Cyber Dawn (A Ben Raine Novel) (2 page)

“So what happened?”

With a shrug, she said, “I think the impact occurred just as your augment was feeding stored Cytoxinol into your system. The process was interrupted, and a software bug kept it from starting again. The lack of Cytoxinol caused your headache. To be honest, I’m surprised it didn’t result in more problems. You were lucky.”

I whistled softly. Cytoxinol was a CyberLife-manufactured drug I took daily. I didn’t know the details, only that it somehow kept my body and my cybernetic system in balance.

“What if I didn’t call you to get it fixed?” I asked.

“You’d have been dead in two days.”

My mouth fell open as I waited for the punch line. When one didn’t come, I said, “Dead?”

“I’m serious, Ben,” Megan replied. “You’re taking Cytoxinol for a reason. Without it, your cybernetic augments would poison you.”

I let out a deep breath. Joining the football team now seemed like a pretty dumb idea.

Megan squeezed my arm. “Now you know why I was so angry?”

“
Was
angry?”

“
Am
angry. Don’t push your luck.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a black data cable. “Since you’re in a hurry, I’ll use the wire. It transfers data a hundred times faster.”

Before I could protest, she bent down and slipped her hands up my boxer shorts. I tensed, both because I expected her hands to be cold and because she had her fingers wrapped around my upper thigh.

“Easy there, Benjamin,” she said.

“Geez, Megan, a little notice next time?”

“Oh, like you’re not used to it,” she joked. “I’ve been putting my hands in your pants for three years.”

My face flushed red. “Megan, seriously?”

She laughed, tucked her fingers under the synthetic skin, and rolled it down past my knee. My cybernetic leg’s rigid titanium alloy shell and flexible Kevlar fabric muscles made it look like something out of a science fiction movie. Even now, six years later, I had to look twice to convince my brain it really was
my
leg.

After plugging in the cable and entering a series of commands on her laptop, Megan sat on the corner of the table and crossed her arms.

“Okay Benjamin, you’ve got ten minutes,” she said, a serious look on her face. “Start talking.”

“Talk?” I replied tentatively.

She scowled and leaned in close. In a voice barely above a whisper, she said, “Tell me why, of all the things you could possibly do, you decided to join the
football
team? Not the golf team. Not the debate team or the chess team. The
full-contact football
team.”

At that moment, I realized the true downside to the sparse, underground lab.

Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

2

“You know I’ve always loved football,” I said. “When the doctors first told me that they would have to amputate my leg, my first question was whether or not I’d still be able to play.”

“Ben, I know,” Megan interjected. “We’ve discussed this.”

I pressed on. “I wanted to see what it was like at the tryouts. I didn’t realize so many people would be there. Classmates, coaches, teachers, and cheerleaders—even some parents. I didn’t want to embarrass myself or let anyone down. When it was my turn, instead of playing terrible, I did the best I could. The crowd cheered me. The other players patted me on the back. It felt . . . great.”

I paused to let my words sink in, then continued. “Before I knew what I’d done, I was on the team. I got caught in the moment, I guess. It’s hard enough being the new kid in school. Before I tried out, I had like, two friends. Being on the team made me popular. Everyone knew who I was. I even got a date with Katherine Nickel.”

Megan’s eyes lit up, and I instantly regretted my words. She had spent two years pestering me about dating. Before she could probe further, I hurried on. “I guess I got tired of being told what I couldn’t do. By CyberLife. My parents. Even . . . you.”

It took every ounce of willpower I had to hold Megan’s gaze. She stared back, eyes unblinking. I knew my words stung. A moment later, she stood and walked to her workstation. She reached into her bag and returned holding a thick stack of paper. Without seeing the cover, I knew what it was. What I didn’t know, however, was why in the world she carried a copy in her bag.

“I know about the NDA,” I said.

Megan shook her head as she flipped through the document. “No, Ben, I don’t think you do.” She stopped on the list of banned activities and turned the stack so I could see them. Not that I needed to. I’d been forced to initial each one.

She then flipped to the end and pointed at a set of signatures. “That’s my signature, Ben—the one right next to yours. I agreed to be responsible for you. If I hadn’t signed this thing, Merrick wouldn’t have let you go. Trust me.”

I frowned at the mention of Dr. Merrick, the CEO and founder of CyberLife Industries. He had spent billions of dollars of his own money building the company and its related research programs. There was a time when I looked up to him as a father figure. We had spent thousands and thousands of hours together perfecting my cybernetic system. Now, I assumed that time had passed. I had not seen or heard from him in more than six months. Not since being discharged from the company’s secret research campus.

“I told him we couldn’t keep a teenage boy cooped up on a campus hidden in the mountains,” Megan continued. “Not forever anyway. So he agreed. But
only
on the condition that
you
agreed as well.”

“Come on, Merrick loves me,” I said.

“He doesn’t love you that much, Ben,” Megan countered. “Do you know how much trouble you’ll be in if he finds out you played football? That you risked disclosing your technology to the public? Your cybernetics are so classified—”

“Yeah, I know,” I interrupted. “
Tell-somebody-and-black-clad-commandos-show-up-at-your-door-and-disappear-you
classified.”

“Exactly.”

“You don’t need to worry about it. I got kicked off the team.”

“Why . . . did you get kicked off?”

“They scanned me for a concussion and found my augment.”

Megan’s blue eyes turned to ice, a sharp contrast to her brightening red cheeks. “Tell me it wasn’t a visual scan of some sort,” she said, voice shaking. “Tell me they didn’t do an MRI or CT scan.”

“It wasn’t,” I answered quickly, realizing her fear. An MRI or CT scan would reveal my cybernetic augments. “Just some handheld scanner thing. They use it to check for concussions. It must have picked up my brain implant.”

Megan let out a deep breath. “What did you tell them?”

I shrugged. “That I had a vision upgrade. Just like half the kids in school.”

“They believed you?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t they?”

The truth was, the medics and football coaches could have figured out I was lying. CyberLife didn’t sell any visual augments that didn’t have a small black data port on the temple of either eye. Thankfully, they didn’t dig deeper. And neither did Megan.

“They kicked you off the team for that?” she asked.

“Because I didn’t disclose it earlier, my name wasn’t on the registry.”

“They have a registry?”

“Yeah. Ever since those kids got caught cheating with the hacked eye augments, they require every student with any kind of prosthetic or cybernetic augment to register before joining a school-sanctioned activity.”

“Sounds pretty Orwellian,” she said.

I nodded, careful not to take the bait. Megan could argue for hours about privacy and the government’s handling of cybernetic augments. There were rumors of a national registry, something that really pressed her buttons. Right now, I just needed to get to class.

Megan sat next to me on the table and put her arm around my shoulder. “Ben, those augments your classmates have—eyes, hands, whatever—are toys compared to yours. We sell them at the mall. I know it’s hard not being able to tell your friends. And I know you’ve always wanted to play football. But that NDA exists for a good reason. It’s not only to protect CyberLife, but to protect you as well.”

I sighed and stared down at the floor. When I made the decision to join the team, I justified it with all sorts of reasons.

I’ve been through hell. I deserve to be a regular teenager.

Football has been my dream since I was two.

All my friends get to do whatever they want, why can’t I?

Now, however, the magnitude of that single decision pressed down on my shoulders like a ton of steel. If surviving cancer had taught me one thing, it was perspective.
I may not have everything I want, but at least I’m alive.

“I’m sorry, Megan,” I said. “It was a stupid thing to do.”

“It’s okay, knucklehead,” she replied, reaching out and messing my hair. “But if you do it again, that cold hands trick will be the least of your worries. I’ll program your brain so you automatically drool any time you’re around Katherine Nickel.”

We shared a laugh before she turned and eyed her laptop. “This update is taking longer than I thought,” she said. “No way it’s going to finish before you need to leave.”

“No problem,” I said. After three plus hours, I was ready to get out of there. “We can finish next Monday.”

“I’m out of town rest of this week and next.”

“Oh right, forgot. Another tech then?”

She shook her head. “You know I don’t trust anyone else to mess around with my favorite teenage cyborg. Besides . . .”

Suddenly, her voice was drowned out as a loud siren pierced the air.

3

She ignored me.

After hurriedly typing a series of commands on her laptop and disconnecting the cable from my knee, she slammed the lid shut and ran across the room to her workstation. With one hand, she tossed papers and notebooks into her bag. With the other, she grabbed my pants and shirt from a nearby chair and tossed them in my direction. “Get dressed,” she yelled over the alarm.

I didn’t protest. If it was a fire alarm, the last thing I wanted was to stand around the parking lot in my underwear. I rolled my synthetic skin back into place and quickly dressed. As I finished with my shoes, Megan ran back and grabbed me by the arm.

“We have to leave. Now.”

She half-dragged me through the lab’s double doors, and we sped down a long, empty hallway. Every twenty feet, a strobe light flashed. To my relief, the audible alarms rang in the rooms only, and not in the confined space of the hallway. At a T-junction, we turned left and raced to the elevator door. As we approached, a light above the door flashed on. Megan abruptly stopped, whirled around, and pulled me in the opposite direction.

“Megan, the elevator is that way,” I called, glancing over my shoulder.

Instead of a reply, she squeezed my arm tight and pulled harder. We stopped at a blue metal door with a sign that read
STAIRS.
Right
, I thought.
In case of fire, use the stairs.

She pushed the door open, stopped on the small landing, and motioned for me to remain quiet. Still holding the door partially open, I heard the elevator chime from down the hall. Then the loud stomping of boots. I peered out and was surprised to see two black-clad CyberLife guards running down the corridor, assault rifles at the ready. Before I could tell Megan, she yanked my arm and ran up the stairs.

After four flights, we stopped at the main floor landing. Megan headed straight for the door and suddenly froze. I noticed a half-second late and bumped into her. She turned and scowled. “Quiet,” she said through clenched teeth.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

She pulled me to the side, away from the small, square, glass window in the door. The sounds of heavy boots flew past. Somewhere below, a door slammed shut. More boots hit the stairs.

The entire situation grew stranger by the minute. I had been in plenty of fire drills on the CyberLife research campus and even one at school. The first rule was always,
stay calm and head to the nearest exit
. We didn’t seem to be doing either.

“Megan . . .” I said.

“Let’s go,” she whispered. “And stay close.”

I followed her into the hallway. Sneaking around a secure CyberLife building wasn’t exactly new to me. I had, on numerous occasions while living on the research campus, done the same thing. It was one of my favorite ways to pass the time. But never had I done it with a CyberLife employee. Especially not one like Megan, who had always been a stickler for the rules, and even carried my NDA around in her bag.

We stopped in front of a locked door. Above the lock, there was a small, gray pad with a red LED on it. Megan pulled a lanyard out of her lab coat and pressed an ID card against the pad. The red LED turned green, and the door clicked open. I followed her through and shut the door behind me.

In sharp contrast to the “lab” in the basement, the room we entered was the typical CyberLife laboratory—gleaming white walls, white tile floor, and stainless steel furniture. We weaved around various metal tables full of high-tech equipment until we reached another door on the far side of the room.

After a short pause to catch our breath, Megan stood and used her hands to smooth out her lab coat. She pushed strands of stray blond hair behind her ears, turned to me, and smiled.

“Okay, ready?”

I shrugged, still not sure what I should be ready for. Or what in the hell we were doing.

“Just act normal if you see anyone,” she said. “Let me do the talking.”

With another swipe of her card, she opened the door. We stepped out into the cool morning air and onto a concrete path. After taking a moment to get my bearings, I instinctively turned left toward the main gate and the visitor parking lot. Megan went right. I jogged a few steps to catch up.