He looked into the mirror with the interest of a man who sees his face on rare occasions. The nerves stood out like splintered cracks in glass. He fingered his face lovingly, unmindful of the agony caused by his touch, remembering the woman. He wondered in what manner her face would differ from his.
The pain made him stop thinking about it and he closed his eyes to spray a weak solution of desensitizer on the burning flesh. Almost immediately the pain was gone; but it left him with a marble mask that wouldn't come to life again until the effects of the desensitizer wore off.
He washed quickly in warm water, rubbed disinfectant on the atrophied area, rinsed it and stepped in front of the dryer. A thousand tongues of almost corporeal warmth licked over his skin.
He had shaved and desensitized his body the night before, so it was only a matter of washing and disinfecting before he climbed into the overall casing and stepped clumsily into the sensitizing shower. The huge bag began to shrink and cloud, adhering to his body as though it were another layer of his skin.
Since the casing acted as a magnifying extension of his nervous and muscular systems, his body, within the casing, felt nothing. There was no sense of contact as he walked across the floor and opened the bathroom door. As far as feeling went, he was without a body.
He said "hello" experimentally, to see if the distorter was still on. It wasn't. The hard flatness of his voice surprised him. The rosy light was gone also. Something peculiar to women caused the filter to slide over the coldly glowing silver. No man could cause it. No warrior was supposed to want to.
He went through the curtains into the tube-like corridor and joined the other silver warriors on their way to the mess hall. He knew no one of them, yet knew them all. In battle, no friend of his would die, yet no one would die that he did not know. Two hundred years of war in this forgotten bit of the universe had shown the value of this. Some day, if he lived to be old, he would become a civilian. Until then the only faces he would see would be his own and those of the subnormal servers in the mess hall. He had no loyalties except to the fortress. The fortress was his past, present and future.
He nodded a greeting to his server. "How are you today, Teddy?" The voice distorter made him a gentle baritone.
The moron stared at him blankly, not understanding what was spoken, not caring. It was mentally impossible for him to care about anyone and psychologically impossible for anyone to care about him. That was why he was allowed to serve in the mess.