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It was about time to prepare the circus for the holiday season. The new clown on the scene, Fourmyle of Ceres, was going to be making the rounds, meeting all the finest people and looking for all the worst.
He looked...normal enough. Handsome in a nice suit, if his credit balance was viewed alongside his face. Fully dressed, temper under control, he was a perfectly normal looking specimen.
He had done enough to himself that it didn't hold true when he was undressed. That was resolved by not letting anyone see him up close, fully undressed. He didn't want to share in any form of intimacy with anyone. Maybe when it was all over, there would be time for something like that.
Body modifications were accessible with enough credits behind the idea. Any aspect of the body could be enhanced. Fourmyle of Ceres, née Gully Foyle, opted to make himself the next thing to an automaton while keeping his original skin.
Not that all of Foyle's skin was original. The way that Foyle's face had been marked up before he returned to Earth was difficult to treat, especially at his price point. He wasn't working with the Fourmyle of Ceres budget then. It was delicate work, delicate skin. It would be easy enough to just splash him with sulphuric acid and start over. They paid out just enough to avoid that level of butchery.
Tattoo removal was relatively advanced after centuries of both the upper and lower classes scribbling on their skin. For the right cost, it could be as if it never happened. For the wrong cost, it could be slashed through and hidden with scars. In between, there were new tattoos drawn on top of old ones and whatever had been done to him. At any level, something could be down to obscure the image scarred into the skin. They'd fallen down on the wrong side of things because that's where they'd been starting the whole time.
The cheap and dirty job to get Foyle's face clean was going to have to be good enough. He had other things that he needed his body to be. The appearance was good enough. As long as he kept his emotions under control, it would be more than sufficient. It came down to pulse, breath, bowels, brains.
Foyle needed to be more human than human. He could control the marks from showing with his new training. They couldn't hurt him, none of them. They couldn't even touch him.
Foyle considered getting a tattoo of Vorga, something that he could mark out when he finally got his revenge. He could get every name that had wronged him, that had left him to die, and mark them through when it was their time.
He could mark up his body with frivolous tattoos. Researching what had been done to him, how to hide the angry red when his blood pounded, led him into seeing the artistic side of things. It would be harder to hide the seamwork from the tattoo artists, but money blinded when it had to. He needed a blind eye and a dumb mouth.
Foyle replaced nerves of steel with platinum wiring. The marks on his face that he could keep at bay were nothing compared to the map of his nervous system. The seams showed what he could do now. The aftermath of the tattoos only showed what had been done to him, twice over.
The network of nerves could be hidden with layers of fabric, the sophisticated modifications covered with high class clothing. No further effort was required for that concealment. The more it cost, the easier it was to hide. Shoddy work had been met with shoddy repair, one clumsy hack job after another.
This was what his face had looked like before. He scarcely remembered it. Context was everything, and he had no need to place his own life into any kind of framework before he was marked with Nomad. He'd never had the resources to be vain before being abandoned, mutilated, imprisoned.
Vorga would pay. He would kill Vorga filthy, like he had promised so many times before. He still fell asleep, woke up, with the words on his lips. It was his heartbeat now, had been since that moment of betrayal. Vorga had left him to die. Vorga had taken everything from him when he had nothing to take in the first place. Now that he had made something of himself, he would guard it with his life, with any life that he had to. He had a mission and would see it through until the end.
This was not what his body had looked like. His face was a sequence of clumsy attacks on him that almost cancelled out. His body was a simulacra of his man-made form.
Foyle couldn't undo what had been done to him. He could only do more, better, with what resources he had now gathered for himself.
There was no going back to who he had once been, even if he wanted to. He would never be that blank slate again. Nomad, Vorga, and Gouffre Martel had all seen to that. Every move that he made wasn't to erase the damage, but to displace the effects and return them to the source of his troubles.
He had to keep moving forward, full steam ahead, until everyone got what was coming to them. He had to stay a cipher to get through that point. He was nothing extraordinary; rather he was extraordinary, and was nothing ordinary any more.
He could get tattoos afterwards, when he'd retired his body from the hunting machine that it needed to be. He could commission great works of art, use his own body as the canvas. He could do whatever he wanted, once it was all over.
He just had to get into and out of the new year first. Things would be different. He would be different, even more than he already was compared to what he had started with. Everything would keep moving forward.