Peyton 313 (7 page)

Kyra frowned over the supportive statement as she rolled her desk chair closer before she sat. “Trust me, Captain Elliott. This will be the worst story of your life.”

Peyton sighed at her resigned tone and sat down on the small metal bed. As his backside sunk into the mattress, he found himself automatically gauging whether or not the frame could hold their combined weights as well as stand up to what he’d like to do with her.

“Before we start the shitty conversation I feel coming, can I just make that offer to show you heaven one more time? Damn lady—I don’t remember the last time I wanted to kiss and hold a woman, much less bury myself inside her. I feel like I’ve been living in some kind of desert for years. This feeling of wanting you so badly carries with it the promise of some terminable thirst finally being quenched.”

Kyra hung her head and bit her lip as she ordered herself not to cry again. Would his poetic side remain after the assimilation? She lectured herself about how foolish it was to care for something so immeasurable as Captain Elliott’s penchant for flirting.

“Your eloquent speeches are very charming, but please stop flirting with me. I don’t have the luxury of feeling sorry for either of us anymore. No matter what I might want to do, you and I have to talk about your future cybernetic life.”

Peyton reached up and rubbed his head, something he’d caught himself doing several times that day. It was an odd mannerism with no purpose other than it gave his restlessness a physical expression. “Maybe I don’t want to talk about my cybernetics. Right now in this moment, I feel more normal than I’ve felt in ages. I’m assuming you know the reason and are planning to tell me, but frankly I’m not sure I want to know the particulars, Doc.”

Kyra nodded in answer to Peyton’s questioning gaze. She was not surprised Peyton had figured it out. So had Alex, and Marshall before him. Feelings were natural for humans and they felt natural. She had also learned that awareness of them came back quickly when nothing was neurologically blocking their way. Unfortunately, some feelings were more pleasant to experience than others, as Peyton was about to find out.

“Let’s start by discussing the work I did on you. I incapacitated you by activating a hidden reboot code in your cyborg programming. Then while you were unconscious, I replaced your primary processor. The new one I gave you isn’t keeping your synapses firing with actions and thoughts you used to be programmed to repeat and follow twenty-four seven. Without those repeating signals blocking the way, your very human emotions are free to find normal synaptic paths across the various parts of your brain. You have physical body parts that rely on you having a processor, but there’s no reason you can’t have access to both your cybernetics
and
your feelings. To achieve that end, I’ve been working on a viable restoration process for the last seven years.”

“
Seven years?
I don’t recall being modified for much more than three years.” His processor spun as he sought to validate or invalidate her statement. He could tell the answer was buried in his brain somewhere, but he just couldn’t get to it.

Kyra took in a breath and let it out slowly. The truth had to be said aloud, but explaining it to her third restored cyborg didn’t make it any easier.

“Captain Elliott, you’ve been a full cyborg and running programs off artificial intelligence chips for ten of the thirteen years that have passed since you received your first modifications. At the time you signed up for your military enhancements, there was no way to reverse the process as I just did. The military lied to you about it because the fledgling UCN believed Cyber Soldiers were necessary to end the wars. It was only later that scientists and non-scientists alike realized there were a great many things that could not be undone. Complete reversals are not physically possible nor mentally feasible. In short, once converted to a cyborg, a person cannot be anything else. For the rest of your life, you will always be part man and part machine.”

Peyton rose and began to pace. His stomach contracted painfully at hearing he’d been existing in some sort of cybernetic limbo. He felt the truth of it instantly in his gut, plus it finally offered a plausible explanation for the gaps in his memories. But how could so much time have passed without his awareness? That seemed improbable.

Damn it.
Was the woman lying to him? Was she his enemy? If she was, how had she created such an elaborate illusion?

Peyton turned and glared. “What was
your
role in the situation you’re describing?”

Kyra stared back without blinking at his rising anger. It was nothing she hadn’t seen before.

“I am one of the two original creators of the Cyber Soldier program. I didn’t engineer your prosthetics, but I wrote nearly all the code that makes your brain work with them.”

Peyton ran a hand through his hair. “Did you know back then? Did you know there was no way to reverse the process when you cut off working parts of our bodies and made us what we are?”

Kyra swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes. I knew. But just like you got the enhancements for the noblest of reasons, I believed by the time your duty was done to the world, scientists like me would have discovered a way to restore all the soldiers. Unfortunately the other original creator developed an idea that was deemed a much better solution than attempting to reverse cybernetic modifications. He won the debate and I was never allowed to officially work on a restoration process. For the last seven years, I’ve been doing it on my own. I realize now that blocking someone’s humanity from being expressed was never a proper action to take.”

Peyton walked to a wall of bars and gripped two of them in his hands. A quick scan told him the tensile strength of the metal was more than he could bend. He also picked up a low level hum indicating the bars of his prison were electrically charged at a level that would knock him out if a full charge was activated. Dr. Winters was a smart woman. She had all the bases covered when it came to keeping him trapped.

“Did you kidnap me from some assignment in the field so you could experiment on me?”

Kyra’s eyebrows rose at Peyton’s assumption. Like Marshall and Alex, Peyton’s last human memories had been of their war time service. Jackson had never allowed any of them to realize how much like a machine they had become and she had written code expressly to make it happen. Once she had even believed that kind of ignorance was showing a kindness to them.

She shook her head as she answered. “No, Captain Elliot. I did not kidnap you from any mission. For the last decade, you’ve been serving in what is called the Cyber Husband program. It was the UCN’s way of retiring Cyber Soldiers while keeping track of where they were. Funds from your various Cyber Husband contracts went into UCN coffers. You were unknowingly paying them back over the years for the cost of installing your cybernetics. You’ve personally been enhanced and fixed and redefined many times to suit your various wives. What I did to you yesterday was really just one more in a long line of tweaks. The difference is that I modified you for your benefit this time. In short, I think I have found a way to keep the promise the military didn’t. All preliminary indications are pointing to evidence that I managed to free your human side from being stifled by your cyborg programming.”

Kyra frowned as Peyton turned and gave her his back. It was not the response she had expected.

“Or you could be making all this shit up for reasons I don’t know yet,” he said flatly.

While not used to being accused of lying, she accepted Peyton’s skepticism as healthy under the circumstances. At least he was still asking questions.

“No. I’m not making this up. You’re my third and final experiment. I’m out of funds and out of time. There’s an ongoing investigation into the deaths of my previous two Cyber Husbands, both of whom I tried to restore. The organization I once worked for did this to you and now suspects what I’ve been doing. It’s only a matter of time before they come after me to find out for sure. I hope to finish your restoration long before they do that.”

Peyton crossed his arms. The physical action felt good—and made him feel safer. Of course that was irrational, but it was like every body motion he made counted in a new way. “After all the trouble you say you went through to get me into your lab chair, I don’t see you taking off without seeing your mad scientist scheme through to the end.”

Kyra shook her head. “I’m not going far. I’m planning to blow up the cybernetic facility at Norton Industries. It won’t stop new cyborgs from being created elsewhere in the world, but it will stop them from being created here in our country for a good long time. At this time in our history, there are over fifteen hundred registered cyborgs in the world. Most of them were never soldiers. Few of them volunteered for their changes.”

“You talk about a corporation making cyborgs like it was making air jets. Cyber Soldiers are a military endeavor, not a civilian one. Are you certifiable, Doc? Is that why I’m locked in this cage?”

Kyra ignored Peyton’s insulting comment about her sanity as she continued. It would likely be just one of many. “Some will probably think I’m crazy when my success with you is discovered. To explain my actions, I created a holographic recording about the corruption of the cybernetics program and my part in it. What I’m trying to do is stop your degree of cybernetic modification from being done to others. I trying like hell to do it before the scientific God-complex grows too large to constrain.”

“If you have this secret agenda, why the hell are you telling me about it? As a paid servant of our country’s military, I’m legally and ethically bound to turn you in for making threats to the leadership of your country.”

Kyra shrugged. “That’s one of the things I’ve been trying to explain to you, Captain Elliott. The world has changed dramatically in the last decade. There is no military anymore like the one you remember. Instead there is a global security organization and right now they support the enslavement of the Cyber Soldiers.”

Peyton glared. He still couldn’t believe her. “If what you’re saying is true, why don’t I remember the last decade of my life? For all I know, you could have just tweaked my memories to suit the story you’re telling. You just explained how that was possible.”

Kyra met and held Peyton’s gaze. He was a lot sharper than his record indicated. She hoped that meant he would be quicker to grasp her story as the truth once assimilation had occurred.

“After my first attempt at cyborg restoration failed so badly, I knew better than to give you full access to all the data at once. Your human mind would have shut down trying to understand it as you dealt with your new processor. Instead, I wanted you to have the unique experience of being mostly human so you have a chance to understand having
feelings
and
emotions
are normal and right. To accomplish this, I put a block on your cybernetically recorded data for the last decade. It’s a simple matter for me to remove the block, but it’s not so simple for you to get all that data back. Once the data comes forward for assimilation, even if you have trouble believing it’s true, you’re still going to feel all kinds of emotions about what’s been done to you. My second restoration subject told me it was like waking up in the middle of a nightmare and finding out every gory detail was real.”

“You keep talking about the others like me. Where are they now?” Peyton demanded.

Kyra lifted her chin and prepared herself to face the first wave of hate.

“Both are dead. I had to euthanize the first because his mind snapped. Marshall couldn’t deal with what he learned about what had happened to him. It had been in his military record that he’d been captured. What wasn’t there was that his captors had tortured him with shock devices and sexually assaulted him repeatedly. After the peace pacts, Marshall was returned and medically retired into the Cyber Husband program without his human side receiving any therapy for what he’d suffered. In freeing him from what I discovered was a customized processor, I destroyed all data blocks that had been shielding him from remembering those experiences. In rapid succession, he recalled his military duty, his torture and abuse, and suffered the humiliation of the fixes I made to him. His life in the Cyber Husband program was nearly as traumatic as his prisoner of war experiences. What Marshall learned about himself was simply more than his mind could handle.”

Kyra paused and looked at her clenched fists. She ordered herself to uncurl her fingers. She hadn’t personally done any of those horrible things to Marshall. She just hadn’t rescued him carefully enough.

“I tried to save him, but I failed. After a week of Marshall constantly swearing at me when I tried to communicate with him, one day he went completely silent. Later I realized he had found a way to shut down his internal organs and make them stop functioning. He never made it out of the cage you’re now in, Captain Elliot. Every time I tried to get in to help him, Marshall tried to kill me despite the pain of the mobile restraints. I had to stop trying when he fractured my collar bone and dislocated my shoulder. Eventually though he grew too weak to try and hurt me. When I finally was able to get close enough to help, his organs were already too far gone. With no further recourse available, I put him out of his misery. So yes. . .I killed him. His death was my largest learning curve. It was three years before I was willing to try the restoration process again.”

Peyton sat down heavily on the bed. The woman had coldly killed a fellow soldier and he had kissed her liked she was life incarnate. His hands fisted and released—fisted and released.

“You said I was your third cyborg. What happened to the second guy?” He didn’t really want to know, but he needed to get a grasp on the full reality of his dilemma. His body was still reacting sexually to her voice no matter what horrors she described. It needed to give that shit up immediately—but his dick didn’t seem willing to listen to the cause of his frustration.

“The physical restoration was mostly successful. Alex handled it better, but after six months he became clinically depressed and suicidal. He threw himself off a mountainside to escape his disillusionment with the world. When he was first restored, Alex seemed fine with the new level of control his human side gave him over his cybernetics. He adjusted well to memories of his past even though he was by nature a glass half empty kind of person. I think it was extremely hard for Alex to be the only cyborg aware of the UCN corruption. He spoke of it frequently.”