Adam (12 page)

True, and yet, if she ever got caught… Adam almost shuddered to think of what they’d do to his delicate doc. “I take back what I said about you needing more action in your life. I was wrong. As a matter of fact, you have too much adventure. It’s time you dialed back your activities.” Yes, he went on a mini rant but only because it occurred to him that Laura was in deep shit if the military ever discovered her actions. Treason wasn’t something to joke about. Treason equaled death. And pain. Lots and lots of pain.

She rolled her eyes at him. His doctor. His serious, ladylike doctor. Who was a fucking mole.

The laws of probability shattered. His whole logical method for thinking went down a proverbial toilet. Forget calculating anything. Apparently association with a human meant all bets were off.

“I see that advanced programming hasn’t completely managed to erase a male tendency to coddle the womenfolk.”

“Most womenfolk aren’t involved in high level espionage,” he hissed, his hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly it bent.

“This from the guy who is also a spy working right under the nose of the military who would kill him faster than I could blink.”

“I fail to see the comparison. I am a cyborg. It doesn’t matter where I work. The death sentence follows. You, however, choose to put yourself in harm’s way.”

“To help others.”

He leaned his forehead against the steering wheel. “I think I am experiencing my first headache.”

“Well, I don’t have any acetaminophen on me, so how about this metal-tipped pen?”

Her curious offer made him raise his head to glance at her. “Why would I need a pen? Absorbing it won’t cure my ache.”

“I was thinking more you could use it to jab yourself in the eye. It’s what I usually want to do when I get a good migraine.”

She managed to say it seriously, and yet he caught the slight tilt at the corner of her mouth.

“Your levity is inappropriate to the situation.” Yet entertaining.

“And your serious robot side is showing more than your human, which means I have to ask, is it hard to maintain the charade?”

“Not usually.” However, in moments of stress, he tended to rely more on his logical processor thoughts than his organic ones.

“You seem much more human than other cyborgs I’ve met.”

“Part of that is because of my unit type. I was designed as a spy model, capable of blending. But the rest of my mannerisms are from observation and recollection.”

“Do you remember much from your previous life? I know not all cyborgs got their memories back when they shattered the programming holding them prisoner.”

“I remember enough.” Enough to both thank his fate and curse it.

“Do you miss your human life?”

Miss the ease of his life before, yes. Miss the endless hours of misery, paralyzed in a bed after the accident? No.

“Is this your subtle way of asking what happened to me?”

“I didn’t mean to be subtle. I want to know what happened to you.”

Since they had time to kill as he made his roundabout way to the rendezvous point, he told her the story he’d not told anyone else.

“I didn’t technically volunteer to become a cyborg, but at the same time, if I could have spoken, I wouldn’t have said no. See, I was in a motorcycle accident. A bad one the summer before I was supposed to start my senior college year. I was paralyzed, head to toe, but not comatose, although they did put me under a few times as they operated, trying to fix me.”

But nothing could repair the damage done to his spine. Rear-ending the car that suddenly stopped had sent him soaring from his motorcycle head first. The helmet kept his skull from cracking like a melon, but it didn’t lessen the impact. He cracked the vertebrae in his neck, severing his mind’s control over his body.

He was doomed. Doomed to live the rest of his life on a machine, in a bed, unable to move but aware of everything. Everything!

For all intents and purposes, he was a living corpse.

Until the day his parents arrived with his brother and outlined a choice.

“It’s experimental nanotechnology, they told me. The doctor they sent in to explain it to me made it sound so simple, so natural. Metal parts to replace the broken ones. A chance to walk again. Live again,” Adam told Laura, still remembering his father’s hopeful gaze as he explained it to him.

“But?” she prodded.

“There was just one catch. By giving me this opportunity, I had to put in some service time to the military.” When the question came, blink rapidly for yes, he’d winked so fast the tears stuck to his lashes.

“I don’t remember much after that. From what I’ve gleaned from other experiences, they put me under and performed their modifications. I got chipped and nanoed and upgraded. When I woke, I only had vague recollections of tests they performed. I didn’t realize there was anything wrong then. They’d kept their promise. I was no longer crippled. Hell, I was better than before. Stronger. Faster. Smarter. I could heal anything. I was invincible. And then they took over my mind.”

While Adam could access the memory files for those years, they didn’t feel real to him. He watched them much like an outside observer would, detached from the unfolding events. During that time, he truly was a robotic puppet, marching where ordered, killing on demand. An assassin given a role and a script that he executed to perfection. He felt no guilt over his actions. He felt nothing at all.

Until cognition slammed back into him, by complete accident. He got struck by lightning. Literally.

And it would happen at the most inconvenient time.

“Realizing you’ve been a meat puppet for men who don’t give a damn if you live or die is a shock to the system. And there I was, smoking from the lightning bolt, on top of an embassy roof, on my way to assassinate some guy because those were my orders.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what? Complete my mission? Of course I did. I played them all for fools for months.”

Until the order came down to terminate them all.

But by then it was too late.

Adam survived the purge.

He survived because the military fucked up. They fucked up when they decided to take away his free will and make him a machine to use at their whim. They fucked up when they thought he was a slave they could command. But most of all they fucked up when they didn’t terminate him at the first sign cyborgs were regaining sentience.

Of course, in their defense, they never knew their perfect soldier was plotting his escape, given Adam played his role as willing servant all too well.

After he regained sentience, he played the role of dumb robot. He didn’t bat an eye when he heard “
Stupid goddamn machine head. I hear they take their balls to make them docile.”

Fact: No, they didn’t. Testosterone was part of what made them so good at killing. As a matter of fact, they were more endowed than unenhanced human beings.

Adam never flinched when the older soldiers tried to impress the newer ones. “
Check this. You can punch them as hard as you like, and they can’t do a thing.”

True. He didn’t act, yet a part of him catalogued the perpetrators of violence. In the end, he made them pay for their lack of respect. But that came later.

While he hid his sentience, he used the chip in his brain for something other than complicated mathematics. He used his smarts to reroute subroutines to give the military the illusion of control, but meanwhile, Adam remained in full command of his senses. He watched. Learned. Listened. And plotted.

During those months, as memories returned to him slowly, bits and snatches of his past life taunted him.

A child blowing candles on a birthday cake, smiling and laughing people surrounding him. Total strangers, or were they the family he couldn’t recall?

The backseat of a car, the windows steamed, a young woman beneath him panting and urging him on, quicker, faster. Him thinking,
oh shit, don’t come too fast.

Waking in the hospital, screaming as they did things to him, his struggle brief and frightening.
These are doctors. Why are they hurting me?

So many clues that kept randomly appearing in his memory data bank. Puzzle pieces, which, when added together, created a disturbing picture.

His voice dropped as he retold his story, and Laura didn’t speak, afraid perhaps that an interruption would end his tale. “They took away my life. They took away who I was. They used me. Rage ignited, a rage to see justice done, a rage to make things right. However, unlike some of my cyborg brothers, I didn’t go on a long murderous rampage.” More like a short one.

Not to say he’d not shed his share of blood. His hands weren’t clean by any means, but he knew when to fight and when to run.

He stayed with his cyborg brethren until the final moments. He stood in the front row when the soldiers arrived with their guns and the pompous major stood at the top of the stairs and ordered, “Kill them.”

Drawing his sidearm as he stepped out of line, Adam made sure he caught the major’s wide-eyed gaze as he said, “I couldn’t have said it more succinctly myself. Cyborgs, attack!”

That day saw a lot of people dying. Human, cyborg, enhanced or not, their blood all ran red.

Initially, Adam and his awakened compatriots held a definite edge until the airplanes showed up with no care for innocent casualties and bombed the place. Adam and a few handfuls of others only barely managed to escape. They learned a valuable lesson that day. While they could win in a hand-to-hand combat situation, when faced against an enemy armed with better weaponry and a ruthless order to eradicate, they were woefully unprepared.

“That’s when the majority of the cyborgs fled earth. Few of them successfully. The military shot down any vessel they suspected of harboring my kind. Even civilian ones.”

“They claimed it was cyborg suicide bombers taking them out,” she said in a quiet murmur.

“Yes, the first of many mistruths in their campaign of lies.” A ploy to sway the public to accept their ruthless extermination and trampling of civil rights as they chased after the hidden cyborgs.

“Yet you didn’t flee to safety. You stayed behind.”

“I did. I felt responsible. Because I hesitated, and waited after regaining sentience, cyborgs died that day. I had the choice to help them escape, but I talked them into staying.” Talked them into biding their time so that he would have their aid when the time came for vengeance. His irrationality and ignoring of the odds had led to their demise.

“So you stayed to atone? But it wasn’t your fault they died. You didn’t give the order to kill them.”

“Perhaps not, but I did give the one to fight instead of flee.”

She shook her head. “Survivor’s guilt.”

He almost refuted her claim. He was, after all, too logical to ever suffer from such a human failing, but he didn’t say a word. Couldn’t, because she was right.

“What I don’t understand is how you stayed and somehow managed to blend in. How? I mean, you’ve been here years. Among us. Among your enemy. How did no one ever suspect?”

He cast her a quick sideways glance. “You mean how did I pass scrutiny? Isn’t my charm enough?”

“You are, on the surface, entirely human seeming, but we both know there’s tests out there to spot cyborgs. Metal detectors. What about your identity? Is Adam the name you were born with?”

“Evading capture did require some finagling. As you noted, the paranoia to weed us out was great, especially those first few months. I quickly realized I required a few elements to survive. First of all, a new name but, more than that, documents and proper identification that would allow me to move about freely.” Because after the cyborg uprising, identity cards linked to a fingerprint scan became mandatory, useless really, given the ease with which a person could burn new ones. However, it made the civilian populace feel safe.

“I chose a new name.” Which he stole from a comatose patient who suddenly miraculously recovered, at least according to digital records.

“Who were you before you became Adam?”

“My name was Eugene.”

She snickered. “Eugene? I have to say you don’t look like a Eugene.”

He grimaced. “Thanks, I think.” He much preferred Adam because, much like the biblical one, he liked to think of himself as the first of his kind to open his eyes to the truth around him.

“So Eugene became Adam. What came after?”

“I started the cyborg liberation movement, although, initially, it was more just me and a firewalled computer in a leaky basement apartment while I worked as a pizza delivery guy. More than six months later, I’d only managed to save one other cyborg. When I realized I needed to change my methods, I signed up as a military recruit.”

“I still don’t understand that part.”

“How else was I going to get access to the information I needed?”

With his memories fractured and his skills good for only one thing—war and survival—it seemed the most apt choice, that and the wages were better. The military was all he knew. Even better, he knew the safeguards they had in place to spot his kind, which made it easy to avoid them and help others escape their detection.