Hemispherectomy — A type of procedure perfected and performed by humans, which requires the removal of one hemisphere of the brain, usually done to treat seizure disorders resistant to medication, or other surgical intervention.

WARNING: Procedure only possible on human subjects.

Captain Adam Vir of the U.N.S.S Harbinger awoke to a horrible itching sensation high on his upper thigh. He wasn't quite sure where he was or what was going on, but one thing was for sure: this couldn't be allowed to last.

He cracked his eyes only to be immediately and forcibly blinded by the overhead lights. Weakly, he raised his hands to block out the beams, the action causing him to feel stiff and woozy. Something was blocking the vision of his right eye leaving everything dark. With spasmodic motions, he reached up to his face running a hand over the bandages wrapped around his skull.

That was weird. He couldn't remember an accident.

It took a while for his vision to adjust, and once it did, he ended up with more questions than answers. Despite what he thought had been blinding light, the room was actually rather dim. The floor was a matte grey/purple color, and strips of eerie blue light wound around the top corners of the room casting a bluish glow upon the strange equipment, which surrounded him.

Could he be dreaming? No, he felt too disjointed to be dreaming.

He groggily turned his head to look down at his body, which was practically plastered with tiny little sensors adhered to his skin: on his hands, on his neck, on his chest, on his stomach, and so on. He even had an IV in his right arm, which was placed surprisingly well.

A moment of clarity came when he realized there was no bed in the room! He was suspended in the air, legs and arms floating freely within a relatively restricted area alien abduction style. He was curious about the technology that allowed this, and while it was cool, he didn't exactly appreciate the cold breeze that licked seductively down his spine like an icy lover. He tried to move, tried to sit up like he would have on a bed, but his attempts failed leaving him floundering in mid-air.

He tried to call for help, but nearly choked on his own dry tongue gasping and coughing against the sandpaper plastered to his throat. Off to his left side—the side he could see from—one of the strange machines began blinking. He tried his best to summon up some spit to wet his throat and call for help again. It was a pretty good attempt, if failing miserably was the goal. The machine began to blink more frantically.

He drew in a large breath determined to make himself heard this time, but at that moment, one of the walls to his right dissolved away, and a figure stepped through the opening. Surprises like that were surely not good for his heart at a time like this. The machines by his side began blinking with even greater urgency as he tried to tug himself from the forces that still held him in place.

"Relax," the creature said as it approached slowly, "I am the doctor that performed your surgery and am here for the post-op examination."

"Surgery?" Captain Vir wondered, a single eye dropping to look at this 'doctor' distracting from his earlier questions. "Cool," he heard himself murmur. An alien stood before him. It couldn't have been more than three feet tall looking like some sort of cross between an ant and a bacteriophage. It had four lower limbs: two sticking out from the front and two sticking out from the back; each of its legs had a single joint at the analogue of a knee bent at about ninety degrees to just before ninety degrees. Unlike an ant, the trunk of its body rose from the junction of its four legs rising into something that resembled a torso with a chest and shoulders. On its upper trunk, it had four limbs: two on either side of the torso stacked on top of each other. In this way its anatomy was almost human.

It had a slim neck that supported a bulbous head in which were its eyes: hexagonal prisms in a ruddy orange color not dissimilar to that of a fly. The eyes took up a good portion of its face leaving a low opening for a mouth which was nothing more than a slit in its face. On either side of the head, two thick antennae stuck up and back. When the doctor turned, he could see the creature's spherical head split apart in the back to form four separate hemispheres.

A drape of folded skin lay over the back of the head, down the neck, and onto the upper shoulders. He couldn't have said what it was for.

"Excuse me, but what are you?" he asked as the "doctor" approached. Without warning he suddenly found himself shifting from a reclining position into a vertical while floating forward.

The doctor stopped in front of him, "You ask a lot of questions for someone with mild brain damage. Is that normal for your species?"

"Mild...brain damage? Now hold on. When or how did I end up with brain damage?"

"You don't remember?" The doctor asked, stepping in to read the machines.

"No," Vir said hesitantly, "I remember we were finishing some repairs in engineering, and then I woke up here."

The doctor stepped away from his machines and moved to stand at the human's side. With a sound like an inflating balloon, the flap of skin at the back of his head, neck and shoulders began to inflate until he was more than 40% his original size and floating a good inch above the floor.

Captain Vir's eye widened, "Awesome."

The little doctor kicked lightly at the floor to rise into the air in order to unwind the bandages, "As an answer to your question, human. I am a Vrul."

"Oh, I've heard about your species. You're the ones who only work one job their entire lives, supposed to be geniuses, all logical and scientific.... like Vulcans."

"Like what?"

"Uh, never mind," the he muttered. The bandage had unraveled in a long, dangling strip that hung towards the floor. There was no blood, but the bandage was stained yellow from some unknown fluid. Finally, the bandage was off leaving only the gauze. Whoever had put the thing on had done a pretty damn good job. Not a hint of light was leaking through.

The doctor reached up and plucked at the edges of the adhesive pulling the blood-stained gauze from his face.

He didn't see anything.

Reflexively, he reach up to feel his eye. Perhaps it was swollen shut, but the doctor brusquely slapped his hand away, "No touching! I have read your biological map; absolutely covered in a biome of germs, and now you want to go and touch an open wound!"

The alien doc sucked at bedside manners. He must be an exceptional surgeon, but that wasn't what concerned him right now.

Captain Vir lowered his hand, but inside his heart began to pound even harder, "Why can't I see?"

The little doctor did not pause in his examination, "Your eye was destroyed during the accident. I was able to save some of the optic nerve while removing the object without damaging the brain. The eye was unsalvageable. I anticipate you will have more issues from the missing eye than you will from any brain damage, which is absolutely ridiculous for me to even be saying."

The doctor continued talking, but Captain Vir didn't hear him. If he had been standing on the floor, it would have fallen out from under him. Even so, the room around him began to spin, and his entire body went completely cold.

He needed that eye! He couldn't be a pilot without it! He could be discharged! His career could be over! He had only been captain for less than a year!

His stomach churned, nausea building up in his throat, which had been constricted under the power of what felt like a steel vice. The next breath that escaped his throat was somewhere between a gasp and a whimper. He cursed the unlucky injury had destroyed his eye and possibly his future plans. He felt as if he couldn't breathe or, truth be told, didn't want to.

The doctor pulled back in alarm, probing at his neck for a pulse. Captain Vir tried to pull away against the strange touch of the unfeeling alien. He just needed... some time to think this through. He tried taking long, deep breaths to slow his heart squeezing his eyes shut. It felt strange not having an eye for his lid to close over.

When he finally opened his eyes, he found the alien staring at him in worried confusion, hands raised as if he wasn't entirely sure what to do. "Are you having some sort of attack, human?" he asked.

The captain shook his head, "No I... I'm fine."

"You don't look fine."

"That's because I am missing an eye!" He didn't intend to raise his voice, but he could not control it. The doctor floated away and though the doc's face remained neutral, Vir could feel the alien's fear. That didn't matter as his breath became more ragged and uncontrolled, his voice raspy, quivering, "M-my career is over."

The little doctor stared at him with a blank, uncomprehending expression, "What brought you to that conclusion?"

Vir would have liked to have taken the news stoically: like the heroes in the old movies would have, like his idols, like his father, but even now, he was fighting to keep his voice calm. "You don't get it," he said shaking his head emphatically, voice cracking. "They'll discharge me... I... I don't know how to do anything else." What would he do? And what would happen to his mission?

He had to get up, had to figure out where to go from here.

He struggled against the gravity field his breath coming in short gasps, but no matter how much he moved, he simply floundered in place.

The doctor had backed up at his panicked reaction. "Stop struggling," he implored.

"You do not understand." He tried even harder to reach the leads in an attempt to pull them from his arms and chest.

He had to-

"Since you will not calm down, I must insist on intervening."

He turned his head eye widening in surprise as he watched the doctor openly inject something into his IV. He tried to reach out and grab the tube, but mid-way through the movement his arm went numb. He flailed about for a bit head lolling losing control of his body.

His vision swam, "You don't get it," he slurred, "Without my eye, I lose everything."

The little creature turned to face him now, its umber-tinted orange eyes flashing with the ghosts of the blue light cast from the overhead strips, "Then get a new eye."

His argument caught in his throat. His vision spun, "What?"

The doctor returned to examining the wound as his head lolled drunkenly, "I said, get a new eye. I noticed you have an analogue leg and if you can survive without a leg, I am going to make the logical leap that your species can probably survive with analogue eyes as well."

The doctor seemed to stretch and elongate as his vision warped, and then faded.

Fake eye.

He hadn't even thought of that...

Maybe his career wasn't over after all.

All of a sudden, he was having trouble caring about his missing eye. He spun downwards into the blackness of the drugs as it filled him with a warm honey glow, like a sunlit afternoon in summer before he faded away.

15 years earlier

A warm breeze drifted through the open window causing the lacey, white curtains to shiver gently from its careless caress bringing with it the distant sound of rhythmic sprinklers along with the calming, earthy smell of freshly cut grass.

Over the sound of the sprinklers, the voices of children swelled as they approached from down the street. Happy laughter echoed off the houses fanned by the simple freedom of a Friday afternoon and the short reprieve from confined classroom walls.

In the front yard, the noise of an engine rose to a slight purring as the automated lawn-bot began its careful patterned trek to create a precisely manicured front lawn.

Inside the warm, sunny confines of the house, an automated wash-bot lightly scrubbed a soiled pan dunking it into the sink once or twice before drying. Not a few feet away, bent low over the dining room table, a slim woman --in a pair of baggy pants and a work flannel-- maneuvered a piece of denim through a sewing computer. The light whirr of the machine could barely be heard over the sound of the house bots. A thin ringlet of blond hair looped onto her shoulder, and she paused to brush it idly away sleeves rolled up to elbow, tongue stuck delicately in between her teeth as she worked.

Martha Vir had originally received her Ph.D in global history with a focus on the post-cold war era and the information age, however when teaching history lost its appeal, she started her own business recreating, and helping others to recreate, historically accurate period-clothing.

The modern world, and even long before that, had experienced cycling trends in fashion, which saw resurgence in styles long past. She herself enjoyed the simple provincial fashion of the early to mid-21st century, which had a focus on jeans, in a myriad of styles, and the flannel of the Welsh farmer adopted and popularized by the American fashion industry during that era.

Her thoughts drifted back to her work, as she folded the garment and began disassembling her sewing kit, disconnecting the power cell, and fitting its pieces snuggly in the contoured case.

She could have programmed her computer to do it all of course but, there was nothing more satisfying than making something with her own hands. She finished packing her equipment and was just folding up her squares of fabric when the front door burst open only to slam shut immediately after. The sudden noise startled her, and she knocked the sturdy kit with a flailing elbow causing a shooting pain to spike up and down her arm.

"Shoot!" She exclaimed rubbing her arm vigorously before turning towards the closed door. The drawer on the side table was still rattling from the violent crash, though there was no one in sight. She stood straight adjusting her fly-away hair before turning to the wall, "Prism, what time is it?"

The glowing strip of blue light that ran around the upper edge of the living room blinked to life and responded in a pleasingly ambiguous voice, "It is currently 3:20 pm Friday, May 16th."

"Thank you, Prism," she said absently, placing her kit back on the table before walking into the hallway. Three of the four doorways were closed leaving the area cool and shaded; however, a single strip of golden light cut through a crack from under one of the doorways illuminating a small portion of the hallway.

She stepped up to the door knocking gently against the familiar, aged wood as she simultaneously pushed the door inward, "Adam ... sweetheart, is everything ok?"

She already knew the answer.

Her youngest son was sprawled flat on his bed, face down disheveled blond hair sticking chaotically in all directions. His oversized sneakers hung over the side of the bed, floppy, untied laces dangling towards the floor. As small and thin as he was, his large, black t-shirt and baggy cargo shorts seemed to absolutely engulf him. His thin shoulders shook silently.

He didn't answer her, but simply lay there with his head tucked under the crook of his elbow. She quietly took a seat next to the still form admiring the eclectic nature her little boy's room. He would talk when he was ready.

The room could have been a museum of NASA and popular science fiction for the past two thousand years. Faces-- many of them long dead-- some over two thousand years gone, stared down from the walls immortalized in reproduced holo-images and vintage posters.

If it involved an alien you could be sure that her son had searched for it, seen it, studied it, and become a fan of it. It didn't matter when the book had been written, when the movie had been produced, or the documentary aired; he knew it all.

Evidence of the young boy's obsession littered the desks and shelves with hand-painted figurines, moon rocks, jars of Mars sand and towers of drawings yet to find their place on the already-cluttered walls.

Concerned gray-blue eyes glanced over at the small figure noting, with satisfaction, that the shaking had died down to the occasional spasm. She reached over a gentle hand placing it on his back between the shivering shoulder blades, "Are those kids being ignorant again?"

"T-they j-just d-don't get it!"

She furrowed her face in sympathy as he struggled to push the words out past his uncooperative diaphragm and its sporadic bursts of air. Growing frustrated with his unintelligibility, he sat up. His round cheeks were puffy, and his large, green eyes were still filled with unshed tears as he struggled to control his own body.

"T-they w-wont listen to me... I s-s-said that mathematical probability s-says that there are aliens, but t-they told me that even t-two thousand years ago they didn't believe in aliens."

Martha frowned, "Well, that's not true at all. Scientists of the day thought it might be very likely."

"I- I tried to tell them that! B-but they just w-won't listen. B-billions of galaxies, trillions of stars and- and they think we are the only ones. Then they said that if there were aliens then they would have at least found Voyager 1 and contacted us, but mom Voyager is only like 691billion 891million 200 thousand miles from earth. That isn't even a light year!"

She gently patted his shoulder, "Inside voice please."

He sniffed, "The c-closest stars to us are Alpha Centauri A and B which are 4.3 lightyears from Earth, and and their only possibly habitable planet is Proxima B and it's tidally locked with their star making life unlikely; plus they would have to find Voyager first."

She sighed past an affectionate smile and pulled him a little closer to rest against her shoulder. She kissed the top of his head, "You are one remarkable kid; you know that?"

He sniffed. "You're just saying that 'cause you're my mom," he said, voice muffled partially by her shirt.

She frowned pulling back to look at him. By now his tears had dried leaving streaks down his cheeks and a dull redness to his otherwise bright green eyes. She brushed back a stray strand of straw-blond hair only to frown again when it stuck back up, "Adam, what is our one rule in this house?"

He looked down for the longest moment, and then with a long extended sigh he answered, "Mom is always right...."

She smiled smugly and ruffled his hair, "That's right, and never forget it." She grew serious, "besides you're my son, so how could you be anything other than intelligent, incredible, and awesome?"

That coaxed a smile from his tight lips as she pulled him playfully closer and didn't stop, not until she had transformed the smile into a proper laugh: like all good mothers she was an alchemist of emotion. He wriggled from her arms only to collapse onto the mattress panting heavily from laughter.

She felt the smile stretch the corners of her mouth which throbbed from overuse. With a deep sigh, she got up and walked over to the curtains pulling them shut cutting off the stream of honey golden light and kicking up the lazy dust motes into a micro-whirlwind. Her son looked up from the bed wide green eyes scrunched in confusion, but she kept silent walking over to the bed and falling to lay next to him staring up at the ceiling, "Prism, activate the Projector."

At her command, the entire room suddenly erupted into a condensed micro-universe of trailing stars, swirling nebulae. and spiral galaxies. She reached up, dragging her hand through an arm of the Milky-Way causing stars to erupt around her fingers, spill outwards, and then form back together. She held her hand still allowing the last of the stars to trickle off her fingertips like droplets of water. Turning her head, she looked to find a copy of that universe reflected back at her from the surface of those wide, green eyes.

She reached out taking his smaller hand in hers, "Adam."

"Yeah, mom?"

She turned her eyes back towards the floating specks, "One day, when you're older, you'll get to see all of this for yourself," she squeezed his hand tight in hers.

"You'll prove them wrong."

Waking up the second time could only be equated to trying to crawl up a sand dune wearing lead boots. His throat was coated in sandpaper, his single eye was glued shut, and his own breath tasted like Satan himself had crawled down his throat and died. When he finally managed to pull himself into some groggy semblance of wakefulness, he immediately wished that he hadn't. Whatever kind of alien drug they had him on, it was absolute garbage: zero out of ten, would not recommend. He considered petitioning for a suggestion box to urge them never use this drug ever again on anyone ever. He wondered if he was the first human to experience this poison masquerading as medicine and vowed to let the doc know that they could take some lessons from the pharmaceutical companies on Earth. He has been drugged before and with results almost worth repeating.

Smacking his lips together in a useless attempt to scour away the mouthful of nasty, he peeled his one eyelid from the cement gunk and glanced groggily about the room. He didn't see a thing as blurry as his vision was. All the action did was serve to remind him that he was missing an eye.

His heart fell.

He reached a hand up to feel the bandage, fingers trembling a bit as they traced over the fibrous surface.

He drew in a long, deep breath.

His life had suddenly become a lot more complicated.

"It's good to see you awake, Captain,"

He jolted upright, eyes wide and wild as the world around him suddenly solidified in his one remaining eye.

The drug addled weariness fell from him like a cloak as he turned to find the source of the noise and was surprised to find his first lieutenant, his navigations officer, and one of his good friends Corporal Ramirez all sitting by his bedside.

They smiled, the lieutenant resting a hand on his shoulder, her warm, dark eyes wide with concern.

He blinked, "What ..."

"Embarrassed to say we were a little worried," his first lieutenant said, her deep, refined voice easily filling the room despite its perceived softness, "How are you feeling?"

He blinked a few more times trying to compose himself to their unexpected presence. He forced a reluctant smile to tug at the corners of his mouth all too aware of their eyes which remained affixed on the bandages over his eye. He searched for the words, "Well ... my ... eye is ... gone, but the doctor says the damage to the brain was...well he said it was the best outcome they could have hoped for with an injury like this."

The room fell into an awkward silence.

He looked away.

He didn't like the way they were staring; he could feel the pity like heat radiating from a fire. It reminded him too much of when he had lost his leg during the war, and that wasn't a memory he was fond of reliving.

Silence pervaded the room: awkward, nervous silence.

The tainted atmosphere didn't last as it was shattered explosively moments later by peals of ruckus laughter. With the awkwardness decapitated --leaving only complete and utter confusion in its wake-- the group turned to look for the source of the interruption. Furrowed brows found their resident marine grinning now grinning from ear to ear. Not stopping there, Ramirez cut the space between them and clapped the captain roughly on the arm shaking him until he was legitimately concerned that his remaining eye would jounce out of his skull and onto the floor.

"You glorious bastard," he laughed, head tilting back towards the ceiling. "You absolute madman!" He stepped back with a grin.

Captain Vir's brows furrowed in consternation, but he didn't have long to think before the marine grew serious, leaning in conspiratorially, while the other two looked on in bemused confusion, "You know what this means, don't you?"

Raising an eyebrow in mild amusement, he humored the marine, "No, what does this mean?"

"You're a pirate, a space pirate!" The marine laughed again, stepping back to motion down towards him with a wide sweeping gesture of the hand. "Missing an eye, missing a leg, the captain of a space ship..." he opened his hands wide above his head as if words would appear there in glowing neon, "Space pirate."

His laughter was contagious, and the Captain found a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. Space pirate, he kind of liked the sound of that.

"And to go along with your new title," the marine announced, "the boys and I got you a little something special."

"Oh?" he wondered aloud, glancing over at his other visitors who just shrugged at him apparently unaware of what the marine had planned. The soldier just grinned at them, reaching slowly and with much ceremony. From behind his back, he produced --with a grand flourish-- a dangling strip of molded leather which swayed from his fingers.

"Is that an eyepatch?" The captain exclaimed unsure whether to laugh or to order the marine out of his sight.

"Hell yeah, it's an eyepatch! Who the hell loses an eye and doesn't get an eyepatch? I mean, in my opinion, any one-eyed person who doesn't have one is doing it wrong and seriously needs to reconsider his life choices."

The captain just shook his head in bewilderment as the marine grinned at him shiny, leather strip dangling in the air between them. The other three stared, all hovering on the razor's edge of amusement and awkwardness.

The way he reacted would potentially shape the way his crew saw him. Not even half a year into their original mission and he had already lost an eye, but would accepting this improve or tarnish his position as their Captain?

Just as the moment was beginning to lean towards the awkward, he reached out and motioned to the marine, "Well come on; help a cripple put the damn thing on. Just take off the bandages, I'm sure it'll be fine."

He couldn't help but feel the small shock of self-consciousness that rocketed through him as the marine began to unwind the bandages, but he shook it off. He had made his decision, and come hell or high water he was going to see this through.

He felt rather than saw the last bandages come off, and heard the murmur of surprise from around the room.

"Damn!" Ramirez muttered, "That is one bad ass battle wound." With a little help from the marine he got the strap over his head, and the patch fit over the missing eye. He gently shook himself, a little bit like a dog, to settle the strap into place and then looked up, "So, how do I look?"

The crew members peered at him with expressions ranging from thoughtful to amused. The first lieutenant approved, "It's a good look on you captain.

"Roguish," grinned the marine.

"Definitely getting a protagonist with a tragic backstory vibe," the navigations specialist nodded.

He wasn't entirely sure if they were jesting or not. Their straight faces said one thing, but his instincts said another. However, after a moment of deliberation, he determined that they were being serious with him, and he left the patch on as the marine stepped away nodding.

He allowed his smile to linger for a few more seconds before letting if fall, "Any word on our mission?"

"No sir, but, to be fair we were more worried about you."

The captain grunted, "That's fine. I wanted to do a little exploring anyway."