Almost human?

Mama wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. For weeks, she’d been tracking the world’s Last Action Hero as he jetted from one disaster to the next, and, no, that’s not a reference to his hair-dying appointments. With a heave of his expansive chest, Arnie blew out Southern California’s wildfires; with a stroke of his mighty pen, he sued to force the Environmental Protection Agency to marshal his Earth-saving tail-pipe-emissions law; with his mighty shoulders, he strung miles of plastic flotation barriers to protect the San Francisco coastline from oil spilled by the wayward tanker that struck the Bay Bridge.

Your curvaceous correspondent followed the ruler of the sixth-largest economy in the world to a hospital in Los Angeles, where, disguised as a nurse, she infiltrated the operating room where luscious was undergoing follow-up surgery on the leg he broke skiing in Sun Valley last year. Mama had warned him that Mt. Baldy‘s artificial snow can be as slippery as snot on a doorknob, but he’d failed to heed this advice. So there he was, about to go under the knife again.

Funny thing was, there was no anesthesiologist in the operating room. Lumpkins was cheery and relaxed as he directed the surgeon where to make the incision in his massive thigh. The scalpel had barely touched his taught, tangerine-colored skin when the insides exploded outward in a jumble of titanium plates and cables, like a sprung wristwatch. Metal rods driven by gears and servo units whirred within. With a pair of needle-noise pliers and a vice grip, the doctor tweaked on one of the cables, and the governor’s arm shot upward in a Hitlerian salute. Wrong cable. Another tweak, and his knee jerked reflexively. That’s it. We sewed him up, he slid off the table and walked out of the room on his own power.

Like your girl next door said, she wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. Is Arnold human, or a cybernetic organism? It’s no matter to Mama, whose love and adoration for the world’s Last Action Hero knows no bounds.

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