Gestalt

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Gestalt, 3k




*

It starts with an accident.

In the fifth month of Psi-Unit #3408's existence, in the twelfth Federation breeding facility on Orion Prime, he is walking down a long gray hallway with his designated Handler. Or rather, Psi-Unit #3408 is throwing an incoherent screaming fit as his Handler drags him forward bodily by one small wrist, her adult strength easily overcoming 3408's. He screams and wails at the top of his lungs, his Handler is grimly silent.

There is a reason for his tantrum. 3408 can feel that there is something very wrong with the room at the end of the hall, which they are going to walk past if they continue on their course, and the Handler can't feel it through the awful metal encasing her head that protects her from psychic backlash. He struggles and cries in terror over what is going on behind the closed door of that room, and his Handler has no idea.

Because she is touching bare skin when the white jumpsuit rides up, he can still hear some of her thoughts despite the shielding helmet, those thoughts revolving around her irritation and incomprehension at her charge's actions. He's not a willful pre-duty. He never cries, or has tantrums the way the other units his age do. She's thankful to have been assigned to the Prodigy line, notorious for their impeccable breeding and excellent performance records, and finds herself exasperated at the sudden reversal of the usual Prodigy tractability. They are late for a training session thanks to a stalled lift and this route should have been a convenient shortcut, not an inexplicable excuse for a screaming fit.

3408 could have explained himself if he knew the words. At five months, he is already more than halfway through the compiling process, where the memories and skills of his genetic predecessors are slowly fed directly into his mind in lieu of years of expensive training. His brain, marvel of genetic engineering that it is, absorbs entire lives and skillsets as readily as a plant drinks up light, but it doesn't always understand the information being poured into it. The full scope of his predecessors' memories won't be available to him until his Awakening, the moment his young mind develops enough to begin processing the information he's been given. At that moment he will for all intents and purposes become an adult, with an adult's mental faculties and experiences to draw on, and after some additional higher level training he'll be ready for combat duty as an Active. Most units Awoke at seven to nine months, the Prodigy line often a bit sooner. But at five months, at the physical and mental equivalent of five years in a manipulated being like a Psi-Unit, 3408 doesn't yet have the vocabulary or speech skills to describe what he can sense from the room at the end of the hall and why it terrifies him. His normal methods of communication, projecting images into receptive minds or babbling the few words he did know in hopes that his exact meaning would be guessed, are not working here. He screams the word no in every language imprinted on his mind and tries to pull away from his Handler, but she continues to drag him forward without mercy.

In the room at the end of the hallway, behind closed doors, a telepath is screaming. Not out loud, no sound escapes through those heavy sound-proof doors, but screaming in the highest frequency mental channels, the kind only trained psychics can hear. Human telepaths naturally communicate over certain frequencies, 'pitching' their mental voices instinctively, and anything higher than those channels of communication is the realm of the xenos. Far beyond the scope of any pre-duty. Or at least, any ordinary pre-duty.

3408 is of the Prodigy line and has heard the higher channels since he was two months old. He can hear but not speak at that level, and hasn't yet been taught to shield at that frequency. A pre-duty didn't need to learn such things until their Awakening, as there are dire consequences for any trained telepath caught contacting or influencing a vulnerable, still developing psyche of a younger unit. 3408 has never had to worry about the sharks in the waters he and his age-mates splash around in during their training and play, and for all his boundless curiosity about the sleek, killer minds that brush past his on a daily basis, he's never had occasion to be afraid of them. They hunt alien prey, pitching their thoughts at the very boundaries of human capacity and hurling their senses out into the stars, hunting for warships and the inhuman minds crewing them. 3408 will be one of them, one day, if he survives his training, and he understands very well that they have no time for pre-duties.

The female Handler drags him closer, and the thing in the room notices. 3408 goes silent too late, teeth clacking together and his tiny boots squealing on the polished floor as he tries to wrench away.

Something cold touches his mind. A shark brushing a swimmer's ankle. It's massive and in pain, and 3408 tastes blood where he's bitten through his lip. The thing focuses on it, briefly amplifying the taste, the texture. Blood is familiar to it.

It fishes the name Prodigy from his mind, battering aside his feeble attempts at shielding, at curling in on himself mentally like a snail pulling back inside its shell. It cracks him open without effort. It knows him, and he doesn't want to know it. It feels old and impossibly complex, and its touch is colder than space as it rifles among his thoughts.

Gestalt, it says underneath the screaming that hasn't stopped, and his entire brain rings from the word. He finally succeeds in yanking his hand away from his Handler and claps both palms over his ears, but it doesn't help. The word in his mind is physical, an object or a spark of electricity thrust directly into his synapses, and he howls from the pain of it.

He hears it say, you will do nicely.

The lights overhead flicker for a moment. The thing on the table in the room dies, finally, its limbs spasming fantastically under the unforgiving white lights. Out in the hallway a confused Handler bends over the prone body of her charge, unconscious on the floor and red slowly soaking the front of his white uniform from a nosebleed.





***






Prodigy wakes up. He is five months and three weeks old, and he has spent four days unconscious. He knows this instantly because the medtechs puttering around his room are thinking it very loudly, and they are not wearing psi-shielding armor or helmets. It isn't required, around a pre-duty, and medtechs are so used to operating on supersoldiers of various types that the threat of psychic backlash, telekinetic attack, accidental applications of super strength, etc, has paled next to the necessity of doing their jobs. Remembering to armor up is the last thing a medtech wants to bother with during a difficult surgery. These five, however, are comparing readouts and statistics from their monitoring equipment, and their thoughts buzz with the novelty of having a Prodigy unit on their table for the first time. None of them notice that he's awake.

Prodigy isn't used to thinking of himself as Prodigy, since he won't officially inherit the name until he assumes active duty. He is a pre-duty, a larval grub, all potential and no substance. There are others of his genetic line waiting to lay claim to the title of Prodigy #A27 if he washes out or is reduced to a Beta or one of the other lower classes of psychic. 3408 is the only personal identification he's known since birth. But something in him suddenly refuses to go back to his serial number. Something in him, he realizes after a moment, but not him.

Fear nibbles at him, but he relaxes his grip on the operating table and centers himself. Fear is an animal instinct, a product of flesh and chemicals, and impedes his abilities. He has been trained to be better than the animal parts of his flesh body.

Hello? he thinks cautiously, simultaneously throwing out the picture of a question mark on a blank white page, wondering if this is some kind of test. Medical exams are one of the few ways to get around the strict contact policies between pre-duties and Actives. There could be another psi-unit in here with him, or just outside the door, or somewhere nearby that he can't see or sense. There are chemicals that can dampen his perceptions, standard issue in the medbays when one out of control psychic could do irreversible damage to other patients without leaving their hospital bed or, more often, without even being conscious. He doesn't particularly feel drugged, but he also doesn't feel normal. There's something off in his head, a little fuzziness, as if he'd been asleep for a long time.

Something chirps in his ear in response to the mental query he'd projected. A bird, he's startled to note, but it's not a physical sound, it's the memory of a bird chirping and underneath that, a voice. Voices, murmuring and whispering to him, to each other.

His predecessors, clear and comprehensible as they have never been before. He's been told countless times that on his Awakening, they'll appear to him as animals, shapes, even colors, and the information they have to share will suddenly snap into focus. He hears them now as birds in the back of his mind, an entire flock calling and twittering and rustling their feathers in agitation.

Oh, he thinks. I'm Awake.

Shock is an unfamiliar sensation. Prickly. He takes a deep breath and allows it to push him back towards unconsciousness.





***




Prodigy wakes up. He is five months, three weeks, and one day old. He is in a different room, and there are now two medtechs instead of five. They are still reading printouts.

Prodigy is still hearing birds. It bothers him much less this time, and for a few minutes he simply listens to them, adjusting gradually to the new scope of his memories. Things occur to him now, thought associations, memories, fragments of other lives turning up for him like buried treasure. He is suddenly aware of every aspect of the breeding process, of how it feels to walk on a planet with low gravity, of the tastes and scents of plants he's never seen, food he's never eaten, things he's never experienced personally. One of his predecessors did, and those memories are now his.

Absorbed in all this, it takes him a moment to notice that the birds are showing him his forest.

Every pre-duty is taught to visualize the landscape of their own mind. When they are young, it allows them to order and understand their own subconscious. After Awakening their training focuses on turning their 'scapes into battlefields, as the duty of Actives is to create and manipulate waking dreamscapes and pull enemy minds into the illusion. Prodigy's mental landscape is a forest, old and endless, with trees that grow high enough to blot out the sun but never dark, never frightening. He built it from memory fragments of his ancestors and images pulled from other minds, things he's seen in pictures of other worlds. Tree trunks as wide as transports, crystal vines climbing the red bark, and ferns curling up from the soft dirt.

At the insistent urging of his predecessors Prodigy wills himself into a battle trance, searching for his forest. The trees spring up out of the darkness behind his closed eyelids, taking shape as they have a thousand times before, but something is wrong. His forest is dark, the shadows menacing, and the birds that he knows should feel instantly at home here are silent and hidden. The sunlight that filters down is cold and muted where it should be golden warmth. The plants crackle under his feet as though touched by frost. There is no wind in the trees but he hears something else, something that definitely does not belong; the crash of waves on a shore.

There is no water in his forest. No rivers, no ponds, definitely no oceans. But as he picks his way among the trees he comes to a break that shouldn't exist, where the branches have withered and blackened as if from a lightning strike, and there stretching out in front of him is a black, endless ocean. Dark waves crash on a rocky shore littered with downed trees, skeleton white like driftwood. And he can see, underneath the breakers, the rest of his forest. His trees are drowned and broken underneath the water.

He knows what it is. He has been told, he has this scenario to expect in his upcoming training. It's another mind's landscape invading his own, corrupting and overtaking it. An Awakened unit trains to pit his illusions against the illusions of an opponent, willing one to become more real and tangible, and an Active controls an entire illusory world in order to entrap his enemies. Neither have any business invading the mind of a pre-duty.

There's a rush of wings and a sparrow flies to his shoulder, burrowing against his neck. One of his predecessors.

Gestalt, the sparrow chirps mournfully, a woman's worried whisper at his ear, and the remembered taste of blood fills his mouth.

He jolts himself out of the trance so quickly he jerks on the table, and the medtechs startle with him at his sudden gasp. He can see himself suddenly, as they see him: a tiny child in a white jumpsuit, midnight-black skin and unruly curly hair, characteristic of the Prodigy line. A girl child. The reality of his physical body as others see him is a new disorientation, although he's well aware that psi-units assign themselves their own genders. Flesh is changeable, deceptive.

"I'm sorry," he says automatically, and watches both of them startle again before he figures out what's causing the shock eeling through their heads. The last time he'd been conscious, to their knowledge, he hadn't known those words or had the physical capacity to express them.

Their thoughts blare the same phrase in tandem. An accelerated Awakening, the youngest ever. Prodigy winces away from the loudness of their minds.

If you could stop shouting, he projects, cross and overwhelmed and more than a little afraid, and doesn't realize he'd framed it as a mental order, something strictly forbidden to pre-duties, until the two retreat behind their own basic psychic defenses and go for their shielding helmets.

"None of that, you," the older one says, while his partner makes a beeline for the communication console. "A minute after Awakening and you're giving orders, you'll get a maximum suppression collar slapped on before you can blink."

A bird in Prodigy's mind tells him that he'll have one anyway, he's an anomaly, prematurely Awakened and from one of the most powerful genetic lines, but Prodigy allows his eyes to go wide and he apologizes again in the most sincere tone he can manage. The medtech softens, (probably a man with children of his own, another bird whispers) and goes on to explain in soothing tones that this is all just a bit of a shock, premature Awakening, nothing physically wrong with him that their equipment can find, just one of those bizarre whims of fate that crop up every now and then.

"Now then," the man says, rubbing his gloved hands together. "You're Awake, so you can help us with this next bit. Anything that you can feel wrong with your head? Your 'scape? Your gone-befores ought to be able to help you self-diagnose if you feel anything out of place."

His birds twitter at him fearfully.

"I feel fine," Prodigy lies, forcing his face to stay in that wide-eyed innocent mask, and pretends he cannot hear the ocean inside his mind.