She finished combing her hair, but it didn’t look a whole lot better. It was at least pointing in the same direction. When she went out into the main room of the flat, Calan wasn’t there so she went to the room where he said she could sleep and lay down on the bed.
It was covered with a thin sheet and had a soft pillow for her head. She lay down on top of it and sighed closing her eyes. For the first time in many months, she felt safe enough to sleep.
Chapter Five
“I see your female has arrived,” Rax said as Calan shuffled into Unit Five of the first six flats.
“My female?”
“Your one true mate,” Rax replied. “We cyborgs call her our female.”
“Yes, in that sense, she is my female. We are psion mates.”
“You’re a minder?” Rax said with a touch of awe.
“Some people call us that. I am a multifaceted psion. I read minds, can send thought, and am a psionic healer as well as a physician,” he said. “Is that a problem?”
“No, I just knew there was something different about you and your brother and his mate. Cyborgs have something similar through our cybernetics,” he explained. “But we can’t move things with our minds.”
“But you have other useful skills,” Calan said.
“They called us killing machines in the news archives. I spent some time catching up on what’s happened in the world since I was created,” Rax said.
“We have a lot more in common than you think,” Calan told him. “I was conceivedin vitroas part of a research project my father was doing. I would have been grown in a nurturing tank like a cyborg, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it.”
“What did she do?”
“She made him put me into her body so I would grow inside her the same way my brother and sister did,” Calan said. “To this day, they use a modern version of the nurturing tanks they used to grow cyborgs to grow embryos outside a mother’s womb. But we don’t accelerate them like they did cyborgs. They come out as babies.”
“I had a virtual childhood,” Rax said. “It seemed real to me. They sent me to virtual military school.”
“But your subroutine has been revised for the security of a large facility.”
“I also downloaded protocols for maintenance of a facility such as this,” Rax said. “So far there is not much to secure.”
“That may change as we start filling this place. There’s bound to be conflict,” Calan said. “You should probably research negotiation practices for future reference.”
“For when we start filling this place up.” Rax finished attaching the last waterline. “Can you read me?”
“I can,”Calan whispered the thought into his mind.
“Wow!” Rax gave a slight jerk of his head. “That will be helpful.”
“It is.”
“I just have my flat left to hook up to water and power. The bots are cleaning the rest of this wing of the building including the rooms that are sectioned off.”
“We’re making progress. I’m guessing some of the rooms were offices and the others were special departments. I have the schematics of this building from when the cyborgs worked from here.”
“I reviewed them,” said Rax. “They didn’t make many changes.”
“Where there are rooms sectioned off, we will convert them into living space. We will put my clinic in the second apartment and an infirmary in the west wing.” Calan continued. “When you finish your quarters, we can start on the rooms in the front section---getting water and power to them.”
“Yes, Calan.”
“But there is no rush on it. As we get people to join our community, we will teach them how to pitch in and help.”
“How are you going to get them to come?”
