by Jenny Foster
Johar has his own plans and they have something to do with Cassie and her unborn children. He asked me if I trusted him. Now we have arrived at the point where I have to demonstrate if I really do. Either I can put my foot down and make everything official, or I can keep silent and show him that I trust him.
The buzzing of the communications’ device saves me from having to answer. I turn the screen on, and position it so only I and the cyborg are visible. It is, as the red blinking light tells me, my father. My heart starts to beat wildly in fear, anger and so many other feelings, and it is hard for me to get my racing pulse under control. Johar reaches for my sweaty hand underneath the table and squeezes it quickly. I check my appearance in the black screen one last time, making sure that all of my blue lines are still covered, and then I push “Receive.”
“Father,” I say neutrally, or at least, I hope I do. My smile probably appears thinner than usual, but he usually doesn’t pay attention to such things. I don’t know what I was expecting, but he looks and talks just the same as always. It is shocking. The circles under his eyes might be a little darker than I remember them, the wrinkles around his mouth more pronounced and the expression in his gray eyes colder. But that may be because of the change in my perspective, too.
“What is the status of your efforts?” he asks and makes no mention of the fact that I have been trying desperately to reach him. Johar and I take turns reporting how far we have come. When Johar tells him that Cassie Burnett and her companions are on Earth, my father’s gaze sharpens. “Where did they land, and when?”
Somewhere near New York, about three months ago,” Johar reports. Am I making this up, or is he being purposefully vague? A cyborg cannot lie, I remind myself. But if Johar has learned anything in his fifty years, it’s skilled evasion and withholding information. My father seems not to notice, and even if he does, he shows no interest.
“Excellent,” he says, highly satisfied. I hear noise in the background. He turns around and makes a sign at someone whom I cannot see. “Your assignment is now fulfilled. Mara, come back here with Johar. I am not too far from you, and will send the coordinates to you shortly.”
I try hard to keep all emotions out of my voice. “Does this mean that you want to join us on the hunt for Cassie Burnett? You are coming with us to Earth?” My thoughts are racing. How are we supposed to smuggle Hazathel and Shazuul secretly to Earth, if my father and his troops are with us? We will need to think of something. I realize that I am starting to sweat, and stop myself from wiping my hand over my face and smearing the cream everywhere.
“Not exactly,” my father corrects me. His voice sounds friendly and cold at the same time, as if he has discovered a secret that brings him immense joy. I have chills all over. This is not good. Something is brewing, right over our heads. Something that can pull us with it and swallow us whole if we are not careful. “It is correct that I am traveling to Earth, accompanied by Johar.” He pauses. His gray eyes stare into mine, and I grow cold. Here comes the final blow. “You, on the other hand, will stay on the mother ship. I have to put you under quarantine and examine you.” I can’t help flinching. The memory of the cold operating table and the shiny scalpel flood over me, and narrow my vision until I see nothing else, other than the face on the monitor.
“No,” I stammer. “You can’t do that.” He is punishing me, I think. But it gets worse.
“I can, and I will,” my father replies casually. “You have disappointed me, Mara. I had such high hopes for you. And what did you do? You think you are in love. You did the dirty deed, and more than once,” his whole face contorts into a grimace of disgust. Has he always had an aversion to sex, or did that come with age? Did he adopt me because he couldn’t handle being intimate with a woman?
“No,” I say. Suddenly, I realize what I have to do. I stand up. Before I turn off the monitor, and sever all communication with him, I need to say one more thing. “The days of me obeying you blindly are over, Father. I have grown up. I am a self-sufficient person. I make my own decisions. I am deciding, here and now, that I have had enough of you. Good-bye, Father.” I reach for the button to cut the connection, when something in his face grabs my attention. He is smiling.
I think not, Mara,” he says. You know what you need to do,” he says, and at first, it doesn’t dawn on me that he is talking to my cyborg. My fingers hover over the button that will separate me from my father. I stare at him, frozen. How can he be so sure of himself?
Johar gets up and stands behind me. His long fingers reach into my hair tenderly, and I am happy that he has the courage to defy my father. I think he wants to show him that we belong together. And then I start to wonder, what his fingers are looking for on my scalp. He presses his index finger into my skull. The world goes pale. Through an ever-narrowing tunnel, I see my father’s satisfied smile. The last thing I hear are the words coming from my cyborg, who leans down towards me and whispers two words.
“Trust me.”
Part 3: The Lawless
Chapter 1
When I wake up, three pairs of eyes are staring at me.
It must be déjà vu. Didn’t I wake up from a similar slumber, just a few weeks ago? The faces staring at me are the same ones, too – with the exception that, other than Johar and Hazathel, Shazuul is staring at me, too. My brain is in overdrive while I try to chase the fog out of my head. Nobody speaks, and for a few anxious seconds, I worry that I have lost my hearing. With considerable effort, I make a screeching sound, and close my eyes in relief when I can hear it. Then I move my fingers and toes, turn my head from side to side and run my tongue over my lips. So far, everything is working.
Why isn’t anyone speaking to me? I get more and more uneasy. I sit up and take in my surroundings. We are in a quiet room on a small space glider, a room that is barely big enough or two people. It is a snug little room, and I feel crowded by the three figures leaning down towards me. I lean back against the wall. The three of them exchange meaningful looks with each other, but I can’t tell what is going on. At some point, I reach my limit. I clear my throat, so I can be sure that the words will come out. “What is going on? Why are you staring at me like that?”
Their reaction is almost funny. Their immense relief is mirrored on all of their faces, especially on Johar’s. Shazuul and Hazathel high-five each other. I think the Sethari even does a little dance, but I can’t see for sure what he is doing, because Johar’s broad back is hiding the alien’s moves. “Boys, we can celebrate later,” he tells them and shoos them out of the room. “Give us a little time together, just the two of us.” The two aliens have huge grins on their faces, and Shazuul makes an obscene gesture with his sucking snout, which earns him a pretty hard smack from Johar. Finally, the door glides shut behind them. Maybe I shouldn’t have reconstructed his snout, after all.
“Can you please tell me what is really going on here?” I ask, while Johar sits down on the edge of the bed. “You guys are acting like I have risen from the dead.” My cyborg takes my hand into his. All this does is scare me. He is acting like he is going to tell me that I have a deadly illness, and that I will die within the next few days. All I did was take a little nap, I start to say, but then I realize that something isn’t quite right.
Somehow, I ended up on this space glider. I look out of the porthole and see the blue planet, some distance away. So far, so good. We are on our way to bring Cassie Burnett to my father. But why can’t I remember coming on board? I swallow dryly and look, in vain, for some water to wet my throat.
“What is the last thing you can remember?” my cyborg asks me, and smiles crookedly. He is trying to hide the tension this question creates in him, but it is no use. Over the last few weeks of our joint trip, I have come to know him well, so I recognize the signs. The tiny, single wrinkle between his thick, arched eyebrows, or the tip of his tongue licking the left corner of his mouth briefly. I want to be helpful, so I try to remember what I was doing when I fell asleep.
“I k
now that we were speaking with my father,” I say slowly. “He said that he is going to Earth himself, to find the woman.” Johar nods in agreement. I am slowly getting suspicious, impatient and, above all, nervous, because I don’t know what is going on. To top it all off, my memory of the conversation with my dad ends exactly at that spot. After that, there is literally nothing, other than blackness.
“Did I faint?” I want to know, because I cannot explain this abrupt break any other way. “I was probably just overworked, I say and rub my eyes. “I spent too much time reconstructing that damn sucking snout. And for what? So that moron can use it for his shenanigans.” It isn’t true, of course. I am still very proud of it and happy that I was able to help the Sethari. I am just trying to suppress the budding fear in my heart by babbling non-stop. “It was good that you guys didn’t take me to the sick bay,” I continue on and realize that a smile is starting to form on my face. “I wouldn’t have missed this new adventure on Earth for anything. It is unfathomable that I would waste away on a stretcher, while you all have your fun on Earth.”
Johar puts a finger on my lips, trying to stop my manic gush of words. His skin is so soft, and it makes me think of another part of his body, where hardness is cocooned in softness. I kiss his finger, something that seems so familiar and normal to me now. Suddenly, I know that I can never go back to my old life. At this anxious moment, when everything is hanging in the balance, and I have no idea what has happened, I make a decision. I have chosen. I will tell my father that I will no longer work as a scientist for him. Surely, there must also be some way for my cyborg to gain his freedom. My father owes me that much for all of the years I worked at his side, late into the night, without worrying about myself. Maybe he will offer this on his own – not out of love for me - I am not that naïve. I may be his daughter, whom he loves in his own way, but he was and is, a workhorse first – not a family man. I see the blue lines the virus has painted on my body, and hope that they are reason enough to let me go. An infected daughter at his side, who is marked by a disease that can only be transmitted sexually, would be an embarrassment to him; of that I am sure. I get dizzy imagining a life with Johar, but it is a dizziness of happiness that makes the world go around.
I look at him, my cyborg. And sense that there is something else that will throw me back down a black hole. “Mara,” he says my name, the way only he can – sensually, lovingly and seriously at the same time. Your father is on his way to Earth, that much is true. But …,” he hesitates, “you have not been sick, nor did you faint.” My heart is racing like crazy. Any second now, he is going to say something that I do not want to hear. I hold my ears in an absolutely childish move, but Johar takes them off my head and holds them tightly. Incredible sadness is shimmering in his eyes, but also a fire that I have never seen there before. I take a deep, determined breath, and face what I know to be true, but don’t want to believe.
“I turned you off on orders from your father, and erased some of your memories.”
My head is spinning.
I am a cyborg. If only I had held my ears! But that wish disappears when I hear Johar speak. “You are like me,” he says. “Is that so bad?”
At first, I don’t know what to say, but then I look at him and say softly “Yes. No.” I take a breath. “I don’t know,” I stammer, to gain some time, so I can think straight. “Just look at me.” I hold out my blue-veined arm to him and lean my head in close to his. “I am not human anymore. My whole life, I thought I was like everyone else. Can you imagine how it feels, when you find out in a split second, that literally everything was a lie?”
“You never noticed that you are different? Not even for a moment?” Johar makes a skeptical grimace, for which he gets a smack.
“No,” I think out loud. Inside me, everything turns to ice, as small details emerge that I should have noticed. For instance, the fact that I never had any girlfriends. No pajama parties for little Mara, no secrets exchanged behind raised hands. No infatuation, when the most handsome of the officers walked by me. I was different, but never knew why. I hadn’t even had a clue that, in reality, I had a mechanical side. How was that possible?
I get dizzy when I start to grasp the consequences of what I have just found out. I am a machine-human, I hear over and over in my head, and nothing else seems to have a place inside me anymore. There must be a reason why I was so blind. I, of all people, who could always analyze everything so coolly and precisely, had no idea what was going on inside me. Did my father add a lock inside me that prevented me from knowing myself? I ask Johar about it, but he can’t solve the mystery, either.
“It seems likely,” he admits, after thinking about it for a minute. “How about your physicals? Surely you would have noticed, then, that you are one of us.” I am surprised about the way he says “us,” but don’t have any time to think about it. Thoughts are racing through my head. I suppress an attack of hysterical laughter when I imagine the gears finally coming to a screeching halt inside my body. Is smoke coming out of my ears, already?
“My father conducted all of my medical examinations himself,” I remember. At least my condition is not common knowledge, and for that I am almost thankful to Ruthiel. Almost. If you consider only wanting to chop his head off, instead of skinning him alive, as gratitude.
“You turned me off on orders from my father,” I repeat, returning to his memory. My synapses are working overtime, trying to make sense of all of the surprises I am facing. My cyborg turned me off. On orders from my father.
It is no surprise that Johar can tell exactly, once again, what is going on inside me. Is it because we share a special connection, or is it because we are both cyborgs? “Before I turned you off, I asked you to trust me.” He pauses, and then he pulls a memory stick from his pocket. “Here are all of your erased memories,” he says and holds out the small, innocent-looking object out to me. I reach for it, but he closes his fingers around the stick. “Before I give them back to you, you need to understand one thing: we are now lawless.”
I want to laugh when I hear the old-fashioned word which sounds more like it belongs to a corny western than to us. But one look on his face makes me think better of it. “That means that we are on the run. From whom and why?” I am proud of myself for staying so calm, even though, inside, a real storm of emotions is raging. At least, I think in a rush of sarcasm, I know one thing firsthand: cyborgs can feel just as well as humans can. It is possible that I didn’t just think it, but mumbled it out loud, because Johar nods in agreement.
“It is all a matter of perspective,” he explains to me. “Humans only see what they want to see. They do not expect a cyborg to feel anger, love, or even grief. So, they don’t see these emotions.”
“Give me my memories,” I say. It is not a request, and not an order, but something in the middle. “After that, you can explain everything to me. Any by everything,” I say softly, “I mean everything. Including what you are up against with my father and why you woke me up again.”
He hesitates and then hands me the stick. There must be a slot somewhere on my body. And – if I am a cyborg, then I must have a tattoo somewhere that shows my serial number. Where is it? I have never seen the tattoo, nor the slot. My hands are running through my hair. There would be no better place to hide this betraying sign.
Johar reaches over, lifts up my hair and guides my fingers to the right spot. Now that I know what to search for, I can feel the slightly raised spot, and next to it, the tiny opening for data transfers. “Wait just a second,” he pleads with me. “It will only take a few minutes until all of the data is transferred. I will be with you every second. If you get scared, or you think you can’t take any more, just squeeze my hand and I will cut the connection. Do you understand?”
I frown. “Why would I want to do that?”
“Because there are a lot of memories, and because it could become a little overwhelming,” he answers. “I am completely serious. Do you understand me? You have never experienc
ed something like this before, and you are still in shock.” Johar tilts his head to the side. “We could just start with half, or better yet, just with a quarter.”
I shake my head, but am unsure. “What is the worst thing that could happen?” I want to know what has been taken from me. What my father took from me; if he really programmed me to feel completely like a human being. He has the skills to do that, no doubt. But is he really so ruthless to turn my whole life – or what I consider to be my life – into a lie from beginning to end? I answer myself. I have seen for myself how far he is willing to go in the name of science.
“Your fuses could blow,” Johar explains, bringing me back to the present.
At first, I think he is making a joke – all of my fuses are already blown, ha ha – but he isn’t. I look at the stick in my hand. It looks so small and innocent, but it contains things that will turn my world upside down. Will I be strong enough to endure it? The next, and much more important question is, if I really want to know.
I make my decision based on my gut instinct and give the stick back to Johar. “Keep it safe for me,” I ask him. I am searching for words, and for the first time I see an expression on Johar’s face that tells me that he doesn’t understand me at all. “I don’t want those memories. Not yet, at least,” I concede. “I want to start a new life, right here and right now.” Relief floods my body, and I know that I have made the right decision. “I don’t need my past. I am starting over, without being burdened by what I was.” I can feel the smile spreading over my whole face. “My father determined who I was. I will determine who I will become.”
