Disclaimer: Yo, Homestuck belongs to Hussie. Not me.
The Trusted Knife
Your name is Sorevo Thorak , and you are a highly talented lowblood surgeon. With no psychic capabilities to speak of and a projected lifespan that could be counted in its entirety on one's fingers and toes, you are lucky to be where you are. You know this. You are grateful.
You never felt the need to be a soldier. It's not that the sight of blood and spilled organs disgusts you, or that you lack the cold detachment needed for combat tactics. But a rustblood can't rise in the ranks. You'd be stuck as a foot soldier, throwing your life away. So when the time came for recruitment, you submitted for entry into medicine. With a constant stream of injured trolls coming back from the frontiers, there was always demand. You demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of troll anatomy, and performed a limb reattachment on a criminal, live, in front of the panel of Determinators. The verdict was clearly in your favor.
Your specialty is cybernetics, whether remedial, voluntary, or involuntary. The brain-computer interface has always been of particular interest.
You don't trust anyone's knife but your own. You've seen too many sloppy jobs, too many operations that end in disaster. Shortened lifespans. Personality changes. Phantom limbs, including where there was no limb originally. Pain, discomfort, frustration. You pride yourself on getting soldiers back on their feet within a perigee or two, even those nearly blown to pieces. You take a quiet amusement from the fact that, despite caste and aside from the obvious differences in color, the anatomies of your patients are largely the same.
You are honored beyond belief when you receive a royal summons to design the interface for Her Condesce's helmsman, according to the most modern and efficient principles.
You prepare for perigees, experimenting with immune suppressors and nerve networks, until you have your final blueprint. You submit the plan to Her Condescension, and in return receive a shuttle to the flagship, where you will bring your design into reality.
You are awed by the Battleship Condescension. It is the size of a small city, bristling with armaments, and staffed by thousands of trolls. Your vascular pump thrums in your chest as you are brought down to the engine room. The air is cool inside, with a set of standard helm-sockets and your subject anesthetized and covered on a gurney. You realize that you are meant to begin work immediately.
There are two medical trolls on hand, in case you need assistance, but you wave them off, not trusting anyone's knife but your own. Still, they are higher blooded than you, so you do so politely, and in the most self-deprecating way possible.
You examine your tools. You've been well supplied with all the usual implements, with the addition of a variety of winches to make the task easier. You uncover your subject. A male goldblood, thin and lanky. Eyes closed in cold, dreamless sedation.
You start by raising the gurney, and yourself, to work at the interface between the sockets and the subject. You cut open the subject's hands and carefully extract the major and minor nerves one by one, drawing out the fine endings. You link the proprioceptive nerves to the biomechanical motion sensors that run throughout the ship's hull, then do the same with the feet. You snip off the unnecessary flesh of the limbs, leaving the nerves, and hook them up to the biomech tendrils hanging from the sockets, smearing the wounds with plenty of stem-cell ointment to encourage quick healing. This is the crux of your improved design, allowing for the helmsman to feel the entire ship as they would their body, steering fine movements with as much alacrity as a troll would move their own limbs.
With the subject now hanging vertically, you can access it back and front. You open the skull and insert the reward and punishment nodes into the brain tissue. It would be much easier if you could excise the parts of the brain that fuel consciousness and make the subject into a piece of nonsentient wetware, but as it turns out, consciousness and psionics are inextricably linked. The next best thing is to use conditioning, to allow the captain of the ship to inflict pleasure and pain on the helmsman in accordance with its cooperation.
You make a fistula and insert the feeding tubes into the subject's stomach, and then insert another tube for waste removal from the intestines. Simple plumb-work. Any surgeon could do it. You then work on the shoulders, reinforcing them with metal joints that allow for easy suspension.
A quick hook-up of a dripline to the bloodstream, and that's it. It's really a simple operation, and only takes you six hours. You leave instructions for the helmsman's upkeep, troubleshooting, and healing time before it can be brought online. You're sure the onboard medics can handle it.
You are about to leave when you hear a phlegmatic cough from behind you. You are confused. Surely they used enough sedation…?
You turn, and the subject has raised its head and is looking at you, bleary. It is still unclothed, and is not yet wearing the goggles that will allow it to see where the ship is going. You notice, with a clinical interest, that the eyes are mydriatic, and that the tapetum of the left eye has an unusual iridescence.
It turns away, gargles a bit, then spits out a gob of blood that must have entered the chitinous windtube during the fistula installation. You go to your toolkit to prepare another sedative.
It struggles futilely to rip itself from the sockets as you approach, wearing the same expression of mute horror that you've seen dozens of times, on other helmsmen. Then, as you approach with the sedative syringe, its head snaps up, cries out "No!" and then you are abruptly floating in the air.
Your feet scramble at nothing. "Don't put me out," your subject says.
You say you won't.
When it lets you down, you reach for the conditioning console, and inflict a mild punishment, along with a verbal chastisement. Your subject curls its lip and inhales with a hiss.
After the punishment, you inform it that it will not be able to function properly until the surgery heals.
"Surgery," it says, its voice hoarse. "God." You notice that it speaks with a lisp.
You tell it that you are willing to provide painkillers during healing.
"God," it says again. "Just kill me."
You assure it that once it is healed and it is brought online, neuroplasticity will allow it to integrate with the ship's computers, until fueling the engines feels like second nature.
"And you know from experience?" your subject snaps, fury in its permanently dilated eyes. "I suppose you have done this before?"
You shrug. A fair number of times. But this design is your best yet. As befits the Battleship Condescension.
Your subject's eyes widen at the name, and swallows thickly. "The Dolorosa," it says quietly. "The Disciple. Where…"
You shrug again. You have heard these names passed around in gossip, some cult of rebels running around on the homeworld. But you are hardly up to date on it.
It closes its eyes, and you step forward to administer the sedative, the conditioning console still in your other hand. But it growls, and a psychic force pushes you backward. You swiftly inflict a moderate punishment, and this time the subject throws its head back, grinding its teeth.
"You are called a lowblood," it says raggedly, once the punishment has subsided. "Why are you doing this?"
You have worked hard to get where you are, and you bare your teeth without meaning to.
"But for luck, you would be where I am," it says. "We are the same."
You tell him - it - that you are nothing alike.
"Aren't we? By the Condesce's doctrine, I should be higher than you. Yet you had no problem with…" He falters. "This."
Orders are orders. You had no choice. And yet, with those mismatched eyes staring you down, you admit to yourself that you do take a certain pleasure in your work, in opening up the bodies of those so much higher than yourself, in seeing them laid out and vulnerable before you. There's a small measure of power, there, and it's the only power you have.
"You are called 'lowblood.' Yet… you don't fight. You do nothing. No one does anything." His lips curl into a sneer. "It's as if you enjoy being ground into the dirt."
You wish that you could excise his larynx, but you know that vocal feedback is important for helmsmen. So you inflict a severe punishment instead.
He screams this time, a keening wail that you are aren't sure is entirely due to the activated node.
Once he gets his voice back, he says, voice cracking: "I do not have his way with words. I never have."
You don't look at the cream-colored tears dripping down his face. You step forward again, and he again pushes you back, shaking his head. So you try something different.
You turn the reward node up to its highest setting, and inflict it on him, again and again. He gasps, and his dilated eyes roll back. "It's not… not your… ah."
With your subject now distracted, you are able to draw close enough to inject him with the sedative, and watch his muscles go lax as he succumbs.
His eyes are still open. You don't look at them, and don't imagine them following you as you leave.
