"What realistic game?" I asked, while squatting down to examine his injuries while he sat up on the lower bunk.
Even without the optical implants listing his injuries, the rips and crumpling in his clothes and jacket gave out clues about his vigorous struggles with the soldiers.
Later, the black and blue bruises will cover his face. His right eye swelled from the impact trauma of a firm punch or the butt of a rifle. The surface of his fist skinned and his palms red, incurred as defensive wounds.
Only this idiot in front of me struggled against the armed soldiers. Without doubt, I can already imagine the rising list of charges brought against him.
No sane mercenary will try to game their luck within a Battle Fortress, whether in politics, combat or firepower. His words made little to no sense.
He looked at me with his good eye tilted his head. "You must be the new ally."
I narrowed my eyes at what he said. What ally?
I don't recognise his face or his kind. The cybernetic implants in him eliminated his kind from a long list of species in my head.
Did the soldiers knock the sense out of him with the beating? What new ally? He needed urgent medical attention if his injuries involved the brain, especially if the damage involved the cybernetic links implanted within the brain tissue.
Should I wave to the guards for attention so a doctor could examine him? Then again, a doctor in the Great Swirl Council would be ill-equipped to deal with cybernetics. They may need a cyberneticist.
I wondered about Trey's species. My optical implant placed him as a maybe candidate for a few species.
Except for the Iktomin, few species stand out in neural link cybernetic tech. They dabbled in that form of cybernetics at an experimental stage, often unsuccessful.
Though with his light brown hair and lanky built, he could pass off as a Perunian if he dyed it a lighter blonde and placed a blue lens on his brown iris in the eye. Perunians used localised, limited cybernetic limbs in their medical industry, but not neural linked cybernetics.
Could he be Iktomin?
The Iktomins also possess similar features to his. However, they never implanted cybernetic tech in their kind.
They only implanted cybernetics in their enslaved entertainers or the wealthy species desperate to use their neural link tech as a last resort to survive.
That's their general rule, unless they changed recently.
"Do you even know what I am?" I asked.
The newcomer studied my face and frowned for a while before answering, "Name's Trey."
"Your species is called Trey?" I asked.
Is that even a species in this galactic quadrant named Trey?
He tilted his head at me with a bewildered look. "No. My. Name. Is. Trey."
Ah, his name.
"Call me Genja," I said and paused.
"Your species is Genja?"
Maybe his command of the common galactic tongue is poor. His reply displayed a misunderstanding of what I asked.
Or perhaps the soldiers whacked his brain so hard that the impact affected his neural link function in language processing.
I sighed and pointed to myself. "My name."
He tapped at his left temple and then mumbled, "Odd, where is the dashboard screen?"
"Dashboard screen?"
"Yeah, it shows me my stats, like health, and attributes, like agility, strength… oh and I also get to see missions. You won't be able to see it. It's only visible to me."
The way Trey described the dashboard sounded like the output of my optical implants. No one can see those outputs except for us.
Out of curiosity, I peered into his good eye.
"W-W-What are you doing?" He tried to stare back.
Even better, I needed a fight-or-flight response for his eyes to widen his pupils. Well, at least one eye.
His other right eyelid swelled like a burgeoning balloon.
[Retina scan initiating]
[Right eye: closed, heightened blood flow, broken blood vessels, unable to scan]
[Left cornea: normal, clear]
[Left pupil: normal, reacting to light, primitive, clear]
[Left lens: primitive, normal, clear]
[Left retina: primitive, normal, clear]
[Left optic nerve: faint cybernetic signal detected]
The faint cybernetic signal carried a similar frequency along the synaptic pathways in the brain cortex, like those of my optical implants.
Had all signal frequencies been in sync, the signals would have sent commands down the optic nerves projected the virtual dashboard in Trey's visions like how my optical implants visualised information.
With only one faint signal, no surprise about Trey's inability to see the dashboard.
[Left eye: no presence of abnormalities or implants, anatomical structure similar to primitives or an animal]
Primitive? Trey likely belonged to a non spacefaring species.
The only way to confirm is to check his bone density, but pulling out the droids capable of scanning his bone density from my mouth may scare the crap out of Trey and also alert the guards to my extra 'accessories'.
Too risky.
Exposure to space long term would force a few extra evolutionary measures in all of all spacefaring species to adapt to space travel.
One of those first core evolutionary changes in most species include thickened bone density of our skulls compared to the pre-spacefaring species. Those who never travelled in space regularly never needed to evolve their bone density further because of the constant gravitational stresses on the planet.
"Examining your eye," I replied. "You spoke of some screen. I see nothing."
He stared at me in surprise and said, "Don't tell me you are an NPC?"
"What the heck is an NPC?"
"Non-player character. One which is not controlled by a player… maybe that's why it appears real life to you. Not saying you are not real… just not real to me," he tried to explain while wincing.
Nothing he said made sense. What did he mean by I am not real to him? In fact, he appeared to be delusional or had problems expressing his ideas about the reality of his dire situation.
"What species are you?" I asked, out of curiosity.
"Species? Human," he replied.
Never heard of humans before, but he could speak the galactic common tongue.
"Which planetary system is your species in?"
He tilted his head at me, puzzled by my questions. "Solar system…"
Solar to me meant any bright radiating star. There are millions of planetary systems in the Great Swirl Galaxy. Millions of 'solar systems' made it hard to figure out, but another idea popped into my head.
"What do you call your galaxy?"
"We call it the Milky way," Trey said. "Like chocolate."
Milky way and chocolate. What the heck are those?
"Maybe Milky Way is actually the Great Swirl galaxy?" I suggested.
"Great Swirl galaxy…" Trey muttered as his eye lowered to the ground as though in deep thought.
To my knowledge, I never heard of a Milky way galaxy. Perhaps that's how his people called the Great Swirl galaxy.
To me, the Great Swirl galaxy didn't look milky at all. More of a giant multicolored spiral of over a trillion stars and millions of planetary systems.
"The game masters said I came from another galaxy," He added.