by Elsa Jade
“Because I’m trying to be better.” She held the tin toward him. “What do you want?”
He didn’t know if she meant the snack or…something else.
His gaze tracked up from the extended tin to her mouth. Her lower lip shone where she licked it.
He had seen the Alpha and the Delta with their keyholders and how they put their mouths upon each other. Although he hadn’t always been able to ascertain what initiated such displays, one trigger seemed to be the allocation of sustenance.
Carefully, he reached out to take one of the orbs. It was soft and giving beneath his fingers, and very sticky. Burnt toast wasn’t any of those things. Oh well. His nanites would neutralize any toxins, and anyway she’d eaten one and it hadn’t killed her.
He took another step forward and leaned down over her chair to put his mouth on hers.
Her lips were soft, giving, and just a little bit sticky.
She made an odd sound. Perhaps the laddoo had gotten stuck in her throat.
He lifted his head. “Are you choking?”
“What?”
He turned back to the stool and sat. “Never mind.”
She stared at him and he stared at her.
“What?” he said.
She sputtered. “Why did you kiss me?”
Kiss. Yes, he’d heard that term. Focusing on the food, he angled his knees away from her. “The Alpha and the Delta kiss their keyholders when they share snacks.”
“That’s not why…” She let out a hard breath. “Okay, I have a tablet here with some downloaded media since I knew I’d have a terrible connection out here. Why don’t you spend some time with that while I run my initial scans on you?” When he narrowed his eyes at the cable she grabbed, she held out the tin of laddoo. “And you can have the rest of these.”
With a grunt, he balanced the tin on his lap and took the tablet she offered him next. While he mastered the primitive device, he ignored the cable she attached to the back of his hand.
His nanites swarmed the unfamiliar hardware until he pulled them back.
But he couldn’t quell the sweet tingling on his lips.
***
Accidentally kissed by an alien cyborg!
This had to be a new personal low for her. Vic splayed her hands on her keyboard to stop herself from touching her lips.
Even on her good ergonomic split board, so familiar and comforting, her fingers trembled. She locked it down, hard.
That hadn’t been a real kiss. First, he didn’t even know it was a kiss. She’d caught the flicker of uncertainty on his heavy, flat features when she’d questioned him. Second, it only lasted, like, a split second. He’d pulled away before she could do more than eep in surprise. The quick, cool glide of his mouth had been barely more substantial than a snowflake even as he’d loomed over her like an avalanche.
Third… Third, she wasn’t kissing anyone. Not when she was so close to making her escape from this planet that had never had anything for her. She wasn’t going to take on new baggage now.
Especially a load as heavy as Cosmo.
She stared blindly at her semi-circle of screens as her first, high-level scans began to run. She’d gotten a baseline from Mach and Delta already but she wanted to see how that compared. Cosmo was so…different from them.
She’d been wrong to think that just because he was one of the matrix, he must be like them. Which was shitty of her, considering how much she’d hated being lumped in with any-other-dom when she was clearly not. Her parents had been so angry at her “selfish need for attention” when she “should be grateful” that they’d rescued her. At the same time, they’d stood her up in front of their little congregation, cried—actually cried—about how the world was full of sad, needy, hopeless children, and used her to open checkbooks.
When she’d gotten old enough to understand, she’d declared they might as well have left her to become one of those pickpocketing orphans if she was just going to steal from lazy stay-at-home tragedy tourists. It was the one time her mother had slapped her, and the guilty tears had been so bad she’d actually apologized for causing the trouble.
An Omega didn’t apologize.
Not that she wanted to be a world-destroying monster. She just wanted to get away from this world. With the Intergalactic Dating Agency outpost in Sunset Falls mothballed, she needed another way. And Mach had promised to contact planetary management—not just for her, but for the good of his own family—once he could prove that he and the other CWBOIs were no longer a threat.
Cosmo was the key to getting what she wanted, but she wasn’t going to hurt him to do it. And she certainly wasn’t going to kiss him!
Er, not again, anyway.
Taking a steadying breath, she swiveled back to face him. Dang, he’d eaten all the laddoo? The fruit-sweetened balls were healthier than the sugar and caffeine she’d regularly mainlined during her all-night/all-day/all-night coding marathons, and she wistfully liked the tenuous connection to her lost heritage, but they were dense, heavy, and filling.
Kinda like Cosmo…
Yikes, no. She wasn’t going to imagine him filling…anything. Even if his sturdy, well-formed musculature looked very human-compatible.
She cleared her throat. “Is the cable bothering you?”
He didn’t look up from the tablet. His cropped hair bristled in her direction like an irate opossum. “My nanites attempted to disable your device, but I prevented them.”
Pursing her lips, she studied the pulse of silver around the jack. The connection, which she’d borrowed from the IDA outpost after it closed, looked sort of like a long syringe stuck into the main vein on the back of his massive hand. “They could do that? I have the best malware protection installed. And not just the Earther version either.”
“They have already broken the safeguards. They intended to invade, take any useful data, overload the circuitry, and cause the device to explode.” Finally he lifted his cool gaze from the tablet. “That final step would not be strictly necessary, but the Omega protocol is… uncomplicated.”
She snorted. “Good thing you can control it.”
“I distracted myself from the urge with this archived material. But I have finished absorbing it.” He set the tablet on the desk.
“That fast?” Knowing she’d be stuck out at the ranches with terrible reception, she’d filled the terabyte hard drive with trashy books, worse movies, podcasts she’d sworn she wanted to listen to, engineering journals—yeah, let’s be honest, those were a last resort. She also had part of an IDA archive she’d wanted to review. She needed to take her engineering skills next level if she was going to find a job in the wider universe.
And if she broke the shrouds’ keyholder lock, so that other beings like Mach and Delta couldn’t be sold into enslavement, she’d actually be a humanitarian savior in a way her grifter parents had only used for personal gain.
It’s all perception, baby, her father had told her more than once. To some people—lawyers and losers—it looks like fraud. To your mother and me, it looks like a chance.
Cosmo turned his attention to the screens where her scan was running. “It will take me awhile longer to compartmentalize and prioritize the data. I am not an Alpha who must act quickly on intel.”
She glanced at the screens too. “Well, mine will take awhile yet too. Don’t blow up my mainframe, yeah?”
He flexed his fingers, and a glitter of silver washed backwards up the circuitry in his bare arm, away from the jack.
She shifted in her chair. “Uh, I noticed that wasn’t an answer.”
“Shrouds are allowed to keep our pleasure/pain receptors since they are used during conditioning and training. Because of it, sometimes my systems react to protect me before I countermand the response.” He flicked a glance at her up. Through the short, pale fringes of lashes, his eyes were like frozen lakes. “By the time an Omega is activated, no one is asking for restraint.”
A little shiver went down her spine. In c
ase for half a second, she’d forgotten he was a killing machine. “Well, how about I distract you again?” She glanced around but he’d already eaten all the food and consumed all her media. “Um, so, what else do you like to do for fun?”
He stared at her.
She swallowed. “Other than destroying things?”
From the time he sat down, his posture on the stool was perfectly straight and balanced, but somehow she got the impression that he stiffened. “I…like to pet cats.”
Another little twinge went through her. She’d seen how well that hobby was going for him. “Have you thought about petting dogs instead?”
“The ranch dogs at the Fallen A are always friendly,” he said. “Because I bring them hotdogs. But if cats would let me pet them, I would know…”
She waited a beat. “Know what?”
“That I am not the worst.”
What could she say to that? This was like the most awkward first date ever. Except she’d already kissed him.
“Maybe you shouldn’t let cats be the final arbiter of your self-esteem,” she said. “If dogs grade too easy, cats are too hard. How about cows? I mean, I know nothing about cows, but they seem pretty chill but not as much pushovers as dogs.”
“Cows aren’t as furry,” he muttered.
This conversation was not just awkward but baffling. “Why does furry matter?”
Again his gaze drifted away from her, but this time the wayward stare seemed less detached than embarrassed. “I…remember creatures very similar to your Earther felines—they were called mishkeets—before I was made a shroud.”
She sat up straighter, though not quite so straight as him. “You weren’t built in a lab like the rest of your matrix?”
His jaw worked side to side as if he were chewing on something much stickier than the laddoo. “Not all shrouds are grown from Delta blanks,” he explained. “It is less expensive to take an unwanted young being and program it as needed.”
She put one hand over her mouth to stifle her gasp, sensing that he wouldn’t appreciate it. But horror turned the small bite of fruit and nuts into a hard pit in her gut.
When Mach and Lun-mei had contacted her after tracking her down through the defunct IDA outpost records, they’d explained the CWBOI program. They’d told her how the Custom War Bionic/Organic Impersons were basically illegal and shouldn’t exist. Nearly all the transgalactic community reviled the sinister consortium that combined all the most questionable practices of a large universe—mass cloning, nonconsensual biomechanical alteration, unjustified incarceration, slavery, and contract killing—into one atrocious business model.
But it seemed that even the “advanced” beings of the universe still tacitly accepted terrible crimes when there was profit to be had. If she found a way to break the shroud programming, all CWBOIs could be free.
“How…how much do you remember?” The chill in her veins eased a little when her thoughts jumped ahead. “If we can retrieve enough of your real memories from underneath your layered programming, maybe you can go home.”
He shook his head hard, and the knife-sharp glint of livid nanites raced across his skull. “I would never go back. They sold me.”
There went her optimistic ideas. “Oh, Cosmo…”
“I was born on a deep-space asteroid mining ship. We were all enhanced for heavy labor anyway. When the ship ran into financial issues, they sold a few of their unproductive young. Including me.” When he turned his gaze back to her, his eyes were pure silver. “If there was one time I would unleash the Omega of my own volition, it would be against my home ship.”
The seething fury in his voice sent an echoing reverberation through her body. She’d been trying to keep him occupied while they finished the scan, not set off the time bomb in his programming when he’d already admitted that he didn’t have much control. What was she supposed to do to bring him back in line?
“I was given away too, or orphaned.” She shrugged one shoulder. “I’m not really sure how I ended up leaving my family. But I think it’s more important what we’ve made of ourselves since—” She couldn’t hold back a wry laugh. “Shit, Cosmo. They made you into a killer and me into a thief. You know what, you have every right to be angry.”
For a heartbeat, he just stared at her, that seething silver in his eyes making her blood rush. He blinked once, and the deadly energy in his eyes faded a little. “I do?”
She leaned forward in her chair and took his hand. His palm was almost wider than both of hers put together. Carefully, she extracted the jack from beneath his skin. A single drop of gray blood—nowhere near as bad as what Wog had done to him—beaded up from the tiny wound. It sealed over instantly as the nanites repaired the damage.
If only all wounds were so easily healed.
“Bad things were done to you by bad beings,” she said. “Of course you’d be angry about that. As for what you do next…” She released his hand. “That’ll be up to you.”
He looked at his hand and then at her. “Detonating would be bad.”
“Maybe just keep trying with the cats, instead?” She gave him a smile. “Might be almost as dangerous though.”
After a moment, he nodded. “At least with the cats, if I win I can pet them. If my Omega protocol wins, I’m dead.”
It was hard to keep her smile in place. At least she understood now why no shroud had ever been taken alive for deprogramming. “Well, it’s a tough choice, but I’m definitely rooting for the cat thing.”
Abruptly he stood, and her pulse skittered. “I see that your initial scan is processing. While you wait for results, I will go to the barn. Do you require anything else from me?”
A promise not to blow up? “No, you’re all good.”
He gazed down at her impassively. “No. I am not.”
He spun on his boot heel and stalked out the door.
It wasn’t until the echo of his footsteps faded that she let out a sharp breath. She’d come here to rescue these enslaved cyborgs.
But now she wondered if maybe the coded chains had actually kept them safe.
Chapter 3
Based on the calculation speed he’d extrapolated from the data scrolling on the screens, Cosmo reckoned he had a few hours before Vic Ray realized he was a hopeless menace.
He narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. Assuming she hadn’t figured that out already merely by interacting with him.
Why did he feel so unbalanced with her? When he’d first visited the Strix Springs Ranch to threaten Lindy a couple of months ago, he’d been confident that his hundred and fifty years as a menacing recluse haunting the Diamond Valley badlands would achieve his goals. In the end, it was the Delta who had sabotaged his efforts by imprinting on the Earther female.
On the front porch, Cosmo paused, considering.
It was Stella’s fault. Ever since he made the small Earther/Delta hybrid, he couldn’t help but compare what’d he done to what had been done to him. He’d made a baby instead of buying one, but Lun-mei had explained to him that the distinction was morally indefensible considering his intent had been the same as the shroud consortium: to use an innocent being for his own ends.
The reflection was…about as pleasant as Wog’s claws tearing in. He had no subroutines for morality, obviously. But since there’d been no intention that he would be activated for anything other than an apocalypse, the crash and intervening years had worn at his fail-safes. The memories of his life before his time with the consortium had leaked through, along with an itchy sense of right and wrong and other…feelings.
He stopped on the porch steps. When his hand on the rail brushed the pine tree branches recently affixed to the house, the soft prickle somehow dug deeper than Wog’s claws, and the colorful glass spheres nestled in the needles struck him as far too fragile for winter at this latitude.
A subarchive of the database that Vic had lent him informed him that these were Christmas ornaments. Although he was not sure of the symbolic value of evergreenery brough
t closer to the house when it surrounded them on all sides anyway. And why didn’t they just check their internal chronometers to confirm that the season was approaching its nadir? Did they really need “Saint Nick” to tell them nothing was stirring? He was perhaps missing some nuance from the “bad Christmas movies” folder on her tablet. He’d have to ask her to explain.
He scowled to himself. Once she finished reviewing his scans, she would want no more to do with him than the cats did.
But still, as he crossed the yard, he could not help but look around with new eyes, despite the fact that he had not upgraded his optical servers. The Strix Springs ranch hands had insisted on decorating the ranch before they left for their winter break, declaring that Stella’s first Christmas should be special. He wasn’t sure why when there was no chance that the unoptimized Earther/Delta hybrid would ever remember these days.
Except… He remembered the moment when he’d passed from the arms of the crèche guardian to the mercenary middlemen hired by the consortium to purchase likely conscripts for the CWBOI program. He should not have been able to remember that moment either, and yet he did. Likely it was an unintended artifact of his damaged programming after the crash that unveiled the deep fragment of recorded environmental and emotional stimuli that comprised memory.
But Stella would never be subjected to shroud conditioning. The Delta would kill the world before he’d allow that to happen. Cosmo let out an approving snort even though his matrix-brother was not present. And Lindy had threatened to shoot Cosmo just on principle the moment she discovered Stella’s existence. No, the pair would never let anything happen to their offspring. And even if Stella somehow accessed these very first memories, all she would relive was unending moments of pure acceptance.
To his strangely altered eyes, the familiar ranch seemed brighter, the greens of the pine decorations more lush, the red of the tinsel ribbon more vivid, even the stacked hay seemed more golden. His perception of the hues had obviously been unduly influenced by the “bad Christmas movies” that he’d so rapidly scanned. He would have to review them at a more careful speed at his first opportunity.