Koban: The Mark of Koban

by Stephen W Bennett

  Noreen looked at her friend. “Aldry, I accepted that Carson would choose the enhancements someday. I bore all three of my children with that knowledge, even expectation. I didn’t want it while they were so young. I know Carson wants this so bad he can taste it, and he has the legal right to do it now. Even if Tet’s alternative age of eighteen were in place, Carson just turned seventeen. I have to let him become a full Kobani man, and it may as well come while he’s young enough for it to go more smoothly.” She sighed, and Dillon put his arm around her.

  Mirikami shrugged, yielding to the inevitable. “What’s the plan Rafe? Staged implementation of the two mods they can have now, bones and muscles separately, or do both together?”

  “Well, the new law says they can decide, to select which mod and when, or to skip them. My team recommends both together, to use as much of their young growth potential now, and get the physically uncomfortable phase over all at once. That will take about two months, and require a reduction in their normal level of near hyperactivity.” He laughed at the truth of that last remark. All the SG1s stayed quite active.

  Thad spoke up again. “We should have built that brig I suggested years ago. Then we’d have some place to lock them down.”

  Marlyn looped her arm through one of Thad’s. “You know the kid spy network spotted us coming to the lab, right? That means they know what we are discussing, and what the law says we have to allow them to decide. Lover, how about you and I talk to Ethan together, right now, and tell him we both support whatever he decides.”

  She pulled his head down and kissed him, and said, “It will go hard on you tonight if I see the slightest sign of you gloating over winning this small battle. The war could turn ugly at bedtime pal. I’m willing to negotiate a vigorous peace treaty, but remember that Kit doesn’t like company sleeping in her own den if the peace is broken.”

  The tough former Colonel merely smiled and said “Yes Mam.”

  ****

  Carson was rubbing at the injection spots that still itched after leaving the gene lab. Ethan was digging at a couple of spots as well. It had been embarrassing to have both their mothers there to observe, since they had to get naked. They made their Moms turn around when they had to drop towels and get into the boxes. It was ridiculous that they both told them that they were their “mothers, and had changed their diapers.” So what? That was before they were men!

  On the way past the end of the lab, they nonchalantly waved at their friends sitting outside, waiting for their own turns at the upgrades. It was as if this was no big deal for the two of them. Just another run-of-the-mill adventure, like many others they were famous for at school. Their heart rates had given the lie to their pretended casualness when they entered the box. Not that they knew that, of course.

  Ethan’s younger brother Bradley, only fifteen and too young for the process, ran up to ask them how it went. Did it hurt, was it scary, a rain of other questions followed.

  “Hold off, bat brain. I’ll tell you about it. We were told to head straight to the Great Hall for some yucky food, supplemented with Koban minerals. You can come if you want.”

  “I already ate. What was it like?”

  Carson, deciding to make it a real story, told him “They put you naked in this box, full of long thick needles, and close the lid on you, leaving you in the cold darkness. Then they lie to you and say relax, it won’t hurt. They do a countdown, but before the end of the count, they surprise you when over a hundred needles plunge into your body, all over. It injects the carrier virus that inserts the new genes into your DNA. They stick even your eyeballs, and into your private parts. You know what I mean? It’s like fiery agony.” He rubbed at his groin, pretending pain, and thinking, that should worry him. He was wrong.

  “Glitzy! Let me go tell the ones still outside waiting.” He ran off to spread the tale of gruesome horror, and to no doubt embellish the partial fabrication even more. He knew his big brother and Carson too well to believe their stories at face value. His Dad had told him there was a box, and it did inject you, but with aerosol injectors, after you received an anesthetic. He said it didn’t hurt, but did itch a bit afterwards. He was really going to frighten the girls. They had seen him talk to Ethan and Carson, the first two to have the procedure. They’d believe him.

  Ethan looked at Carson. “That was mean…, I wish I’d thought of it.” They shared a good laugh at the kid brother’s expense.

  “That was a nice touch, Carson. ‘Fiery agony’ in your privates. You are an evil genius.”

  ****

  It was fiery agony! He felt so stupid. Carson was really sorry that he had manipulated that particular ‘muscle’ of his anatomy. He was bored, horny, and wanted to see how strong his muscles were getting. It was the third week of this restricted activity crap. Why couldn’t they have had the vote back when school was in session? He could at least be avoiding homework and not fun. It took him hours to get to sleep.

  His mother intruded on his mood of self-pity the next morning. “Get cleaned up, you look and smell bad. Aunt Aldry is coming by to check on your progress, and she’s bringing a portable brain scanner. Let’s hope she finds something inside that lumpy unkempt hairy mess you call your head.”

  “You have a real talent for comedy Mom. Ha, Ha! See how entertained I am?” Sour mood aside, a hot shower not only did not make the burning worse, he felt much better afterwards. Who knew? The parental badgering to keep clean and get dressed each day, trying to make him get out of bed and pajamas, might actually work to improve his mood. He’d hate to let them know if it actually worked. Couldn’t set a precedent he’d have to live with later.

  Aunt Aldry showed up as promised, a suitcase sized box on roller wheels in tow.

  “Noreen, it’s good to see you.” They exchanged hugs.

  “Dillon tells us that you have been stuck here at home, with some sort of dirty troglodyte?” Smiling, she glanced across the living quarters and spotted Carson, sitting in front of a Tri-Vid set, watching some ancient flat image movie. “I see yon trog, and he appears to have cleaned himself off a bit. How go’s it today Carson?”

  In a permitted concession to his changing muscles, he wasn’t expected to get up, so he waved. “I took a shower and shaved, just for you, Aunt Aldry.” He returned his attention to the old western he was watching. Aunt Maggi had gotten him hooked on some of them, if they were in color.

  At the mention of his shaving, Aldry looked quietly at Noreen, and pantomimed feeling whiskers and shaving, the raised eyebrows making the silent question obvious.

  Noreen smiled and shook her head no, and shrugged. Carson had started a weekly shaving ritual a couple of months before he received the gene mods. He had only the usual adolescent fuzz, and unless a man wanted treatments to grow a beard, centuries old gene mods had virtually eliminated unwanted beards four hundred years in the past. However, the rough and tough men in the old movies he watched sometimes shaved, and so he thought he should. The inevitable nicks and cuts were his badge of manhood, which he seemed to show off mainly to girls as proof of his maturity. To the adults, it proved exactly the opposite.

  “Carson, I’ll have to ask you to put your movie on hold. I need to check your vitals, tap a few places, ask and answer questions, and give you a quick brain scan. I have a lot of other house calls to make today.”

  She checked blood pressure, heart rate, lungs, eyes, ears, nose and throat. After a gentle manipulation of limbs, poking a few muscles, asking what he felt, she placed the small adjustable helmet on his head and started a scan. As an image appeared on a screen inside the lid of the box, she manipulated, rotated and zoomed in on sections, and read out the data the new software program extracted from what it detected.

  “Carson, your new neural connections are forming extremely well in your brain, well ahead of our expectations. However, the new carbon fiber muscle tissue will take a while longer to complete infiltrating all of your muscles. If you send signals to the muscles along the ‘fast path�
� nerves right now, you will be sending motor impulses from your brain that are currently terminated in human only muscle tissue, without the proper nerve receptors. That causes a burning sensation. Try to focus on the slower nerve pathways for the remainder of this month. We know it can be done, because even the pigs and goats learned, without an explanation.”

  “Uh, OK.” That wasn’t a very brilliant reply, he thought. I’ll ask a question.

  “If the superconductor nerves don’t connect to the new muscle receptors yet, then why do I feel the burning in the exact place where that muscle is?” He had one muscle in mind, but wasn’t about to name the one that burned last night.

  “That’s a pertinent and perceptive question. The sensation really only exists in your brain, where virtually all of our physical sensations are processed. The brain’s mapping of our body tells the brain where on our anatomy that sensation originated. It already has the map, and if there’s a short circuit, it thinks the pain comes from the appropriate location, when actually it happens in the brain. It’s a bit like phantom pains and itches we might feel if we lost a leg and the missing foot still seems to need scratching. You can feel that until the leg regrows. Your phantom burning will end when your new muscles and superfast nerve receptors are joined.”

  He was glad she didn’t use the term “imaginary pain” like Aunt Maggi had. It might be phantom pain, but it damn well wasn’t imaginary!

  He wanted a bit of confirmation. “So focusing consciously on the older slower human nerve sensations will avoid triggering the burning?” He’d sure try that.

  “In principle, yes, but that’s a hard thing to do in practice, I think. How do your joints feel, and particularly the leg bones, when you stand?”

  “Not bad. A dull ache is always there, but not intense.”

  The bone changes caused general aching all the time, but because there were fewer nerve receptors involved, that ache stayed dull and was tolerable. Aldry gave him a few words of encouragement, talked with his mom a bit, and left for her next house call. After watching the movie, he returned to his personal “cave.”

  Troglodyte! I’ll bet they thought I didn’t know what that meant.

  At times the tingling, itching, and burning were too distracting to sleep. He spent many late hours talking with Ethan, Arlene, Jaylene, and other friends that had the same sleep problems. They seldom saw one another for the first month of the change, since that encouraged physical activity that could “cause discomfort.” A charming euphemism that meant your ass, arms, legs, or whatever, was on fire!

  It was another sleepless late night com call to Arlene Parkinfem that convinced him to try the concentration and focus technique he had practiced after Aunt Aldry had left that morning. He believed he had that method down now. He was sure he could do what a goat or pig had done.

  In their wandering conversation, Arlene reminded him teasingly of the “kissing and touching” that had followed his presenting her with the first ever seen blue colored, two-foot long whiteraptor arm feathers. That was a very fond and stimulating memory for Carson. As soon as they finished talking, he tried his new technique. Only to discover that certain emotionally laden thoughts were not subject to “focus” and clinical “concentration.”

  Hence, the intense burning ‘muscle’ pain he caused himself again tonight. He needed to think of something else for a relaxation exercise. Such as how he got those feathers.

  They came from an adolescent raptor from early last winter, born blue, and which had not turned full white yet. It was only fifteen feet long, or else he and Ethan would never have tried to draw it closer to the thirty-foot wall, urging it to leap uselessly up at them, where they could grab at feathers when it extended its grasping small forearms. In their imaginative retelling of the event, the creature had grown considerably larger, and the feathery proof had garnered him his first near sexual experience with Arlene that evening. Ethan had used his share of feathers to score points with Jaylene Cotes.

  The next afternoon, alerted by Mister Rigson, their old elementary school teacher, his Dad investigated the source of the blue colored raptor feathers that two girls were flaunting to their high school friends. He heard the story behind them, so he and Ethan’s Dad flew out to the wall to check security, taking their heavy rifles. They returned to tell their sons that one-day old tracks of a large female raptor were all around the base of that wall now. They had missed dear old mom raptor by a just little bit. Everyone knew that a determined big female whiteraptor could scale those walls, with the right incentive. The boy’s peashooter Krall pistols would have been useless if she had made it over.

  Ahh. Thinking of his Dad’s reaction had calmed the burning sensation. So…, that long endless lecture finally offered some benefit.

  ****

  The second month was a huge improvement, pain wise. One week into the second month and Carson, along with the other forty-nine first week candidates felt aches, but no burning. The second fifty candidates, a week behind, were happy to hear that. The fifty from the week after them were ecstatic, and so forth back to those that were only now entering the painful burning phase. The order of processing the kids was by date of birth, fifty per week, and Carson was four days the oldest, just ahead of Ethan.

  Of the three hundred twelve Prime City kids eligible for the mods, only nine had opted to delay. Some for family vacation reasons, some for flaky sounding reasons that were likely based on apprehension and fear, or they had family pressure. One girl had turned sixteen last week, and asked to receive the mods for her Sweet Sixteen Birthday gift. It was quickly turning into a coming of age event for the Prime City Koban born.

  For the two months of transformation, Carson was spending as much time with Kobalt as he could. However, the cat had found a mate in the northern pride. He was frequently gone overnight, or for a couple of days.

  Actually, it was his third mate in the last six years. Ripper males were fickle, and drifted from female to female after one or two seasons. He had sired seven cubs; or rather, they had been cubs. All but two were now independent of their mothers, who did the primary raising. Carson was introduced to them all, but he had not been able to grow as close as he had hoped. It was due to the wild influence of their mothers, and the images they grew up sharing, taken from the pride’s long history. Humans were recent allies, formerly prey, and humans had hunted rippers for vengeance. The latter was hard for the wild rippers to understand, and wasteful. They had done nothing wrong, and killing prey that you ate wasn’t wrong.

  Kobalt and Kit had become adept at understanding human images and translating concepts from wild rippers. That process worked in both directions actually, supplementing confusing human images with other pictures that helped explain our thoughts, and soften those that felt too harsh or unreasonable to a wild ripper.

  Kit was more selective than Kobalt, and had mated only twice, bearing twins both times, as her ripper mother had done. She had delivered her litters with her “mother” and “aunt” by her side, in her den. Carson was close by with Ethan the first time, but both had to leave when it grew too tearful for the then fourteen year olds. Aunt Marlyn and his mother were crying and blubbering something awful. The cubs were adorable, both female, and Thad and Marlyn were planning to let them bond with Bradley (he got Kayla) and Danner (got Kally).

  Unless Kobalt could convince a female to join him and live with the human pride, it would be difficult to have his cubs grow up with humans. Ripper tradition was that most males joined and left prides, eventually leaving the one in which they were born, in order to mate with nonrelatives. Females generally stayed with their birth pride. One possibility, offered in negotiation with three prides that hunted near Prime City, concerned orphaned cubs if a mother died. If there were no home-pride females able to take them, they asked if the human pride could raise them.

  Unlike Earth lions, ripper prides were more protective of cubs when a new male suitor came courting an unmated female with cubs. The suitor may not hunt f
or them or teach the cubs to hunt, but he would seldom try to kill them. That difference from lions was probably a function of frill contacts making the prides more strongly bonded. Although, infanticide did sometimes happen, as Kit had learned in memory images from the wild prides.

  With Kobalt to provide frill contact, Carson found that the cat was able to help him sort the double signals his brain was receiving much sooner than his peers. Ethan reported the same effect with Kit.

  Both boys found that the frill contact was growing much more vivid, and the rate of flow of information was accelerating. The cats indicated that their normally “slow” human brothers were rapidly becoming fast thinkers. It was fun for the cats to exchange ideas as fast with their “siblings” as they did with each other, and with other wild rippers.

  It was an amusing revelation for the boys to learn that the family pets had considered their “parents” and “siblings” lovable, but slow-witted as well as slow moving. They decided to save that discovery for some future joint family gathering, when they could “gently” explain to their parents the “facts.” Then offer to do the heavy thinking for them in the future. That should spark a fun exchange.

  ****

  By the end of the second month of the Koban gene modifications for the first week’s fifty candidates, all of the kids had completed the expected tissue and bone growth, and the organic superconductor nervous system finally had links between the brain and the greatly enhanced muscles. The next month or two would involve their learning to shift mental focus from the older nervous system to the new, and to control the stronger muscles without exerting excessive force.

  Smacking yourself hard, when merely reaching up to pick your nose, led to bloody noses. Not surprisingly, this happened mostly with boys. Everyone became extra cautious around the teenagers as they started leaving their enforced isolation. They had pent up boundless energy that was often under poor control. However, there were two notable, and initially mysterious, exceptions.