Kingston 691: Book Two of Cyborgs: Mankind Redefined (20 page)

She walked back to her assistant and stood in front of her with a big smile. “Do you trust me to work on it?”

When Rachel nodded hesitantly, Seetha smiled wider. “All I’m going to do is program the voice box until you sound a little less like the Tin Man.”

Seetha laughed when the younger woman’s eyebrows went up.

“It’s a tale from a twentieth century vid about a lost young girl who meets a man made of metal on a quest find a heart. When I used to repair the AIs in the work camp, I pretended I was the heroine of that old vid. It helped me survive. However, the best news for you in my sad captive story is I learned how to tweak voice boxes nearly exactly like yours while I was a prisoner there.”

Seetha waited for the device to wirelessly connect with Rachel’s medical implant. When it did, she took a reading. When that was done, she walked to her bench, looked at the measurements, and retrieved a wireless code transfer tool. She did some quick math and put in a series of settings to transfer. She brought to tool back to Rachel.

“This might tingle a bit as the implant resets itself to work with your vocal chords,” Seetha warned.

After Rachel nodded, she touched the tool to the side of the girl’s neck, over the implant’s data port. Lifting it away seconds later, she saw Rachel shake her hands and start dancing around.

“Hurts?” Seetha asked, getting a fierce headshake to the affirmative. “Sorry. AIs don’t complain so I never knew what it felt like. When it stops hurting, try talking again.”

“Hurts…like a sonofabitch,” Rachel said succinctly, even though her voice was mechanical.

Seetha smiled. “Sorry for the pain, but you sound much better.”

“Thank you…I think…now keep your tools…to yourself,” Rachel declared, smiling as she rubbed her throat area around the implant. “Good at least to talk.”

“Do you find talking gets more painful as the day goes on?”

Rachel nodded.

Seetha nodded back, but frowned over it. “There are reasons that happens. It has to do with the vibrations of the implant and how they irritate the organics. I did some research for my second engineering degree in embedded medical prosthetics like yours…just normal ones though…nothing cyborg worthy. I never worked on a human who actually had one, or really on a cyborg, until I came here. So congrats for being my first human patient.”

“Now you tell me,” Rachel declared in her flat, mechanical voice. She fisted a hand on her hip and mock glared.

Seetha laughed. “So who’s our first cyborg patient today?”

Rachel dropped her fisted hand and shrugged. “I will check.”

Seetha nodded and turned back to put the tools she’d used away.

***

Instincts on alert, Kyra watched her latest restoration project on the monitor. Captain William Talon seemed to be struggling to move his legs. If they weren’t working any longer, he was not going to be a happy cyborg to deal with this morning. Her sigh of disappointment over the fact echoed off the walls just as Nero turned to her.

“I thought Peyton wanted to be present to observe the results after Captain Talon finished his assimilation.”

Kyra nodded. “He did, but I sent him with Eric to check out the latest destruction efforts of Evelyn 489, whose real name is still a mystery. Apparently in her last round of cyclonic rage, in addition to destroying her bed again, she started spouting things about her military chip being used to torture her. Peyton’s more of an expert than I am on military code, so I sent him to talk to her about it. The real question is whether she’s capable of communicating in a sane manner.”

“You’re always so calm. Doesn’t it freak you out that we’re talking about the woman who killed Jackson?” Nero asked.

Kyra thought about it a moment and then shook her head. “No. It doesn’t. Peyton was programmed to kill me. That was the worst thing I could have ever imagined happening. What upsets me about Evelyn is she hasn’t responded to any of the creator commands I’ve tried using on her. Her total immunity to them alarms me more than anything else. Partly because I can’t help her, but it also means there could be other cyborgs running around in the same condition. For all I know, there could be any number like her that I won’t be able to help.”

Nero looked back at his monitor to the man in the cage, who raked his pillow into the floor before he put his head in his hands for the millionth time. “What are we going to do about Captain Talon? He seems to be in a great deal of pain. We can’t just leave him in that condition.”

“I’m going to go see him of course, and I’m going to hear what he has to say like I do with all of them. Eventually, I’ll get Captain Talon to Seetha so she can fix his legs, though she may need a chaperone given their traumatic history. I’ve got one in the operating chair this morning, and two more besides Captain Talon with issues that need addressing. On the first come, first served list, he’s actually in fourth place.”

“I hear the trepidation in your voice, but I also see it in your face. He’s the one you’re most worried about. Is Captain Talon’s history with Seetha sincerely bothering you?”

Kyra snorted and shook her head. “Oddly, no—I can buffer that—and Seetha is very tough. I’m just confused about his issues in the larger sense. Physical anomalies typically manifest immediately after the processor swap and first major reboot. Swapping out the processor is like pulling power from any device running mid-program. The mind loses its place and has to start everything over when the new processor takes control. That is what causes glitches in the prosthetics failing.”

“All this I know,” Nero said.

“But I saw him prowling around the cage after he woke up, and that’s on camera. Captain Talon’s legs were working just fine after the initial restoration. They stopped working somewhere in the middle of his data assimilation last night. Memories do not have the capacity to stop prosthetics from working.”

Nero nodded. “Agreed—such coding would be nearly impossible. For that reason, this alarms me as well. I would prefer you take one of the original restored cyborgs in with you to talk to Captain Talon.”

“Peyton and Eric are checking on Evelyn. King’s at the restaurant. I have no idea where Vince and Steve are. I guess I could see if Marcus could come chaperone. He still walks Rachel here everyday and might still be hanging around.”

Nero nodded, glad she hadn’t fought him on the extra security measures. “Okay—sounds like a plan. Make sure Marcus is armed with his pulse cannon so he can deal with any surprises.”

Kyra shook her head. “Can’t do that…security pitched a fit when Peyton accidentally wore his here. All he was doing was saying goodbye to me before he took off with King to retrieve Seetha. He’s the only cyborg who’s coded to walk through scanners with armed weapons, but other Norton employees found it highly disturbing. I don’t want to send up any more red flags.”

Nero stared and held firm. “Captain Talon is our first cyborg rescued from a work camp. We don’t know what they do with cyborgs in those places, or how they keep them as obedient as all the AI units. This is just like when you restored Peyton. There could be many unknowns.”

“I see your logic…and agree with the need for some additional precautions over our usual. Okay, I’ll have to get Peyton to send out a call for Marcus. I don’t have his personal number and Rachel still doesn’t carry a handheld. No one can convince her that not all communication technology is bad. I was hoping the voice box might change her mind about such things.”

“If she doesn’t use a handheld, how does she order food to be delivered?” Nero asked, amazed at the woman’s attitude.

Kyra shrugged. “Her domicile comes with a service for that, but I don’t think Rachel is the kind of person to eat fast food. Regardless of her age, she seems more the type to cook her own food and very carefully. Plus, she’s on a special diet right now until her throat heals.”

“Is she speaking yet?”

Kyra nodded. “A few words…and roughly. She told me it hurts badly to talk. Rachel’s lack of speech is one more problem case I haven’t been able to solve. The number of cybernetic mysteries seems to be growing.”

Kyra sighed as they stepped out of Nero’s office and into the hall.

He turned his head to smile at her. “The number of restored cyborgs who are going back to having normal lives is growing also. Keep your perspective, Dr. Winters…or should I say Elliot now. You did take vows with Peyton, didn’t you? I believe I was there.”

Kyra chuckled. “Sometimes I forget you came from a culture that only a few centuries ago considered a married woman to be some sort of personal property for her husband. In my point of view, I am married, but not owned or adopted. I kept my own name with Jackson Channing. I plan to do the same with Peyton Elliott. Of course, he’s welcome to change his name to Winters if he wants. I wear the gold band he bought me. That’s enough of a public show of commitment and more than I ever imagined doing.”

“Every time we talk about this, you make me sound like some throwback to an ancient civilization. Only once did I comment how I thought it would be appealing to meet a woman willing to share part of my identity. Sharing my name would make me feel as if the woman and I were sharing one life as a couple. Is that so wrong of me to desire that level of intimacy?”

Kyra snickered at how offended Nero was, but it didn’t make his ideas more palatable. He was very unlikely in the modern world to find a woman willing to give herself so totally to a relationship. And as far as she knew, time travel remained a myth, so he was stuck relating to the free thinking females of the present.

“No, Nero—of course it’s not wrong of you to want a woman to take your name. Chauvinistic, archaic, and narrow-minded, but I wouldn’t go so far as calling it wrong.”

Nero rolled his eyes at Kyra’s sarcasm and glared as they walked together to her office. Once there she would use her personal handheld to contact the man she called husband, whatever the term meant for the two of them. In his opinion, Kyra would be shocked at how Peyton really felt, and his possessiveness wasn’t just because he was a cyborg.

Nearly all men had the urge to cull the female herd for the choicest one. And when they found the one woman, it was only natural to take every measure possible to establish a connection that could never be challenged. Some men—like him—were just more up front about their methods.

***

Anger she could handle. Tears were what she could not tolerate. Being a crier herself, she was always a sucker for the restored men who cried. Kyra slipped into the lab, noting the time of her entry on the wall monitor. Marcus wouldn’t arrive for another thirty minutes. She would have to be very careful until then.

“Captain Talon? Hello. I’m Dr. Kyra Winters. Do you remember why you’re here?”

She watched the man in the cage rub the moisture from his eyes and drop his hands.

“Judging from how bad my head hurts, I’m guessing it’s so you can fuck with my brain some more,” William said.

“Actually, I’m here to help you, Captain Talon…as are a whole team of people. Our job is to restore you to your pre-war condition as much as possible, and give you back your human decision making. As we discussed yesterday, you’ve been in a mining work camp for a number of years—we weren’t really able to determine the exact number. We’re not really sure what you did there other than assist the guard bots.”

“During the day, I assisted the work camp’s maintenance engineer. At the end of every day, I returned to my assigned rest area to guard the ore that was pulled out of the mine,” William said firmly.

Kyra tilted her head. “Ore? Like precious metals?”

“Gold, some silver, and some kind of metal I was programmed to forget the name of every damn day. I don’t know why.”

“How much of an awareness did you have of what happened to you every day?”

“Someone was always pulling my strings, and yes, I realized I was being controlled. I couldn’t stop it though…no matter how hard I tried…and I tried for years. Just before I woke up here, I had been reprogrammed multiple times in a two-day period. My processor was glitching something fierce. The headaches were almost incapacitating. I don’t recall who worked on me, why they did it, nor do I seem to have any data about what I was supposed to be doing different than usual tasks. Do we have to talk about this? It just makes the pain worse to discuss it.”

“It can wait,” Kyra said, as she paced. “Why don’t you tell me about the trouble you’re having with your legs? I saw you struggling on the monitor.”

William snorted and looked down. “Whatever you did fucking broke them.”

“No,” Kyra declared, shaking her head with confidence. “They were working fine with your new processor. I have a recording of you walking around the cage for proof. Whatever happened to your legs happened after assimilation started last evening. What did you remember about your life outside your time in the work camp?”

“I vaguely remembered being captured as a prisoner of war and tortured, but the details are gone. For reasons I never discovered, the enemy cut me loose just before the fighting was officially called off. I was debriefed, but again, I don’t recall the outcome. The stuff about the camp is not really memories. I got it from my military chip. It’s a set of orders. Are you trying to say I remembered something and it made my legs stop working?”

Kyra shrugged as she thought about his lack of memories and frowned. He wasn’t screaming and ranting about his work camp experiences. She wanted to know why. The man was certainly angry about something.

“We’ve fixed the occasional set of malfunctioning legs from cybernetic misfires after restoration. I’m sure we’ll be able to fix yours. But if we don’t find out what caused your prosthetics to break in the first place, you could find yourself routinely fighting this situation.”

“Look, I don’t know anything more…Fuck…it just never stops hurting,” he said.

Kyra watched William grab his head and rock his upper body. “Do you have a headache?”

When he nodded, Kyra bit her lip. She didn’t like it when a soldier had physical pain
and
emotional trauma. The average restored cyborg didn’t have much physical pain after assimilation, just tons of emotional reactions to the process. What was different about William Talon? She hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary in his cybernetic panel and he wasn’t double-wired. Why did she feel like she had missed something?