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he knew, but the boy would be able to rewrite the ID code in his implant at will, along with some other volitional features which would have surprised anyone who knew anything about them.

  The boy grew up truly enjoying his body. It seemed to always do pretty much what he really wanted, aside from purely physical limitations. He could have been a natural athlete, but his temperament was more artistic. So while he did develop a decent physique, it was his love of visual art which drove his life choices. He could always get his hands to do exactly what his eyes could see was the best motion.

  In a day and age when devices could reproduce any image anyone could imagine, there was precious little place for people who in times past could paint or draw. Education steered them into other paths, often having to do with photography. For all the brilliance of artificial intelligence, nothing anyone could do would precisely duplicate the functions of the human eye. There simply was no algorithm for what was eye-catching and inspiring. So while a few artists stubbornly worked with drawing equipment, there was always a market for photographers. Cameras had been reduced to tiny head-mounted or finger-tip mounted units, even some implants, but apparently it would always require a human eye to decide where to point the lens.

  Our boy became a peculiar kind of photographer, specializing in technical imagery. He seemed to have an instinct for adjusting zoom, granularity, color shift, penetration by radiation outside the range of vision -- whatever it took the extract the greatest amount of detail and pack it into a single image.

  6

  His friends called him “Rez.” It was an abbreviation for his full name: Restas Eran Ziskel. The nickname didn’t make much difference until he went off to boarding school. He could have stayed on Randell Colony, but the education lab was primitive, and all the residents said so. It became an excuse for the restless yearnings of a young man to seek a wider experience in some of the more settled worlds in the galaxy. Would his skills not best be honed in places where there was a much wider selection of equipment to photograph?

  He had won a scholarship to a corporate fleet academy, on a planet where a wide array of actual ships was built. It was about as cosmopolitan as human space could ever get. He had heard rumors there were even some genuine non-human aliens there. What kind of technology might that offer for his studies? A good half of his education was simply surveying the vast range of equipment and how it worked, so the more different kinds, the better.

  Nothing could prepare him for the assault on his eyes.

  The academy was on a planet where voluntary prosthetics and all sorts of implanted enhancements were quite the fashion. His backwater colony world missed out on a lot of fads, and this one came and went over the centuries. Prosthetic enhancement was sweeping the galaxy, raging in all different flavors of extremes. In just a matter of days, the bewildering array of human and machine mixtures left him almost numb. Despite his tough act, pretending nothing surprised him, he was almost ready to go back home just to let his brain rest and process what he had seen in the first few days.

  Nothing could prepare him for the assault on his emotions, either.

  It wasn’t simply his nickname had became an object of some ridicule. He was colonial, and totally unsophisticated in the minds of most everyone who wasn’t from some colony themselves. In the midst of his initial struggles to find an anchoring point for his bewildered mind, he ran into the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. Yes, masculine tastes varied widely across the galaxy, but this girl was quite popular with a very large collection of male students, and seemed well aware of it.

  Almost from a desperate need for the protection of a group, he had joined a small crew of boys from various colonies. At some point, the social clashes could not be avoided. They ran into a bevy of girls which included this stunning creature. These girls were pushy and aggressive, and the boys simply decided to play gentlemen, and stood aside along the wall in the corridor to let them pass. But the girls took it as a cue to tease them. Why that one particular girl chose him, Rez never did understand, but she got in his face.

  Almost in his face, since he was easily a head taller, not to mention considerably heavier. The only reason he wasn’t intimidated is he was already too confused and mentally swimming in rough seas from everything else, so he just held a blank look on his face. He managed to raise a single eyebrow, but he had an otherwise total lack of expression. Against this high speed verbal assault, he closed his eyes rather deliberately, and half turned to look to one of the other guys for help. So while he was frankly too stupefied to back up closer to the wall, she took it as something else.

  She grabbed the fabric of his tunic at the shoulders and pulled her face up against his. Instead of yelling even louder, she kissed him full on the lips. Then just as suddenly she released him and turned to walk away. The other girls followed, cackling and chattering loudly.

  He still wasn’t sure what happened, but the other guys were patting him on the back and saying something he never quite caught. Only his jiggered implant kept him from stumbling as he let himself be led along their previous path.

  7

  At first it was heaven. She literally hunted him down and all but raped him. Her aggressive behavior was totally outside his experience, yet typically what haunted the testosterone fueled dreams of young men. He didn’t understand what drove her interest in him. On the one hand, he was too lost, too completely cast adrift from everything he knew. She seemed totally inflamed, both angry and fascinated, by his instinctive lack of response to the crazy things she said and did. On the other hand, his implant kept him from ever appearing clumsy, which would have betrayed his confusion. His body knew what to do, even if his mind was still floating in the cosmos far away from any solid ground.

  But it was entirely because he was totally unsophisticated socially that it left her entirely in control. He had the word “dominatrix” in his vocabulary, but not anywhere in his experience. Rez was not simply under the spell of a beguiling young lady, but was wholly owned as her slave, without having any idea such a thing was possible.

  He didn’t jump at her every word, of course; it was far more subtle than that. Feminists only claim they want that, but despise it when they get it. His physical finesse continually surprised her. Anything he tried to do for the first time seemed to work out just fine, because he could do whatever he could see others doing -- dancing, sports, and everything in general. She wasn’t the only one impressed. But in some distant future day he would come to realize his intrinsic slowness to jump at her whims, as he would for his own whims, must have struck her as something resembling a strength he didn’t actually possess. She seemed to believe she didn’t own him, when she actually did, but she was not the sort to be patient. Her instinct to dominate was provoked with unquenchable fury.

  Within a week, the head games began.

  It was at about the same time his training exposed him to a wide array of devices. There was a need for his skill because every war seemed to wipe away some portion of technological memory, and each corporation was trying to understand things they had captured or found in the wreckage. He had a phenomenal ability to turn the camera to angles no robot could have imagined, seeing the image on the electronic display with a clarity few others saw until the image was saved and transmitted for analysis. Rez was consistently able to capture the essence of a device in the fewest images of anyone working on the same projects. He literally became famous among his fellow students at the academy.

  His training was accelerated. It kept taking him away from the facility, and his girlfriend fought tooth and nail. Rez never really understood, except that it had something to do with her incredibly possessive nature, as if she feared he might find some other girl when he was away from her. No amount of assurance from him would soothe her on this point of tension.

  8

  As nearly as he could understand, Rez thought perhaps she was only trying to prove he wasn’t so morally strong as he claimed. At first were the subtle questions, the te
sting which always seemed to manipulate him into saying something she could make him regret. Why she never simply left him for someone else was beyond him, but she kept making these tests more intricate and complicated. She began enlisting help from others, he was sure, but never found out who. In fact, he later realized he never even knew what she was studying at the academy, but what he knew about the curriculum could have explained some of what happened.

  Knowing it didn’t help. Somehow she managed to create a false reality around him. He would leave for a short trip, come back and she would overwhelm him with an emotional welcome back. He would lose himself in her intoxicating embrace. Then just as he was sure everything was okay, she would start the game. When he was most open and vulnerable to her was when she struck hardest. It was back and forth in waves, first in passionate heat then in passionate words of distrust. She was using forms of manipulation he never understood, things which simply and plainly caused him to doubt reality itself.

  There were times he had to test the floor under his feet to make sure it was solid, and then still not too sure. The technology and tricks she used literally drove him insane.

  So on that one last test at the end of