[ My interview today is with the Head of the Exo-Shel Team. He is tall and thin. Nerdy might be an apt description. He had definitely spent a few years of his youth playing D & D with assorted outcasts banded together to survive puberty. Broad smile. His hair is light brown and swept back into a ponytail. Probably still smokes a joint or two during his off hours. He has touches of grey at the temples and a hairline that shows the beginnings of receding. A prominent nose on which hard rimmed black eyeglasses are perched magnifying his hazel eyes. His chin is all but forgotten. He has thin lips that he has a nervous habit of licking. He smells simply clean. Like that green soap they scrub with in an Emergency Room. He is dressed in a white lab coat with his credentials badge clipped to one pocket like a large tag on an airline bag. The man in the photo looks much younger. He has obviously been at this for a while. We begin as he pumps my arm excitedly.]
"My name is Steve. Steven Drossinger, actually. You must be Dr. Troy. I've heard so much about you. So pleased to finally meet you."
[ He is effusive, greeting me like a rock star, and I suddenly realize that he must think I am solely responsible for his pet "lab animal" returning to the fold.]
"I have been a part of the Exo-Shel Team from the beginning in 2001. I was also on-site when Sgt. Mark Cole arrived at the V.A. in 2008, and after his last amputation. I remember thinking Mark was the guy we had been waiting for since the beginning...the proto-type of Shel. Oh sure, we had replaced individual arms or legs. But this. To give a guy back EVERYTHING. To give him back his life!"
[ His eyes are glazed in almost fanatical absorption]
"Sorry, it still kind of blows my mind."
"Anyway, we were making real progress until his wife left him."
" I think a lot of us here at The Shel thought it would remove distractions for him. Let him "become", you know. It didn't work that way at all. He became completely non-compliant, and refused to continue. Just totally shut down."
" Can you even imagine what kind of a set back that was for us? For The Program?"
[It was a rhetorical question, apparently, as he continued on unabated. Presumably unaware (or unconcerned) of what a setback divorce must have been for Mark.]
"Anyway, thanks to you, he is more motivated than I have seen him in three years. Letting us work with fittings and already experimenting with the arms and hands using his thoughts to create movement. They aren't incorporated into the Exo-Shel, just yet. Just arms and hands right now. But they will be. Most of the lower Shel was together before he quit The Program. So we have that going for us, anyway."
[ I realize until this moment I had always thought of the Exo-Shel Program as a bunch of altruistic nerd-types out to "Save The World". Maybe just "Help Humanity". I was wrong. By the abilities they were able to confer through state of the art robotics and neuroscience, these kids who were once jammed into lockers or beaten up for their lunch money when they left chess club, were elevated to "demi-gods" re-building mankind.]
[I am still far away in my thought as he rambles on enthused, non-stop explaining the process, and what they will be embarking on next. When he finally shakes my hand again and leaves the office I am still smiling at the idea of Steve.
A Beta Male, who, through the wizardry of cybernetics, became so much more than the Alpha-male he was re-building. He became a god. Not bad for a day job.]
