Edna Grossbart Lives

Edna Grossbart flipped through the magazine, as her roots sucked in the Clairol Number 2 Aubergine Red.

Suddenly, she almost swallowed her cigarette stub.

Edna Grossbart is bionic.

Born in 2020; the Company determined that Edna’s genetic data-stream had medical cancer in the ascendant.

The Company had little reason to sponsor her – she was facing almost certain extinction. So Edna did what she had to do; she started to rework her organ configuration.

But Edna did it smartly; she took an invisible boat to the C Island. And she came back with a bionic body.

From the moment Edna arrived at C Island, she knew, deep inside, that her dive into major organ transplantation was unavoidable.

She started small: breastplates instead of breasts. Soon, Edna’s penchant for new organs, non-cancerous major organs, radicalized; like a tattoo addiction, one body adjustment led to another.

Edna Grossbart stretched to heart and kidney transplants.  She was no wallflower. The longing to dispense of her own organs was perplexing and dangerous; changes to her genetic data-stream were bound to raise red flags.

Edna was after the real thing. Synthetics were out of the question. Only pedigree organs, from the extinct Old Race.

The genetic robustness of Old Race organs had so threatened the Company that it triggered the annihilation of their owners in 2025. So Old Race organs officially no longer existed.

Unless you knew where to look. Edna did. C Island.

C Island.  Edna knew the bootleggers, the backs-streets. She had spunk.

On her first trip, Edna replaced one eye, her heart, liver and a pair of very robust, if not granular, kidneys.

Edna’s new heart. Edna loved the feeling, the throb, the pulse, the connection to life.

But when returned to the Mainland, with her new heart, came problems. Suddenly, Edna desired.

Edna desired so much that she wanted to scream- out of pain, out of pleasure, out of the vibrancy of her new ability to feel pain. A spiraling, madding, magical feedback loop of vitality.

Along with the desire, Edna found herself lusting for bizarre and archaic traditions of the Old World and the Old Race.

The first desire emerged immediately and dimly: a penchant for gaudy gold watches. She had to have them. But back on the Mainland, that desire was dangerously hard to hide from the Company.

Edna was worried.

The Company had surely blacklisted her on suspicion of Old Race organs.

Surely, only her Approvals had saved her from Investigation so far…

But no Investigation was forthcoming.

Luckily, the Mainland’s 2045 retro trend for 2020 fashions (which took off the month Edna returned) enabled her to service her lust for gaudy gold.

But three months later, another desire surfaced. This desire was so strong and so primal that Edna was powerless to avoid it.

The desire came, apparently, from her itty bitty transplanted heart.

A longing.

For Clairol Aubergine Red. Number 2.

Circa 2025.

The last date of the known whereabouts of the Old Race.

This is how Edna Grossbart found herself in the downtown salon, terrified the spies from the Company would spot her.

Should the Company learn her organs were not synthetic- but of pure Old Race stock- then they would no longer sponsor her. And that would mean death.

The chemical cocktail of peroxide permeated her cuticles.

Edna closed her eyes and dwelt on the burn, sucking harder on her cigarette, not noticing it had almost burnt to a stub.

That is when she almost swallowed the stub.

That was when she knew she had come too far.

That was when Edna Grossbart, bionic woman, started plotting her escape from the Company…

…to be continued…