The daily physicals were the worst. It made sense to be thorough when there was no way of knowing the potential changes, but it certainly wasn’t pleasant.

  It was the morning of the seventh day since Zed had stood in the middle of the mess hall and taken teenage substance abuse to a cosmic level. Dr. Roth and Dr. Bailey had promised him some test results this morning.

  Zed wasn’t nervous about what he’d find out, but he was certainly anxious to get out of the med bay. While he was curious about what the tests could tell him regarding the changes he’d experienced, the test he was most interested in was the one that would determine if he was contagious or not.

  A few days ago, Commander Jones had come in and given Zed the most scathing lecture he’d ever received. She hadn’t even raised her voice, but all he’d wanted to do was crawl back into that crater cave and never come out.

  Even his mother’s tirades had never reached him like that. Maybe it was because he actually cared about what the legendary Thabisa Jones thought of him. When she told him he’d been a fool and put the entire colony at risk, he knew it wasn’t hyperbole. He had been an arrogant idiot, and he just wanted to know that he hadn’t done any permanent damage. At least, not to anyone but himself.

  As if on cue, Dr. Roth and Dr. Bailey walked through the door.

  “Hi, Zed. How are you feeling today?” Dr. Bailey asked. She seemed relaxed, so that was good.

  “Great. Can I get out of here?”

  “Whoa there. Cool your thrusters, Zed,” Dr. Roth said as he and Dr. Bailey took up their customary spots on either side of Zed’s bed. “First things first, let’s go over our findings and give you a better picture of where you stand. Sound good?”

  It didn’t. Zed really just wanted a straight answer, but he’d been in a colony of scientists long enough to know it was a waste of time to rush someone explaining every detail of a thing.

  Zed nodded.

  “Great," Dr. Roth said with the sarcastic tone that Zed had come to realize was his only tone. "Now that I have your permission to proceed, let’s first look at your scans and blood work.”

  Zed received a shared space invite and hit accept. A swarm of info displays filled the room like a cloud of digital locusts.

  “Oh dear. My apologies,” Dr. Roth said, quickly herding the contents of the virtual space into a more contained area. “I tend to work a little messily. Ah, alright then, this here.”

  He pointed to a collection of windows with x-rays, brain scans, and what Zed assumed were the results of the battery of samples they’d taken from him.

  “The good news is, for the most part, you’re the same as you ever were.”

  “And the bad?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say bad, so much as perhaps, weird.”

  Dr. Bailey cleared her throat. “What Dr. Roth means to say is that the changes seem to be very restricted to certain areas, and that’s a good thing. So far, there’s no domino effect throughout your body like one would expect with a disease or poison.”

  “The changes that are happening, though, are like nothing we’ve ever seen.”

  Dr. Roth pulled at a cluster of info displays and brought forward scans and images of Zed’s eyes. There were no mirrors in the room, so Zed hadn’t really gotten a good look at his eyes since the day they had changed. He barely recognized them.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “As you can see in the before-and-after images, the differences are—to put it mildly—exciting.”

  Zed remembered right after eating the Martian plant that Dr. Roth had mentioned gold flecks in his eyes, but he’d never imagined anything like this. There were tight-knit flecks of gold around the outer edge of his iris. The flecks continued to spread toward his pupil but faded off quickly. It gave the impression that his pupil was a black hole sucking in a ring of stars.

  Wearing the CIGs made people look like there were tiny metallic flecks in their eyes, but this was something far more extreme. Zed wasn’t sure if he should be thrilled or terrified but had to admit, they looked impressive, or at least they would have if they were someone else’s eyes. But these were his eyes, and he didn’t recognize them.

  Oblivious, Dr. Roth continued with the joyful gusto of a child showing off his new toys on Christmas.

  “If you’ll look at this chart here, you’ll see that your vision now takes in even more of the light spectrum than any human on record! There have always been outliers, of course—people who could see more colors than the rest of us. But your eyes, Zed, make them seem downright colorblind by comparison.”

  Dr. Bailey cut in. “Zed, have you noticed anything different about the virtual items you see with your CIG?”

  “Yeah, actually. They used to be more—I dunno—real. Now there's a sheen to them that doesn’t quite match the real world.”

  “That’s a perfect example of you seeing more of the light spectrum than you used to. Now for an even stranger question: do you see people with any kind of glow or shimmer?”

  Zed had to think for a moment. There had been weird flashes when he was looking at the doctors, especially if he happened to be concentrating, but he’d chalked it up to just the general weirdness of his eyes.

  “Yeah, I have actually. Is that OK?”

  “As OK as anything, I suppose,” Dr. Roth said. “We think you’re seeing so much of the light spectrum that you may even be dipping into infrared, at least sometimes.”

  “So I could, what, see in the dark? Can I see people's bones?”

  “No, no, no, that’s X-rays. You’re not quite there yet, but for all I know…” Dr. Roth trailed off, as if he was imagining the possibilities. He shook his head. “No, I don’t think we need to worry about that. But yes, you may, in fact, be able to see in the dark, or at least better than I can.”

  Zed felt his head swimming. It was a lot to try to process the current changes, let alone try to fathom the idea that more could come.

  Dr. Bailey read the shift in Zed. “Isaac, perhaps we should move things along.”

  Dr. Roth shifted more info windows around. “You’re well aware of your ‘zoom in’ ability. It’s bizarre, but comparatively straightforward. The really interesting stuff is what seems to be going on between your ears.”

  Zed touched the base of his skull and took a deep breath. “Am I going to be OK? Did this thing give me a tumor or something?”

  “No, not a tumor. As far as whether you’ll be OK, so far so good, right?”

  "Right?"

  “So, that moment you described with—well, I know it was rather awkward—but calling out your mother…” Dr. Roth trailed off.

  Dr. Bailey filled the silence. “What you described at first sounded like some kind of mind reading. The good news is, it’s not that. You won’t have to deal with listening to whatever’s bouncing around in Isaac’s head.”

  Zed smiled. He hadn’t really been worried that he could read minds. He knew whatever had changed hadn’t given him anything supernatural. He just couldn’t quite put his finger on what was different.

  Dr. Roth jumped back in. “It’s not about reading minds, or even that it’s made you smarter, per se. From our testing, it seems that your brain is just a whole lot better at making connections. You can’t conjure information you don’t have out of thin air, but whatever information you do have gets pieced together far more easily and in ways that are far more unconventional.”

  “This is happening in my own head, but I’m still not sure I understand what that means exactly.”

  Dr. Roth steepled his fingers and tapped them against his chin. He seemed to search the rigid, dull walls for the right words. “Do you remember that surveillance footage we showed you? The one with the couple? You said the woman was involved in drugs.”

  Zed nodded.

  “Well, the sequence of clips we showed you is actually from a test intelligence agencies give recruits to check their aptitude for picking up details that average people might miss.”

  “A three-letter agency back on Earth actually insisted we give you that one,” Dr. Bailey interjected.

  “True, and you passed with aplomb.”

  Zed shook his head.

  “Really? Aplomb?” Dr. Roth shook his head slowly. “As I said, it didn’t make you any smarter. It means you did really well. Well enough that, by this metric, you are now Earth’s premier intelligence agent. Sort of.”

  “I’m a super spy?” Zed asked, only half-joking. This didn’t sound bad at all.

  “Before you get too excited, we should probably talk about the downsides,” Dr. Bailey said.