by J N Chaney
LOADING ADDITIONAL MEMORY FILES...
RETRIEVING FILES...
FILES RETRIEVED
From the same point the duplicated pixels had vanished, new ones streamed toward him. They collected into a cloud of data, appearing as a fluffy, green cloud somewhere nearby.
WRITING ADDITIONAL MEMORY FILES...
The cloud swirled lazily for a moment, then faster, until it became a hurricane. It filled Warren’s vision—frantic chaotic motion—but no sound. Sometime later, the pixels froze in place, slowly falling to those below like snow. The new pixels remained where they landed, still and silent.
MEMORY WRITE COMPLETE
21
Warren’s mind flooded with images. The onslaught was difficult to comprehend. Some of it, on the other hand, was all too clear and he wished they would vanish back into oblivion.
He remembered his disappearance—the one where he’d almost been gone long enough for them to make another Warren. It had been planned far in advance. He and the others who’d been involved had only been waiting for the right opportunity to put their plan in motion.
It was staged to make it look like he’d been captured by the enemy or destroyed. Protocol stated that in the event a cyborg was completely obliterated, and no trace could be found, the war computer would wait two weeks before ordering his replacement. He’d been gone for ten days.
The incident had happened on Reotis. Hendrose hadn’t been involved, but he’d known of the plan and he knew when it would happen.
A wave of anguish washed over Warren as he remembered those who’d given their lives to make sure the plan would succeed. They were all Reotians, and all of them were civilians. The future of their people meant more to them than their own lives.
As far as anyone on the planet knew, they’d been kidnapped, or simply vanished into thin air. Each had left their home behind for the sake of others. Maybe some were still alive. There was no way to know—not without searching for them. Coming back might’ve revealed they’d left in the first place. It could draw unwanted attention by whoever controlled the planet at the time. They might’ve been forced to reveal where they’d been, what they were doing, and who they’d selected. If that had happened, Warren knew the Republic would have deleted him. They might’ve called Reotis a complete loss and glassed it rather than risk a cyborg rebellion.
Those who’d volunteered knew the risk, yet they still did their part. Warren was the means to an end. It wasn’t personal. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. He had to make sure their deaths hadn’t been in vain.
Next, he had been spirited away from the Grand Republic to perform a test. The blueprints for cyborgs were a carefully guarded secret, though bits of their design had been stolen and shared with certain operatives. The Reotis scientists had collected what they could, discovered a flaw in the cyborg design, and only needed a volunteer to test it. Unless one came willingly, it would never work. They needed one alive who was willing to risk everything to help them, and their fellow cyborgs, escape their virtual slavery.
“Revolution.” Warren wasn’t sure if he’d said it out loud, or only in his mind. The memories seemed to tumble in his mind as it returned. People—there had been people there. And sounds. An environmental system which had seen better days, rattling as it removed carbon from the air and warmed the lonely place.
Warren thought of what he and Anita—one of the volunteers—had planned made him a little sad she hadn’t survived. Warren liked her. He respected her. He… missed her.
He’d decided to become a traitor to his government with the vain, distant hope that the Reotian scientists might be able to find a way to disable his compulsion chip. If they could do it—if the experiment worked—he hoped he could free other cyborgs, too. It was part of the plan, and it was the only way it would work.
The free cyborgs could escape and form their own society, cohabitate with the Reotians, and form their own community where they could all be free.
Warren remembered the feelings he had when the alarms sounded, and the war computer ordered him to don his armor and grab his weapon. They were in the right sector. They were heading back to Reotis. The time to put his top-secret plan into action had come.
He had been their only hope, and when they staged a random explosion during the battle to spirit him away, two Reotians died. Looking back, he guessed they’d underestimated the force of the blast that ended up turning each of them into meaty chunks.
Two cyborgs had been killed as well, but as they’d be reset soon, so it didn’t seem like that big of a loss. Sure, he didn’t want it to happen to him, but war always had casualties. Their sacrifice would be worthwhile, in the end. They wouldn’t even know what happened.
He started to fit all the pieces together even though they were coming in random chunks. The Reotis rebellion had needed a cyborg—one willing to go under the knife and turn traitor on the government that had made him or her. They needed someone like Warren. Someone who’d seen enough to want to rebel against the Grand Republic.
Warren was hurried from Dome-2 onto a transport shuttle where he was summarily wrapped in layers upon layers of thin metal. The two technicians who did the work hooked a couple of alligator clips to the metal near Warren’s head and toes when they were finished. Then they applied a current.
The pain wasn’t bad, but it glitched his HUD. He couldn’t see anything not immediately in front of him. His vision went pixelated, and he stopped receiving information from the war computer. Although he was in pain, it wasn’t more than he could handle. His skin felt like he had a bad sunburn and someone was slapping him, but he could take it. Everything, except the deaths of the civilians, Anita being one of them, had gone to plan.
He kept his mind on the woman. She was a lot shorter than him, the top of her head barely reaching his throat. Her hair and eyes were brown, and there was nothing particularly attractive about her except her attitude, which she’d possessed in droves. She’d developed a certain toughness Warren thought the homesteaders of the American old west might’ve possessed—charming and a little frightening.
The pain had started to seep through the mental block he’d put up, so he’d focused on the shuttle itself. As they lifted from the surface, pieces fell off somewhere near the bridge and started rattling and rolling across the floor. An alarm sounded, but the pilot squelched it almost immediately. It was an old Commonwealth vessel, so if anything fell off but nobody died, it shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Over-engineering was a problem the CoWs didn’t have.
Warren was having a hard time differentiating between reality and memory.
The battle was still raging below, but the shuttle took off anyway. Commonwealth forces fought against Republic cyborgs as their ships duked it out somewhere in low orbit. Since both sides were present, the pilot engaged two stolen transponders—one pretending to be Commonwealth, and the other transmitting a Republic identity. With a little luck, everyone would be too busy to offer the little ship more than a cursory check. A few minutes later, once they’d left the planet behind them, the civilians with Warren breathed a deep sigh of relief.
“We made it,” an older woman said. She was pretty, but she’d seen better days. Life on Reotis could be hard on a body and hers was showing it. “How are you doing, Warren?”
“I’m okay,” he grunted. “Can’t wait to get out of this shock suit, or whatever you call it, though.”
“Sorry, love, but you’ve got to stay in there until we get to the research facility. Once we get inside, I’ll turn you loose, okay?”
“Yeah,” Warren muttered. “If I get out beforehand, the Republic ship will know I’m off the planet. It’ll force me to kill you all. I’m fine.”
The woman’s face turned ashen. Though Warren knew she understood how his compulsion chip worked, there was something that bothered her deeply when he spoke about its effects out loud. He clamped his mouth shut.
Fast forward and another memory crept in.
They’d launched six ships, loaded with eight crew in EV suits apiece. The battle had been short, but only six Reotians lived. The survivors lashed the huge, hollowed-out rock to three of the ships and towed it into an orbit further from the system’s single star. Within a few months, smaller rocks had crashed into it and changed its shape, making it all but impossible to find.
Once the deed was done, the Reotians began using it as a secret meeting place. There, they’d hatched their idea of freeing the cyborgs, and at the same time, themselves.
Warren had arrived at the research facility 24 hours later. It took ten minutes to bring the ship into the facility’s small, hidden hangar, and no sooner had the hatch opened than someone started yelling.
“You’re four hours late!” the scientist, a bald man who’d grown enough eyebrows to make up for his shiny pate, growled. “We’re behind schedule!”
“There were probes!” the pilot, a twenty-something long-haired man, snapped. “What did you want me to do? Fly past them while I held my breath in hopes they wouldn’t notice? Maybe if I sucked in my gut I could have fooled them.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” the scientist complained. “But this is a timely mission. We’re on a schedule and you just screwed it up.”
“Then you’ll have to skip something,” the pilot said, attempting to walk around the scientist who didn’t look like he was going to move. “Do what you can, but I’ve got to get him back in time no matter what.”
“What difference will four hours make?” the woman unwrapping Warren from his metal wrappings asked. She’d already removed the electric leads.
“Well, we don’t know, and that’s the problem,” the scientist said with a pained expression. “We have a plan, but until we begin, nobody knows what problems we’re going to run into. We’re going to attempt to free Warren from his compulsion chip, but something like this has never been done before. Then we have to get him back, but inflict just enough damage to justify a reset, rather than a repair. If they find evidence of what we tried to do, whether we’re successful or not, they’ll change the design. I’m sure of it.
“Plus, we have agents aboard the Ruthless ready to assist in the cover story. They’ve been fully briefed, and as of yesterday have not been discovered.”
“How many agents?” Warren asked, sitting up from the bed he’d been laying on.
“I won’t say,” the scientist replied. He crossed his arms and shook his head to make his point clear. “If you get that information and it’s compromised, we’re done for.”
“Maybe we should get to it,” Warren suggested. “And I need you two to make peace. I’m in this just as deep as you are. If they find out what I’ve done, they’ll delete me and we’re back to square one. No free cyborgs and no free Reotis. All of this will be for nothing. The only thing we cyborgs have that we can take with us is our memories, so to save time, cut whatever tests can be cut—whatever’s least important.”
“Everything is important,” the scientist argued. “This has been planned for more than a year. We didn’t know it was going to be you, and we didn’t know when it was going to happen, but we’ve been ready. We’ve checked the plan over and over again, and everyone agrees that every single step is important.”
The pilot opened his mouth, an obvious fresh retort on his lips, but stopped when Warren raised a hand.
“That’s enough,” he said in a tone that left no room for argument. “You did what you could do, and here we are. We’re not going to blame each other anymore. We’re not going to point fingers. We’re going to complete our mission no matter what. Does everyone understand?”
The scientist paused for a moment and nodded. The pilot followed suit, though he didn’t look happy about it.
“Good,” Warren said. “Because we need to work together if this is going to happen. Now, let’s get started.”
The scientist led Warren out of the hangar to a small room nearby. Two of the people who came with them entered as well. They each had their own tasks to complete.
Warren ran a quick diagnostic as he laid himself back on the table. “I’m ready, doc.”
“First, we’re going to have to take you apart,” the scientist explained as he took a few tools from under the table and set them on Warren’s belly. “It’s going to hurt, but there’s nothing that can be done about it. We can’t disable your pain sensors or there won’t be enough voltage during the final stage to disable your compulsion chip. It’ll hurt like you took an economy trip to Hell.”
“You only live once,” Warren mused.
Everyone in the room glanced at each other in confusion.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s an expression from my time. Please, carry on. Oh, but do me a favor and erase that part of my memory when you’re done. I don’t really need to remember being tortured.”
“I’ll do it if there’s time,” the scientist promised. “We don’t have a lot of blueprints or details on how your cybernetics function, which is what this procedure is for. When we’re done, I’ll better understand how your systems interact. It’ll help me know how to disable the chip. It’s exploratory more than anything else.”
“What happens when you’re done?” Warren asked.
“Once we’re done, I’ll disable your pain sensors. I’ll have to cause some serious injury to your body, but nothing that will disable you outright. Don’t worry about pain then. You’ll have a lot of damage indicators popping up on your HUD, but that just means it’s working. I’ll make sure the damage is extensive enough that they won’t be tempted to repair you.”
“Will I remember any of this? I mean, if they reset me, I’m going to lose everything?”
“Not if we load this,” he said, holding up a cyborg data cube, what they called a CDC. “We’ll wait until just before we load you back on the transport so you can remember everything that’s important. When our agents on the Ruthless deem the time right, they’ll reintroduce you to your memories. It should answer your questions.”
“Let’s do it,” Warren said. “Let’s make history.”
Warren opened his eyes. Hendrose was watching him with a curious expression. Craig looked downright worried.
“Did something go wrong?” Craig asked as he gave Warren’s face a close inspection.
“We need to change everything,” Warren said, feeling a smile spread across his lips. “I have a new plan.”
22
Warren tried not to laugh, but the sound escaped him anyway. The expression on both men’s faces was priceless.
“Stop everything?” Craig blurted. “What do you mean, stop everything? This operation is a huge boulder rolling down a steep hill. Do you know what it’s going to take to stop it all?”
Then he turned an angry look toward Hendrose, who backed up a couple of steps. “I swear to everything unholy, if you screwed up his—“
“I’m fine,” Warren interrupted. “It turns out I had some memories secretly stored away. Everything’s back. The mystery of where I was for ten days has been solved.”
“I remember that,” Craig said slowly. “Where were you?”
“Planning for this,” Warren said, waving the rest of his answer away. “I’ll tell you about it later. The point is, I remember what the original plan was. I also remember my own backup plan—the one I never told anyone about.”
Hendrose looked worried. “New backup plan? Didn’t you think this might be something we all should have known about?”
“No,” Warren said, squaring off with the tech. “Nobody could know about it. It had to remain secret.”
Hendrose sighed and his shoulders slum
ped. “Okay, what do you need me to do?”
“The first thing is we need to get to the war computer.”
“Gonna blow it up?” Craig asked, sounding hopeful.
“No,” Warren said, giving the other cyborg a stern expression. “We need the war computer, but instead of following its orders, we’re going to make it follow ours.”
Then he turned to Hendrose. “Where do you keep the data cubes?”
“In the vault,” the tech said.
“Good. Take us to them.”
The three left the infirmary and hurried down a nearby passage. Craig stayed right on Warren’s heels, but the tech was having trouble keeping up.
“What do you need them for?” Hendrose asked between breaths. “There’s nothing on them. They’re blank.”
“That’s why I need them,” Warren said as he took the last turn and stopped in front of a complicated-looking door lock.
The portal took up the entire three-meter-tall wall. It was nearly as wide and had been built of a secret alloy few within the Grand Republic knew the recipe for. Even Warren’s HUD couldn’t figure out what it was made of.
A shiny metal digital entry pad set in its center looked both simple and imposing. It had ten keys, numbered zero through nine, and two tiny lights. Currently, the green one was lit.
“We can’t get in,” Craig said. “Trust me, I’ve thought about it a hundred times. But anything short of a nuclear blast isn’t going to crack this thing. What’s your plan?”
“I know the code,” Warren said with a smirk. Twenty-two digits later, the door clicked several times and swung open a few centimeters.
Craig and Hendrose stared at it with open mouths.
“How did you get the code?” Hendrose asked. “Only the captain knows the code.”
