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Dr. Arn Logus was breathing softly, his eyes closed. At least, from what Brooks could see of his face, that was how it appeared.
The lower half of the man’s face was covered completely by a soft membrane that was slowly regrowing his lower jaw.
The semi-organic cocoon covered his upper torso as well, a thick, slightly yellowish clear substance forming the shape of the arm that would, over the next few months, hopefully regrow and allow him to become whole.
Of course, it wasn’t going to be that easy, Brooks knew. For as much as medical science had progressed, the events that led to the moment of disaster for Logus would not be so easily forgotten.
They had ways of altering the mind, of healing damage – but it was not the sort of thing that was as simple as it seemed.
No matter how well they could understand the pathways of a human mind, how they could map out every neuron and model them on advanced computers, there were ethical questions that no machine could answer for them.
If a person is even just partially the sum of their experiences, then what did messing with those experiences mean for them? Sometimes people opted to have the worst memories of their lives excised, to truly forget them – at least consciously. Yet the body did not forget. In other spaces, something akin to memory could be triggered, causing even more trauma as the individual could be sent into a flashback episode without even knowing why or what the connection was.
They could try to hunt down those memories in the brain, too. But as soon as you found some you might find others, and soon more might need to be excised than many people – even those severely traumatized – might be comfortable with.
There was no easy fix. And the cost for any fix at all was high.
After Terris had come a heavy spate of research into the field, Brooks recalled. At the time, some experts had even spoken to him, as if he was some sort of expert in the subject of trauma.
They argued that his own apparent success in life after surviving the Ring Collapse for ten years made him suited.
He didn’t have answers for them, though. He did not know how to put into words what he’d done after Terris. It hadn’t been, in hindsight, the wisest or most responsible life choices. He’d fled the Sapient Union entirely, going to the fringe frontier of human space. Even today, sixty years after first contact with the Bicet and other aliens, in some places they were all still struggling to exist alongside each other. Harmless misunderstandings could lead to violence if that was the real desire of one side. Different customs, different outlooks, and different goals, with not enough infrastructure or resources to go around exacerbated it all still further.
But he’d thrived out there. The same skills that had let him survive in Antarctica during the ten-year winter gave him the self-reliance – and sometimes ruthlessness – to prosper.
But it had never been easy. Literally and mentally.
Dr. Y shifted in his strap-seat, sitting on the other side of Logus. The doctor had been unusually quiet, his attention on his friend.
Brooks was unsure if Y would have appreciated dialogue. As Captain, Brooks should try to work for his crew’s morale, and with other people he had always had a knack for it. But Y was a super-intelligent AI, far beyond him, and anything he might say felt like it would be cheap.
Dr. Y unhooked from his seat and moved over to a control panel, setting minute adjustments to Logus’s regrowth chamber.
Brooks decided that it was better to let the doctor busy himself for right now, rather than talk. He would speak to him – he would have to – but he would do it later.
For now, he simply looked back down on Logus, wondering just how aware the man was. Sometimes he seemed like he might have been slightly awake, his eyes cracked open and moving. But even if he was aware, most likely he would not remember such incidents. For him, it would be like they never happened at all.
Brooks wondered on Iago Caraval. The man was having his own battle, all of it in his head, and Brooks did not know which way it would go.
He knew there was a chance that Iago might simply leave the ship. There were clues that it might happen . . .
And if he did, Brooks wondered if he should let him.
It was what he had done, after all, wasn’t it?
Lt. Commander Pirra’s concern for him came to mind, and he felt uncertain again, wondering if he should have intervened sooner.
But he still felt, in his gut, that to confront the man would have made it all worse. For all the size of the Craton, its population was around the size of a small town. To feel confronted in such a small space could lead people to feeling trapped, not loved.
And if that happened with Iago . . . it would make it all so much worse.
At least he did feel confident that the man was not a danger to himself or others around him. Every psych exam of the man had showed that he had too strong a moral compass and concept of duty to enact violence against himself or others. Despite that, Brooks had made sure that all of Iago’s armory codes had been taken away. They’d been brought back only after he’d joined his Volunteer unit, but he hadn’t gone to any meetings of it since the battle.
Of course, someone of Iago’s training could weaponize a lot of ordinary things, if he wanted. Brooks just didn’t think that he ever would.
Please, he thought, let his intuition be right on that.
Other Terrestrial 
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