It was catastrophic—least so for the crew of the Phoenix, who would not need to worry about the extraordinarily ugly war that was about to begin. The fleets had been moved into position for a first strike months ago. There was no way to stop what was unfolding.
The war, however, would not begin for approximately three and a half weeks. Fatrath was so remote that it would take upwards of ten standard days for news to reach the capitals of the two empires, and another ten for the fleets to come investigate. It was this remoteness that had been of particular interest to the pilgrims, and had become of interest to both militaries in the months since the last round of peace talks had failed so spectacularly.
Getz Corp, gloriously unburdened by large-scale troop movements, had a very clear protocol in this case: retrieve any and all proprietary implants from the crash site. They were authorized to do so under the terms of their contract with the Hantu Navy, and the first team had landed six hours after the crash to prepare for extraction. Two more of their operatives were presently beginning their descent through the atmosphere.
The agent leaned back in his seat and tried to let his shoulders relax. If they’d sent him alone to join the prep team, he would have been all smiles, jovial in the face of what the team clearly thought was an impossible task. In the face of an impending core meltdown, he could get Getz Corp’s property out without breaking a sweat, another successful job done. In a week, tops, the place would be swarming with soldiers and he would be long gone, reaping the benefits of a dangerous job with an exorbitant paycheck. Getz Corp would Get It Done. They always did, which was why he’d joined them. They sent the best.
He just wished he hadn’t needed this particular best to accompany him on today’s mission; she made his palms go clammy. He darted a glance at her under half-lidded eyes, expecting to see her staring, clear-eyed—the basilisk gaze that made him go cold, the same one that she’d turned on him when he arrived to enlist her. To his surprise, she was staring out the window of the shuttle, face unguarded, eyes far away.
Her hand was curled into her lap. What was she daydreaming about? Half-electric sheep? He felt a smile to touch his lips and looked away hastily in case she should notice.
He prided himself on his logic, and on doing the job correctly the first time, every time. That meant using the correct tools, and a cyborg was the correct tool for this job. It was the correct tool for a lot of jobs, and on each one there came the tension of wondering if he could do it any other way, and seeing the ways it could go wrong if he did. Logic always overrode emotion in the end, but it should not even be an argument he had with himself anymore.
And he should most certainly not break out in a cold sweat when one of them looked at him. He’d interrogated terrorists, for God’s sake. He’d worked with murderers and never felt the terror that washed over him in a cyborg’s presence. He was prey. He knew it, and they could see everything he was feeling—he knew what implants they had, what training. And what did they feel when they saw him? Nothing.
Not nothing, he wasn’t stupid. He knew the difference between a cyborg and an android. But that made it worse—he couldn’t tell if it was the spark of humanity or the lack of it that paralyzed him. They’d chosen to become what they were—there were no unwilling participants in Getz Corp’s program—and the agent wanted desperately to feel what they felt, whatever it was that made someone sign away what they had been for what they could be. That was logical, wasn’t it? His weaknesses did not, as he pretended, make him wiser or more prudent.
Behind the logic, never far away, lay the memory of walking into Getz Corp’s headquarters to sign up. A pen hovering over the first line on the form, Biomechatronic & Behavioral Enhancement Program in unassumingly small letters at the top. And he could not sign the forms. His muscles froze and he’d sat for an hour, shaking as he tried to jerk his hand upwards to fill in the blank spaces while his mind screamed that it was too much, too much.
He had waited, trying to focus on wondering why they still used clipboards and paper, until the receptionists changed shifts, and he could go up to the new one and pretend he’d been given the wrong form. And when he saw the cyborgs in the hallways, gaits smooth and faces unnaturally still, he remembered fearing that he would tip into the abyss that opened before him in the lobby, the overwhelming sense of loss even before he set pen to paper.
Too much to give up. But what was it that he had been so desperate to keep?
And so cyborgs unsettled him—hell of an idiosyncrasy in a mission supervisor. He had the sense to keep it well hidden, which meant the fear, denied an outlet, only prowled around in his head. He busied himself with the mission documents, and as the shuttle banked into its final descent, he gave in to the impulse to let his mind circle on the impending war. Even that was less unsettling. Or the abandoned ruins of the pilgrim settlement, he could think about that. He wondered if it would be considered too distasteful to visit them.
Probably.
The landing was smooth, and the agent was on his feet before the hatch opened, sliding a filtration mask over his face. A look confirmed that the cyborg had one, too. When she met his eyes, he froze, forcing himself back into motion with an ungainly jerk. There was the basilisk stare. Not cold, not even dispassionate, rather there was too much going on behind those eyes, and the face moved not at all.
The company official waited outside, nervous and sweaty. The rank and file of Getz Corp didn’t like agents. Their exquisite deference bordered on rudeness, but today the agent smiled instead of giving his usual cold stare. It was easy to smile, knowing what was coming out of the shuttle behind him. Whatever they thought of agents, everyone liked cyborgs less.
So she had a purpose after all. He wanted to stick around and see what the prep team made of her, but he had a site to inspect. Suppressing the desire to give a low whistle at the spectacle of the ruined ship blotting out the horizon, the agent set off, his masked breath echoing in his ears.
“Name?” he heard behind him, and his smile widened at the note of panic in the official’s voice.
*******
“Name?”
The cyborg crouched, picking a line of sight along one of the distant center support beams of the Phoenix. A quarter of a kilometer distant, the ship was creaking slightly in the wind. It was a sound beyond even her extraordinary natural abilities, but the aural implants caught a faint hint of metal and plastics, and the low crackle of fire.
She could see from the ambient radiation alone that they were too late. The core was melting down. But she knew, too, that this was unacceptable to say. She would work until their meters caught the danger and they decided to pull the mission. That was how it went.
A flicker of blue caught her gaze and her eyes snapped sideways: the stripe down the side of a team member’s pants, the rich blue-purple that adorned everything Getz Corp made.
Blue.
Blue.
The eyelids flickered.
Blue.
She had spent the ride down to the surface lost in memory, not so much voluntarily, but because something had malfunctioned. The slip of paper crackled faintly in her hand. This time, she could not leave it behind.
Scheherazade.
She had been learning just how much she kept with her across assignments. She was not sure if she was supposed to do that. On the one hand, she was better at being what she was, and they would like that, she assumed. On the other hand, well…she was not supposed to remember, was she? And learning was remembering. The word SCHEHERAZADE jolted deep into her consciousness, coated in half-meanings. It took on a different hue every time she read it, every time she rubbed her thumb over the letters. A voice saying, “Yes, this is you.” She always looked between the seat and the wall. She could communicate with herself—even if she hadn’t yet determined what the metaphor meant.
As she learned to crave the call of familiar thought patterns, she sought them out in her head. More were surfacing now. She was half in the shuttle, descending smo
othly, even in the turbulent atmosphere of Fatrath, because Getz Corp always paid for the best. And she was halfway in the operating room, clean and bright for the same reason, with the blue chips sliding under her skin and the technician asking her to wiggle each finger and toe in turn after each chip.
The latticework will only hurt for a few moments, dear. It grows quickly. Lacing down her muscles between the implants, cool pricking and then gone.
She shouldn’t be remembering this. Not now. Memories like this were Suppressed when she was on assignment. They should be available for recall only with intense feelings of discomfort, and only in the sterile halls of Getz’s recovery dorms. Not here, not now.
She had broken something, down deep. She had played with her core, and she had broken herself.
A wave of panic hit her, an urge to run to the shuttle, destroy the slip of paper that was not there—it was in her pocket—destroy it before she looked at it the first time. But that was time, and she couldn’t move in time; wishing to do so was human. She wasn’t human anymore.
And she was malfunctioning.
“Name?” the official repeated, and the cyborg looked over at him.
The world was fading in and out, senses picking up too much, too little. She could see the man’s pores, the uneasy dilations in his pupils; he didn’t like her. It was truly amazing how quickly people could realize what she was. It was the little things, the minutiae in a glance, the speed of a reflex, and they always knew. What the law could not seem to quantify in this age of implants and enhancements, humans could always tell. The term cyborg was reserved for the best of the best; you knew one when you saw one. She had tried telling people, once or twice, that the things they could name weren’t cybernetic at all. They were trained, deep-taught. The implants just made it faster. It didn’t make her inhuman, only helped her mind go further. It changed a surprising amount, but she was still part human.
No one cared, and it did not matter that it seemed an important distinction to her.
Not important, her task center said. She needed to respond to the official, which meant she needed to give him her name. Only she did not know her name, and there arose a second moment of panic. She knew vaguely that this wasn’t the first time, and both the knowledge and the haziness terrified her. She’d played around with her memory banks, that was what had done it, and it was all falling apart now. Did she not know her name because they hadn’t given her one, or because she had forgotten?
She knew one should not wonder whether one’s handlers had remembered to implant a name. A cyborg on assignment should not even remember that they had handlers—or should not care. She had been chosen partly for just that ability in her human half: acceptance of the rewrite. Was she losing it?
She wanted to be back in the labs, needles under her skin and her eyes losing focus on the ceiling tiles. She had no idea who she was supposed to be right now; she couldn’t remember the mission. And a name was so very basic. She could sense a low, primal horror underlying her panic. Everybody had a name. She thought down into the wrong place, into who she was instead of what she was called. A vivid memory of a training room, glaring white, of a blue chip sliding under her skin, the color deep and velvety.
Blue.
She blinked, trying to focus on her surroundings. Everything was sliding out of kilter, but she could save it. Something here had to be a clue. Her eyes darted across his notepad, to the ship on the horizon. What were the odds that they were here for something other than the ship? She sharpened her implants to scan across the bow. IGFS Phoenix. One of their ships, theoretically. And containers rated for radioactive material.
But what if their assignment was different from her assignment? She could see her arm outstretched, red spreading across a shirt, a man falling away from her, and in the memory she saw her hand reach out for the vial at his hip. The recall was precise. It was supposed to be precise.
It was supposed to have been purged. What was the assignment now? She could not remember. But she remembered the look on his face: betrayal. Betrayal meant he’d trusted her. Betrayal meant she’d gone in with him. She wondered now if she’d left his body there when she left.
It should have been purged. It should have.
“Ma’am…”
I’m malfunctioning. Please contact headquarters and give me a sedative. She wanted to blurt out the truth to this bored bureaucrat. The urge to speak was so overwhelming that her mouth was opening before she saw the hatred in his eyes and clamped her lips shut on the words. She should not say that to him. This man thought he had hidden his dislike deep, but she could see it. He did not like her, he did not trust her, and so she could not trust him. Certainly not with this. Her eyes darted left, darted right, around at the scene.
She was in the chair, and the skin on her arm was stinging, resistant to the anesthetizing gel. A chip held in mechanical pincers slid between muscles and she breathed in sharply. She did not move. They had told her not to move. She only tilted her head slightly to watch the red and pink close over the blue of the chip.
“Ma’am, your name.”
Blue.
“Indigo,” she said. She waited, but he did not challenge her. He did not say anything at all. He wrote it down like he believed it, like it was enough.
Maybe it was her name.
She climbed into the buggy nearby and set off for the Phoenix.
* * *
“How much longer do you figure, sir?”
Dusk was closing in on this particular portion of Fatrath, and the crew was getting restless. The agent looked over to all of them, a single eyebrow raised to let them know he was not impressed with the question. It was quite obvious that the cyborg had not yet reached the bridge of the Phoenix. It would be some time more. And that was all that mattered.
“There’s no way to know.” A curt answer, not the type recommended for intrateam relations, but he was in no mood to indulge this sort of behavior. They’d been hired by the best company in human space, goddammit. He looked away, taking a deep breath to calm himself. They all knew quite well that it took at least 30 days of continuous exposure for the atmosphere of Fatrath to kill a human. He pondered telling the ones peering furtively at their hands that if they could see spots, it was already much too late, and decided against it.
For a moment, he would even have preferred the cyborg’s company to this. He took a deep breath and gave a curt nod as one of the officials approached him. Getting the job done meant not yelling at the crew.
“Sir.”
Don’t yell at the crew. “Yes?”
“I thought you should know…”
“Yes?” He stared at the Phoenix and hoped his derision did not show on his face. The man needed to spit out whatever he wanted to say.
“She’s—the cyborg, I mean—well…she’s behaving oddly.”
The agent turned to look at him, pale-eyed, studying the man’s features. A tangle of uncertainty and fear. The man hadn’t wanted to make a fuss. No one ever wanted to make a fuss.
And she was late. He’d been so derisive of the crew, prided himself on his own calm. But she was. She was late getting to the bridge.
“Oddly how?” he asked carefully, hoping that no one could hear the sudden roaring in his ears. It was amazing how quickly the fear could come rushing back, when the pieces of the puzzle snapped into place all at once and a pattern emerged.
He should never have brought a cyborg with him.
Only it was an entirely logical choice, wasn’t it?
He might get to be one of the first people killed in the cyborg uprising. First was good. They’d tell stories about how it all started, wouldn’t they?
Not if the cyborgs won, they wouldn’t.
“Well, she’s…she didn’t…is her name really Indigo?”
“Excuse me?” Was it panic, or was the man not making sense?
“I had to ask her for her name about ten times.”
The agent found the presence of mind for a cold st
are before he took the clipboard. He did not care for hyperbole.
Indigo, read the writing on the check-in list. It proved nothing, just what the official had written down.
So why had the agent looked? Because he had the sickening feeling that he knew what was going on and he needed something to do with his hands to keep them from shaking.
It was imperative, he thought with a strange stillness above the sudden maelstrom of his mind, that he remain calm. Otherwise the mission would fall apart, and that could not happen. His base instincts were screaming at him that they were all going to die, and those very instincts were going to get them all killed if he could not get a grip on himself. They had a very dangerous animal on the loose and no idea of its mental state, and a panicking crowd of humans would be like blood in the water.
Any chance he had of bringing it back now was for him to be the authority she would respond to. He handed the clipboard back, took one deep breath to wait for his hands to stop shaking, and checked his gun.
“Sir.” The official waited until the agent looked over at him. “Is something wrong?”
He debated what to tell them. How to spin it.
“Botched rewrite.” He made sure that his expression did not shift. “She was the only one in the quadrant; I had to take her off a military research vessel. She was already written for surgery, so she was the best choice for this mission. The partial rewrite must not have taken properly.”
“What does that mean?” Energy vibrated in the man’s voice, warm fear in the air, cloying and close.
The agent dug deep and found a jovial smile. He reached out and clapped the man on the shoulder.
“It means we get held up here a couple of days at most. I may even get to send you back to the ship and wait on the surface myself—no sense in everyone camping out, but someone should stay with her. She’s going to be scared; it’s probably what’s slowing her down.”
The Cyborg Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) Page 19