"Absolutely," Talia said. But she obviously had something else on her mind. She frowned, and stared into space as though in deep thought.
"What's wrong?" asked Zhang. "You can tell me anything."
"It's about him," the nurse replied, pointing at the sleeping man. Then she looked at her colleagues; they all had similarly strained looks on their faces. "It's not just that he's remembering. Something else is going on. His brain... is segmenting. As though broken into two personalities. The new memories only seem to apply to one segment, with very little overlap. The other segment is... unreadable."
"Unreadable? How?"
"Our instruments simply can't penetrate it. It's as though the brain waves from that segment are in a different language. One which our technology has no translation for."
Zhang considered this. He started rubbing his beard again. "What could this mean?"
"I think there are two possibilities," said Talia.
"Let's hear them."
"One is that this young man is experiencing some new, exotic, never-before-seen disease of the brain. Perhaps it's the reason for his amnesia, originally. Memories and brain activity are corrupted. The brain attempts to heal itself during sleep, going to drastic measures. But always the memories are broken down again, distorted into an unusual shape. A shape that our instruments don't even know how to find."
"And what's the other possibility?"
"It has something to do with that arm of his. It's Nerian technology, isn't it? Have you ever heard of Montezuma's revenge?"
"Yes, I have. An old term. And a crude one. It refers to diarrhea experienced by tourists who are visiting an exotic place."
"A curse to the conqueror who revisits the place of his conquest," said Talia. "This may be something like that. The Nerian arm infected him in some way. Perhaps with foreign DNA. It got into his brain and mutated there. Sort of like the malformed proteins which cause certain types of dementia. In this case, our young man actually has Nerian brain matter in his skull. Nerian DNA. And yet, other than his memory problems and strange sleep, he seems normal. Healthy. We detect no other issues."
Zhang felt troubled. You didn't need an extensive knowledge of medicine to understand how strange this circumstance was. But he was the Commander here; it was up to him to decide what to do.
As far as the station went, anyway. He decided it was time to consult his distant superiors. Perhaps they would be able to give him some inspiration.
***
I stare at the monstrous half of me. It isn't real. It's just a shell surrounding half of my being. A perfect screen for the deceptive intentions within. I am the Trojan Horse, the double agent. They may suspect I am different, that there is something unusual in me, but they will never be able to know what it is.
"...Even Steven..."
I repeat the words in my mind. Their meaning is obvious to me, now.
Though I still had no idea what the green thing was that had entered my arm, I knew that it had something to do with Dr. Steven. This was his plan all along. This was the purpose he envisioned for me.
It was not anything I had ever really wanted. I wished to take vengeance on humankind, not to skulk through their ranks like a child in a costume. But I accepted it. I knew it was the only real chance I had, now that I was completely alone.
It's dangerous for me to even be keeping this journal. But let them be a record of what lengths a desperate person will go to. To save my race, I will have to take on immense challenges. I cannot afford to fail.
***
The first thing Jess saw when he woke was the face of the red-haired nurse. She was smiling at him. Her cheeks were plump and red. Her bosom was enormous. Jess found himself recoiling from her, the way you would from a strange animal. Then he saw his own body, his Nerian form overtaken by a human one, and felt a surge of nausea and sorrow as all the memories flooded back.
But... there was something more.
"What's happened?" he asked.
"You fell asleep once we arrived here," the nurse replied. "It didn't take you long; you must have been exhausted. How were your dreams?"
Jess narrowed his eyes, trying to remember. He realized that he felt very well rested. But he also felt strange. It was a feeling he couldn't describe or begin to puzzle out.
"I don't think I had any," he said, an honest answer.
The nurse smiled and nodded, as if all this was to be expected. "And how do you feel?"
"I feel... fine."
Staring into her face, Jess felt an irrational rage.
But was it so irrational? No. He was looking into the eyes of a human, a member of the race that had ruined his homeworld and nearly committed genocide against his people. His rage was justified. But he must learn to suppress it. To control it.
There was a beep from some instrument nearby. The nurse looked over at it, and her expression changed to one of concern. She took a step away from Jess, perhaps without realizing she was doing it.
Jess saw that many electrical feeds and little suction cups had been attached to him. These all led to one huge machine on the wall of the room, where a dizzying amount of information was displayed.
His every bodily function was being monitored. The machine had detected his anger, his barely withheld violent intent, and gave the nurse a warning about it. Quickly, Jess turned his thoughts to something pleasant. He thought back to a warm day spent with his family, before the war. Everything was beautiful back then. Peaceful. He felt his heart rate drop.
But suddenly, before his mind's eye, the memory began to flicker. It blinked back and forth, from memories of his family to memories he shouldn't have. A human woman, naked in bed beside him. A memory from his time away at school.
What school? What woman?
The machine beeped again. A different pattern. It warned the nurse of a drastic increase in Jess's heart rate. The patient began to tremble violently. All signs pointed to an attack of some kind. A panic. The nurse quickly ran to her machine and used it to deliver a dose of sedative.
The young man calmed down and fell into a light sleep.
Chapter 6: Positive ID
It was time for the interview. It was an important one.
After Talia Barrett, the next most qualified to sit in on this interview was Rama Ishmael. He had gone through several years of standard medical studies before realizing it wasn't his passion and switching to physics. Those immutable laws, those eternal doctrines decided long before the first primordial creature slithered onto the cooling shores of Earth, were to him the most beautiful thing possible.
But he was an intelligent man, with a flawless memory. He soaked in information like a sponge and never let it go. He remembered all of his medical studies, and had absorbed additional knowledge just by being around people like Talia Barrett.
He attended the interview as an observer. Stationed back behind everyone else, standing with his face lost in shadow, it was easy to look past him. To forget he was even there.
Throughout the interview, Ishmael's mind raced as he tried to piece together the puzzle that was presented to him. He had never before been called into the role of detective. But he figured that the brain, having been birthed by the workings of the universe, must follow physical laws. There were differentiations and unique features of every brain - these were usually called "personality" - but not to such an extreme that they were rendered unquantifiable.
To a man like Ishmael, giving up was not an option. He knew that some people often gave up halfway through solving a problem, having decided that they would never find the solution. But he considered those people to be fools. They were exactly the sort that shouldn't be allowed to breed; they dragged the rest of humankind down to their depths of laziness and superstition.
Respectfully, Ishmael remained silent for the duration of the interview. This allowed all the powers of his brain to be channeled into the act of observation.
It started with the young man. He sat down on one side of a metal t
able. He was not hooked up to any machinery. Other than a camera to record the interview, the only things that observed him were the sensory organs of the humans who sat across from him.
At first, Ishmael had no doubt that this young man was the missing professor, Edwin Caldwell.
Caldwell had been sent by Skyway University to observe the use of Starframes on Planet Nera, especially during the cleanup immediately following the first transfers of waste. He did not ride in a Starframe himself, but moved with supplementary ground units. Much like Ishmael now, in this interview, he was there just to watch and form opinions. He was meant to return to Skyway with fresh knowledge on Starframe usage, and to formulate better methods.
But he never came back. He was lost somewhere on that planet. Since half a dozen other troops were also lost, the professor was considered as a simple statistic. A casualty of war.
Apparently, he had survived.
And now he was here on Space Station 0025. This was the most interesting thing that had happened during Ishmael's tenure here. That wasn't saying much.
Before the interview, he had been allowed to peek at a picture of the lost professor. The Prodigy, they called him. Merely seventeen years old, but possessing an almost supernatural knowledge and intuition regarding Starframes and their almost unlimited uses. He had pioneered a new technique of zero-g maneuvers, turning off the interior stabilizers so that the pilot floated inside his or her Replicator. This allowed for more fluid and much more unpredictable Starframe movements. This technique was now being used more often than not by the newer generation of pilots.
There was no doubt that the young man in the interview chair resembled Edwin Caldwell exactly. There was no discernible difference that could not be explained by age. It had been five years, after all. Five tough years, stranded on a trash planet.
If it was a disguise, it was a perfect one.
Commander Zhang asked the first questions. This was planned from the beginning. The idea was that he would intimidate and frighten the young man, in hopes of shaking loose some thread they could pull on.
But all this was just standard procedure. Ishmael didn't think any of these people truly believed the young man could be an impostor.
"It just seems strange," the Commander began. "You come to us with Nerian technology bonded to you. How do we even know it's compatible with human tissue? For all we know, it should have rejected you based on genetic differences."
The young man didn't seem bothered. "I don't really know. Sorry."
"Do you remember the instance of having your arm severed?" asked the Commander.
The young man nodded. He answered without hesitation. "I was scrounging in a pile of trash. Looking for food or water. I guess I dislodged something. The whole pile started to shift. Sliding down. My arm got pinned by something heavy. Crushed. It shattered the bone and cut through a lot of the muscle. But the tendons... I had to find something sharp, to free myself..."
He looked down, shaking his head.
"I'd prefer if you didn't ask me again," he said quietly. "It's not a fun memory."
"We understand," said nurse Barrett. She started to reach across the table to touch the young man's hand, but stopped at a sharp look from Zhang.
"Tell us," said Zhang. "Tell us who you are. Use your own words."
The young man was instantly suspicious. "What does that mean?"
"It means you're the new kid in class," said Zhang, "and we want to hear what the hell you did over the summer. So let us know. Don't take it so seriously. If you're really this Caldwell guy, you shouldn't have any trouble just telling us."
The young man stared brazenly into the eyes of the Commander. Zhang did not look away. It had been a long time since someone was brave enough to stare at him like this, with such intensity. It became a staring contest. Finally, someone coughed and fidgeted in their seat, which gave Zhang a good excuse for looking away. Not because he was intimidated, but because he was bored of the contest. But he was still impressed.
"My name's Edwin Caldwell," the young man finally said. "I'll turn twenty-three in eighteen days. Maybe nineteen, it's hard to keep track when you're in space. Where it's always night. You just have your internal clock to go off of."
Zhang sat back in his chair, relaxing. This was the cue for Lady Stanford to take the reins.
"I'd like to know more about you," she said. "I'm curious to hear your story. Our files on you are limited. There hasn't been enough time for Skyway to get back with us. Bureaucracy, and crap like that. It takes forever."
This was a lie. Their files on Caldwell were detailed.
"I was born on Earth prime," the young man said. "Right away I showed proficiency with machines and spatial awareness. I learned how to drive my father's air-cab at the age of three. I could pull off maneuvers he didn't even know were possible. I excelled in school and was fast-tracked to the Lunar Hivemind, where I became an indispensible part of the Earth's problem-solving processes. But soon enough the upper government got wind of me. I was recruited to Skyway University and given a substitute position in their most important class; Starframe maneuverability. They gave me the promise of a full-time position once I came of age, if I proved I was as capable in the field as I was in the classroom. So I went on this little mission to a place called Nera. A real cut-and-dry operation. Routine. Easy. But it went wrong for me."
No one batted an eye at this. It all matched perfectly with what the files said.
"We all want to know," said Lady Stanford, "how did you ever survive on such a planet?"
"You know the answer. I'm smart. Smarter than all of you put together. You don't think I could scrounge together an existence from the scraps of mankind? Do you have any idea how much food and other things we throw away every day? It's ludicrous. If we hadn't invented jumpgates, our solar system would have had a new asteroid belt. One made of trash. And if we hadn't learned to dump all our refuse in space, Earth prime would be buried under a uniform sea of trash a hundred miles deep."
Everyone nodded. Not a single one of them could claim innocence as far as the sin of throwing away perfectly edible foodstuffs. Ishmael himself didn't like bell peppers, and yet the station's cook always insisted on using a huge amount of them in every dish. For the vitamin C. Ishmael always picked them out and scraped them into the garbage bin later.
Most ships carried a lot of human cargo, and so they had to have things like atmospheric pressure and oxygen. Not so with most garbage pods. They were automated, controlled remotely by escorts. They carried with them a bubble of air that they had naturally taken on during the filling process. This bubble of air cooled and leaked slowly during transit to the dump planet. Thus, the food scraps contained within were kept fresh by gradually dropping temperature. If the young man was lucky, he might have been able to scrape together a decent bounty of food that wasn't quite freezer burned.
If he was lucky.
"That must have been really boring," Lady Stanford said. "What did you even do all day?"
"Survival isn't boring because there's always something to do," said the young man.
He said this was such genuineness, such truth, that Ishmael began to feel the smallest bit of doubt for the other things he had said. Because he had not said them in this way.
"There's not a lot of a down-time," the young man went on. "You wake up, try to find some sort of water to drink... Then you go out to find parts to fix one of the ten things that broke the day before. This kind of searching, hunting, scavenging can take hours. By the time you get home, you're tired and just want to relax but there's nowhere comfortable to sit. And there's too much work to be done, storing the things you've scavenged. Putting things away. It's non-stop. By the time you go to bed, your brain won't shut up. You just keep thinking of all the things you have to do tomorrow. And all the things you failed to accomplish today. It wasn't boring. It was lonely, and scary, and depressing, but not boring."
Throughout this monologue, Ishmael found that his doubts were
melting away. He felt impressed with this young man. By his resourcefulness. The simple fact he was able to survive on his own, especially after losing his arm, was incredible.
Finally, it was Talia Barrett's turn to speak. "We don't have a lot more to ask. I know that some people would like to subject you to more tests, to really dig deep into your brain. But we can't do that without your approval. It wouldn't be ethical. But I have to ask... would you approve of more tests being done?"
The young man shook his head. "I just want to go home. And continue where I left off. I don't want to fall any further behind."
Chapter 7: Destination - Jumpgate
The quickest way out was in a Starframe.
This time, Jess got to ride with Lady Stanford. His terror at being in the heart of that huge beast was tempered by the view he had of her in a tight jumpsuit. And because she was wearing the visor that would allow her to see what Galgaran saw, she couldn't catch him staring.
"Ever been through a jumpgate?" she asked. "What am I asking, of course you have. How else would you have gotten all the way out here? Hehe."
Jess still found her personality annoying. But as long as she kept her mouth shut, he would get along with her just fine.
"Before you ask," he told her, "yes, I do remember it. Now, I recommend you don't ask me any more questions. Unless you enjoy the smell of vomit."
"It wouldn't be the first time someone blew chunks inside Galgaran," said Lady Stanford, with a bubbly laugh that made the hair on the back of Jess's neck stand up.
They shot through space like a spear, the stabilizers on the back of Galgaran keeping them perfectly stationary. The jumpgate was spreading and thinning out, opening its inner recesses to them like a flower. Glimpsing in through the petals of folded spacetime, Jess could make sense of nothing. It was like a kaleidoscope that had swallowed the entire universe. As the Starframe plunged into the jumpgate, they seemed to be moving in all directions at once. Sucked inward, spit out, tugged to left and right. The jumpgate turned inside out, a prolapse of the fabric of the universe. They went through it like an arm sliding into the sleeve of a sweater.
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