Chapter Fourteen
I am caged. This is my own fault, I know. It’s also my fault that I’m alone, because Adam has had to leave in order to fill in the tunnel I dug out and close it in. To do that, he has to go scavenge among the ruins of the city, and no doubt fight off hordes of half-mad humans like the ones I saw on the night I emerged.
I’m worried for him. I’m worried for us. I’m worried for whatever life might be sparking inside me. I can barely bring myself to even think about that aspect—that there could be a little somebody inside me even now, growing innocently unaware of the utter chaos outside.
My mind skips to the math of the matter. Statistically, it’s unlikely to have happened yet. Rates of conception aren’t that high. But still, there’s a possibility, a possibility that my cold scientific rationale can’t quite make go away.
Being stuck in a cage gives me a lot of time to think. About me, about Adam, about everything that led up to this and everything that might still happen. Is it even possible for us to have a happily ever after?
I hear the door open, heavy iron scraping across the not quite level stone floor, and breathe a sigh of relief. Thank god. He’s back. I don’t have to think anymore. He can let me out of this cage and I can go pee.
There’s scuffling and shuffling about and I wonder what he’s doing. He must have got some more supplies; they sound kind of heavy. I know he likes me to stay quiet when I’m in the cage, so I don’t call out to him, even though I really want to.
I wait, and I wait. What is he doing in there? Why hasn’t he closed the door behind him? It’s usually the very first thing he does. Adam never leaves any passage into the place open if he doesn’t have to.
A bad feeling is starting to creep through me. I can’t see anything, but I know something is wrong. I can’t feel Adam. That makes no sense empirically, but I feel in my gut. Whatever just came through that door wasn’t Adam.
A figure enters the room slowly but stiffly. It’s not Adam. It’s not even a male. I can’t see this woman’s face, but I can see the outline of her body silhouetted by the light from the other room. She’s wearing something very, very tight that leaves nothing to the imagination. She’s tall though, almost as tall as Adam, and she’s broad-shouldered for a woman.
I can’t see her properly. I’m pretty sure she hasn’t seen me yet, cowering here in the corner of my cage. But there’s something… familiar about her. A shiver runs up my spine. She is eerie. There’s something wrong with her. Something I can’t quite put my finger on.
She takes another step into the room, light falls properly across her face, and I know in an instant what it is. She is like Adam. She has the same technology as him. My work, but not from my hand.
The sharp intake of breath I take causes her eyes to zero in on me, twin lasers of crystal blue intensity piercing me across the room.
“Who are you?” We both ask the question as the same time, our words blending, mine afraid, hers harsh.
She stalks over to me, looks down at me with clinical contempt. She does not remark on the cage like a normal person would, because she is not a normal person. Strictly speaking, she is not a person at all.
I can’t help but stare at her, marveling at what someone else must have made. From an examination at this distance, she looks practically perfect. I don’t detect any tremors in her fine motor range, and her gaze is locked on, none of the glassy gaze we saw in some of the smaller animals we tested with the technology.
“I’m… Martha,” I say. If she doesn’t know who I am, there’s no way I’m going to tell her. There are precisely zero ways that would improve this interaction.
“My name is Eve,” she says, her voice cold. “Where is my mate?”
I don’t answer her. I just stare at her. She looks so much like Adam. I’m starting to think that they must have taken precisely the same code and allowed for female instead of male. Maybe duplicated the X chromosome to make up for the extra missing leg of the Y… and then called her Eve and told her she was Adam’s mate. Jesus wept.
The hubris involved in doing something like that doesn’t surprise me. The kind of people who like to create life don’t have a problem with having a God complex. It’s basically a point of pride. Now we’re dealing with a potential clusterfuck of biblical proportions.
“Did you understand me?” She snaps the question, impatient.
“Y… your mate?”
“The one named Adam. The only other one in the world who is as I am.”
“I don’t know.”
It’s the truth. Adam has been gone for hours now and he’s not in the habit of telling me where he goes. He leaves me here like a mother beast leaves her baby behind in the den—except now there’s another super predator here and I know I can’t defend myself from her.
The same thought has apparently occurred to her.
She walks toward me, her movements unhurried, but somehow intimidating. As she comes further toward me, I see her better.
Her clothing is rubberized, perfectly formed to her perfect body. I can make out the lines of her nipples under the tight fabric. I can even see the taut plane of her stomach… and… as my eyes lower, I see that literally nothing has been left to the imagination. The rubber is so thin and so tight it outlines her feminine places in a frankly lewd manner.
“What are you doing here?”
She really doesn’t know who I am, and that is a very good thing. One, it’s probably the only thing keeping me alive right now. Two, it means they didn’t upload data about me to her, which might mean they don’t know Adam and I are together. The less they know, the better.
“I, uh…” My throat starts to close from fear as she gets closer to me. She is just as tall as Adam, and I have no doubt just as physically powerful.
For the first time ever, I am glad for the cage surrounding me. It will protect me from her. It will… my mind goes blank as she casually wraps her hands around the bars and simply pulls them open, peeling the bars back as if they were made of rubber rather than steel.
She reaches through the opening and takes me by the neck. I don’t know if the grip is meant to be intimidating, or if she’s just picking me up awkwardly, but either way she drags me through the opening roughly, banging me against the bars without remorse or even a flicker of acknowledgment that such an action might hurt me.
I don’t see the desire to hurt me in her face. I do see a blank indifference, as if I were a fly or something entirely irrelevant to her. She is a cyborg as we had decided not to make them. The cold, passionless, unemotional kind. I’m willing to bet they didn’t even attempt to map those brain functions in. She’s probably missing entire chunks of brain.
Eve looks down at me and lowers her face to mine, taking a brief sniff before lifting her head again.
“I smell him on you.”
She seems more confused by that than angry.
“He has been mating with you,” she says, her voice still flat. “Why?”
“I…” It’s basically impossible to answer her because her grip is cutting my breath off very successfully.
She frowns, then loosens her grip, dropping me to the floor. I land on my hands and knees, cursing under my breath. She could easily have broken my neck, but it’s hard to hold that against her. Being angry at Eve would be like being angry at a toaster. She’s not… real. Not like Adam is.
“He is my mate,” she says in that horrible voice that is just so devoid of existence. “I was made from him.”
“You mean for him?”
“I mean from him,” she corrects me roughly. “They took a part of his bone.”
“Let me guess,” I say, rubbing my neck. “They took a rib.”
“Yes,” she says, barely registering the fact that I know something I shouldn’t really know. Her mental skills are really not up to par. She doesn’t have a sense of what she knows versus what other people know.
Those sick fucks. Did they do it because they knew the significance of it, or because a rib really is the best part of a cyborg to take? I try to force my mind back to the problem at hand. There’s a huge cyber-enhanced female looking down at me and at any moment she could decide that I’m competition and the best thing to do is crush me like a bug.
I should be fearing for my life, but I find myself utterly fascinated with this creature. So this is what Ascent got up to after I left. They forgot the entire design philosophy and just started pumping out half-baked replicas of Adam, building them around some kind of borderline blasphemous fantasy.
How many other Eves are out there? How many other Adams? A chill runs through me. It occurs to me that I can’t even be sure that the Adam who has me now is the same Adam I knew in the lab. He has that Adam’s memories, but perhaps memories can be replicated or transplanted; they’re just data after all, encoded in neural networks.
“You know Adam? He’s been with you?” I try to keep the jealousy out of my voice, but it doesn’t really matter because she wouldn’t recognize it anyway.
“Not yet,” she says. “I was made for him. Sent to find him. I must find my mate. He dwells here. I can smell him.”
Her sentences are staccato, but they’re also correct.
“Where is he?” She repeats the question.
“I really don’t know. He will return if you wait.” That’s the truth. He will be back sooner or later. I just hope I survive that long.
“I…” she announces. “Will wait.”
She walks over and takes a seat on the couch, perching in an incongruously ladylike fashion, knees together, ankles crossed one over the other. There’s an elegance and beauty to her I can’t help but admire.
The wait for Adam isn’t actually all that long, but it feels like forever. I try to avoid eye contact with Eve, and behave like the furniture would. It seems to work. She is far too preoccupied with him. Even the fact that I smell of his seed doesn’t concern her. It’s more like I’m a dirty tissue she found with his cum drying on it than a potential love rival.
Finally, I hear his footsteps. I am filled with simultaneous relief and fear. This could go well, or it could go horribly wrong.
The first thing Adam sees when he walks through the still open door is my cage.
“Lilly!” He booms my name angrily.
“Adam!” I call back. “We have a guest.”
“What?” His growl is low and angry as he stalks into the room, looking for me. There’s already a strip of leather in his hand, which I’m sure he intends to punish me with but this time it really isn’t my fault.
He sees me sitting on the floor. I have not moved since Eve dropped me. Staying still and appearing to be nothing more than an object in the room seems to be the safest option. His eyes run over me, settle on the red mark around my throat. Before he can come to me, or even formulate a question, he is greeted by his guest.
“Adam.”
The female rises from the couch and turns toward him. I see a hundred reactions pass over Adam’s face in a split second. I see shock, anger, aggression, confusion, and lust.
“I am Eve,” she introduces herself. “I am your mate. I have come to procreate.”
I groan internally. If Eve was a real woman, I would be consumed with pure jealousy, but there’s something so awfully innocent about her, so utterly undetermined. This isn’t her choice. She’s not doing or saying these things because she really wants Adam. She’s been programmed to, that’s all.
Adam clears his throat. “Eve,” he says. “Where did you come from?”
“I was made in the same place you were.”
“That place is gone now.”
“I was made in the same place you were,” she repeats. “I was made for you. You are my mate. You will place your semen inside my internal channel and I will grow a replica of our combined genetic code.”
Well, she’s direct, I’ll give her that. There’s a certain sense of deja vu to this. Adam was less robotic about his plans for me, but they were and still are essentially the very same plan.
“I do not wish to replicate with Ascent technology,” Adam says, dashing her hopes. “You should leave.”
Oh, god. No. That’s not a good idea. She has very low emotional intelligence. The odds of her being able to compute rejection, let alone take it well, are staggeringly low.
Eve’s demeanor changes in an instant. She goes from formal and somewhat friendly to stiff and aggressive.
“You,” she hisses with the unmistakable fury of a woman scorned. “You are mine.”
“Yours?” Adam’s lip curls. “What do you mean?”
“They made me for you. You are mine.”
“They made you for them,” he says. “Just like they made me for them. I’m not yours.”
“You are my destiny.”
“No.” Adam shakes his head.
“Yes,” she insists. “I know it. It is all I know.”
She has lost all interest in me now that he is here. Her eyes are locked on his with a desperate, almost pathetic longing. He does not reciprocate her desire. His posture is rigid, aggressive. She made a big mistake when she put her hands on me, and I can see that he will not forgive her easily.
“I don’t care what you know,” he says, his voice cold. “It is time you left. Return to your masters and tell them that they have failed.”
Her hand goes to her top, where a zipper sits between her breasts. A calculated smile rises to her perfect lips as she slowly pulls it down an inch.
In a flash, I realize what they’ve done. They’ve sent a cyborg to seduce a cyborg. They know sending aggressive units will only result in loss of life, so they’re trying to use Adam’s instinct to mate against him.
This Eve is freshly printed, probably less than a week off the block. Physically, she’s perfect. Technologically, she’s rough and she’s completely unsocialized. They’ve probably only done the bare essentials of her programming. And that means she’s very, very dangerous.
Whether Ascent has managed to set up another lab, or whether this is some fucked-up government plan go awry, she frightens me for a whole host of reasons other than the fact she is here trying to take the man I love.
Her existence means that Adam is no longer the only functioning unit. Someone, somewhere, has the capacity and the desire to create multiples, all based, no doubt on the Adam prototype. If I know them as well as I think I do, I have no doubt that they will be putting cyborgs into mass production with zero thought for the consequences.
I feel sorry for Eve. She’s a monster, created without care. Adam was brought into the world by people who gave a damn. Even the ones who later abandoned him to his pain, they cared about him when he was nothing more than a cluster of cells and a neural network ready to be laid down.
Eve never had that advantage, and it shows. Her eyes are physically like his, but they are cold. There is no soul behind them, and I am left wondering whether Adam is a product of the process, or if in our hubris, some other unseen force was at play, something we didn’t recognize.
He is not like her. I see it. He sees it. But she does not. She believes what she has been told to believe, and his rejection quite literally does not compute. She stops, her stare and smile frozen as her virgin processors attempt to make sense of what is going on.
“You are my mate,” she says, more mechanically than ever. If this wasn’t so dangerous, it would be utterly tragic. None of this is her fault. She hasn’t had the time to develop, or more likely, she hasn’t been given the physiological architecture to have free will. She looks like a woman, though in reality she has more in common with a hammer. She is a simple tool, nothing more.
They have taken our beautiful work, and they have made monsters out of it. I am angrier than I have been since I saw them hurting Adam. We’re probably going to have to hurt Eve. It’s not fair and I don’t want to do it, but we have no choice. This will not end well.