Kingston 691: Book Two of Cyborgs: Mankind Redefined (8 page)

“Says the woman who loves to shop.”

Seetha smiled at her mother’s shrug. Annalise Harrington had always been big on maintaining a proper appearance. More than half of the clothes she owned had come from her mother—definitely all the beautiful, impractical ones.

Seetha crossed her arms as she stared. Her mother was generous, but had a strict moral code that would have made any religious leader wince in shame.

“Why aren’t you mad at me for what I did? A normal mother would be ranting about what a fool I was to go tearing off just because I got my heart broken. You can go ahead and say it if you feel that way about what I did. I deserve to hear how upset you are and I will listen completely before I apologize for the millionth time.”

Annalise laughed wryly and shook her head. “Don’t you know every woman makes mistakes when she falls in love? I’ve certainly made romantic errors blindly, but I’ve also made some with my eyes wide open. It’s just a part of life. How can I blame you for your heartache when I watched it happen? I hate this too…and darling, King forgetting you wasn’t your fault.”

Seetha tilted her head and gave her mother a disbelieving look as she got up and paced. Compared to her cell at the work camp, the small bedroom was spacious.

“What mistakes did you ever make with a man? Daddy was great. Lane was great. You managed to marry two great men, Mother. Not me though—I married a logic-driven cyborg whose every memory of me got erased out of existence. I was dumb, dumb, and more dumb to think I could control who and what Norton did to King. First, I spent over a decade’s worth of savings to buy him. Then I spent the rest of my money, and some of
yours
, to keep Norton from updating him. Did it do me or him any good? No. All I did was postpone the inevitable, which eventually happened anyway. He wasn’t even harmed by it. He came right back, all programmed and ready to be my walking, talking man toy again. I should have been dating plain, old human males, instead of trying to convert the unconvertible. No sane woman falls in love with a cyborg’s damn picture and buys him because of it.”

“Seetha…”

“Sorry for the bad language—I picked up the habit of swearing at the guard bot.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.” Annalise sighed, lifted her daughter’s hand, and clutched it tightly to her chest. “Listen to me, Seetha Harrington. You were just following your heart every step you took with Kingston. And it may shock you to hear this, but after you left, I married a cyborg myself.”

Seetha snorted. “I can’t believe you married a cyborg after seeing the hell I went through. Mother, you really are a die-hard optimist.”

“Our relationship was just platonic. You bought a cyborg for love, but I bought one to save him from a worse fate. The man remains very special to me even though he’s no longer a real part of my life. And I’ll tell you the same thing I told him—I’m glad Dr. Winters liberated him. He deserves to be free to live as he pleases.”

Seetha sighed heavily and hugged her mother. “I’m sorry you lost another big bunch of money reacting to my freak-out. I’m as sorry for you as I am for myself.”

Annalise shook her head. She swallowed hard, accepting the time to confess was now.

“Seetha, I purposely let your house go back to the mortgage company because I needed the money to buy Kingston back from Norton. I knew when you returned him that you were making the biggest mistake of your life. You were hurting so bad you couldn’t see his suffering or how unfair it was for him to just have his life taken away. I couldn’t stop you from sending him back, but I did manage to undo it.”

Seetha pulled her hand from her mother’s and walked a short distance away. “Are you saying that you bought…
King
? That he was with you the whole time I was gone?”

Annalise bit her lip and nodded. “Yes. I couldn’t stand the idea of some strange woman making him do things to her. It seemed so wrong after seeing the two of you together. Plus, I simply couldn’t bear to lose both of you. While we waited for you to come home, he tended the tomatoes and cooked. I know it was a very boring life for him, but I sincerely believed one day you’d come back and wish you had kept him.”

Seetha shook her head as she tried to come to terms with what she was hearing. Tears threatened. What her mother did…all the money—the millions—she must have spent to save King…it boggled the mind.

“I am so sorry…so very, very sorry…that I put us both through what I did. I swear I just wanted to get away from my failed relationship for a while. I wasn’t planning the break to last more than a few weeks.”

Annalise walked to put her arms around her child, refusing to be pushed away again.

“You were just trying to survive the pain of losing someone you loved. I know well what that feels like, Seetha. I loved your father…and I loved Lane. I figured King was going to be a captive one way or the other, no matter who had him. At least with me, he was relatively safe…and not being taken advantage of sexually. I don’t know what he’s done with women since he’s been restored, but there was no one the whole time you were gone. He was being faithful to you, even though he didn’t know it.”

Seetha let the tears leak out. “I have no words of gratitude big enough, but thank you, Mother.”

Annalise hugged her hurting daughter tightly. “You’re welcome. He’s welcome too…though I’m not sure he completely understands I had his best interests in mind when I bought his contract.”

Seetha shook her head again. “King may never figure it out. He’s…strange now. I’m still the invisible woman to him though—I saw it for myself. He’s nice and polite, but there’s nothing there, just like when Norton returned him.”

Annalise petted her daughter’s hair. “I’m sorry then. I hear the hurt in your voice. I promise you one day you’ll love again and this loss will fade to something you can manage. Life has a way of going on even when you don’t want it to.”

Seetha nodded and felt her mother tip her chin up.

“King may be very different, but some of the man you loved lives on in who and what he’s become. After Kingston was restored, he opened a restaurant.”

“
He did?
Good,” Seetha declared, honestly pleased. It was like hearing the news about his human decision making being restored. All she could feel was elation and relief that no one would ever take his life from him again.

“Yes, I thought it was good too.” Annalise squeezed hard. “Then one day I went to see him at his new restaurant and told him the truth about why I had bought him. He was very kind…just like you saw. When I told him you were missing, Kingston promised he would find you and bring you home to me. And he did just exactly what he said he would, even though he didn’t remember his time with you. Though I will miss him being a real part of our lives, I will always be grateful to him for bringing you home.”

Seetha nodded. “Yes. So will I. He came just when I needed him most. I guess I should count my blessings instead of mourning for what I’ve lost.”

She hadn’t shared the fact she’d almost been killed with her mother. No charges would be made against Norton’s negligence, or the UCN’s faulty database, so there was no need to pass along to her mother the same nightmares she kept having over and over. What she had endured in the work camp was a burden she would bear alone. She would consider it penance for all the pain she’d caused the woman who raised her.

“So…how is the food at King’s restaurant?” Seetha asked, trying to shift her mind to the positive.

Annalise laughed. “Actually…I don’t know. I didn’t stay to eat anything after I talked to him. The bread is good and the wine is excellent. Kingston sources locally so most items on the menu are very healthy and cost worthy. Maybe we can break in your new wardrobe and go try the food together.”

“Sure,” Seetha declared, but the idea depressed her. She didn’t know if she had enough emotional fortitude to watch King being happy in a life that was never going to include her.

Chapter 6

“Play the next vid,” King ordered, staring at the display which had just finished playing back one of his many erased files. “I want to see all of the recordings.”

“Are you sure, King? We’ve been at this for hours now. What I’ve shown you so far is just a random sampling of what was captured in long term storage. It took me nearly a full work week to look through all the material. You can read the data files on a handheld, but the videos have to be watched at the same speed they were recorded for the language to be properly heard. And keep in mind—these are not really your memories—not in the normal sense. They are short recordings of what your processor sporadically deduced was significant enough to collect through your vision and hearing implants. We didn’t know you had those until we saw these vids. Now it turns out your entire team got both even if those weren’t part of the official records. Only Peyton’s implants are official. He has nearly everything Norton ever put into a cyborg.”

King was numb…and somewhat in shock...over Nero’s reduction of what he was seeing and hearing. Was it just data? Fuck no, it wasn’t. It was his damn life. It was his past. And what he was seeing and hearing was exactly what Annalise had described.

He had been cyborg…and yet not a cyborg…or at least not completely one. Whatever he had been had smiled and laughed at everything Seetha Harrington said and did. Each recording was like watching an entertainment vid—fascinating but surreal—even though he and Seetha were the actors.

“Does Norton consider the information they took from me to be theirs, Nero?” King knew it was a dumb question when he asked, but he just wanted to hear someone be logical when they explained it to him.

Nero nodded as he shrugged. “Yes. A cyborg’s collection of data from long term storage was routinely removed and scrubbed during yearly maintenance. Usually the storage area was wiped clean to allow for new information to be recorded and stored. Your collection from all those years you weren’t upgraded was atypically large. By the time Norton finally got you away from your engineer wife, your storage area was likely on the brink of being at full capacity. They cite in their work logs your data pull took an entire day. It was one of the primary reasons they kept it all. No one wanted to take the time to go through it. Then afterward, Seetha’s complaints about your personality change brought up questions they probably planned to investigate at some point. Hence the lockdown on it.”

King’s mind said Nero’s explanation made perfect sense, but his gut was not in agreement. There was something missing there, some story about his situation, Nero was not capturing with his logical deductions.

“What would have happened to me if I’d filled up the storage area completely? Would my processor have shut down or rebooted me on its own?”

Nero shrugged. “Hard to say. To the best of my knowledge, filling up a storage area has never happened in recorded cyborg history. Yearly maintenance prevented it. I do find it strange Norton let your contract wife hold them off for so long.”

“I was thinking the same thing—and that maybe they wanted to see what might happen,” King stated.

“When Kyra restored Peyton, she blocked his storage off temporarily, which is what I think your processor would have tried to do if long term storage had gotten too full. She said Peyton acted almost completely human after she did that. She also said his sense of time reverted instantly to his last recorded human memory. That state of being lasted the whole time the long term cybernetic data was inaccessible.”

“Did Peyton go nuts on Doc any way at all?” King asked.

Nero laughed. “No, he flirted with her until she confessed what was going on, then he got angry. Peyton believed Kyra had captured him during a field mission your team was conducting. It was very traumatic for him later when Kyra removed the block and let him process all his time in the Cyber Husband program. He felt even more angry then, and destroyed everything in his confinement cage. Who could blame him? Not me. I’d have been mad too to know I’d been bought and sold by my government.”

King crossed his arms. “Peyton at least got to keep all of his past though, no matter how shitty it was to discover it. I don’t have any real sense of what I went through being Seetha Harrington’s Cyber Husband. Tell me something—do you think this stuff you’ve found is technically mine as well as Norton’s?”

Nero thought about it briefly and then nodded. “I guess you could say I consider this information to be yours as well. Why?”

King lifted his gaze and his chin. “Because I want everything I forgot about my time with Seetha Harrington put back into my head.”

Nero blinked and stared. He chuckled softly, but stopped instantly when he saw King glaring at his amusement. “Well…I…don’t really know how to answer without risking an ass-kicking. It doesn’t exactly work that way.”

“
Why the hell not?
Just put it all on a chip and stick it back where it came from.”

Nero shook his head as he spoke. “No. I can’t do that, King. You don’t have room for all this data, and you can’t give up what you have been collecting since your restoration. We could put the Cyber Husband chip back, but only with some very basic information on it. But the rest…?”

Nero’s arm swept out to include both their viewing consoles.

“You’re going to have keep the rest of this on some kind of external disk. In a sense, watching the vids and reading the reports will be a way of partially putting the information back. Well, except it will be processed mostly by the human side of your brain this time, and as you know, you won’t retain
everything
that way. Unless you are gifted with an eidetic memory, your human mind will be very selective about what it decides to keep. You might have recall of one or two percent.”

King heard the words and processed the logic, but he wanted back the memories of the laughing woman on the vids. He also wanted to be the chuckling man who recorded the info again. Both of those desires were rapidly becoming his obsessions. He had every right to have all his memories returned.

“Maybe I’m not being clear about what I want, Nero. I want
all
of my life back which includes this information. I don’t want to hear how impossible it is. Just tell me how you or Doc can make it happen.”