Challenge #00717 - A352: Pre-Luddite

The first cyborg hate crime probably happened around the time the first peg leg was ripped off with malice aforethought.

“Ereb… ka… heb…” Lynn dutifully wrote down the hieroglyphs and checked the translations. Her quest for extra credit had her translating old manuscripts that had been collected from, apparently, the dawn of time.

This was an ancient form of writing, from the super-early period of Egyptian civilisation, so translation was especially tricky.

She stretched the kinks out of her back and re-read over her translation.

It was a legal document. A court case.

And the earliest evidence of prosthetics.

Kef the Butcher bought his case against Horeb the Priest before Pharaoh himself. They had been through a number of lower courts, and the antagonism between the two arguing parties lead them straight to the living incarnation of Ra.

Horebb protested that the Gods had a plan for every living thing, and the fact that Kef had lost a finger and a half to a bumbling apprentice was part of the larger plan. Therefore, Kef had no business at all wearing  a strap-on finger and a special ring that replaced those lost digits. He should be proud of his scars and not rely on artifice.

Kef complained that he was still unmarried and, on the occasions that Horeb had stolen yet another set of replacement fingers, Kef noted that all his romantic overtures were more likely to be ignored. If the Gods had a plan for him, then why did all the offerings he made at the temple not grow his fingers back? The Gods had given him a brain and his brother a magnificent skill. Could they therefore not mean that Kef was entitled to wear his new hand pieces to win love?

Pharaoh listened in silence to them argue case and countercase. Finally, he held aloft his flyswatter and decreed thusly:

Horeb the Priest should no longer speak for the gods. He shall go into the desert to find clarity. And if death should find him before wisdom does, his wealth shall go to Kef the Butcher. If wisdom does find him, Horeb the Priest will therefore pay Kef the Butcher the full value of all the fingers he has stolen.

Lynn managed to get so much extra credit from her work that she managed to swing Salutatorian.

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