Recovery of Rez 5

In the colonies, life was never typically anything. That is, each was a random mixture of advanced civilization with all sorts of primitive conditions. The Randell Colony did have one thing in common with all the rest: It was supposed to start turning a profit very early or risk a pretty painful shut down. The people were highly motivated or they weren’t selected, risk takers who would faithfully keep the profits of the sponsoring corporation as a high priority.
Keeping track of standard newborn implants was not a high priority. Randell was lucky to get some diverted to their clinic, even at the extravagant price they paid. Still, it was utterly necessary to prevent having to send all the infants and mothers off-world. All of the mothers were critical staff themselves. The current trend in management was to allow women to bear their young and raise them on site, provided their work didn’t suffer too much. Of course, the first round of births came in a batch. Married couples with time on their hands during the early stages of colonization, when the odd mixture of life support necessities would arrive almost at random intervals from all different directions of the galaxy, would naturally find some of the women visibly pregnant a few months after landfall.
The medical staff placed the implants as part of the birth routine, but someone forgot to track the reference codes. Part of every implant was a unique identifying code response to certain pieces of equipment used throughout the galaxy, but the staff decided it didn’t matter so long as the kids were still on their home planet, especially with such a low human population as colonies always had. Someone could add them to the registry later when it mattered. Rudimentary records were kept and everyone hoped for the best.
The boy child welded with his implant. Whether it was indeed sheer genius or pure luck would never been known, but the ambitious lab technician’s reconfiguration of the implant did grant the boy an unusual degree of eye-hand coordination. On the other hand, the experimenter forgot to lock in the ID code, along with a few other functions. It would be a long time yet before he knew, but the boy would be able to rewrite the ID code in his implant at will, along with some other volitional features which would have surprised anyone who knew anything about them.
The boy grew up truly enjoying his body. It seemed to always do pretty much what he really wanted, aside from purely physical limitations. He could have been a natural athlete, but his temperament was more artistic. So while he did develop a decent physique, it was his love of visual art which drove his life choices. He could always get his hands to do exactly what his eyes could see was the best motion.
In a day and age when devices could reproduce any image anyone could imagine, there was precious little place for people who in times past could paint or draw. Education steered them into other paths, often having to do with photography. For all the brilliance of artificial intelligence, nothing anyone could do would precisely duplicate the functions of the human eye. There simply was no algorithm for what was eye-catching and inspiring. So while a few artists stubbornly worked with drawing equipment, there was always a market for photographers. Cameras had been reduced to tiny head-mounted or finger-tip mounted units, even some implants, but apparently it would always require a human eye to decide where to point the lens.
Our boy became a peculiar kind of photographer, specializing in technical imagery. He seemed to have an instinct for adjusting zoom, granularity, color shift, penetration by radiation outside the range of vision — whatever it took the extract the greatest amount of detail and pack it into a single image.