Vex… It’s a strange name.

It must be my human name, from before I became a cyborg, from before I died.

But we’re not supposed to remember anything. We’re dead. We’re new creatures, with none of our past. That’s the official line, of course.

It’s nice having her next to me, feeling her naked body against mine.

She dozes off, and I’m left to my own thoughts for an hour, thoughts that tumble through me, sparks of old memories that I can’t quite get at…

But Vex is a start. I’m no longer a series of numbers and letters.

I’m Vex.

And I might even be human.

A slightly larger than normal wave sends us up on a huge swell, and we crash down again into the ocean, unharmed.

But it wakes her up.

“What happened?” she says, her eyes sleepy and relaxed.

“Just a big wave,” I say.

“That was incredible,” she says.

I nod.

She doesn’t need to tell me.

I gaze at her naked body, drinking it all in.

“So what now?”

“Well,” I say, “I’ll check to see if the drive on this raft works.”

“You mean there’s an engine?”

I nod.

But when I open the access panel, there’s nothing there. Just a couple wires that aren’t connected to anything at all.

“Well, there’s supposed to be one, anyway,” I say. “I guess they were trying to cut costs. Frankly, I’m surprised the cargo ship had this raft at all.”

“So we’re just going to die out here, in the middle of the ocean? We could be miles from land.”

I nod.

“We could,” I say.

“Well, that’s not very comforting or reassuring.”

“I’m not really used to being… comforting or reassuring.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“I think there was some land to my… left, when we crashed,” I say.

I let my mind drift back, letting the circuits implanted in my mind activate. The memories return. They’re crystal clear images of the scene from when we crashed. One advantage of being a cyborg, I guess. It’s as if I have a perfect photographic memory.

“What are you doing?”

“Picturing the crash,” I say. “There are circuits in my brain that let me reconstruct the image perfectly.”

“Great, so which way do we go?”

“It’s not that easy… We’re turned around now… But if I take a look at the sun…”

It’s hard letting the circuits do their work.

I have to really, really concentrate, and it feels like every fiber of my being is fighting against the work of the circuits.

But in the end, I get it.

I know which way to go.

East.

I let the circuits shut down. It’s a weird thing, having these pieces of my body and brain that aren’t really me. But they’ve also been inside me so long that I wouldn’t know how to function without them. Actually, without them, I’d be dead.

I stand up on the raft and it sways.

“What are you doing?”

I ignore her and dive into the ocean gracefully, completely naked.

Grabbing onto the back of the raft, I start kicking, as if I was using a kickboard in a swimming pool.

“You’re going to kick us there?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

She’s silent.

“I suppose senator’s daughters are used to more… regal transportation,” I say.

Her pout turns into a laugh.

“I guess you’re right,” she says. “That’s one of the advantages of the position.”

As the minutes turn to hours, we fall silent.

I’m kicking as hard as I can because I have a bad feeling about the weather. I don’t have any internal circuitry that would help me predict what’s going to happen in the sky… just good old human instinct, which I’m learning I apparently have in spades. Back on the ship, I seemed to know what to do when the general was attacking. I couldn’t have gotten through that situation with cyborg reflexes and memory alone. No, there was something else at work.

My legs become tired after hours. Even with my enhanced mitochondria, I’m prone to eventual fatigue. Cyborg miners can work for about a day and a half until fatigue, but these conditions are actually tougher than mining deep inside Mina Dos.

Even though the gravity is similar to Earth’s, not to mention Mina Dos’s, I’m kicking faster than any human could, using up my energy at a fairly rapid rate.

“Aren’t you tired?” she says, calling at me from the raft.

The waves have increased in their intensity, and it’s difficult to hear her. The huge swells that I propel the raft through don’t help with the fatigue.

“The sky’s getting darker,” she says.

I look up while still kicking. It’s true. All of a sudden, the sunny, tranquil sky seems to have changed to nothing but black and grey clouds. They hang ominously above us.

Lightning starts to flash around us, hitting the water only feet away from me.

“We could be miles away from the next continent,” she calls.

I nod my head.

This is about the time I would normally need a rest. My servo motors can’t go on forever, and neither can my mitochondria, no matter how supercharged they are.

But I need to keep going… there’s a strange motivation inside me. Normally, I would be doing this for us, the cyborgs. I need to protect my captive and complete my mission. But there’s something else that’s starting to creep up inside me. Could this be the human side of me that the comet released? Could it be that something has really changed inside me? I feel a desire to protect her from this storm, from this alien planet, and it’s not necessarily because she’s a crucial part of my mission. But the logical side of me knows that that’s why I need to do this. Without her, we still stand a chance against the humans in an all out war. But an all out war is exactly what I’m trying to avoid.

There’s no land in sight. She’s right. We could be thousands of miles from land for all I know. And who knows what surprises await us on land.

It’s not like the humans have spent much time exploring these planets. There could be crazy and hostile animals, or completely new alien species. Xenophobia has been overtaking Earth culture for some time, especially after what happened… People want to stay on Earth and not contact anyone else. They just want to remain by themselves.

“There’s something!” she calls out.

“Land?”

I can’t see well, with my head just barely above the water. The life raft is blocking most of my view. I just keep kicking. There’s nothing else that will save us. If only the ship hadn’t exploded, but there was no way to avoid that.

“No… it’s something else…”

Exhausted, I pull myself up so that I can see over the life raft. The first thing I notice, despite the lightning crashing around us and the sound of the thunder, is her magnificent body, her breasts buoyant and massive in her soaking wet skin tight top. But I tear my eyes away from her, and I see it.

“What is that?” she calls out, her voice barely audible above the immense crashing waves and the sound of the storm.

It’s certainly not made by nature, that’s for sure. It looks like some piece of alien technology, strange and foreign to us. It’s a massive white structure shaped like a tube.

It’s sitting half submerged in the ocean. The top is just above the waves that slam into it.

“Do you see anything inside it?”

“Just… blackness…”

That’s all I can see too. It’s a huge tube of advanced technology that leads to who knows where. It could be a hyperspace jump point, leading to anywhere in the galaxy, or it could just be a deathtrap. It could be a turbine used to power some alien species’ power stations, harnessing the power of the storms—and if we enter it, we’ll be incinerated instantly. It could be anything.

“We’re going on!” I shout, making a snap decision.

“What! Are you crazy?”

“The boat’s going to sink!” I say.

I start kicking furiously, even harder than before, steering our little raft right into the giant gaping opening.

It’s approaching, but there’s no way to know if we’re going to make it.

A lightning bolt strikes the front of the raft, just a few feet away from Felia.

It burns a hole right through the raft, and water starts rushing in.

I reach up, seizing her by her upper arm. I yank her down into the water with me, and she cries out. I let go of the raft, right before water gushes into it and it goes down into a big swell.

I hold her above the water and do the only thing I can do.

I swim right into the huge white tube.

I half expected the storm to seem calm from inside this thing, but it’s still loud and intense. The waves still crash around us. They hit the tube, which must be hundreds of meters tall and hundreds of meters wide, and rock it back and forth. There’s no way to know if it’s floating or stationed with some kind of gravity anchoring technology.

There’s a strong current inside, pulling us down into the blackness at the end of the tube.

“We can’t go in there,” cries Felia, her voice full of terror.

If I do have a human side, it’s crying out inside me, telling me not to let us get sucked into the blackness.

But the calculating part of me tells me it’s the only thing to do. Another couple minutes in that storm, and we’ll drown. Even I can’t keep us afloat in that intense of a storm.

“No!” screams Felia as a big wave shoots towards us, its speed amplified as it rushes into the tube.

It hits us, crashing over us, and the next thing I know we’re both under water, moving rapidly into the blackness.

I hold her as tight as I can.