Yep, I'm posting episodic stories here again.  

(WARNING I DON'T CENSOR THESE)

Nope, can't hide that first line, sorry.

Damn everything, thought Adam.

He strode slowly, hunched over slightly, through the gleaming white corridor, grey-suited guards at either side of him, oppressive fluorescent light streaming from the ceiling and bouncing off the gleaming white walls.  His hands were bound behind him in a glob of transparent gel, and the guards each carried electrified pikes, which they had prodded him with more or less unnecessarily more than once that evening.

The Betelgeuse Nebula Prison had not suited him well.  His normally well-muscled arms were weak and feeble, his white prison jumpsuit tattered and stained with grime.  His dark hair hang, lanky and unkempt, to his shoulders, and his beard had been roughly cut down to stubble with the near-useless prison standard razors.  He wore a metal band around his forehead, glinting with blue lights, that suppressed his telepathic ability.

The guard on his right whacked his back with the bottom of their pike, and he grimaced.  His stride became slightly quicker, and the guard seemed mollified.  He bit his lip, refraining from biting out the strings of expletives that occurred to him suddenly.  Instead he settled for a dirty look at the guard, who grinned wickedly back.  Yellow-toothed and unattractive, the guards were nevertheless undoubtedly in better physical condition than Adam was, and even if his hands weren’t bound, he would be virtually helpless against two of them, armed as they were with electric pikes.

Adam looked ahead again, finding himself facing a white door with a slot for a keycard on the right side.  The right guard stepped forward, taking a keycard from his belt and sticking it in the slot.  The device beeped, and the door slid open silently.  The guard walked around to Adam’s back and took out a handheld laser generator, firing a half-second pulse into the gel that bound Adam’s hand, which melted away and fell to a pile on the floor.  It smelled rancid, and Adam wrinkled his nose.

“In ya go, cupcake,” said the guard gruffly, the wicked grin still on his face.  Adam rolled his eyes and stepped through the door into a significantly darker room.  A light flicked on, shining a small luminescent circle onto an uncomfortable-looking chair – an unmistakable invitation for Adam to sit in it.  He complied, grimacing as he did so.

“Please place your arms on the armrests,” said a mechanical voice, emanating from somewhere on the other side of the room.  Adam glared in the general direction of the voice’s source, and did as he was told; more gel leaked from the ends of the armrests, hardening quickly and binding his hands once again.

The room was quickly bathed in light, revealing a wide, cavernous courtroom, in which seven different species made up the ten-person jury.  Unsurprisingly, humans were rather overrepresented; there were three humans on the jury, two men and a woman, and only one of various other species.  The front of the room was dominated by a large mechanical eye, suspended from the ceiling.  It focused on Adam, shining points of blue light on his face and chest.  The lights flicked off.

“Adam Everett,” continued the mechanical voice, presumably issuing from the eye, “new evidence has come to light suggesting that you may be innocent of the crimes you were accused of.  Though your DNA was found on the scene, various telepaths who have examined that particular moment in spacetime have found that something else may have been using your DNA.”

Interested despite himself, Adam asked, “What do you mean?”

“Observe,” said the voice.  The eye turned around and rose, nearing the ceiling of the room.  It projected an image onto a screen at the back of the room – image being used only in the loosest sense of the word.  It was a complex grid of crisscrossing blue lines, which flickered and wavered irregularly.

“This is called a telepathic record,” said the voice.  “Visually, it means nothing.  However, a telepath can focus on it and experience a moment in spacetime as seen by an exceptionally powerful telepath focused on that moment, without having to locate the moment themselves.  Ms. Greene,” the voice continued, “would you please remove Adam’s inhibitor?”

An attractive, dark-haired woman stepped forward from the back of the room.  She was dressed in a tight-fitting, black leather suit, and her silver eyes glinted dangerously behind glasses.  Adam thought she might have been of Asian descent – though such terms had little meaning in the age of space travel and terraforming – but the color of her skin and subtle shape of her eyes suggested as much.  She reached around to the back of his head and pressed a hidden button on the inhibitor, which unlocked and sprang open.  She took the inhibitor and walked back to the back of the room.

“Be warned, Mr. Everett,” said the mechanical voice sternly, “your mind will be under surveillance for as long as you do not have the inhibitor on.  You are permitted only to access the telepathic record for observation.  Any other telepathic activity will result in your being placed in a catatonic state and being returned to your cell for one week.”

Adam raised his eyebrows, but decided to make no more of it than that.  He focused on the screen with his telepathy, and slowly seemed to sink out of the courtroom.  Information flowed into his brain, some in forms his brain did not recognize, stimulating neuron centers that did not exist.  He jerked back into himself, hunched over, panting, beads of perspiration still forming on his forehead, despite the relative cool of the courtroom.

“What… what was that?” he asked between heavy breaths.

“I apologize,” said the voice.  “This particular telepathic exploration was done by a Bioth, who, as you may be aware, possess far more senses than humans do.  You may be able to create neural centers to respond to these new senses, but I am as yet unaware of the total number of senses this particular Bioth was using at the time.”

“Over seventeen,” came a loud voice from the back of the room.  The image flickered off, and the mechanical eye swiveled around in surprise.  Being bound in the chair, Adam could not see what was going on – which irritated him – but he thought he recognized the voice.

The source of the new voice turned out to be a tuxedoed human, with short black hair and dark eyes.  Adam did, in fact, remember the voice, but he associated it with a different appearance.

The man turned to face Adam.  “Hello, Mr. Everett,” he said.  “Nice to see you again.”

Adam raised his eyebrows.  “I’ve never seen you in my life.”

“Yes you have, actually,” said the man.  “Professor Xavier Xorrn.  I had different hair then.”

“Xave?” said Adam questioningly.  “You’re Xave?”

“Yep,” said Xavier.  “You don’t look well.  Clearly prison doesn’t suit you.”  Xavier turned back to the mechanical eye.  “If I remember correctly, it was around nineteen.  In case you were wondering.”  He counted off on his fingers.  “Let’s see… five human senses, plus electroperception, magnetoperception, mindsense, psysense, gravsense, timesense… what else was there?” he murmured to himself.  “It can be hard to keep track.  Oh well, your AI probably isn’t equipped to understand all of them, so why bother, really?  Anyway, you may know me.  I’m Professor Xavier Xorrn – Professor roughly translated from pure thought into your language, and not very well, I don’t think.  Xavier Xorrn just has a nice ring to it, in my opinion.  I’ll be Mr. Everett’s defense witness.” He walked to the side of Adam’s chair and glanced down at him.  Adam could have sworn he winked.

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