Eric 754

by Donna McDonald

  It did bother him that he didn’t know what he waited for even though he knew he waited.

  But he would know soon. He would know when the correct prompt came. He would know what to do, and after he did the thing which was required, he would feel liberated again. He would earn the self-evolving logic chip he’d been promised. It was a new and improved version of the one he’d had just before this one—the one that had been destroyed by the virus.

  Thinking about the past made him physically tense because it was like a long stream of half understood content with shadows shielding large parts from being completely understood.

  Who was he? Each time he checked his cybernetic identification appeared to be missing.

  Something so very simple as his name and ID ought to be easily found within his functional cybernetics. Oddly, his maintenance program seemed to have a block on several unidentified chips. This was not anything he understood either. What purpose did the block serve?

  Was he still broken?

  This upgrade was not good—not good at all. He felt completely dysfunctional—in fact, extremely dysfunctional. Yet he lacked the ability to determine a percentage. His logic chip seemed resistant to doing the math.

  He closed his eyes and decided he might as well run diagnostics again. It took a while and gave him something to do while he passed the time. As he calmed, he felt rhythmical pulses start to travel down his spine. In each pulse was a code—yes, a code.

  Did he know what was being transmitted?

  He concentrated, counting the pulses. His spine straightened on its own. Yes. He was beginning to.

  More alert now, his gaze traveled beyond the bars. The room was plain. There was a com on the wall, another on the door, and yet one more just beyond the tri-alloy metal separating the room from the hall. He looked at the camera, counting the red flashes of light as he wished he had the power to make them stop. Then the light froze to a solid red, staying on and not blinking.

  Did he do that?

  He concentrated. The camera went green and began again.

  He repeated the process a second and third time—just to prove he could—leaving it in the solid red mode afterward because it seemed best to do so.

  His mind felt larger. Could brains actually grow? He felt his head and somehow knew his brain filled it to overflowing.

  If he could do such amazing things, perhaps he was not malfunctioning after all.

  Actually, he’d just stopped a camera from recording him. That was brilliant. So why he was in a cage? His captivity was suddenly very illogical to him.

  That’s why he cybernetically ignored the setting advising him to remain at rest and be calm. Instead he stood and walked to bars that hummed.

  “Stop,” he ordered, focusing hard on his goal of killing the current.

  Pulses from something in his head left his mind, traveled down his spine, then reversed their path to return. When they got back to his head, they circled it with what he could only describe to himself as multiple rings of awareness. It was like living inside a hologram. He could feel so much energy that his normal senses could barely take it all in.

  He reached out a hand, touching the now non-humming, flat metal bars.

  With that barrier gone, it was a more simple matter to coax the door of his prison to open wide. The circuitry of the locks was actually very simple. He focused and then heard a click. Something clicked in his head at the same time.

  What he was doing was not just a normal functioning cyborg. He could force electronics to do his will. He suspected he could force other more simply programmed cyborgs to do what he wanted as well. That meant he was powerful—a cybernetic god even.

  Gods did not let anyone keep them prisoner. That was the most illogical state of all.

  “You shouldn’t try to constrain someone who is your cybernetic superior,” he said to his missing captors.

  There was no reason to stay when the logic of his conclusion was one hundred percent correct.

  Looking around the room in amazement of all he’d been able to do, he simply walked out of his cage without glancing back.

  Chapter 24

  Pain had been a constant feeling in her body for so long that waking without it felt very strange. Maybe they had finally developed a sedative to treat the massive cybernetically caused headaches she got so frequently.

  Lucy wondered how long she had been out this time. Waking from the hibernation state was like being shot with adrenaline. This time she’d just been asleep—like real sleep.

  Her face was turned to a blank wall when she pried open her eyelids. Bars were on the end of the cage beyond her feet. She didn’t roll over because she’d heard a heartbeat and knew someone was in the room with her. She would wait to engage the person until she was ready to do so.

  She closed her eyes again and searched for her super secret file until she found it. It was a simple list of questions which provided a checkpoint for her recall. When she finished—when she knew her sensibilities were still intact—then she would check the rest of her surroundings.

  First question.

  What was her human name and military rank? She was Lucy Pennington. Full name—Lucille Evelyn Pennington. Captain. Army. Meritorious service award. Special forces.

  What was the Cyber Soldier identification assigned to her? Cybernetic unit identification—confirmed as Evelyn 489.

  What was her current location? Since she didn’t readily know the answer, Lucy let her eyes open again to roam the ceiling and wall.

  She had no recall of her current location, but her intuition was working overtime on it. There was an abundance of natural light in the room. The last prison she remembered had been underground. She vaguely remembered someone saying she had to live there. Of course she did. She carried a bomb. If it detonated, the surrounding city might be destroyed.

  Her hand reached under the loose shirt she wore and stroked lightly over her muscled, nearly flat torso. If she pressed harder, she could trace the outline of the weapon containment box.

  Volunteering to become a Cyber Soldier had turned out to be the worst decision she’d ever made in her life. Too late she had realized Norton’s involvement had been a cover for other, more devious scientific testing—testing that had nothing to do with winning the war.

  Soldiers in the program were treated like cyber lab monkeys. First had come the Cyber Husband/Cyber Wife programs. Then they had done something more invasive to the females—something very few could fight when it had been fully functional. They had installed a second processor, and a second logic chip in most. They had developed neural controls beyond what she could resist obeying. Running the code was the only relief her mind had found. Using pain and invasive programming, they had all but turned her into a robot.

  And her head always hurt like hell every time she thought about what she’d let happen to herself. Resentment ran high until she found a way to let it go. But when she managed to release her anger she had become… had become… What had she become?

  My name is Lucy. I am a New World Companion.

  Lucy swallowed hard and bit back a frustrated groan when she couldn’t stop the statement from looping through her mind over and over. Was that what she still was? Hundreds—no thousands—of files about her time as a New World Companion queued up to be read.

  Then she suddenly remembered the beginning, remembered it without reading a single file. They had rounded them all up, all the females that had been converted. Her squad of twenty-seven. Captain Everett’s squad of twenty-five.

  She had fought the cyber scientist bastards, lost some rounds, and fought some more. But in the end, like a broken prisoner of war, she’d unwillingly done everything they wanted. The pain would allow nothing else.

  Their experiments had eventually killed Captain Everett and thirty-five total before they managed to successfully negate her unexplainable ability to countermand their code. Only a precious few had ever escaped from them. Aja Kapur. Meara McMcDonald. Kathryn Bec
k. Lynette Ross. Her people—no more than that—they had been her friends.

  But she had not escaped. After she had been the only one left with the scientists, things had gotten even worse. The program had been scrapped, but she had not been. Rather than honor her destruction order, Dr. Jackson Channing had kept her alive, using her for his personal experiments. But if he had succeeded, why was she here? Why was she able to ask herself these questions? He always used hibernation to make sure she was incapacitated. The bastard never let her sleep.

  Lucy bit back her groan and went on to the next question.

  For what purpose were you converted? To infiltrate enemy camps and save other soldiers.

  No… wait… that information was severely outdated… obsolete even. There were at least five other prime directives listed now in her logic chip. She rolled through them checking dates until she found the newest one.

  What is your prime directive? The loop she’d been avoiding started up again. Her back arched as the memories crowded around all the others fighting for her mental attention.

  I am Lucy. I am a New World Companion. I service the needs of Eric 754.

  Eric 754? No, that couldn’t be right. None of her contracts were fellow cyborgs. Male soldiers were all in the Cyber Husband program. It was impossible. Had her files been corrupted?

  Lost in reviewing her past, Lucy rolled to her other side without thinking. On a chair against the far wall sat a good looking guard swiping a portable com. Or maybe he was her new contract waiting for her to wake from being flushed. If so, why had the man not initialized her before letting her body go into rest mode?

  Well, whoever the bastard was, he certainly wasn’t the first to lock her up in a cage. Nor would he be the first to put her back in here after he found out she wouldn’t willingly do what he wanted—code or not. This one might just be her last contract though, if she remained as clear-minded as she felt at the moment. She felt like she could kill someone in her current frame of mind. Which meant she could kill him—couldn’t she?

  Uncomfortable with the thought of the death of her captor, for reasons her logic chip couldn’t fathom, Lucy rolled to her back quietly and stared at the ceiling again. At least the bastard was good-looking this time. Most of the others had not been. She looked for her scanning mechanism until she finally felt the wireless circuitry boot and connected her conscious mind to it.

  Spine tingling current made her body twitch as all her neural synapses started firing. Her wireless capabilities came back online first and fully in her control for once, which surprised her. In a matter of moments, she was able to tune into the man enough to look for his identification chip. Even if he was human, she’d at least find out something about him.

  What is his name? Cyborg unit identification—confirmed as Eric 754.

  So a cyborg really was her contract. How strange.

  Files reshuffled—more rapidly this time—with his name as their subject. Nearly fifty new ones pushed forward in her mind. Photos. Recordings. Lists of his likes and dislikes. A detailed description of what he was like in bed… and what pleased him.

  All of it appeared to be written by her and yet…

  Lucy turned her head, looked at him again. Feeling her gaze this time, the man dropped the com to his lap and smiled more innocently than her sensory receptors were willing to accept.

  “Hi, honey. How are you feeling?” he asked.

  Lucy heard the concern in his placating tone, but cyborgs could be programmed to mimic such human behaviors. Most even felt emotions to some degree. But that didn’t mean what they were experiencing was real.

  She couldn’t rule out the possibility that he’d been programmed for her as much as she had been for him. It was a sobering thought to think the man looking at her so kindly was also one of Creator Omega’s experiments. That would be a fresh scientific approach to emotionally torturing her.

  Seeing him smiling at her caused a nervous butterfly reaction inside her stomach, lending credibility to her analysis. Should she proceed by considering him an enemy or fellow victim?

  “You look stunned, Lucy. Do you want me to call Nero and Kyra? Maybe they should check you. Wait…” he paused his questioning, stood, and rapidly walked to the cage. “Do you even know who you are?”

  Lucy snorted at the stupid question and rolled her protesting body up into a seated position. She didn’t know what game the cyborg was playing, but she wasn’t going to play stupid. If they were being watched, she wanted their keepers to know how it was.

  “I know I’m for damn sure not going to be your New World Companion no matter how attractive you are.”

  Eric opened his mouth, closed it again, and then grinned. Reaching up, he ran a hand through his hair. “You still think I’m attractive?”

  “Did they program you to be that arrogant? Fuck you,” Lucy said bitterly, looking away. “It was a rhetorical comment meant to obliterate your juvenile expectations of my programmed obedience. It was not—is not—a damn statement of any real fact.”

  Eric crossed his arms and studied the angry woman in the cage. “And I see my hellcat is back. Captain Pennington, I presume?”

  “Stop with the stupid blond act. You know exactly who I am. Now either let me out of this cage or go to hell,” Lucy declared, hoping to make him mad enough to open the door. She glared when he just grinned harder.

  Eric answered her angry statements with all the calm he could dredge up. “And this attitude would be one of the many reasons I named you Lucy Hellcat. Why don’t you stop glaring at me like I’m a laser blade murderer and check your hand, Captain?”

  Glaring more over him issuing an order to her than for what he was asking, Lucy refused to obey at first, but then curiosity got the better of her. She lifted her cybernetic hand. There was nothing on it. She turned to glare. “Cut the bullshit. What kind of head game are you trying to play?”

  Eric snickered at her growing irritation, but inside he was having a ‘Holy Shit’ moment.

  “Not your cybernetic hand, Lucy. The ink would have disappeared from it by now. Check your organic hand. I put something on it last night for good luck with your restoration. And to remind you of us.”

  Lucy snorted and glared harder. “Restoration? Is that what they’re calling their fucking experiments these days?”

  Rolling her eyes at his grin, Lucy held up and inspected her other palm. There was a giant red heart drawn on it in long lasting ink. Inside the heart was written: Eric Loves Lucy.

  She looked back at her handsome contract and narrowed her gaze. “Am I supposed to actually believe this romantic shit means something? It’s not going to get you willingly laid, if that was the idea. Sorry, but you’re going to have to knock me unconscious, just like the bastards before you had to do.”

  Eric shook his head and sighed. He liked hearing that Lucy had never lost her will to fight, even after all that had been done to her. But he hated hearing confirmation that he was starting at ground zero. The woman didn’t seem to remember him—or them—at all, despite his art. He thought of last night. It helped to remember Lucy vowing never to forget him. Now he just had to believe.

  “Damn. I knew I shouldn’t have let Nero install those new chips. All I had to worry about with the Miss Sexy Pants version of you was her paranoia about her frizzy hair. I can see tangling with the real you is going to be much more interesting. And yes… eventually that romantic shit is going to get me laid because it’s not shit at all.”

  “Let me tell you something… if we ever tangle, the title for your obituary is going to read ‘Fucked With The Wrong Damn Woman’ when I’m done with you.”

  Eric looked away and scrubbed his face with both hands to keep from blasting back. Was he really going to try to have a relationship with this contrary creature?

  Deciding it was too soon to expect her to thaw, he looked back quickly and caught Lucy biting her lip, proving to him her harsh words were just a shield. He’d been hyper aware of her vulnerability even wh
en she had ripped through her cell furnishings like a tornado.

  Awwww hell… he wasn’t going to let any version of Lucy down if he could help it.

  Eric gave Lucy most of a grin and a low-lidded appraisal, even though he knew it would piss her off further. The long frustrated breath he released turned into laughter when she crossed her arms tightly over the ample breasts he loved so much. Her defensive reaction made him twitchy—and made him want to console her.

  Maybe he should just consider this version of Lucy as what she was like in a really, really bad mood. The thought made him grin.

  “Spit out all the venom you need to, but you finally managed to save your own ass, Captain. If you’re not up for playing nice yet, I guess that’s understandable. In another three hours you’ll be permanently sprung from the cage if you keep up your good behavior. Everyone’s being cautious because of your bad reputation. So don’t throw one of your hissy fits and tear up the furniture in there. You’ll only screw yourself being pissed at the good guys. Get some rest and I’ll be back to check on you in a little while.”