I huddle in the darkness, concealed in a filing cabinet located in the visitor’s locker room at the Staples Center. If my hunch is correct, any moment now, Manu Ginobili will arrive to begin his pregame treatments. Already I can hear the trainers getting tape and ice packs ready for the Spurs players.
Almost as if on cue, I hear the door open. “Hey Manu!” comes a muffled male voice that must belong to one of the Spurs’ medical personnel.
“Hey Tom,” replies Manu. “You got my stuff ready?”
Now I hear the clinking of what sounds to be a bag of metal parts. “Everything’s right here. What seems to be problem today?”
It sounds like Manu flumps down on one of the hospital-like beds in the room. “My joints need some tightening. Especially my knees. And I think that there’s parts of my torso that need to be totally replaced. That’s why I came early.”
To my horror, my hunch is proving to be more correct than I had ever dared to hope. Frustrated by my inability to see anything, I slowly crack open the door of the filing cabinet a few millimeters. I exhale a silent sigh when the small movement completes without making a sound. Now I can see that Manu has entirely disrobed and is lying on the bed as if preparing for a surgery.
Tom has next to him a Tupperware container filled with screws, bolts, and other mechanical parts. As if it is the most normal thing in the world, he retrieves a scalpel and calmy slices the skin which covers Manu’s knee. When I see what lies underneath that skin, my gasp of surprise is just barely suppressed.
Manu’s knee is no longer a human joint, but a robotic joint!
Setting down the scalpel, Tom next finds a small Allen wrench. With practiced, almost bored precision, he tightens various components of Manu’s knee machinery. This must be a regular occurrence because Manu does not even bother to watch; he is looking at something on his phone. The other knee is similarly operated upon, and then, as I watch with growing fascination and repulsion, the skin which had been recently cut open seals itself without any aid from either man. I now realize that, not only has Manu had his bones and tendons replaced by robot parts, but his skin itself has been swapped out for some super-advanced self-healing replica!
I feel sick to my stomach as Manu’s chest is likewise sliced with a two-foot-long incision. There is no blood anywhere to be found, nor organs as a human anatomist would understand them. Where Manu’s heart should be, a cold iron sphere sits; the lungs, a fibrous carbon nanotube bag.
“I think the respiratory subsystem needs to go. My breathing is not sounding convincing anymore, and people are starting to notice,” Manu says, and it is only now that I realize that the source of his voice is not his mouth, for his lips remain still, but a speaker attached to the back of his throat!
The heinous surgery continues as I grow fainter by the second. I had suspected something, yes, but the technological advancement I am witnessing is far beyond even my most disturbed nightmares. When Manu’s lung-surrogate is finally replaced and he has put his clothes back on, it is all I can do to stay conscious.
Manu leaves the room, but Tom lingers. I desperately want to leave, but when Tom glances with suspicion at the filing cabinet, my breath nearly stops. And when he walks over to investigate, I know what I must do.
Throwing open the doors of my hiding place, Tom is too startled to do anything other than yelp in surprise. I sprint from the locker room to the publicly-accessible hallways of the arena, knowing that if the trainer got more than a glance of my fleeing figure, I would be dead by evening. The knowledge I possessed would be too great to allow my continued existence.
Now, I sit at my desk and type this report. My doorbell rings; I hesitate to check who my visitor could be. There is some louder knocking and some yelling, then the sound of my front door being broken in. My worst fear is coming to pass, and there is no running this time. I will face my fate, and the Spurs’ terrible secret will go untold.