Free Kingston 691: Book Two of Cyborgs: Mankind Redefined by Donna McDonald Page B

and hearing. Was it just data? Fuck no, it wasn’t. It was his damn life. It was his past. And what he was seeing and hearing was exactly what Annalise had described.
    He had been cyborg…and yet not a cyborg…or at least not completely one. Whatever he had been had smiled and laughed at everything Seetha Harrington said and did. Each recording was like watching an entertainment vid—fascinating but surreal—even though he and Seetha were the actors.
    “Does Norton consider the information they took from me to be theirs, Nero?” King knew it was a dumb question when he asked, but he just wanted to hear someone be logical when they explained it to him.
    Nero nodded as he shrugged. “Yes. A cyborg’s collection of data from long term storage was routinely removed and scrubbed during yearly maintenance. Usually the storage area was wiped clean to allow for new information to be recorded and stored. Your collection from all those years you weren’t upgraded was atypically large. By the time Norton finally got you away from your engineer wife, your storage area was likely on the brink of being at full capacity. They cite in their work logs your data pull took an entire day. It was one of the primary reasons they kept it all. No one wanted to take the time to go through it. Then afterward, Seetha’s complaints about your personality change brought up questions they probably planned to investigate at some point. Hence the lockdown on it.”
    King’s mind said Nero’s explanation made perfect sense, but his gut was not in agreement. There was something missing there, some story about his situation, Nero was not capturing with his logical deductions.
    “What would have happened to me if I’d filled up the storage area completely? Would my processor have shut down or rebooted me on its own?”
    Nero shrugged. “Hard to say. To the best of my knowledge, filling up a storage area has never happened in recorded cyborg history. Yearly maintenance prevented it. I do find it strange Norton let your contract wife hold them off for so long.”
    “I was thinking the same thing—and that maybe they wanted to see what might happen,” King stated.
    “When Kyra restored Peyton, she blocked his storage off temporarily, which is what I think your processor would have tried to do if long term storage had gotten too full. She said Peyton acted almost completely human after she did that. She also said his sense of time reverted instantly to his last recorded human memory. That state of being lasted the whole time the long term cybernetic data was inaccessible.”
    “Did Peyton go nuts on Doc any way at all?” King asked.
    Nero laughed. “No, he flirted with her until she confessed what was going on, then he got angry. Peyton believed Kyra had captured him during a field mission your team was conducting. It was very traumatic for him later when Kyra removed the block and let him process all his time in the Cyber Husband program. He felt even more angry then, and destroyed everything in his confinement cage. Who could blame him? Not me. I’d have been mad too to know I’d been bought and sold by my government.”
    King crossed his arms. “Peyton at least got to keep all of his past though, no matter how shitty it was to discover it. I don’t have any real sense of what I went through being Seetha Harrington’s Cyber Husband. Tell me something—do you think this stuff you’ve found is technically mine as well as Norton’s?”
    Nero thought about it briefly and then nodded. “I guess you could say I consider this information to be yours as well. Why?”
    King lifted his gaze and his chin. “Because I want everything I forgot about my time with Seetha Harrington put back into my head.”
    Nero blinked and stared. He chuckled softly, but stopped instantly when he saw King glaring at his amusement. “Well…I…don’t really know how to answer without risking an ass-kicking. It doesn’t exactly work that way.”
    “ Why the