Origins: Cross

[Cross]

"The inability to see never stopped anyone from doing anything if they set their mind to it." The medical droid told its patient in what had been medically determined to be comforting tones. Statistically speaking, depending on the nuances of the meanings of words, what the droid had said was not exactly a lie and it had been programmed for somewhat of a bedside manner. After a moment, the droid determined that the statement fell within acceptable parameters. The woman was dying, the stresses of the childbirth too great, and the droid was doing all it could to try to lighten the human's last moments. The baby boy was healthy, surprisingly so given the state of the mother, but it was permanently blind. As far as the droid could tell, though the preliminary results were sketchy at best, the eyes themselves were not damaged, nor the nerves connecting them to the brain. As best as the medical droid could tell, the part of the brain that dealt with the sense of sight was damaged beyond repair. The child would be blind for his entire life and no amount of surgery and no sophistication of implants could replace what the child lacked.

[Cross]

Cross knew his universe only by sound, by touch, by taste, and by scent. He knew at an instant the feel of a dozen weapons placed on his body, some literally at his fingertips. He knew the exact smells of two dozens worlds and four dozen species. And he could distinguish the tones of a lie in twenty different languages by a hundred species.

Spaceports and starships had been his home for the entirety of his twenty-six years of life. He grew up among the underside of galactic society with the those who, like him, were born to a low state, those who had been brought low by others, those who chose the low life, those who thrived among the low, and those who hid among them. When he was very young, he had relied upon the scant sympathy of those who had once known a better life, but he also learned lessons from their lives. Occasionally, he would find one of the older beings whose minds were stuck in the past and whose mouths ran with words. From these beings he listened and learned of other worlds, of places, of species, of languages, of cultures. Most importantly, the more he listened, the more he found he could distinguish the ring of truth from the arrogance of a lie. It was luck more than anything else that had allowed him to survive. As he grew older, he became the target of others who believed him to be an easy mark. Thus it had become necessary to learn to defend himself, to discern the sounds of an attacker. He bore scars all across his body from blasters, vibro-weapons, even mere pieces of sharp metals where the lessons on survival and fighting with a handicap had left their mark.

[Cross]

Once upon a spaceport, Cross had come across a retired beast-handler. The beast-handler had told him a few stories and explained how many of the beasts responded to high frequency sounds at the very edge of the hearing range of most species. The handler had produced a small device that emitted the high frequency pulse. Curious, Cross had taken the device from the man as he had no longer needed it. Over the course of time, Cross had learned to pick up on the frequency the device emitted and use it to determine the location of solid objects by listening to the echo as the frequency bounced off objects and walls. For the first time in his life, Cross found he could be on equal footing with the average being.