by Mark Wandrey
Minu's mind was whirling. They had it badly wrong. How could they know so much of what happened and have no idea that Ivan and his band attacked her group? Didn't they know he tried to kill Cherise? What about her being raped? "You said one was impaled? How?"
"We don't know how exactly, he impaled himself in the chest with one of the hunting knives we stocked in the hut during the first leg of the physical Trials. Most generous of you to share them. Very sad that one resulted in an accidental death." Minu's heart was racing again, this time from fear. She'd killed that boy! Deep in her heart she'd known he might be dead. To have the truth so simply laid before her and with a ready-made alibi was horrible Oh my God! She was a murderer, and they were going to let her get away with it!
"Oh no, what did I do?" she sobbed. Someone did something to the field keeping her in place and she could open her yes. Jacob came around into view; the look on his face was one of concern and interest.
"You did the best you could," he said and laid a hand on her leg. The limb felt like it was asleep. "You did what any leader would do in this sort of situation. You rose to the occasion with determination, self-sacrifice, and strength of character.
She fought with her inner self for a moment before opening her mouth to speak. Before she could he cut her off. "Not now, no more talking. You need your rest. There will be plenty of time to talk at the post-trial briefing." He turned to leave.
"Chosen Jacob?"
"Yes, Miss Alma?"
"You said a lot of the last was pure conjecture." He nodded his handsome head. "Then how do you know as much as you do?"
"The first to wake was Ivan Malovich, he told us quite a bit of the story, including how he saved your life after the raft flipped. Quite a brave boy. He got stabbed through the neck by a branch and nearly died himself. The others have substantiated his account since then, with only a few minor variations. Completely natural considering the traumatic situation.” He looked her in the eye and cocked his head slightly. “That is what happened, isn't it?”
Minu swallowed and nodded her head ever so slightly saying “Yes.” She marveled at how easy it was and wondered who'd spoken that word. It couldn't be her. Minu Alma didn’t lie!
He smiled and turned again to leave. "Get some sleep, we'll talk again soon." The door closed and she was left alone with a mind full of raging thoughts and fears. Confusion and shame battled for supremacy until someone out of view flipped a switch and sedatives sent her back to sleep.
* * *
She was fed and slept several times before Dr. Tasker made another appearance. Despite her protestation they refused to lower the stunfield and she remained immobilized from the neck down. When the doctor came in her room was aglow with a soft natural lighting as he asked her how she was.
"Tired of being restrained," was Minu's terse reply.
"I can understand that."
"Good, then your here to let me up?"
"As a matter of fact, I am." Minu felt her first bit of genuine excitement is quite some time. She saw a couple of nurses come into view and what was probably another doctor.
"Who is he?" she asked of the new doctor.
"That is Dr. Bane, he is a specialist." The new doctor nodded to her and she wondered what his specialty might be. "All right, we're going to deactivate the field from head down slowly. We have to be careful your body doesn't go into shock."
"I understand," she told him and the doctor smiled and nodded to one of the nurses. She lifted a handheld computer and Minu felt her feeling instantly begin to return, starting at collarbone and slowly moving down.
"Tell me if you feel any discomfort." Again Minu nodded as the field progressed downward. As it passed her shoulders she could look down at her body finally and saw she was covered with a sheet. Mildly disappointed that she would have to wait for the field, she stole herself to do just that.
As it moved down, she tested each freed set of muscles. They were stiff and a little sore but otherwise none the worse for wear. As feelings began to return to her arms she instantly knew something was wrong with the right one. She fixed her gaze on the covered limb and Dr. Bane, the mystery specialist, noted her movement instantly.
"What's wrong with my arm," she directed her question at him.
Dr. Bane looked at Dr. Tasker before turning back to her. "You have to understand the degree of severity of the injuries suffered from the kloth, then the river itself."
"Will I be able to use it again?" she almost whispered, a dark force grasping at her heart. No arm, meant no Chosen. Then a little voice spoke the name Alexis Krum in her mind and she felt tears begin to roll down her cheeks. Was a mangled arm a fair price to pay for taking a boy's life?
"We couldn't salvage the limb," Dr. Bane said simply, as if telling her she had a hangnail. At least she knew what his specialty might be. Limb removal? The field continued downward and she shifted slightly. As the blanket moved she could feel it across the skin of her right arm. What? She'd heard stories about people still having feeling from a missing limb. No, there was something there, she was sure of it!
"But," she said as the field reached her waist and she sat up. The movement was almost too fast as she saw spots behind her eyes. The blanket fell away to reveal her new cybernetic arm. It moved without thought, just as her old one would have, answering the long learned muscle memory any five year old child possessed. She raised it to her face so she could examine the hand. A hand with three fingers and a thumb slightly farther forward than the old one. The color was a dull metallic gray that offset starkly in clear line of demarcation where it joined her skin, just below her armpit. There was some scar tissue there and a strange spider web of metallic filaments just visible below the skin.
"We don't have the technology to make one for you,” Dr. Bane explained, “so the Chosen use the closest thing we can find from Concordia manufacture. Cybernetic Medicine is my specialty. The species who used these are long gone, lost in the halls of time, or so I'm to understand. Probably extinct for a million years. However some warehouse on a distant world has a sizable stock of replacement parts for them. Their biology and physiology is remarkably compatible with our own.” He gestured at the limb she was flexing. “It was almost like they were designed for humans."
"It only feels funny where my arm ends and it begins," she noted aloud.
"Party because you are still healing,” he told her. “The cybernetic nerves will shortly blend with your own, a remarkable chemical compound that infuses them allows this. Once that knitting is complete, you'll never know it's not your own arm, unless you look at it. Of course it will always be a little strange. It's not you, after all."
"I understand." She let the arm lay by her side. At least the crying stopped.
"You shouldn't feel sad," the cybernetic doctor told her, "that arm is superior to the one you were born with in many ways."
"Except it's a three fingered hand and gray." The doctor nodded and shrugged.
“Here,” he said and held out a metal tube that he'd been holding. She took it with her right hand without thinking. It felt like a simple metal pipe, maybe a millimeter thick and twenty long. “Squeeze it.” She did. “Hard,” he told her. Minu bore down on it. To her shock the tube crumbled like a toothpaste tube. She dropped it over the side of the bed like it as suddenly hot. It made a fairly loud clank as it hit the floor, testimony to its true nature. “Your arm is roughly sixteen times as strong physically as a normal human arm for your sex and build. Structurally more like a hundred times as tough. It will stop bullets easily and the skin is tough enough for you to punch through brick. So that you don't injure your real self, it has a tiny brain that interprets your instructions. While you could easily lift a thousand kilos with the arm, the hand would drop the load long before your shoulder was pulled from the socket. Civilian versions have automatic limiters in place.”
“Amazing,” she said and examined the palm. Sure enough, it was untouched after crushing the pipe.
“You h
ave to really think about pushing yourself for it to exert more than normal force, another safeguard. You wouldn't want to pulverize your left hand while washing up for dinner, would you?” He laughed largely, quite amused at his own humor.
“Shall we continue?” Dr. Tasker asked. Dr. Bane looked self-conscious and stepped back. Minu sat and waited patiently until the field was completely gone and she could move her legs. Without prompting she lifted her feet and rotated out and down to the floor. Two nurses appeared, a man and a woman, to help her as she stood for the first time in many days. She was only a little unsteady.
“How long was I in this bed?” she asked no one in particular.
“Two weeks,” Dr. Tasker answered.
Minu just grunted in understanding. Once she was sure she wouldn't tumble over, she reached down and lifted her nightgown. She was only mildly surprised to realize she was naked under the gown. After the trial she was not terribly embarrassed to expose herself, though the male nurse on her left looked away quickly. As she expected there was a jagged scar in her abdomen about twenty centimeters long and just to the left of her navel. But there were also two other ones, these neat, straight, and much shorter, one on either side of the longer one. What she didn't expect was that her groin was shaved. She used her new cybernetic index finger to trace the long scar.
"We needed to operate to repair damage to your intestines." Dr. Tasker spoke again. “We usually shave patients within a half meter of any incisions. Standard procedure, you understand.”
"I see. How did the wound happen?" she asked, testing the story woven in her absence.
"I understand it was a jagged rock when your raft overturned. You don't remember?" Minu didn't answer, instead she just lowered her gown and took a few tentative steps. "How are you feeling?"
"Better that I can get up now."
"Good, you have an interview this afternoon." Icy cold fear raced through her blood.
"Interview? With who?"
"The Chosen leadership council, of course," said Tasker.
"But I thought..."
"What, just because you were injured you were out of the running? As the daughter of the First, you should realize that a Chosen need not be a perfect physical specimen. And as Dr. Bane just told you, that arm is actually superior in many ways. It may end up serving you well, should you be Chosen."
"Do I have to charge it up, or something?" she asked Dr. Bane.
The man chuckled and placed a data chip on the nightstand by her bed. "There are the technical specifications on the limb. It is powered by a 39 type two micro EPC and should provide enough power to operate it for your foreseeable lifespan."
"There is an EPC in here? Wow!" She began to look at the limb as more than just a symbol of her failure in the Trials, as reminder that she killed someone. That there was a Concordia manufactured EPC in her body was incredible.
"So if you're feeling well enough," Dr. Tasker said and opened the hospital room’s small closet, "there is a uniform in here. Please get dressed. I can have a nurse stay if you-"
"No, I'll be fine." He nodded and they all left in short order. Minu dressed somewhat mechanically, only stopping part of the way through to note how the new arm worked without thinking about it. She didn't really even pay attention to what she was putting on beyond the fact that it fit. The hand only messed her up when tying the laces on her boots. The three fingers kept fumbling the laces and she didn't know why.
Dr. Tasker hadn't said how long before the meeting so when she was done she scooped up the chip and slid it into the room's computer. It only took a few minutes to find the answer to the difficulty with the laces.
"Some patients find initially that certain lifelong motor reflex acts such as brushing of teeth, scratching in unseen areas, and tying shoes can become difficult for a short time," it read. "This is attributed to the reduction in fingers from four to three and is more often than not overcome in short order. The computer within the limb automatically sorts out the nerve impulses trying to control the extra finger. Eventually, the brain discards the superfluous instructions permanently."
Minu held up her new hand and looked at it. She couldn't help thinking it had a cartoon quality to it. Three fingers instead of four. "I wonder if I can find some flesh colored spray paint?"
She finished with her boots (concentrating on using thumb and index fingers only). They were of a modern comfortable design, instead of the simple shoes she'd worn during the Trials. She stood and looked at herself in the mirror when her door opened and a nurse stuck her head in.
"You ready?" she asked. Minu smoothed the front of the jumpsuit over her scared abdomen (noted the slight tenderness) and nodded her head. "No problem with the shoes? Dr. Bane said you might need help.”
"I figured it out, thanks."
"You Chosen are chiseled from stone," the nurse said with a tone of amazement in her voice.
"Why do you say that?"
"After that horrible accident, getting chewed up by a kloth and all, you get a new arm and don't even miss a beat. You're ready for more!"
Minu thought about it a moment and just shrugged. The nurse was almost ten years older than her. A mature woman was amazed at her, a fifteen year old girl? Maybe I am ready for more! "I kinda thought you were Chosen," she told the nurse.
"Me? Oh, no way. Not a chance. I thought about it, but I have an uncle who was in the Trials twenty or so years ago. He was so messed up afterwards he doesn't talk about it very much. There have only been what, a dozen women? You've got some big shoes to fill."
Minu looked down at her new boots and tested how they felt. "These seem to fit me just fine." The older woman looked at her in a way no one ever looked at her before. Minu realized she was being looked at with profound respect.
"They're waiting for you," the nurse said and held the door as Minu walked through. A short way down the gleaming white corridor another door opened and Dr. Tasker waved her inside. It was a simple room with a round conference table squared on one side. Empty seats were arrayed all around the round sides but only one sat on the flattened side. She knew where she was to sit before he gestured to it.
"Your health is of primary concern, even above this interview,” Dr. Tasker explained. “You may ask for a recess at any time without it having a bearing on the disposition of your status."
"I understand." Minu took the preferred seat and quickly poured herself a drink of water. It was ice cold and very refreshing. The doctor, apparently satisfied that she was not going to keel over any moment, took one of the seats on her left. Almost instantly the only other door in the room opened and people started to file in.
"You may remain seated," the first one who entered said. She'd instantly recognized him from their earlier meetings, Second Among the Chosen Jacob. All those entering were wearing the signature jumpsuits of the Chosen, black as the depths of space. When she'd been a little girl, her father told her it was like a black arm band of mourning. "We serve to pay off our debt," he'd told her, "the color is symbolic of the pain our people must pay in living on this alien world, and not Earth." She'd never thought of Bellatrix as alien. It was the world of her birth, as it was of her father and for twenty generations before. Sometimes grownups could be so confusing.
It took very little time for the room to fill. She counted ten Chosen; including the doctor and Dram who'd she'd met back at Steven’s Pass. One space remained empty, that directly opposite where she sat. Once they were all seated and some helped themselves to water, it began.
"Minu Alma,” spoke up Dram, “you are here having successfully completed all phases of the Chosen Trials." She looked dumbfounded. "You have a question already?"
"But, I thought I failed the last part."
"Why would you think that?"
"We never found the objective!"
"Young lady, there was no objective." There was a disturbing twinkle in Dram’s eye and Minu almost spat on the floor. “The last segment of the trial tests several aspects of the appl
icant. First is problem solving, another endurance, and finally sheer stubbornness. You passed on all accounts. Thus, here we are. Do you understand now?"
"So we were allowed to wander around until we fell over to see if we were stupid enough to just keep going?"
"There is a fine line between stupidity and bravery." Jacob spoke and several of the others chuckled. "You held your group together, and did so better than most others.”
“Most?” someone else asked.
“All then,” Dram said. “Few would have continued to follow the river even past it becoming impassable on foot. Yet you persevered."
"But someone died," she said, her insides knotting up.
"Are you trying to talk yourself out of this?" Jacob asked.
"No Chosen," she said and looked down.
"That is more like it. For the last week or so, we on Chosen council have reviewed your file and have reached our determination. Only one final step remains. You must be confirmed by our masters."
Minu looked up, her heart racing. The lights dimmed to half their former brightness and the door swung open once more to reveal an inhuman shape. The being walked on four spindly backwards hinged legs and stood barely taller than her. It walked into the room with silent grace and considered her with unblinking almond shaped eyes of infinitely deep blackness. The Tog regarded her as she regarded him. Minu reminded herself, the Tog didn't have male and female parts. They were like worms in that they were both male and female at the same time. Hse or Hser was the proper way to address unisexual species of the Concordia.
As soon as she realized what was walking through the door she jumped to her feet and bowed almost low enough to touch her forehead to the floor. Her still healing abdominal muscles screamed in protest and her head spun so badly she was afraid she would tumble over and crash into the table. She controlled the pain and stood back up. The Tog inclined its vaguely humanoid head ever so slightly in reply. Devoid of mouth and ears, their heads only held eyes and lizard-like nose slits for breathing. Her father said that he believed they were completely deaf, communicating only through a combination of hand symbols, smells, and bio-luminescence.
