Illustration: “Scanman” © 2005 by Romeo Esparrago.
“We used his soul to mend the hole
bound the fabric of time…”
When he first came to us, his mind was contorted by conflicting ripples of thought. His tiny body arrived packaged carefully in amniotic fluid, the limbs curled and foetus-like, the head grossly expanded. A genetic defect had caused the cranium to develop rapidly in the womb, sucking sustenance away from the withering body. If we had allowed the child to be born he would have died, the tiny heart and lungs unable to pump oxygen to the oversized head.
So left, his mind had grown in on itself, stagnating with the lack of external stimulation. It was a mind gone circular, insane yet of vast intellect.
We did what we could to unravel the thought pathways that had built up — constricting logic — while the boy lay unborn in the still-bag. We diverted unnecessary cross-links in the neural patterns, replaced them with ones that would impart a basic understanding of language, fed the mind enough information to interpret environmental stimuli.
We spared no effort to retrieve him from his inner world; we had foreseen that one like him could help us. If not for that knowledge, we may have faltered in our search for him in the crowded human world of Hubbab. Knowing the stakes, our seers forwent recuperation to maintain the search.
We concocted a suitable body, and having removed the boy’s cranium and tail-like spinal column from the useless body, employed a team of Nuverhanian neurosurgeons to fuse the two together.
We named him Elam, in our language “healer”. We faced ruin, not the end of an era, but annihilation from the fabric of time.
We watched as they put Elam together, waiting for our turn with him.
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