The Cyborg Chronicles by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Windrift Books
Published: 2015-12-28T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

“Indigo.” The voice crackled over her transponder.

It was all coming apart. She stumbled and fell against one of the walls, tinny breath echoing in her ears from the mask. She could feel the implants scrubbing radiation damage, a constant set of pinpricks, the hum of the protective field generated near her sternum. Everything working as it should, except her.

Retrieve the implants. She slid down the wall—floor, everything was sideways—and uncurled her hand. The slip of paper was soaked with her sweat.

SCHEHERAZADE.

A sob and a gasp caught her ear, and she rolled her head. A woman, blonde-haired, blood dribbling from the corner of her mouth. Infrared showed the wound in her chest and an implant in her forearm. Standard reflex enhancements, nothing fancy. But the mission was to retrieve all of the implants. All of them. Indigo crawled to her target. A knife parted the skin, and tweezers yanked the implant free. The woman gave a choking cry.

She wasn’t going to make it; help was too far away, and the cyborg had no medical supplies for live bodies. She reached out, the woman’s brown eyes tracking her, and planted a bullet in the woman’s head. No more pain.

She wondered if they could hear the gunshot from the camp. She slumped back and let her head tip against the wall, dragged in a breath. Everything that should be automatic was failing her. She knew the mission, but it hadn’t implanted deep enough to trigger her.

She’d played with the shape of her mind. The fact was, this should mean nothing to her. She was a cyborg, she existed only Now. Mission memories were lost, surrendered to the wipe. A cyborg had no guilty conscience, nothing to remember. Not her orders, not her memories.

She would not remember this, she realized, and panic gripped her. It would all be white soon. White was comforting, always had been. White hallways, white lights, soft voices, wiping it all away. No matter how bad things got, the memories would be lifted away, leaving only the faintest impression behind. Here was dirty and dark and bloody death and pain that crackled in the air like static on her human half, and it would all be gone when she got back to the Erasmus.

She should want it to be gone, so that she could lie in her bed and be as clean as the ship, and as whole. They would put her back together in the chair and wipe over all of this with white. Erased, detoxed… But there was something terrifying about the thought of not remembering this. She would have no memory at all of crouching in the dark, amazed that anything could hurt so much, ripping apart in her chest. She felt terror of what was coming, a fracturing of self—and still she could not let the pain go. It was now the ground she stood on.

Were humans built on fears, hard won and precious? Fire-water-cold-fangs, preset, and the others built up from a lifetime

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