John Throckmorton pushed his body hard on the alien exercise machine. It felt as if he were trying to outrun his past, his soul. The device beeped at him, and he pressed on. A couple of minutes later, it beeped more insistently, and John eased up and came to a halt. If he kept going, he'd get another scolding from Dr. Vickall.
He got into the "shower" and was clean in seconds, then put on the astronaut outfit NASA had given him to wear when he left Earth. He refused to get back into one of the business suits he'd brought. He couldn't bear the thought yet of going back again to the man he used to be, even if just in appearance.
He paced in his tiny cabin for a few moments, unsure what to do next. For the first time in his life, he wished he had a therapist, but he had never dared take on the security risk, and his logical mind still insisted that trusting anyone with his innermost thoughts was suicidally stupid. He grimaced.
He'd watched a cruel video recommended by the doctor, a remedial empathy tutorial. It had taken him five tries to get through it, but he had done it at last; his pride would allow nothing else. I will not be broken by this. If billions of idiots can cope with this, so can I. I am a winner.
I am a winner, and unlike some people, I earn my wins. My wins are real. I will not be broken. I will do what I have to, to come to grips with this. To turn it to my advantage.
But first, I have to make it hurt less. He would concede temporary weakness. He conceded that he was in emotional pain. He mentally ran down a checklist from the video. The first suggestion was to speak with someone who had empathy for him.
I have no one. Never trusted anyone. I paid escorts for companionship, so that I always knew where I stood. For the first time, he found himself wondering about how those young women had felt—not just for how their emotions would affect their behavior and possibly his reputation, but aside from any direct effect on himself. He wondered how they felt about him, about taking his money and giving him what he demanded. He wondered, for the first time, whether he had hurt any of them.
I have no one. Briefly, he thought about Bowser, the gray mastiff he'd had for three years before he found the animal dead from poisoning. Even his well-paid security team had never figured out what had happened. He remembered that he'd felt...annoyed. Betrayed. And maybe, just a little bit...sad. He hadn't understood the feeling or liked it, so he buried it, and avoided getting another pet that might stir up such feelings again.
I have no one. He thought about the miserable pack of parasites that were his blood relations. Once he truly succeeded in business, they'd come out of the woodwork trying to leech off of him. He had no wife, obviously, and no children. He hated his siblings and they returned the sentiment a hundredfold.
I have...enemies. I have those, at least. They care whether I live or die; they'd just prefer I die. Of course he had butted heads with other powerful people; that was the nature of business. The horde of jackals was always ready to tear down anyone on top who showed the slightest weakness.
A second suggestion was to review decisions that had impacted others, and try to identify ones that benefited someone else. He'd done that, but making more money for stockholders didn't seem to 'count' in some way.
There was that one time that he'd pulled out of a deal to build an outlet in a medium-sized town. He'd done it because he'd found a cheaper site elsewhere, but a lot of the townspeople had actually thanked him, as if he'd done them a favor. Of course, he'd accepted their thanks—gratitude could be useful later. He hadn't thought it was important at the time, but looking back...it had been important to them. He hadn't done it for them, but at least he hadn't made things worse for them.
Thinking about that didn't really help, but at least it didn't hurt.
One of the other recommendations was to try doing small, so-called 'good deeds' with no expectation of recompense. The experience was supposed to be beneficial to adapting.
He'd tried it. He'd made an anonymous donation to a charity for children with cancer or something like that. He hadn't felt any better, afterwards, and griped to himself about the waste of money.
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Another option was to find someone who was hurting or needed help, and help them. Well, a lot of problems could be helped by throwing money at them, but he wasn't getting enough satisfaction for the cost. He suspected that he would feel better if he did something, but had no idea what.
He wandered down to Sickbay, and found Dr. Vickall deep in thought, working on some cure or other. He decided not to bother her, since a lot of people were depending on her and her time was limited. He turned to go.
"John? Did you need something?" He glanced back, and Dr. Vickall was stretching as she looked at him. "I could use a short break."
"I was..." The words wouldn't come. Suddenly, the thought of talking about himself made him feel sick. Talk about something else. Someone else. Anyone else. "I was wondering how Miss Montpelier is doing?"
The doctor scowled. "I can't figure out what's wrong with her. I can treat her—but only so long as I have access to her. She'll start getting worse again as soon as we leave. I can't come up with anything to reliably keep her enzymes in balance, and it is pissing on me."
John blinked. "Pissing you off?"
Dr. Vickall stared off into space a moment. "Yes."
"So, it's not a poison? And not an infection?"
"Neither one. Our medical knowledge is centuries ahead of yours, but there are always a few people we don't know how to help. I don't see a way it could be a threat to anyone else, so there's that at least. If I could get the DNA of a relative, that might possibly help. But it still bothers me."
John thought about that, with his weird new thing of feeling an echo of what someone else was feeling. He tried to imagine it. "That must be frustrating, but surely you have had other patients you couldn't help. She must have a rare genetic disorder or something."
The doctor shook her head. "It doesn't feel like that, though. Something is odd. This isn't the way a genetic ailment should progress."
"Did someone change her DNA?" he guessed.
"I considered that. It would account for the progression. But without knowing the cause..." She sighed. "I should be able to detect if any of your human methods were used to modify her DNA. There's nothing."
Something teased at John's memory, and he drew upon his augmented intelligence to fish it out of his brain. A doctor had come to him for funding, with a technique he wanted to develop. An engineered virus that would attack the DNA of people in a particular ethnic group. He'd checked with an expert, and they had dismissed it as too hazardous—a mutation could make it too general, so that it would decimate every population, or too specific, so that it wouldn't attack all the members of the ethnic group. He had had no need for such a thing anyway, so he'd sent that doctor packing.
She just said that she checked for all human methods of modifying DNA. And the girl has been sick long before the aliens showed up. So that can't be it. Something about the memory wouldn't let go, though. John frowned. Too specific...
"What if...you didn't know all the human ways to modify DNA?"
"I searched all the medical literature of your world and the records of all your militaries, in case one of them had devised something special. If they had it, I would have found it."
"What if it was someone else?"
"Another alien?"
"No, a human that you missed. Like..." What was that bastard's name again? Again, his new, improved memory came to his aid. "Dr. Ezekiel James Crenshaw, for example."
"Petra, show me the DNA-modifying research of that doctor, please."
"I cannot find any such research, Dr. Vickall."
John stiffened. "That can't be right. I know that bastard was working on it. Around seven years ago. Maybe he's using a different name?"
Sana stared at him a moment. "Petra, do you have the personal files of a doctor by that name?"
"Yes, Dr. Vickall."
The doctor sat up straighter. "Show me." She fell silent for a while. John wondered what she was reading. Abruptly she said, "There. Those files. Those are DNA research, Petra."
"They are labeled as—"
"I know what they're labeled as! The label is false!" The doctor tugged on one of her horns for a few moments. "I'm sorry, Petra, but this is very important." She looked at John. "How did you know about this?"
John shrugged. "Sometimes, being very rich has given me access to information that others do not have. And sometimes, that information is never written down anywhere, or else described in code or otherwise hidden."
"Every tribe has their group lore," the doctor muttered, staring at nothing. Then she refocused on him. "Thank you, John. This may help. Even if this particular doctor's work was not involved, I can explain to Petra how to look for more such hidden research. If you'll excuse me, I now have additional work to do."
John nodded and backed out of Sickbay. That Petra has access to everyone's data. That was shocking enough. But Petra doesn't know how to analyze it properly. It's naive, easy to fool. You need to know where to look.
Omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient—pick two. Petra has knowledge but doesn't know what to do with it. I think the world has gained a guardian idiot.
He walked down the passageway, vaguely aware that he was feeling slightly better. He found that he had a mental itch to be helpful elsewhere, to see if maybe that eased his depression a little more. I'll bet that young Captain could use someone who could negotiate on her behalf...