The New Pornographer: A Work of Fiction Written as a Long Form News Piece
by M. J. Stevenson
ATLANTA— Final XXX Studios doesn't advertise its location anywhere and their actual production facility isn't listed under that name nor do they receive any mail there.
When they order equipment - from very specific medical equipment to mundane office supplies - they have an individual in an apartment high rise receive it and deliver it to another location. Then that receiver brings it to another location and usually, it's four locations before it gets to where it needs to be.
This may sound paranoid, but their last studio was destroyed on May 8, 2032.
The bombing made international news and was initially misattributed to every terrorist group in the world every day for a week and the reasoning for it was equally misattributed.
As of this writing, the FBI is still hunting for the perpetrators.
Initially, that day was the day I was supposed to start writing this story and had I not been stuck in unusually slow - even for Atlanta - traffic, you wouldn't be reading this today.
The Foundations
The abundance of pornography has had countless primary, secondary and tertiary effects across countless levels, from web hosting to the sex workforce and the economy as a whole.
This is nothing new.
Pornographic productions have always been "early adopters" of technology.
Two of the earliest pioneers were Frenchmen Eugène Pirou and Albert Kirchner - Kirchner using a "nom de filme" Léar - who directed the earliest surviving erotic film for Pirou who served as a sort of producer.
It was a seven-minute film, Coucher de la Mariée in which model Louise Willy performed a striptease in a bathroom.
The seven-minute run time definitely predicted the YouPorn era where something close to 80% of the content is under ten minutes.
Only Fans changed the game in 2016 when it allowed sex workers to make their own footage and share it directly with a client. In a way, sex workers were the pioneers in the remote work that would become the standard after the first wave of Covid.
The greater degree of safety provided by Only Fans caused a dramatic drop in a very certain type of crime. Exploitative pimps, potentially murderous Johns, and callous police forces that are focused on arrest numbers wouldn't even know a sex worker when they saw one in public.
Jace - named changed for their safety - was a prostitute with a pimp starting around age twelve in Miami. He is unsure of his real birthday like many people trafficked at a very young age. He escaped to Atlanta at age 17 only to find his greatest skill and asset at the time was still sex work.
"Shit ain't fun," Jace said as we split a pizza at DaVinci's on Peachtree in NW in Atlanta. "But it's like... you are good at it, you know? There is some shame there if you didn't choose the life." When Jace says "didn't choose," he becomes vulnerable in a way that's hard to describe.
Like someone brought up something awful he did in his youth that he'd like to forget. Like he burned ants with a magnifying glass or tortured squirrels with a pocket knife and would prefer never to hear about it again.
"You choose the life, after the fact, I guess," he shrugged. "It's like 'Wait, other people want me to be ashamed of decisions I didn't make?! Well, fuck you. Maybe it's a little oppositional defiance disorder. Maybe it's a little post-traumatic stress."
Jace didn't use those diagnostic terms lightly, he was about to defend his dissertation for his doctorate in psychology when we spoke.
Jace is a very attractive man with hazel eyes and tightly braided hair so it's easy to see how he could do good business as a sex worker. When I met him he hadn't done sex work in a year, living off the money he was able to save from five days a week working a global market accessed partially through the power of the internet.
"Did Dr. T get you into that program?" I asked.
At her name, Jace lights up. "She did! Well, she pointed me to it and wrote a letter, but she was pretty clear I got this far on my own merits. She is such a great lady; she helps so many sex workers, hell so many people like... everywhere."
Dr. Elspeth Torrez-Navarro is a well-known figure as the founder, CEO, and chief architect of Final XXX Productions.
And as far as anyone knows, she's only responsible for one death on camera.
The Queen Before Her Reign
Young Torrez-Navarro was Elspeth Navarro or just El. She grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb of Quezon City in the Philippines. She was the only child of a Roman Catholic father and a Buddhist mother.
Accounts vary as to what actually happened however, under Rodrigo Duterte's regime her home was raided and her parents were murdered because an anonymous person reported her mother as a drug kingpin.
Her mother being a drug kingpin was an absurd falsehood on its face but Duterte's regime would brook no argument against any of their actions. It made the front page of the local newspaper.
El woke up in a hospital with what she thought was a sore throat. Her throat had actually been slit by a police officer who would later insist he thought she was a drug-addicted prostitute in court testimony and thus he was allowed to kill her.
El's lawyer, John Mark de la Cruz, was the one to make the argument against any and all injustice, and in court he took apart the entire team involved in the operation, starting with the officer who attempted to murder El. Excerpt translated from a heavily redacted document:
DELA CRUZ
So you slit teenage girls' throats where they are merely in the presence of the alleged drug dealers?
OFFICER [REDACTED]
No, but we have clearance.
DELA CRUZ
To kill children?
[REDACTED] Esq.
Objection! Leading!
DELA CRUZ
Withdrawn
OFFICER [REDACTED]
No, you don't understand drug dealers.
DELA CRUZ
Well, certainly not. I'm only a lawyer, but if a child is a sex worker... you kill them?
OFFICER [REDACTED]
No of course not!
DELA CRUZ
Unless they are near drugs or near a drug dealer?
[REDACTED] Esq.
OBJECTION!
JUDGE [REDACTED]
Sustained.
DELA CRUZ
No further questions.
Dela Cruz put everyone involved in the fiasco on the stand and went after them just as hard for a week. In a press conference challenged Duterte himself to testify. Dela Cruz perhaps knew very well what that meant as the next morning he saw to it El was put on a boat to America.
Two days later, Dela Cruz was found dead in a gruesome fashion: hands and feet were cut off and the forensic evidence showed he was forced to walk a mile and when he would stop, he would be tased until he stood up again.
An autopsy revealed he died of heart failure before blood loss, though the blood loss surely contributed.
El arrived safely in San Francisco. The captain of the ship would lock her in his quarters at night and the first few nights it scared her.
On the third morning, he brought her breakfast on a tray and explained a few things. He was the captain of the ship, he was taking her to family and she shouldn't ever leave his quarters. There were members of his crew that he wouldn't trust with a hamster let alone a little girl.
...
I met Torrez-Navarro at the Silver Skillet, an institute of the classic southern diners in the Atlanta area by some accounts.
I arrived on time and got a text from her "I'm running late, order me the Big Doc special and I'll be there soon."
The waiter showed up less than a minute after I sat down and introduced himself as Wayne. I said good afternoon and ordered two Big Doc specials.
"Oh okay cool... standard beverages too?" he asked.
"I'll just take some water for now," I said. "When she arrives, yes, two of those beverages."
"Oh. Um. I'll need your card." Wayne's face wasn't happy at all. In fact, the move from customer service to suspicious was very clear.
I brought out my chipped hand and he shook his head.
"I need a card or you need to go," he said with an intensity wait staff usually reserve for after your card is declined.
I pulled out my corpo card and gave it to Wayne, he eye scanned it with a contact lens and his device gave a happy chirp.
No double-check.
"Okay great!" instantly back to the gentle southern waiter.
Something felt off but I wasn't sure what at the time.
I'd like to believe if I'd been reporting from a combat zone or a non-American city, I would have noticed the man who would try to murder Torrez-Navarro, but we let our guard down in familiar places.
The Future of the Medium
El was a good student. In fact, annoyingly so by some accounts.
She got straight A's most of the time and when she didn't she would contest it. Not because she thought she deserved better exactly. She was trying to get to college fast.
She started her undergrad at 15.
She graduated with a bachelor's, and a path to medical school at 19-years-old.
Her adoptive family in San Francisco had no complaints. They were distant relatives and her adopted father only complained she wasn't having enough fun.
"You know," said Angelo, the name changed for safety, "She was quite unstoppable, but I remember my cousin. I don't want to assume..." Angelo sipped his coffee at a café called "Another Café" on Pine Street. "He was quite distant. I think I saw him laugh once. And she grew up there?! My god. Of course, she's an A student! Her first toy was probably an abacus or something."
I asked him when he heard about their deaths.
"Almost Immediately, but circuitously." Angelo said as he peeled paint off his fingernails as he was "live painting" fast, small portraits of people for tips. We were surrounded by larger works that he was displaying at the café.
"A friend of the family called someone in Australia, they knew someone who knew someone and the owner of a gallery I was showing my work at and they got an email that they forwarded to me and I emailed back. Three weeks later, that sea captain showed up with El, and we tried to pay him, you know? I was thinking he was a snakehead. He was embarrassed and angry at the idea of getting paid."
I asked him about how he tried to get Torrez-Navarro to have fun.
"The classic way for smart kids, video games!" He laughed. "And she loved them! She was great at them, too. She did some time with my wife at her company programming things. She learns everything. All the time; she takes information in constantly and she's there where things fit in a way no one else does. [sic]"
I asked him if he thought she would become who she is.
"She can do anything," he said, looking away.
"Even what she does now?" I asked.
"Especially what she does now." he sipped his coffee. "Unstoppable."
Unstoppable
When Torrez-Navarro walked into the Silver Skillet everyone talked more quietly but they didn't stop.
She gave greetings, and she said hello. She knew quite a few people in the place. In some regards, she reminded me of accounts of Bumpy Johnson of Harlem, New York who would hand out food on holidays. None of these people knew she was coming, and she knew them all.
Torrez-Navarro used to eat at the Silver Skillet nearly every day when she worked for the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), but she wouldn't say exactly what she did there, though still in the service, she rarely wore her uniform.
"Wayne," she greeted our waiter warmly, "how is your husband?" and they did the kiss on each cheek greeting.
"Much better, thank you."
Her suit was cut astonishingly, corpo cold and yet bringing out her femininity and warmth. It was black but it had a gold sheen when it caught the light.
"I assume this guy hasn't been too much trouble?" she indicated toward me with her chin.
"Seems okay for a corpo," Wayne said as Torrez-Navarro slid into the booth.
"Wayne!" she chided.
"He has a corpo card!"
"I'm my own LLC; it's really the only way to freelance," I said.
"It really is," she nodded.
"All of our models are their own LLCs as well. If they aren't when auditioning, I see to it that they are, I have a lawyer who does that all day," Torrez-Navarro said with a tone of pride as she slid into the booth.
"Have you always been a journalist?"
Bleeding
On May 8, 2032, Torrez-Navarro was getting coffee, water, and juice for the crew.
She was driving one of the company minivans and they had just done a "level five sever sequence" where they cut off someone's limbs and let them bleed out on camera. They would be just fine with Silver Blood in their system and an immediate IV of fluids.
But they would be thirsty.
She parked and struggled to get it all out of the vehicle.
The explosion killed her whole staff and thirty-two others in the office park. If she hadn't been at the back of the van, she could have been killed, too.
Silver Blood kept the actor - Kyle Peterson, stage name Hard Slabmeat - alive for far longer than they would have lived normally.
People saw his body burn live before the camera also succumbed to the fire.
It was determined that whoever made the bomb used heavily irradiated cesium, a mineral that melts at room temperature. When detonated, the cesium became atomized and to this day people are still being diagnosed with cancer within the blast radius.
The actor suffered for a week as the nanites forced them to stay alive.
"And that was my fault," Torrez-Navarro said, staring at her burger.
The burger was two beef patties with cheese, tomatoes, caramelized onions, pickles, and a fried egg, over easy. The beverage was lemonade with pureed strawberries and ginger ale; exceptionally refreshing.
"Let's have a contest," she said, trying to tamp the memory and the guilt down. She smiled the kind of smile you smile when you're trying not to cry.
"If you can finish that plate before I do, I'll show you the studio."
"And if I don't finish?" I asked.
"You'll have to report it that way, won't you, reporter?" She smiled this new and playful but sinister smile. "Ready?"
I nodded.
"Go!"
I ate everything on my plate.
Except for a lone French fry that fell off my plate, and as the doctor went for it, I noticed the guy I wished I'd noticed sooner, moving from the single seating bar, he turned around with purpose and drew a knife.
"Knife," I said as I slid out of the booth, without realizing I was in no position to stop anyone with a weapon except to absorb the attack and then bleed.
Which I did.
The police report said the assailant's name was Devon Schmidt, a known white supremacist but no formal organizational affiliations. A major talking point of far-right groups has been that Final XXX weakens "White Power" by making white people an object of the base emotion of lust, as usual saying the soft part loud but not exactly clear.
My last thought in the diner was about finishing this story.
Kintsugi
Torrez-Navarro served in several wars which is part of the reason I sought to write this story. I'd heard her name while I was covering Syria and Panama but I'd never met her.
As a medical officer in the Army reserves with a penchant for volunteering for deployments, she saw the worst of everything.
Later as a researcher for DARPA, after her time at GTRI and resigning her commission, she sought what she called "kintsugi for tissues."
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending it with an adhesive dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.
It was in Afghanistan the idea occurred to her, so she said. Twelve-hour shifts repairing American military and allies just wasn't enough for her as an Army captain.
"You know, she is very much like Christ,'' said Command Sgt. Maj. (Ret.) Ursula Owusu. Built like a linebacker but moving with the grace of an opera singer, Owusu runs The Future Saints School, where we met in the main cafeteria.
Future Saints is a 22-acre compound for abused children a few miles outside of Helena, Mont. that Torrez-Navarro funded.
"That man from Galilee sacrificed for all of us because his father said he had to," she said. "And Doc T would just because she could."
Owusu speaks lyrically, somewhere between Ian McKellan and Tupac Shakur. She has a rich contralto voice and teaches singing twice a week at Future Saints in addition to her regular duties as headmaster and commandant.
"I'm an enlisted black woman, you know? If I see an officer sneaking off in the middle of the night like that? I'll bring the pain. These officers would fuck around and I'm what they would find out." She laughed proudly. "But you know with Doc T it was way different; she was never like that. Always on the up and up. Always sharp, always kind but most of the time? The brightest light has the darkest shadows."
Owusu sipped her tea.
"I was wrong. She was a very bright light in any and all dark. I followed her off the post and she was at the local Red Cross station, patching even more people up, women and children and old men that just got caught in that crossfire. Then she'd stumble back to post exhausted as hell and she'd take a two-hour nap and get back on it fresh as spring."
Owusu went straight to work after that and didn't say a word to "Doc T," and within a day there were volunteer rosters at every chow hall in Afghanistan, whoever wanted to help during their downtime could sign up. There were a lot of downtimes to be had.
"You know she was furious at first and I understand that. You know the Gospel of Matthew?"
I shook my head.
Owusu recited it from memory “'when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your father who is unseen.' That was how Doc T was praying. Unseen. Saving lives that way. And I... you know."
She looked down at her tea then and stared at it for what felt like a long time.
"I took it from her," she shook it off. "She takes on burdens and doesn't want help. She's bad as hell and won't ever tell. But you know I'd like to think the extra downtime let her think more, over breakfast she told me about kintsugi and how with human tissue it would be even easier. No scarring."
"So what do you think of her new business venture?" I asked.
"She's trying to save the world," she said, with certainty in her voice. "And like Christ, she's starting with the sinners."
Pirates, Porn Stars, and Flanagan's People
I woke up in a hospital bed, but not in a hospital.
"If I didn't do this you would be dead." Torrez-Navarro said solemnly. "He was trying to kill me and you are a brave fucking moron."
My skin tingled where I'd been stabbed.
"You gave me Silver Blood," I said.
"I didn't have a lot of options. He cut you up like Peter Murphy."
I laughed at the reference. "You just keep some on your like that?" I asked.
"It's my invention. I'll use it how I want. Do you know... how much money I make with a live broadcast?" she asked, still solemn.
"On average ten million American dollars," I said.
"Good boy. Did your research." She looked out the window. It was dark outside and no signs of sunrise.
"I am a journalist," I said. "Where are we? Final XXX studios?"
"We've filmed here before, but this is my command yacht."
Final XXX Studios is not actually located in one place anymore, instead working as most porn did in the late 90's and early aughts, out of rented or local locations, none of which I will disclose even under penalty of torture.
And it would take a lot more effort to torture me with Silver Blood in my system.
...
Silver Blood takes its name from how "phase 1" of the nano-machines operating to save your life look when moving: your blood and the resulting scars do indeed turn silver for a few seconds, then metallic red, and then as the scar tissue forms it has a slight sheen to it.
Eight hours later, the scars appear to be very old, and if you up your protein, amino acid, and collagen intake for a day or two - while the nanomachines are in "phase 3," - the scars just go away.
A medical marvel if ever there was one, under capitalism Silver Blood's MSRP is about 10,000 USD per gram - a lifetime time dose for anyone under 30 - makes it far too expensive to just give to people who need it.
However, if you give it to porn performers and have them get cut up on camera live for a dollar per minute per user? Well, you might make some money.
Final XXX Studios first live stream where an 18-year-old Caucasian girl was sliced apart by a masked surgeon peaked at 50 million viewers each paying a dollar per minute for ten minutes.
Inevitably, Only Fans banned the channel soon after and the company adopted a more "pay per view" style model.
The police and Georgia Bureau of Investigation were swift in their response; after all, torturing a white woman on live television certainly triggered the "missing white woman syndrome."
The model refused to press charges to start and it wasn't clear what exactly to charge who with what. Eventually, Torrez-Navarro was charged with obstruction of justice for not giving up the name of the doctor, but that didn't hold up in court. All the contracts were submitted well before hand and they were airtight.
The biggest coup of Final XXX Studios isn't just the very unique style of its content, but the choice of its models.
They all appear to be white. Not just pale but very Caucasian in their features.
That's a standard that has been maintained in the short five years since Final XXX has become the least prolific but most profitable producer of pornographic material on earth.
The studio gives all on-camera personnel 7% of the money made streaming, and off-camera personnel 5%, and that includes everyone off-camera, all established in the first stream.
The most recent film by the studio wasn’t a live stream. It was advertised as a premiere and was closer to a gory art film, directed by Tiffany Timbers. Her breakout performance and directorial debut were the famously well-produced porn trilogy Seas of Sex.
"When I first started out the directors would always be rushed, always get it recorded ASAP," she said as her husband, who wished to not be named in this story, cooked us all breakfast in the kitchen of the house they'd just bought in Little Five Points, Ga.
Except for the kitchen and bedroom, everything else was still in boxes.
"Do this, do that, money shot, in the can, hydrate, stretch, do it again," said Timbers. "There would be days where I'd work 12 hours easy and then have to dance at a strip club. It was brutal."
Timbers - real name Gorodensky, which she insisted be mentioned because she will not be shamed - is very much the classic "girl next door" blonde type with blue eyes, a winning smile, and when she was making content before Seas of Sex, an uncomfortable affecting a child-like voice. In real life, she's much closer to a tenor.
"The 'little girl voice' was - is - way, way too popular. Ick." she shuddered theatrically. "This industry as a whole is a meat grinder for youth: get you when you’re 18, use you up until you're 24 then you have to start making MILF scenes with 18-year-old boys who only get to do the hetero stuff they were lured into the industry with for half the time if they're lucky."
I pointed out that "meat grinder" was an interesting turn of phrase considering her directorial debut.
"Oh, Flanagan's People came to me with a collaborative idea when they figured out I was the model in the very first movie Final XXX put out and I was in the Seas of Sex movies? They were pretty clear they would only work with me."
The Seas of Sex Trilogy was among the more expensive pornographic series in the history of the genre with the movies averaging 5.5 million in budget. In terms of plot, the story was head and shoulders beyond anything made with graphic sex outside of Gaspar Noé’s 2015 film Love.
Timber's husband initially pitched the trilogy as "Really Horny Star Wars" and the producers gave him two mandates: keep it as aesthetically away from Star Wars as possible and pay for the first movie entirely by himself.
Timbers was there trying to earn some extra money as an office manager and followed him to the parking garage after overhearing his meeting.
"Hey, what about pirates?!" she shouted at him as fumbled with his keys.
Timber’s husband slid an epic omelet onto my plate, artichoke hearts, ham, capers, salmon, and three different kinds of cheese, then one for Timbers that appeared to be every kind of meat and one for himself that looked quite bland but just as substantial.
"And thus," he said as he opened his omlette, "Seas of Sex was born.
Timber's husband made her a kind of shadow producer and casting director and before they started filming, he paid for a three-week acting workshop for everyone she cast.
"You know they didn't know we were porn stars the first week and we were really terrible." Timbers laughed. "Then [husband] said we were all porn stars and then the teachers were like 'oooooh!' well you need to sell emotions while NOT having sex and it clicked for everyone!"
The first movie was about happy sex and piracy - including an orgy scene where everyone was actually having fun by most accounts - for the first half. Then the pirates get trapped and attacked by an evil British Naval officer who kills everyone and throws Timber's character overboard and then the credits roll.
The second half featured no sex at all, but streaming statistics reveal people do watch the movie until the end. It is mostly a revenge montage where Timber's struggles against the ocean itself and tries to survive on a desert island - naked of course - intercut with happy memories of a better life of sex and piracy.
The second in the series starts with Timber's being so fed up she walks into the ocean during a horrible storm and being rescued by mer-people of every conceivable gender who of course have sex with her and then they join her in a campaign of BDSM revenge sex against the crew that tried to kill her so brutally that it's affectionally called "The Porn Star Strikes Back" in the fandom.
The third is Timbers and her crew - a decent amount of whom are people she "sexually awakened" in the previous film - doing their own version of Return of the Jedi against the British Crown but again with far more sex.
"So who are Flanagan's people?" I asked.
Timber's husband wolfed down the last of his omelet and cleared the plates and then disappeared.
"I uh... assume he doesn't approve?" I asked.
"He just doesn't want to be here for this; he's a good boy and I respect his limits," Timber's said.
Flanagan's People are devotees of Bob Flanagan, an author, BDSM practitioner, cystic fibrosis patient, and educator of all three. Cystic fibrosis is a brutal genetic disorder that largely impacts the lungs but can also attack the pancreas, liver, kidneys, and intestine, slowly killing its victim.
"Flanagan's people are the hardest of the hardcore," said Timbers.
While not all of them have terminal diseases that will kill them, many of them do, but they all revel in displaying pain. They believe Flanagan to be a sort of prophet and that displays of masochism insist on a reality of the pain of human disability, and humanity in general.
Harris Jones and Linda Smith - their legal names - saw an opportunity with Final XXX. Their first movie would be something amazing and Timbers would be their director.
The Lovers
Jones and Smith wanted to make something truly special.
As devotees of Flanagan, they knew his entire history and went quite deep into their idea for a film.
For the first time, Final XXX Studios did an ad campaign.
"A Film Experience They Don’t Want You to See!" was translated into seven languages and displayed on millions of websites through an ad placement agency. In English, it’s pretty a sly combination of high and low ad copy.
The stars declined to be interviewed, insisting the work spoke for itself, which after turning a profit of 750 million dollars it most certainly did.
Smith did want it known that the couple had some disappointment over the lack of scarring.
The film was exceptionally well directed, lit, shot, and edited. It was even favorably reviewed by one of the oldest publications about the art of film, Cahiers du Cinéma. Yvonne Abd Al-Rashid wrote (translated from French):
"Through a truly horrific concept executed with grace, Final XXX Studios and their director for The Lovers, Tiffany Gorodensky - a veteran actor of the pornographic film herself - has revealed a truly unique and compelling balance between the sensual and vulgar creating a tableau that comments on the meaning of love in general and how between two people the meaning of love can be exceptionally specific and to a person observing those two people, love can be alien and even grotesque.
Their explicit reference paraphrasing the opening to The Garden of Torture by Octave Mirbeau in their only slate "To the priests, the soldiers, the judges, to those people who educate, instruct and govern the people, we dedicate this display of pain and love to you."
In the course of the piece, the lovers point to different parts of each other and a surgeon cuts that flesh away, then the influential American chef Dyson Bryce cooks the piece of that flesh and serves it - simply but elegantly on a black glass plate - to the lover who requested it and they consume it with grim ecstasy. This continues for thirty minutes until neither of them can continue due to blood loss."
Dyson Bryce was willing to give an interview.
Bryce is a ropey person with prison tattoos up both arms and they're quite proud of their criminal past which they will speak of extensively. They will speak of many things extensively. To get quotes for this interview took two hours, but they are passionate about two things: cooking and talking shit about rich people.
"Because fuck 'em, that's why." they laughed when we met at their restaurant, What You Got, in Fayetteville, Ark.
Named after their incredibly influential cookbook What You Got: How To Cook Well When You Don't Have Money, the restaurant offers a full menu but in the evenings people can bring ingredients, and a chef who knows how to cook those ingredients cooks it for them.
They can eat it there or get takeout. On Fridays thru Sundays "rich folks come in," and try to challenge the chefs of What You Got to cook whatever strange thing they came across.
"I reckon that's how it started," Bryce said as they sucked a cigarette so hard it was half ash. “What's that thing when they want you to fail but don't want to call you a failure?"
I shrugged. I honestly couldn't think of a word despite working with words more than most people.
"Don't have the word," they trailed off for a moment. What You Got was in a full lunch rush, working folks from across the spectrum of work: from hard hats to suits, hush puppies to steel-toed boots.
Their expression appeared to doubt the reality of the situation. They grew up in poverty with an abusive alcoholic mother who broke their arm when they were five. Their father packed them up and moved back to West Virginia hoping to give their only child a better life. He did the best with what he had and while Bryce was safe from abuse, they were not safe from the effects of poverty.
"These rich assholes know two things: jack and shit," they said in a playful fury. "You know how real local cuisine starts? Poor people get hungry and desperate and they look at some shit like 'can I eat that?!' Frogs' legs and snails? Sheeeeit, nobody wanted to eat that shit. That French ass cuisine. Crabs?! Mother fucker?!" they laughed
"You know they couldn't make prisoners eat lobster because they would pile up on the beach in Maine. Piles of them. Free meat! But no, can't make me eat that, warden! Giant ass sea cockroach! Then the economics kicks in and any damned thing becomes a 'local delicacy.'"
"Alligators aren't really local to here," I said, referencing a local news piece where inexplicably a 400-pound alligator loped down the street and ate Florence, a beloved local stray mutt that each restaurant on the street took turns feeding and occasionally bathing.
Bryce shot the alligator in the head for that grievous crime with a .22 pistol. They actually reloaded and fired a whole other magazine into the reptile's brain until it stopped moving.
"Got one back for Florence right outside the restaurant, cut that mother fucker up!" They laughed. One of the local butchers was from Louisiana, arguably the Gator meat capital of the United States and definitely the world, and that evening Bryce declared "Free gator meat for everyone" resulting in a kind of impromptu block party.
In front of a substantial crowd, Bryce wasn't all that long-winded.
"We all loved Florence, and we'll all miss her. She was the sweetest girl and everyone's friend. And you know what? This is my solemn promise, anyone who crosses anyone like that? I'll fry their ass up, too we'll eat that villain together!"
The crowd cheered and then the video went viral.
"You know that was one of those times where you're just in the moment and it sounds awesome at the time and then you realize 'that was just fucking weird to say.’ Then I got a call from that Timbers lady, and she asked how I felt about cooking human flesh."
"That was a new challenge for you?" I asked.
"You know cannibalism ain't nothing new and some folks had cooking methods documented. So I said fuck it, sure."
"You didn't know you would be paid very well?"
"I knew it'd be a lot, but money ain't shit; money's just the means. I do own this whole ass building now and I do charity cooking five days a week if I'm feeling it."
"So if you didn't need money, what would you do?" I asked.
"Cook. Duh," they said.
All the Good That Can Be Done
Torrez-Navarro is a high-figure millionaire maybe... two months out of the year. She pays for the manufacture of Silver Blood entirely by herself, ensuring she burns through money
She has seven "yachts," luxury ships retro-fitted to transport aid supplies and personnel around the world and named using conventions derived from Ian Bank's Culture series, books she grew up reading and loving very much. Here they are named with their respective missions:
Who Needs Gravitas When You Can Have Tacos? (Food Aid)
I'm Not that Cool, But I'm Here to Help (Refugee Transport Assistance)
Porn Paid for This. So What? (General Emergency Assistance)
The Queen is a Stupid, Here is Aid and Then Some (Economic Refugee Assistance)
Look At All These Kittens! (Animal Aid and Assistance)
Some Senator From Kentucky Is Not Going to Stop Me (Gulf Hurricane Relief)
Don't Believe The Hype, We Are Here Now (General Assistance as Needed)
These ships are not tax evasion, either. They are registered in America and Torrez-Navarro pays all the appropriate taxes on them and they all bear three flags: the American flag, the LGBTQ flag, and the flag of Final XXX Studios.
Stepping out on the deck of I Am Proudly That Bitch - a much smaller "two-bedroom" all-electric vessel Torrez-Navarro uses for personal travel and residence - I looked out at the sunrise over the port of Columbus, Ga., I saw a crew loading up Who Needs Gravitas When you Can Have Tacos? with crates.
"They are heading to India for relief after the monsoon, Kittens and Fuck What You Heard are already there, running supplies and personnel from the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders," Torrez-Navarro said.
"You know I have to ask this next question, doctor," I said mirroring her solemnness.
"I don't remember." Torrez-Navarro said flatly.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"No, it's just a blank space. Pretty common with concussions."
The blank space was the murder of Rebekah Navarro, Torrez-Navaorro's fiancée. Though they were never married, Torrez-Navarro legally took her last name and put it on Rebekah's memorial plaque.
A complete stranger called Rebekah a "tranny" and shot her in the back of the neck with a .22 caliber slug, fracturing her C2-C5 vertebra. Torrez-Navarro was knocked unconscious a second or so after with a baton of some kind and the assailant walked away, to be picked up later by Atlanta PD after they had done the same thing to three other couples.
Anthony Yancy had no criminal history nor any history of mental illness. Interviews with neighbors were a throwback to the early days of mass shootings. Not radicalized, he "seemed normal."
In his rampage through midtown Atlanta, he murdered four women and injured four people who were in their company. One of them was a transgender woman, the rest were all cisgender.
Yancy was found guilty and is at present a model prisoner; up for parole in three years.
"Would silver blood have saved her?" I asked.
"Not by itself. Would have just killed her more slowly, like Peterson."
"Surgery?" I asked.
"No." Torrez-Navarro said flatly. "Silver blood can't mend bone." Her mood lightened a little then. "The next product can, and I have a job opportunity for you."
"What kind?" I asked, as nearly any job offer to a freelancer - even from someone like Torrez-Navarro - is a gamble at best.
"Human trials. You'll be well compensated and if your editor will let you keep reporting you could 'double dip' getting paid for that as well."
Changing Lives
Just seeing your own blood from a paper cut can possibly cause three human systems - sympathetic nervous system, neuro-endocrine system, and immune system - to deploy a few choice chemicals to keep the pain at bay with the key ingredients being adrenaline and endorphins as part of fight or flight response.
One person who doesn't know what that's like is Lan Tran Pham, the child of two Vietnamese immigrants who is a music producer in Miami, Fl.
I met them at the Navarro Center for Rehabilitation (NCR), which had more of an air of a spa than anything else, where we were both staying for the Gold Bone human trial.
Pham was born with an extremely rare neurological condition called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain (CIP) less commonly called congenital analgesia.
Pham didn't wish to say how their parents figured out their condition, but they did say their poor mother was terrified - she is now a retired neuroscientist - when they were diagnosed.
Despite this, their father encouraged them to find "as many safe ways as possible" to express themselves and Pham leaned hard into that encouragement and at sixteen found themselves on a tour of the Southern United States with their father chaperoning.
During a concert, one of the strings on their violin snapped and caught them in the ear, it bled quite profusely, but they didn't stop playing. Instead, they reached for a backup violin and continued playing, which was distressing to other members seated near them.
Their father knew that if he interrupted the concert with only two minutes left in Niccolò Paganini's Caprice in A minor, Op. 1, No. 24, where they were playing his first solo, his perfectionist child would never forgive him.
Immediately after, of course, Mr. Pham had patched his child's ear, brought them a change of tuxedo then got them bottled water and juice, and was about to clean up the blood off the stage when the staff of the concert hall said that was unnecessary.
At the reception afterward, the conductor asked for a special round of applause for "classical music's own Dave Grohl; didn't even scream!" referring to the time the Foo Fighters frontman broke his leg at a 2015 concert in Sweden, which the conductor was in the front row for and was the only reference to rock n' roll he could reliably make.
Pham felt instantly self-conscious as they often did when someone didn't know about his condition. Of course, Torrez-Navarro was there and saw Pham's body language which led her to strike up a conversation.
"It's not that it was a secret, but Dad would just deal with it so often he just didn't notice and stopped saying anything. During COVID-19 when mom could study at Tulane from home, he became an EMT just for me, before I became a toddler. People see someone not expressing a pain reaction and they think it's some sort of superpower when it's the opposite."
"And what does he think of Silver Blood? Your father?"
"He saw the result and he cried and then he slept 12 hours for the first time since I could remember," Pham said. They laughed then, and they cried a little. "You know I didn't know I was such a burden."
Later that day I called Pham's father and he could only say how proud he was of them and asked me if I knew anything about the trial for Gold Bone. I told him all I knew was the same as anyone.
"You know they're like an astronaut to me," he said. "Doing this may be a dangerous thing again, but so many people with the same disorder? They got Silver Blood, too and their lives improved too."
At absolutely no point did Mr. Pham even imply his child was a burden. Not once.
There aren’t “so many” with CIP either, it’s extremely rare, but Mr. Pham reached out to as many of them as he could, evangelizing. He coordinated with Torrez-Navarro’s people to get more people with CIP dosed with Silver Blood.
Prototypes
Soft tissue is, relative to bone healing, "easy mode."
How Silver Blood actually works is largely propriety and even if you're one of the thousands who have received it for free, you must sign an NDA, and hospitals - without any prompting - keep samples with Silver Blood separate and secure from other samples, sometimes using labs subsidized by Torrez-Navarro herself which she will gladly provide.
On several occasions, U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity has offered Torrez-Navarro an Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract.
This is unusual for two reasons: the American government generally doesn't seek out specific product creators after the fact: they typically identify a need and have contractors apply. The second reason is an IDIQ contract for a pre-existing product that was already approved by the FDA and commercially available raised a few alarms.
"Their monetary offer was fine," said Torrez-Navarro. "The exclusive rights to the technology were not. I don't even think it's possible with the number of people who have it in their system now. What happens to them exactly? What would the DoD do to those people? It would be like... saying people with the Covid Booster Mark X can't leave their country."
"Gold Bone will be more complex," she said. "I've already said it sounds like a sex toy, but marketing said it 'had to pair with the known product, synergy!'" she rolled her eyes.
The kintsugi for bone is already a great deal more complex than merely healing soft tissues as the nanomachines can more or less be on a kind of "auto-pilot" with that previously mentioned proprietary programming.
But the Gold Bone nanites must be programmed with a much clearer "map," this means several X-rays, backscatter scans, and a version of sonar because I and Pham already have Silver Blood and an MRI would have pulled them out of us in a guaranteed painful but potentially fatal way.
We were the only two with Silver Blood already in our systems.
I saw other volunteers: two were football players - neither from the Atlanta Falcons, oddly - two obvious MMA fighters and people who appeared to be in good shape of one form or another, and a few more with veteran swagger who probably used their DoD biometrics for their "skeletal map."
My personal activity has always been running, towards things and away from things, and with no chance of shin splints I assumed I would get better at that.
The NCR has a resort feel as it's mostly the paying customers for Silver Blood.
Pham and I were to go first, as we would be the "Electrum Package," test, a term which Torrez-Navarro admits is solid marketing, but still extremely cloying.
The night before I sat at a bar where the patrons would have made Bryce break out in hives. Maybe I was still a little keyed up but I almost jumped out of my chair when Pham slid in next to me.
And under ordinary circumstances, saying "All your drinks are comped" would have been a bad idea for all parties concerned but I was looking for a nightcap.
"Get you a drink?" I asked Pham. I gestured to the auto-bartender: two Lagavulin Scotch Distillers Edition, neat. It's a hand gesture so complex the auto-tender might glitch and not even charge you.
"Do you feel alone?" Pham asked.
"I guess. You're the only one here like me after all." I said.
It took me a second to realize they meant the implantation. It was too quiet.
"Yeah. What's your plan. If this works?" I asked.
"If I don't die? Mixed Martial Arts. Laurence has a gym down the street from my studio."
"I'm sorry, what... one of those guys is Laurence DelGaudio? I barely recognized him." I said.
"Yes!" they said with glee.
"Holy shit that's cool. He's like one of the sweetest dudes, Mx."
"I know! I had posters of him as a kid! He's going to start an augmented combat circuit!"
The bartender brought our drinks.
"How do you know DelGaudio?" they asked.
"I was a young reporter, he was just starting out and his first televised fight was at the State Farm Arena and I was already covering a story in the area so my editor asked me to cover it. I swung in early that day and asked for a quick interview, you know, the five W’s. Five hundred words, tops. Who he was, some anecdote about his family, that kinda stuff but I guess he knew who I was because he told me he liked that one question I asked the president of Serbia when he was at the White House so he said to me 'I'll get you ringside and when I win, you'll be only one allowed in the ring.'"
"That was YOUR footage?!" Pham squawked.
DelGaudio won his fight in a KO and only let me into the ring, wrapped in an American flag. A transcription of his speech:
"I fought hard. Who did I fight for? Italians! [crowd roars] and Black people! [crowd explodes] Five. Hundred. Miles. From here my ancestors and your ancestors were slaughtered in 1891! This is not about money or fame, it's about JUSTICE!"
He held up the flag then and the crowd roared.
"Yeah, that was me. I'm shocked I didn't recognize him, though."
"Oh he had FFS," they said.
"It's still 'he'?" I asked.
"Indeed," they said.
"Wonders never cease," I said, sipped my extremely expensive scotch, and swirled it around in my mouth.
"What are you going to do if it works... if you survive..." Pham asked.
"I don't know," I said. And I honestly didn't have an answer. "Go back to war reporting, maybe?"
"You want to.. um... get out of here?" Pham asked.
I looked at them then. With their big brown eyes, jet black hair and pale skin. They had this innocent look. And then I thought about people like me and Torrez-Navarro. We know a lot about the world. Maybe too much. And maybe I didn't want to infect them with that knowledge.
"I'll have another drink with you, Pham," I said. "But I don't..."
"Another drink is fine," they said.
The Electrum Package and the 45 Fractures
I volunteered for the first test. I didn't like the idea of Pham suffering, even if they wouldn't feel it.
And there is a reason I was well paid.
The day after the gold bone was introduced into my system, I was escorted by some excessively tough-looking people to a more secure laboratory area of the resort.
The room they brought me to was disconcerting on several levels.
The first was the test machine, which appeared to be a smooth single piece of polished silver metal in the shape of a "human figure" like a bathroom gender indicator from when I was a kid but with the arms at a 90-degree angle to the torso.
The second was the smell, an overpowering bleach smell. Nothing else. The third was two technicians dressed in just darker-than-blood-red jumpsuits, matching masks, and those very large laboratory goggles.
The goggles worried me the most.
I was wearing a papery smock typical of hospitals but the back was thankfully held closed by Velcro. I was also wearing a lead jock strap to protect my bits from higher-level rays than usual; the ceiling was nearly two stories and had a large apparatus with several camera lenses.
I spent the previous evening reading the waiver for this test. There would be a lot of fractures. I knew it would hurt but some part of me wanted to understand. That's been part of my whole career; the pursuit of understanding. I wanted to understand things in my bones.
Literally.
Most fractures go something like a stable simple fracture is the easiest to heal as the broken pieces are practically parallel and close together, and an oblique fracture has more of an angle to it and an oblique compound is angled way off, usually slicing up through the skin.
The worst of them is a comminuted fracture with a compound fracture that breaks the skin. When you see "shattered" in a written work it's referring to a comminuted fracture, bone fragments bouncing all around. When the bone rips through the skin and is combined with all those shards, that damage is often permanent.
Every so often I see signs around July 4th "Veteran lives here." That's not for fireworks on July 4th, that's for every day before and after that isn't July 4th.
When you know something's coming, it's a lot easier to deal with.
It's the surprise that is upsetting. Veteran or not, literally no one likes sudden loud bangs or pops. When someone has had to deal with loud bangs or pops being potentially fatal the response can look pretty intense to someone who's never experienced that.
If you're ready for something it's different.
The first was actually a spiral fracture. I watched the machine turn my hand all the way around twice so it looked like was I waving and it happened so fast I didn't have time to feel the pain, damage to shock happened amazingly fast.
Usually, you get a spiral fracture when a police officer puts you in a rear wrist lock and doesn't stop twisting. I thought of the last time a police officer gave me that kind of fracture, it was in Paris.
I felt the itching draw a sensation pattern on my bones, the ulna, radius, and tibia.
"We can stop, now," Torrez-Navarrow's voice came over a speaker.
"I'm good," I said.
"Compound fracture." said one of the technicians.
I could feel the machine seams open again under my arm, perhaps more slowly this time.
I Watched with a fascination perhaps similar to the audiences of XXX Studios productions. My forearm broke open like a crab's leg but the colors reversed. One of the two forearm bones, I couldn't say which, sliced up through muscle and skin. It splashed out far less blood than I expected and again far less seeped from the wound.
The machine reset my arm and I watched.
I felt the itch first and saw the gold sheen over the eggshell white bone, it was uncomfortable as the muscles churned via the silver blood to move them back into place. The noise it made was as unique as it was frightening. It was slower than the snap so it wasn't the snap backward, it was stranger.
Maybe I could only hear it because the room was so quiet; not maddeningly quiet like the anechoic chamber I got locked in by a well-funded military security firm as a form of torture, but close.
Before I went to cover my first war I paid for a class called C-SERE or civilian - survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. Six grand for a group of professional disassociators to teach me how to disassociate. Also, waterboarded me and broke one of my pinkies.
Everyone disassociates differently, so a psychologist who deals with sex crime survivors and war veterans told me.
Superheroes are a big one. Being one and rescuing oneself. Or letting oneself be rescued by one. Unsurprising considering the first Avengers movie came out before I was born and they released one every year until I was a senior in college.
However, the psychologist said it is best to customize your disassociation much more closely to yourself.
When I was six, there was an animated thing saw and I don't remember much except there was a cat and she had some kittens and then some guy took them, tied them in a sack, and threw them in a river. The mom cat said how she could feel them dying in the cold, dark water. I cried a lot, but I was alone so I was able to get together before either of my parents saw.
Pushing myself down into that cold dark water, the sound of my body breaking and reassembling is muted and more and more distant.
Down into the dark away from the bright lab with the tang of my own blood hovering just above the bleach smell.
I barely notice when my femur is pulled out of its socket. The pop is loud enough I hear it under the water, and the pain is abundant, but dulled by the cold.
I can't see anything so I push my hand into the muck, looking for the burlap sack, the pain of nanomachines pulling the femur back into place ends quickly.
The femur. Not my femur. I find the bag and feel the panicked thrashing of the tiny bodies.
I take the bag to my chest hoping my body can keep them warm enough and I bring my feet under me and push up.
Distantly I hear "catastrophic rib cage crush" and I push off the floor of the river against a suddenly strong current.
I thrust the bag of kittens up like a superhero that can fly, and my breaking ribs don't bother me as I break the surface and hold them high up and swim.
My body is failing me and I'm sinking.
My legs stop working. My arm is barely keeping the kittens out of the water.
I seethe with anger and scream "DO YOUR JOB!" to my own body. The nanomachines. Whoever is listening.
I have to get them to the shore.
Please. Just
let
me
save
them
p
l
e
a
s
e
...
In a very nice recovery room, I felt the tingle wear off on my skin. My... bones and skin still "itched" as they finished getting me back to"zero state," where they found my body.
There really wasn't any scratching that itch so I just closed my eyes and tried to hold still and breathe and think of the nanomachines as my friends.
"How are you feeling?" Torrez-Navarro woke me up with a jolt.
"I could feel my own bones for a while there, which is new," I said.
"I saw that in your after-surgery interview. I'm pretty sure it will pass. Pham went ahead anyway despite seeing that. All that." she said.
"They deserve a normal life." I sighed. Sure enough, the sensation of feeling my own bones was indeed already fading.
"Who were you asking to do their job?" Torrez-Navarro asked.
I looked at her then and we were the same. Burned. Hurt. In some kind of space with people. A lot of people. Some of them we don't like.
Most of them we at least relate to.
Some of them we love.
"The nanomachines," I said. "I wanted them to do their job."
"I know;" Torrez-Navarro said. "I guess I just wanted you to say it. Look at this."
She handed me a tablet and it showed me some things.
"The top track is recorded audio from the room that we had as a backup for medical technicians and the other two are the nanomachines activity levels," she said with anticipation in her voice I recognized from interviewing scientists.
"Aw fuck, let me guess..." I said as I watched the audio track grumble and stumble.
"Yes, but watch! It's really cool," she said.
I watched the lines and it was all low, I heard my body breaking distantly again and then I heard my own voice loud and direct 'DO YOUR JOB!' but the nanomachine activity went insane.
"Is that good?" I asked.
Torrez-Navarro paused for a long time. "I have another job offer for you," she said finally.
"I'm not making movies for you," I said.
"Please, you already have a skill set. I want to fund your LLC."
"What?"
"Just keep reporting. One person can move faster than any large organization. Find the trouble. Report on it, and let me know about it a little in advance if you can. I'll be able to move my humanitarian efforts faster than ever before."
I thought about it.
"Fuck it, sure," I said.
(Editors Note: M.J. Stevenson submitted this story remotely and submitted their resignation)
If you want to support my writing PayPal is JHiggins35, CashApp is $FairyGhostFather and Venmo is @John-Higgins-179
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