Chapter Fifteen
Adam
This… thing hurt Lilly. I can see the strangulation marks around Lilly’s neck clear as day. They are starting to bruise. This creature in front of me hurt her, and she is going to have to die.
We come to that conclusion at the same time, this Eve thing and I. At the exact same moment, we move into an aggressive stance. They may not have given her all the advantages of my technology, but I am sure they will have given her the same combat capacities. She is made in the form of a female, however, and that will affect her ability. The frame of a woman with wider hips and smaller shoulders is less powerful than that of a man. Simple physics at play.
“You are mine,” she says. “I will make you mine.”
With that, she drives her fist toward my face. It is a smaller fist than mine, but it is thrown fast and with perfect power. I dip to the side and another blow is already coming, precisely where my head moved. She anticipated my action before it came, and her blow connects with my skull with a ringing strike that makes my pain receptors activate in a frenzy.
I may have underestimated her because of her feminine frame. What tech they left out in terms of social adeptness, they seem to have made up for in combat calculations.
She’s fast. She’s brutal. And in under twenty seconds it becomes apparent that she is kicking my ass. My guard is too low, untested. I’ve never fought anything my equal before and my defenses are inadequate.
I don’t truly want to hurt this female-shaped thing, but that chivalrous instinct is going to get my skull caved in and it will inevitably get Lilly killed. Sooner or later, Eve is going to realize that Lilly has what she wants, and then it will be the simplest matter of all just to kill her. Lilly would not last two seconds against this creature. I have to kill her. I have no choice.
“You are my mate!” she yells as she drives her fist into my solar plexus.
The red mist descends. I unleash the full fury not only of my cybernetic technology, but my innate drive to protect the woman I love. The woman who is cowering only feet away from me, and who will suffer terribly if I dare lose.
Eve is no match for that. I take her blows, absorb the pain, and I wade through her defenses, crushing them with my own blows until she is knocked to the ground and lies there unconscious.
I lean down to make the finishing blow, but a streak of girl gets in my way.
“Stop!” Lilly rushes forward, throws herself on Eve. Seeing her do that reminds me of what she did with me all those years ago in the laboratory. I’m reminded of her compassion, and also, her utter foolhardiness.
“What are you doing? Get off her!” My words echo the words of the old overseer. We are acting out the trauma of the past, but now I am the aggressor, not the victim.
“Don’t kill her,” Lilly says, her innocence betraying her now. This better nature of humans does not help in the slightest. Eve would kill her without thinking twice.
“There’s nothing there to kill,” I say. “She’s just a machine. Get off her now.”
“There’s something there,” she insists. “And this is a waste. There’s just you and I out here right now, Adam. Imagine what we could do with a guardian. Maybe I could adjust her programming.”
Maybe she could. But we don’t have a lot of time before the cyborg woman wakes up. I can see her eyelashes fluttering as her system reboots. She’ll be online very soon, and when she comes back up, she’s going to come up fighting.
“Get me all the materials you brought with you from Ascent,” Lilly says. “Let me see what I can do.”
I hesitate. There are no marks on the cyborg’s body, but her suit has not withstood the trauma of battle. It has ripped along several seams, including the one over her pubic area.
Lilly’s eyes follow mine. “Oh, my…”
We realize the cruelty of Eve’s existence together as we both see what is between her thighs. Or, more precisely, what isn’t. Where the female sex organs should be, there is nothing but a small hole for elimination.
“They didn’t even give her a vagina to mate with,” Lilly murmurs. “They gave her the drive to mate, and no ability to carry it out.”
The cyborg groans and shifts slightly. Her speech comes online before the rest of her does, and she stares at us with blank eyes as she repeats her mission in a way that now seems tragically futile. “You will mate with me. You will deposit semen in my cavity. You will be my mate. We will procreate.”
* * *
Lilly
She can’t procreate. So she’s not really here to procreate. They sent her out like a horny homing pigeon, looking for Adam. And she found him. And that means… it hits me suddenly. The danger isn’t Eve. The danger is her handlers, and they are likely not far behind at all. She was devised as a distraction, and she has been a very, very effective one.
“Adam…” I open my mouth to warn him, but it’s already too late.
Tink… tink… tink…
That is the sound of the world ending. A small cylinder rolls down the ventilation shaft and onto the floor a few feet away from us.
Boom!
It explodes in a haze of gas and powder and smoke. There’s instantly no visibility, but I can hear the invasion taking place, soldiers in full body armor and gas masks storming in from the door Eve must have marked on her way in.
Chaos ensues.
Adam puts his foot on my chest and shoves me back, hard so I go sliding under a heavy cabinet raised just high enough off the floor for someone my size to lie flat under. It’s all he has time to do to protect me before they’re on him.
I can barely see and I can’t hear anything at all, so everything happens in a frenzied haze. Through the clouds, I catch glimpses of Adam fighting for his life and for mine. I see armored men going flying like toys. The high-pitched ringing in my ears doesn’t stop, but I can hear screaming anyway. Maybe theirs, probably mine.
Is he winning? There seem to be so many of them. Six. Maybe twelve. Definitely twelve. Every time one of them falls, another takes his place. There are shots being fired, ricocheting off the walls. Idiots.
Even as I watch him fight, the fog of battle obscuring the worst of the carnage, I know this is impossible for him to win. He was caught off guard, and at a disadvantage. They are prepared. There is no way they would have come without the resources needed to take him, and though Adam will fight to his very last breath, there is only so much anyone, man or cyborg, can do against an insurmountable enemy.
In the gassy cloud, I see Eve get up. I let out a scream of warning, but it does nothing. Now Adam is in real trouble. The soldiers have him surrounded and with Eve fighting him again, all is lost. I keep screaming, even though screaming is pointless.
Any second now, she will take him down and they will take him away. And me too, when they inevitably find me. We will both be prisoners again. I do not think either of us will survive another round of captivity.
I can’t bear to watch this, but I can’t stand to look away.
And then, a miracle happens. Eve does not hurl herself into combat against Adam. Instead, she puts her back to him and she throws herself at the soldiers with all the feral fire they put in her. The result is short-lived and brutal. Suddenly overwhelmed by two cyborgs, an order is given. I can’t hear it, but I can see the result. Shots are fired at close range. Eve falls. But not before that rabid hound has turned on those who made her and minced them out of recognition.
Adam makes short work of the rest of them and in the end the floor is thick with blood and the air is heavy with the silence of the dead. As the smoke clears, I see our place is covered in the bodies of the fallen. Adam is injured, bloody, but somehow has managed to evade the worse of the shots. Obviously their orders were to bring him in alive. I doubt those will be the orders next time.
He staggers over to me, picks me up, and hugs me tight. “We have to go,” he murmurs into my ear. “Now. There is no time to wait. They will send more after those people and they will not spare us again. We will die if we stay.”
He doesn’t have to argue with me. We pick up a few of the most essential items, stuff them into packs, and we go on the run. Most of my view is of his ass as I follow after him through alleys and into tunnels. Adam prepared for this day. There are egresses all over the place, he tells me. And other safe spots.
We run for hours, moving through the very worst parts of the city where horrors take place daily and a man covered in blood with a woman in tow doesn’t attract much in the way of attention. I am dead on my feet, paying no attention to anything other than making sure I keep moving.
Sleep comes when Adam scoops me up and carries me. I am exhausted. He must be too, but he is strong for the both of us and I know he will not rest until we are safe.
* * *
I wake up in a dingy little room, wrapped in Adam’s arms. It is morning and we are safe. Or at the very least, not dead. He stirs as I do, opening his eyes and pressing a kiss to my cheek.
“We’re okay?”
“We’re okay,” he agrees. “For now at least. No pursuers that I can find.”
I breathe a small sigh of relief. The events of the previous day were so tumultuous and vicious it’s going to take me a long time to process them and come to terms with them.
“Eve…” I say. “We left her behind.”
“There wasn’t…” Adam coughs and tries to phrase things more delicately. “There wasn’t enough left to even attempt to save. They aimed at her head.”
I cringe, even at the lack of description. She didn’t deserve that. She didn’t deserve to be made to suffer and she didn’t deserve to die the way she did, like an animal.
“She saved us.”
“She did,” he admits.
We only knew her for less than an hour, but in that time, Eve changed our lives. I’m sad for her and grateful to her.
“I really hope they don’t make more like her,” I murmur. “I hope she was somehow the last of Ascent’s technology.”
“They made a lot of replicas while I was there,” Adam says, holding me close. “Most of them didn’t survive.”
“So something about the process isn’t reproducible,” I say, thinking deeply. As terrible as this is, it’s also fascinating. I never spoke with Adam about what he knew about Ascent’s other work.
“I wonder why you’re not reproducible,” I murmur. “I mean, by all rights, the process is the process. It should work a thousand times in a row. But she wasn’t like you. She was similar, but not like you.”
“No.” Adam shakes his head. “It doesn’t work.”
“What do you mean?”
He is looking at me gravely, his expression full of some emotion I can’t quite place. This is the thing with Adam, he has so much richness in his expression. He has more depth of feeling than many people. And yet, he is undoubtedly not human. So what separates him from a walking processor like Eve?
“There’s something you don’t know about me,” he says. “Something they never wanted you to know.”
“What?”
I’m pretty sure I know everything there is to know about Adam. I was there at his inception. He can’t have secrets from me. I know him to his genetic core.
“You seem to think I was a blank slate when I was made,” he says. “But I wasn’t.”
“I saw your brain being printed,” I say. “Literally in the lab. What do you mean you’re not a blank slate?”
“You saw someone born,” he says. “What you didn’t see was someone else die.”
“What… do you mean?”
“I mean…” He takes a stressed breath. Whatever this is, he has been hiding it since he found me. And whatever it is, I can sense I need to know it.
“I mean, I’m not what you think I am. Yes, I have a partially synthetic brain. But it’s only partially synthetic. The rest of it is… human.”
“What?” I keep repeating that stupid question.
“He… I… was a man,” he says. “A soldier. His name was Adam. He served in special operations until one mission blew a hole in my skull and took a chunk of my brain with it. When they got him… or me… into the medevac, I was basically gone, except I didn’t stop breathing. So they got me back to base, put me on a ventilator, and then Ascent,” he grits his teeth, “they bought my breathing corpse, and took parts of the remainder of my brain to integrate into their machine. They didn’t mean for me to remember, but they wanted me to launch with the training and socialization of a soldier, so they burned out the parts they thought would let me remember who I am and…”
“That’s not how brains work,” I object gently. “You can’t take a part of someone’s brain and plug it in. They’re not modular.”
“According to Ascent’s research, brains are fractal,” he says, sounding as though he is reading a manual from memory. “A little bit of the tissue contains the entirety of the whole. Like a fern. You take one little bit, and everything is there, just in a smaller version. They used my… his… I don’t know how to say it,” he winces with the effort of the mind fuck.
“They made a Frankenbrain,” he growls. “Part cyborg, part human. And for a while, it worked like they thought it would. I had no memory of being Adam. I was meat on a slab. But slowly, over time, I started to recover memories. At first, I didn’t know what they were. Sometimes I still don’t. But they’re there and I’m here and whoever I am now, I’m partly who he was… who I was.”
I try to make sense of what he’s telling me. It’s true that there were several parts of his development I wasn’t entirely privy to, and his brain was fabricated separately from the rest of his body. I did see it going into production, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t messed with along the way. Ascent’s ethics committee was nonexistent. And him having some human adult brain tissue does account for a lot of what I’ve observed in him over time. He’s far more than a machine.
“So you’re Adam,” I say slowly. “I mean, another… I mean…” It’s difficult to talk about this in any kind of way that makes objective sense. He is who he is now. But he is not who he was.
“I am Adam, but I’m not that Adam, I’m someone new, someone with memories I don’t always recognize.”
This explains a lot. Explains how he can be so mechanical sometimes, and at others be so very uniquely human.
“Adam died,” he says. “But he lives on in me. I’m not the Marine who died in the field and I’m not the machine Ascent made either. I’m something else. Both. Neither.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Adam shakes his head. “I thought I would have more time to tell you. I thought there would be more time for many things.”
“That’s not why,” I persist. “There was a lot of time to tell me.”
“Because it’s weakness,” he growls. “It’s something I don’t understand. You think I am a perfect cyborg. But I am human too. And that is confusing enough for me, let alone for you.”
“I don’t mind being confused,” I tell him, brushing my lips over his neck. “I want to know you.”
“You do? Why?”
“Because I love you, you idiot.”
“You love me,” he says, slipping into his borg-type talk. “Why would you love me? I hold you prisoner and I do to you what Eve wanted to do to me. What is there to love? I have some sliver of humanity in me, but in the end, I am a machine just as she was. Just a series of processes with a reproductive goal. There is nothing to love.”
I love him all the more in this moment where he believes himself to be unlovable.
“We’re all machines in some sense,” I say. “Humans can be seen as a series of processes with reproductive goals, but that’s not all we are, and it’s not all you are. I love you because you give me what I need.”
“What do you need?”
“Someone to challenge me. Someone to love me. Someone to fuck me. Someone to…” I almost choke on the word, but I have to be truthful now more than ever, “…discipline me.”
A smile appears on his lips. “You are a very naughty human,” he agrees. “You need a lot of discipline.”
“I do,” I agree, less shamefully, though I am blushing. “I love you because you know me, Adam. You care about me, and I know you too. We both know each other in ways nobody else does, or could ever hope to. And that’s what love is.”
“Love is knowing,” he says in a thoughtful tone.
“Love is knowing and not running for the hills,” I say, smiling a little. “Love is knowing someone for all their flaws and wanting them anyway. I want you, Adam. You don’t have to hold me captive. I’ll happily hold myself captive for you.”
He smirks and shakes his head. “We will see,” he says. “Because you and I are going to go to the hills together. To the mountains.”
“We are?”
“We have to leave the city. Eventually another Eve may find us and I am sure the next one will not be programmed to sacrifice herself for me. They will keep hunting us until we disappear. So we have to go disappear. There are places where no man goes. Wilds where we will live as we please. It will not be a life as you have known it, or I, but we will survive out there as we cannot here. We will live free.” Free. I’m not sure there’s such a thing anymore. But I’m willing to try to find it.