I walked down the hallways of UNSC Hopeful. It was a bad sign that these corridors were becoming familiar to me, but today, I could not bring myself to care.Three times before now, I had been on this very ship. Today was the fourth time, and I despaired at that horrible coincidence. My first time aboard the vessel had been for the original augmentations, back in March of 2525. Twenty-one days I had spent living out of a guest suite, nibbling at food as I watched my Spartans undergo their augmentations… and watched as many of the augmentations had been aborted or had failed. No matter what went wrong, the result was the same: to preserve the children’s compatibility with the augmentations, they had been frozen in cryopods, locking them at their current age in a state of suspended animation.
Only a mere month after those initial procedures, in April of 2525, I had returned to the Hopeful as David and Paul began the second wave of augmentations. Seven Spartans, the ones that had only barely ‘failed’ the augmentations. It was possible, David had admitted, that the second wave could have survived the normal procedures if they had just pressed onward a little harder. There hadn’t been much need for customizations in their surgeries – just a few tweaks, and that was it.Six months after that, in October of 2525, we came back for the third round. This was where things had gotten… worrisome. Paul’s Augmentation Team had done their best, and they had come up with modified versions of each augmentation. If all went well, these Spartans would be identical to their siblings, just... six months delayed in age. Full capability, as we originally designed.And now… now it was March of 2526, and it was time for the final Spartans to undergo their surgeries. Not to be augmented. Just to save their lives.Paul and David had told me that it would take a year to come up with a solution for the seven most unfortunate cadets. But in the end, they had failed. They couldn’t figure out a way to fully augment them.Instead, it was time for compromise. If we couldn’t make them into full Spartans, then at least we could save their lives.Michael Stanforth had accepted the logic, and I was grateful for that. I hadn’t dared yet talk to Vice Admiral Richards or Admiral Keeler about the topic. I had promised them that if they gave me more funding, I could give them seventy-five out of seventy-five Spartans… and I had failed. They would get only sixty-eight. But that was a small price to pay to save the lives of the children. Especially Visha’s.
I already had a line of bullshit ready to feed Richards and Keeler about how the seven ‘half Spartans’ would still be invaluable. Their eight years of training had turned them into some of the greatest minds in the galaxy, even if their bodies would fall short of their brothers and sisters.Frankly, I didn’t expect much in the way of pushback from either of them. Richards had been aloof in our few meetings, and I got the impression that he trusted Stanforth to manage me on the basis of our previous relationship. Keeler was an even rarer sight, busy as he was managing the initial stages of what the academics were already calling the Human-Covenant War.
Somehow we had lucked into a similar situation to the one we had enjoyed during the first several years of the Spartan-II Program: benign neglect from above. With HIGHCOM’s decision to delay deployment of the Spartans, I had years to prepare for their inevitable first taste of combat. The rest of ONI was far, far too busy to worry about little old me. The War was consuming everyone’s attention, and Section Three was reeling as they frantically shifted gears from counter-terror operations back into the larger scale required for operations against a peer opponent – though ‘peer’ was underselling the Covenant, from what little we knew thus far.
It wasn’t totally quiet, of course. Stanforth had taken me aside a few months ago and informed me that the political games targeting my research teams were intensifying. He was leveraging his new position to shut them down, but bluntly, the requests to siphon away my funding were very persuasive. The needs of the war, resources better allocated to tried and tested operations, things like that. I would have agreed with such things, if not for the fact that it would have hurt my Spartans in the end.Taking a deep breath, I opened the final door in the hallway, and walked into the familiar sight of the same cross-shaped viewing gallery that I had stood in, one year ago. It looked… unchanged. Even the couches were still there. Four surgeries would happen today. Three would happen tomorrow. Since we had four full surgical teams, David had taken the liberty of assigning the extra team to assist with the most difficult surgery: Visha’s.Out of all the Spartan failures, only Visha’s involved the risk of an immediate death. Every other failure had been salvaged by David’s painstakingly created protocols for aborting each surgery at any stage of the process. However, as the five augmentations proceeded from the simplest to the most complicated, it meant that we didn’t dare advance them to the next surgery.Visha, for example, had completed the first two augmentations without difficulty. It was the third – the carbide ceramic ossification – that had threatened to kill her. Theoretically, we could have tried the fourth and fifth augmentations, and she might sail through them just fine… but that was a chance that none of us wished to take, after she’d had complications with significantly simpler surgeries.
Of course, the bigger problem with Visha was that she was actively dying when we put her in the pod. All the other Spartans were just a matter of finishing their half-complete surgeries with the new tailored approach, so that they weren’t permanently confined to wheelchairs or fluid suspension tanks. But for her… we needed this surgery just to make sure that she wouldn’t stay locked up in a cryopod like some European fairy tale, never to see the light of day again.
The main problem that faced us with Visha’s situation was that technically speaking, there was nothing wrong with the surgery itself. The carbide ceramic agents had not failed. The medical applications had been done perfectly.It was Visha herself that was the problem – or to be more specific, it was her genetic compatibility. The process of hardening a Spartan’s bones required the same kind of pressurization issues that commonly occurred with SCUBA divers. The only thing stopping us from giving unbreakable bones to the ODSTs or Army Rangers was the fact that if we tried, many of them would die in the exact same horrifically painful manner.The simple way of thinking about it was that we were installing little pellets of flavored mint candy into a subject’s bones. If the procedure worked, that candy dissolved and spread out, coating the entire bone in candy! However, if they were not genetically compatible enough, then instead, it was like the candy was dropping into soda, and causing a release of the carbonated gasses within the soda.
What was that delightful American example that was so popular on the Internet in my first life? Diet Coke and Mentos? Yes, that.
Now just imagine that chemical reaction happening inside someone’s rib cage. Lovely, isn’t it?Thanks to my Spartan’s genetic compatibility, they adapted faster than almost anyone else. This was incredibly niche, and would have meant that they could handle decompression sickness much more easily. For the augmentations, however, it meant that they had a vastly lower risk of this chemical reaction, and the resulting cavitation bubbles.
However, as I had been warned since the beginning of the program, Visha’s genetic compatibility was the worst of all cadets… and this was where it had manifested.
Ironically, the fact that we had been forced to throw Visha into a cryopod had actually helped us realize the solution to this problem. The cryopod had been our default emergency solution because of our hopes that it would slow down or prevent a subject from actively dying to any one of the various medical mishaps that might happen… but one of Paul’s research AI’s, Demetrian, had theorized that the cryogenic suspension might actually help prevent that chemical reaction.Despite all my scientific knowledge, I was not a medical doctor, so I struggled to follow the exact specifics. As I understood it, Demetrian’s theory was that by applying a steady application of cryogenic gasses, we could lower Visha’s body-temperature, and thus dissipate the build-up of gasses inside her rib-cage before they either spread to the rest of her body, or burst apart, shredding her vital organs.Paul had called it ingenious, and he, David, and Ysionris Jeromi had spent many hours working out exactly how this would work. Portable dispensers of cryo-gas had been rigged up, customized cold-weather gear had been made for the surgeons, and Visha’s cryopod would be physically moved into the surgery room before they started.
Unlike all the other Spartans in this final wave of augmentation, as soon as that hatch opened, the surgeons would be racing against the clock… and they had no idea when those cavitation bubbles might burst.
It was dangerous, extremely so. Hypothermia was only one of the potential side-effects that might kill Visha even if they could dissipate the byproduct gasses. The accelerated cryogenic suspension itself might cause problems, since normally the UNSC preferred to do that slowly, not over the course of a mere five seconds. And that’s not even getting into the fact we had been forced to leave the incisions into Visha’s chest open to the air when we’d frozen her!
But they all thought it would work, and I was desperate enough to agree.
Perhaps I should have refused, since we didn’t actually have any idea what the odds of success were! But then I thought of Visha being trapped in that cryopod, and I shuddered. That was not living. It was an eternal purgatory. She was trapped in one suspended moment of time, always about to die, and never quite managing it.
They said that nobody dreamed during cryosleep, but I feared that they were wrong. What kind of horrible dreams had Visha been having over the last year in that damn pod? What kind of nightmare-land would I confine her to, if I had refused to authorize the surgery?
These were the thoughts that lingered in my mind as the first four surgeries started.
It was callous of me to ignore the suffering of the other Spartans; the suffering of Kirk, Douglas, Otto, and Cassandra, all of whom were undergoing their surgeries right now. But I couldn’t help it. Their lives were in danger, yes, but they had hours of life for the surgeons to curtail and halt the augmentations gone wrong. Visha might only have minutes, or even just seconds.
Yet Visha’s surgery was not until tomorrow. As much as I cared for her, I had four more children under my protection. Even if they could not see me at this moment, sedated as they were, it was not right for me to ignore them.
I had an obligation to witness their surgeries, the same obligation that I had possessed for every single other Spartan. Visha’s life was not so important that I would condemn others to death just to save her… and though my presence as an observer had no effect on their survival chances, I felt that I needed to be here, regardless.The first set of regular augmentation surgeries had lasted about eight to ten hours, with some variation. The second and third waves, due to their partially complete nature, had finished earlier. This final set was the shortest of all, as they were only meant to stabilize the Spartans. And so I sat there for the next two hours, biting my lip and waiting for it to be over.That was not to be, alas. Paul Wu approached about halfway through the surgeries, and sat down beside me.“Brings back memories, doesn’t it?” he asked quietly.
“Mm,” I hummed, barely managing that non-verbal response.“They’ll be fine,” Paul said unnecessarily. “If you think about it, this is safer than the last batch we did. Just… triage.”
I grimaced. I liked the man, truly he was a good friend, but nobody who had ever seen a triage scene would actually use that word to reassure someone else. To triage was to condemn some men to die simply so that others could live – and that was the exact opposite of what we were doing here. We were trying to save every life possible.
“It’ll all be over soon,” I said, keeping my words as generic as possible. “We will finally finish up with the cadets.”
“Do you really think that?” Paul asked. His voice was still soft, but I tensed a little anyway.
I trusted Rear Admiral Jeromi, truly. I also knew that he had already removed all recording devices from these areas. It was still hard to talk about these kinds of things.
“…No,” I admitted, bitterness in the back of my throat. “Not unless the Covenant roll over, or unless the Spartans under-perform. And those possibilities are…”“Unlikely,” Paul agreed. We sat there in silence for a few more moments, before my friend spoke up again.“The first set of maintenance checks will be ready for the summer,” he said, with a strange tone in his voice. “The plan is still to bring them all back to Reach for the summer, correct?”“Subject to requirements of the service,” I reminded him. “But assuming that nothing goes wrong, then yes. Michael tells me that HIGHCOM is debating some quick anti-Innie operations for them, but they’d be back at their academies by the fall.”“I know I’m not military, but it feels wrong that they even get a summer vacation,” Paul said, shaking his head. “Is there a war on, or not?”“You’re right, but don’t look the gift horse in the mouth,” I muttered. “If we look ungrateful, they might just change their mind.”“True,” Paul said, before lowering his voice even quieter and leaning in to whisper in my ear. “…and while we’re there, you can pretend to participate, and keep the others off your back.”I blinked, and then slowly turned my head to look at Paul in complete confusion.“What?” I asked, my eyebrows knitting together and my eyes narrowing.“Michael, Frank, Avery,” Paul said. “They think you’re an ex-Innie super-soldier.”I froze, the words bouncing in my empty skull like shrapnel blasted around by an artillery shell.Me? An Insurrectionist? I knew that there was a certain prejudice against people from the Outer Colonies, but surely not from those three, who knew me so well! And a super-soldier? What the hell was that about? How on Earth could they have ever reached such a conclusion?Then my breath caught in my throat, and I realized exactly why they thought that: because of what I’d done on this very ship, one year ago, when Visha had nearly died. I didn’t remember much of that fateful day. I had a small stress attack, and after it had ended, I’d been carried off to my bed by the man sitting right next to me… but I did remember what I did to that door handle – burning off the last of my magic in a pitiful and furious display of anger that had achieved nothing at all.Frankly, I thought that I had been lucky that nobody had seen my display, and that Michael Stanforth had arrived after it had finished…
…but evidently, that was not true.“They think that,” I breathed, noticing the implicit exception in that sentence. “But you don’t?”Paul glanced at me, and the tiniest smile graced his face. “If you had been, you would need maintenance for your augmentations,” Paul said, pointing the fact out with a melancholic serenity. “They haven’t really thought about that, I guess. Either that, or they think you were getting that maintenance from me, under the table.”I leaned back slightly, pressing my back into the couch’s upholstery, and took a slow, deep breath. A few years ago, I would have been raging in apoplectic fury or terrified to insensate paralysis at this moment, and at these kinds of accusations. But I was not the person that I had been a few years ago.
I trusted everyone in leadership positions of the Spartan-II Program. Franklin Mendez had been there for the entire duration of the project, and had been my loyal second-in-command. Michael Stanforth had thrown himself between the petty backstabbers of ONI office politics to defend me. Even Avery Johnson, the sarcastic and bombastic Orion-I, had become a familial figure to my Spartans and even to myself, an uncle or a cousin of sorts.And apparently, Paul trusted me just as much. He had clearly known about this well before today, but he hadn’t said anything, nor had he changed how kindly he treated me.
“Why haven’t they just asked me?” I asked, my mind racing for the only unanswered question – and even as I said it, I already knew the answer.“Because what difference would it make?” Paul said, confirming my own supposition. “You’re still you, and that’s all that matters.” He didn’t add any more – and he didn’t need to. It was one thing to suspect such things about a friend, and it was another to actually ask them. The former was merely your own speculation, but to demand answers to said speculation was the same as admitting that you didn’t truly trust that so-called friend. I digested that information for a long time, staying quiet as I worked through the possibilities. Obviously, I should find the time and the place to tell them all the truth, that I wasn’t an Insurrectionist, former or not. That I wasn’t a super-soldier, and they didn’t need to cover anything up for me. But… wouldn’t that be the same kind of rudeness, just redirected back at them? If I felt that I was forced to address their suspicions, then didn’t that broadcast my own insecurity?
The difference was in the execution, I mused. If I summoned them all and frantically tried to explain away my origins to them, then it would be a desperate attempt to not lose their friendship – and in doing so, it would demonstrate that I feared our friendship was weak.
I will tell them, I decided. Maybe not today. And maybe not the full truth of reincarnation. That might be a bridge too far, especially now that I cannot demonstrate magic in front of them anymore… but they have trusted me, and I should trust them in turn.
Paul sat by my side for the rest of those surgeries, and we didn’t talk any further about that topic.
Xxxx
The next day, I rose early and made sure to eat a proper breakfast alongside all the surgical teams, sitting between David Meyer and his head anesthesiologist.
None of us spoke about the upcoming operations, especially not Visha’s. The tension was already palpable in the air, and there was no need to address it. Instead, I simply made sure that I saw them all eat a full meal, so that their energy levels were not spiking up or down, and I tried to show that I had a quiet confidence in them.I wasn’t sure if the doctors would understand the gesture I was making, but at the very least, David did. He clapped a hand on my shoulder as we finished bussing our dishes.“I’ll see you in a few hours,” he said, as if he was merely going away for a quick meeting, and not heading off to handle such an important event.“You will,” I said, smiling weakly in reply.When I arrived at the couches in the observation lounge, Paul joined me. A few minutes later, to my surprise, Rear Admiral Ysionris Jeromi also sat down by my side. Neither of them said anything, however, so I kept my own silence as we waited for Visha’s surgery to begin.
The cryopod containing my oldest friend was already sitting inside the operating room. It looked cramped there in the corner, and for a moment I entertained the idle curiosity at how they’d gotten it inside. Perhaps there was a second door, hidden somewhere. Perhaps the Hopeful’s crew had simply removed a wall, put the pod inside, and then sealed it back up. Whatever the trick was, it didn’t matter.David and his teams were already preparing for the surgery. They were taking no chances, to the point that they even had a backup autosurgeon waiting in the corner, just in case the primary one failed. I didn’t bother trying to make eye contact, well aware by now that there was no point through the one-way glass.Some part of me, a juvenile and pathetic one, wanted to take charge and start making improvements. It was the same urge that had filled me during my first visit to the Hopeful, one year ago.But I repressed that urge viciously, stomping down on it.I trusted the Surgical Team. I knew them, and I knew they were the best in the galaxy at what they did. Any attempt to insert myself into their area of expertise was nothing more than an attempt to reassure myself by exerting control over the situation. That’s what it kept coming back to: control. I was a passenger in a crashing car, and my desperate instinct was to reach out and take the wheel from the driver, even if it would make the situation vastly worse.
But letting go of your desire for control was, perhaps, the best indicator of maturity. That was what trust truly was: a relaxation of your own tyranny over other people. A respect for their free agency - not only that they possessed it, but that they would make good choices with it.
That was where Being X had failed, back when I had died in my first life. When we had first met. Though I could not remember all of that life as the Salaryman, for he had taken those memories, our meeting itself was crystal clear. His desire to control every little part of me. His judgement of my sins, minor as they were. His temper tantrum at the fact that I had not respected him.
And that was where I had failed, myself, one year ago. When I had tried to tell David how to run his surgeries. When I had tried to change things at the last minute. I had told myself that it would improve the odds, but it wouldn’t have - it only would have satisfied my terrified ego.
Juvenile really was the best descriptor for that desire… and here, I think, there was no better example of it than to look at my Spartans and learn from them. Even at fifteen years old, they were more mature than I was. More accepting of the unknown paths that military life might put them on. More tolerant of failures and more aware of their own limitations. More adult in that most important of ways.Behind the glass, David nodded to the second surgical team, and gave the signal.
The cryopod hissed, loud enough that I could hear it in the observation lounge. The de-icing agents were deploying, the pressure equalizing. Two of the larger male doctors reached in as soon as the cryopod opened, and pulled Visha’s body out with delicate care.My eyes was glued to her. It had only been a year, but that was a full year of stasis, while the rest of my Spartans had been steadily growing under the influence of the growth hormones from their augmentations. Samuel, who I saw occasionally due to his stationing here on Reach, was fast approaching six feet tall, while Visha was still only a few inches taller than five feet. In other words, Visha looked small and pale, compared to the other Spartans that had grown tall and tan. It probably wasn’t the fairest assessment; she was still in excellent physical conditioning. It was just… comparative. Or, if I was being honest with myself, I was allowing my emotions to influence how I saw my dearest friend. While I sat there with maudlin thoughts, David’s surgical team was rushing around with haste. They were on a ticking timer, and they acted like it. One man was carefully inserting a tube down her throat, removing the bronchial surfactant with a gentle suction.Two surgeons were wielding nozzles and hoses, with attached tubing stretching up to the ceiling like fire-hoses. They were spraying super-cooled cryogenic gasses over Visha’s torso. Hopefully, this was delaying the cavitation of the failed augmentation long enough.David had taken manual control of the autosurgeon. He was carefully inserting needles into the same incisions that already existed. Counter-agents, diminishing mixtures, all of them were aimed at the same goal of diluting down the carbide ceramic to lower, safer levels. Of course, this was horrendously expensive. Not only the cost of all these surgeons and the equipment, but the carbide ceramic material itself was bleeding edge research. And now we were destroying its effectiveness, intentionally. Like buying an expensive sports car, then smashing it up with hammers.If it all worked, then Visha’s bones would be nowhere near as strong as the other Spartans… but she would live. And that was the only thing that mattered to all of us.
We sat there for the entire duration of the surgery. Paul Wu on my right side, Ysionris Jeromi on my left. None of us left for food, or to use the restroom. It was touching, and it gave me a warm feeling in my stomach that I didn’t fully appreciate until this moment. Trust. That’s what it was. I was honored by their trust in me, and their desire to bear the same burdens that I was forcing myself to bear.
I was sure that Jeromi probably had countless amounts of paperwork to do, overseeing the daily operations of the Hopeful, but he stayed here. Perhaps he was simply passing the duties off to his second-in-command. That would have been my trick, but alas, my usual target for such delegation was currently under the knife, so…
Two hours. A hundred and twenty minutes. The times practically flew by, simply because there were no clocks in the observation lounge. David’s work was not perfect, and it didn’t go entirely as planned. Sometimes the cryogenic gasses were too much for Visha’s skin, even though they had turned the entire operating room into the closest thing to a cryopod, and they were forced to reduce the intensity. Sometimes the carbide ceramic was too thick to be diluted, and they had to carve off chunks of it from her bones, before it could spread its catalyzing cavitation. But after two hours of careful work and hasty improvisation, David stepped back, and signaled for them to start slowly, carefully raising the temperature to bring her out of the cryo-coma that she had been trapped in.“She’s still sedated,” he said, turning to the one-way glass and speaking to us. “I want to keep her under direct observation for at least the next hour. After that, we’ll put her in the recovery room, and we’ll be on standby in case anything unexpected happens…”He paused. None of us could make out his expression behind the combination of surgical garb and cryo-protection gear that he was wearing.
“But it worked,” he said, with clear relief in his voice. “Visha will live.”All the strength in my shoulders fled, and I slumped back against the couch, exhaling a ragged, shuddering breath.She would live. After a year of tension and terror, filled with some of the most unpleasant twists I had ever faced in my existence… finally, at least one thing was going right.Ysionris Jeromi stood up and walked over to the intercom panel. “Thank you, Doctors,” the Rear Admiral said, the machine relaying his words into the operating theater. “I believe this is the first ever case of cryo-surgery that has been performed in the UNSC. Good work, all of you.”One of the nurses raised a fist wearily into the air, and in a tired voice, let out a simple reply of: “Yay.”The rest of the room broke in chuckles. Paul laughed by my side. A weak grin spread across my face unwillingly.
Xxxx
Five hours later, I was resting in a chair by Visha’s bedside when she finally began to stir.I was alone at that moment, but I hadn’t been for most of it. David had joined me, along with two other doctors, each monitoring Visha’s vitals until they were satisfied that not only had the reduced ceramic carbide levels settled down, but also that there were no other side-effects. Perhaps a year ago, I would have spent those hours staring down at Visha, my eyes locked on her like every twitch was the difference between life or death – similar to watching through a periscope in a trench-line to give immediate notification of an enemy attack.
These days, I could relax enough to read a book, and look away from her. I trusted David’s work, and the work of his team. I put faith in their expertise, and conceded that I had no real ability to affect the outcome.All that time ago, when I had realized what prayer really was… well, it had an influence on me, I must admit. If prayer was the penultimate act, the last action one could undertake before admitting powerlessness, then I would simply pray to the skills of the surgeons, and trust in them rather than that wretched Being X.Noise was the first sign of life. A soft vibrating sound, almost like a small engine starting up. I set down my book and almost thought it was some automatic seat adjustment on Visha’s bed, before I noticed that the sound was coming from her throat. Visha’s head turned a half-inch one way, and then the other. I saw her face scrunch up, as if she had smelled something bitter… and then, slowly, her eyelids began to rise.I held my tongue as the fourteen-year-old blinked slowly, and then repeatedly. She had gunk in her eyes, I realized. I took up a soft cloth from a nearby aid station, and carefully wiped away the detritus of cryo from her eyes without a word, as Visha obligingly held still.When I was done, Visha’s eyes opened fully, and she looked to me.“Doctor,” she whispered, her voice faint. “I’m here, Visha,” I replied, smiling down at her. “Here, have some water. Your throat must be sore.”The young woman took the cup from me and sipped gently at it, before handing it back.“A success, then,” she said, her voice gaining strength. “See? You worried for nothing.”I closed my eyes, and tried to not let my bitterness show on my face. Even now, she had so much faith in me. Far more than I deserved.“No, actually,” I said, opening my eyes and looking at her. “You had a severe reaction to the augmentation, Visha. We had to downgrade the procedures to save your life. I’m sorry, but quite technically, you have failed.”Visha blinked twice, looking almost like a small cat, and a pout came across her face.“Oh,” she said softly. “I’m afraid you were in cryosleep for some time,” I continued. “A year, to be precise. You’ll be undergoing a recovery for some time, but… you’re healthy. You’re alive.”“I missed a year?” Visha asked, sounding almost disappointed. “The other Spartans are never going to let me forget this. I overslept.”It wasn’t funny, but I snorted anyway. Visha giggled in response. “Well, the Insurrection is a big threat,” she said, continuing. “I can’t have missed the entire war. We are still fighting the Insurrection, right?”She smiled up at me, and I felt my face freeze, as if I had been the one trapped in a cryopod for a year. I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. How could I possibly explain how much things had changed? The Covenant, the destruction of Harvest? The death toll?Of course, I thought to myself distantly. She wouldn’t know, obviously…
“Doctor?” Visha asked, a note of concern entering her voice. “We are still fighting the Insurrection, right?”The young woman looked at me with increasing worry.“I’m afraid that you’ve missed quite a lot,” I said, delicately. “I’ll have to bring you up to speed. For now, I’m… I’m just happy you’re alive, Visha.”She still looked confused, but I ignored it as I leaned in and hugged her very carefully.