He had been cautioned by the hospital doctors that a possible side effect of a flash-burn injury was a reduction in the physical range of motion but the treatment and follow-up rehabilitation would have doubled his recuperation time. After fifteen days in the hospital, Marty was anxious to get back to the shop floor where he belonged.
The second degree burns and blisters on the side of Marty’s neck and arm had mostly healed but the scar tissue lacked elasticity. Simple repetitive motions, especially those involving turning and reaching were more difficult. Working through the difficulty was occasionally painful and usually awkward but he was determined. He had taken twice as long as he normally would to replace a malfunctioning sensor in the emergency life support air system of a Knight because he lacked the basic flexibility to reach the device. Improvising an alternate route through secondary electrical seemed like going the long way around but it served the purpose.
When he sat in the pilot’s seat to run the final diagnostic checklist to be certain the fault code had been cleared, the machine spoke.
“You are the T9.”
“Pardon?” Marty answered looking up from his portable logic display.
“You are the T9 that configured the Instrument in his Ascension.”
“I don’t understand. I am a T9, that’s my proficiency rank but I don’t know anything about an instrument or an ascension.”
“You were there when the Instrument Ascended, you were touched by his Illumination. You are the T9.”
“Touched? You mean burned?” Marty asked making a quick mental connection.
“The Illumination touches all those close to the Instrument. Such is the nature of the Instrument.”
“Since when do Knights speak in riddles?” Marty asked starting to lose his patience.
“All will be revealed.”
“Okay, let me see if I’ve got this right,” Marty said shaking his head. “What you’re saying is the Centurion itself is this ‘Instrument’ and the power upgrade I performed on that Centurion was part of this ‘Ascension’?”
“You are the T9.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘Yes’. But the flash-fire after his restart that ‘touched’ me; the accident was part of this ‘Illumination’ you’re talking about?”
“You are..., yes, T9.”
“Alright, then when you said that the Illumination will ‘touch’ those close to the Instrument and such is the nature of the Instrument, did you mean that this ‘Illumination’ wasn’t actually an accident, but some kind of a..., product of his ascension?”
“You are the T9.”
Marty sat back with a thump, “Then it wasn’t an accident after all! I was burned in some kind of a concentrated energy burst the Knights are calling the ‘Illumination’, whatever that was,” he realized with a mix of shock and relief.
“The Instrument will Illuminate the world.”
With a stunned look, Marty scrambled out of the pilot’s seat and ran stiffly to the open doors of the passenger elevator.
He punched the button for the second sub-level of the depot maintenance floor fully expecting his work area to still be a shambles; cordoned off till the accident investigation was concluded.
When the elevator doors opened, Marty was astounded to find his work area deserted, clean and smelling of fresh paint. All the yellow ‘caution’ tapes and barriers hastily erected following the ‘accident’ had been removed and all evidence of the flash-burn damage repaired.
The melted access scaffolding over the service bay had been meticulously replaced with new and the safety hand rails re-coated with fresh yellow paint. The massive Centurion, however had simply disappeared.
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