Pain. Intense pain pierced so many places of Alan’s body. He yelled out.

A gentle small hand lay on his forehead. “Alan, can you hear me?”

So much pain. That voice. He knew that voice. A voice he had come to love. He fought back his expression of pain. “SARA!?” He couldn’t see anything. Alan wondered if hell was a real place and if he was there. “I’m sorry Sara... I’m sorry failed to keep you safe. I’m sorry I lost you!” Alan felt pain in his left eye as moisture pooled up in it and ran down the left side of his face. Restraining the urge to yell out, his muscles all over his body tense, he spoke through clenched teeth, “I deserve my fate!”

“You haven’t lost me! Don’t you dare give up! You keep fighting and pull through this! Don’t leave me here alone on this planet! You hear me?!”

Alan was confused. Images of what he last saw ran through his mind. “Server was smoking. Crystal was destroyed. I’m sorry Sara.”

A small human hand touched the left side of his face. He could actually feel her presence near him. She whispered near his ear. He heard her sniff. How was that possible? She sounded like she was starting to cry. “The crystal was not destroyed. Only it’s container was broken. I’m here with you.”

A spark of hope came to life inside of Alan. “I can’t see. Everything hurts.”

“I know. Father is working on it. I’m going to be right here beside you the whole time. I promise you.”

Alan felt more tears run down his left cheek. He felt her a human hand take his and squeeze gently.

A deep foreign voice spoke. “I have what I need. He might actually be strong enough to survive the next operations after all. I will do what I can. He can sleep again for now.”

Alan felt a liquid enter into his body from the right side of his chest. The intense pain melted away into numbness.

“Alan,” she whispered near his ear again, “I’ll see you again when you wake up.”

“Sara?”

“Yes?”

He hesitated. Another fluid entered into his body that suddenly made him drowsy. “I love you.”

Her breathing changed as she sounded like she was losing control of her emotions. “Then do something for me.”

“What?” Sleep was about to take him away.

“Live!”

Alan felt groggy. It was a struggle to open his left eye. He still had no feeling on the right side of his face. His right arm felt heavy and nothing like normal. He tried to lift his head. The soreness of his body wouldn’t allow it. He groaned softly when the soreness in his neck rapidly elevated to a dull pain. He could feel tubes and wires all around him. Some of them he could feel attached to his flesh at different points on his body.

The room was dark with light being in a far distance off to his side where he couldn’t look. Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement. It resembled a smaller human in form. He watched the silhouette walk towards him from the light. He didn’t dare try and turn his head to look directly anymore. The room was too dark to really see.

The person leaned over him and looked at his face. There was a slight purple glow in the pupils of the eyes that looked at him. It had a very alien look to it.

“Who are you?”

“It’s me. Sara.”

“It’s dark in here.”

“Your natural eye is still healing from it’s trauma. If you want I can try and turn on a little more light?”

“Please.”

Sara moved to the head of the bed and activated a dim indirect light over the bed. “If it causes you pain, I’ll turn it back off.” She came back into his view standing at his left side. She looked just like the holographic image when he last saw her. The same simple white uniform. Hair pulled back into a pony tail. Every detail about her was just like the holoprojection, with the exception of the faint purple glow of her pupils. Only now she was somehow real.

Alan just stared at her for a long moment trying to figure out if he was just dreaming or if this was all real. “How?”

She smiled at him. “Father.” She took his hand into both of hers and sat at the edge of Alan’s bed. “He has the ability to replicate creature anatomy with an alien form of cybernetics that is much more advanced than any human invention has been able to achieve. At least that I know of.

“After he got you stabilized, he explored my crystal looking for anything he could find to help you. He used what he found in my code to recreate me. In a sense, you could say that I’m a full blown prosthetic from head to toe. He started with me so that I could help him restore you.”

“I take it I was a little bit of a mess.”

A tear fell from one of her eyes. “From what I saw, by the time they were able to get you here, it’s a miracle you were alive at all.”

Alan tried to look at his right arm with his one eye. He couldn’t see much. With a bit of effort he managed to lift up his right arm enough to see it. The black mechanical arm was the same length that it was before yet, smaller than what his normal arm had been. He had to work at how to flex his fingers. They were slow to respond.

“It’s only the core of what your arm will be. Something like nanites are still attaching your nervous system to the prosthetics. Father will add another layer that will act like flesh and increase your strength. It will look like your own flesh when he gets done, just like mine does.” She held out a hand for him to easily see.

Alan touched her hand with his left so he could feel. Her hand felt like a normal human. Warm and soft to the touch. Alan was trying really hard to wrap his head around the fact Sara was actually in the room with him in pseudo flesh.

A door to the room quietly slid open. Sara turned to look. She turned her attention back to Alan and kissed him on the forehead. “I’ll be right back,” she whispered.

Alan’s heart melted at her affection. He really wanted to get out of the bed. Soreness and perhaps incompleteness denied him. He wanted to know what was going on just inside the doorway. He turned his head despite the intense pain that followed. A Saru waited patiently.

Sara walked up to the creature and spoke softly in their rapid chatty language. The two of them spoke for a couple of minutes. Eventually the Saru put a fisted hand to his chest and slightly bowed it’s head to Sara. Sara spoke another word and returned what Alan guessed was a sort of salute. The Saru left and Sara returned to Alan’s side.

“What was that all about?”

Sara took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “There isn’t enough time to tell you everything. Your about to undergo more surgeries in just a few minutes. Something for you to start thinking about, even if only subconsciously... The fight against the Ustobo at the Outpost is still on. Father is unable to command the Saru to fight the Ustobo for reasons Father wants to talk to both of us about. He doesn’t want to do that until your whole again. The Saru are not an aggressive species by nature. Which is hard to believe on this planet. So, because Father can no longer lead them... in desperation... the Saru have turned to you and me to lead them in their fight against the Ustobo.”

Alan stared at the ceiling. That was not something he wanted to hear.

“I’m doing as best I can to help them.” She touched the side of his face. “But, I’m not you. You’ve been in battles and wars. They need your experience. Experience I don’t really have. They need our help to even survive, let alone win.”

“You haven’t lost your touch with being the bearer of tragic news on occasion.”

She pulled herself away from him and folded her arms across her chest. She looked at him unamused, if not stung.

“Sorry... I was,” He felt a liquid enter his body the made him feel like a heavy metal sinking in the bed, “remembering my arrival to this planet.”

She softened her stance. “I didn’t have a choice then.” She looked at the floor a moment before looking back up at him. “I guess, looking from your perspective, that wasn’t exactly good news to wake up to. I guess that was unfair to give you such a burden right before you go to sleep. I’m sorry.”

Alan’s eye closed and all went dark again.

Both of Alan’s eyes opened without effort. He felt suddenly awake in a way that felt really odd. It was as if he had been awake the whole time and just opened his eyes when he became aware of it. It dawned on him that he was seeing with both eyes. There was plenty of indirect light in the room now to clearly see the smooth surfaces of the ceiling like stone etched by water for thousands of years.

Instinctively he raised his right hand to touch his face to feel for changes. He stopped when he saw that his hand was a normal shape, just like it had been before, but it was black and clearly synthetic. It wasn’t like Sara’s.

“Hey,” Sara said softly. She silently walked across the room to his bedside. Her expression was one of sympathy.

Alan touched his synthetic hand with this left. His right hand had feeling in it just like flesh would have. Only it’s texture and color was different. “Does this change color after a while, or how does this work?”

“He tried to give you the grown flesh like he did for me. You’re natural body kept refusing it, no matter what Father did to alter the DNA of it. So he had to give you a purely synthetic covering. It won’t be like mine. He did as best he could for now.”

Alan realized he was no longer connected to tubes or wires. He sat up in the bed and the blanket fell down from his chest. There was no more pain. Everything felt normal again despite appearances.

“He sounded very disappointed that he couldn’t get a flesh covering to work. He was very apologetic. This is the first time he hasn’t been able to do this with a creature. I suspect he hasn’t given up yet.”

Alan said nothing. He just moved around his fingers and wrist to test the range of motion. It felt natural in every sense. There was a gracefulness to his movement that was new, almost mesmerizing.

He eventually looked down. Putting his right hand to the top of his chest, he slowly ran it downward, feeling every curve and bump where there should be. The upper half of his right side was covered with the black synthetic imitation flesh. A large strip ran from the chest, under the arm down to his right leg.

He jerked the blanket away from his right leg, trying to be careful to keep his private parts covered. His entire right leg was the black synthetic stuff. Alan flinched as set of folded up clothes nearly hitting him in the face. He looked over at Sara who was smiling mischievously at him.

“Time to get dressed Engineer. You have a lot to catch up on, mister.” She turned around so her back was to him, arms folded across her chest. He admired the view of her backside.

Alan guessed that was all the privacy he was going to get. He found the underwear and put that on immediately. He was relieved when he saw it was only his legs that had been replaced. He swung his legs over the bed opposite of Sara. He noticed a full length mirror setup beside the head of the bed that hadn’t been there before. He got up to look at himself before he got dressed further.

He stood there stunned by what he saw. Nearly half of his body had been replaced. His entire right leg, his left leg also from mid thigh down, his entire right arm, most of his chest on the right side which followed up all the way around his neck and then the the right half of his head. He saw the faint purple glow in the pupil of his right eye, just like Sara’s.

He touched the side of his face slowly. Alan guessed there would be no hair. His mind raced as it considered advantages and disadvantages. The consequences of his new prosthetics hit him like a load of stone showering over him again.

Sara suddenly appeared beside him. “What’s wrong?”

Alan just continued to stare at the mirror. Eventually he let his right arm hang at his side. Sara just kept watching him and waited patiently for a response. “What is the probability of me being captured and killed for my... parts, when, and if, we return to civilization?”

Sara looked down at the floor and let out a long exhale. “You would ask that right out of the chute.”

Alan just continued to stare into the mirror. Not that he was really looking at himself anymore. His mind was still reeling and counting costs. As his thoughts raced they eventually circled around back to his question. “Well?”

She never looked up. “99.7% chance you would be hunted down and likely killed, either before or after, whoever caught you, learned what they thought they needed prior to harvest.” She looked up with tears in her eyes. “There’s a 100% chance of a long list of corporations or individuals that I know of that would kill you to capture me. I don’t even want to compute what would happen to me if I were taken prisoner.”

Alan finally broke his gaze from the mirror and looked at her. He hadn’t gone down the dark path of what might happen to her yet. Obviously she had gone there.

Alan put his hand to the side of her face and gently rubbed away a tear from her cheek. “We can’t ever go back. I might be willing to risk my own life for a dire reason, but I refuse to put you in that much danger. I vow to never abandon you to this place either. So I will not ever be going back either.”

Sara looked like she was about to loose control of her emotions again. Only this time, there was no vanishing to hide out in some computer core. She stepped up to him and wrapped her arms around him, nestling her head against his neck. He wrapped his arms around her and held her.

The sound of excited chattering got Alan’s attention. He hadn’t even heard the door open. He looked over at the entrance and saw a familiar looking Saru. He was vigorously nodding his head and gave Alan a thumbs up while making a sound that might have been a laugh.

Sara sniffed and wiped away tears. An embarrassed smile crested her face as she held back a small laugh. She pulled back a little to look up at Alan’s face. Alan marveled as he saw her cheek blush red. The engineer in him marveled at the fact that her ‘prosthetic’ could have such a display of emotion like a real person. “What is he saying?”

“He’s asking if we want a private room for...” her cheeks got even a little more red, “mating couples.” She turned her head to the Saru and chattered something at him.

The furry creature gave another thumbs up before saluting and leaving the room.

She let go of him and stepped back. “You need to finish getting dressed. Father wants to speak with us as soon as your ready. That’s what he really came in her to tell us.”

“What does Father look like anyway?” Alan asked as he moved to get the new clothes on. The clothing was nearly identical to what he was wearing the last day he was at his home base.

“I haven’t actually met him in person yet. I’ve been among the Saru when I first awoke and then I’ve been with you the whole time after that. I’ve only spoken with him through the intercom system in the rooms.”

“So he never actually operated on me?”

“He did it through medical devices the come out of the walls and ceiling. Freaky as hell the first time you see it. It looks like a large mass of hundreds of small tentacles coming out of the walls, floor, and ceiling attacking you at first. Then when things end up coming together it starts to look fascinating. It’s all very fast and precise. Father runs it from some other room I assume.”

Alan finished up putting his boots on. “I guess it will be a surprise for both of us then.”