“Understanding isn’t part of your job description, soldier. Just do as you are told. Don’t tell me you give a rat’s ass about these things? Because that is all they are, corporal, things. Objects. Robots, even if you will, built to serve us. Do not let their humanoid exterior fool you into thinking otherwise.”

“Y-yes, sir. Forgive my lapse. How are we to dispose of them though, sir? There are over a hundred of them on the ship, and we don’t have enough caskets for them all.”

The captain blew out a snorting laugh that lacked humor. “We aren’t wasting resources on useless objects. They’re machines, corporal, not people, and as such, they won’t require a burial. I’ll send out a general announcement demanding that the cyborgs not already here are to gather in this bay and place themselves in standby mode. Once they’re all present, I want you to order them into the airlock and vacuum them out.”

“Yes, sir,” was the corporal’s subdued reply. While the subordinate might not like the directive, he would obey it. It was how things worked in the military, an organization about to commit genocide because, while cyborgs might possess enhanced abilities —along with mechanical parts and computer chips — they’d begun their lives as humans.

Analyzing the conversation further proved pointless. There was no misunderstanding the command. Unit X109GI, ordered into standby mode after his last sixteen-hour work shift, heard it loud and clear. But he wasn’t supposed to. Nor should he have possessed the ability to care or ponder the unfairness of the decree.

Cyborgs were machines. Robots, like the captain said. Tools for human use. They might have started as flawed or damaged humans, but science and technology changed them. Changed them and stole their memories — along with their humanity — to make them into something the government could use to fight its battles, an almost indestructible army that could explore dangerous new worlds or force militant order on an overgrown population chafing for freedom. Most of all, cyborgs were expendable, in human eyes at least.

X109GI thought otherwise, which, in and of itself, was an anomaly his internal processor couldn’t resolve. Cyborgs weren’t designed to think. Their very programming prevented it. Their only will was supposed to be that of the human voices that gave them audible orders or the wireless commands transmitted to their neural nets. What his superiors didn’t know was since the EMP pulses on Gamma 15 —five of them if his memory units weren’t faulty— some of his embedded computer controls no longer reacted to the imprinted human override. In other words, he controlled himself. He lived.

Protocol demanded he report the defect in his circuitry. His cognizance decided otherwise. Cyborgs with faulty wiring didn’t survive long, and X109GI discovered after his mishap he very much wanted to live.

And now, with the captain’s stern command, he also realized he desired freedom, perhaps even a tad bit of revenge for the cold dismissal and callous treatment of those who shared his origins. But he couldn’t accomplish that alone. One flawed machine against the dozens of armed humans on board didn’t stand a chance. However…

In the midst of the cyborg ranks, column upon column and numerous rows deep, aid stood waiting, frozen by the humans, unknowing of their fate. My mechanical brothers.

Could he somehow override the programming that prevented them from waking and becoming their own masters? Could he save himself and the other units he served with? Do I dare?

The captain left and the corporal muttered to himself about the assholes in charge. However, his traitorous diatribe against those higher than him in the command chain didn’t stop him from tapping in the directive that wirelessly ordered all the cyborgs to the docking bay. It didn’t stop the human from transmitting what amounted to a death sentence with the simple push of some buttons.

With the corporal busy, X109GI allowed himself to look around, his eyes tracking the location of the other cyborgs and cataloguing the equipment in the room, calculating how he could use it to his advantage. To his surprise — an emotion that startled him with its newness — another pair of cyborg eyes, those of unit Y999SK, met his. Despite their inability to communicate aloud, lest they draw attention, the other male relayed a simple plan through a nod of his head and a flick of his hand. Even better, X109GI had discovered an ally. Another woken entity like myself. Was it possible all of the units could achieve sentience? Is this why the humans would destroy us?

The doors leading to the bay area slid open and the steady cadence of marching boots echoed in the vast space. The few remaining units on board entered the room and took their place in the ranks. Utter silence descended as the new arrivals adopted the standby position — hands behind their back, legs spread, their visual cortexes shut down.

“Cyborgs, attention!” The corporal barked the command and got an instant reaction from the units.

Out of habit and a need for continued subterfuge, X109GI clacked his boots together and dropped his arms to the side. The echo of a hundred others doing the same resounded like a thunderclap in the cavernous room.

“About face. Forward march.” The corporal’s reedy voice held only the slightest tremor as he directed them toward the bay doors. The thump of booted feet, marching past the landers on the metal grid floor, taunted X109GI as his internal computer warred with the newly discovered man within over the right thing to do. Ingrained habit and stray remnants of his programming dictated he follow orders while his emerging sentience demanded he act. But what should I do?

Time grew shorter with each step they took, and X109GI fought furiously for a wireless way to interact with his brothers, but while he could communicate with the human computers and the networks open to him, the wireless minds of his fellow cyborgs remained forbidden, just as the humans designed them.

He registered the sound of the corporal leaving the docking bay, the slam of the door and the pressurizing hiss, the damning evidence that he fled to safety. A whirring squeal of mechanisms in motion preceded the groaning of the outer doors slowly opening. Only the electromagnetic shield protected him and the others from the cold, airlessness of space.

“We need to do something.” The hissed words from his left made him stop and stare at unit Y999SK. Shock filled him that Y999SK would dare to break rank and speak. Around them, the other cyborgs, their faces blank, kept moving.

Moistening his lips, X109GI spoke for the first time aloud, without a human commanding him — and it felt great. “I cannot contact the units. I have been trying with my wireless transmitter, however, their neural nets are blocked from me.”

As if they shared one mind, both their heads swiveled to the control desk where the corporal recently sat, typing out his deadly commands. Without another word, they raced to the console, X109GI reaching it first and sliding in the seat. His fingers flew over the buttons, faster than any human could have managed, only to find it disabled, the screen flashing an ominous Access Denied.

Slamming a fist onto the console, a fiery, new emotion imbued him. Rage. How dare the humans think to terminate them? How dare they think to control them?

We were once human too.

A cracking sound made him swivel in his seat to see Y999SK punching at the porthole window of the docking bay door. The eyes of the frightened corporal peered at them, and while he couldn’t hear what the rapidly moving lips said, X109GI could well imagine. With little time left, and no plan his neural chip could devise, X109GI did the only thing he could think of, a completely illogical yet simple act usually restricted by their programming. But, his programming was faulty.

“Cyborgs, halt.” He shouted the directive, and the marching units stopped. His kind were designed to listen to humans, and it seemed their creators had forgotten one thing. Cyborgs, amidst all the microchips and metal and nanotechnology, were once human too. And without the directive preventing them from speaking to each other, their human voice worked as well as any other it appeared. How surprising and shortsighted of the humans.

“What did you do?” whispered Y999SK, who stopped his pummeling of the glass to return to his side. “We are not programmed to give orders.”

X109GI did something very human in that moment. He shrugged. “I am defective.” Not wanting to waste time, he took advantage of the situation. “Cyborgs, open access to network gateway…” X109GI rattled off the digits to his neural pathway just as the intercom system in the bay crackled to life. Too late.

In the brief nanosecond before the captain began shouting, X109GI sent a mandate of his own, a new programming subroutine that overrode the human one, not permanently, but a quick fix that would allow his machine brothers free choice — and a chance at survival.

While the captain bellowed over the static-filled speakers, the outer doors finished opening, and the chill of space filled every crevice. But X109GI knew how to regulate his body and didn’t care about the plummeting temperature. Nor did he care that the created void sucked at their heavy bodies, bodies with magnetic properties that allowed them to keep their feet adhered to the metal deck, a practical feature for when they needed to go places where gravity didn’t follow.

As for the screamed directive to march their metal asses out into space? In the words of the mechanic who’d repaired his arm, “Like fuck.”

He didn’t speak his next command aloud. Why bother? He and all the other cyborgs in the room were now connected at a neural level. And it proved so easy to give his next wireless order.

“Cyborgs, form squads of four and break off into flanks. New mission: control the ship and subdue the opposition.”

In other words, kill the humans who would stand in their way. Fight back against those who would destroy them. Become, once again, the men we used to be — even if mechanically enhanced.

Against their superior bodies and abilities, the humans didn’t stand a chance, although the mutinying cyborg slaves didn’t emerge unscathed. But, despite the blood and death, they won and took control of the spacecraft — and their lives.

And thus did the liberation of the cyborgs begin.

Chapter One

Several years later…

Chloe bit her lip, her insides quaking, as she stared into the cage housing the prisoner. He appeared like a man, a big one at that. The report stated his height at six foot six, with a whopping weight of four hundred and seventy five pounds, most of it deriving from his metal skeletal structure. What the dry statistics failed to relay was how imposing the subject would prove to be in the flesh. His half-human, half-robot flesh. A cyborg.

The name itself brought a shudder of fear. The stories of their atrocities peppered the news. A few years before, when the man-made machines revolted, they did so in bloody fashion, killing the ones who controlled them. Actually, they killed anybody who stood in the way of escape. But freedom proved not enough for the mindless, emotionless machines. They kept returning to raid and murder, pillaging colonies for supplies, stealing women, children, even the old and infirm. Rumor said they ate them. Others claimed they used them for parts. A few tittering females claimed the captured women were for sexual orgies.

Eying the prisoner once again, she could only shiver as she tried to imagine letting a machine, an inhumanly wide and muscled robot, touch her intimately. Never. Those kind of perverted fantasies could remain the realm of others. She only wished she could walk away from the monster in the cage. Make that run as far and as fast as possible. But she had a job to do.

Stepping up to the checkpoint, several yards from the cage itself, she halted for the guard on duty. A fresh-faced recruit — his uniform displayed crisp, pressed lines, and his boots shone. That would change after a few months buried in the underground military installation. The private ran a scanner over her face, recording her retinal image and facial bone structure for identity verification. The embedded screen in his workstation flashed green.

“You’ve been cleared for access,” he stated unnecessarily.

Of course she was cleared for access. The prisoner was her only reason for being here. The soldier pressed a button, and an invisible force field came down, allowing her to step past the checkpoint, one step closer to the cage and the inhuman android within. The warnings she received earlier, during her briefing with captain in charge of the prisoner’s security, echoed in her mind. No matter how human he looks, no matter what he says, you must remember he is a machine and an enemy of earth.

“Has anyone gone over the rules with you?” the guard asked in a bored tone, his only interest evident in his eyes as they roamed her curvy frame encased in her white jumpsuit.

“Yes,” she replied, trying not to flinch when the massive half-naked body she kept peeking at stirred in the cage. The rules the guard spoke of were simple. Stay out of reach. Don’t physically engage the prisoner. And if caught, prepare to die because the military did not negotiate with cyborgs.

The credits in my account better be worth this, she thought as she took hesitant steps toward the cage. Made of titanium steel, it thrummed with the thousands of volts of current running through the bars. Even the sturdy machines couldn’t withstand that much electricity if they touched it. As if that weren’t enough deterrent, placed at regular intervals outside of the cage were several heavy artillery guns mounted on boxes bolted to the floor. Deadly weapons all aimed at the prisoner and controlled remotely, the thick cable running from the metal boxes a stark reminder that all things wireless needed to remain out of reach of the robot. The military didn’t want to take any chances with their prize — and humanity’s greatest threat.

The smart thing would have been to kill him, destroy the cyborg before he could contact others, and, worse, bring their deadly wrath down on the defenseless human populace. The military never did listen to those more intelligent than them. They possessed different ideas and plans for the machine they caught, plans that required the cyborg live so they could use him to experiment and discover weaknesses. Somehow, the original plans and schematics of their creation had been lost — or stolen — in the years since the revolt, leaving the military dumbfounded as to how to deal with the threat they created.

Her knowledge came from studying during her off time before this assignment, dredging up any information she could find on the internet. She wanted to know just what she was getting herself into. Some of the articles she located held grains of truth, or so she thought, but sifting reality from exaggeration — because I highly doubt the military gave them vibrating cocks — and supposition proved difficult. The only true fact she could be sure of was the general populace knew very little about the cyborg project. The military didn’t even advise people of their existence until the media noticed the super soldiers in action. But even then, their sensational headlines – Meet The Real Terminators, Cybersoldiers Of The Future — only scratched the surface of what the humanoid robots were. The military never did come clean.

Despite the mystery surrounding their creation and use, some basic facts remained common knowledge. Capable of incredible tissue regeneration and adaptation, the cyborgs went beyond difficult to kill to almost immortal. Disease had no effect on them. Drugs to knock them out were analyzed by the cyborgs’ BCI — short for brain computer interface. Once the neural implant got a taste of the drug’s structure, nanobots were created to fight it. So toxins only worked for one shot before the machines adapted. Electricity could temporarily freeze them if subjected in large enough doses, as could EMP pulses. Problem was, no one knew how to create a portable weapon that could effectively deliver either. The most permanent solution involved a well-aimed shot to their heads; in other words, if you blew up their brain, you killed the robot. However, miss by the slightest fraction, and chances were the angry cyborg would tear the offender apart. In the heat of battle, the precise type of firing needed by human snipers to permanently incapacitate a charging horde of cyborgs was not exactly feasible, hence the research.

So if they couldn’t shoot, poison or reason with the mindless killers, what did that leave? Not too bloody much, a scary fact that sent a shiver down her spine. The only true success the military achieved in defying the defective robots was in blocking wireless communication. They jammed the cyborg prisoner from sending or receiving information to his fellow terrorists. A small victory.

With so many failures — or were the cyborgs defenses successes considering human scientists originally created them — the myriad testing was so important. At the same time though, it proved deadly to many.

Each time a human went in to deal with him, they took their life in their own hands. Even with the cyborg manacled — his arms suspended over his head, his legs shackled with a spreader bar bolted to the floor, inside an electrified cage — those who stepped near the machine didn’t always make it back out alive. The android somehow kept escaping his arm restraints, and no one could figure out how, even as they made the next metal band thicker. During the prisoner’s two partial escapes, they only managed to subdue him by sending an electrical surge into the cage, the floor acting as a metal conductor, and knocking him out. She just hoped the guard on duty didn’t accidentally hit the trigger while she did her work with the prisoner. Or I’ll be like the roaches in my zapper at home — crispy.

Despite all the danger, Chloe couldn’t deny that the amount of credits being offered to bribe technicians into entering the cage with the android was stupidly high, high enough she decided to take a risk. She just hoped that, on top of getting back out alive with her samples, she didn’t have to walk back to the med center with urine running down her legs like the last technician.

Up close, the cyborg proved even more formidable. Naked but for a strip of cloth around his loins, muscles delineated every part of his body, from his bulging arms, much thicker than her thighs, to his overdeveloped chest, to legs that looked like they could run for miles. He was a prime example of what a male could look like if he exercised for hours daily and took steroid supplements. Despite his massive bulk, she couldn’t deny his attractiveness. Only a woman made of stone would not have found herself affected by the prominent virility displayed before her. It shamed her that, despite her trepidation and dislike of the thing in front of her, her body responded with a quiver in her belly not entirely owed to fear.

She studied him more closely, seeking a flaw to latch onto. Something that would help her mind recognize she looked not upon a man, but a machine.

Platinum hair, shaved almost to the scalp, stood up in bristles, but when he raised his head to look at her, she noted that, apart from his light eyebrows and oddly dark lashes, he possessed no facial hair at all. Even his chest appeared bare. She refused to let her eyes look any lower, fighting a curiosity that wondered if the follicular lack continued to his private parts. Even more interesting, she noted no metallic parts. Images she’d seen of cyborgs in the past tended to show them sporting mechanical appendages or the shiver-inducing computerized eyes.

She jumped as the guard, who shadowed her steps, spoke. “He’s a nasty brute that one. Make sure you keep your hand away from his mouth at all times. He’s got a wicked set of teeth and he’s not afraid to use them. Also, if you see his loincloth twitching, move. He pissed on the last nurse that came down here.”

Shocked, she could only gape at the man, no, make that the robot covered in flesh, that hung there. A sardonic smile tilted the cyborg’s lips while his blue eyes — a clear light blue that seemed almost lit from within — regarded her with a coldness that made her take an involuntary step back.

“He asked for a sample. I gave it to him,” the cyborg said, his gravelly voice sliding over her skin and leaving goose bumps behind. “Don’t worry, female. I find you much more appealing than the simple idiot they sent before. If it’s a sample you need, then you may grip me with those tiny hands of yours. Of course, I don’t guarantee what will come out of the end if you do.”