Chapter Nine
Dalia felt numb, but the thought had no more than occurred to her than a hysterical urge to laugh assailed her. How could shefeelanything? She wasn’t human. Machines mimicked human emotions. They didn’t, truly, feel them.
But she did. And Reuel did. And from what she could see, the others did.
It wasn’t right that those bastards had allowed her to believe--no,madeher believe--that she was human when she wasn’t. Even worse, they had designed, programmed and trained her to kill her own kind--whatever that was.
What Reuel had done was just as wrong. She should hate him as much as she did the others who’d used her.
She wondered why she didn’t.
Now that she knew everything--or much of it anyway--she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d reprogrammed her mindnotto hate him and the others. If he could infiltrate the company and impregnate her, that shouldn’t have been beyond his capabilities.
She was going to go insane wondering how much of her memories was real, and how much was pure lies. How much of what she felt were her feelings?
Several hours passed before Reuel returned. He stood in the door way for several moments, holding a tray of food, and finally entered. Setting the tray on his desk, he pulled a drawer out, extracted a key and removed the manacles. She rubbed her wrists, studying him. Finally, she got up and went into the head.
She glanced toward the door to the corridor when she came out, but there wasn’t much point in bolting. She had nowhere to go.
“I brought the food for you,” he said, his voice carefully neutral.
She wasn’t particularly hungry, but then she hadn’t eaten much at breakfast, and she’d expended a good deal of energy fighting him--and--afterwards. She took the tray and sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed with it. He frowned, obviously not terribly happy about the idea of crumbs in his bed. Suppressing the urge to smile, she pretended to ignore him and ate the meal he’d brought.
“Is there some particular reason why I wasn’t told?” she asked after a few moments, more because she was uncomfortable with his scrutiny than because she expected to get a straight answer from him.
He was very good atappearingto be completely open and actually telling her nothing at all.
“By the company?”
“By any damn body!” she retorted tightly.
He frowned, his lips tightening at her tone. “I would not have told you at all if I had believed that, in time, you would learn to accept us. Your ... contempt for us, hatred of us, runs too deep, however. I realized that you would always hate us unless you could be brought to see that we are the same.”
Dalia studied him a long moment and looked down at her food again. “Not as deep as you seem to think,” she muttered. “If it did, I wouldn’t have--done what I did a little while ago.”
To her surprise, he colored faintly. “You were bound. I am well aware I gave you no choice.”
She shrugged. He was a real dolt if he thought she hadn’t gone a good bit beyond submitting--or the call of duty for that matter. Maybe he’d been too enthralled to realize she was thoroughly enjoying it? Or, maybe, he thought she’d only pretended to enjoy it to get him to let his guard down?
The last seemed most likely.
“I will not apologize.”
Dalia bit her lip, tamping the urge to smile, and then concentrated on her food once more. “I’d be disappointed if you did,” she murmured, “but you still didn’t answer my question.”
Something flickered across his face, but it was gone too quickly for her to grasp it. Relief?
He frowned. “I am Reuel CO469, prototype for those,” he gestured toward the other end of the ship, “for all the CO469s—the CS series and the PD series. I was designed using the company’s combined knowledge about robotics, bioengineering, artificial intelligence--even DNA structuring. When I was completed, they realized that I was more human than cyborg, which I have to suppose was the goal to start with. I had most of the advantages of being both, and few of the disadvantages--to their way of thinking, anyway. The problem arose that we knew we were cyborg. We were activated with that knowledge, with everything we needed to learn to become more human than cyborg, but none of the learning experiences necessary for humans to develop the correct emotional responses to given situations.
“Some of us managed to develop, more or less, normal responses anyway. Some did not and some simply could not accept that they weren’t human and never could be. They developed abnormal emotional behavior and became dangerously unstable.
“The company had already embraced the CO469 enthusiastically, however. They’d produced nearly half a million—primarily in the CS series as soldiers for the government--before they discovered the design flaw.”
Dalia almost choked on the drink of water she’d just taken. “Half a million! We were told there was less than a thousand!”
“You, of all people, are surprised that the company lied to you?” he murmured wryly and then shrugged. “I suppose, strictly speaking itwasthe truth since they only acknowledged the CO series as defective. They destroyed several thousand before they had ever been activated, but the company cringed at the loss and finally decided to try something else. They reprogrammed some ... not very successfully and proclaimed them as the new series CS … including a few thousand PDs—Pleasure Droids. Those had to be destroyed, as well, and they’d already sent out nearly half a million to fulfill their government contract.
“They created a new prototype--you. They gave you--almost--everything that they had given to me, but they were cautious for once. The first VT570s were all female, and designed to be like their human counterparts, physically smaller and weaker than the male CO469s. They were also given a childhood--everything it took to support the fantasy they had created--and not told that they were not human. Since these were successful, they also produced male VT570s. All of them were designed to be rogue hunters ... to track down and destroy the CO469s and successive series designed from the prototype—me.
