Chapter One
“Kill them all!” shouted the sergeant. His artificial eyes gleamed wickedly, reflecting the fires the RCC soldiers had started inside the tattered shacks of the rebels. “Don’t forget to save some for Directive 66!”
How could they forget? They were also victims of the infamous Directive 66—the one that took all kinds of convicts and lowlifes and turned them into cyborg soldiers for the great WEIR Republic. Even though they knew where they had come from, their memories started the day of their activation. Their previous life and their previous personalities—some bad ones, as they say—were erased.
Women and children were crying and men were trying to shoot them, but it was to no avail. The soldiers’ metallic plates repelled their bullets like they were flies.
H207’s automatic targeting system computed the source of the bullets and made him fire a round that missed nothing and silenced the insurgents for good. But listening to the sergeant’s orders meant that he was not shooting only armed rebels. The weak and the young were also easy prey for them. Only the strongest males and females were spared and retained for Directive 66 cybernetic retrofitting.
He could not disobey the orders; they’d built him that way. But during the recent missions, he had discovered two things. First, he was not enjoying these massacres as he was supposed to. Secondly, there was a small loophole to his programming. He could shoot the civilians but still be careful to inflict only non-lethal wounds. He could just incapacitate them, and that eased his conscience somewhat.
Did he have a conscience? Was that a luxury he could afford? These were just some more questions that troubled him lately. He knew he had a mostly biological brain with digital interfaces linked to external sensors and weapons to control. His sensors were built for both pleasure and pain, but the activation of those sensors was in the hands of his masters. The pain was used to punish him and the pleasure… to reward him. It was as simple as that. Between the punishment and the reward, he felt nothing. He was as numb as a doorknob.
But lately, he must have felt something because he consistently tried to evade his orders somehow, not wanting to be the image of relentless cruelty the RCC projected. He still debated internally whether he should report this “glitch,” so the RCC Ops specialists might be able to reprogram him to not feel anything at all.
Was it better to not feel anything? It could be, since he was doomed to do this despicable job day after day…. But then again, maybe they would decide to discard him altogether, considering it not worth the risk to reprogram him at all.
The rotten wood shacks were aligned in three rows, and he was assigned to patrol the end of the third row. So far, he hadn’t found anyone suitable for the Directive, so he’d just shot them as non-lethally as he could. Maybe some of them would die anyway from blood loss, but that was not his concern. Not now.
The last shack was engulfed in darkness. No light creeped through the dirty window, but that didn’t mean no one was there. Someone could be waiting in darkness for the scourge to pass. As if they could be that lucky!
With the kick of his boot, he slammed the door open against the wall and entered, mildly cautious. A surprise attack could have been possible at any time. As his eyes adjusted to night vision, he started to scour the room. He was confident that his embedded motion detector would catch something he might miss with his slower human mind.
The installed sound processors also improved his hearing, and he was able to isolate the smallest sound despite the ruckus from outside. But eventually, his enhanced vision was what detected the movement at the side of the room behind a cupboard full of kitchen utensils. He could see a silhouette outlined with red to emphasize the gun the person was holding.
A brief computation was all it took to target his opponent with a trajectory that could pass through the cupboard and blow away the gun. His shot flashed in the darkness of the room, and the gun indeed flew from the hands of the woman.
The short flash was enough for H207 to ascertain that his opponent was a woman. Despite the tattered clothes, her messy blonde hair and elegant curves gave her away. She let out a pained cry when her gun was lost, but that didn’t discourage her as she launched herself toward her assailant with a hunting knife in her left hand.
With a calculated move, he deflected the attack, making the knife fly out of her hand and fall to the floor. With a backhand, he left her unconscious. He restrained her hands behind her back with metallic cuffs and hoisted her body over his shoulder.
Once outside the shack, he saw that the raid was coming to an end. The Directive captives were being lined up and guarded by the other cybernetic soldiers like him.
“Yo, 207! What you got there?” asked H078. He was his bunk mate and had a preconceived notion that they should be bonded somehow.
“Just some spoils of war,” he answered, not knowing exactly why he said that.
“I get it. You found yourself a nice piece of—”
He didn’t continue because Sarge was coming up to them. “I said that the fun and games would be taken on site!” he barked.
Indeed, the Ops Comm had activated their pleasure sensors that would make their anatomically correct dicks fully functional just so they could force themselves on the rebel women to make the punishment even crueler and break their rebel spirits in the process.
“Sorry, Sarge, I couldn’t make myself to do it when I work,” H207 said unflinchingly.
“A-ha, so you thought to save some for later. Okay, but get rid of her as soon as you are done with it.”
“Yes, sir!” H207 admitted curtly.
Sarge left, and H078 winked. “If you like her so much, maybe you’ll submit her for Directive 66. That way, you can be with her every day.”
“Shut the fuck up!” H207 shot back, still carrying the woman on his shoulder as he marched forward. After the prisoners were loaded in the trucks, H207 put his prey into the trunk of the assault vehicle he and H087 were sharing, but not before he checked her pulse. It was stable, and her breathing was, too.
The military convoy returned to the base located more than 50 miles from this rebels’ hideout, a place of the disparaged people who had lost everything or maybe had never had anything to lose in the first place.
Half an hour later, they were entering through the gates of the base. In the light of dawn, he could see the tall barbed-wire fences that enclosed three rows of barracks, other administrative buildings, and a large hangar. On one side, near the fence to the barracks, sat a thick forest with vegetation so wild that it provided a secure side to their camp. No guards’ posts sat on that side. Just patrols.
Once their car had stopped, H207 removed the woman, still unconscious, from the trunk and hoisted her again onto his shoulder. H087 winked again at him and went to park the car in the hangar and let him do his business. As usual, after a punishment mission like that, they had some leisure time to unwind.
H207’s favorite leisure activity was to wander through the wild forest. He would explore it and find some new wonders every time. The tall fence was no problem for his enhanced artificial body to leap over. He just needed a small push during the leap, so he grabbed the top of the fence, and, in no time, he was on the other side. Having extra weight with him today was no problem, either. He just had to send more power to the servo motors that controlled his legs.
Once he was on the other side of the fence, he followed a tunnel he had previously made through the thorny thicket that surrounded the base. Cradling the woman’s body to his chest to protect her from being hurt too badly by the thorns, he went on with measured perseverance until the thicket blanket from the edge of the forest dwindled and left room for tall, straight trees.
H207 still kept the woman close to his chest. She was beginning to show signs of life and moaned from time to time. He wondered whether she was reliving the scenes from that morning in her dreams. It would not be a happy place to go…
Since his retrofitting, he didn’t need that much sleep. Even when his human brain needed to shut off, he didn’t dream. Or maybe just he didn’t remember them. He’d heard that this was a side effect of the retrofitting because his brain had been dosed with substances to erase his previous life, and those same drugs prevented the memories from resurfacing as dreams.
Their trip through the forest in the morning sun that barely crept through the thick foliage was coming to an end in a small clearing bathed in the mist. Here, some time ago, he had found an old log cabin, long abandoned by its owners. He had cleaned it up, removed the dust motes and spiderwebs, and made a spot only for him. If he didn’t have to go to the base for recharging, he would spend most of the free time here.
He loved to sit here in a comfortable position and clear his mind of any immediate thoughts; perhaps he was meditating. In doing so, he tried to access some information from his previous life. He knew that his brain was the center of his being, so he could not accept that he had been deprived of the precious part that was his previous life, with his memories, people he knew, and experiences he had lived.
Still holding the woman, he opened the door while listening with his heightened senses for any foreign presence. There wasn’t any, so he laid her on the old couch that occupied the center of the room.
In the bright morning light, he could now take a better look at her. Despite her tattered clothes, she was beautiful, with slender features and a pretty face that looked peaceful in her sleep. He wasn’t sure she would maintain the same sweet lines of her lips once she woke up and saw that she was his hostage.
He checked her clothes. In the pocket of her tight pants, he found a Republic ID. The name was Melanie Norgreen. age 28. The domicile was listed as Hague City. That was pretty far from here; more than 1,000 miles. What was she doing so far from her home?
He would perhaps have to employ some interrogation techniques to get something out of her, but would that really be necessary? His superiors didn’t know about her. So, why was he so curious about her?
Was she really his spoil of war? He hated labeling her that way. But then why had he taken her in the first place? Why had he spared her from certain death or from Directive 66, a fate worse than death? Thinking better now that he had the time, he still could not find an answer. It mainly had been an impulse in the moment. In trying to find where that impulse came from, he got nothing.
Usually, his actions were the result of tactical analysis based on experiences and information fed to him by the central base computer. He had no previous experience with women. Not since retrofitting, at least. Although their superiors encouraged it, he hadn’t wanted to force himself on the poor females at the sites they raided.
That was, until now. He was somehow attracted to this woman, but also, he didn’t want to hurt her. Under the influence of those two radically contradictory impulses, he did nothing and just sat there in a rocking chair sturdy enough to support his metal-rich body.
Eventually, she moaned again and opened her eyes. To his surprise, she wasn’t panicked. Just confused.
“Where am I?” she asked with sleepy eyes. “Who are you?”
“I am H… don’t you remember anything?”
“No, who are you? Are you a soldier?” she asked again as she stood up. “Who am I?”
