The conscript UI around my wrist itched, a constant, low-level reminder of my supposed leash. It was supposedly unhackable, a fleet-grade marvel of secure tech. That might have been true if I’d been strictly Tech or Sorcery. But with my merged affinity, it was like trying to hold water with a sieve.
Laughably dumb. Apparently, they trusted it enough—or my file seemed safe enough—that they didn’t even provide an escort to the J-school. Just a set of coordinates and a node transit authorization. Maybe my placid, cooperative performance to date had instilled a level of trust. I hadn’t run. Why would I?
It was possible to remove one, of course. If you had a fully-stocked cybershop on at least a Tier 6 tech world and didn’t mind the fact that removal would immediately broadband an All-Points Bulletin on the hacker and the wielder, painting a target on your back for every bounty hunter in the sector. Goblins did it all the time; they were the core of the black market, after all. But I wasn’t a goblin, not really. My homeworld, Korse, was forcibly maintained at a barely Tier 4 level, its tech base bombed back to the stone age every generation or so by EMPs. Someone from there shouldn’t have the first clue how to bypass a Tier 6 security device. I was a safe bet.
Except, I really wasn’t. I’d removed mine in the first week of boot camp, using nothing but my brain, my gifts, and a hint of techno-sorcery applied with the delicate precision of a neurosurgeon, just to see if I could. The feeling of its invasive presence vanishing had been a relief so profound it was almost spiritual. I’d put it back on and hacked it three more times just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. It felt… primitive. “Tech Six” was a broad category, after all, encompassing everything from primitive cellphone networks to ionic spaceflight. The UI was on the lower, clunkier end of that scale.
My ability to do that was the very reason full genemods had been outlawed for centuries. The reasons were drilled into every schoolchild, even on Korse. The first was moral: people were creating custom-designed perfect slaves, beings engineered to bond with their masters and become insanely, unspeakably loyal no matter the abuse. It broke down the last vestiges of ethical frameworks between worlds. The second was psychological; genetically ‘perfect’ beings were walking insults to baseline humanity, destroying morale and creating a biological caste system. Ugly, but understandable.
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The third reason was practical, and it was the one that got the laws passed. The Technomancers. A weird, terrifying set of custom-designed affinities that created nearly-omnipotent beings who, once they grew powerful enough, bid fair to destroy or own all of humanity’s territories. They’d shattered the old, pre-United Planets empire before they were finally, bloodily, taken down. My existence was a ghost of that fear. A blend of affinities that shouldn’t mix.
I wasn’t perfect. Far from it. I looked like a big-eyed, skinny goblin. Spiritualism was already a dangerous combination when you considered the kind of monsters you could create with it. Adding Forces—an enhanced, high-level affinity—to any other affinity, left you with a creature that, according to UPF doctrine, soon left behind the understood bounds of crime and punishment. It supposedly drove them insane with power, under the old, simplistic theory that ‘power corrupts.’
That wasn’t strictly true. Power doesn’t corrupt; it just makes getting away with corruption a hell of a lot easier.
Absolute power tended to attract the already corrupt. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to go crazy and try to take over the universe. Both affinities were in my bloodline, and none of my grandmothers had ever tried to conquer the galaxy.
They’d been too busy trying to keep our little world from being devoured.
Yep, that was the official line. My homeworld generally considered that sort of reasoning highly suspect, which was probably why we got bombed so regularly. Even we, however, were aware of why Forces-enhanced affinities needed external controls. It was about the Bond. If your bond was an ethical, moral, and generally decent person, life could be very, very good. But if they were a monster, a sociopath, or even just extremely selfish, that control could be a chain around your neck from which the only escape was self-immolation. A final, fiery act of defiance.
Under the circumstances, however, the UPF had me pegged perfectly. No, I wouldn’t run. Where would I go? There was no way to get home. There was a moratorium on all imports to Korse, and with its crushing gravity, any ship short of an overpowered fleet lighter or a dedicated raider would see its gravity well as a one-way trip.
I couldn’t buy that kind of hardware, and unless I wanted to get involved in some seriously shady ventures—something I was hugely, philosophically opposed to—there was no path to gaining my own ship without making myself vulnerable to a Bond along the way. At the very least, the fleet was harsh on certain conduct. My chances of getting force-bonded before I was powerful enough to protect myself were far lower here than in the cutthroat civilian sector.
