must be absorbed in something. Guess what? A real Prince Charming finally arrived on my doorstep. I have high hopes because Peyton 313 is way superior to the other two duds I bought. Wait until you see the guns on this one. I can’t wrap both hands around one of his upper arms. And before you ask, the answer is no—Peyton is not well behaved—but I don’t care. I like bad boys, even if they are cyborgs. So how do you feel about a little get together to meet him? Call me back when you get out of the game.”
She disconnected and frowned. It would have been preferable to wait a couple more days until she was sure Peyton was adapting fully. But her instincts were singing and that was never good. The last time they sang this loudly, Jackson had asked for an official divorce so he could take a Cyber Wife without looking bad to the UCN.
Before the forms had gotten through the legal chain, Jackson’s first Cyber Wife had moved in with him. She had spent the first week of her new single life working with Nero to reset privacy codes throughout the house and lab to respond only to her. When Jackson had come back to the house to get something a few days later, he’d had to wait for her to get home from work to get inside. His shock at her actions to protect herself had been great, but he’d soon adjusted to her new autonomy—as had she.
By that point she’d accepted that she was never in her life going to be able to forgive him.
It didn’t take long after that epiphany for complete apathy to set in about how Jackson was living.
Now she was about to change her life again, only this time she was going completely off the grid. To do the best job of that, she needed to create a side trail of research that would lead any investigation away from Peyton’s true changes to something far less interesting.
Once he’d had a chance to calm down, maybe she could convince the angry Marine to help her.
Chapter 7
Kyra sat at her desk downloading the last of the notes and video from Peyton’s restoration onto the special encryption disks Nero had made for her. In the cage, Peyton used his thumbs to flip screens on a large handheld. She knew he was comprehending about eighty-five percent of the data because she was still wirelessly monitoring his brain activity. Whether he was taking it in with full understanding or not was yet to be determined, but according to his EEG readout, the man was a reading machine.
His occasional grunt of disbelief, followed by a short-lived outburst of swearing, was the only thing that occasionally broke the silence between them. She was bit startled when he finally spoke.
“I give up. I’m obviously not understanding what I’m reading. How could an entire decade of my life be so completely suppressed just by a software program? It seems too improbable to be true.”
Kyra sighed softly as she thought about how to explain it to him. “Before the universal peace pacts were completed, military prisoners of war, including cyber soldiers, were kept on rigidly busy schedules during their captivity. Tasks they were forced to do were part torture and part reward. Surviving the daily grind of getting through them gave prisoners little time to think creatively, much less plot or plan escapes. Those drastic survival routines were an effective tool to keep them physically tired, but the bonus was they worked on their minds as well. When the mind is kept too busy, it forgets how to stop and reflect on anything.”
She got up to pace, studying the floor as she looked for the right words.
“Keeping the mind too busy to do anything but follow routine is pretty much what the constant code programming does to a cyborg’s brain. Your cybernetic chips are kept one hundred percent preoccupied with running a variety of routine tasks. The theory is that the part of the brain producing emotions simply doesn’t get a chance to express itself. In other words, your emotional reactions never got to have their turn
She disconnected and frowned. It would have been preferable to wait a couple more days until she was sure Peyton was adapting fully. But her instincts were singing and that was never good. The last time they sang this loudly, Jackson had asked for an official divorce so he could take a Cyber Wife without looking bad to the UCN.
Before the forms had gotten through the legal chain, Jackson’s first Cyber Wife had moved in with him. She had spent the first week of her new single life working with Nero to reset privacy codes throughout the house and lab to respond only to her. When Jackson had come back to the house to get something a few days later, he’d had to wait for her to get home from work to get inside. His shock at her actions to protect herself had been great, but he’d soon adjusted to her new autonomy—as had she.
By that point she’d accepted that she was never in her life going to be able to forgive him.
It didn’t take long after that epiphany for complete apathy to set in about how Jackson was living.
Now she was about to change her life again, only this time she was going completely off the grid. To do the best job of that, she needed to create a side trail of research that would lead any investigation away from Peyton’s true changes to something far less interesting.
Once he’d had a chance to calm down, maybe she could convince the angry Marine to help her.
Chapter 7
Kyra sat at her desk downloading the last of the notes and video from Peyton’s restoration onto the special encryption disks Nero had made for her. In the cage, Peyton used his thumbs to flip screens on a large handheld. She knew he was comprehending about eighty-five percent of the data because she was still wirelessly monitoring his brain activity. Whether he was taking it in with full understanding or not was yet to be determined, but according to his EEG readout, the man was a reading machine.
His occasional grunt of disbelief, followed by a short-lived outburst of swearing, was the only thing that occasionally broke the silence between them. She was bit startled when he finally spoke.
“I give up. I’m obviously not understanding what I’m reading. How could an entire decade of my life be so completely suppressed just by a software program? It seems too improbable to be true.”
Kyra sighed softly as she thought about how to explain it to him. “Before the universal peace pacts were completed, military prisoners of war, including cyber soldiers, were kept on rigidly busy schedules during their captivity. Tasks they were forced to do were part torture and part reward. Surviving the daily grind of getting through them gave prisoners little time to think creatively, much less plot or plan escapes. Those drastic survival routines were an effective tool to keep them physically tired, but the bonus was they worked on their minds as well. When the mind is kept too busy, it forgets how to stop and reflect on anything.”
She got up to pace, studying the floor as she looked for the right words.
“Keeping the mind too busy to do anything but follow routine is pretty much what the constant code programming does to a cyborg’s brain. Your cybernetic chips are kept one hundred percent preoccupied with running a variety of routine tasks. The theory is that the part of the brain producing emotions simply doesn’t get a chance to express itself. In other words, your emotional reactions never got to have their turn
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