The Edge of Darkness

Chapter Three: The Eden (Part I)

Chapter Three: The Eden

Ethan and I were, to all intents and purposes, married. As married as a second-class citizen can be. As married as we could pretend to be. We knew we were bonded deep, deep within our souls and that, given the chance, we would never, ever be apart.

But cyborgs don't get to control their own lives. Their own destinies.

When I first became a cyborg, I was too young to be sexually active. No, that's a lie: I was old enough, legally, but being the daughter of a preacher had turned me off any kind of sexual content. I simply wasn't interested, I wasn't ready.

By the time I discovered what the thing called desire was, it was too late.

Cyborgs don't procreate. We don't have that right. They couldn't hard wire it into our system, because it's a basic human instinct, but they told us that we are no longer people and don't have the right to bring a new human into the world unless we want it taken away from us to be raised by 'proper' people.

We're not allowed to marry, either, because we are no longer man and woman but machine.

Funny how no cyborg ever made up that rule, or voted for it, or had any say in it at all except for protesting it. To each other. Silently.

I spent a year on the Rock before I met Ethan. After two years together, he and I exchanged ring fingers. I wore his finger now, proudly on my robotic hand. You couldn't tell the difference, except if you looked inside it and saw his branding.

At one point, Ethan and I fantasised about what we could make of our futures if we weren't cyborgs. If we were normal people, we'd get engaged and married and have a ton of children and fill a house with their noise and messy colour. When we talked about it, my throat would grow thick with emotion. It was an impossible dream. Ethan would hold me and I'd cry out of my one good eye for the future we could never have due to circumstances neither of us volunteered for.

I began to wonder what use there was, if all I could do was work in a factory or be a prisoner.

I was working in the factory when the Authorities broke in, rounded us up, and took us onto their spaceship. They were all – incredibly – roughly the same size and shape of a human. They had heads and arms and legs where human heads and arms and legs should go. But they were all dressed in space suits with black visors – thick-skinned suits that allowed them full mobility but stopped them from even coming into contact with our atmosphere. They also all carried big plasma guns – terrifying cannons held in both hands that burned and boiled flesh and metal. They activated these cannons with hands. I wondered if they had evolved from a primate-like specimen as well. They didn't have tails or wings to help them walk upright: they seemed as proficient at it as humans.

For an alien species, they were pretty boring. They could have at least had tentacles or extra eyes or a tail.

The Authorities already knew about cyborgs. They knew we weren't human, but that we were alive and conscious. Someone told me about their reckless experiments: tearing off our limbs, opening our chest plates while we were still online and exploring our wiring, causing us to jerk and short out. Experimenting to see how intricate the wires were, and what they did. Exploring the false nerve endings rewired back into us.

It makes me shudder just to think about the pain and torture those first cyborgs must have felt.

Eventually, the humans reached an agreement with the Authorities, and shipped us off to the former asteroid the Rock to hold us while the war raged. We were too valuable to destroy outright, but the Authorities didn't want to give us back to the humans, not while the interstellar war was giving them opportunities for extortion and blackmail. We were all collectively hostages, refugees, and prisoners of war. We were a bargaining chip and a promise. We held technology the Authorities hadn't dreamed of in their worst nightmare: who in their right mind would meld a machine to a sentient being and expect it to function as one creature? The Authorities didn't even view us as sentient beings, but machines. At least on Old Earth we were acknowledged as intelligent beings. Just not intelligent enough to become the primary caregiver to a baby.