Author's note: This is my redo on my Better, Stronger, Faster essay for character development.
Imagine being a world class Astronaut, loved by the entirety of the United States of America. Your career is almost over, and you’ve been spending the last of it test piloting landing vehicles, when suddenly, your entire world literally crashes down around you. How would you feel to wake up from that crash, having only 25% of your original extremities? Would you panic? Would you be scared? Would you lose the will to live? Would you think you were less than human? In the exciting novel "Cyborg", by Martin Caden, Colonel Steve Austin rode that exact emotional roller coaster. He was testing the M3F5 prototype space shuttle that was being tested for soft earth landing, and as he was just about to land it crashed. The next time that the Colonel woke up, he was told that he was now in the care of the OSI and was being given a new arm, two new legs, and a brand new left eye to make up for what he had lost in the crash, all courtesy of the US government. He reacted like any of us would, with rejection. Steve was forced to change how he looked at himself, and to accept these new limbs, and their extra special abilities. Bionics.
In the beginning, Steve is a fun loving guy who doesn’t do as he’s told and takes life for granted. As he goes onto the M3F5 landing plane, he thinks of it as just another job, and doesn’t think about it as one of his last times flying a plane. He puts on his headset and talks to “Huston”, setting up the plane and making sure it’s all set up. And when he’s up in the air, he still has that same mind set. But, when things begin to go south (literally), he loses the cool facade and begins to panic, yelling at Huston to help him, and then.... He crashed. While before and during the beginning of the story Steve is a fun loving guy, through the story’s progression he begins to learns how to take things more seriously.
Rudy Wells changes Steve the most throughout the story because he makes him accept the fact that the Bionics are just as much a part of him as his actual arm, or his actual eye. At first, when he shows Steve his bionic arm, setting it on his lap in the hospital, Steve rejects it, hiding from it with his good arm. Rudy yells at him in frustration, “Steve! This is your ARM!” and basically forces Steve to look at his arm, forcing his good arm down and making him take a good solid look at the mechanic arm that is in front of him. He says, “It’ll look identical to your actual arm, right down to the little freckles”, and Steve begins to think that maybe he can accept it, maybe. During the story, Steve has a huge impact on Oscar Goldman, the head of the OSI, or Office of Scientific Intelligence.
As Steve and Oscar begin to work with one another more and more, Oscar still treats Steve as though he’s another piece of technology, a “brand new bionic gadget”. But as Steve rebels against him when Oscar asks him to go on a mission, Oscar is forced to realize that he can’t just tell Steve what to do like a computer. He has to take Steve’s actual opinions into account, and realize that he has feelings too. While they are forced to work together, their relationship shifts from being “boss and worker”, to friends, or to an extent, family.
While Steve went through struggles learning how to except his bionics and change his outlook on things and his overall attitude, Steve begins to except his job and quickly learns that the job matches his personality. The job requires courage, strength, speed, and a mind that can get out of serious situations. Steve has all of these capabilities. The sly, smart alick attitude quickly disappears as he learns that he can’t think like that when he has a job of national importance, and Rudy is the person who makes him realize this. While he hated Oscar in the beginning, seeing as he was the one to make the call and make him bionic, Oscar becomes a close friend, someone who he can rely on most. Steve’s character development through the story is quite astronomical in every way, seeing as he now is a responsible, and respectful man, instead of a smart aleky guy. And all it took for him to become that was his bionic extremities. They made him Better, Stronger, and Faster.
