Dalia turned to look at the woman who’d called her name. It took several moments for recognition to set in. The name continued to elude her however. “How are you?”
The woman shrugged. “Just bruised and banged up a bit. I’ll live.”
For some reason, that struck Dalia as funny. She snorted.
“You know something I don’t?”
Dalia shrugged. “I don’t remember your name.”
The woman looked surprised for a moment, then frowned. “We trained together. Camile?”
Dalia nodded. “I remember. It’s just ... actually I never really paid much attention to anyone’s name. I figured it wasn’t a good idea to get to know anyone, considering....”
Camile shrugged. “I guess I can see your point.” She frowned. “I couldn’t help but notice you were fighting with them, not against them. What’d they do, brainwash you?”
“They told me the truth.”
Camile’s brows rose. “What truth?”
“That I ... that we, are the same as they are.” She glanced around at the hunters nearest them. “We’re cyborgs.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Speak for yourself, you traitorous bitch! You might be nothing more than a stinking machine, but I’m sure as hell not!”
Dalia stared at the woman across the aisle from her and Camile, recognizing her as one of those who’d trained with her. “Think about it, Zenia. Do you really think the company would risk precioushumanlives to clean up their mess? And what human would be able to single-handedly take on a cyborg?”
The woman made an abortive attempt to leap up from her cot, but Dalia saw she was chained to it. She wasn’t surprised. Zenia was probably the most unstable, and most fierce of all the female hunters. Her problem had always been that she completely lost it when she went into a fight. It was for that reason that, despite her skills, and her determination, she’d been defeated by the cyborgs she’d been sent to eliminate more times than she’d succeeded. She’d been patched up and put back together by the company so many times that even if she’d been born human, she was more machine now than anything else.
“I’ve taken down my share,” Zenia gritted out.
Dalia’s lips curled. “Your logic circuits should have been replaced a long time ago. If you’re too stupid to grasp that, then think about this--Zenia. It’s a flower. Camile, Dalia. Do you think your parents just happened to name you after a flower and you just happened to end up in the hunter program? All of us? Every female in the hunter program bears the name of a flower. Doesn’t that seem like just too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence?”
“I remember my childhood,” Camile said quietly.
“You remember what they imbedded in our programming. None of it happened to you. It happened to someone else, or it was computer generated. I don’t know that much, but I do know it’s true. Do you think I like it any better than you do? Do you know something I don’t? If you know something that proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the company didn’t lie to us, tell me. Because I’d much rather believe that I’m human.”
Camile frowned, but she had paled. Like Zenia, she looked vaguely ill. “They said you were gestating. That the cyborgs had found a way to simulate reproduction.”
Dalia sighed. Drawing her knees up, she covered her face with her hands. “We’re the next generation CO479, the new and improved model. They decided the CO479s had gone rogue because of faulty programming. So we were designed to bemorehuman, to believe we were human. You shouldn’t be at all surprised to know they fucked up-- again. They made me, us, so human that the biological engineering took prominence. All of the human organs and glands they engineered for us began functioning in a purely human way, or purely biological way. Reproduction is part of that cycle. When they failed to include the critical materials for reproduction, our bodies, probably because of the rapid cell regeneration we were given, were able to improvise and evolve ... or at least mine did. I’m betting we will all find that we’ve evolved reproduction capabilities.
“It’s why the cyborgs were determined to capture all of you alive. We’re the same, except we have a future and they don’t. Maybe they figure they can discover what’s missing from them so they can change it.
“I honestly don’t know what the ultimate plan is, or even if there is one. All I do know is that they feel like, as cyborgs, we belong together, and, to their way of thinking, they have freed us from human bondage.”
Zenia made a sneering sound and rattled the chain attached to her wrist. “If they’d asked me, I’d have told them I preferred human bondage. At least they didn’t keep me in chains,” she growled.
Dalia lifted her head and stared at Zenia a long moment. “You’re so very reasonable, Zenia. I’m sure they’ll realize very quickly that you, of all of us, don’t need time to adjust--or even reprogramming.”
Camile snickered, but tried to disguise it as a cough.
Zenia, naturally enough, took exception to the remark and began screaming profanity. Shrugging disinterestedly, Dalia lay down and turned her back on the woman. The snub only infuriated her more and she began beating the chain, trying to break it. After a few moments, three cyborgs marched into the room. One grasped her by either arm. The third injected her with something, and blessed peace settled over the hold.
There was nothing to mark the passage of time beyond the meals that were brought in and since Dalia didn’t know the schedule, even that didn’t help much. Two meals were delivered and then five more cyborgs were brought into the holding cell on stretchers.
Dalia thought they might be survivors of the craft that had crashed, but none of them were in any condition to communicate.
The lights were dimmed for a while and she slept. She was awakened hours later by the delivery of another meal. Several hours later, a large group of hunters was led in. Dalia sat up, examining them as they passed.
