Probing

People, or humans at least, didn’t sleep well in new locations.

I couldn’t remember where I’d read that. It had been more than eight months since I’d read any English that wasn’t in my own head.

So my first night in the Green Complex saw me lying awake for too long. If you fall asleep late, you wake up late.

And Nai was having none of it.

“”

The sound thundered in my head, and I flew out of bed in terror.

I managed to put a hand between my face and floor, so I didn’t smack my head on anything. Still, it wasn’t a flattering way to start the day.

It took me a few panicked moments to get my heart rate under control, but five different aliens in the room were giving me stares.

Nai, I realized, had not actually said the words very loudly, even if the accompanying psionic signal had been near maximum intensity. The Casti in the room had just seen me leap in fright from just a whisper.

“That is so cruel,” I said wearily. “Why would you do it that way?”

Nai scowled. “This isn’t a vacation, human. We’re all on a schedule: you were supposed to be up half an hour ago.”

“Give me a break,” I complained. “I’m off my usual schedule, and yesterday was a big deal.”

“Is Umtane going to care about that? Take things seriously,” she demanded.

Huh. Was she just being prickly or was that actual advice? We had a deal, at least symbolically. It hadn’t come up much, but was that her idea of fulfilling her end?

“…You got it, [princess,]” I said.

“Do I want to know what that means?” she asked.

“…No.”

“Then get moving.”

“Just let me get cleaned up, I only need a minute or two.” Even if I was waking up at a different hour, I had carefully perfected my morning routine over the past months. I could grab a shower and shave in thirty seconds flat.

Of course, that was assuming our assigned room had a shower.

“I wouldn’t bother,” Nai said. “You’re going to be sweating. The first thing they want you to do is a kinetic series.”

“Those words mean nothing to me,” I said. “At least, together they don’t.”

·····

As it turned out, a ‘kinetic series’ was a physical. I’d been told that yesterday, I just hadn’t understood Nai’s phrasing this morning.

The biologists I was to be entrusted to wanted to keep the first day as generalized as possible. A broad series of physical checks in the morning, and a battery of samples in the afternoon.

Man, it was a good thing Dyn had gotten me used to needles. I had a feeling I was going to miss his lack of bedside manner.

This place was big from the outside, but I hadn’t really appreciated it’s size until I was inside it.

The Complex might have been sunken into the plateau, but it was surprisingly open, especially toward the center. The center of the Complex opened up into an atrium that connected to every floor in the top half of the building overall.

Planter boxes dotted virtually every balcony, basking in the sunlight that shone in from above. Which was extra confusing, because I remembered the ceiling of the Complex being opaque from the outside.

As much metal as there was in this cutting-edge building though, the amount of plant life was staggering. Some of the planters were open to the air while others were enclosed in their own little glass tops—probably to regulate the temperature or humidity for the plant inside. On the lower floors of the atrium, and even on the corner balconies of the higher ones, several types of trees twisted out into the open air.

It was an indoor jungle.

I was so dumbfounded by the spectacle that I almost didn’t notice the Casti on some of the far balconies noticing me.

Yeah, there was going to be a lot of gossip about me. There wasn’t much point trying to keep me a secret though.

The physical medicine department was on one of the upper levels of the Complex, even attached to the public area.

It was a massive multi-level gymnasium with all sorts of alien workout machines. Only instead of sparse functional metal contraptions, each one was sleekly combined with a computer terminal—hilariously bulky by my standards but a powerful machine by theirs.

This wasn’t a gym so much as it was a laboratory wearing a gym’s outfit.

And since this area had been closed to the public this morning, I had the run of the place.

“So,” I said, “what am I doing first?”

“Er…running,” one of the researchers said.

“Your name is Eebat, right?”

“Yes,” the researcher said. He was one of seven who was going to be working with me, but even with my psionics I knew I was going to have trouble keeping track of people’s names.

“Any extra parts I should say? Labels or titles? Back home we usually call physicians like you by a title,” I said.

“[Doctor,]” Tasser supplied from the sidelines.

“Yes,” I said, pointing to him. “[Doctor] is correct.”

“Er…I don’t think that’s necessary,” Eebat said, “but feel free if you’d like.”

I gave Tasser a fist bump, explicitly without explaining the action to anyone else. It might have been a bit cruel, but I wouldn’t pretend that messing with the doctors in small ways gave me some satisfaction.

“So [Doctor] Eebat,” I said shamelessly, “what kind of running am I doing?”

“Well this is all a little… improvised for now, so a lot of this will be more about figuring out which instruments to look at you with and how to calibrate them. Start with the stationary path, here.”

The small crowd of doctors shifted to point me towards what was unmistakably a treadmill.

‘Stationary path.’ Right.

“I’m a little curious what other projects I’m interrupting,” I told them. “First Contact doesn’t happen every day, so you had to drop something to be free to do this work.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Eebat said firmly. “Doing any First Contact work is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Rumors have been spreading for months, so this wasn’t completely by surprise.”

“Maybe not completely, but still a surprise?” I asked.

“Yes.”

On the one hand, I wasn’t totally sure I knew what being surprised felt like anymore—I was a bit numb to it. On the other hand, Nai had startled me awake this morning, and thinking I couldn’t be surprised anymore was a great way to be caught flatfooted.

But today was supposed to be busy.

The doctors had me take off my shirt to cover my torso with different shapes of sticky sensors all wired to different machines. With how many cables there were attached to my body, I was a little concerned about tripping over one while I ran.

Back on Earth, I was pretty sure sticky sensors like this were strictly used for cardiac monitoring, but there was too much variety in these ones to all be for the same purpose.

That was confirmed when I felt a buzzing sensation spread outward from one of the sensor heads. For a split second, I was unsure and a little afraid if I was completely honest.

But the sensation wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. In fact, it was passingly similar to an Adept’s tactile cascade…

“What exactly is that?”

The doctor hesitated, “Well, that could be a bit hard to explain. How familiar are you with Adept capabilities?”

I gave Tasser a consulting glance and transmitted to Nai as well for good measure.

Following the conversation closely, Tasser gave a small nod. Nai concurred from a distance,

“I am Adept, so some, but not nearly enough,” I said.

Hearing that I was Adept sent the doctors into another frenzy and I heard no less than four of them whisper about meta-microbes and other samples.

Eebat was managing to stay with me though.

“If you have a tactile cascade, then you can likely feel several of these probes. They’re mechanized facsimiles of a real Adept’s cascade. They can detect the composition, position, and material of anything inside the field.”

“My cascade is supposed to be pretty detailed,” I huffed. “But even I can’t perceive cells with it. How precise can the machine get?”

“In this case, not very. The machine’s programming usually has to be customized to the organism it’s analyzing. But even if we probably won’t get any useful information, it’s still worth trying. You never know.”

I nodded slowly. His explanation was satisfying, if not completely assuaging.

Eebat struck me as the kind of person who would sit up front in the schoolroom. Even if he seemed shaky and unconfident, he didn’t lack for initiative.

The rest of them were not making much of an impression though. The names of the doctors with Eebat were Banra, Iffikit, Timot, Matthu, and…well I was missing the rest, and definitely didn’t have the faces to go with the names yet, but it was still the first day. I was still learning.

But I was impressed with how much multitasking they were doing.

I would answer a question posed by one of them, and while they scribbled down my answer, one of the others was ready with the next. To my delight, they were even open to answering a few of my questions.

“What’s the purpose of building a facility into the rock like this? Seems like it would make construction complicated.” I wondered.

“Not really,” one of the more personable doctors—Timot, I think—said, “it’s just rock. What’s so complicated?”

“Well maybe it’s just my planet, but carving into mountains isn’t usually the simplest way to make a building. It can’t possibly be frugal.”

“That’s true,” a different doctor said, “it’s not cheap. But it’s not expensive either. Even if it were, it would be worth it. Building into the geology is a redundancy in case there’s a containment breach that could threaten enough lives. The Complex’s reactor can be scuttled. In thirty seconds this entire facility can be reduced to molten antiseptic slag.”

“Is…is that likely?” I asked nervously.

“No,” another doctor replied, “but we would have preferred you be in quarantine.”

“Well, sorry,” I said. “Blame the ones who abducted me.”

“The Vorak?” yet another doctor said. Wasn’t that all six of them? No, wait, there was a seventh wasn’t there?

“I…am not supposed to say anything about that,” I said tactfully. “I was abducted, and I wound up in a Red Sails cell on Korbanok. But aside from my word, I don’t have any evidence. So I’m being judicious.”

I cast a look over my shoulder at Umtane on the second level of the gymnasium overlooking this one.

“Is that okay with you, Rak?” I asked loudly.

“He’s a vicious pup, isn’t he?” Umtane asked Nai, who was standing next to him.

Ordinarily, I might not have heard him, but Nai was being kind enough to psionically share what Umtane said.

“When you said I should help you find this bioweapon, I didn’t think you were just going to watch Caleb the whole time,” Nai said.

“Well, I’ve been poring over material consumption logs for the last three days, so if you want to sit down and dissect paperwork with me, just say the word.”

I asked Nai.

she replied.

“[Yeah, yeah,]” I muttered.

“Sorry, repeat that?” Eebat asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just muttering to myself.”

“Is that…well, is that considered normal for your kind—humans?” the doctor asked nervously. “…psychologically, I mean…”

“I guess it would depend on who you asked,” I said. “Sorry, that’s a bit of a big question. I don’t quite know how to answer.”

The physical tests went on like that, most of them had me doing some kind of repetitive exercise on one of the machines with them carefully tabulating the data. Those weren’t so fun, especially compared to when they had me do sprints. I’d casually talked about the jogging I’d done at Demon’s Pit and the group of physicians collectively pounced on the idea.

I gave Tasser a glance while they fervently consulted each other. My expression said ‘seriously?’ but Tasser only shrugged. The doctors were giving Tasser a wide berth, and it struck me as odd. He was, by far, the most qualified alien to answer any extra questions they had about me, but they hadn’t referred to him even once.

Tasser noticed the realization cross my face, and he gave a small shake of his head.

‘Not now,’ he meant. Fine. Later then.

They put me through running, jumping, some odd calisthenics, even this odd form of speedy jump roping.

After every test, the gaggle of doctors gave a quick huddle to debate what to have me do next. I didn’t catch everything said, and more than a few sentences were in some Casti languages I didn’t know. But I did get some of the gist.

They had no idea what all needed to be done. They were just gathering any odd piece of data they thought might be useful to analyze.

Not unlike us actually. Since Nai was with Umtane, what information did we need before we could start really searching for this data drive?

I was debating how much I could talk with Tasser in the interim when the doctors were ready for their next question.

“Since we have the whole wing for the morning, we want to really make sure we’re testing him as an Adept as well as just an organism. We’re going to put your augmentations to the test.”

I stared at the Casti doctor cluelessly.

“My what?”

·····

It turned out to be a harder question than I’d bargained for. This was in no small part due to this team of Doctors being very experienced in the field, but none of them actually having much practical experience when it came to Adepts.

Ten minutes later and they still couldn’t agree on the definition of an ‘augmentation.’

“Your body builds on itself,” Tasser summarized.

The team of doctors collectively winced at his simplification. “The cells are laced with exotic particles that complement ordinary function—” one of the doctors tried.

Two others spoke up at once, “No existing cells are displaced, they—”, “Tissues are altered, not ‘built’ upon. To fully understand the nuances at—” they just kept going.

“[Dear God,]” I muttered. Dira, this was ridiculous. They were all saying the same things…I was pretty sure. I couldn’t be totally sure, but I suspected they were so eager to correct my understanding because Tasser had been the one to supply the explanation.

I held up a hand in exasperation, hoping they would stop for a moment but none of them did.

I gave Tasser a desperate look. He could only shrug, though he might have also mouthed ‘I don’t have a gun right now.’

Umtane was the one to restore order.

“When were you planning on sharing that he’s Adept?” Umtane asked Nai coolly.

“Would you have told us you were Adept if Caleb hadn’t already known?”

I couldn’t make out Umtane’s expression from my position, but I imagined he wore a shrewd expression.

“…How did he already know?” the otter wondered. “I only know of two other Adepts with a trick anything like that…and your Caleb Hane killed one of them.”

“Sendin Marfek,” Nai connected. Umtane gave a bobbing Vorak nod.

I reminded Nai.

“Caleb didn’t kill Sendin Marfek,” she pointed out.

“No?” Umtane said airly. “I’m sure not…”

Still psionically privy to their conversation, I heard him ask Nai, “If I went down there to calm them down, would you react badly?”

She must have shaken her head or given some other nonverbal indication, because the next moment, Umtane vaulted over the balcony railing and heavily landed on the story below.

The impact shut all the Casti up automatically, and I didn’t miss Tasser’s hand instinctively drift for a weapon he wasn’t wearing. He didn’t have access to Nai’s forewarning.

“You’re all an embarrassment,” he said simply. “Not just to the Organic Authority but Nakrumum itself. The Rahi’s answer was perfectly acceptable but you’re all too proud to agree with him.”

One of the doctors looked like they might protest, but Umtane ignored them and walked toward me. Feeling the Adept draw closer made the hair on my neck stick up. I mustered myself and didn’t show any reaction. I’d been in the presence of scarier Vorak than him.

He addressed Tasser first. “Tashi Umtane,” he introduced, inclining his head. “You’re taknak.”

Instead of introducing himself back, Tasser coldly looked at the Vorak, but returned the nod. “I know,” my friend replied.

Umtane, much to my discomfort, actually started grinning. “Oh, I like Casti like you. You make me wish your people could be Adept.”

“Augmentations,” Tasser said, dragging everyone back on topic.

“Yes,” Umtane said, turning to me. “Don’t listen to the doctors, at least not while they’re all talking over each other. Augmentations could be called the specialty of Vorak Adepts. Your ally is right, it is your body building upon itself, improving its stock of materials, so to speak.”

“So Adept bodies are stronger?” I asked.

“Some,” Umtane said. “Adepts aren’t all augmented in the same ways. Some aren’t augmented at all, besides things like meta-microbes or digestive catalysts. But some Adepts like your dear Torabin have altered bodies, tough enough to shake off bullets.”

“Or survive tumbling down a mountain over and over again…” I said, thinking back.

“[Stalker?]” Tasser asked in awkward English.

I nodded.

“You were stabbed in the shoulder that night, remember? The next morning you climbed up the outside of that building with your bare hands,” he reminded me. “I only have you to go on, but even I know that can’t be normal for humans.”

Yeah, he was right. I’d thought it had been Daniel in my head, somehow blocking my perception of pain. But when it was all spelled out for me…

It was just obvious.

“My hand!” I remembered. “I stuffed a…” I trailed off, suddenly thinking better of saying it out loud in present company.

But when Courser’s panther-hound had attacked me, I’d killed it by stuffing a flashbang down it’s throat and detonating. In the desperation of the moment, I’d been prepared to lose my hand, or at least cripple it. But it had come out unscathed.

“Depending on the Adept,” Umtane said, “different portions of the body will be augmented. Which portions are often correlated to the early experiences of the newly activated Adept.”

“We could image for it,” one of the doctors pointed out. “It would take a few minutes to set up the machine, but a few of us could do that while the others complete some more tests here.”

There didn’t seem to be a reason not to, so half the doctors disappeared into a hallway. It left Tasser and I more or less alone with Umtane. There might have been three more Casti doctors still in the gymnasium, but they didn’t inspire much confidence in me.

We continued with the basic athletic tests, measuring my heart rate, breathing, and I’m sure a dozen other bodily functions. It wasn’t hard to tell everyone was anticipating more Adept developments.

When Eebat and the other doctors returned, they came with a pair of dollies with some plastic crates stacked.

Despite how much equipment it appeared to be, it was quick to set up. There was a modular frame that hung a curtain to act as a backdrop for the sinister looking projector device on a tripod.

“Here, just stand in front,” Dr. Eebat said.

“Is this going to sting?” I asked.

“Probably not?”

And on those inspiring words, he hit a button on the projector device. An invisible light flashed—I didn’t quite ‘see’ it, but the sensation made every psionic and Adept sense I had flare up for a heartbeat. It was gone as quickly as it came and I was left with a strong impression this was like an x-ray: not the kind of thing you wanted to do over and over again.

A mostly Casti horde of aliens gathered around the computer module to look at this scan’s resuly. Umtane was just as curious as I was, and even Nai had migrated down from the upper level to take a look.

An outline of my body shown on the module’s monitor, which I realized didn’t have pixels. It was a CRT! The aliens were literally using screens older than I was…

But the image of my body was actually quite sharp, not at all fuzzy like the old tv my family had watched VHS’s on when I was little. They might have been using a CRT screen, but it was an advanced one.

It immediately reminded me again of an x-ray. My skeleton was brightly lit up while the softer tissues were shades of dark gray.

It was not an x-ray though because while my bones were bright, there were other parts brighter still.

My hands and feet especially were pure white on the display. Thin strands of bright material ran up my arms, clustering into more bright spots at my wrists and elbows.

“Hands, feet, joints,” Umtane said.

“The connective tissues too,” the doctor said. The specific vocabulary they used went over my head in Starspeak, but I knew what they were pointing at. Ligaments. Tendons.

“Your body is optimized to move, Caleb Hane,” Umtane said. “I’m a little envious.”

“I’m not wild about a Vorak seeing under my skin,” I said. “Feels like I’m showing you where my weak points are.”

“It’s more like your strengths, but I take your point. Here,” Umtane volunteered, “scan me too. Take a look.”

The Vorak irked me because he was obviously trying to be disarming. But I was interested.

Umtane stood still in front of the projector long enough for the doctor to snap another scan. The image of his body popped up on screen, and the differences were immediately obvious.

I asked Nai.

she didn’t respond psionically, but she did frown at me. Was she offended?

“…Might as well scan me too,” she said reluctantly. “Just for reference.”

“I would have figured information on your augmentations was classified,” Umtane mused. “You’re okay with me seeing?”

“Well they’re not going to keep the data, are they?” she gave the Casti doctors an accusing look. The seven of them didn’t object.

“Besides,” Nai said lightly. “Even if you did somehow keep a scan, it wouldn’t help you.”

Umtane didn’t shudder, but he went almost completely still for a heartbeat. Umtane had been too easygoing. It was extremely gratifying to see something give any Vorak pause.

The doctors were disquieted by Nai too. No one said anything while they snapped a scan of her. Though, I did see Tasser wearing a faint smirk.

Between my picture and Umtane’s, the differences were obvious. My image was lined with exotic materials, with the most intense concentration lying in my hands and feet. My joints weren’t far behind though.

Umtane by comparison was rather sparse. His bones lit up, but much fainter than mine.

“The bright areas are augmented, right?”

“More or less,” Nai said. “Detectors like these only read the presence of Adept-created matter. That doesn’t necessarily predict how much the body parts are augmented, but in general, more exotic material means more augmented organs.”

“So Umtane doesn’t look very augmented at all, except for his eyes, I guess,” I said.

The two orbs sunken into his otter-head were the only parts of his scan that even approached the brighter portions of my scan.

“You can probably see better than a Casti,” Nai reckoned.

Some of the doctors looked like they might ruffle at that.

“You said augmentations are a Vorak specialty; what are you just the exception?” I asked.

“Yes, actually,” Umtane said. “Most Vorak Adepts tend to have some augmented body parts, but by the same token there are ones like me who have…other strengths.”

“Okay, so what does being augmented actually look like? I haven’t noticed anything different aside from those early examples.”

“That says a lot more about what you were doing when you first got here than anything else,” Tasser said. “Augmentations like these don’t affect musculature much. Most of your benefits are going to be about withstanding strain. You won’t feel stronger, but your joints can probably take punishment like they were steel.”

“Tougher body parts like bones and tendons tend to benefit proportionally more than softer ones like muscle or skin. But there’s a huge range to it. Measuring them is tough,” Umtane said. “Some tissues will only see marginal reinforcement—as low as ten percent. But others might see thousand percent increases in tensile or shear strength.”

“That sounds like it’s difficult to measure. Does that affect any of our testing today?” I asked the doctors.

“Yes,” one said plainly. “For one, it probably means we could have you run for hours. You might still get tired, but your joints wouldn’t even be sore. But it’s your hands and feet that are actually more noteworthy.”

The doctor clicked the button on the projector, bringing Nai’s scan up next to mine. Unlike Umtane, her body was crisscrossed with concentrations of exotic matter. Although, no single part of her body showed up as brightly as my hands and feet did.

Overall though, her body was more augmented. I was only just learning about this, but there wasn’t a single piece of her that didn’t look affected.

“So my hands and feet are just going to be more durable?”

“Your grip might be better too,” Dr. Eebat said. “We could have him climb?”

“The problem is the tendons and ligaments, if they’re augmented, that throws off a lot of our tissue data. We can't just a break a bone and measure how much force it took: we need a way to estimate,” another doctor shot back.

It wasn’t the first time today the doctors had casually talked about injuring me. At least this time it was in the context of why they shouldn’t.

Tasser saved me though—he was such a dependable friend. The radio at his hip buzzed with a message from Nemuleki. He finished checking the message just in time to pull the conversation apart.

“Whatever more augmentation tests you want to do will have to wait,” he told the doctors. Turning to Nai, he added, “Nemuleki just called, she’s with the facility Director in the hot lab they’re going to be keeping all of Caleb’s samples in. We’re supposed to go there now.”

Nai nodded and whispered to Umtane, “Well Rak, are you done watching the human or is it time to find this bioweapon now?”

“Alright,” he said. “My team has taken over an office in the accounting offices. I’ll show you some of what we have.”

Tasser and I left the way we came, picking up two extra Casti security guards waiting outside the physical medicine wing.

I tracked Nai and Umtane on radar, pinging Nai every few moments just to test the effective range on the telepathy. So far we were more than fifty yards apart and I still had a fix on her.

Keeping my radar dialed out to its maximum range like this ruined its precision, but when I cross-referenced the radar with the floorplan of the Complex, it was good enough to pick out which room she was in.

If she was nervous about going alone with Umtane, it didn’t show.

I asked her.

she said firmly.

I admitted.

I pointed out.

Really? Based on the feeling from my radar, I could definitely see the possibility, but it felt too straightforward. If he was really an L1, didn’t that give me a leg up on him?

I told her.

she said.

she trailed off. Hesitating.

she said.

I recommended.

she pointed out.

…

She wasn’t responding. I stopped Tasser for a moment, my blood running cold. Had something happened?

I sent.

she replied.