The man swallowed and his shoulders dropped a fraction. Good.
“She’s not…dangerous?”
The agent’s dislike of childish notions warred with expediency, and expediency won out.
“No, but she’ll need her mission superior. Thank you for telling me about her condition.”
“Of course.” The man stood a little straighter. “I thought I should.”
Of course you did. The agent gave his most convincing smile as he turned toward the camp. “Did she…mention anything else?”
“No. Why?”
“There are triggers that will trip if her programming breaks down past certain barriers. She might have mentioned needing you to contact headquarters? Or asked for a sedative?”
“No.” The man shook his head. “Nothing like that. What does that mean?”
“It means it’s not a serious situation,” the agent lied promptly, hoping that the sudden leap of terror didn’t show in his eyes. Something had malfunctioned. Something was seriously wrong.
Or it didn’t mean anything. He needed to breathe. He needed to remember that it might genuinely be nothing at all, but in the meantime, another part of his mind was telling him calmly that it was an experimental program. They had no idea what might go wrong out here.
His body kept moving somehow. A calm gesture opened a pill case and he lifted a capsule to his mouth, swallowed. His resistances were nothing compared to hers.
“I’m going to the Phoenix to see if she needs help,” he heard himself say.
“But she took the buggy.”
“Then I’ll take the shuttle,” the agent snapped, fear winning out at last. He paused and forced a smile. “The Erasmus should still be in orbit. Let them know we’ll be a bit delayed.”
“Yes, sir.” The official trailed back to the main campsite, looking panicked. “And she’ll be all right? They always say to do whatever we need to do to get the cyborg out.”
“We’ll get her out.” Sedated, if necessary, but they’d do it. He’d sat through the same damned training, some executive droning on about Getz Corp’s assets, how much this program was doing for humanity, how every precaution needed to be taken to make sure Bourian companies didn’t get their hands on this tech. And all it boiled down to was how much Getz spent on each and every one of these. That woman was a walking goldmine, and she probably didn’t even realize it anymore. He had the impression they probably didn’t tell the cyborgs everyone was watching out for them.
“Maybe we should come with you to the Phoenix.”
The agent blinked. Fear was naked in the man’s voice, and it took a moment to think of what he might do if he didn’t think anything was wrong. Would he tell them to stay? Yes.
And it was still the correct choice. If the cyborg decided they were her target, having a shuttle would make about as much difference as a hula hoop.
“You haven’t got the resistance built up,” the agent said simply. “It’s much safer for you here.”
Their deaths would be quicker, at any rate. He didn’t wait for a response, only ducked into the shuttle and shut the door in the man’s face and swung into the seat, leaned his head back as he pressed in the coordinates. The shuttle lifted beneath him, autopilot kicking in.
It was nothing. He was overreacting. Slow progress through a crashed ship was to be expected, and God only knew what condition the bodies were in at this point. Deep breaths. He had to calm himself before he did something regrettable. A cyborg was always top priority, always worth more than the mission.
Suddenly, savagely, he pulled out the gun, checked the clip. Regulations be damned. He would not sit around waiting to be killed, letting this mission go to hell and his record get dinged, just so some high-value asset could get back in one piece. There were other cyborgs they could use. If she threatened them…if she was going to go rogue…
Deep breaths. He simply didn’t want to wait to die like some animal in a cage, that was all. He put the gun back in its holster and pulled up the mission brief. He’d do everything by the letter. He’d call her in. And if she did anything weird, he’d shoot her. It was as simple as that. He scrolled to the appendices, and his lips moved as he read.
“In the event that the asset is compromised…”
When the shuttle touched down a scant few moments later, the agent ducked under the rising door and strode toward the Phoenix. She was in there somewhere. She might even be watching him. He just had to count on getting to her failsafes before she noticed the safety of his gun was off.
* * *
“Indigo.” The voice crackled over her transponder.
It was all coming apart. She stumbled and fell against one of the walls, tinny breath echoing in her ears from the mask. She could feel the implants scrubbing radiation damage, a constant set of pinpricks, the hum of the protective field generated near her sternum. Everything working as it should, except her.
Retrieve the implants. She slid down the wall—floor, everything was sideways—and uncurled her hand. The slip of paper was soaked with her sweat.
SCHEHERAZADE.
A sob and a gasp caught her ear, and she rolled her head. A woman, blonde-haired, blood dribbling from the corner of her mouth. Infrared showed the wound in her chest and an implant in her forearm. Standard reflex enhancements, nothing fancy. But the mission was to retrieve all of the implants. All of them. Indigo crawled to her target. A knife parted the skin, and tweezers yanked the implant free. The woman gave a choking cry.
She wasn’t going to make it; help was too far away, and the cyborg had no medical supplies for live bodies. She reached out, the woman’s brown eyes tracking her, and planted a bullet in the woman’s head. No more pain.
She wondered if they could hear the gunshot from the camp. She slumped back and let her head tip against the wall, dragged in a breath. Everything that should be automatic was failing her. She knew the mission, but it hadn’t implanted deep enough to trigger her.
She’d played with the shape of her mind. The fact was, this should mean nothing to her. She was a cyborg, she existed only Now. Mission memories were lost, surrendered to the wipe. A cyborg had no guilty conscience, nothing to remember. Not her orders, not her memories.
She would not remember this, she realized, and panic gripped her. It would all be white soon. White was comforting, always had been. White hallways, white lights, soft voices, wiping it all away. No matter how bad things got, the memories would be lifted away, leaving only the faintest impression behind. Here was dirty and dark and bloody death and pain that crackled in the air like static on her human half, and it would all be gone when she got back to the Erasmus.
She should want it to be gone, so that she could lie in her bed and be as clean as the ship, and as whole. They would put her back together in the chair and wipe over all of this with white. Erased, detoxed… But there was something terrifying about the thought of not remembering this. She would have no memory at all of crouching in the dark, amazed that anything could hurt so much, ripping apart in her chest. She felt terror of what was coming, a fracturing of self—and still she could not let the pain go. It was now the ground she stood on.
Were humans built on fears, hard won and precious? Fire-water-cold-fangs, preset, and the others built up from a lifetime of encounters: storms-spiders-space…and all of it led here, to the loss of a scrap of paper, a single link to her past self, to the first nagging sense of dissonance that led her to keep it. A warning. Fear was to carry a human in time, past consciousness now, and a cyborg had no past. She could no longer even remember the choice to become what she was. Was it fear that had driven her here to begin with?
If so, she had found a new fear—a worse fear. She remembered that she was supposed to be removing implants, and she was doing so, and neither the knowledge nor the action gave her any comfort. It was not the loss of the assignment that had crippled her, as she thought, it was the knowledge that things could go wrong. And she had to have known they could, once. They’
d made her sign waivers. You always had to sign waivers.
And here she was, because she’d forgotten that fear. She’d forgotten that it could always, always go wrong. The one next to her in the operating room had died. Wide, staring eyes. Chest not moving.
It was all coming undone, memories surfacing and images racing through her mind. What was in the pieces? What was left? If she fell apart, was there anything left of a consciousness? Would she be stuck, streaming information and never knowing what it meant, never able to ask for it to stop, stop, stop—
The gun was in her mouth and she was gagging, choking, tears bleeding into her lashes.
“Indigo.” Again, softly, the catch of the radio clicking off. Emotions skittered through the notes of the word, the guttural catch in the back of her throat. Longing, wanting to touch—and revulsion. She had seen it in his eyes on the ship. Hadn’t thought it mattered. Many people did not like her, and it had not hurt her yet.
Or what if it had? How would she know? She existed, but what had she survived, and by how wide a margin? What fears should she be carrying?
“You haven’t reached the bridge yet,” the agent said. “Are you injured? …Are you all right?”
It was a kind question. Something jarred distantly in her mind, discordant. She withdrew the gun from her mouth slowly. Was her name Indigo? Not important. Important was the fear, cascading down from the memory: a form in her operating room, all black with the blue Getz Corp logo, a known quantity of danger, comforting in its familiarity. Her pass code dropped out of his lips and hooked deep, and she wiped her hands on a towel and followed him out of the room without looking back at the soldier on the table. Her eyes caught faint tension in his neck; he wanted to be inside her skin, she thought at the time, but the dilation in his pupils didn’t fit.
He had been professional, but he would never be kind unless he wanted something. It had to be the mission. Did he know it was failing, too?
“Everything is all right,” she responded back. I’m malfunctioning, please give me a…
“We could give you a sedative.” His voice was warm and close, breath on the back of her neck, the solid comfort of a body next to hers. Her eyes drifted closed. “If you’re tired, you could go back to the Erasmus. We could delay the mission.”
Her eyes opened, pupils dilating in the darkness to allow ocular implants to take over.
So he didn’t know the mission was failing.
Then why was he here?
I’m malfunctioning, she wanted to say. It would feel so good to say, wouldn’t it? She knew it would. Her body was primed for the rush of it.
But if she spoke the words, he would take her back, and she could not go back. She had to understand, and if they took her back they would wipe it away, and she was so close, so close to understanding.
“I don’t want to come out.”
“Indigo, I can help you.”
Trustworthy. He would get her fixed, wouldn’t he? Mission supervisors were always trustworthy. Best training in the universe. A cyborg’s right hand, one instructor said, and he always laughed when he said it.
“I don’t need help.” She was backing away, past the woman’s body. She wiped one sticky palm on her pants. She was falling apart and he could not see. He would put her back together.
“You’re scared.”
She froze in a doorway, flinching away from the sound of his voice. It was all coming up in the fracture, pieces of a whole person.
I’m Scheherazade, and even if not, I’m me—I remember I was before, and I exist now.
It was too much information to hold. She wasn’t used to it anymore, memories triggering and slowing her reflexes. She’d learned to take only what she was given and move quickly, implants firing and emotions dampened. That was why they took the memories. She remembered the burst of color in her mind every time she saw the word printed on the scrap of paper. Color. Her memories were not supposed to have color.
“Every cyborg has a mission that doesn’t take.”
“They do?” It didn’t even sound like her voice.
“You’re extraordinary, Indigo. This is your first.”
“It is?” Frozen, unable to back away and run from the cracking in her soul, unable to accept the wipe.
“And it can all go away. We’ll find what went wrong. You’ll never have to worry about this again.”
But we will, because I did it. Do you realize it was me?
He very well might.
And when it was over, she would be just like all of them, wiped and docile, memories gone until another word caught and she wrote something more, and ten missions later, fifteen, twenty, she would be here again, and she would be scared, and she wouldn’t remember that she’d survived it, would she?
What if he was lying, and it had happened before?
Her hand was shaking, the scrap of paper tightly rolled. She didn’t need to open it to see what it said. She could remember every imprecision of her handwriting; apparently, penmanship wasn’t one of the things they fixed in the conversion.
She wouldn’t even remember that about herself when she went on her next mission. If she could only talk him out of the wipe—
The fracture roared in her mind, squeezed a cry from her chest. She was breaking, she was in pieces and there was nothing underneath at all. She was huddled on the floor, scrap of paper in her palm, and nothing could block the images that were coming. No framework. No knowledge.
She wasn’t built for this anymore. She wasn’t human, was she?
“Indigo. You’re scared.”
Her lips were moving. Scheherazade, Scheherazade, Scheherazade. It wasn’t fitting, it wasn’t a whole thought, and the answer to it was down below the chaos. Pieces not fitting, she wasn’t giving herself enough for a pattern, and she never would if she went with him.
And yet…she was splitting down the middle. She looked out, finding a tiny crack in the hull of the ship, and saw him waiting. Afraid. His hand was hovering near his hip.
“They won’t shut me down?” she asked him quietly, and she saw his shoulders drop slightly.
“No. They would never do that.”
Did she hear bitterness?
“I want to keep a thought,” she told him, rolling the paper in her palm. She was sniffing, and she could not say why. Her throat hurt. Tears.
“A thought that hurts?” he guessed astutely.
She said nothing.
“If it’s hurting you, they can take it away. You don’t want to keep it.”
I do.
“Come out. They’ll be able to explain what went wrong, you know. They’ll be able to help.”
A sensor pinged at her wrist. The radiation was reaching even her upper limits. She had to leave.
Or die. Was it better to die, knowing part of it, or live with all of it taken away from her? She clenched her hand around the scrap of paper and waited for it to coalesce. Breathed.
It was never going to make sense, was it? And she could make the chaos go quiet. The shards of broken glass and shattered patterns would be smoothed down.
She turned her hand and uncurled her fingers. She dropped the scrap of paper. Her legs carried her up without volition, and her fingertips stretched down for the tiny curl on the bloody floor, but then she walked slowly down the broken beam and into the night, to the glare of the shuttle engines and the mission supervisor waiting for her.
The chaos would go quiet. That was the promise.
He could make it go quiet, and she would be in the chair again, calm.
And what did she have left to give up, really?
* * *
It took everything he had not to curl his fingers around the gun when she emerged, but the fear eased as he saw her move. She wasn’t a cyborg anymore, not really. The smooth motions were interrupted by an awkward hitch in her step, jerky turns of her head. She was breathing hard.
He’d send the code in a moment. Asset malfunction. He had never experienced this. Had anyone? Not
important. He just had to get her to come sit in the shuttle, and he could give her a sedative.
He held out his hand and she took one uncertain step. Stopped. Her hand went to her waist and so did his.
“You want to shoot me,” she said. There was no inflection in her voice.
A wave of hatred—how dare she see it, how dare she not care—and one thought penetrated: she had not lifted her own gun. She did not mean to kill him.
“No,” he lied. Long minutes of panic began to fall away. He was shaking. And it was only a half-lie—he had wanted to, but he would not. “You’re malfunctioning. We can get you to the Erasmus for a wipe.”
She flinched.
“Do you not want a wipe?”
“Of course I do,” she said, but her voice was very small. Saying what she was supposed to. Something in his chest broke, warm, and he smiled at her.
“It will be okay,” he told her gently. “And then you can come back to finish the mission. Would you like that?” The mission was a cyborg’s highest reward structure. Always speak of the mission.
“We can’t complete the mission,” she said blankly. “The core is melting down. We need to go.”
“It is?” He hadn’t, of course, been watching the monitors. “We’ll confirm with the ground crew.”
“We don’t have time for that.” Simple. No compromise. Her fear was gone. “We have to go now. Leave the ground crew.”
“Unacceptable,” he heard himself say. That was good: a strong voice. The voice of a man who got promoted. “The entire team must be extracted. Anything else is a mission failure.”
Getz Corp did not have failed missions.
“But if we all die, that’s also a mission failure,” she observed gravely. “And we won’t be able to get them all in time.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sixty-four percent probability,” she said promptly.
She was trained to act on anything more than half, he remembered. And she did not even care. He’d be thrown out of the company, and she…she would just keep being one of their highest-priority assets. Of course. Bile rose in his throat.
The Cyborg Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) Page 20
