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They finally shuffled out, leaving Rhys and Hannah alone.
“I wish I’d told you that before,” she whispered.
“It’s all right.I love you too.”He’d never said those words to anyone, nor was he certain his original had, either.
“I’ll tell you every day from now on,” she promised.“Just please don’t fall apart on me like that again.”
”My sensors have been replaced with new units.It won’t happen again.”He hauled himself to a sitting position, wincing a little as he did so.“Hannah, come here.”
She threw herself into his arms.“I was so scared!”
“So was I.While I was out, I remembered everything.I know why we exist.I’ll have to tell the others about it.I know they’ve been wondering.”
“Is it bad?”she asked tentatively.
He nodded.“Our originals weren’t good people.They eventually realized where they had gone wrong, but not before our unit brought destruction across the galaxy.”He stroked her hair, reveling in her familiar scent.One he’d thought he’d never smell again while he was being operated on.“I love you so much, Hannah Forsyth.”
“I love you too.”
He sighed, hating to speak his next words.“You may not, when you find out what we did.”
Rhys swayeda little on his feet at first.Hannah reached out to steady him when he hauled himself out of his sickbay pod.He grasped her hand, and to her surprise, brought her to him for a kiss in front of the other cyborgs.Her free hand flew up to touch his face, to make sure he was really all right.His short dark hair had been shaved off, and thin scars bisected his scalp.He turned to everyone assembled, opened his mouth to speak, then paused, as if unsure what to say.Finally, he said, “Did any of you pick up on the dreams I was having while I was in surgery?”
“I could tell you were experiencing something similar to REM sleep, but our equipment registered the phenomenon as unknown.We couldn’t read what you were experiencing,” SP29 replied.There was a murmur of agreement from the others.
“I recalled my original’s memories while I was out,” Rhys announced.
Hannah thought she could hear everyone in the room stop breathing for a second.His warning that she might not love him after he told her what his original had done rang through her mind like a alarm.
“As we suspected, our originals were recruited for military operations,” he continued.He leaned against the pod’s side and rolled his shoulders, as if to physically shake off bad memories.“Rhys Hammond was the leader of our troop.He was a black ops specialist, recruited for top secret jobs around the old world.His specialties were off-world espionage and black market trade.He was especially adept in rooting out illegal arms dealers.
“A counterintelligence agency recruited him after they developed a super soldier program.He was paid to recruit other candidates to the program, too, most of whom are your originals.Hammond and the others thought they were to be proverbial guinea pigs and were compensated accordingly, until they were ordered to invade the Darraugh Sector for their darzanite.”
Hannah had never heard of either of those things, but the others nodded.“Darraugh has been uninhabited for years,” SP29 said.
“In part, due to the program’s invasion and mining efforts.The entire sector is unlivable.Pelossian settlers were in the process of terraforming an H-class planet when the original cyborg troop was ordered to put a stop to it and take over the mining operations on behalf of an Earther corporation that wanted first access to it.Hammond refused to be involved with the mass murder of the Pelossians and tipped them off, causing an evacuation.Then he led an uprising of the other originals against the program’s director.He was executed for it.”
The room was again silent.“What about the rest of the originals?”
Rhys gave a half shrug.Pain bracketed lines around his eyes and mouth.Whether it was because of his surgery or the memories flowing back, Hannah had no idea.“I don’t know.It’s possible they were executed as well, and the first clones were ordered to the Darraugh Sector.The darzanite was mined until there was nothing left.Some of our previous iterations may have worked in the mines.I don’t know for sure.”
“Wouldn’t any of us remember that?”one of them asked.It took Hannah a few seconds to remember his name.Brandon something?She recalled Rhys telling her he’d taken a different one from his original’s.
“Not necessarily.I’m the only one who has consistently had memories from my past selves turn up.I wish our records aboard the ship were still intact.”
“If they were there in the first place.Our previous clones bought it and retrofitted it about thirty years ago, after we settled on our homeworld,” Brandon piped up.To Rhys, he said, “Do you have any idea how long ago our originals existed?We’ve all agreed it has to be at least thirty or forty years ago.”
Rhys hesitated.Hannah’s heart pounded against her ribs.She knew that look.He had an answer and wasn’t sure if everyone else would like it.“My original was murdered nine months after he entered the cyborg program, two hundred and four years ago,” he finally replied.
A dozen pairs of wide eyes stared at him.“That long?”SP29 finally said.
Rhys nodded.“I don’t remember much of the other clones, other than my first and last one.My first clone drowned.”Where he’d drowned, and the reason why he was in the water in the first place, still eluded him.Drowning did explain his terror of being in the water at the power station.They all remembered his last clone’s death, when his cybernetic heart gave out.It was the first and last time they’d tried using a non-organic heart in a cyborg.
“We have something to work with as far as our origins,” Brandon pointed out.
Rhys’s reply was anguished.“We do, but this proves that we were built for terrible purposes.All of our originals were complicit with murder and who knows what else.”
“We suspected as much already.We also know now that our originals refused to participate,” SP29 said firmly.“They did something right.”
