Mirror Image

Arsenal sat down. The tissue sample cartridge poked out of the pocket of his lab coat and clattered to the floor.

"What's that?" Jinx sat cross-legged on the thinly carpeted floor. She was about to tell a story, but the noise distracted her.

"Oh!" He felt irritated with himself for forgetting. "It's a tissue sample from the space trike. I wanted you to see if it was like the samples from the crew."

"You'd better get that into the refrigerator. I'll run it up later."

Arsenal got to his feet, retrieving the cartridge from the floor as he stood up. "Where--?"

"It's the huge thing in the corner of the room."

The refrigerator was a large model, intended for the kitchen of a well-to-do family, vastly over-sized for a collection of tissue samples. Arsenal opened the door and deposited the sample next to the other ones. "Yeah. Nice and roomy."

Jinx shifted on the ground, making herself comfortable. "Yeah. Like some sort of really, really obvious product placement. Now, come here -- I have a story to tell you."

They sat on the thin carpet. Jinx began talking.

"It wasn't all that long ago that our ancestors were nomadic hunters. Three, four millenia ago?"

"What, on the homeworld?"

"Yes. Before we had all this." Jinx gestured around the room. "Before technology, back when symbols were only used for magic, not for keeping records. But not before history."

She paused for a moment.

"Oral records -- poems and songs -- survive from the archaic era. Back then, social organization was hardly more developed than a hunting pack, often led by individuals with remarkable abilities."

"Super-powered warlords."

"Yes. One of the longer story cycles was about the struggle between the great hunter Darneth and Nyqll, the river king. Nyqll built a walled city, and kept his meat in pens. He would send his soldiers out to burn the forest, and grow grain to feed his livestock. Over time, the grasp of Nyqll's burning hand reached Darneth's hunting grounds, and the two warlords began to fight."

"It sounds like Nyqll was ahead of his time."

"He was. Agriculture, slavery, docile livestock, and books of account -- all of this seemed like a perversion of nature to the ancients. Forcing flesh to submit to one man's will. For them, Nyqll was a monster, an enemy of freedom and righteousness."

"And they wrote the poems."

"Precisely. Their vision of the river valley king."

Arsenal tried rubbing the back of his neck, but stopped -- his left thumb was pointing the wrong way. "So that monster is a projection of some long-dead culture's rejection of the modern world."

"Not just any culture. The distant ancestors of the Reyll. They preserved the nomadic values of Darneth in their own moral code. He's not just some archaic political cartoon, he's a fundamental part of our sense of reality." She looked at Arsenal's ruined hand. "Give me your hand."

Arsenal hesitated a moment, then gave Jinx his left hand. She spoke.

"I can't shape your flesh, but you can."

He looked at her for a moment. "All right. All right."

She smiled and lifted up his forearm. "No use starting an operation without a plan. You need a mirror image of your left hand. How do you want to do that?"

"Turn it inside out."

"Kind of. You'll need to keep the nerves and the blood vessels attached. How do things look in there?"

He concentrated, probing his hand and wrist. "Twisted around. One half-turn to the left."

"And the tendons?"

"Straight ahead."

"Brace your arm. I'll talk you through it."

He lay on the floor, and braced his elbow on the floor. She lay down facing him, and looked at him. "Do you know what you have to do?"

He hesitated. "Yeah."

"I'll hold your arm steady. This is gonna hurt."

He swallowed. "Let's do it."

The flesh of his land became pliable like clay. His fingers became shorter.

He gritted his teeth, trying no to scream.

"Keep going."

He shuddered as he came to the long bones of his palm. Jinx held his forearm still.

A mirror image of his ruined hand now hung limply from the end of his forearm. Jinx took a breath. "You're going to need to sever the tendons, twist your hand back into position, and reattach them."

Arsenal was pale and breathing shallowly. "All right."

"Don't tense up."

"Let's get it over with."

She grabbed his wrist to help keep the tendons in place. "Now."

The pain was indescribable. His hand twisted around, and slowly rose back into position. "Hold on."

"Do it. Do it now."

Tendons reattached. Peter took a deep breath, and wiggled his fingers.

He smiled.

"It worked!"

The Burning Hand

Arsenal pulled on a white lab coat and thrust his hands deep into the pockets.

An attentive viewer might have noticed him relax and smile as he pulled on the utilitarian garment. It reminded him of what he was before the industrial accident that revealed his powers -- another mass-produced clone worker, trained as an engineer, type 350, lot 125, requisitioned for the development of plasma soliton weapons. Peter Cat, one of many.

Thresher -- a cyborg, and no stranger to violent dismemberment -- poked his head out of the cargo hold into the hallway.

"Hey, Arsenal! Can you give me a hand?"

Arsenal waited a half-second too long to pull his hands from his pockets and quipped flatly, "Yeah, I think I can spare one."

A recent mishap had resulted in him having two right hands.

The humor was marginal enough, but Arsenal fluffing his cue utterly ruined the joke. Most of the audience didn't think he had a sense of humor anyway, and this scene would do little to change their minds.

Thresher attempted to save the exchange with a forced chuckle, and they proceeded to the partially disassembled open-frame space-craft in the middle of the room.

"So, what do you make of it?" Arsenal stuck his hands back in his lab coat.

"It's got a power plant -- fairly conventional fission job -- but nothing that would explain the acceleration we saw when we were chasing it down." Thresher took a few steps around the ship, and pointed out one of the rear modules. "That looks like a thruster, but it isn't; it's some kind of resonant amplifier."

Arsenal looked under the ship, where some clear liquid was dripping on the floor. "Interesting. This looks like a closed-cycle life support system."

"Oh. Whoops. I sorta unplugged it from the power plant about an hour ago."

Arsenal followed a bus of pipes to a spherical module in the middle of the vessel, just below where the saddle was mounted. "The bus runs up to here." He paused for a moment, and stretched his subtle fields through the container. "There's about a kilo of organic matter inside the sphere."

Thresher extended a small circular saw from his cybernetic left forearm. "Should I open it up?"

Arsenal nodded. "Go for it. We need a tissue sample for ID."

Sparks flew with a grinding noise as Thresher opened up the spherical module. A sector of metal fell to the floor.

"Dude. That is nasty."

Arsenal swallowed. "A vat-grown brain. Probably telekinetic. I think we've found the thruster."

On the bridge, Jolt and the Eye watched a progress bar slowly extend from left to right on the main view-screen. It was very nearly full.

Jolt drummed her fingers on the armrest of the command chair. "Well, this is exciting."

"A broad sweep of all hyperspace jump activity in sensor range takes a while." The Eye was apologetic. "I'm sure it will be done soon."

"You think?"

"Yeah."

"Is that your professional opinion as a registered precognitive?"

"Sure."

The progress bar filled in another step. Now only a tiny sliver remained.

The Eye turned and smiled at Jolt. "See?"

Arsenal entered his quarters, holding a small cartridge with a tissue sample from the strange star-ship's dead brain.

Jinx had set up an effective improvised laboratory in his stateroom. She looked up from the screen of her workstation, which was connected to a humming box by a broad, rainbow-colored ribbon cable. "Hey. I think I have canonical sequences for Lowrider and Apostrophe Girl. Check this out."

Arsenal looked over her shoulder at the screen. "What am I seeing here?"

"It's a set of genes from a chromosomal insertion in both bodies. The sequences look almost like genes inserted in a force-growing process, but they don't match up with anything used in mainstream Corporate clone production."

"Is this from the tumor monsters?"

"Nope. The tumors show no signs of mutation or degradation from rapid mitosis, and match up perfectly with the samples from the corpses."

"That's crazy."

"That monster's got one funky cancerbeam." She looked into Arsenal's eyes. "How are you holding up, Peter?"

"It's my hand. I can't stand it any more."

"I understand. I wish I could help you." Jinx looked sad. "I used to be able to heal people. Shaping flesh is easy." She broke eye contact with him and looked down at the floor. "I'm so sorry."

"Listen, I'm going to try something crazy. If I blow myself up, I can patch my state and fix myself up."

"You're going to blow up?"

"Yeah."

"Do me a favor and do it in the shower, OK?"

"OK." Peter walked towards the sealed bathing compartment and opened the door. "Wish me luck."

Jinx smiled weakly. "Good luck."

He closed the translucent door.

Jinx could not look away.

A moment later, there was a soft wet pop, and the inside of the door was covered in gore.

Jinx heaved, but could not vomit. She curled up into a ball and began sobbing uncontrollably.

She rolled on the floor for a few moments, and her spasms changed slowly from retching to simple sobbing.

Peter emerged from the shower compartment, and showed Jinx his palms.

"What the hell?"

She looked at his hands -- two copies of a right hand.

Her face moved from shock to calm.

"It's god power. Ontology control. Nyqll's corrupted your state equation."

"Who?"

"The burning hand." Jinx grasped Peter's hand. "Sit with me. I have a story to tell."