The Edge of Darkness

Lissa Bilyk

The Edge of Darkness

Copyright © 2011 by Lissa Bilyk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

First edition

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

Find out more at reedsy.com

This book is dedicated to my partner husband, Adam, who kept me on track with his gentle encouragement of

Write, wench!

Thanks to Samantha Andrews for being my beta reader J

Contents

Author’s Note

The Edge of Darkness

Awakening

Home

The Eden

The Gathering

Trapped

Consequences

The Discovery

Mutiny

Negotiations

The Black Hole

Carpe Diem

Questions

Return To Earth

About the Author

Also by Lissa Bilyk

Author’s Note

This book is written in Australian English, which is a combination of mainly British English spelling (including u’s) and the odd American pop culture reference. If you think you’ve found a typo or misspelling, you might be right! No one’s perfect. But also, you may just be reading an Australian book. Neat, huh?

Remember to sign up for my newsletter to keep up to date with future releases, and check out my Facebook reader’s group! Drop a post introducing yourself, I’d love to see you there!

The Edge of Darkness

I did not choose to become this way. This corrupted, innocent body. Who in their right mind would willingly choose this life?

Max never asked to become a cyborg, but now she’s one of the thousands of prisoners of war trapped on a deep space transport after the interstellar war. Each day brings her one step closer to being recycled, and the only person who gives her hope is Ethan. But love isn’t an option for a cyborg, and Max knows it. So why does her heart race when she meets Ethan again on the long journey home? His touch is forbidden, but it sets her blood on fire.

Together as Max and Ethan search for answers about the cruel fate of their fellow cyborgs, she realizes that the authorities are hiding a terrible secret. Max must act quickly to save those she loves before everything she knows is lost beyond the edge of darkness.

Awakening

Nothing.

Then… an awareness of nothing. An awakening, a sense of perception.

Movement. Not outside, but within. Tiny, minute; barely distinguished, but still infinitely unignorable. Strange sensations. Neurons firing, circuits responding, hormones being activated. Awakening…

Dark.

Movement. Air drawn in body. It is smooth against the inside and tastes smooth as well. Fills up lungs. Body feels strong. Powerful. Breathe air out and breathe in again.

Sound. Movement outside. Turn head. Listen. Estimate sound. Cannot turn head any more. Raise upper body. Fluids adjust and body stable. Turn head and listen again. There.

She moves.

More noise. Bigger sound. Pinpoint reverberations.

Wait.

Activate visual sensory perception. Open eye. Activate optic.

She’s awake. The noise again, but sounding different.

Light and colour and loud. Close eye. Optic search to confirm source of noise.

There. White coat. Dark hair. Who are you?

Mother?

I snapped out of my daydream as my husband Ethan sat next to me.

You’ll never guess what, he said, his one human eye shining with excitement. Ethan was one of the lucky borgs who managed to keep his human voice. I think that’s why he gravitated towards me: that and the full head of hair I sport. I was originally born in the Philippines on Old Earth, and I still have the long black hair I was born with. When my face was smashed, I was given a cybernetic eye and face plate. At first the human in me was horrified by the way I looked in a mirror – and then I never saw a mirror again, and so I forgot. Cyborgs aren’t given mirrors, and on the Rock we don’t have anything that can cast a reflection. So I forgot about my face. Until I saw Ethan.

Ethan tells me he was very athletic before the explosion. He had longish blonde hair and tanned skin – his skin is now pale and sallow, like so many of us. I do adore his human eye, though. It is blue and happy. That’s how it seems to me. Happy.

Happiness is rare on the Rock.

What is it? I asked him, taking his human hand in mine. The touch set off a bunch of receptors to my cybernetic nerves, and my system flooded with euphoria. Every time I touched him, I got the same response. When I reported the over stimulus to the Authorities, they told me they couldn’t afford the mechanics to fix the overload. So I learned to enjoy it.

Apparently the war’s over. I heard the Authorities talking about incoming transport ships. The Antiquity fleet. Max, my girl, I think we’re going home!

Home! I tried not to laugh at his hopeful expression. What could home offer us? Perhaps we would no longer be refugees, or prisoners of war, but we’d still be second-class citizens. Why did they want to send us back to Old Earth when they could use us until we died in servitude?

We’re too expensive an investment to risk sending home, I argued quietly. Why don’t they ship us off-planet to some alien contractor? They’d get their money’s worth.

Well Max, the war’s over, so the risk of being pirated while offline is minimal.

I don’t want to go offline, I said under my breath. He squeezed my hand.

It’s OK, love: I’ll compartmentalise right beside you. I’ll never leave your side, you know that.

Yes, Ethan, I do know that. I looked furtively around, and saw that there were no Authorities nearby. I leaned in and kissed him quickly on the lips.

It was an illegal move, and one that could have grave consequences if we were caught. That’s why, in the three years we have been together on the Rock, neither of us have progressed further than a kiss or a grope, despite us both being healthy semi-humans with fully functioning sex organs. It’s just too risky. The consequences for breaking proximity rules were harsh. I think it haunted a lot of the borgs who were capable of thinking about it.

Every day is the same. It doesn’t bother me. Repetition means nothing to a machine. I came across the concept of I and myself a few days ago, as my human mind began to take over more of my daily processes and applications. The passage of time is marked by my internal clock. The idea of me is a notion from my human brain.

It begins with waking up at 5am. Notifications flag my internal clock like a silent alarm and I prepare for the day ahead. Making my way to the biggest room in the factory, I see that it is enormous, many stories high, with dirty daylight seeping through rank old skylights, kilowatts nothing compared to the bright lights that hang just above my head.

There are several attachments set in front of me to one side. My left hand can be removed and replaced by an array of different tools: one for crushing; one for finely-tuned electronics; one for dexterous work my ‘normal’ hand cannot operate; and so forth. There are electronic parts approaching along the conveyor belt in short, jerky motions. The axis needs greasing. At my point in the line it is impossible for the computer inside me to recognise what the parts are – it just does the job, unquestioning – but the human mind analyses, estimates, and imagines that they are complex wiring inside intricately designed hands. Hands that one day will come apart and be replaced with new attachments just like mine. Hands that one day will be fitted to an arm piece and grafted onto flesh. Hands that will help make more hands.

As I stand, my left leg starts to ache. It is organic, and cannot stand up to the stress of an eighteen hour shift like my mechanical one can. I send a command from my machine brain to my left leg. Crossing the barrier from mechanical to organic, the electrical command penetrates where it is not welcome, and my leg locks. I push the pain aside. I am still human enough to do that. They did not touch my amygdala: my emotional responses are still my own.

The conveyor belt moves, shuffling new half-formed hands for me to inspect and cauterise. I am thinking of a time long ago. There is a woman with short black hair in my thoughts. Her skin is a golden tan colour, and her eyes are the darkest brown. She is wearing a multicoloured summer dress, spinning around and around, her arms thrown out wide, her mouth wide too, laughing. She is entirely human. The day is hot, the sky deep blue, the grass green. The day was hot.

My skin prickles and I begin to sweat. My right shoulder has tightened. I contract the muscles, trying to relax it. My left arm does not need supervision from my human brain – my machine one can compute many things at once. It leaves my human brain bored, wandering.

Who is the woman? I cannot recall. Is she my mother? My sister?

Is she me?

And the man who met me when I woke – who is he? I know he watches us, high above the assembly line. He does not come down to our level, but stays above, safe behind his glass and metal wall. Safe from what, I do not know.

Father?

The more intelligent of the other cyborgs started to get excited at the idea of the end of the war. The lesser of us sat there, missing robotic limbs or heads and slowly died from the inside. The majority of us were trying to consolidate with those whom we had formed bonds of friendship, and were anxious to see if we would be given a choice on which ship we boarded.

It seemed like such a great idea at the time. For the first time in four years, we as a race of half-people had hope: Hope that someone cared about us, that someone wanted us. That we had a place to go and a purpose for our lives.

Hope had kept us alive for four long years. Four years of simultaneously reading all the classic novels uploaded onto my system and seeing which one I could finish first. Four years of cold slops to eat that satisfied only the basic requirements of nutrition to keep our organic side alive. Some of the borgs that were more human than machine wasted away and died. The borgs that were deemed too machine were taken away to work in dangerous areas the Authorities were not allowed to go. Those of us stuck in the middle of cyber-organism were also stuck in the middle of our lives, unable to do anything but continue the struggle to survive. But survive we did. If we were fully machine, we would have given up.

But humans do not give up.

And even though the cybernetics are twined in our brains and part of our system, the human side of us fuels the robotic side and hangs on to that last shred of hope that we can outlast the war.

My father was a preacher. After the crash, after I had lain in hospital for days slowly dying, he and my mother decided to save my life by handing it over to the Corporation. They spent millions saving my life, and I was indebted to them for the rest of it. When my parents came to say goodbye, my father couldn’t look at my new robotic half – my face plate covering one eye, my new arm, my new leg. He couldn’t accept that part of me. The general consensus is that borgs are too much robot to have souls anymore. There’s no ghost in the machinery here. My father could no longer see me as human.

Perhaps if English wasn’t their second language, they might have realised what they were doing in time to say no. But I was dying – supposedly – and my mother was upset. My father was trying to console her while at the same time dealing with the Corporation’s recruitment agents. They were no better than pushy second hand car dealers – desperate for another indenture, another commission to their wages.

And then I was contracted to be a slave for the next twenty years of my life.

I believe I have a soul, even as a half-robot. I still remember, I imagine, and I dream. I remember my former life, and the hopes and wishes I had for my future. None of them involved becoming half machine. All of them involved life and creation and love and splashes of colour. But no one cared what I thought or wanted anymore. No humans ever concern themselves over cyborg well-being. We’re advanced robots. Emotional, intelligent, capable of intuition and imagination. We’re so much more valuable than robots ever were.

Robots wore out eventually. They were incapable of thinking and learning. They couldn’t adapt and adjust. Faced with certain challenges, they’d plow on regardless of their own safety, often destroying themselves in the process. As for cyborgs, well: Every organism living in a hostile environment gradually develops survival strategies. Cyborgs could think for themselves. They could develop beyond artificial intelligence. They had a certain flexibility granted from the human brain. That’s what made us so valuable.

I once heard that hundreds of years ago, gay couples weren’t allowed to get married. There was a distinct streak of discrimination based on a person’s skin colour or accent. Border security was much tighter. I couldn’t help but wonder how cyborgs would have been treated back then. As it was now, we were the last great minority to be discriminated against. I guess haters just have to hate.

I wanted to go to University to study art. I wanted to be a famous artist, a famous painter. I would wow the world with my colourful creations and I would grow rich and fat with contentment.

Then the war hit Old Earth, and dragged us along with it. Millions of citizens died while the combined governments desperately tried to salvage their space vessels. For a year I walked the streets afraid that an Authority would snatch me up and carry me away.

Turns out I didn’t need an Authority to change my life.

There was a crash. Twisted metal and burning rubber, smoke and fire and pain.

I was injured. I was dying. I remember my mother sobbing over my broken body while I struggled simply to breathe, my limbs in agony.

And when I awoke, I was half-machine, stronger in arm and leg and more powerful in mind. Possibly able to live forever.

And expendable. Not applicable to human