Free A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) by Randall Farmer

Keaton’s current home?”
    A question easy to answer with truth.  Keaton was good.  “I don’t know.  She left Philadelphia when I graduated and she’s always been the one who’s contacted me, since.  Hey, I just thought of something.  Her new answering service ladies speak with a Guatemalan accent.  I wonder…”  I concocted a specious story about Keaton being out of the country, all based on excessive speculation.  I nurtured a thousand of these bits of excessive speculation and I doled them out as slowly as possible.
     
    Night in the Detention Center was deadly quiet, even to my ears.  Sleep, though, still came rough.  Bad dreams of evil clowns warring with Madonna figures and evil princesses dressed in white.  Dreams starring Keaton, almost all from the first few months of my training, when I didn’t understand how to avoid giving offense.  Dreams of Bobby and I screwing.  Those were the good ones, but they had become corrupted: Bobby always died in them.  I worried that even if I escaped from this place, the bad juice here would have driven me mad.
    I still didn’t dare pray.
    About three in the morning I gave up on rest.  I had a growing problem, or set of growing problems, due to my incorrectly healed left shoulder.  Its range of motion was limited and I couldn’t exercise it as I needed.  Which meant the shoulder muscles were atrophying, following the Zielinski dictum on Arm muscles that the muscles you use grow and the ones you don’t do not.  I risked hypertrophy in many of the surrounding muscles, from compensation.  In addition, because of my left shoulder and the confined nature of my cell, I couldn’t exercise the rest of my muscles sufficiently to keep my old muscle problems at bay.  So I starved myself, to lose muscle mass all over my body.
    I needed to figure out my left shoulder.  I poked and prodded, creating a visualization of its structure.  The shoulder wasn’t dislocated; my humeral head was lodged in the glenoid socket as it should be.  Only, if I wasn’t mistaken, the glenoid socket itself had healed about 20 degrees off true.  More poking and prodding produced incredible pain and a hypothesis that both my scapula and my clavicle had healed into a warped configuration, because of the way the Feds chained me up for however many days the Feds took to transport me here.  Yet more poking and prodding convinced me I had a second structural problem in my left shoulder: my rotator cuff muscles and tendons, shot away while I lay bleeding on the pavement after my takedown, had somehow split in two lengthwise when they regenerated.
    I was well and truly fucked.
     
    I wa ited until mid-morning and most of the way through the day’s medical tests before I brought up my problems.
    “Dr. Wilson,” I asked.  “May I have a moment of your time?”  He might not know shit about Arms but his ignorance was at least honest.
    He looked up at me from his paperwork and waved away an orderly to meet my gaze.  He did have years of experience dealing with (I couldn’t say ‘caring for’ with a straight face) other Transforms, including Focuses.  Like Zielinski he had some immunity to my blandishments, likely from his experience with Focuses.  Unlike Zielinski he was both still employed and still trusted by the Feds.
    “Certainly, Carol.  It’s a pleasure to talk to you,” he said, lying like a rug.  Deep in his mind he still believed my ability to talk closer to the skills of a parrot rather than a human being, despite how I peppered my commentary with medical lingo.
    I explained my shoulder problem.  “Would it be possible for you to surgically fix it?”
    “Technically, yes,” he said, after a pause.  “I’ve done similar regeneration-based surgeries to Focuses after car crashes and falls.  Practically, no.”
    “What’s the issue?”
    “Without anesthesia this operation is far too dangerous.”  For him.  “I can’t immobilize your left arm and still