done is the easy part. Once finished comes the hard part. We have to map those nerves and how they feel to you when stimulated. They will do a large amount of it while you are asleep and then run through it with you.”

“Why? These are just more fake legs,” the younger of the boys asked.

The man went over to him and said, “Oh, these are far from fake legs. When they had to amputate your legs above the knees, you had all the nerves there for your legs and feet like everyone else. Those nerve clusters are still there but not doing much right now. Once we get this done, they will interface with these bionic legs. You will feel pressure, hot, cold, and even feel when they need you to stop working them so hard or require a battery recharge. How they attach to the custom connector and end of your thigh bone will make them behave as close to a human leg as is possible with the current technology. We even designed the sock that goes over your thighs to be nearly impossible to find the edge. You will have to learn to walk because your brain never learned. It goes faster than you think.”

Something went into each kid’s IV to put them to sleep before they even realized it.

I took the oldest to pick up his new car.

In the morning, he helped me break down the two kid’s bedrooms. They were getting in-bed-charging for their legs, which meant new beds. Both kids also needed dressers to handle their new clothes. They only had a dresser two drawers high due to being as high as they could reach on their own. Their brother went with me to a big box store to find the kids some new sheets and bedding. He picked out some for himself as well.

They sent the boy and me to extended-stay suites near the hospital.

“We have to gut the two bathrooms and kitchen this afternoon. The crew will remove the existing carpet before repairing the walls and prepping for painting. Tile work will begin as soon as the bathrooms are ready. The kitchen is installing a new wood floor once the demolition is completed and cleaned up. At this time, the home is not inhabitable,” the foreman explained.

The boy, Ralph, and I headed over to settle in our suites. Both kids were still in surgery, and his parents were at work, so there was nothing much to do. We headed to the indoor pool area, where I helped him with some foreign language school work giving him trouble. Before meeting his parents for dinner, he and I headed over to watch a movie without much else. As we were having dessert, the hospital called to say the boy and girl were awake.

While the family went to see the kids, I got a rundown from the doctors that participated in the surgery.

“Both patients had extensive nerve damage to the nerve clusters as a result of poorly performed amputations,” the head surgeon who had learned how to attach the nerves to the connector for the bionic legs. “I prepared to tell these two children that their surgeries were unsuccessful. Let me be the first to say that I was ready to raise all manners of hell for believing I had paid eighteen-thousand dollars for this training opportunity. I found that these last two days have been eye-opening. Current mainstream neurosurgery can repair minimal nerve damage if addressed briefly after the injury or when another nerve gets transplanted from elsewhere in their bodies. What I learned is that is no longer the case.”

When he stopped, I said, “You paid handsomely to get a glimpse behind the curtain at what is possible with advanced tools and techniques. I have a friend whose spine was severed below her fractured skull in a car crash. She was brain dead when they poured her onto the stretcher. Electrodes were implanted in her heart to keep the blood they were transfusing into her flowing. They began using their research to see if they could reconnect her spinal cord. It wasn’t as if what they tried would kill her. They used me to stress-test their exoskeletons, and my friend became one of the first to wear their spinal brace. Now she did have to relearn almost everything. As she experienced something familiar, she began to remember things like people’s names, phone numbers, email addresses, and memories about that person from her early childhood. For all of you, the best is yet to come.”

“We are all under an NDA. Can you explain your last statement?” a woman asked.

“To be clear, I’m not funding, nor do I own any part of the people here teaching you. Because my friend was in the first generation of spinal braces, I had to learn how to adjust them quickly when the braces got out of alignment. I spent weeks, if not months, training on it. I have this body, martial arts grand-master skills, and fast reflexes because I was a scrawny kid in puberty who happened to be at their private research facility with nothing else to do. They used me as much as a guinea pig as they did my friend, only she had no choice in the matter. I mean, seriously, what is a fifteen-year-old boy going to do while waiting on four of his friends to walk out or leave in a body bag? I know that teenaged boys masturbate a lot, but even that gets old after a while,” I said, breaking some of the tension in the room.

To her, I said, “I will do my best, but as I said, I’m not a scientist or doctor. What I understand is the next steps were somewhat automated. Patients had buttons on the remote that they pressed to describe what they felt when a specific impulse was put on a nerve. These include heat, cold, pain, pressure, touch, and a few other mixtures of sensations. It will be challenging because the impulse their body sends to their brain to say that nerve is cold may instead say they have an itch. In other cases, the signal may trigger other nerves that cause them to climax. The kids will wear a sensor helmet to pick up the impulses. I have seen that it is extremely precise in locating the areas of the brain getting stimulated.”

“And how is that used once the process completes,” another asked.

I explained how the software in each leg connector is programmed to know the correct signal to send for something, say heat, even if that isn’t the same signal needed to signal for heat on another nerve. The process allows the data from the bionic legs to correctly convert into the correct nerve impulse.

I had one doctor shoot hot coffee out of their nose when I joked, “While we might all prefer it to the pain, having the most intense orgasm of your life when stubbing your toe can lead to a myriad of injuries. These two kids never learned to get around using what portion of their lower legs they had at birth. Trust me. You will be amazed at how quickly these two kids will run laps around the hospital. There are so many more surprises. I don’t want to take the thunder away from the people behind them.”

The doctors began working with one of the two kids to do the nerve mapping in the morning.

None of them had the patience to do the repetitive process for long. After lunch, the kids were connected to the computer and quickly worked through the rest of the nerve impulse mapping.

The doctors may be old and cranky. They all seem to chuckle each time an impulse causes one of the kids to cum.

“There is a reason they try to find what nerves cause the kids to go to that happy place,” I told two skeptical doctors. “It provides a rapid form of positive feedback when they accomplish a difficult task. If they do something that should hurt, it will. The same holds for a movement that would cause a muscle to be sore. I know that the programming and science behind it are beyond anything you’ve ever seen. These aren’t perfect, but they are as close as we have come without trying to see if we can regrow the limb. Once correctly fit and configured, you will be hard-pressed to tell them from a human leg without scanning them. Even then, it will require time and effort to study the scans carefully so as not to miss that they are bionic.”

This group of doctors was checking on the progress when the boy demanded, “Stop tickling me!”

They saw that the younger boy’s sister was there tickling the foot of his right bionic leg. He had both stump connectors and legs hooked to the computer. Both the bionic leg and his connector were attached to the computer.

Her little brother reached over to pinch the exact spots on each leg to cause his sister to cum. We’re not talking a tiny, quick cum, either. The girl’s butt lifted off the bed as she arched her back. Both hands fought the snaps on the gown until she managed to get loose to give her access to her tits. Eventually, she was too exhausted to keep getting off and dropped heavily on the bed. When she regained her breath, her brother told her to stop tickling him.

“That was mean! Everyone saw that happen to me. Your turn,” she said as she pulled her brother’s bionic leg into her lap, thus moving the computer connected to it over where she could reach it.

Her fingers flew over the keyboard as her brother started begging her not to do it.

You went too far first.

Due to the testing, both kids were exposed from the waist down. We all go to see the boy’s two-inch dick get hard and then powerful shots of clear precum.

Each blast came out as hard as the first. As this boy’s dick throbbed, his precum blasts went all over the place. I did have to fight not to laugh when his dick went limp, but he was still firing away. His sister kept him getting off for the three minutes it took someone to find the tech that knew how to undo what the girl had done. The younger brother had long since run out of precum to shoot, but he was still getting off.

When he had his breath back, he reached over to hold his sister’s hand and said, “I’m sorry. It never shot out anything when I played with it before. I liked it initially and didn’t want to stop, but then it got too much.”

“I’m sorry too. I only meant it to happen for as long as you did it to me. I saw the tech checking which signals made us cum, so I made the computer do that to you. I couldn’t make it turn back off,” the girl apologized.

Their mom said, “It is good that the warehouse club sells tissues in bulk.”

Damn, that little pee shooter got his precum all over the place.

They split the kids into two rooms. Techs in each room started running a rounded probe over every inch of each leg. Cameras connected to the computers watched both kids for indications of arousal. The girl had just over fifty places on her two bionic legs that got her juices flowing. Her brother was popping wood, and sometimes his cork, many more times than expected. The computer mapped out each location and the signals sent to their nerves. To confirm, they used a less rounded probe. They slowly poked around the perimeter of each area and worked their way inward. The connected computers analyzed the data and modified the impulses sent to the nerves accordingly.

The tech used a pointed probe to poke the kids in their upper legs, butt, and sides to get a baseline of the pain impulse sent to their brains. In each hand, the kids had a squeeze “toy.” If they felt something other than being poked, such as a feeling of heat, they squeezed one hand. Should the poke be more intense than the baseline, the kid would squeeze their other hand. Each “toy” had sensors that would mark the area for review. Like before, that data then had the computer map out areas around the one in question to work from the outside inward.

The tech would poke at an area that tested correctly and then the one in question. Using feedback from the squeeze “toy,” the computer adjusted the sensor output to align with the ones around it.

“Now that they have the system calibrated to generate the pressure and pain impulses consistently, the software will correlate data from the helmets to previous sensor calibrations. It can send millisecond-long impulses that correspond to a sensor,” said the person the man-in-the-machine had uploaded the knowledge into how he did some with me when I was in the exoskeletons. “After the children have had the chance to use the bathroom and have a few high sucrose, high protein drinks, the system will go into an automated sequence. It will randomly generate sensor signals for as long as it takes the brain to register the nerve impulse, but not long enough to make it to the children’s conscious mind. If you look at the wall of monitors behind the children, you can see the parts of the brain stimulated by a test impulse light up. Some nerve impulses will register on two or more of the brain maps. The expected color gets plotted onto those other maps in those cases.”

A female neurosurgeon asked, “I understand collecting the data, but how is that useful to this process?”

He replied, “An excellent question. As you are already aware, some of our impulses cause side effects. Pain and orgasm stimulate the same part of the brain, even if that relationship is not exactly understood yet. We have found that a slight variation in frequency and phase of the impulse, for some nerves, causes either pain or sexual stimulation. Early experiments have found that patients will begin to associate pain with sexual stimulation and hurt themselves to reach their climax easily if not tuned adequately. If allowed to continue, they will move from damaging the prosthetics to causing harm to themselves. Conversely, we need to stimulate them when they feel pain similar to that from lactic acid buildup. We are continually analyzing data from all our patients to refine our code better to approach those of a human leg and foot.”