"Good", the voice said. It wasn't Gide.
Valentine felt a gap in his teeth on the upper left side. He probed with his tongue, felt a missing tooth, or rather the stump of one. The other felt good and cracked.
* * *
The next day - at least they told him it was the next day - he could sit. The tubes were gone, but he still had wires running the length of his body, individual ends attached to forehead, Adam's apple, chest, stomach - a couple more on his back. They hung off the bed and met at a black box.
He had the run of a two-person berth on the hospital floor. It
was in the "security" wing - the doors were solid steel, hinged on the outside and closed with what sounded like a heavy bar reinforced by bolts dug into stone beneath the linoleum. The man in civilian clothes sitting opposite, under two painted panels masquerading as windows, didn't have many answers.
His name was Wholmes, and thanks to burned and reconstructed skin, he looked like he'd been freeze-dried and rehydrated. He spelled it as he said it, though Valentine could read it on his ID card.
"How do you feel?" Wholmes asked.
"Better", Valentine said. "I had eggs and oatmeal for breakfast".
"You're on soft foods until those teeth get taken care of. Tomorrow or the next day".
"Has anyone figured out what went wrong?"
"Nicely put?"
"Clearly put".
"You were a pig who wandered into a bacon factory in hopes of speaking with the management. But when a pig visits a bacon plant, there are obvious hazards. Sir doesn't direct or guide or advise this freehold. He's used strictly for creating Bears".
"Who are you, Mr. Wholmes?"
"I help new Bears with their adjustments to transhumanism. You're an interesting case, though, Valentine".
"Why's that?"
"Sir didn't do anything to you. Well, anything much. To the Lifeweavers, the human body is like a big, locked-up factory with all the switches turned off. How we got that way - well, I'm not going into the various theories. I'll leave that to the philosophers".
Valentine felt a little jolt of recognition; Wholmes talked a little like the general who'd offered him a choice of death or the possibility of eternal life in service of the Kurians.
"Are you feeling all right?" Wholmes asked.
"Yes. Closed factory and all that".
"Now, throughout history a few individuals have managed to turn on bits of their factory on their own, transcending normal human
limits, like some of the great athletes or, with mental discipline, astrophysicists and yogis and the odd musician and so on. Some combine the two; I'm told there were martial artists who could do the same sort of tricks you Cats can.
"Now, of course when the Lifeweavers go into the factory and turn on a couple of machines, sometimes it takes the mind a little while to catch up and learn to channel the new outputs. That's where I come in, and were you aware your crystal-spark-snorting mother sucked off drovers in station bars to get her fix?"
"When your old man wasn't beating her to it", Valentine said. "What's the deal?"
"That's the fascinating thing". Wholmes reached under Valentine's bed by the black box and tore off a piece of paper covered with squiggles. "A little stress peak when I questioned humanity's origins. A bigger one, a good deal bigger, when I insulted your mother. Another Bear, fresh from his Invocation, would have jumped out of the bed and started pounding me".
"I take it your job has a comprehensive benefits package".
Wholmes chuckled. "Like you, I'm a fast healer. Plus they learn an important lesson when they calm down, and it sticks, and they become more receptive to my training". He lifted an object that looked like a flashlight held backward, with two small silver prongs. "Besides, a quick jolt calms you down.
"But you, you've been controlling yourself and your reactions since childhood, I'm guessing. You've got straight pipes, so to speak, in the brain-body connection, but you've managed to install a muffler yourself. I wish we knew more of your early childhood".
"I remember fighting a lot with my sister".