PREQUEL, Advance Facility, February 13th, 2335
He lay whole again, but weak. The invasives, transplants, debriefings, re-growths, and interfaces had seemed to go on forever. The smell of sterile afterbirth permeated the bio-station. A freshly exuded secondary smell came to him immediately—the earthy odor given off by his operations suit as it reached for him every time he woke and it mindlessly yearned to become their Potent One.
Perhaps it is intelligent, not the plant-like organism they claim?
It sensed an opportunity to join with him, and reached out for his olfactory’s from their bio-rack like some leaf opening to the morning sun.
Will I ever be permitted to interface with my suit? Will I forever be the oddball, low-tech grunt that gets heaved into the forgotten past to scavenge fresh drone-meat?
Finally, as he lay half-elevated on the graviton board in Sedation Sigma, he heard them there, standing vaguely—mere shadows in mist—above him. Their heads seeming to float like the disembodied visages of ancient gods above the clouded murk of his suppressed visual field. There were three of them: his Gestation-Brother, Brenner, their designer, Doctor Wyeth, and his fellow explorer, erstwhile rival, and sometimes enemy, Captain Davis, come to discuss his fate.
Wyeth was a science gen intentionally generated to be unappealing to men. Her voice, coming from beneath the pale curtain of her prematurely gray and unnaturally thin hair, was a reptilian simper, “So, Agent Brenner, what do you think of your brother’s reconstruction?”
Brenner sounded, precisely like Yule—I am Yule Alpha 7, aren’t I?—in tone but not in diction. Brenner, serving primarily in the Lunar Executive Protection role that their template had been generated for, had gone to great lengths to cultivate the exact speech of the ancient 20th Century actor that they had been patterned after. This appealed to the female gens who dominated the corporate hierarchy on Luna, Mars, Titan and the Orbital Stations.
Yule had been bio-stressed, retrofitted and implanted with low-tech protocols in utero—without the benefit of an accelerated gestational childhood, adolescence and early adulthood like normal gens—and had then been inserted as an infant back into the late 20th Century to await activation. Once activated, Yule had taken the side of the primitives he had been tasked with harvesting. Instead of bringing forward low-tech humans to be converted into bio-drones for PREQUEL’s generation ship, he had come back to 2334 fighting, and had, of course, been stopped.
Yeah, losing the lung was the worst part.
Listen to the backstabber kiss her corporate ass.
He’s still my brother.
Despite Yule’s resentment of his brother for betraying him in his attempt to bring down Mother Corp for—who was I fighting for?—he loved Brenner still, and thrilled to hear his deep, rich voice echo through the bio-station, “Amazing work, Doctor. I thought for certain that refitting Yule would deplete half of our bio-rack. I am grateful for him, as well as for myself.”
The maddeningly serene voice of Captain Davis rose to grate on his nerves. Davis was a high-end military gen who had defected from Father Corp along with some others. Yule had once beaten this big, perfect special-operations freak nearly to death in a Neanderthal camp back in 33,000 B.C. The fact that the tall, handsome I-Ching Master had then healed him, and then outsmarted him, thus leaving him outwitted and in his smug debt, infuriated Yule—no, I was someone else once. Who was I?—to no end.
There was something though, about the celibate, homosexual monster’s voice that relaxed him, even in his current altered state, “Excellent physical reconstruction, Doctor. I am pleased that you were able to retain the distinctive scarring and psychopathic body art. A pristine reconfiguration would have raised suspicions among the primitives on his return.”
“Why thank you, Captain. We were actually unable to salvage much of the scarring. After reconstruction we used cosmetic bacterial treatments to achieve a full replication.”
You sinister bitch! I’d pull you down by your hair and eat your face, but it would all fall out in my fist!
Brenner’s voice, so deep and unique that it gained instant attention, chimed in, “Doctor, I am most concerned with his psychological state. His protocols—particularly the Contingency Cannibalism, Apex Polygamy and Stone-age Predation suites—became hopelessly erratic towards the end. When I debriefed him during his 21st Century incarceration he was barely sane. I believe only the Mother Wolf Archetype suite prevented his hemispheric nexus from convulsing under the stress of his recollections and plunging him into a vegetative state."
That’s thoughtful of you, Bro. You wouldn’t want a head of cabbage for a twin brother would you—you backstabbing prick!
The doctor’s voice simpered with satisfaction, “Oh, the debriefings and interfaces supplied a surprisingly detailed psychological matrix. As you adduced, the Mother Wolf Archetype suite prevented Yule’s experimental protocols from completely unraveling his psyche. We will be tapping into that and linking it to his largely unused Indo-European Archetype suite. Since it appears we will not be using him for early medieval retrievals in light of the Neanderthal fiasco, I believe it is a wise use of that unique suite.”
Davis’ voice had an obscure note of worry attached to his Zen-machine diction, “Doctor, are you certain? My interface with Yule indicated that his Jungian subconscious has been polluted by significant Appalachian Protestant, pre-contact Native American and even pre-sapient Neanderthal sub-strata. If we send him back into a low-tech environment he will quickly progress up the food chain and become socially established and recalcitrant once again. If we insert him into a high-tech setting he will surely…”
The transcendental oatmeal cookie is afraid I’m going to knock over the pots in the Dali Lama’s garden. Next time, Davis there won’t be five-and-a-half Neanderthal do-gooders to pull me off of your suppressed gay ass!
Brenner’s voice cut off Davis with a note of worry, “Captain, Doctor, the halo imager! His hypothalamus is lighting up and the frontal lobe is ghosting out.”
Before Wyeth could check the readings he heard Davis declare smugly, “He just wants to rip my head off. Brenner you cannot imagine how messy it is in there. His barely suppressed desire to attack dominant males, of any species, is one of the only consistent aspects of his inner self. Doctor, please be careful with his command implantation. He is frighteningly emotive where the primitives are concerned. I recommend a second psyche-scrub just to be cer…”
Someone please shut the big queer up…
He was already drifting toward Sedation Omega when he heard her sibilant voice attempt to sooth the big Zen-freak, “Not to worry, Captain... My, my, does my beautiful Baby Boy have a raging lizard brain or is he just glad to see me? Is something angering you in there, Yule, or are you just glad to see Mommy? Would you like to speak to…”
Speak up, you diabolical bitch!
This strand of the novel is complete, and available in the print anthology, Astride the Chariot of Night.
