The Edge of Darkness

Chapter Three: The Eden (Part II)

It was a month later almost exactly. I remember most of the day. It's burned into my memory banks. I had woken up, gone to the kitchen to spend hours making the bread for the day (cheese and herbs, tomato and pumpkin seeds), and eaten a good breakfast of fruit, bread, and cereal with soy milk (what is the big deal about soy milk? It tastes good). After that I had gone to the gym to work out, simultaneously reading Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice and comparing their female leads who dressed as men, and wondering how Shakespeare could have written about cyborgs if he was from our time, eight hundred years later... Perhaps Viola could have been a cyborg pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man... or Portia could have dressed as a cyborg doctor to free Antonio... of course, even Shakespeare hadn't the faintest idea of the future of his kind: that advances in prosthetic limbs would create robotic limbs, that robotics would spawn androids and cyborgs, that Old Earth would be invaded by an alien race.

After I had given my remaining human limbs a good work out (all both of them) I went back to my bunk for some painting. I spent a few hours in there. And then I received a wireless wave from the Authorities requiring a congregation in the mess hall.

The mess hall is only big enough to fit one third of the population at any one time. I was down the other end of the ship and barely made it to the mess hall running as fast as I could. The rest of the borg population (closely watched by the Authorities) packed into the nearest spaces they could find that housed the big projection screen they sometimes used for announcements. They were dotted around the ship and the mess hall had one mounted on the far wall way at the back. It was like a big scoreboard announcer at the rugby, from what I remembered about it from my old life. At the moment the camera feeding the image was facing a stern-looking Authority in the mess hall, with what looked like several more Authorities behind it... and Lima. They were standing at the far end of the hall before everyone's curious gaze.

Oh no.

Not Lima.

I shoved myself through the crowd, unapologetically using my elbows and strength to slip through the gaps, until I stumbled into the front row.

The Authority spoke. "The rules of proximity have been broken by this cyborg Y-385, also known as Lima Mendez."

"No," I whispered. How could they? How could they betray this trust? How could they do what they did to her and then punish her for it?

"The punishment for a transgression of this nature is to be recycled."

"No!" I shouted louder. Several borgs turned to look at me, and the Authorities policing the group let their hands drift to their weapons.

"No!" Lima cried out from behind the Authority. They dragged her up next to the Authority who had made the speech, closer to the camera. I could clearly see a difference in her waist size as she struggled valiantly, though I had been watching her every day for the past month. If anyone else saw the miniscule difference in her already tiny waist, enhanced by the tininess of her chest plate, I'd be surprised.

Lima was forced to her human knees in front of the crowd in the mess hall. The camera wobbled slightly as it refocused on her distraught face, tears streaming from her emerald human eye, her optic flickering from her panic and adrenalin overwhelming her cybernetics. Two hulking Authorities took hold of her arms and braced themselves. I couldn't look away. I couldn't afford her that betrayal. I locked my eye on hers as she begged for mercy, screaming how it wasn't her fault, not her fault, how could they do this, she didn't know, they programmed her...

The Authorities tensed and then with a ripping noise that sounded like a car door being shorn clean off its hinges, they pulled her arms from her torso, leaving exposed wires sparking within.