Red Eye

Astarte didn’t really get many chances to visit her mothers house, and rarely ever stayed the night. So she never really got the chance to visit her old room. She had thought that since her mom had renovated the brothel she would have packed away Aster’s old stuff and made use of the space. Instead she had left everything exactly the way Aster left it. Some things were out of place from regular cleaning, and someone had definitely gone through her manga seeing as some of the volume where out of order. But beyond that everything was the same. Her dresser and closet still had some of the clothes she had left behind, her shelves were still packed with books and music. And the little white daisies her mom had painted on the wall when she was a kid were faded, but still recognizable.

And most importantly, the floor still creaked just a little whenever someone stood by her door. “Come in” she said as soon as she heard the floor creak and saw the small shadow peak out from under her door.

There was a slight pause before her visitor gently opened the door, and poked their violet head through. “How did you do that?” Alwen asked. She looked very groggy, and just barely managing to stand upright.

Astarte smiled mischievously “X-ray vision.”

She looked stunned for a second “did the Toy Man make an eye that can see through walls?” she asked incredulously.

Astarte snorted “I wish, he said the radiation would fry my brain. Shame too, it would have made peeping a lot easier” she said hoping to get a rise out of Alwen

Alwen stared at her for a second before shaking her head in defeat “I’m far to hungover for this.”

“If you need more time to recover then we can postpone this.” Aster offered.

“No, its my own dumbass fault for going so overboard. I swear one of these days I’m going to swear off alcohol forever.”

Aster made a face “Blegh, life without booze wouldn’t be worth living.”

Alwen glanced at her and pursed her lips, but held back whatever it was that she wanted to say. “Well alcoholism aside, are you ready to remove the bandages?”

“Already, didn’t I just get brain surgery? Shouldn’t we wait a little longer?"

“Ordinarily yes, but the Toy Man used the same filaments we used to operate on your eye to stitch your head back together. He perfectly healed the bit of skull we removed and stitched the two halves of skin back together on a cellular level. So while I’d recommend against anything too extraneous or stressful, it’s perfectly safe to remove the bandages.” She explained.

Aster blinked with her one eye in surprise. It appeared that the Toy Man’s progress into advanced medical tech was further along than she had ever imagined. Just a few years ago something like this was thoroughly outside the realm of possibility. She would have to see if she could convince the Toy Man to sell some of his designs to Caduceus. “Then by all means, let’s see what half a billion credits gets me.”

“How much!” Alwen gasped.

“A little over half a billion. Costs were pretty high since this is the first ever synthetic human eye, and might have been a little cheaper if I just went for an exact replacement of what I had before”

“How rich are you?” Alwen gaped.

“Upper half of the one percent here in Sol, but close to the bottom when compared to some of the hundred billionaires in the core worlds, and I can’t even hold a candle to the trillionaires. I usually just pump all of my profits back into the market, but I keep about a billion in savings just incase something goes catastrophically wrong.”

“I guess I be shouldn’t too surprised, my earnings from this last year have already exceeded what I would have made on Torwen ten times over.”

“And who said crime doesn’t pay.” Aster quipped.

Alwen looked unimpressed by her witty remark and simply drew the strange Torweni knife from her belt and stood behind Aster’s head. One quick cut and the bandage came free, Astarte unconsciously closed both eyes as Alwen undid the remaining bandage. Alwen saw that Aster had closed her eyes and gently turned her head to face the mirror over her dresser. “Go ahead and look” she said softly.

Slowly Aster opened her right eye, through the mirror she observed the left side of her face. Despite a little bald patch of hair that was shaved away for the surgery, her face was perfectly fine. There wasn’t even a hairline scar of where Alwen and the Toy Man had cut. The savage scar she had received from the explosion was still there, but Bachir had therapies that could slowly mend the scar tissue should she ever want to remove the last vestige of her grievous injury. Though she doubted that she ever would, she wanted to leave the scar as a reminder of the time her carelessness had lost her an eye.

Slowly she opened her left eye, there was no split-second blur as her vision adjusted. Just one moment she was looking at herself with only one eye, and the next she had binocular vision once more. Like she had never lost it. The room around her spun a little as her brain suddenly realized that she could see out of both eyes, and no longer compensated for her lack of depth perception. The eye in question looked completely identical to the one she had lost, she had to send the Toy Man as many photos of her face before the accident as possible so that he could perfectly replicate what she had.

She closed her right eye so that she was only looking out of her new eye, and she felt no noticeable difference between the two.

“Will wonders never cease” she muttered as she opened her other eye again.

Alwen chuckled “Not so long as there are genius inventors out there like the Toy Man. Honestly I felt a little redundant.”

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

“Give yourself some credit, Toy Man’s smart, but he isn’t without his faults. Sometimes his vanity and ego will get in the way of common sense.”

“What’s his deal anyway? Why is he-“ she trailed off

“Half burnt and creepy.” Aster offered.

“To put it bluntly, yes.”

Aster stood and stepped towards the mirror to get a better look. “Kind of an interesting tale. He was some sort of child prodigy, way too smart for his own good. Scoffed at the religion his parents tried to teach him. Wrote it, and all its lessons on morality, off as superstitious idiocy made up by lesser minds who sought to bind themselves to mediocrity. Believed the only reason he was so smart was because he shirked spirituality and morality in pursuits of money and glory. He made all sorts of things for anyone who had money, bombs, chemical agents, guns, until one day a bomb of his dropped half a sky elevator on his section of the city. Got buried and burned.”

“That’s awful!”

“Yup. He was buried for four days until some Maidens dug him out. Can you imagine that, four days in intense pain, choking on fumes and ash? He didn’t bleed out because the fires had cauterized his wounds. And while he was under there he had some sort of epiphany, realized that this was all his fault, and that the pain he was suffering was divine punishment. I guess he figured with all the darkness and fire that he was already in hell. When they dug him out he decided that God had given him a chance to be better, and he dedicated his whole life to the betterment of mankind.”

Aster saw Alwen frown through the reflection in the mirror. “That sounds-”

“Conceited.”

“Yes”

“It is, but he is literally the best out there. Bachir thinks he’s and arrogant blasphemer and hates to even think about him. Apparently they got into an argument during one of my operations and things got really heated.” Aster said as she leaned in closer to the mirror.

She had requested a lot of special features that normal human eyes didn’t have. Infrared and ultraviolet vision, catlike night vision, a range finder, and a few other neat tricks that involved her pupils. Supposedly she could access them with just a thought, the issue was that the human brain didn’t normally have the right mental pathways to do any of that. So now she had to figure out how to trigger it on command and build the muscle memory to do so.

She stared at herself very intently, thinking about her eye very hard, consciously trying to feel that region of her face that her brain generally ignored. Until she felt a strange ‘something’ and her vision shifted. In her right eye she could see that the dark black cornea of the cybernetic implant turned bright red, and in her left eye she began to the see a soft warm red glow around everything emitting heat in her room. the change in eye color wasn’t necessary to the function, but if she was getting a brand-new eye with extra vision options, then she also wanted it to turn red whenever it did so.

“That is so trippy.” She muttered as she turned to better look at Alwen, but just as she focused on Alwen she lost concentration and it transitioned back to normal.

Alwen’s eyebrows scrunched up “How did you do that?”

“I thought about it really hard. Not sure about the Torweni, but human brains are pretty adaptable, and can rewire themselves.”

“Huh. I see” she said uncertainly. “Would you mind sitting on the bed, Toy Man gave me a list of things to check once you were awake”

Aster sat and Alwen pulled out a small flashlight. What proceeded was every possible exam a doctor could perform in a fancy brothel. Alwen had Astarte follow her finger as she moved it closer, further, and to the edges of her vision. She shined the light into the eye to test its reaction and compared it to her other eye. Had her read really small letters from a distance, which she was sure she couldn’t have done before. Then had her feel out and test the other vision options, infrared came the easiest and was also the easiest to get used too. All color faded away, and she saw things in turns of brightness. She could even vaguely see through the walls, though looking through walls in a brothel was more distracting than it was useful.

It took her a couple of minutes to figure out Ultraviolet, and when she did the effects of it startled her so much that she lost control and slid back into normal vision. The whole room had changed colors in ways that made her brain hurt, and when she had looked at Alwen she could see every pore on her face with absolute clarity. “Jeez, that’s going to take some getting used to” Astarte muttered.

“Was that the night vision or ultraviolet?” Alwen asked as she conferred with her little clip board.

“Ultraviolet, it’s the weirdest one so far. By the way, you should use more moisturizer, your pores are pretty huge.”

“There not huge!” Alwen said quickly “You just saw them in ultraviolet, its like looking at an overexposed photo.”

“I’m just teasing. Next is night vision, should we turn the lights off?”

“Lets leave them on until you figure out how to do that one, I need to be able to see what your eye is doing to make sure it’s working fine.”

“Alright, gimme a sec.” Astarte said as she picked a spot on Alwen’s face to focus on. The night vision was really just a controlled expansion of her pupil, trying to expand the light receptor in her eye to absorb more light. She could also tighten it to a pin prick to focus on small or distant objects. She felt a contraction within her eye as the whole room got really bright, she felt a slight stabbing pain in her brain but chose to soldier on despite the growing headache.

“That is freaky” Alwen muttered to herself, “See if you contract it even further.”

Astarte gritted her teeth and pulled her pupil even wider; the room was almost to bright to see anything.

“Okay, now relax.” She ordered, and Astarte gratefully complied.

“What did it look like?”

“Kind of scary, your eye turned bright red and then your pupil chased the red to the edges of your cornea until there was just a faint ring of red, and then it engulfed your whole eye. You could intimidate a lot of people with a skill like that.”

Aster grinned “Half billion-credit eye, great for party tricks”

Alwen rolled her eyes, and Aster realized that she could now see the thousands of little flecks of color in her eyes. Most of it was violet amethyst like fragments, but sprinkled throughout her eyes were also yellow citrine and deep blue sapphire. Alwen was also staring into her eyes, though with a more professional air. For an instant she felt her heartbeat accelerate and a flush of heat rush through, and she thought about taking this girl on her childhood bed. And then a moment later clarity broke through and pushed down the arousal.

“Are you alright, your face just went bright red? Are you feeling feverish?” Alwen asked in concern as she pressed a hand to her forehead.

“No, just horny. You’re a little too close” Astarte muttered.

Alwen straightened up and cleared her throat “Uh, I see. But I, uh, don’t swing that way.”

Astarte scratched the back of her head “yeah, Modius told me. Don’t worry about it, just a biological reaction to a pretty doctor.”

“I don’t think I’m that pretty” Alwen said with a blush.

Astarte laughed “Are you kidding, first moment I saw you I was checking you out. Seriously, all you Torweni have this lithe elven frame and fair facial features, its totally unfair.”

Alwen laughed as well, and whatever brief awkwardness they felt in that moment passed. “Don’t sell yourselves short, you Terrans have a certain robust and grizzled quality, like Olken.”

Astarte had been learning Torweni, and was using classic Torweni literature to help her study. Olken were the Torweni version of fantasy Dwarves or Orcs, tall, strong, with the hearts of warriors. In the Torweni analogue for the Hobbit there was a story of Three Olken brothers who competed with each other throughout the journey to see who could die in the most glorious fashion, only for them to survive each time by the skin of their teeth. They would laugh about it and then try to die in some other epic way in the next adventure. They were described to have coal like skin, and long knotted black hair.

“Now that I think about it” Alwen mused “we’re on a continent of real-life Olken”

“That was my first thought when I read the Saga of Steel and Bone, Olken, and few other races just sound like normal humans and a few Mammaloid species.”

“That would make Alice and Gato Barugie.” Alwen smiled, and then the smile quickly faded. She turned to Astarte and put on a determined expression “Can I ask you something, Captain” she added, signaling to Astarte that their informal banter had ended and now they were Captain and subordinate once more.

“Ask away Bones” she said as she straightened up.

“Alice and Gato, what’s their story?”

Astarte frowned “I heard that there was an incident involving the three of you, just so you know I try not to interfere with the personal lives of my crew. But whatever the hell went down with you three is having ripple effects across the ship, and that could be deadly.”

“I know, I’m sorry” she apologized before steeling her nerves “I developed feelings for Gato, and the first person I told was Alice, which complicated my friendship with her. And then when I confessed to Gato he brushed me off, which also complicated things between us. Alice found out and had an argument with Gato and put them both at odds with each other.”

Astarte blinked in surprise at how well Alwen relayed what must have a complicated jumble of emotions and confusion “Fuck.” She cursed. “So you put both of my marine captains at odds with each other, and split my whole marine contingent into two factions in a love triangle?”

“Yes” she said meekly.

Astarte put her hand to her forehead “Do you know how hard I worked to establish a working truce between them?”

“No, but I can imagine it wasn’t easy.”

“So what do you want me to do, make Alice be your friend again, or make Gato go out with you? Because as good as I am, I can’t make either of those two things happen with a command.”

“I know that; `I want you to tell me how their relationship ended so that I can try to fix this myself.”

Astarte bit her lip, and weighed the options. “Fine, fuck it. Can’t make it much worse any way.”