Peyton 313 (4 page)

The recording camera’s blue light panned around her as she worked. Long used to not discussing the restoration process with anyone, it was challenging now to remember to talk to the camera.

“Based on my past two failures at restoration, there are no predictable outcomes with any attempt. A full reversal is obviously not possible with any cyborg because it would have to include the removal of the cybernetic enhancements which require the processor to maintain. With Captain Elliott, my plan is merely to restore his cybernetics to a basic state that will allow his human mind to function alongside his enhancements. Whether this will ultimately prove to be a positive possibility for restoring other soldiers remains a theoretical supposition. Captain Elliott’s survival and adaption are critical to any scientific discovery and proof.”

Kyra paused talking to consider what she was saying. There were a great many things that could go wrong with what she was doing. If she lingered on even one potential failure too long, she knew she might lose her nerve to finish what she had started.

She stared at her Cyber Husband’s handsome profile and waited another full minute before finally shaking off her indecision. Motivated at last, she strapped the chair restraints into place around his ankles and wrists. She had to expand the one for his chest to the maximum width her confiscated operating chair allowed. That’s when another truth about the situation hit her full force, and worse than it had with the first two cyborgs she had tried to restore.

“Add a personal note to Peyton 313’s file. Start recording.
There is no universe in which it is fair that such a strong, good man’s free will should be thwarted by a few simple spoken words in his ear. Further apologies for my part in this would only be redundant. However, I remain incredibly ashamed of myself for not acting sooner to rescue all cyborgs from this unnatural fate.
End note. Pause recording.”

Tears—hot regretful tears about her part in the Marine Captain’s circumstances—fell on the metal bands holding him in the chair. They fell faster than she could blink them away. An occasional swipe with the sleeve of her lab coat was necessary to keep working.

“I’m truly sorry I didn’t do this a long time ago, Captain Elliott. I hope it really is a case of better late than never. Restoration will work this time—I swear it,” Kyra whispered.

After she had secured him as best she could, Kyra walked to a nearby sink and washed her face. Nervous nausea threatened to eject the measly breakfast she had consumed earlier. This time when she had killed the primary processor, she hadn’t left any of the government’s latest updated programming behind. Instead of trying to amend existing code as she had twice before, she had totally erased all former initialization routines from Peyton 313.

The problem was she had no idea how much of the real man she’d erased in the process. Captain Elliot might be an empty shell when he came around. Or he might be anything from a very confused to mentally unstable cyborg.

As well as knowing what to turn off in the reboot, from her failures she had also learned that the risks were not all on the side of the cyborg. Without the primary processor’s safety protocols, nothing prevented a still very dangerous man from misusing the greater physical assets his cybernetics provided. When he woke, Captain Elliot would be quite capable of killing her or anyone else he chose.

His military training happened prior to his cybernetic enhancements. That earlier, fully human programming was encoded in cellular memory, which cyber scientists had discovered could never be erased from any soldier. Kyra counted that fact in the positive column for the restoration process. Captain Elliot would need the memories of his military training for what he had to do. A full scale revolution needed a real leader with his kind of background. His service was a large part of why she had specifically chosen him.

Kyra turned from the sink and her remorseful musings to stare at her captive. The tears had stopped, but her gut still clenched in rebellion of what she had to do. The possibility of failing a third time loomed like a dark cloud and threatened to disintegrate her resolve.

“Damn you, Jackson. I should never have gone along with you. I wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Her bastard ex-husband had come up with the Cyber Husband program, which the relieved chancellors of the UCN had rushed to support. Fueled by monies received for renting out the soldiers, Jackson had convinced them to try a Cyber Wife version. When no volunteers stepped forward, they had coerced women prisoners into it. She had been happy when Jackson and his sadistic followers had found women much, much harder to control. Chaotic hormone surges influenced cyborg females as much as any set of processor commands ever could. Hormonal disruptions happened in over ninety percent of the cases, and they happened regardless of what the best and smartest of cyber scientists did to prevent them from occurring.

Through her continued work at Norton, Kyra had heard the whispers that Jackson had killed one of the Cyber Wives during experiments to tweak her sexual leanings. Whatever the truth was behind the rumors, one of his tortured victims had finally managed to kill him back. Having gone from loving Jackson to loathing she had ever met him, she had been nothing but happily relieved with that fatal consequence of his work.

Yet Jackson’s tweaking of the Cyber Wives had not been the trigger for the extreme actions she was currently taking with Peyton Elliot. No. The women had not been the thing that tipped her over the edge.

One year before Jackson had been killed, the sick-minded bastard had found a way to insert a smaller controller device into children. Behavior issues were a thing of the past now for parents wealthy enough to afford the million dollar implant. If a controlled child rebelled, a parent could just zap them a couple times. It had proven to be one hundred percent effective in wiping out rebellious behavior. Future generations among the wealthy would be automatons afraid to take any normal human risks.

Kyra had refused to be part of the work, but as a senior scientist at Norton she had been unable to avoid seeing the outcome. Children with controllers drew their personalities inside themselves the way abuse victims did. The wiring of children was more than tragic. It was despicable. . .and truly evil. It was on par to the evil she had committed by not challenging Jackson’s ethics when she should have.

Everything bad had started with the soldiers who had volunteered to become cyborgs to better serve their country. Sure there was general peace across the entire world because of them, but the lack of open conflict had come at a cost no one had anticipated. Now every crime, every legal transgression, was potentially punishable by the installation of some form of cybernetic implant used to control the individual.

Kyra hung her head as she did every time she thought about her part in making such human enslavement a reality. Visionary scientists like her had cured cancer and finally relieved the world from its dependence on nearly non-existent fossil fuels. But sadly, her generation’s vast intelligence was what had also given birth to advanced cybernetics.

In the beginning, cybernetic replacements were just intelligent prosthetics. Studies in how similar the brain was to a computer had led to experiments that resulted in reprogramming sociopathic criminals who had been declared socially unsalvageable. That had been the focus of her graduate work. No one had minded when former rapists, murderers, and child molesters had been turned into productive civil servants. Her self-righteous about the ethics of those criminal conversions had died a hard death right after she’d come to terms with what she’d helped do to the Cyber Soldiers.

Her success in controlling criminal minds had led Jackson to his solution of how to keep cybernetic soldiers from acting out their potential post-traumatic stress issues. In the span of six months, the line between right and wrong had been erased by the money pouring in from the first soldiers put into the Cyber Husband program.

If she had only rebelled then instead of helping make sure it worked, men like Peyton might have freed themselves a hell of a lot sooner.

“Resume recording. Before I install the new processor, my first task is to remove the controller wires. Without the aid of a body scanner, this will be a long process. Keep recording the visual even if I cease talking.”

Kyra frowned at her brain’s habit of endlessly rehashing the past. A person could intellectualize the ethical debate all they wanted. It didn’t change the one truth she had painfully learned in her last twenty years as a cyber scientist. Good. Bad. Or somewhere in between. The degree of trying control didn’t matter. Humans with free will were not meant to live as robotic machines. And they certainly were not meant to be forced by programming to obey the every voice command of another human being.

Cyber slavery was technically against the law, but the law only governed what was done with creations containing one hundred percent artificial intelligence. As strange as it was, the rights of completely mechanized robots were protected better than those of cyborgs. No one enforcing cyber law seemed to care that cyborgs were still human despite their processors and prosthetics.

Lost in her thoughts, Kyra walked slowly to her workbench and started gathering up her tools. Everything in her said mankind was doomed if programmed enslavement of all cybernetically enhanced people was allowed to continue and flourish.

She couldn’t let that happen when she could potentially stop it.

Determined to change what she could before it was too late to try, Kyra carried her operating tools back to the chair. Rolling Captain Elliot’s head to the side, she felt for his cybernetics access panel. When the small square opened, she stared into the metal compartment now mostly filled with soot coated electronics.

Ignoring the smell of burnt circuitry, Kyra removed the controller screw and set it aside. Then she began the task of pulling out twenty feet of conducting wire that carried the controller’s current throughout his torso. The removal process took over two hours, during which she was mostly silent. It had to be done a few inches at a time to keep from tearing adhered tissue any more than could be prevented. Finally, the end cleared the tiny insertion hole and she let out a relieved breath.

“Suspend recording for ten minutes. Resume automatically after that time.”

With the worst part of the restoration over, Kyra allowed herself to sob for real in relief. When that short bout of self-pity was done, she wiped her eyes on the cloth sleeve of her doctor’s coat and swore at her dead ex-husband again. Regret over her marriage rivaled the shame she felt about her life’s work.

“Damn you, Jackson. Damn you to hell and back. I’m glad one of your creations killed you for this fucking shit. What the hell were we thinking when we did this to living people?”

She heard the camera begin recording again and gladly moved on to the easier task of replacing Peyton’s upgraded circuit boards with older models she had programmed herself.

Well, Nero had done some of the work, but she had checked the content several times. The only override left was hers and it was there to prevent the newly configured cyborg from taking negative action against himself.

She had learned that hard lesson with Alex when she couldn’t prevent him from jumping to his death.

“Two big ones down and only a hundred things left to go. Hang in there, Captain Elliott. I’m working as fast as I can.”

***

Eight hours after Peyton’s delivery to her doorstep, Kyra sat exhausted in her desk chair recording her final notes as she waited for Peyton to wake up on his own. Depending upon the amount of damage the reboot had caused, his upgraded cybernetics might take some time to integrate with her older processor code. No master chip was running the show for his body any longer. All Peyton had was a basic repair-as-needed processor that worked in the most rudimentary of robotic machines, even those not melded to an organic human.

Of course, there was no guarantee the new programming would work as she hoped. For all she knew, she might find herself trapped in her lab with a mad killing machine when he came around. That had happened with her first experiment. She’d had to euthanize Marshall 103 after only a few days when it was obvious his mind had not been able to rebuild normally. Having removed the creator code file, she had essentially left herself with no recourse to reboot him again.

After she had released Marshall from his torture, she had also had to remove the evidence of her changes to him. Adding insult to injury, and to cover her modifications, she had taken Marshall’s dead body to a burial facility for immediate cremation. She had collected his cybernetic parts and had the metals melted for recycling while she watched.

Experiment number two had gone a little better. Alex 287 had physically recovered and survived the emotional roller coaster of the assimilation process. However, living with the shame of what he had endured as a cyborg turned out to be more than Alex could handle. A few months after his restoration, Alex had committed suicide by throwing himself off a mountainside where they had gone for what Kyra thought would be a relaxed and healing weekend for him.

Alex’s cybernetics had tried to fix him as they were made to do, but they had not been able to repair his body after such a traumatic fall. Kyra had eventually come to realize the jump had been intentional on his part. She’d had to retrieve Alex’s broken body by helicopter. Then she’d had to repeat the body disposal process to once again hide her modifications from being discovered.

Kyra sighed with regret for both Marshall and Alex, even as she manually typed notes about what she had removed and left in Peyton’s cybernetic compartment. After hours of talking about what she was doing, her voice was more tired than her hands.

She accepted that nearly anything could happen with Peyton, and that some awful things probably would, but it had still been a risk worth taking. In his life as a soldier, Peyton had both killed and saved people. If the restoration actually worked on him, Peyton could do what was necessary to liberate the rest of his kind.