The sunshine felt amazing on my wounds.
Well, I told myself, they do say sunshine is the best disinfectant, and laughed.
It had taken me many hours of soul-ripping agony crawling through tunnels barely big enough for me to fit through and backtracking after hitting dead end after dead end to finally get my broken bleeding self to the surface of this wonderful hellhole of an asteroid, and now I was lying on a nice warm rock letting my solar cells recharge and basking in the glory of my achievement, otherwise known as the endorphine high you get after extereme exertion.
Once a biologist, always a pain in the ass about everything, said a voice in my head.
Yeah whatever. Knowing how things work never stopped me from enjoying them. And man, am I enjoying this high.
God knows I deserve it after what I’ve been through.
I decide to extend the buzz by thinking about how all my enemies think I’m dead. That always brings a big ol’ smile to my face.
Because of course, nobody could survive a crash like that. And if they did, there’s no way they could survive long on that barren, lifeless hunk of rock.
And the thing is, that’s almost right. No normal person could survive any of that. But then again, normal has never been my strong suit.
See, what they don’t know is that I happen to have an extensive suite of very expensive, super powerful, and extremely illegal implants all through my body, and those are what have allowed me to surive.
The ones near my heart threw up a force cage of great power and extremely short duration at the moment of impact.
The ones in my lungs are cleaning and recirculating the air I breathe.
The ones between my fourth and fifth vertebrae are projecting the skin tight passive-stable force field that is maintaining normal air pressure around me so I don’t explode.
And the fist-shaped one between my testicles contains a computer with the highest computational density known to man feeding its information directly into my nervous system as it controls and coordinates all the other implants.
That means one thing and one thing only : I am literally thinking with my balls now.
That amuses the hell out of me.
And the best part is, I know that nobody knows about the implants but me because if they did, they would all be hunting me like I had all three colors of the plague. Whole navies would be dispatched to hunt me down and kill me on sight.
That’s how bad anti-Enhancement hysteria has gotten. Having even the tiniest implant carries a trial-free death sentence on 80 percent of the planets in the League. On the rest, the best possible outcome is being stripped of all implants and thrown into some kind of dead-end mental health facility to rot till I die.
Besides, the guy who did all my implants is dead.
I should know, because I killed him for an entirely unrelated reason.
So I now have the glorious experience of knowing that absolutely nobody in the universe knows that I am alive.
The time between now and when they finally figure it out is gonna be SO MUCH FUN.
I don’t want to think about what all that pain did to me.
Not physically. Physically I will be fine. Now that my implants have all the solar energy they could ever want, I know I am going to be just fine despite having, according to diagnostics, several ruptured organs and burns on every inch of skin left.
It might take a while, but my implants will set everything right.
No, I am mostly worried about what that pain did to my soul. My moral being. I had to dig pretty deep to get to the surface, and I know that shit doesn’t come without a cost.
Surprised that someone the news describes as, variously, a “terrorist”, a “monster”. a “pirate” and “the most evil man alive” is worried about his moral being?
Well the truth is that I am a very moral man. Everything I do is in service of my deep seated sense of right and wrong.
And I bet that for the most part, mine is the same as yours.
Or at least it used to be.
I have run my own sort of diagnostic on my morality, and the prognosis is not good. I have tried elicit tender emotions by thinking about all the people I know I should care deeply for – my wife, my husbands, my kids, my “pirate” pals, even my childhood friends – and all I feel for them is a cold contempt and the barest flicker of a kind of detached pity, the kind you feel when you read about a disaster far, far away.
Weaklings, all of them. Worthless wastes of time, space, and skin. Random conglomerations of carbon compounds as meaningless to me as ants on a hill.
That…. is very far from how I usually feel.
I probe myself for any kind of moral feeling. And at first I get nothing. Null set. All readings at 0. And a terrible panic begins within me at the thought of a future with nothing but reptile instincts to guide me.
But at long last, I find my highest, most transpersonal ethics more or less intact. I still want people to live and thrive and for civilization to keep stumbling forward. If I could prevent a disaster, I would. I still think the plagues are a tragedy. I still feel angry when I think of what the Bund has done to innocent people everywhere.
I still think baby animals are cute.
So I am not dead on the inside just yet. And it could be that this is all a side effect of whatever the implants are doing to keep the pain at bay and that once I am healthy enough, I will be back to my usual passionately moral self.
But I know who I am and what I am capable of. I know what in me let me become the monster everyone knows and it was far more than ruthlessness and greed.
And it’s not just genius and creativity and resourcefulness either.
I know that I have that special spirit that drives people to greatness and just what kind of damage an amoral version of myself could do without compassion to restrain it.
And I know what I have to do if that should be the case.
I think about how ironic it would be if I were to survive all I have survived only to end up having to kill myself.
And it makes me smile.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.