Much against his will, but in compliance with the wishes of his family, he has come to Fleet Orientation Station Medical to learn how to be a Fleet chief medical officer under Jurisdiction, where he’ll learn how to be a torturer and an executioner for the brutal and unforgiving system of government called the Bench. He finds his duty morally repugnant—he finds the whole system morally repugnant—but he also comes to discover that he has a terrible talent for the work itself, and a capacity for taking pleasure in pain that repulses him on a moral level even as it attracts him on a physical one.