Arriving from Com-Mine cryogenically frozen, having served his purpose in generating the fear and outrage necessary to pass the so-called "Pre-Empt Act", Angus is delivered into the less than tender hands of the Data Acquisition division surgeons.
Unlike the more benign "wedding" between willing volunteers and their cybernetic enhancements or prostheses, we know that welding is carried out without the consent of the...recipient.
However, what's interesting here is that while we know that this sort of surgery already exists (like the bio-retributive surgeries on Thanatos Minor), it may be that this is the first time it has been done on such a scale, given Hashi's somewhat acerbic comment to Frik;
The context is ambiguous, but it seems to suggest that while they have been ready to do it, they hadn't actually done so yet. But we rush ahead of ourselves...He will be tested, of course, but no difficulty will be encountered. I state that categorically. We have been ready to do such work for some time.
At first mercifully unconscious, then only conscious in fits and starts too brief or too traumatic to register, Angus goes through extensive surgical procedures, reinforcing his bone structure, embedding lasers into his forearms, replacing his eyes and linking everything up to an on-board computer (and data-core), and installing not one, but several zone implants.
And I find the following a telling quote indeed:
Now physically transformed, the next step profoundly harder task of getting Angus (or Joshua as he has been designated) to activate the link by thinking his new name/access code.In their own way, the surgeons worked to transform him as profoundly as an Amnion mutagen.
(Joshua, of course, was one of the 12 spies that Moses dispatched into Canaan, in preparation for the Israelites invasion of that land...uh...I mean...before God gave it to them. ) (Which makes me wonder...does that make Thanatos Minor and the fringe it represents an enemy to be spied on? Or the Promised Land? Or both? )
Now of course, it is horrifying enough that somebody, even a criminal somebody, could be so totally enslaved that obedience is not even necessary, simply compulsion. That their agency could be so completely removed. Made not just into a slave, but into a literal tool without any will of their own. But that is far from the limit of the horror contained in this chapter.
Here, (for the first time?) we learn about the true horror of Angus' own childhood. (If not for the first time, certainly the first time in such detail.) Of the systemic and brutal abuse he suffered from infancy at the hands of a clearly mentally ill mother, that left a host of indelible marks on his soul.
Indeed, in his memories of his mother, we can see a clear echo of his treatment of Morn...like his mother did to him, he hurts her and loves her until he can no longer tell where one leaves off and the other begins. As he was broken, so too does he break, only to be broken again in turn.
But Angus has always been strong in the most broken of places, and at first he resists, resists unbelievably, instinctively opposing anybodies coercion against him.
Still, eventually, drugged, manipulated, lost, he thinks his code name, and his computer comes online.
Training, therapy, and most of all, interrogation follow. And even wholly owned by the doctors and their zone implants, monitored at unprecedented levels, he manages to keep some secrets. And most of all, the secret of his ability to edit datacores. Something so impossible that it seems nobody else can even conceive of it.
Finally ready though, Hashi, followed by Min and Godsen Frik come on the scene, and while Hashi puts Joshua through his paces, they discuss the situation, the threat that Morn is under, and the strong likelihood that Holt will not permit Joshua to rescue her. She is, in fact surplus to requirements as far as the UMC is concerned.
Hashi also reveals, the general horror, the fact that Milos will be Joshua's handler, sent along in order to help modify his programming on the fly, in the face of unforeseen circumstances which could otherwise imbue him with a modicum of free will.
Min and Frik, in opposition to the suggestion, storm off to supposedly attempt to have this decision over-ruled.
And incredibly Angus, still locked in place by his zone implants, sees something in the situation that gives him a faint sliver of hope.