Faith Healer: Part 3

Interrogation rooms were almost always interchangeable across all versions of Earth. White walls, white lights, one mirrored wall with dimly seen biosignatures on the other side. Only the locality, language and the sophistication of the technology varied: on this iteration of Earth, it was circa 2032 and the tech was about twenty years ahead of my own Earth at around the same point in its history. The doors were made of thick, translucent plas-steel instead of metal and glass, each hexagonal panel watermarked with the Party's symbol. The table and chairs were sleek and office-like, other than the fact they were bolted to the floor. There were no visible cameras, but I knew I was being recorded from a dozen different angles.

I sat with my hands open and loose on the steel tabletop, careful not to leave any fingerprints on it. My wrists were still manacled. My face was puffy from the brief beating I'd taken while being pulled out of the van, but I faced the grim, grey-clad SID agent with a warm, open smile. He didn't smile back as he consulted a foldable tablet computer he held in one hand. It was as thin as a sheet of paper, able to be crumpled. When he'd pulled it out of his pocket, it had sprung out and flattened. The back of the display was blurred to prevent me from reading anything on the front of the screen.

"Ricardo Kusanagi," he intoned. "Date of birth?"

"November 19, 2004." He'd asked this same question eight times already. My interrogator had big, dark, work-worn hands covered in small pale scars. Short nails, bitten down. Rifle calluses, too. He'd pulled a lot of triggers. Those traits, along with his wariness and the hard, dark eyes told me that this man had been a soldier, and that he'd seen a lot of combat. There was no identifying information, no badge or insignia. Not even the Integralist Sigma-in-a-circle. We had been here for a couple hours already, going back and forth with basic, repetitive questions and attempts to get an outburst as the interrogator worked to confuse me and break me down.

"You engaged in charlatanism. Do you know what the penalty for charlatanism is?"

"I am not a charlatan, sir," I replied calmly. 

"You are impersonating a priest."

"I am a priest."

"You are a fake."

"I am real. And God's gift is real."

The man crumpled his screen up, and shoved it into a pocket. He looked pissed. Like almost everyone here, he wore a small, thin chain under his collar, a crucifix. But unlike many of his fellow Party members, this man wasn't a believer. He'd seen too much of the real world for that. "You engage in charlatanism, you imitate a man of the cloth, and now you are lying to an official. This makes you a criminal, mentally ill, or both."

"The gift is real," I insisted.

"So if I call my men in to break your fucking legs, you're telling me you can heal them?" The tone turned aggressive, brutish. Of the two of us, he was the only one sweating. The smell of his armpits hung heavy in the otherwise sterile room.

I shocked myself with a little adrenaline, keeping myself alert. "Yes."

"You're telling me you can heal broken bones?"

"Yes, sir."

"Cancer?"

I paused a moment. "No. Not cancer."

"So you say you can fix your own broken legs, but you cannot cure cancer. Why?"

"I don't know, sir," I lied. "God did not see fit to gift me the ability to cure cancer. But wounds, auto-immune diseases, diseases of the brain and-"

"Shut up. You are a liar." But the interrogator's eyes now glittered with interest. He had the look of a man who had just opened a treasure chest and spotted the mound of gold inside, but was wondering if it was cursed. 

'Checkpoint Two,' I thought to Digger. 'He's sniffing the bait.'

There was a short delay, as there always was when we switched to psionics. 'Roger. Keep it up.'

"You will be shot." My interrogator leaned forward. "You will be taken to a pit, you will lie down, and you will be shot in the back of the head. That is the penalty for lying to a government official. Insanity is no defense. Plead guilty, and your family will be spared."

I gazed at the man for several long moments, steadying myself. The screams of the people in the church were still ringing in my ears, any feelings I had about it sealed behind a thick blank wall of chemical dissociation. But as he waited for my reply... I healed my face. The bruises on my cheeks and around my eyes bloomed, briefly darkening, then rapidly fading through blue and green and yellow to clean, tan skin.

The man froze, blinking rapidly. While he was stunned into silence, my vision warped and deepened. The man ahead of me came apart, transformed into an elaborate display of tissues, cells, DNA. An entire body laid bare in four dimensions.

"You have a piece of metal shrapnel sealed inside a sac of scar tissue between your left-side fourth and fifth rib," I said quietly. "Which is why it hurts on that side when you breathe or lie on it. If you were treated for shrapnel, they missed a piece. You have two root canals: one in your upper right molar and one in your upper left canine tooth. And you..." I paused, partly for effect, and partly to make sure I was correct.

"I... I what?" He stared in disbelief.

"You... also have a malignancy forming in your left lung, sir."

The smug, sadistic expression faded from my interrogator's face. His swarthy skin was now pale and clammy.

I regarded him with deep sympathy. "Sir, if you have that tumor looked at now - as in, within the next three weeks - you can get it removed. You will be alright. But your lungs have a lot of tar from chronic smoking, and-"

"Stop. Shut up." The man flew to his feet, spine ramrod straight. "You will wait here. Do NOT move."

A thrill of fear pushed out past my self-induced chemical haze. There were several possible outcomes from here, but the two most likely were that I'd either be taken to a cell while bureaucrats argued over what to do with me, or my boy with the blacklung was about to grab a pistol and pop me in the back of the head out of sheer terror. But then twenty minutes passed. An hour. Like any soldier with half a brain cell, I used the opportunity to get some sleep, rousing only once the door behind me wooshed open. A different SNI agent entered, also dressed in gray... accompanied by an older man in his 60s. This man's uniform was blue, militaristic, and he was clearly labeled as a Major of the Party cadre. Not too high up, because I didn't recognize him from my briefing, but high up enough that he wore insignia and carried weapons. He was hairy and sallow, with the stocky build of a pitbull.

"You, wait outside the door," he snapped to the SNI guy as he marched to stand behind me. "And give me your pistol."

The officer looked confused, given the Major had a pistol of his own. Still, he didn't argue. He handed the gun over and left. The Major picked it up, made sure it was loaded, then jammed the muzzle up against the base of my skull.

"Tell me what's wrong with me," he said coldly. "And if you are wrong, this will be over very quickly."

I drew a deep breath, suppressing my central nervous system a little more and dampening my fear response and affect. I'd learned a long time ago that while Lifesight could show me anything about a person's body, and Biomancy could fix it, both of them required my expertise and attention to detail to use effectively. Fascists rarely understood that kind of work was made more difficult when you had a gun to your head. It was kind of their solution to everything. 

"You have Type 1 Diabetes, sir," I said, once I was sure.

He stopped grinding the ring of cold metal against my nape, and rounded the table. The weapon tracked me as he found his seat, flint-chip eyes boring coldly into mine. "Can you cure it?"

I nodded."

The Major lowered the pistol. He lay it down, the muzzle still pointed at me, one heavily ringed finger resting beside the trigger. "Then do it. I order you."

"Well, sir..." I closed my eyes and summoned an air of pious gravity. "The gift isn't from me; it is from God, and if he wills you to be healed, you will be healed."

'You are so full of shit, Angkor,' Digger chuckled over the line.

The Major's expression set into hard, angry lines. That wasn't the right answer. But as he brought the gun up again, I raised my hands placatingly and added: "But the Lord favors you for your works, sir, and he has promised to work through me as I lay on hands. I am but a servant. Please, uncuff me so I can show you."

"You had better." He stared into my eyes... and whatever he saw there unsettled him. Even so, he took an electronic key and entered the password before touching it to my cuffs. They unlocked and collapsed to the table with a clunk, and I felt a different sort of thrill slip through the armor of my neural suppression. Excitement.

Diabetes Type 1 was fundamentally an autoimmune disorder. The immune system destroys beta cells in the pancreas, the cells that make insulin - a powerful hormone that regulates blood sugar. At a deeper level, the cause was genetic - discrepancies in the HLA Class II genes. And because this form of diabetes was genetic, it was curable with stem cell therapy - temporarily, at least. Medical technology in the EIB was advanced enough to do so, and Party members like this one got the best medical care on offer. In theory. But I knew why he hadn't been cured. If the Major had presented to a state doctor with an inheritable genetic condition like this one... well. There was enough Nazi eugenics influence in the Integralists that he knew exactly what would happen to him, so he got his insulin off Brazil's thriving black market and made do, and had built a career inside of the Party to insulate himself from extermination.

I beckoned to him, holding my hands out. "Here. Hold them."

The Major stared at me a moment. Holstered the gun through his belt, then reached out to lay his gnarled fingers over mine.

Helping this guy was the last thing I wanted to do, but it had to be done. As I had with Marguerite, I worked on his immune system first, calming it and ramping down the chronic inflammation. Then I focused on his marrow, stretching my awareness through the permeable pink walls of living bone, plunging deep into the spongy red heart of his femurs. Stem cells, the wellspring of Life, brooded deep inside this most fragile of tissues. The stem cells there could transform into any other kind of cell, and it was these I gently coaxed to replicate. Softly, softly, I energized the mitochondria and the protein-building 'factories' of his body to produce millions of them. Within minutes, they were circulating through the Major's pancreas... where I had them assemble into new beta cells. I could at least temporarily put the horrors of Tapejos aside while as I worked. Even in the body of an objectively evil man, the patterns of cellular architecture were elegant, even beautiful.

The Major sat, entranced as his body twitched and spasmed occasionally, muscle twitches from the sudden activity deep inside parts of his body he couldn't usually feel. When I opened my eyes, he looked apprehensively into mine. 

"It is done," I said softly. "You need to go eat something sweet, now. Before your blood sugar crashes."

Unconsciously, he wiped his forehead. The Major was already starting to look pale, clammy and sweaty, the tell-tale signs of a hypo. His stomach audibly growled.

"If this is... if you... " he stammered, pausing to grind his jaw in irritation at himself before continuing. "I am going to go and have a blood test done. If it shows that I am still, still... afflicted... I will personally see to it that the rest of your worthless life is as miserable as possible before the end. Do you understand?"

I resisted the urge to grimace or quip. These motherfucking people. "Yes. I understand."

"Good." Shivering now, the cadre took out a handful of jellybeans from a hidden pocket deep inside his jacket, and chewed frantically as he stalked off toward the door. "You will wait in a cell until I have the results."