Revenant told Onslaught about Humility’s offer.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, Onslaught became absolutely insufferable, until he surrendered and helped her wobble to the medical bay all while sending a message to Humility that they need the AI there.
What followed included a lot of scans, as you could expect from healthcare centuries in the future. Revenant, naturally, has at least some understanding of anatomy and modern healthcare, but he doesn’t even try to guess what machines were involved in it.
“I see.” Humility nods. It must have connected directly to the network to see and analyze the results there, as it was just sitting in the chair. Onslaught and Revenant are sitting right next to each other, her hand holding his own with most likely more strength than she intended it to. “Well, I have good news and bad news, but to be honest the latter are mostly small things.”
Somehow, the grasp grows even stronger. Should he be surprised? Probably not.
“You mean… I can be healed?” Onslaught says. Her voice is shaking a little, but she soldiers on.
“Let’s do it in order.” Humility replies. “The first thing is your eyes. The issue we have here is that you, to be frank, do not possess optical nerves. At all. I assume it to be a birth defect of a quite particular degree.”
“Yes.” Onslaught replies. “I was born like that.” The AI nods.
“I can imagine this to be nigh-impossible to solve with the technology of your time.” Humility replies. “No individuality could help with that?”
“Overhaul and Clockmaker could.” Revenant admits, Onslaught looking confused about it. “Regretfully, Overhaul only became a notable villain after Onslaught’s death. Almost no one heard of them and their individuality beforehand. And while I knew that a properly guided Clockmaker in her creative mood could make appropriate cybernetic augments, installing them correctly without Overhaul was way too risky.”
“So, what I’m getting out of it is that I could be healed if we just… waited for a while more, until that Overhaul fella would show up?” Onslaught replies, with a hint of confusion in her voice.
“A bit more complicated than that, Oni.” Revenant replies. “You know that one of the arguments that Archvile had for the alliance with your father was providing someone with an individuality that could heal you? Overhaul was that person. It’s just that Archvile was taking his sweet time with fulfilling his part of the deal, which is why the war ended before it happened.”
“Oh.” Onslaught says, before clicking her tongue. “Archvile was a fucking dick.”
Now he really wants to kiss those lips. But that’s for later. For now he nods at Humility to continue.
“Well, today it can be healed even without involving that Overhaul person.” Humility states. “Through either appropriate cybernetic augments, though it would require replacing eyes too for optimal performance, or by grafting new nerves. Not exactly a routine operation, due to people typically having this sort of birth defect corrected soon after birth, but most decent hospitals in the Human Space should manage to do it pretty easily. That, naturally, brings us to the second part of the issues, namely the brain.”
“I’d say that my brain is perfectly fine.” Onslaught comments, prompting Revenant to sigh.
“It’s not about that, Oni.” Revenant decides to intervene before Humility replies. With something that would probably start a fight. “Even if your eyes start working tomorrow, you won’t instantly master a completely foreign sense. You don’t know how colors look. Not to mention accidentally killing yourself with the first stairs you’d encounter, simply because you wouldn’t be able to tell that you’re getting close to the edge. As you wouldn’t know the difference between something growing in size and something getting close to you. It’s the sort of thing that people develop naturally in their earliest childhood, something that you missed due to being blind since birth.”
Humility nods in the background. It seems that Revenant was right on the money. Good to know that his research wasn’t in vain. Because yes, he did a lot of it before New Liberty burned.
Onslaught seems to have realized that his knowledge on the field came from him looking for ways to help her, back then when he was still Analyst. He fails to find another explanation for why she suddenly hugged him closely without a word.
It’s nice.
“There were cases of people that regained their eyesight after being blind for most of their life and since birth killing themselves because of how much of a ‘letdown’ the eyesight was, as despite recovering it, they still couldn’t use it properly.” Humility adds. “Precisely due to their brain not knowing how to interpret the completely new input it was receiving. It’s not something that can be consciously learned, at least not to a degree even remotely comparable to what normal people can do.”
“Can modern technology help in that?” Revenant asks. He has hope, especially as Humility said earlier that the positives outweigh the negatives in general when Onslaught was involved.
“Actually, yes.” Humility replies. “I regret to inform you that humans have long ago found a way to tinker with the brain to a rather substantial degree. However it might reinvigorate your clear trauma, Mankind has mastered the concept of brainwashing.”
Onslaught’s hug grows tighter. She must have felt him tense under her fingers. He… doesn’t like what he just heard.
“Psychosculpting, in other words altering the way your brain works and through it, memories, personality and so on, is a thing nowadays.” Humility continues. “Of course, it’s a situation similar to genetic modifications, in that Mankind went a bit too far and then decided to hit the brakes, big time. Today the whole technology is vastly restricted. And before you ask, applying it to someone without their consent is punished by death. In every ethnopolity.”
He can scarcely imagine the ethnopolities to be this nice. His tendency towards cynicism shines through, despite Onslaught being there.
“And if it is an ethnopolity that does that?” Revenant asks.
“Then the ethnopolity as a community will be executed.” Humility surprises him. “Violating the Founding Charter of the Confederation of Mankind or the Icarus Accord treaty forbidding certain branches of technology means automatic expulsion from the Confederacy of Mankind which, by all intents and purposes, terminates your human rights. Which means that unrestricted orbital bombardment of your population centers and brainwashing of your population is now legal. In the current political climate this is non survivable. Any more questions?”
…
“No, please go on.” Revenant says. Destro’s probably busy learning about those treaties right now from Humility’s ‘short introduction to the fuckery called modern politics’ file.
“Good.” Humility replies. “Before you ask: No, imparting knowledge for easy mastering of skills isn’t really a thing. Psychosculpting requires detailed mapping of your brain before you try anything, and then requires the same thing from the skill donor. It’s basically a separate, lengthy medical procedure per skill per person, requires a lot of fine-tuning and simple manual skills transfer might not work correctly only because, say, the donor and receiver have slightly different length of fingers.”
Goddamn realism ruining all the cool things of the far future.
“However, certain things are still possible to be altered that way.” Humility continues. “Especially those that manifest more uniformly throughout the population, that are less reliant on minuscule changes to, say, your fingers, less reliant on years of practical experiences. Mental disorders, for example. I regret to inform you that yes, it also involves sexual orientation, gender identity and kinks.”
Revenant groans painfully. This is the sort of shit that he would prefer to not know. If only because he is… well, maybe less vanilla in interests than his recent behavior would suggest (he is just not sure how to deal with the emotional part of the whole thing), but…yeah, he is certainly not as much of a vocal exhibitionist as Onslaught is.
“Please tell me that no ethnopolities tried to make any of that a part of their national hat.” Revenant says instead.
“Regretfully, that would mean me lying to you.” Humility confirms his worries. “Thankfully, the dumbasses doing that are typically rare. But there are ethnopolities where certain sexual behaviors are mandatory. There are also ethnopolities that are trying to significantly tinker with not only human gender identity but also biological sexes. Do you want to know more?”
“Thank you, but the answer is a big fat no.” Revenant says while shaking his head.
“Good, as I said, they are rare.” Humility replies. “And like most of the more divergent ‘hats’, they tend to discover that sticking to well-tested behaviors and biologies born out of millennia of natural evolution, only somewhat guided near the end by humans, works best. Besides, that stuff really quieted down after the Yalka affair.”
“Yalka affair?” Onslaught asks when Revenant decides that he doesn’t want to know.
“It’s generally not easy to get yourself excommunicated from the Confederation of Mankind on the grounds of violating the Icarus Accord.” Humility replies. “Do you actually want to know the details of how an interstellar megacorp by the name of Yalka Love Industries managed to achieve that?”
“I think we’ll pass.” Revenant decides to intervene. It’s probably something incredibly squicky. Even Onslaught looks like she was rapidly reconsidering her decision to even start that talk. “Can we go back to the subject, please?”
“Yes.” Humility replies. “The solution to this particular conundrum is actually easy. Medical applications of psychosculpting are perfectly legal. In this particular case, we’d simply need to copy appropriate neural connections associated with sight from someone else. I strongly suggest Hypothermia or Kitsune - before you develop it on your own, you’ll literally see the world as they do. Since they both considered your boyfriend attractive, it’ll make things much easier for the two of you.”
For some reason, Revenant feels as if Onslaught with the eyesight of Kitsune was just asking for problems. And, probably, ‘death by snu-snu’ to quote Decay. Kitsune was… enthusiastic about everything. And slightly insane.
Sure, she was very much into romantic love, but…. crazy in life, crazy in bed, right? And she was plenty crazy, even if a part of him genuinely thought that her antics brightened up the room.
He should probably apologize to her for pretending otherwise back then. He was of way too grimdark disposition for anything else to feel logical. Then again, Kitsune knew about it. He is also about 90% sure that most of her antics were due to a self-imposed quest of making him laugh.
“Regretfully, the Ball Python doesn’t possess the appropriate facilities allowing me to perform psychosculpting of this magnitude.” Humility then adds. “As I said, it’s not a matter of ‘put a person in a tube, click the right button and they’ll know how to make handcrafted jewelry’. I need extensive brain scans to even start planning an appropriate medical procedure. However, I do guarantee you that it’s something that can be done in any planetary hospital.”
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
Onslaught’s quiet now, but she’s clearly biting her lip nervously, still hugging him tightly. For all the time they spent together, he has no idea what’s going through her mind right now.
“That covers the eyes.” Humility continues. “Now onward to her legs. Here the damage is much harder to deal with and significantly more composite. Her muscles were torn practically to shreds, and while they were patched up properly, it wasn’t enough to heal all the damage. Frankly, from what I’ve seen she practically changed most of her leg muscles into minced meat. I’m unironically impressed by whoever fixed her up after it, and managed to do it to the point where she can actually move them.”
Yeah. Destro lost her mother to an accident while she was barely one year old, then she almost died on him when her individuality kicked in (surviving by a miracle). Was it really that strange that Destro doted on her so much? And that he spared no expenses at getting her the best possible medical care that money could buy.
“Her nerves also took a significant blow, leading to general numbness and problems with muscle tension.” Humility continues. “She manages to walk and run while under the influence of her individuality because, to use a numerical comparison, 10% out of 100 is much more than 10% out of 10. Normally I’d have suggested replacing most of her legs with cyberware or bioware implants, but… things get a bit quirky here.”
“Before that.” Revenant raises his hand, interrupting the AI’s speech. “I can figure out what cyberware implants mean. Namely, cybernetics. But bioware implants?”
“You grow replacement tissue or entire organs in a vat, then implant them.” Humility replies. “Certain wacko have figured out how to deal with rejection issues completely, so you can make replacements superior to the original. Or even make completely new organs doing wacky things, if you can find a place to add them.”
Sounds like someone tried to make Warhammer 40k space marines into reality. Wow. Incredible.
“In this case, we’d have to recreate the muscles in question in a vat and then replace the damaged originals.” Humility continues. “Can you figure out what’s the issue that I have with this idea?” It then asks Revenant.
“Let me guess.” Revenant replies. It’s not the behavior of a proper medical professional to ask questions like that, but… Humility probably didn’t have a medical license either way. “You don’t know how her individuality would work with replacement tissues.”
“Yes.” Humility confirms his suspicions immediately. “Before attempting this sort of medical procedure, we’d need to first test with something less potentially deadly. Like, say, get someone with an individuality working through their skin to replace small parts of it with cyberware and bioware implants to see if it works with them as well. Because if we discover that replacement tissue conducts her individuality to a lesser degree, the results will be the repetition of her initial injury. Coincidentally: does your individuality strengthen your sense of smell and touch?”
“No.” Onslaught replies. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I’m not one hundred percent certain how your individuality will react to you getting your eyesight back, either.” Humility replies. “Similar case to the issue with leg muscle implants. We don’t want your replacement optical nerves to explode, am I right?”
No one bothers answering that.
“For now I suspect that your individuality responded to the missing sense by amplifying another one, in a way similar to how it happens to many people without individualities.” Humility continues. “Just to a bit larger degree. Which implies the fact that your senses are involved in your individuality’s workings. But yes, this is one more research subject to investigate before we start working in the field. Anyways. Implants cover the quick and easy solution to the issue you have with your legs. There is also a lengthier one.”
“Let me guess.” Revenant repeats his earlier words. “Slowly reconstructing her damaged muscles and nerves.”
“Yes.” Humility replies. “Once again, it’s a rather custom medical procedure, but it’s doable. It would require a lot of work and thousands of microsurgeries to patch up all the muscle fibers, but with a properly equipped hospital, I can do it. In fact, I already marked two hundred seventy-two structural damages that can be treated with the equipment I have available right now. Fixing them should improve Onslaught’s mobility significantly, as the reason why they are treatable here is because they are also the biggest. However, be aware that she’d have to take a backseat from fighting for at least two to three weeks afterwards to make sure that things heal properly. Other than that, I’m ready to do that whenever you want me to.”
That… to be honest, Onslaught wasn’t very useful nowadays. Mostly because while she could fight local supersoldiers in melee (judging from Humility’s assumption that she could fight the Truthseekers’ Perfects), it was simply too dangerous right now.
Blindness made it harder to avoid being shot. Her echolocation was very limited in usage. Guns got better. Anti-armor rounds were probably enough to injure her (or even kill her if it hit a weak spot).
Destro was much tougher than she was. Of course, the situation would be flipped on its head if Onslaught could use a bigger percentage of her individuality. They were still going to have him tested against modern munition before deploying him anywhere.
“Do you want it?” Revenant asks Onslaught. She is still wrapped around him, something that he doesn’t interrupt. It’s cute.
“Y-yes.” Onslaught says, her voice shaking a little as she nods furiously. “Yes, if possible, I’d like to get it done right after Hypothermia is released.” He most certainly isn’t surprised by that.
“Duly noted.” Humility replies. “There is also another subject. Namely, Singularity.”
It’s not like she could make any decisions for herself. She was… perfectly compliant. There is no reason for her to be here. She showed up for the tests and then left.
“Please tell me that she can be fixed.” Revenant says. He needs the answer. He needs it now. To him this is the same caliber of news as the ‘yes we can heal you’ to Onslaught.
“I believe this is a ‘yes, but’. situation.” Humility replies. Revenant… calms down. Slightly. Very slightly. “What was done to her resembles an early, more experimental stage psychosculpting. It’s primitive, crude and, in a way, that makes it harder to fix rather than easier. There are two ways in which we can proceed with that.”
It raises a hand with one finger up.
“Option one, we do a hard psychosculpt.” Humility says. “This is the more invasive option. ‘Hard’ in this case means wiping most of the slate clean and rebuilding her up from there. Does she remember her life from before Archvile got his hands on her?”
“No.” Revenant replies. “No, she doesn’t.” He tested that. Many, many times. Archvile didn’t want to risk any potential insubordination born out of this.
No shouting at Singularity to remember them, and Singularity’s memories suddenly flooding in as if they were living in a shonen manga. Say what you want about Archvile’s moral compass (or lack thereof), but he was genre savvy.
“Then my suspicions that what Archvile did to her was akin to a hard sculpt were correct.” Humility replies. The hand’s still up there, it’s not like a robot can feel discomfort of keeping it that way for long. “This option includes wiping the slate clear again, then reconstructing as much of her original personality as we can from external sources. This is sometimes done to victims of illegal hard sculpt, when there is no option to rewind the damage. However, in their case it’s easier due to having a lot of data to go by. You can simply gather all the pictures, recordings, administrative data, testimonies of past acquaintances and so on and run a machine analysis on it all to get a relatively coherent approximation of one’s personality for the reconstruction work. The result is nearly impossible to tell from the original person but with amnesia. Here, we lack most of the data necessary for it to work.”
“That… to me it’s a bit as if you tried to replace your dead friend by giving another friend of yours a plastic operation before telling him to act as if they were the other guy.” Onslaught replies. “It’s… icky.”
“Not necessarily.” Humility replies. “The ego remains there. They are still the same person, just missing most of their memories and with typically some minor personality changes due to imperfections in the reconstructed psychological profile. However, I do admit that hard sculpt is typically considered a last resort. That brings us to the other option, the soft sculpt.”
Second finger joins the first.
“I can undo the part of the brainwashing that ensures her obedience and lack of character development.” Humility continues. “It’d upgrade her back from a human-shaped tool to a human being. However, to be honest, she’ll end up having to redevelop herself nearly from scratch. Grandmother of all existential dreads is to be expected. Mental instability is also likely. And I can’t promise you that the result will be anywhere close to the person you knew.”
Hard choice. On one hand, bringing Singularity as close to what she used to be - but also changing her again, doing to her what Archvile did, just with good intentions in mind. On another, giving her back the free will while accepting that she’d never be the same person that she used to be.
He has a strange feeling that ‘doing to her what Archvile did’ was going to be playing a much more important role in his decision-making than the other arguments combined. It’s… something important to him.
One positive side of ever getting to know Archvile? He had someone to act as a living (to a time) list of things he wasn’t supposed to do. Naturally, he has already done most of the things. Only the worst things on the checklist remained unchecked.
“There’s no need to make the decision right now.” Humility interrupts his internal musings. “I don’t have the facilities here that are needed for psychosculpting. This is all a matter of a distant future. For now, that concludes the medical consultation.” It tilts the head a little. “Aside from one small favor that I’d like to ask you for.”
***
Thirty minutes later, Onslaught and Revenant are sitting together in his room, the meeting with Hypothermia slightly delayed.
‘Sitting together’, but she is actually on his lap again, Onslaught hugging him as if she was afraid of falling to her death if her grasp weakened for even a millisecond. He is, naturally, hugging her back.
Hey, he doesn’t want her to fall to death either.
“So…” He eventually says, his hand stroking the top of her head comfortingly. “... looks like wishes sometimes do come true, eh?”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she is still pressing her face into the front of his suit. Judging from what he hears and sees, it’s probably great that his suit is waterproof because it’d be completely ruined.
That’s fine.
Destro is going to freak out when he finds out. They didn’t tell him about the appointment, precisely because he would be beyond anxious the whole time. But… they’ll have to tell him, eventually.
Speaking of, Revenant wonders what his not-dad is doing right now.
***
“Ah, just the person I meant to meet!” Destro smiles widely towards the man that he just ran into after walking beyond the corner. Like many other spontaneous things in his life, this one was planned to the detail. “Ted Wilcher, I believe?”
“Y-yes.” The sole surviving member of the New Springfield political class (at least the only one they met thus far) seems to have been startled for a second. Destro appearing out of nowhere has that effect on people. He is big. “Who do I have the pleasure of talking to?”
“My callsign is Destro.” Destro replies. “I’m the head of our mercenary units’s PR department and Revenant’s political advisor. Absolutely delighted to meet you.”
He extended his hand. Wilcher responds in kind after a second of hesitation, the two men shaking their hands rather vigorously.
“I was mostly told to introduce myself for now.” Destro then says. “Revenant had some good things to say about you and I’m really looking forward to working together.”
Slight narrowing of eyes. Someone’s clearly suspecting that Destro was trying to sweet-talk them. To be honest, Destro was trying to do just that. But it was all part of the plan. For now, time to call him out on that.
“What, suspecting me of trying to sweet-talk you?” Destro says, grinning lightly when the man looks startled by it. “To coax you into thinking highly of me? Well, I’d say that the problem here is you thinking of yourself way too low. How many politicians do you think we’ve encountered as a mercenary group? And how many of them turned out to be a source of problems rather than a solution? Yet you’ve put the good of the people behind you over your own ego. You’re letting lieutenant colonel Palmer make the overall decisions while focusing on managing your group's resources. And you’ve kept doing your best to keep everyone fed and clothed, despite the treatment you were receiving from pirates.” Destro leans forward a little. “I’m completely serious here, friend. You’re better than at least 95% of the politicians that we’ve dealt with in the past. So don’t sell yourself short and take pride in what I’m saying rather than take it for empty platitudes.”
Very few people out there do not respond positively to a little bit of flattery. But it has to be correctly measured. It can’t ring hollow. If you truly want to build rapport with someone, don’t compliment their clothes. Compliment something they do.
And, even more importantly, explain where it came from.
Besides, Destro isn’t even kidding. Ted Wilcher might have been merely an assistant to some state governor, but he was much less of a pain in the ass than most of the politicians he had to deal with in his life.
“Well, it’s… nice to hear it.” Wilcher replies, clearly taken aback a little. Looks like it’s working. “I’ll try not to be a disappointment. To be honest, the whole thing is… a bit beyond what I expected to be doing when I was taking the job.” He says with something of an anxious smile on his face.
Destro lets out a hearty laugh. Hey, it’s actually funny! He can do the forced laughter thing convincingly, he just also finds a lot of things funny so that he rarely has to. It’s greatly helpful to a politician, in his opinion.
“And you also have a sense of humor even after all of that!” Destro smiles widely. “This is going to be a very smooth cooperation, I can already tell. If it’s possible, would you mind sparing me an hour or so of your time? I believe that we need to have a good, lengthy talk about the details of it, and I think this sort of talk is best done over a meal.”
“Well, I’m having a meeting with…” Wilcher tries to respond, but Destro doesn’t let him.
“No need to do that, I know that I came out of nowhere with the offer, I don’t expect you to come with me straight away.” Destro replies. “You’re a busy man, and I’m still getting brought up to speed by Revenant. How does tomorrow sound?”
It clearly sounds pretty good.