Code Breakers: Beta by Colin F. Barnes

fly for as long as the hydrogen lasted, and then pop the ejection seat and float on the sea until something happened.
    Of all the dangerous situations she had been in, and of all the times where death presented it self as a possibility this was the most chilled she’d ever been. It was as if death wasn’t such a bad outcome really. For as long as she could remember, she’d been in one scrape or another. Filled to her core with malicious code and bad AIs, all rotting away her humanity, changing her into something else.
    Gabe had often used her as nothing but a tool to further his agenda, and Enna nothing more than a research project and a weapon. She didn’t blame them really, or harbour any hard feelings. They were just doing what they thought right, and in their own way they had cared for her, looked out for her.
    Only Gerry noticed something different within her, and yet even that spark of… no, she couldn’t say it was love, not yet. How would she even know what love was anyway? She was a killer, a hacker, and a weapon. She didn’t love. She maimed, and stole, and destroyed.
    That a chip had been ripped from her with the name Criborg stamped into it didn’t mean she was going home. For all she knew this place was just a chip and weapons producer and someone else had stuck that in her to make her better at killing and hacking.
    It’d be like sending a robot back to the manufacturer of its sensor array.
    And then a nagging thought surfaced as she flew over the blue sea, am I just a robot too ? It made sense when she looked at the evidence: no memories before Gabe discovered her wandering the desert; chips and implanted weaponry; the ability to contain and manipulate code and AIs; reflexes and abilities faster than most people she knew.
    Then there was her extraordinary tolerance to NanoStems. The amount they had pumped into her over the last few years would have killed a regular person, but she took it in her stride. Thrived on it.
    She wondered how much of her body was real and how much of it was actually billions of nano-machines all swimming about doing various jobs, keeping her going.
    And yet, despite all that evidence, she still felt .
    Even now, as she noticed two UAVs, similar in design to the one she found in the Jaguar, drop out from behind a thin wisp of cloud and head towards her. Dread, fear, excitement, and anticipation rose up inside her. Her hands began to sweat and she fidgeted in her seat, fingers poised over the weapon’s controls. She held off, waited. They drew closer, and then split off to flank her.
    Her fingers edged closer to the triggers of the machine guns. The pair of UAVs appeared on her holographic display with a red ring around them. The targeting system had them locked.
    A second passed, then two, three. She eased her hand away, took her eye off the radar, checked the data flow. Traffic spiked. Same signal structure as before. They were definitely from Criborg.
    Two crashes smashed into the Jaguar simultaneously, alerting a rainbow of warning signs and a cacophony of beeps and sirens. Dammit! Guess they’re not friendly, after all.
    Petal wrestled with the controls, but the damned thing locked down and headed for the big drink. Two more blasts sealed the deal. Petal punched the ejector seat.
    The air pressure popped her ears, her guts tried to remove themselves via her feet, and her head swam, even more so than normal with the ‘Stems floating about in there still. She watched almost as if it were happening in slow motion, as the Jaguar broke apart: its stub wings split from the fuselage and all three large pieces headed down into the calm waters below.
    Strangely, she thought of the whales, hoped they would be safe. For years these waters had nothing in them, but as the damage to the climate eased, life had returned. The sea’s biodiversity could come and go as they pleased, but here she was creating yet more mayhem. Everywhere she went, destruction and death followed.
    The