Recovery of Rez 2

At one time it had been a mining station. When the ores played out, the mining company moved on, auctioned off the equipment and allowed the facility to rot. Except it was in a place which seemed oddly shielded from most degrading particles. Somehow the random alignment of free floating asteroids in the belt, along with the isolation from most radiation sources, allowed the old seals to keep functioning and the place never lost any air. It was stale, but breathable.
During one of the many interstellar wars and pogroms and other conflicts the fleeing Brotherhood ship stumbled onto the one planetoid in the belt which had been previously inhabited. Their sensors had only picked up internal cavities, and they were hoping for a pocket they might hide their crippled ship. It turned out to be a docking bay properly excavated. While the fittings were ancient, it was just possible to extend a flexible seal over the portals. A hasty exploration showed it was still quite livable.
In just a matter of hours, they had transferred the power and air generators into place, and the ship was scrapped out for various furnishings. The war went on without them. At last they were free to carry on their research and develop a fairly substantial hospital.
While they had all the standard physical therapeutic equipment, it wasn’t their specialty. This was what in ancient times would have been called a “asylum” or “nut house.” The Brotherhood specialized in treating disorders of the soul.
Typical traffic from passing ships might go like this: “Can you take a patient? He’s a real basket case, comatose and barely breathing.”
To which the station communications would respond: Basket cases are all we handle.
Most people could find ways to cope. Various implants with electrodes, field generators or the ever popular virtual reality implants. It required a peculiar sensitivity to be so devastated as to need real help. These were the only people capable of being helped by the Brotherhood.
They never bothered to document their own history. That was a critical expression of what made them unique in the galaxy. Indeed, they were vaguely aware, only because historians told them, they once had a much longer name, but they never seemed interested in digging into it. They had been called simply the Brotherhood for a very long time, and it was comfortable. The only archives they had were those related to their own research. None of it had names of authors because it all belonged to the Brotherhood.
People didn’t shed their identity to join, of course, nor did they have to surrender all they owned or anything like that. But if they got involved in the work, it was all for the Brotherhood and the good of mankind, not for fame or fortune. No one was turned away, but of course the wealthiest families desperate to save their own were critical to their survival as an organization. It was also what kept them free and independent most of the time.
So it was during one of those boom times when donations were heavy and membership was high, they received yet one more comatose man, tightly balled up in a fetal position. He had been a trainee, found in his cabin after saving the ship. Aside from a few moans when he was moved to a safer place in the sick bay, they couldn’t get him to respond in any way. He did take food and water periodically, and eliminated, but it was all utterly mechanical and minimal. The crew had never managed to get him out of the main portion of his pressure suit.
Only the Brotherhood understood how they did it, and no one would ever talk. They said it was because there was no way to explain it. While a few never did recover, this one did. As part of his recovery, he was offered a chance to stay and learn the ways of the Brotherhood. He went through the basic introductory phase, but decided it was not for him. Not that they needed him, but he decided he really did have something he needed to do. That, said the Brotherhood, was the primary symptom of recovery.