E.J. Zain

Excerpt from WIP The Twinskies by E.J. Zain

(if you know of a medical journal I could research for better descriptions of bio-mechanic devices, lmk otherwise it's a long hunt on this piece!)

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Marga and Marie Sanger were the miracle babies of New Megiddo. Conjoined at birth at the hip and shoulder the twins were detached as toddlers but outfitted with a state of the art hydraulic appendage “hinge.” “Their bio mechanical arms were also replaceable which is what their father, the famous Dr. Jeeve Sanger, had proposed to the medical board at the New Megiddo Hospital he had founded, for approval. He knew he would get it despite the holographic deck showing a most despicable aberration of humanity. He was eager to weed out whom he considered the “weak” members of the hospital administration—the ones who might gasp at such a sight. For that purpose he accentuated the upcoming images with more exaggerated grotesque features, similar to the few surgical tools he was unsuccessful at passing regulation without complete modifications through the NM FDA. Still, once the 4-D image of the improved Sanger Twins buzzed into formation, a woman fainted while a very stiff lipped man dropped his implanted chin to the floor –just one of the old facial “ornaments” performed by an earlier and more handsome version of the doctor. 

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“As the specimen grows,” Dr. Sanger stated, I will expand the connective and maneuverable features of the hinge so they can more freely move about; so they are not bound together too tightly—as in a more natural way,” he said, with a roll of his hand, possibly to help himself endure the simplifications of explaining to nauseatingly outdated peers that this procedure was in-keeping with the wonders of a twinned childhood. “At adulthood, the impatient doctor assured, “They will be able to unhinge completely and become autonomous.” To roaring applause, the proud Doctor showed the audience which hydraulic mechanisms were programmed from the neurotransmitters in the twins' cerebellums. The predictive mechanical algorithm, or “Jeever's Jiver” as it was called –he hated that slang—was coded with the greatest number of physical movements each girl had made since they were in utero. That is, the artificial uterine device they were grown in, which was half made of Mrs. Jung-Sun Sanger’s biological uterus and half from an untested incubation mechanism “pod.”

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The program would behave like this: if Marga was about to reach for a writing tablet and Marie was closer to it, Marie would already have placed it in front of her sister and vice versa. When they weren't attached, which became more frequent as the girls became teenagers, they relied on the traditional approach of predicting each other's wants and and needs –the twin method. 

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