by Greg Curtis
“I’m not the knight in armour you seem to picture me as, but I can’t stand to have you think less of me. I’m a strong man, but I couldn’t bear that. I’d rather die.” It was as close to a confession as he could bring himself. He couldn’t tell her the facts of what he’d seen and covered up, for even if they hadn’t been national secrets the thought of seeing disappointment in her eyes was unbearable. But she still had to know why.
“One day I hope you’ll tell me everything. Especially the things that shame you. Because I won’t think any less of you. I can’t. I’ve seen you at your very worst, and it doesn’t scare me. Even at your most dangerous, you’re a man of unyielding goodness. I know you perhaps even better then you know yourself, and I know why you do the things you do. They’re the same reasons that I do. You believe you’re protecting your people. That’s who you are. You were a good man in a bad place. That’s all.”
“There’s more you need to know.” He didn’t want to tell her, it might drive her away. But he had to. Nothing had changed but finally he had no choice.
“There are people who have good reason to hate me. People I’ve hurt, or perhaps whose family members I’ve hurt or killed. People who may one day, if they ever escape their prison cells or make it to America, come after me. There’s blood on my hands, too much. And while I’m sure that they were all in the wrong, and that none of them left me any choice, it won’t matter to their kin. Many others if they ever found out who and what I was would also want to find out everything I know. All that I’ve seen. They won’t use soft tactics. They’ll come hard and fast. They’ll be armed, and some of them are simply too dangerous to stop. Being with me places you and maybe your people in danger.”
“I still want to be with you. I love you, and I will stand by you if and when they come. Besides,” and she smiled in a way that sent his blood racing, “- you have no understanding of our technology, our security. One day I hope you will.”
Something deep within him began to crack as he listened to her. It was his self-control. He desperately wanted to believe her but there were things he knew he could never say. Things that would make her run a thousand miles from him if she had any sense. Yet things he also had to tell her. She had to know who he was. She had that right. And she also had to know that no matter how far out of that community he lived, one day it might always come back for him. And despite her confidence he knew it would be ugly.
“Besides, I’m not perfect either.”
“Right now you are.” And she was. Wrapped round him like a fur coat, she was once again managing to fire him up, as his body finally recovered from their last ordeal, and she knew it, instinctively rubbing herself against him in ways designed to turn him into a panting wreck. They were working.
“Oh yeah! It’s about time.”
Chapter Eleven
The trial that afternoon was delayed a couple of hours because of the extent of David’s injuries, or so he and Cyrea claimed; whether anyone actually believed them or not was another matter. It was a very different trial to any David had ever seen. There were no judges, no lawyers and no jury. There weren’t even any charges. Instead Ayn Lar who David thought of as the prosecutor, though Cyrea still claimed was actually just the head of the local police detail, and her boss, read out a simple statement of what Dr. Roze had done, and he was asked to explain.
The doctor sat in a simple chair in the middle of the room, surrounded by Leinians. Many more were watching from afar. In fact, many were watching from other worlds. Trials of such deviance as Cyrea termed it, were extremely rare. The prosecutor stood before doctor Roze, a picture of calm and authority. He waited for an answer. They all did.
Unlike any Earthly defendant, Doctor Roze didn’t try to deny the charges, but then he couldn’t really. The evidence had been collected and placed before everyone aboard the entire ship. There was no possible doubt. He had after all recorded everything. In retrospect that could have been a bad idea but then the recording was an integral part of what he’d been trying to do. The doctor had been studying him like a lab rat.
It seemed the not so good doctor had an interest in alien physiology as well as biological engineering, and an agenda. Doctor Roze believed that humans were almost perfect imitations of Leinians, the result of parallel evolution on nearly identical worlds. He believed that every feature of Leinian physiology, had an equivalent feature in humans. He wanted to map that similarity and so prove that evolutionary forces dictated genetics more directly than ever believed possible. And that they did it identically. Therefore on any world with the same characteristics as another, the inhabitants would be the same.
Thus far all the medical tests had borne out his theories, as had David and Cyrea’s union which spoke of physical compatibility as well as emotional. But there were some things he couldn’t test in the labs, and some things he couldn’t test with other people knowing. Top of the list was the human fight or flight reactions, key to understanding survival mechanisms, emotional intelligence and hormones like adrenaline. The same chemical cocktail Leinians had in their blood stream. He’d long since needed a fit human subject. David fitted his purpose beautifully. He was young, combat ready, and most important of all, available.
Instead of denying his guilt, the doctor spoke at length about how he hadn’t intended to harm David at all. How he’d simply wanted to test him, to find out his limits. The limits of his body, of his heart and the strength of his will. Given his emotional involvement with Ayn Cyrea, his knowledge of unarmed combat, and the relatively simple nature of the human psyche, the mechanics of the arrangement were obvious. David found himself wanting to strangle the pompous little bastard as he heard himself described as a science experiment, but Cyrea beside him understood his anger and held him with a touch. He would have his say. Yet even as she held him back he noticed that she looked even more angry than him. She was just more controlled.
Dr Roze had driven him into a fighting state and deliberately unleashed his full potential, believing that only when he was at his most terrified and desperate would he have a chance to find out David’s limits. The synthetics were as always nasty, but they would always stop short of a lethal blow. He’d never harmed Cyrea at all, never even had her, just her voice as Cyrea had told him that morning. But Cyrea too was angry, furious at the thought he could use her voice like that, and that he could so casually risk her happiness.
The Doctor had had an arsenal of technological tricks up his sleeve, all to drive David insane. Biochemical agents in the air to make him more angry and frightened, low frequency sound waves to make him more edgy, frightened and paranoid, and a synthetic voice designed by psychologists simply to invoke fear in the listeners. He had used every single technological trick he could find to push David to the edge and beyond.
But as he himself admitted, he had made an error. Though even then he believed his mistake was only in not understanding how dangerous David was. It never entered his testimony or probably his mind, that what he had done was cruel and inhumane. In his world it was simply science, and he was a scientist. David was nothing more than a guinea pig.
He had started him off in the fights with a level six synthetic, having known that Cyrea regularly trained against synthetic opponents of level five. Since David had beaten her he had thought that a good starting point, even though six was considered the level of a master. Unfortunately synthetic number one had been destroyed in under a minute, and the doctor had realized he had underestimated the human, badly.
Number two he’d immediately sent in was a level eight, which he was sure would push him to his limits. Instead, he had watched in horror as David had turned it into confetti even more quickly than the first. And as Cyrea whispered to him, level eight was the highest fighting level used by any agent in the service. Top level martial artists and athletes might use it for training, but only if they really wanted to suffer, and only with every safety in place.
But that was just the beginning of the nightmare for the
doctor. Believing David couldn’t possibly be that good, he’d thrown a level nine at him, and watched it get turned into trash, while at the same time the room was being destroyed around him, and Leinians from all over the ship were trying to find out what was happening. For all his precautions against being heard, the sound of the massive impacts of the synthetics on the floor was being transmitted directly through the entire ship. The doctor had known then that he was going to get caught, and he still had no true idea of the human’s limits. So he locked and barricaded the doors and carried on.
The last two synthetics he’d sent against David were both level ten’s, the highest possible rated synthetic. Nothing more powerful could be allowed. Tens were so close to deadly that just the slightest slip up could spell disaster. No-one had ever officially beaten a level ten, though some claimed they had, and a few could hold them for a while. More than a few had been badly injured and even killed by them. And David had destroyed two in a night. But at least the doctor had thought he was getting his data.
The analyses he’d been carrying out on David’s body showed he was at absolute maximum. His every muscle movement was as powerful as it could be, while his reaction speed had levelled out at something well beyond the Leinian capability. Far beyond what was believed to be humanly possible. Until then they’d believed that Leinians were faster than humans. But David, a mere human, was faster still, a state surely only possible when he was simply reacting like a wild animal.
But then, at the end, the doctor discovered he still hadn’t pushed David all the way. What was shocking to the doctor was that even as he was fighting to what he believed was the death, driven out of his mind with worry and crippling psychological attacks, David was also planning his escape. Against all the odds, he still had some reasoning capacity left over, though the doctor hadn’t realized that till long after.
When David had escaped the doctor had nearly had a heart attack. He’d had visions of the human running amok among the ship, killing all who got in his way, and he’d known it would be his fault. High on chemical agents, believing his love was being tortured to death, psychologically stressed by the other stimuli, and beaten half senseless, the chances that David could be reasoned with seemed remote. The likelihood was that he would kill everyone he saw.
In his own defence as he claimed, he’d immediately alerted the ship to the situation, confessing all and begging people to stay out of David’s way. That alert had probably frightened more people than any other scare in all the years the party had been on Earth. But none had been more shocked or scared than the doctor when David had suddenly come ripping through the door. He’d thought David would be running for his freedom. He should have known better.
The doctor had reached for the cutter he kept with him for work, and blasted a warning beam across the far wall. Or at least so he claimed, but David knew he’d hoped to kill him with it. It just hadn’t worked out. Immediately he tried it he had regretted his action, or so he claimed. But not for any decent reason such as not wanting to kill him. It was just that he had known logically that it was next to useless against the power of the beast as he referred to David, but he had been scared. It had been worse than useless as the doctor swiftly found out, and he’d had his arm smashed for the mistake. David could hear the anger in his voice at that. The doctor was trying to hide it but he hated David for hurting him. Maybe that was why his words were poison. As the not so good doctor said, why antagonize the beast if it was only going to make him angrier?
Cyrea stood up about then, snarling under her breath, and David knew she was going to take a piece out of the doctor before he uttered any more garbage. He grabbed her, quickly bundled her up in his arms and sat her down on his lap. People all around them had noticed and the doctor went a little pale, but at least she hadn’t done anything for which she might get in trouble. He ignored them.
“It’s okay Love. He’s just a bigot. A person who has to believe himself superior to others, or else he would know himself as so much less. Anyone with any sense would just ignore everything he says knowing what he is and how contaminated everything he believes must be.” He stroked her hair, helping her to calm her down, while those looking on suddenly looked away, confused. They had heard his every word as he’d intended; so had the doctor, his real target.
“Let him speak. The more he says the more he condemns himself. In a little while I get to speak, and you get to speak. We get to tell our side, to share our pain, and to let others judge him, not him us. He gets to be punished.” The sound of a throat clearing brought them both back to the court, and they saw the prosecutor trying to re-establish order. Behind him the doctor was trying to say something, but his mouth just opened and closed pointlessly. Probably he’d never heard someone speak about him that way, least of all to an audience. Perhaps it was about time.
David stopped speaking and nodded to Ayn Lar to let him know he was finished. Cyrea slowly retook her seat. She was still angry, her every muscle was stiff and unyielding, but she had heard, and for the moment she would be patient. But not he knew, forever.
***************
Until he sat in that chair that afternoon David himself had no idea what he would say. He had expected something more like a human cross examination where he would be asked questions and expected to reply. Instead he was simply asked to say what had happened from his perspective. It was something he was more than happy to do.
“The doctor has called me a beast. A savage and wild creature better not approached without protection. In doing so he sought to insult me, because as everyone here knows, beasts are less than people. He is, though I doubt he will ever accept it, both right and wrong. His words are a compliment.”
“I am a beast. I am a man. And those two parts of my nature are not in conflict. As such I do not find being called a beast insulting. Under the circumstances of yesterday, I find it a compliment. A civilized man could not have beaten those robots. A civilized man could not have rescued his loved ones. A civilized man would have died. But a beast would not have cared. A beast could not have thought its way out of that room, or found the doctor. I am both and I am well pleased with that.”
“We have a saying on Earth. That the civilized man is only a few meals away from the savage beast. While that is perhaps true in a very few cases, in most it takes a lot more to make us go truly wild. It takes a serious threat to life, to liberty, or especially to family. For me to know that Cyrea was being hurt in that way was beyond my ability to stand. Which was exactly as the doctor had planned. So why he should seek to insult me for his own deliberately planned actions, I don’t know.”
“What I do know is that what he did was torture, pure and simple. I would give my life to save Cyrea’s, without ever a question. But I could not do that. I was trapped, unable to reach her, and hating myself with every tortured cry he made me listen to. I needed to go to her with every heartbeat, and I couldn’t. You can’t even begin to imagine how I hated that miserable wretch.” Though actually, he suspected some of them could. It was in the way they clung together in couples, curled in among themselves. He was describing their worst nightmares.
“Instead I had to survive. I had to destroy those things. I had to escape. I had to save Cyrea. Nothing else could have been allowed. If I had died on that floor, it would have been the worst possible death I could know as I would have failed to save Cyrea. Under those circumstances only the most extremely violent, the most unrelenting, determined, and totally savage personality could have succeeded. And only if it had the most highly trained, quickest thinking, and again utterly single minded intelligence guiding it. Nothing less could have succeeded. Nothing less could have been allowed. So that is who and what I became. Exactly as the doctor intended.”
“Despite the doctor’s statements to the contrary, those robots hurt me very badly. The doctors will tell you the physical score, but the reality is that the suffering was far worse than mere pain and physical damage. With every injury I knew my chances
of reaching Cyrea became worse, and I felt her dying before me with every blow. I knew nothing but that terrible pain, and the failure because it was my fault. The pain of my flesh was nothing compared to that.”
“Only terrible fear and desperation kept me going, far beyond where I would normally have fallen down. So that is what I became. That I am alive is a tribute to your doctors’ skill, to the beast in me, and my love for Cyrea, not the doctor’s claimed good intentions. He had none.”
“As such I know I may have hurt some of you yesterday. My memories are still vague but I remember throwing a few people aside far too roughly. And for that I humbly apologise. It was never my intent to hurt you. Only to get to Cyrea and then to escape.”