by Lea Tassie
Charger was at work on time and waiting as Marcus appeared. "Hey buddy, it's the start of a new week. What say we start off by not belting you into the seat? You don't kill me and I won't have to hate you for killing me, agreed?"
Charger made no response; he just entered the skidder. Big Bertha jerked across the Martian surface with Marcus singing at the controls. He did not talk all morning.
Right after lunch, Marcus pulled the skidder to the side of a gully and turned his seat around to face Charger. "Okay, so you said last week you're here to kill others of your own kind. Does that mean other Hyborgs?"
Charger sat in silence unmoved.
With a long drawn out breath, Marcus tried again. "Who commanded you to do this?"
Charger was still silent.
"Tell you what, blink once for yes and twice for no," Marcus snapped.
Charger finally relented. "Why do you ask me questions?"
"Because that's what friends do, man, they talk. I tell you about me, and you tell me about you. Oh, and you have to tell me how great I am as a friend, too." Marcus grinned. "Just throwing that out there to help, ya know."
Charger refused to say another word, no matter how much Marcus pleaded and prodded. The day ended with no success, but there were still fourteen more work days before a weekend off. Marcus decided to press on. He looked for Hyborgs in the base records, but there was no indication that any Hyborgs had ever been on the base, and no record of any deaths. There wasn't even a record of Charger being on the base. He truly had no past or presence on Mars.
"Hey, buddy, it's day thirteen; bet you're looking forward to a weekend. I know I am," Marcus said, as he prepped his gear for a day inside the cab with Charger. Charger just entered the skidder, took his seat, and sat patiently. They drove for some time in silence before Marcus spoke again. "I checked with base personnel. They say you're the last Hyborg on this planet. It seems the five other Hyborgs who were here all died in accidents. I guess with your work done, you'll be leaving soon?"
Charger just stared at Marcus with those blank white eyes that only ever reflected Marcus's face back to him.
Marcus pressed on. "So, where do they ship you next?"
"Earth," Charger said.
Marcus waited. He didn't want to scare Charger off from more answers. "Hyborgs there that need killing?" Marcus asked cautiously.
"No," Charger replied.
"Then what?"
"Military experiment."
Marcus was elated. Charger was talking, but he'd have to take it slow or the Hyborg would clam up again. "Military, eh, so what? Like checking to see if your vocabulary still works or something?" Stupid, so stupid, Marcus thought, try to control yourself. "What kind of experiment?" he added very quietly.
"A re-connection protocol. I'm to be linked to five Taskers," Charger reported in a matter-of-fact way.
"Taskers?" said Marcus, not wanting to end the conversation. "I thought Taskers were alive or something. I heard, during the war, that they were supposed to be smart."
"Not these, they are blanks like me," Charger said.
"Ah, buddy, you're not a blank. I just know that somewhere deep inside that big, ugly, warped skull of yours there's a brain bursting to get out."
They sat in silence for quite some time before Charger finally surprised Marcus by saying, "I had a friend called Dal once, but that was over a hundred years back. I do not like you, but you would make someone a good friend."
They did not speak again. Marcus shipped out a week later, never having achieved his goal of becoming Charger's friend.
***
Charger was ordered to remain on Mars for an additional three weeks before being relocated to Earth for the Tasker program. He spent the time sitting in a small mechanical room below the main floors of the complex, not moving or sleeping, just waiting. And counting. Sometimes he counted the aliens he'd killed. When the memories galled him, he'd count the seconds as they slid by. When that got boring, he'd set himself a problem in cube root. Numbers were so clean and precise.
He'd been there four days when a sound caught his attention.
A woman's voice screamed in pain. He could hear sounds of violence and men's voices mixed with cruel laughter. Charger did not move; he had no interest in the affairs of humanity. The noise drew nearer but still he didn't move.
Suddenly a woman burst into the mechanical room, obviously in a frantic search for a hiding place. Torn clothing hung from her bloodied and bruised body. She had escaped her rapists momentarily, but Charger could hear them coming closer. Her wild glances darted here and there and finally landed on Charger. She froze at the sight. Charger's gaze rose to meet hers, like a massive beast gazing on its kill from some dark cave where humanity dare not go.
Her hair was straight and thin, she had lost much weight, and her face was gray. The eyes, oh yes, the eyes! She was so afraid of me.
The almost forgotten words flashed through Charger's mind. Words he had spoken long ago, when he was young. The face was different but the eyes were blue, a blue like no other he had ever seen, blue eyes that he had only ever known once before.
"Beth," Charger hissed, almost a question.
The woman, shaking uncontrollably, realized the monster had called her name. "Did you just say Beth?"
He didn't reply.
"Please, can you help me?" Beth pleaded, fearful to reach out and touch this beast. Charger did not move, and his seeming lack of interest had her panicking even more.
Then Charger saw a necklace hanging around her neck. A necklace representing the solar system, made only once, by Charger's origin, Henry.
Five men, crazed with the desire to continue raping and abusing the woman, rushed into the room. Beth tried to escape by running behind some metal shelving. As the men taunted her and circled, closing in, a great thud moved the air. The only door to the room had slammed shut.
Now the five men were trapped in the room with Charger.
They had no chance of escaping his cauldron of rage. He had not felt hate, or any other strong emotion since his conversion to Hyborg, but this was different. Charger beat the five men into unconsciousness, while they pled for mercy. Then he took the man closest to him and, with great strength and precision, Charger forced the arm of that man through the chest of another man, careful not to destroy any vital organs. He wanted the men to live through what he was doing.
He continued taking the men, one at a time, and forcing their arms through the chests of others. As an arm passed through a chest, Charger would snap the arm, breaking the bones in such a way that the arm could not be retracted.
Beth pleaded with Charger to stop, repulsed by his brutality. The men were alive, badly beaten, and now bound together as one mass of flesh.
Charger walked to the storage locker, took out supplies, and created a bomb which he placed in the center of the writhing mass of men. He set the explosive to trigger if anyone tried to touch them. Beth crouched against the wall, sobbing and begging Charger to stop. Blood poured from a wound on her head as she rapidly weakened.
The beast continued working. As a final touch, Charger drew his sword and a brilliant flash of blue arc light erupted from his blade as the plasma, held firmly in place by a magnetic field, sparked to life. He pressed the blazing hot sword into the testicles of each of the five men, cauterizing the wound as the flesh burned off. Screams filled the room. Beth lost consciousness.
When she came to, Charger held her in his great arms, trying to get her to the medical facility. But Beth was fading fast. "You called my name. Do I know you?" Beth managed to say, unsure if this beast even understood her language.
"I knew Beth, but not you. The Beth I knew was a long time ago," Charger replied. He added, "I made that necklace."
Beth wasn't sure she understood, but replied, "This was my great grandmother's necklace. She gave it to me. She told me that her first love, Henry, made it for her. He was lost in the invasion. He was my great grandfather."
C
harger was stunned. He was holding his great granddaughter in his arms. Here he was, a hundred and forty-one years old, and only now did he learn that he'd fathered a child. He broke into a run toward the medical bay. For two weeks Charger never left Beth's side. The medical staff tried to save her, but she eventually succumbed to her wounds.
For these brief few days in a very long life, Charger had been with Beth's great granddaughter. His own great granddaughter. He could feel something changing in his brain, something loosening, something trying to run free. He had begun life believing that humanity was worth saving, but the experience of being a despised weapon in two wars had destroyed that belief. Now new conflict grew and festered in his mind.
Chapter 6 Charger linked to Taskers
"Look, you little shit, if you shock me again with that cable, I'm going to shove it up your backside. Do I make myself clear?" Charger pulled the engineer up off the ground by his lab coat and drew him close. The small man jerked his head 'yes,' shaking in fear of Charger's gleaming white fangs.
It was more than fifty years since the war with the Taskers had ended, but now the science people in the military wanted to try building a new type of soldier. The plan was to hook Charger up mentally to a Tasker battle group, to see if it would be possible for him to control a group of robots the same way he had worked with the Lycans, Mac and Jill. He was to be the meat behind the joystick, linked with five biogenetic Taskers as his drones.
Mac and Jill had been disconnected from his brain years back, when he received the command to kill them. At first, he'd appreciated the peace and quiet, but soon found himself missing their companionship, even if it had been noisy. Now he was curious to see if this experiment would provide him with the same things as the Lycans had.
"If you clowns get this right, will you be trying the technique on humans?" Charger asked the man he had just threatened.
The man gave Charger a wary look. "Yes, but I'm afraid that's a long time off. We still need to discover just how you are able to differentiate yourself from your familiars." He carefully reconnected the computer cables back to the implant surgically placed in the back of Charger's skull.
The engineer made the final connections to his networking system. "All the other Hyborg subjects had just one familiar hooked up to their brains. You are the only subject to ever have two familiars, thus with the possible ability to hold multiple familiars."
"So I'm just a subject to you?" Charger growled.
"Ah," the engineer said nervously, looking around for the nearest exit.
Charger snapped, "Relax, I don't bite in daylight, but after the moon comes out, I make no guarantees, so you'd better speed this up."
This of course had the effect of making the engineer even more nervous as he scuttled about the room hurrying to finish the necessary connections.
"So, these drones you guys built, they have humans inside them?" Charger asked.
Pushing his thick black-rimmed glasses up his nose, the engineer replied, "Well, sort of. As far as we can tell, though, they're merely clones placed in bio suits, they possess no significant brain waves, no conscious thought. We think that, to you, they will be just blank shells for you to boss around."
"So you created them from your own DNA then?"
The engineer gave him a blank look and Charger grunted. This guy's IQ was so high that ridicule was lost on him.
The engineer signaled to the observers, watching the process through a glass window from the next room, that he was ready to proceed. A voice replied, saying, "Carry on with the test."
"I'm going to start by bringing two Taskers online to your implant, then dial in the other three over a few minutes," the engineer said.
"Go nuts," Charger said.
The experience turned out to be very different from being hooked up to Mac and Jill. When that started, he'd begun by seeing not only them, but also himself through their eyes as they looked at him. However, this room was dead quiet. There was no mental interaction with the Taskers.
Then a spark of light caught the edge of Charger's vision and, as he turned to look, it was gone. Then it happened again, but from a different location, then again as he tried to see where the light was coming from. The third and fourth Taskers were being brought online and his sense of confusion grew. The light did not seem to be coming from him. As the fifth Tasker was connected, a strange dark red glow filled the room. Charger had a brief impression of himself looking at himself, but the next scene he saw was real, the room where the experiment was taking place. He had a sense that the Taskers were now seeing what he saw, but he was no longer looking through their eyes.
Then what seemed to be a memory popped into Charger's mind. A small girl stared up at him. She asked him why her brother was so sick, and if he was going to die. Charger found himself reassuring her and holding her small body close to his. He began to realize that he was a mother, and the little girl was his daughter.
Then someone was saying that it was possible to implant consciousness inside the Tasker drones, and that this would enable all of them to go on living. Another voice said some of the crew would need to be placed inside cryo-pods, and others would need to be sacrificed. Only the strong could survive. Charger knew it was too late to save his children; the cicadas had already infected them. There was no antidote.
Then Charger was planting vegetables in a garden and, when he looked up from his work, he saw how beautiful the world around him was. He looked down at his hands but they had been replaced by the claws and clamps of Tasker appendages. He looked up again and understood that this was New Eden, the Tasker home world.
What was going on?
A ship descended from the sky, huge and flaming as it burned through the atmosphere, apparently out of control. It crashed into the surface. Then Charger was in a temple, beautiful in design. He was talking to a soldier, who looked familiar.
The test room around him grew black, as guys in lab coats kept their distance from him, as if he had a plague, or was an enemy. Then the room vanished and he was working on the controls of a space ship, trying to understand how to make it function. He had no idea what he was doing, but it was important to make this cargo ship work. The young man next to him was passing him a small handheld computer displaying a note that read, 'I love you.'
Then there was blood everywhere, and Charger's Tasker body was being hit with round after round of enemy gun fire. He tried to retreat, but there seemed no place safe to be. His husband held him tight. No face looked the same as he remembered. They had lived for several years inside these bodies, and now friends and colleagues all looked like Taskers, identical except for color and design.
He was flying like a bird! It felt great!
He was dying; he could feel it. His husband looked at him with a blank metal Tasker face, but there seemed to be a sadness in it. The room grew cold and dark, the light faded from his eyes and suddenly everything around him just seemed to stop.
Then a light. He was enraged, firing his weapon in every direction, trying to stop the advancing army from reaching the center of the city. As if from nowhere, a huge monster appeared. It seemed to be heading straight toward him and, no matter how many times he fired his weapon at it, the shells ricocheted off its armor. A great lumbering beast of a thing, the like of which he'd never seen before.
Long hair flew from its head, its body was covered in spikes and dirt, and it carried two long swords reflecting the sunlight. Then something hit him from the side. He turned to find two wild beasts covered in dirty fur biting and scratching their way through his metal body, tearing it apart. Gritty dirt mixed with his blood as he tried to fight off the two beasts, and then came the last sight.
The huge monster, mouth drooling blood, a look in its eyes of insanity and death, four fangs glinting in the light as the huge swords sliced deep into his armor. Then nothing but darkness.
Memories continued to flood into Charger's mind. How could this be possible from clones? Then he knew. He had relived sev
eral years of the memories of others in just a moment of present time.
Quickly he regained control of his own mind and pulled the plug from the back of his head, releasing himself from the networking system that connected him to the five Taskers. In a rage, he lashed out at the room around him.
"You filthy, murdering pricks!" he growled as he smashed through the viewing window that separated the engineering room from the military observers. "You should be running now!"
Desperate with fear, the observers tried to fend off Charger's advance, but it was useless. He grabbed several of the observers and flung them against the walls of the viewing room. Their unconscious bodies crumpled to the floor.
Then the clicking began. From behind him, the Taskers stirred to life, spurred by the memories of that time when humanity was at war with them. The engineer cried out, begging for help as the five Taskers grabbed his limbs and tore him to shreds. Alarms rang out and military boots thumped down the hallway leading to the lab. As the soldiers entered, they faced Charger and five Taskers bent on killing every human they could find.
The red mist cleared from Charger's eyes and his mind filled with confusion. He had a choice to make.
Kill humans to take revenge for what they'd done to the Taskers?
Or save them?
His programming had begun to break, but it was not yet broken. A thread still remained, tying him to humanity and he made the choice.
Time slowed to a crawl and the ticking of a clock in the distance seemed to stretch into infinity. He had to face these five Taskers alone, without Mac and Jill at his side, the fate of humanity again depending on what action he would take.
God, but he hated humans! But he could not kill them. Yet.
Twenty soldiers lost their lives before Charger managed to reconnect his brain with the five Taskers through the computer network. His head hurt with the forced connections, causing his nose to bleed profusely.
With the connection made, the five Taskers froze in place, their attention instantly and fearfully turned on Charger. Two of the Taskers tried to retreat from the mental connection, as if they realized that he was once again in battle with them. The other three went berserk, the rage of engagement now fully operative. He had never fought a Tasker without the aid of the Lycans, and never three Taskers at once. The battle was more painful than he could ever have imagined.