moment.”
❖
“Please tell me you’ve done this before,” Zero said, eyeing the medical equipment as Talent set it up around him.
It looked a lot more complicated than anything he’d used on himself in the past. It was all wires and tubes as Talent connected the auto-diagnostic bed to the console on the other side of the room.
“Don’t you need to have qualified as a healer to use all this?” he asked nervously, trying to slide off the bed without Talent spotting him. A sharp look from the tall Lathar pinned him in place.
“Not for these systems, no.” Talent’s hands moved confidently as he made sense of all the wires and plugged them in. “This is an auto-system so it doesn’t need a neural link. Still, it’s far in advance of the old scanners you guys were using. I can’t believe you still had it boxed up in storage.”
Zero shrugged. “None of us could make heads nor tails of it. You’d think they’d come with instructions or something.”
“Well, that’s what happens when you steal stuff.” A smile curved Talent’s lips as he knelt to put the last few connectors in place. “Yes, I’m well aware this unit was destined for the healer’s hall on Yxaniixos Seven.”
Zero blinked. “How do you know that?” Even he hadn’t known that, and he’d been the one to boost the container from its shipment.
“Auto-units aren’t that common. When one goes missing, the healer’s hall on Lathar Prime is informed. I was tasked with shipping a replacement unit out to them.”
“Ahh.”
That made sense. Medical units were expensive, but then again, so were imperial healers… and there was always the risk of falling out of favor with the empire and being barred, which was the reason they’d decided to “acquire” a unit. None of them had realized that simply setting one up required several decades of medical knowledge, a note from the lord healer, and a minor miracle.
“Okay… we should be good to go.” Talent stood, slapping the side of the unit in satisfaction as he moved to stand behind the console. “Just lie as still as you can, no fidgeting. It’ll help me get a good initial scan.”
Zero grunted in reply and went still. With absolute control over his body, no one could go as still as a cyborg. Well, as still as him because as far as he knew… he was the only one of his kind in existence.
The machine whirred to life around him, intersecting holographic rings moving over and around each other as they scanned him. He didn’t bother closing his eyes. He just focused inward and let his onboard inform him about what was going on.
He could tell he was being scanned, right down to the molecular level and… it itched. Ignoring the irritation, he pondered the feeling. His own systems were a constant source of fascination for him. Even though he had no memories before the point T’Raal had pulled him half-dead from the wreckage of his ship, he knew several things about himself.
He had been made. Not born.
There was no other explanation for it. Analysis of his skeletal structure and the enhancements made to it indicated that his implants were approximately six months younger than his biological components. Which meant either he’d come out of the womb an adult, or… yeah, he hadn’t been born.
He’d been grown somehow.
The tickle from the scanning ramped up a notch as the machine began a low-level whine of complaint. Too low for an unenhanced being to detect, the machine seemed to work harder to scan him. Probably because he was mostly machine.
Given that, was he even a person?
Yes. He was. He had to believe that. He was capable of independent thought, even when he shut his onboard down as far as he dared, to the bare minimum required to run his cybernetics. He was alive… and sentient… but past that, he didn’t know anything about himself. Even the few serial codes he could dig up from his base coding weren’t a match for anything from any known world or civilization. Not even humanity, the latest species to join the intergalactic community.
Still, he couldn’t help a little curiosity over what Talent, formerly a member of the healer’s hall on Lathar Prime, would discover. The tickle in his body ramped up again. He gritted his teeth when it became an unpleasant buzz. Hopefully, this would be over soon.
“Interesting.” Tal’s voice was low. “Physically, your biological construction mirrors the Lathar. Same bodily systems from what I can see. Your