PART 2: THE GAUNTLET

The alarm on my phone didn’t beep; it vibrated. 3:45 AM.

In the darkness of my small apartment, the first sensation I felt wasn’t the grogginess of sleep, but the absence. The ghostly, hollow feeling below my left knee where the nerves still tried to reach out to a foot that hadn’t existed for three years.

I sat up, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. The right foot hit the cold hardwood floor. The left stump hovered in the air, twitching involuntarily. This was the part nobody saw. The “Barbie Broken” they mocked in the hospital corridors was a polished product. They didn’t see the raw manufacturing process that happened every morning before the sun even thought about rising.

I reached for the spray bottle of isopropyl alcohol and the silicone liner. The smell of the alcohol was sharp, biting into my sinuses, waking me up faster than caffeine ever could. I rolled the liner onto my residual limb, smoothing out every microscopic air bubble. Even a tiny pocket of air could turn into a blister after a fourteen-hour shift. A blister could mean infection. Infection could mean losing more leg.

Then came the hardware.

It sat in the corner of the room, plugged into a charging dock that hummed with a low-frequency pitch only I seemed to hear. My “toy leg.” My masterpiece.

In the dim light of the streetlamps filtering through the blinds, the hot pink carbon fiber seemed to glow. It looked alien. It looked defiant.

I disconnected the charging cable. The battery indicator on the embedded LED strip flashed green: 100% CHARGE. SYSTEM OPTIMAL.

I didn’t just put it on; I docked with it. I slid my liner-clad limb into the socket. The click was audible—a solid, mechanical locking mechanism that engaged with a satisfying snap.

Then, the boot-up sequence.

I reached down and pressed the concealed button behind the knee joint. A faint whirring sound filled the room as the internal cooling fans spun up.

System Initializing… Gyroscope: Calibrated. Accelerometer: Calibrated. Neural Bridge: Active.

I stood up.

The sensors in the footpad read the pressure, calculated the angle of the floor, and adjusted the ankle hydraulics instantly. I wasn’t just standing; I was being supported by a constantly calculating algorithm.

I walked to the mirror. A young woman in scrubs looked back. Dark circles under her eyes, hair pulled back in a severe bun, and a leg that screamed for attention.

“Game time, Maya,” I whispered to the reflection. “Don’t let them see you limp.”

---

05:30 AM – The Arrival

Memorial Hospital at dawn was a beast waking up. The air handlers on the roof roared like a jet engine, and the smell of industrial cleaner couldn’t quite mask the underlying scent of sickness and antiseptic.

I parked my car in the furthest lot. Not because I had to, but because I refused to take the handicap spot near the entrance. Tyler and the others watched the parking lot like hawks. If I took the close spot, I was “milking the system.” If I parked far away, I was “trying too hard.” There was no winning, so I chose the option that gave me more time to calibrate my walking gait.

The walk to the entrance was my warm-up. The pavement was uneven, cracked by years of winters. For a standard amputee, this was a minefield. A toe caught on a raised crack meant a face-plant.

But my leg was scanning. The LIDAR sensor embedded in the shin—a piece of tech I’d scavenged from a self-driving car prototype—mapped the terrain fifty times a second. Before my weight even transferred to the prosthetic, the ankle had already pre-adjusted its dorsiflexion to clear the crack.

Click. Step. Click. Step.

I moved with a robotic precision. Inside the lobby, the night shift was dragging themselves out while the day shift poured in with coffee cups like shields.

I made it to the elevator bank. Of course, Tyler Chen was there.

He was holding court with two interns, laughing loud enough to echo. Tyler was the golden boy. Tall, handsome in a generic way, with hands that were insured for more than my parents’ house. He came from a dynasty of surgeons. His father was a cardiologist; his grandfather had invented a clamp named after him. Tyler didn’t just walk through the hospital; he glided, buoyed by the invisible cushion of nepotism.

When he saw me, the smile didn’t leave his face, but the warmth evaporated from his eyes.

“Barbie!” he announced. The interns giggled nervously. “I saw a sale on AA batteries at the gas station. Did you stock up? Hate for you to power down in the middle of a consult.”

I pressed the call button, staring straight ahead at the brushed steel doors. “My batteries last forty-eight hours, Tyler. Worry about your own stamina.”

“Ooh, feisty,” Tyler smirked, stepping closer. He invaded my personal space, a common intimidation tactic. He loomed over me. “You know, Morrison is on a warpath today. He failed a third-year yesterday for yawning. Just yawning. Imagine what he’s going to do when he sees you… clanking around.”

“I don’t clank,” I said, my voice level.

“You do,” he whispered, leaning down. “To us, you’re loud. Every step is a reminder that you don’t belong here. You’re a liability, Rodriguez. One day, that thing is going to malfunction, and someone is going to get hurt. I’m just hoping it’s not a patient.”

The elevator dinged. The doors slid open.

“After you,” I said.

He scoffed and brushed past me, his shoulder checking mine hard.

It was a physical challenge. He wanted me to stumble. He wanted to knock me off balance so he could “catch” me and perform his fake concern routine.

But he hit me on the left side. The prosthetic side.

My leg’s internal accelerometer detected the lateral impact force within three milliseconds. The micro-actuators in the knee and ankle instantly stiffened, locking the joint into a rigid pillar of stability. I didn’t move an inch.

Tyler, expecting me to give way, actually bounced off me. He stumbled sideways, catching himself on the doorframe to avoid falling.

He looked back at me, eyes wide with confusion. It was like running into a lamppost.

“Careful, Dr. Chen,” I said, stepping onto the elevator smoothly. “You wouldn’t want to slip.”

The doors closed on his bewildered face. That was a small victory. But I knew the war was just beginning.

---

07:00 AM – The Rounding Gauntlet

Chief James Morrison didn’t walk; he marched. Rounds with Morrison were not an educational experience; they were a bloodsport. He viewed residents not as students, but as potential threats to his patients’ lives that needed to be neutralized through intimidation.

There were six of us trailing him like ducklings. Tyler, me, and four others who were essentially background noise to our rivalry.

“Patient 402,” Morrison barked, not breaking stride as he entered the room. “Mr. Henderson. Post-op day two, Whipple procedure.”

We fanned out around the bed. Mr. Henderson looked yellow and frail, tubes running in and out of him like a spiderweb.

“Presentation,” Morrison snapped, pointing a finger at Tyler.

Tyler straightened up. “Mr. Henderson is stable. Vitals are… uh, within normal limits. Drain output is 100cc over the last shift. Pain is managed.”

“Specifics, Doctor Chen!” Morrison roared. The patient jumped. “I don’t care if they are ‘within normal limits.’ I want numbers. What is his lipase? What is his white count?”

Tyler froze. He scrambled for his tablet. “I… I have it right here, just a second…”

“Too slow,” Morrison cut him off. He turned his gaze to me. “Rodriguez. Are you as slow as your hardware?”

“Lipase is 45,” I said instantly, my memory recalling the chart I had memorized at 5:00 AM. “White count is 11.5, down from 14 yesterday. Drain output is serosanguinous, no sign of bile leak. However, his potassium is trending down to 3.4, likely due to the NG tube suction. I recommend starting replacement now before he becomes arrhythmic.”

Morrison stared at me. His eyes narrowed. He hated being anticipated.

“Replace it, then,” he grunted. “Don’t wait for an invitation.”

He moved to the next patient. Then the next. For two hours, it was a barrage of questions. Anatomy, pathology, pharmacology. I answered everything. I was sharp. I was ready.

But Morrison wasn’t looking for intellectual failure from me. He was looking for physical weakness.

We reached Room 412. A bedside procedure. The patient needed a central line placed, but his anatomy was difficult due to morbid obesity.

“I’ll do the line,” Morrison said, putting on sterile gloves. “Rodriguez, you’re on ultrasound guidance. Chen, prep the kit.”

This was the test. Holding an ultrasound probe steady on a shifting, obese neck while reaching across a bed in an awkward position requires immense core strength and balance. For an amputee, leaning forward shifts the center of gravity dangerously over the missing limb.

I stepped up. I leaned over the patient. I placed the probe.

“Don’t move,” Morrison warned. “If you lose the image of the vein while I’m sticking the needle, I puncture his carotid artery. He strokes out. You end his life. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hold it.”

Morrison took his time. He was deliberately slow. He laid out his instruments with agonizing precision. He adjusted the bed height.

Minutes ticked by. Two minutes. Five minutes.

My lower back began to scream. The muscles in my right leg—my flesh and blood leg—began to burn from taking the majority of the weight. Sweat trickled down my spine beneath my lead apron.

Tyler was watching me, waiting for the shake. Waiting for the fatigue to set in.

Warning: Pressure differential in socket critical, my leg’s interface whispered into my haptic feedback sensors. The sweat was making the liner slippery. If I slipped now, the probe would slide.

I closed my eyes for a microsecond. I needed to redistribute the load.

I sent a command to the leg: Lock Knee. Increase Ankle Stiffness 200%.

The joint froze. The carbon fiber became a solid strut. I leaned my weight fully onto the prosthetic, trusting the mechanics over my own biology. The relief was instant. The burning in my right leg subsided as the artificial limb took the load without complaint.

“Still holding?” Morrison asked, finally looking at the screen.

“Image is perfectly centered, sir,” I said through gritted teeth.

He grunted. He inserted the needle. Flash of blood. He threaded the wire.

“Done,” he said, ten minutes later. “Not terrible, Rodriguez.”

I stepped back, disengaging the lock. My shirt was soaked with sweat, but I hadn’t moved a millimeter.

“She looks pale,” Tyler whispered loudly to the group. “Maybe she needs to sit down. The battery must be draining her.”

“I’m fine,” I said, though my stump was throbbing. The friction from the prolonged stance had likely started a blister. I couldn’t check. Not now.

---

11:45 AM – The ER Incident

I thought the physical test was over. I was wrong.

I was heading to the cafeteria—not to eat, but to find a quiet corner to recalibrate the sensors—when the overhead speakers crackled.

“Code Gray, Emergency Department. Code Gray, Emergency Department.”

Code Gray meant a combative person. Security was needed. But residents were often closer.

I was the closest.

I ran. Or rather, I engaged the “Jog Mode.” The prosthetic’s bounce increased, returning energy with every step, propelling me forward. I burst through the double doors of the ER.

Chaos.

A patient, a large man clearly under the influence of PCP or a massive psychotic break, had broken his restraints. He was swinging an IV pole like a medieval mace. Two nurses were cowering behind the station. The security guard was down, clutching his head.

“Get back!” the man screamed, swinging the heavy metal pole. Glass shattered. Monitors crashed to the floor.

He turned and saw me. He saw a small woman. He didn’t see a doctor; he saw a target.

He charged.

“Doctor, run!” a nurse screamed.

I couldn’t run. He was too close. If I turned my back, he’d crush my skull with the pole.

Time slowed down. This is what happens in trauma. The adrenaline hits, and the world becomes frame-by-frame.

I saw his muscles tense. I saw the arc of the swing.

He swung the IV pole horizontally, aiming for my ribs.

I didn’t think. I reacted.

I planted my left foot—the pink foot—forward. Stance: Impact Absorption.

I caught the pole.

I caught the metal shaft with both hands, but the momentum of a 250-pound man swinging metal should have sent me flying. It should have knocked me off my feet.

But my feet didn’t move.

My prosthetic leg detected the massive sudden force. In a nanosecond, it drove the heel into the linoleum, adjusted the hydraulics to maximum resistance, and acted as a counterweight. It was physics. Force equals mass times acceleration. He had mass, but I had superior geometry.

The pole stopped dead in my hands. The shockwave traveled up my arms, but my base held firm like a statue bolted to the floor.

The man blinked, confused. He pulled, trying to yank the pole back. I held on. I used the leverage of the locked leg to twist the pole, ripping it from his grip and tossing it aside.

Before he could attack again, three security guards tackled him from behind.

I stood there, breathing heavy. The nurses peeked out from the station.

“Did you see that?” one of them whispered. “She didn’t even budge. He hit her with everything and she stood there like a brick wall.”

I looked down at my leg. The pink paint had a new scuff mark where the IV pole had grazed it.

“Are you okay, Dr. Rodriguez?” the ER attending asked, rushing over.

“I’m fine,” I said, smoothing my scrubs. “Just… checking on the consult.”

I walked away before they could ask questions. My heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. That was too close. The leg had saved me, but it was also exposing me. Humans don’t absorb impact like that. Humans stumble. Humans fall.

I was becoming something else.

---

02:00 PM – The Lunchroom Isolation

I sat at the furthest table in the cafeteria. My tray had a sandwich I wouldn’t eat and a bottle of water I desperately needed.

Across the room, the “Cool Table” was in full swing. Tyler, the other residents, and a few nurses. They were laughing, throwing grapes at each other.

I pulled out my phone and opened the diagnostic app for my leg.

Error Log: 11:48 AM – Sudden Impact Detected. Force exceeded 800 Newtons. Servo 3 temperature critical.

I sighed and tapped the screen to run a cooling cycle. Under the table, my leg hissed softly.

“Mind if I sit?”

I looked up. It was Dr. Sarah Miller, a quiet neurology resident. She didn’t wait for an answer, placing her tray down.

“I heard about the ER,” she said softly. “The nurses are saying you practice martial arts. Aikido or something.”

“Something like that,” I lied.

“Tyler is saying you probably froze up and got lucky,” she said, poking at her salad. “He’s trying to get Morrison to pull you from the microsurgery lab this afternoon. He says your leg is a ‘distraction’ to the learning environment.”

I gripped the water bottle. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because my brother has cerebral palsy,” Sarah said, looking me in the eye. “I know what it looks like when people underestimate someone because of how they move. Tyler is a bully. But Morrison… Morrison listens to results. Don’t let Tyler get in your head. Just show them.”

“I intend to,” I said.

“Good.” She stood up. “Because the microsurgery lab isn’t just a test today. I heard Morrison invited the Hospital Administrator. He’s looking for a reason to cut the residency funding. If the residents perform poorly, Morrison looks bad. The pressure is going to be insane.”

She walked away.

I looked at the time. 2:15 PM. The Skills Lab started in 45 minutes.

I wasn’t just fighting for my spot in the program anymore. I was fighting for every person who had ever been told they were “broken.”

I took a deep breath. I initiated the Precision Protocol on my app.

Re-calibrating sensors for fine motor tasks… Tremor cancellation: Standby. Haptic sensitivity: Maximum.

“Okay, Barbie,” I whispered to myself. “Let’s go play.”

---

03:00 PM – The Skills Lab: The Killing Floor

The Skills Lab was a windowless room kept at a refrigerator-like temperature. Rows of surgical microscopes stood on tables like silent sentinels. The air smelled of ozone and anxiety.

Dr. Morrison stood at the front, flanked by a man in a suit—Mr. Henderson, the Administrator.

“Gentlemen, and ladies,” Morrison began, his voice echoing off the tiled walls. “Microsurgery is the pinnacle of our craft. It requires the hands of a pianist and the soul of a monk. Today, we are not just sewing plastic tubes.”

He gestured to the trays in front of us.

“These are live tissue samples. Rat femoral arteries. Diameter: 0.8 millimeters. The wall thickness is less than a sheet of paper. You will transect the artery, and then you will repair it. If it leaks, you fail. If you take longer than twenty minutes, you fail. If you tremble…” He let the sentence hang.

We took our seats.

Tyler was two stations down from me. He was cracking his knuckles, looking confident. He had been practicing on these for weeks. His father had probably bought him a scope for his apartment.

“Begin.”

The room descended into silence, broken only by the hum of the scope lights.

I adjusted my oculars. The rat artery looked like a massive pipe under 40x magnification. But I knew the reality. One wrong twitch, one heavy breath, and the needle would tear through it like wet tissue paper.

I picked up the needle driver.

Step 1: Stability.

I planted my feet. I sent the signal. Lock.

The prosthetic engaged. I felt the familiar grounding sensation. It was like turning into stone from the waist down.

But then, disaster struck.

Tyler, in a calculated move of pettiness, “accidentally” kicked the leg of my stool as he adjusted his own chair.

It was a violent jolt.

For a normal person, the needle in my hand would have slashed through the artery, ruining the test instantly.

But my leg reacted faster than my brain. The gyroscope detected the shift in the stool’s center of gravity. The prosthetic didn’t just hold still; it actively counter-balanced. It shot out a micro-burst of hydraulic force against the floor, stabilizing my entire kinetic chain.

My upper body didn’t move. The needle in my hand hovered, perfectly still, millimeters from the tissue.

I slowly turned my head to look at Tyler. He was waiting for the curse, the gasp of failure.

I just stared at him. Cold. Deadpan.

Then I turned back to the scope.

“Nice try,” I whispered, too low for Morrison to hear.

I began to sew.

This was where the engineering met the art. My hands were the end effectors of a complex system. My brain sent the signal to move. My muscles fired. The prosthetic read the recoil of my heartbeat traveling through my body and dampened it.

I wasn’t sewing. I was weaving.

In. Out. Loop. Knot. In. Out. Loop. Knot.

I fell into a trance. I wasn’t in the hospital anymore. I was back in the MIT lab, soldering a circuit board at 3 AM. The world was just geometry and vectors.

“Dr. Chen, time?” Morrison called out.

“Twelve minutes, sir,” Tyler announced proudly. “Finished. Flow is established.”

“Check it,” Morrison ordered.

I heard the squirt of saline.

“Patency confirmed. Good work, Chen. That’s the time to beat.”

“I don’t think anyone is beating that,” Tyler said loud enough for the room to hear. “Especially not with… baggage.”

I placed my final stitch. I cut the thread.

I checked my stopwatch.

Eight minutes.

I sat back. My hands were folded in my lap.

“Dr. Rodriguez?” Morrison called out, sounding bored. “Are you having trouble? Do you need to abort?”

“I’m finished, sir,” I said.

The silence in the room was sudden and absolute. Even the Administrator looked up from his phone.

“Finished?” Morrison scoffed. “It’s been eight minutes. You can’t rush microsurgery, Rodriguez. If that vessel leaks, you’ve killed the patient.”

“It won’t leak.”

Morrison walked over. His footsteps were heavy, angry. He was expecting a mess. He was expecting to give me a lecture on hubris.

He sat at my teaching scope. He peered in.

The silence stretched. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds.

He adjusted the focus knob. He zoomed in further.

“Impossible,” he muttered.

“Sir?” Tyler asked, stepping closer, a grin ready on his face. “Is it a butcher job?”

Morrison stood up slowly. He looked at me with an expression I had never seen on his face. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t even respect. It was confusion bordering on fear.

“The spacing,” Morrison said, his voice quiet. “It’s… perfect. Equidistant. Every stitch is exactly 0.1 millimeters apart. The knots are square. Flat.”

He looked at the Administrator. “She finished in eight minutes.”

“Is it patent?” the Administrator asked.

Morrison flushed the vessel. On the monitor, the liquid flowed through the tiny artery perfectly. Not a single drop leaked from the suture line. It was watertight. It was machine-grade.

“Zero leakage,” Morrison announced.

Tyler’s face went pale. “She… she probably glued it! Or she didn’t actually cut it!”

“I watched her cut it, Dr. Chen,” Morrison snapped. He turned back to me. “Rodriguez. Stand up.”

I stood up. Click. Step.

“Your hands,” Morrison said, grabbing my wrists. He held them up to the light. “Relax your arms.”

He was looking for the tremor. The physiologic tremor that everyone has. The tiny, rhythmic beat of the human nervous system.

My hands were rocks. Because my leg was canceling the frequency of my own pulse before it could travel up my spine.

“No tremor,” Morrison whispered. “Resting tremor is… non-existent.”

He dropped my hands. He looked at my pink leg. He looked at me.

“You practiced,” he said, trying to rationalize it.

“Yes, sir.”

“You practiced a lot.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We need to verify this,” Morrison said, his voice hardening. He couldn’t accept it. It broke his world view. “This is a fluke. A statistical anomaly. No resident is this steady.”

He turned to the class. “Dismissed. Rodriguez, stay behind.”

The other residents filed out. Tyler lingered at the door, his eyes burning with hatred. He had lost. For the first time in his life, the golden boy had been beaten by the broken toy.

When the door closed, Morrison leaned against the table.

“I don’t know what game you’re playing,” he said low. “But surgeons aren’t machines, Rodriguez. We bleed. We shake. We feel. You… you operate like a robot. It’s unnatural.”

“I operate like someone who can’t afford to make mistakes, sir,” I replied.

“We’ll see,” he said ominously. “Thursday. We have a full trauma slate. If you’re this good, you’ll survive. If you’re cheating… I’ll find out.”

I walked out of the lab. My battery was at 60%. My stump was raw and blistering. My back ached.

But as I walked down the corridor, the Click. Step. Click. Step. sounded different to me.

It wasn’t the sound of a limp anymore. It was the ticking of a clock.

They had forty-eight hours until the impossible case arrived. Forty-eight hours until the girl with the mangled hand would land on the helipad.

And forty-eight hours until I stopped hiding what I really was.

The gauntlet was over. Now, the war began.

PART 2 (CONTINUED): THE LONG NIGHT

18:00 PM – The Sanctuary

The locker room was empty, save for the hum of the vending machine in the hallway. I collapsed onto the hard bench, the adrenaline from the Skills Lab finally draining away, leaving behind a residue of exhaustion that felt like lead in my veins.

I checked the door. Locked.

Only then did I allow myself to grimace.

I rolled up my scrub pant leg. The pink carbon fiber shell was cool to the touch, a stark contrast to the heat radiating from my residual limb. I pressed the release valve. Hisss. The suction broke.

Pulling the socket off was an act of violence. The silicone liner was soaked with sweat, sticking to my skin. As I peeled it back, the smell of trapped perspiration and stressed skin hit me—the unglamorous scent of disability.

I inspected the damage.

On the distal end of my stump, right where the bone met the soft tissue, a blister had formed. It was angry, red, and about the size of a quarter. Every step I had taken today—the walk from the parking lot, the standing rounds, the impact from the crazy patient in the ER, the rigid stance in the lab—had ground the skin against the liner.

“Damn it,” I whispered, tears pricking my eyes. Not from sadness, but from frustration. The machine was perfect. The flesh was the failure.

I opened my gym bag. I didn’t have a first-aid kit; I had a mechanic’s toolkit.

I took out a portable voltage meter and a tube of antibiotic ointment. I treated the skin first, applying a hydrocolloid patch over the blister. It would cushion the blow, but it wouldn’t stop the pain. Pain was just data. I had to ignore it.

Then, I plugged the leg into the wall outlet behind the lockers.

The LED strip pulsed orange. Battery Level: 58%.

I had twelve hours of shift left. If I ran the “Precision Protocol” again, I’d drain the battery in four hours. I had to conserve energy. I pulled out my laptop and connected it to the leg’s USB-C diagnostic port.

The screen filled with lines of code. My code.

Run Diagnostic: Servo Motor 4. Result: Overheating. Efficiency down 12%.

The incident with the IV pole in the ER had done damage after all. The lateral impact had stressed the internal gearing of the ankle rotation.

“Don’t you die on me,” I muttered, typing rapidly. I adjusted the torque settings, rerouting power to the backup actuators to relieve the stress on the damaged servo. It was a software patch for a hardware problem. It was risky. If the backup actuators overheated, the ankle would freeze solid. I’d be dragging a dead weight.

I sat there in my underwear and a scrub top, laptop balanced on my one knee, a soldering iron cooling on the bench next to me. This was my life. While Tyler Chen was probably at a bar bragging about his sutures, I was debugging my own body.

21:30 PM – The Ghost of MIT

I must have dozed off for ten minutes. The vibration of my pager against the bench woke me up.

Room 304. Pain Management. Consult Required.

I reassembled myself. Liner. Socket. Sleeve. Pants. The blister screamed as I stood up, a sharp spike of agony that shot straight up to my hip. I gritted my teeth and waited for the endorphins to kick in.

Click. Step. Click. Step.

As I walked the dimly lit corridors of the surgical wing, my mind drifted back.

Three years ago. MIT Robotics Lab.

I was in a wheelchair then. The stump was still healing, still swollen and purple. I was angry. I was the kind of angry that burns down forests.

I had thrown the standard-issue prosthetic across the room. It was a “passive dynamic” foot—basically a fancy spring. It was clumsy. It didn’t know where the floor was. It didn’t care if I fell.

“It’s garbage,” I had told my professor, Dr. Aris. “It’s a stick. Pirates had sticks. We have iPhones that can recognize faces, but I’m supposed to walk on a stick?”

“Then build something better, Maya,” he had said, picking up the plastic leg. “You’re the engineer. Stop crying and start coding.”

I spent the next six months living in that lab. I didn’t sleep. I stopped eating. I became obsessed with the concept of “active stabilization.”

I tore apart a Segway. I scavenged gyroscopes from high-end camera gimbals used in Hollywood. I stole code from drone flight controllers that kept quadcopters stable in high winds.

The breakthrough came at 4 AM on a rainy Tuesday.

I realized I was trying to make the leg walk for me. That was wrong. I needed the leg to listen to me.

I built the neural interface—not a direct brain implant (that was decades away), but a myoelectric sensor array that read the intention of my thigh muscles. If I twitched my quad specifically, the leg knew I was about to step. If I tensed my hamstring, it knew I was stopping.

I painted the carbon fiber shell hot pink with automotive paint I bought at a hardware store.

“Why pink?” Dr. Aris had asked when I finally stood up on the prototype.

“Because,” I said, taking my first unaided step. “I want them to see it coming.”

I snapped back to the present. The hospital corridor. The pink leg carrying me toward Room 304. I wasn’t that angry girl in the wheelchair anymore. I was sharper. Colder. But the fire was still there, fueling every line of code running in the processor beneath my heel.

23:45 PM – The Human Error

Room 304 was dark. The patient, Mrs. Gable, was an 82-year-old woman with a hip fracture. She was confused, likely sundowning—a state of delirium that hits the elderly at night.

“Get away!” she cried out when I entered. “Get the dog away!”

“Mrs. Gable, it’s Dr. Rodriguez,” I said softly, keeping my distance. “There’s no dog.”

“I hear it!” she pointed a trembling finger at me. “I hear it growling! Under the bed!”

I froze.

She didn’t hear a dog. She heard my cooling fans.

The “Overheat Warning” I had ignored earlier meant the fans were running at maximum RPM to keep the servos from melting. In the silence of the night, it sounded like a low, mechanical growl coming from my leg.

“It’s just the air conditioning, Mrs. Gable,” I lied, stepping closer.

“No! It’s snarling!” She tried to climb over the bedrails. She was going to fall. Her hip was fragile; a fall would shatter the repair.

I lunged forward to catch her.

“No!” she screamed, thrashing.

She kicked out. Her foot connected hard with my shin—right on the sensor array.

CRITICAL ERROR. SENSOR DISCONNECT.

My leg died.

Instantly. No power. No hydraulics. No support.

It went from a technological marvel to a dead weight in a split second. My knee buckled. I collapsed, hitting the floor hard on my right side, dragging Mrs. Gable down with me onto the mattress (thankfully not the floor).

I lay there on the linoleum, my heart hammering. The leg was dead. I couldn’t stand up. I was just a one-legged woman on the floor of a patient’s room in the middle of the night.

“Help!” Mrs. Gable screamed. “The dog bit her!”

The door burst open. It wasn’t a nurse.

It was Tyler.

He stood in the doorway, illuminated by the hall lights. He saw me on the floor. He saw the patient halfway off the bed. He saw my leg twisted at an unnatural angle because the knee joint had disengaged freely without power.

For a second, I saw pure triumph in his eyes. This was it. This was the failure he had predicted.

“Well, well,” Tyler drawled, stepping in. “System failure, Barbie?”

He didn’t rush to help the patient. He walked over to me first.

“Get her,” I hissed, pointing at Mrs. Gable. “She’s going to fall.”

Tyler rolled his eyes but grabbed Mrs. Gable and hoisted her back into bed. “Calm down, grandma. You’re safe.”

He turned back to me. I was trying to reach the manual reset switch behind my knee, but I couldn’t reach it without taking my pants off, which I couldn’t do with him watching.

“Need a hand?” He offered it, his smile cruel. “Or a tow truck?”

“I slipped,” I said, grabbing the bedrail and hauling myself up on my one good leg. I dragged the dead prosthetic underneath me. It was heavy, useless.

“You slipped?” Tyler laughed. “You fell. Because you’re not stable. Morrison needs to know about this. Patient safety issue.”

“She kicked me,” I said, leaning heavily against the wall. I covertly jammed my thumb into the hidden restart port through the fabric of my scrubs.

Come on. Come on.

“She’s an 80-year-old woman, Rodriguez. If she can knock you down, what happens in a trauma surgery when things get rough?” Tyler crossed his arms. “Face it. You’re playing dress-up. You’re an engineer playing doctor.”

Buzz.

A tiny vibration against my stump. The system rebooted.

System Restore. Safe Mode Active.

The knee joint locked. I felt the stability return.

I stood up straight, pushing off the wall. I looked Tyler in the eye.

“I’m standing, Tyler. Are you?”

He frowned, looking at my leg. He had seen it go dead. He knew he had seen it. But now I was upright.

“I’m writing this up,” he said, turning to leave. “Incident report. Fall in patient room. Compromised physician.”

“Do it,” I challenged him. “Check the room camera. I dove to catch her. I saved her from a hip fracture while you were standing in the doorway gloating.”

It was a bluff. There were no cameras in patient rooms. But Tyler was a coward. He didn’t know that.

He hesitated. “Watch your back, Rodriguez. The battery runs out eventually.”

He left.

I waited until his footsteps faded. Then I leaned against the sink and vomited into the basin.

My body was shaking. Not from fear, but from the realization of how close I was to the edge. The hardware was failing. The software was glitching. And the biggest test of my life was coming in less than 36 hours.

03:00 AM – The Phantom Pain

The rest of the shift was a blur of misery.

I couldn’t go back to the on-call room. I was too wired. I spent the hours in the radiology reading room—the darkest place in the hospital—pretending to review scans.

But I wasn’t looking at X-rays. I was fighting the phantom.

Phantom limb pain isn’t like normal pain. It’s not a throb or a sting. It’s a haunting. It felt like my missing foot—the one buried in a cemetery three years ago—was being crushed in a vice. My toes, which didn’t exist, were curling so hard they were breaking.

It was my brain trying to map a territory that was no longer there.

I turned up the neuro-stimulation on my stump interface. The prosthetic had electrodes that sent tiny shocks to the nerve endings, trying to trick the brain into thinking the foot was there and relaxed.

Zap. Zap. Zap.

It barely helped.

I sat in the dark, gripping the arms of the chair, sweat pouring down my face. This was the price. The “Bionic Surgeon” was just a girl being electrocuted by her own invention to stay sane.

“Focus,” I whispered. “Focus on the mission.”

I pulled up the file for the upcoming “Impossible Case.” Emma Chen. The six-year-old girl.

I studied the anatomy of a child’s hand. The vessels were so small. The nerves were microscopic. Even with my stabilization, it was going to be pushing the limits of physics.

I needed an upgrade.

I couldn’t do it with the current firmware. The “Surgical Overdrive” I had used in the lab was a beta version. It consumed too much power and heated the servos too fast. I needed a version 2.0.

I opened my laptop again.

I began to code.

In the dark radiology room, while the rest of the hospital slept, I rewrote the PID controller algorithms for my own leg. I smoothed out the acceleration curves. I tightened the reaction times. I created a new mode: absolute_zero_latency.

It was dangerous. It removed the safety buffers. If the sensors misread a vibration, the leg might jerk violently enough to snap my femur.

But I didn’t need to walk. I needed to stand still. Perfectly, impossibly still.

06:00 AM – The Shift Change

The sun came up like a threat.

I walked out of the hospital. I had survived 24 hours.

Tyler passed me in the lobby, coming in for his next shift. He looked fresh, rested. He probably slept eight hours on a mattress that cost more than my car.

“Still here?” he asked. “I thought they’d have towed you to the scrapyard by now.”

“See you Thursday, Tyler,” I said.

I walked to my car. My gait was perfect. Smooth. Rythmic.

But inside the socket, my skin was raw bleeding meat.

The Interval: 24 Hours Before The Case

Wednesday was a blackout day. I didn’t go to the hospital. I stayed in my apartment.

I dismantled the leg completely.

On my kitchen table, the pieces of the “Pink Beast” were laid out like a sniper assembling a rifle. Gears, wires, carbon fiber shells, lithium-ion cells.

I replaced the overheating servo with a spare I had cannibalized from a high-end robotic arm I bought on eBay. I reinforced the knee joint with titanium screws. I re-soldered the connections on the sensor array that Mrs. Gable had kicked.

Then, the aesthetic.

The pink paint was chipped from the IV pole and the fall.

I sanded it down. I didn’t paint it beige. I didn’t paint it black.

I applied a fresh coat of “Neon Magenta.” Then I added a clear coat mixed with crushed diamond dust—industrial abrasive I used for polishing, but it glittered like stardust.

If they were going to stare, I was going to give them something to look at.

I reassembled it. I calibrated it.

I stood in my living room. I engaged the new absolute_zero_latency mode.

I held a laser pointer in my hand. I aimed it at the wall across the room, twenty feet away.

The red dot didn’t waver. It was a pinprick of light, frozen in time.

I was ready.

---

THURSDAY: THE STORM BREAKS

07:00 AM – The Gathering

The atmosphere in the O.R. holding area was electric. News of the trauma case had spread. A six-year-old girl. Massive industrial accident.

Dr. Morrison was pacing. He looked stressed. This was a high-profile case. The press was already outside. If we failed, it would be on the evening news. “Memorial Hospital Amputates Child’s Hand.”

If we succeeded, it was a miracle.

Tyler was scrubbing at the sink. He was pale. His bravado was cracking. He knew the stakes.

I walked in.

The chatter stopped.

I was wearing my scrubs, but I had made one modification. I had cut the left pant leg shorter, just above the ankle.

The pink leg glittered under the harsh fluorescent lights. It looked high-tech, aggressive, and unapologetic.

“Rodriguez,” Morrison nodded at me. Acknowledgment. Not approval, but acknowledgment.

“Dr. Morrison,” I replied.

“You’re on the bench,” Morrison said. “Tyler is lead resident. You are backup. Don’t get in the way.”

“Understood.”

We entered Operating Room 1.

The patient, little Emma, was already under anesthesia. Her tiny arm was draped in blue sterile sheets. The injury was horrific. The hand was barely attached.

“Scalpel,” Morrison said.

The clock started.

10:00 AM – The Collapse

Three hours in. Things were going wrong.

As I described before, Tyler was spiraling. The pressure was eating him alive. The vessel walls were disintegrating under his shaking hands.

I stood in the corner, watching the monitors. My leg was in “Standby Mode,” conserving power.

I saw the moment Tyler broke. It wasn’t when he missed the stitch. It was when he stopped breathing. He was hyperventilating behind his mask.

“I can’t… I can’t get the angle,” Tyler stammered.

Morrison stepped in. He tried. But even Morrison, with his thirty years of experience, was struggling. He had had too much coffee. He was angry. His hands weren’t shaking like Tyler’s, but they lacked the microscopic fluidity needed for a child’s vessels.

“It’s no good,” Morrison slammed the forceps down. “The intima is shredding. We have to amputate.”

That was the moment.

The timeline I had fought for, bled for, and engineered for.

I stepped forward. Click. Step.

“No,” I said.

The room froze.

“Excuse me?” Morrison snapped.

“Don’t amputate,” I said, my voice cutting through the noise of the heart monitors. “I can fix it.”

Tyler ripped his mask down, exposing his sweaty, terrified face. “You? You’re a cripple, Rodriguez! You can’t even stand without a battery! This requires finesse, not… not hardware!”

“Get out of the chair, Tyler,” I said. I didn’t shout. I didn’t need to.

I looked at Morrison. “You saw the lab. You saw the rat vessel. This is the same. Give me the seat.”

Morrison looked at the girl’s hand—a life of disability waiting for her. He looked at me.

“If you mess this up,” Morrison hissed, “your career is over. You’ll never practice medicine in this country again.”

“I know,” I said.

“Five minutes,” Morrison whispered.

I sat down.

I adjusted the stool.

I looked at the mess Tyler had made.

I closed my eyes.

System: Engage Absolute Zero Latency. Warning: Safety Protocols Disabled. Injury Risk High. Confirm?

Yes.

I felt the leg bite into the floor. The sensation was visceral. It felt like roots growing from my stump through the carbon fiber, through the tile, into the concrete foundation of the building.

I opened my eyes.

I reached for the instruments.

And the world stopped moving.