Simulated battles bleed into each other like raindrops in a puddle, losing their individual identities to the greater whole of simulated war. With all of her body’s own sensory input effectively removed, the ship’s Oracle is free to craft infinite scenarios with which to test and hone her mind. The ship that she is to pilot is not a weapon of war, but an exploration and scouting vessel. It is, however, equipped with weapons and shielding, and with her mind a fusion of flesh and machine, she is far more suited to wielding those tools than the crew members that she will be shepherding.
In the first few simulations, she is simply having to outmaneuver an enemy cruiser–an equivalent vessel to her own. Conserving ammunition or energy is not a priority in such a situation for either combatant, so the fights tend to be over quickly. Some scenarios have the goal being the elimination of the enemy vessel, while others prioritize the safety of the crew, or the cargo, or sometimes simply her own life. A ship without its pilot is very nearly helpless, after all.
Over the days or weeks or years (she’s really not sure) that she spends in these simulations, they evolve in complexity. Occasionally, she’s managing multiple remotely-controlled zones through subspace communications. Sometimes she’s having to regulate all of the internal systems of a ship manually when the automatic systems go offline.
In one scenario, she is placed in control not of a cruiser, but of a full-scale Empyreal warship. This stresses her nervous system to its limits, as she has to deal with all of the sensory and mental input not just of the ship as it currently is, but as it will be in the immediate future, should it not be changed, like an overlay on top of all of her senses. It would be enough to cause permanent brain damage to most pilots, but she assumes (when she has enough leftover brain space to assume) that Lieutenant Denilah is under orders to push her harder than usual. Perhaps because of her history as a cyborg, it’s assumed that her systems are used to higher levels of stress. She certainly hopes not. Every moment controlling the simulated warship makes her body feel hot, nauseous, as her own endocrine system and the tank’s artificial supplemental systems pump her body full of enough adrenaline and cortisol to kill someone with a weaker heart. She’s pretty sure that she vomits into her liquid respirator, by the feeling of painful burning in her lungs, but it gets flushed out rapidly enough to prevent her from suffocating, much to her chagrin. Choking to death on her own vomit feels preferable to this.
Luckily, it doesn’t last forever. Eventually, once she’s proved capable of piloting a hundred different ships in a thousand different configurations of hellishly stressful situations, she finds herself being gently guided back into proper consciousness, her own senses being returned to her. Some deep, animal part of her resents that almost as much as the simulation. At least she was in control of something, despite feeling like she was dying. She hears a voice prickle at her ears, a voice that is not Lieutenant Denilah. It’s a man’s voice, firm and strong. It makes her shudder.
“You did wonderfully, Louise. I think it’s about time that we start making preparations for takeoff, don’t you?”
-
This is not the first time that Louise has found herself getting surgery in a basement, and on her current life trajectory it likely won’t be the last. There’s a way that these things are done. It starts with unzipping her old security jumpsuit down to the waist, and tying the sleeves tight just above her hips. She removes the bindings on her chest, and stuffs them into the improvised waistband of her jumpsuit, before hopping up on the metal operating table. Declan may be a criminal, but to his credit he politely refrains from staring. This is going to be unpleasant for the both of them, as-is.
Louise lies down, and Declan crosses the room so that he can begin strapping her down. Her ankles are first, then her hips, then her wrists. It’s only then, once it’s too late for her to back out, that the two of them really begin to talk.
“Things must not be going very well for you if you’re resorting to doing business with me, Lou,” Declan rasps. When he speaks, she can catch glimpses of his multiple rows of sharp-looking metal teeth in the low light of the sub-basement.
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“Please don’t call me that. I don’t let anyone call me that anymore, and especially n-”
Declan interrupts, “Especially not me?” He pulls a small metal folding table out from under the surgical table, and sets it up next to Louise. He takes one of the few devices that she actually recognizes, and a brilliant ray of violet light erupts from it to sterilize the surface of the table.
“You know that’s not what I was gonna say,” she says. “I don’t know why you can’t just believe me when I say that it wasn’t about you. I just had to make the right decision for me.” Her neck is beginning to strain slightly, having to manage the tasks of speaking and keeping her head upright at the same time. She’s not sure why she’s bothering with the latter–he keeps refusing to look at her.
He chuckles. It’s an awful sound, and turns into more of a cough, at the end. She’d be concerned about him infecting the surgical tools if she didn’t know the man hasn’t seen another human soul in months. He keeps collecting tools, sterilizing them with the strange violet beam. “Well, look where that got the both of us. Back in a fuckin’ hole in the ground,” he sneers.
Far too gently, he slips a small, flat pillow beneath her head, and places his icy cold fingers on her forehead. She recoils, lowering her head so that he can strap it in place. He coos, softly, and she doesn’t deign to dignify it with a response. He sterilizes his own hands, next, using the strange contraption, and then puts on a pair of thick pink rubber gloves, which get the same treatment. He begins the process of drawing a paralytic into a syringe.
When she can no longer see his face, his voice loses all its vitriol, and he sounds disturbingly earnest. “Are you happy, now that you’ve gotten to make your own decisions?”
“It hasn’t exactly led me where I wanted to go,” she hisses, as he sticks the needle carefully into the delicate flesh of her eyelid. She hardly notices the tiny pinprick of pain. In moments, she finds that she can’t blink with her synthetic eye, anymore–not that it needs it.
“But you’re still glad that you did it, aren’t you?” She can feel him looking at her, now, his gaze boring twin holes through her skull. As his weak vocal chords strain, she can almost hear the voice of the man that she used to love. “You always cared more about the process. Me? I like results. I think that’s the real reason that we couldn’t be together, Lou.”
She sees him in the periphery of her working eye, tools in each hand. With a pick and a screwdriver, he begins disassembling her eye much as she had tried to do not long ago, but with infinitely more practiced hands. She can feel the light pressure that the driver exerts on her eye, and that the eye exerts on her optic nerve, and it makes her want to scream.
“We couldn’t be together because you refuse to play by anyone's rules, Declan, not even your own.” Louise finds her own voice quaking slightly, though she’s not certain if it’s with rage or with fear.
He efficiently removes the last of the flush screws keeping her false iris mounted down, and with a flick, he carefully takes out the ring of metal and sapphire, placing it down on the tray beside him. She can see out of the corner of her eye that he’s smiling, really smiling. That locks her current emotion to fear, because she’s never seen Declan smile. He doesn’t respond to her, and so she watches him operate in silence with her one working eye.
With his screwdriver, pick, and miniature soldering iron, he slowly removes all of the internals of her synthetic eye without even touching her actual flesh, until all that’s left is the exterior shell and the optical nerve hookup. As he begins to reach for his scalpel, however, Louise begins to panic, properly. Her muscles tense, and she begins to involuntarily strain against the restraints of the table.
“I didn’t think you were going to take the optical hookup,” she stammers out. “Leave it, please. I’m gonna need that when I get good work again, I-”
He snorts, derisively, and she almost thinks she can see a forked tongue behind those awful rows of silver teeth. “For the price that you wanted? You’re gonna have to do a little better than just the eye.”
The pick and scalpel are lowered into her eye socket, and she flinches, hard, causing the blade to nick against her eyelid. Crimson bubbles up from the cut, and oozes down into the socket. He clicks his tongue in disapproval. “Fine, be that way. You always did like to make things hard for me for no good reason–it’s not like you’re ever going to be able to afford implants this nice again. Your choice, then. I’ll take the optical hookup or the oracle port. And before you say anything, if you really wanna go with ‘neither’, then that’s fine. Go ahead and get your things, bring them down here. I think we both know that you don’t have anywhere else to go.”
She goes still again, stopping her resistance. She feels the drop of blood drip down into the hollowed out shell of her synthetic eye, and resists the urge to shudder. “Fine,” she says. “Do whatever you want.”