On the medicae deck, Thorfinn and I sit in a clean, white, consultation room and stare at the words on the dataslate lying on the table between us.
++This organism’s genetic sequence is the property of Wild Hunt EugenicsTM.++
“Aldrich. What does that even mean?”
“Technically? Absolutely nothing. Wild Hunt EugenicsTM no longer exists, so they can’t own anything. What it is used to mean is that whoever colonised this moon, sometime during or after the eighteenth millennium, likely crafted absolutely everything, probably as a hunting reserve for wealthy individuals. That, apparently, also included the workers, your ancestors.
“I don’t know how many of these modifications remain and we’ll have to do hundreds of tests with thousands of people to find out exactly what was altered from a baseline human.
“There are a few things I can tell you immediately. There are no traces of hereditary diseases, your appearance, like everyone else on this planet, is unusually aesthetically pleasing, and your immune system does not decay with age. I suspect you are highly resistant to mutations and are unlikely to suffer from cancer.”
“Is that good?”
“For you? Yes. For your ancestors, I doubt it. It is possible they were a servile caste of sex workers and domestic labour. The lack of human vs human conflict on Marwolv suggests there were significant behavioural modifications done to the life-code that influences who you are.
“There are likely hundreds, even thousands of other minor tweeks done to make you a better, more resilient human. If it wasn’t for my implants, you would outperform me in every metric. You're not at transhuman levels. Everything you are capable of can be achieved through drugs and minor surgery, you just get it for free.”
“Huh. So it was cheaper to modify every human on Marwolv than it was to provide healthcare to the working class?”
“Almost certainly. I doubt it was on compassionate grounds, even if the justification for such extensive modification might have been presented as such.”
“How does that compare to an imperial citizen?”
“No idea. I only have mechanicus samples and data. There’s such a large variety of modifications the only base sample I have is my own, which is how I know what was done to you.
“One would think that all humans who left Terra during the great exodus were modified to survive the generational journeys and to reduce resource expenditure, and that later colonisation efforts once warp drives were developed in the eighteenth millennium would also fortify their colonists.
“If you were to ask me to bet on every colony making smart decisions, that no mistakes were made, and that modifications for all humans persisted in their perfected form until the forty-second millennium I would laugh at you.”
Thorfinn looks up at the ceiling, sighs, then refocuses on me, “Alright, I have a good idea of what you mean. Not much I can do about it, unless you can help?”
“It is beyond me. Right now, your body is in harmony and the alterations are to your benefit. Best stick to the cybernetics. They are easier to replace if something goes wrong and I know a lot about them. I actually remotely oversee these two surgeries you’re due for today over a thousand times a month and have done so for years. Just under one point four surgeries an hour.”
“You’re doing one right now?”
“I sure am,” I grin. “Working remotely from home is one of the perks of the job.”
“Can I do that?”
“You’ll have to. It is hard to run a vessel’s worth of troops in person. Working at the speed of thought is the least you must be capable of. Savant lets you learn anything quickly and never forget. A mind impulse unit lets you send and receive messages as fast as you can think them, among many other things.
“Despite my best efforts, these implants don’t work anywhere near as well for a servitor, which is why I need a thinking crew and to stop wasting valuable technology on brain dead flesh.”
“Right, we’re a crew of three right now.”
I nod, “Plus one-hundred and twenty thousand warded servitors and millions of machine-spirits spread across a cobra-class destroyer, a lathe-class light cruiser, a shipyard, the framework of a mobile shipyard the size of a grand-cruiser, and two, half built resource stations. We also have five hundred armed, class one D-POTs, four hundred class two D-POTs, and one hundred class three D-POTs.”
“D-POTs are the shuttles shaped like triangles with fat bellies and oval tops, right?”
“Those are the ones. I armed all of them after the altercation with the tau, so we have a lot of armed transport capacity.”
“Well, it sounds impressive at least. Will you make more?”
“No. Not enough hangar space, and not enough servitors to crew and maintain a bigger fleet. I don’t need more transport capacity either with Erudition’s Howl working as a mining ship supported by a dozen flights of D-POTs, or the gravity lift on the shipyard.
“Two thirds of my labour is in construction and resource collection and it’s still not fast enough for me. I’m a decade away from having even a small crew of trained tech-priests to delegate to, and they will be stuck training even more people most of the time.”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“No wonder you didn’t want to talk about this planetside or do more than intimidate the tau. You have too much to do and not enough to do it with,” Thorfinn smiles and shakes his head. “Just like any other armed force.”
“That’s it. Are you ready to stop chatting and go for your surgery now?”
“You noticed I was nervous? I thought I was hiding it well.”
“You asked these questions last week.”
“Ah.”
“I’m also watching your heart beat and I can detect the stress hormones evaporating with your sweat. There is very little you can hide from a person wearing power armour without extensive training and body modification.”
“That’s just cheating.”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean, ‘yes’?”, Thorfinn shouts.
Faster than he can see, I jab him with a mechadendrite and sedate him. There’s no point dragging this out any longer and I have a class to teach in an hour.
I’m sure he’ll get over it. Probably when I teach him how to dive the noosphere and show him all the games and simulators idle tech-priests hide in the dark corners far from their supervisors. There’s an amazing one to one recreation of a Belacane subterranean hive city set up as a multiplayer online battle area (MOBA).
It is absolutely criminal tech-priests lock down the super internet and keep such fun from everyone else! Sure, there’s no such thing as game balance as you have to fight with exact simulations of yourself and your servitors, but it is the perfect place to test your hardware, resolve disputes, and troll uppity juniors in a fairly safe environment.
Yes, you can get hacked and killed, or puppeted, if you make inadequate preparations, but pulling that off and getting away with it is far harder than actually pulling the plug on a tech-priest's implants. Most cases in the logs are harsh lessons, rather than murder.
As one mind muses, another directs my mechadendrites and places Thorfinn in the specialised auto-doc I created for these two operations.
I place a sterile, glass, half-sphere around his head, leaving his face free. The sphere has a small seal at the back that irradiates the tools as they pass in and out of the operations area.
A two quick flashes of paired lasers engineer Thorfinn’s skull with such precision that when a small suction cup adheres to his skin and pulls the final sliver of bone is broken and one, then two small sections of his skull are removed without a trace of blood, or the pressure of the cup damaging the skin of the coin sized circles of flesh and bone.
A curved, armoured plate with delicate, tendril-like electronics, is glued to the removed sections. Micro manipulators feed the electronics into the brain with precise, gravitic pulses, threading the wires inward without touching the brain or displacing a single neuron.
With a final spray of mechanicus-made nanites, the same ones that are made by auto-sanguines, the removed section is glued back in place. While the nanites fuse, the implants go through calibration and once they are done, the tools and half-sphere retract.
The whole operation is automatic and takes two minutes. When I first started doing this it took me over an hour and I damaged four servitors and seven implants before I got the hang of it. Now I have created a machine and its spirit to perform the operation for me.
I teach my class and return as Thorfinn awakes.
Just as planned.
“How are you feeling, Thorfinn?”
His eyes narrow, “Why do you ask?”
“Any strange tastes on your tongue, are you hearing colours, or smelling images?”
Expressions flash across Thorfinn’s face as he connects the dots, “You absolute bastard. You frigging knocked me out! And yes, I am fine. No thanks to you.”
“Good to hear. I’m going to give you the guardsman manual for lasgun maintenance. See how quickly you can learn it.” I hand him a modified lasgun with a flat battery pack. “See if you can figure out what is wrong with this one. The data should flow into your mind when you touch the gun.”
Thorfinn takes the gun from my hand, stands, and walks over and picks the foldout chair off the wall then pulls down the fold out table.
I place a small case, the size of a paperback book, on the table, “There, that should have everything you need: tools, spare parts, even a small scanner and data slate built into the case. I want to know what pattern this is, what is wrong with it, and what is different from the pattern you identify it as.
“We’re doing this to test your implants. I’ll grab you some food and water and then sit with you as you go through the test. I won’t be helping much while you’re at it, but once you're done, I’ll be happy to explain anything you like in more detail than you could ever want. For now though, I want to see how far you can get with only the book and the maintenance kit, just like any other imperial guardsman.”
“Are you going to ignore every complaint I throw your way?”
“Absolutely. Complaints are for when we’re chatting over beers and burgers, or bitching about dumbass protagonists on the holovids. Right now, you’re at work, healthy, whole, and comfortable and your friend is wearing his boss hat after he just stuffed implants into your head. Enough implants to make a noble imperial scion fork out sufficient thrones to acquire and fund a company of guardsmen for a year to pay for the favour, and he did it for free. That doesn’t include the effort he went through to create a custom rifle so that this test would be more interesting for you.”
“Alright, Aldrich, I get it. Back off. I just, you know, wanted a bit of sympathy from my friend after he drugged me, cut open my head, did whatever the fuck he liked that I have to trust him on because I will likely never, or could never, know. I don’t think you get how scary and weird this is for me because you’re used to it.”
I sigh and fold my arms, “That’s fair, I could do that, but I am worried for you. This is the least surprising act I could think of. I wanted you to learn and adapt even faster than you already do. Being a bit of an ass, rather than explaining everything was my attempt to give a little shock therapy, so the next time you are taken by surprise, my friend has a chance, rather than a funeral. Telling you this makes it moot.”
“Damn. Now I feel kinda shitty.” Thorfinn winces, then looks me in the eyes. “Even so, you should have told me. I know there won’t always be time to talk through every little scenario, but when there is, we should. Miscommunication is the bane of command, as I am sure you know.”
“Well, that’s just the thing,” I scratch my cheek. “I do know that, but I’ve done nothing but direct servitors and machine-spirits for over a decade and I spend a huge amount of time locked in my own head. Time runs a little differently for me, it’s closer to me having spent a millenia learning and ordering all by myself. I am embarrassed to say that, even with a perfect memory, I forgot.”
“We live in such different worlds.”
“Nope, we’re on a void ship.”
Thorfinn snorts, “You’re such an ass. Now shut up. I need to, what was your lingo? RTFM.”
“Yep. Read the... friendly manual.”