Sophia faced Vin with slightly narrowed eyes from the comfort of her leather seat. “The lieutenant had trouble procuring your medical record, Vincent,” she began tersely. “I trust you have it on you?”

“I had a stint in the OSF, you know,” he deflected and shrugged, eyes averted for a hesitant microsecond. “Would’ve thought they’d keep tabs.”

“Apparently, that’s not the case,” she remarked impatiently, tapping her fingers. “Can I have it?”

Vin looked down at his fingers, interlocked and fidgeting restlessly. There was no way they had nothing on him. They’d at least have his years in the fleet. Probably everything before then, too. Anything after could be found with enough digging. Perhaps they just didn’t care to look hard enough.
 
Regardless, he supposed she needed it to do her job. A slight, resigned exhalation, and he looked up again. “There,” he conceded, and her slate beeped in affirmation.
 
“Excellent.” Sophia opened the relevant file on a holo-display floating to her left. Her eyes immediately fixated on it as she impassively provided further instructions for him: “We’ll begin with a mundane physical examination. I will be taking measurements, determining your fitness and sensory aptitude, et cetera. I’ll need you to remove your outer clothing.” 

Within moments of browsing his documentation, she made a disapproving hum. He tried to track her gaze to see what it was she didn’t like, but she was already looking expectantly at him. He had a pretty good idea regardless: few were approving of the melding of minds with machines. Luddites.
 
He pulled his shirt up and his pants down, standing before Sophia in nothing but his underwear. Pale. A bit on the lanky side. His robotic left arm reached slightly further down his side than his right. Off-the-shelf article, one-size-doesn’t-quite-fit-all.
 
“This enough, or you want more?” he smiled sheepishly, pointing at his underwear.
 
Sophia’s eyes darted to the side, momentarily distracted from studying his records. “I should think neither of us wants ‘more’. That’ll do.” The doctor swiveled in her chair, turning it over so that she could reach for the blood extractor. Armed with this device, she got up and approached him. Reaching for his remaining, organic arm, she pressed it against his vein and pushed the button to insert the needle.
 
“So, Vincent. Do you know where you were born?” she asked almost menacingly - though perhaps it was simply the effect of receiving an uncomfortable question whilst having a needle in one’s flesh. She did not look up to him.
 
“How’s that relevant?” he deflected, voice coming out more bitter than he had intended.
 
“Your first record,” she began to explain as the needle retracted, “is at age 10. That is a big gap between then and your birth, Vincent. Could help explain your rather interesting condition, perhaps. Could also help in establishing a psychological profile. The circumstances surrounding your birth are hardly irrelevant.” After removing the device, she stared him in the eyes for a moment, perhaps to convey the gravity of her request. She soon relented, however, and returned to her seat.
 
“Fine, it’s just…” He exhaled, and could feel his body loosening up. He hadn’t even noticed it tensing. “I’m just not comfortable being under the microscope, I guess. Can I put my clothes back on?”
 
“Before that, I’ll need you to lie down on the operating table for your scans. No cause for alarm, I won’t be making any incisions.” After a moment, she added in a gentler tone: “I’m sorry we cannot provide a male examiner for you.”
 
“That’s not really the issue here,” he said. [i]I’m feeling naked in more ways than one[/i], he didn’t say. He walked up to the table and laid down, and a glass-like dome grew out of the table to envelop him. A myriad of tiny sensors were embedded inside, too small for the human eye but big enough to be visible to his augment. It helped that he didn’t have to look at Sophia.
 
“It’s… You just read the file, right?” he continued testingly. “Memory defect. Can’t really trust anything I remember from back then. Besides, my folks were basically nomads.”
 
“Nobody told you where you’re from?” she asked incredulously, her voice sounding slightly distorted through the glass. “No contact with your parents, I take it?”
 
He shrugged. “Mom came from Herakles, far as I can tell. Dad, I’ve got no idea. My best guess is I was born out in the void somewhere.”
 
“I see,” she answered thoughtfully, watching his metrics appear one by one on her display. “Void births are statistically more likely to incur difficulties for the newborn. Myriad reasons but essentially, humans weren’t designed to perform well in space.”
 
“Yeah, if I see them I’ll tell them to be more careful next time,” he quipped.
 
“You have a lively sense of humor,” she remarked dryly.
 
After capturing his superficial details, the glass tomb began its deep-scan; layer by layer, a graphic of Vincent’s body, muscle by muscle, nerve by nerve, began appearing on screen. Then, his brain: large sections of his right hemisphere were cut out, replaced with compact electronics. Even the left was not unscathed, with strips of circuitry following the contours of most of its surface.
 
“So you’ve had your memory implant since age twelve,” she continued. “Have you experienced any technical difficulties with it since then? Any flaws? Has it ever been offline for any period of time?”
 
“Well, you’ve got to flip the switch when you make changes”, he said. “Goes for the wetware, too. Easy for things to go wrong if you try to tinker with a live system.”
 
“Tinkering with live systems is my profession, as it turns out,” she quipped uncharacteristically. “So you’ve only had it deactivated for your many augmentation procedures? No unexpected failures otherwise?”
 
“There’s… been some hiccups, actually,” he replied, eyeing the invisibly small arrays of sensors. The only sign of their activity was a subtle emission on the EM spectrum.
 
“Compatibility issues,” he continued. “When I got a digital memory module - that was in ‘24, if you check the record - they didn’t play nice. The old implant used a pretty hacky solution - it worked, but it messed up the circuitry. Scrambled the signal going to digital, had to mess with the drivers for both.”
 
“You’ve modified the firmware for it yourself?” Sophia asked whilst calling up a spec sheet for the implant’s serial model in question. Mechanical augments were hardly her expertise, but she understood them well enough to gather the important points at a glance. The model could hardly be considered novel at this point, or indeed when it bad been put to use in Vincent’s head. Her brow furrowed meaningfully.
 
“Had help from my professor at the time, but yeah.” He shifted uncomfortably. “My case was fairly novel, and he took an interest. I studied neural computing, y’know.”
 
“I suppose I know now. I can see why he would take an interest - frankly I am curious myself.”
 
He spread his arms as far as his cramped cage allowed. “I lay bare before you.”
 
“Perhaps,” she continued, her eyes darting over to his pale body trapped in glass, “we can work together on improving your condition. To minimize risk to the mission and maybe find a permanent solution. The current one is clearly less than perfect.”
 
“It had a pretty good run, actually. Gave me a better memory than most.” It had given him an almost savant-like visual memory, handy during his studies, at the cost of some emotional recollection. “It’s taken the back seat since I went digital, though. At this stage it’s pretty much just there for redundancy.”
 
“You don’t strike me as the complacent type, Vincent. Your left arm had a good run - until you excised it like a tumor.” Was that resentment in her voice?
 
“No need to make any hasty decisions,” she added, ”but - think about it. I can prepare some-”
 
“Look,” he cut her off, “I get it. You want to poke around in my skull. Maybe you even want to [i]help[/i]. But really, I don’t need it. I already have something better.”
 
“That old thing,” he tapped his temple and continued, “just… tries to fix the wetware circuitry for memory. Falls short in some ways. Improves it in others. But baseline memory is still full of holes. The compression is pretty damn lossy, and it doesn’t even [i]try[/i] to remember something if your brain doesn’t think it’s important. And even what it [i]does[/i] remember still gets corrupted over time. My… condition was basically just that but worse.”
 
Sophia rolled her eyes and suppressed a groan. “So you’d rather keep a mechanical band-aid in your brain than try to improve upon it. Be my guest.”
 
“I’m not saying it can’t be improved. I’m saying there’s no point,” he retorted. “I went digital. Why run when you can fly? Besides, tampering with it means I’d probably have to recalibrate everything else again.”
 
“So long as your functionality isn’t impaired, it’s your call,” Sophia concluded, “but I will be monitoring your condition - and that of your implants - closely in the future. Derelict has unpredictable effects on human brains alone and there is no telling how your particular set-up will react.”
 
“I’ll admit I’m a little worried about that, actually,” he confessed. “I can disable wireless, but there’s other ways to mess with electronics.”
 
Like EM radiation. With a sensor delicate enough you could follow the path of an electrical charge through the circuit. Given enough time and computing power, you could figure out what a computer was doing just by looking at the dance of electrons.
 
With a precise enough application of electromagnetic induction, you might even be able to tell it what to do.
 
“Though I suppose the same goes for the brain,” he sighed ruefully and shrugged, “so what can you do?”
 
The doctor frowned to herself. “Nothing at all, I’m afraid. Just wait and see. And hope it’s not too late to do anything by then.”