Free Transcendental by James Gunn

someone else had programmed for him.
    If he could feel anything, he would feel bruises and aches, he thought, but even those might be sim. The back of his head had hurt, he remembered. An injury of some kind at the base of his skull. If it was real.
    It was a hell of a universe: a galaxy divided uneasily between alien species that once had sworn war to the death now trying to find a way to coexist; technology beyond humanity’s dreams, some the product of human ingenuity, some modified from alien sources; and all of it used to distract, to divert, to suppress, to maintain. Riley had joined many expeditions into the unknown; he had met dozens of adventurers like himself, most of them now dead, and dozens of creatures with innovative ideas about how to do better, be better, improve conditions and possibilities for everybody … and all of them defeated, if they were still alive.
    He had been one of them, early. He had worked his way through the Institute as assistant to a succession of brilliant scientists. He had studied mathematics and computer science and physics and astronomy; he had immersed himself in comparative cultures and alien art, and, most of all, in space-time engineering. He had imagined himself a diplomat or an inventor, making peace or a better future, but he had been recruited as a mercenary, trained in a dozen different ways to kill a creature silently and a half-dozen ways, undetectably, equipped with extrasensory apparatus. He was sent to scout alien intentions on alien worlds until, on his fifth assignment, he was captured and tortured. Eventually he was ransomed and restored to what the doctors called a state of health. After that his employers lost faith in him, or maybe in his luck. They told him he would be taken care of, but as soon as he was able to walk they let him go, to find his own way in the universe. He was always going to be damaged. The way to a better future seemed now permanently closed.
    Humanity had ventured out into the galaxy to claim new worlds and discovered the galaxy already occupied. Dozens of alien species, many of them older and more advanced than humanity, though none of them more deadly, traversed interstellar space as if they owned it. They tolerated one another because anything else was suicidal. But humanity tipped the balance. Was it humanity’s fault? Was it humanity’s aggression or humanity’s disappointed dreams? Or was humanity simply the unknown factor that ended the status quo, a development with an outcome no other species could calculate or risk? The interstellar wars began.
    Education had delayed his service, but now he was called up, good for nothing more. He fought in a dozen battles on as many worlds, each of them brutal, each of them vital to the welfare of humanity, each of them inconclusive, each of them meaningless. He had lost an arm in one, a leg in another, an eye in a third—each replaced after hospitalization. He was no worse for all his experience except for wounds inside; the surgeons could not reach them; the chiatrists could not ease them. His only remedy was to drown them in one illusion or another. Maybe that was what Sharn had seen in him and despaired.
    *   *   *
    Was there a lightening of the darkness? Did he hear movement? Was feeling returning?
    Sharn had been his surgeon in one of his restorations. He forgot which of them it had been, there had been so many. But he could not forget her deft fingers in the surgical console or her dark eyes focused on the images magnified on her scope or occasionally raised to meet his own. Within them was all the hope and promise that he had thought forever lost.
    They had reminded him of his first love, the tomboy named Tes, who had raced him through the streets of Clarkeville on terraformed Mars, and up the slopes of the towering mountains whose summits they could never hope to reach or along the shores of the new seas. Her eyes had been dark, too, and they had teased him and taunted him, and