Recovery of Rez 6

His friends called him “Rez.” It was an abbreviation for his full name: Restas Eran Ziskel. The nickname didn’t make much difference until he went off to boarding school. He could have stayed on Randell Colony, but the education lab was primitive, and all the residents said so. It became an excuse for the restless yearnings of a young man to seek a wider experience in some of the more settled worlds in the galaxy. Would his skills not best be honed in places where there was a much wider selection of equipment to photograph?
He had won a scholarship to a corporate fleet academy, on a planet where a wide array of actual ships were built. It was about as cosmopolitan as human space could ever get. He had heard rumors there were even some genuine non-human aliens there. What kind of technology might that offer for his studies? A good half of his education was simply surveying the vast range of equipment and how it worked, so the more different kinds, the better.
Nothing could prepare him for the assault on his eyes.
The academy was on a planet where voluntary prosthetics and all sorts of implanted enhancements were quite the fashion. His backwater colony world missed out on a lot fads, and this one came and went over the centuries. Prosthetic enhancement was sweeping the galaxy, raging in all different flavors of extremes. In just a matter of days, the bewildering array of human and machine mixtures left him almost numb. Despite his tough act, pretending nothing surprised him, he was almost ready to go back home just to let his brain rest and process what he had seen in the first few days.
Nothing could prepare him for the assault on his emotions, either.
It wasn’t simply his nickname had became an object of some ridicule. He was colonial, and totally unsophisticated in the minds of most everyone who wasn’t from some colony themselves. In the midst of his initial struggles to find an anchoring point for his bewildered mind, he ran into the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. Yes, masculine tastes varied widely across the galaxy, but this girl was quite popular with a very large collection of male students, and seemed well aware of it.
Almost from a desperate need for the protection of a group, he had joined a small crew of boys from various colonies. At some point, the social clashes could not be avoided. They ran into a bevy of girls which included this stunning creature. These girls were pushy and aggressive, and the boys simply decided to play gentlemen, and stood aside along the wall in the corridor to let them pass. But the girls took it as a cue to tease them. Why that one particular girl chose him, Rez never did understand, but she got in his face.
Almost in his face, since he was easily a head taller, not to mention considerably heavier. The only reason he wasn’t intimidated is he was already too confused and mentally swimming in rough seas from everything else, so he just held a blank look on his face. He managed to raise a single eyebrow, but he had an otherwise total lack of expression. Against this high speed verbal assault, he closed his eyes rather deliberately, and half turned to look to one of the other guys for help. So while he was frankly too stupefied to back up closer to the wall, she took it as something else.
She grabbed the fabric of his tunic at the shoulders and pulled her face up against his. Instead of yelling even louder, she kissed him full on the lips. Then just as suddenly she release him and turned to walk away. The other girls followed, cackling and chattering loudly.
He still wasn’t sure what happened, but the other guys were patting him on the back and saying something he never quite caught. Only his jiggered implant kept him from stumbling as he let himself be led along their previous path.