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  “Your survival is irrelevant if humanity is saved”, said Melon. “My analogy is sound.”

  “You’ve really got to work on that bedside manner, Doctor,” said Kam.

  “Zed,” said the doctor. “Every colony planet the aliens set up was an experiment as much as it was a backup, planet-wide, laboratory for the brain-construct project. My planet was colonised using a fleet of stasis-capable colony ships and, when we arrived at our new home, we were greeted, warmly, by the Kon Ramar. Co-habitation with the aliens was the experiment here, as well as to study how humans coped with the combination of stasis and colonisation.”

  “Mind fuck,” said Kam.

  “Blue-skinned alien fuck, more like,” said Oxley. “Come on Melon, you guys got jiggy with the aliens, yeah?”

  “Stasis?” I said, “So the people kidnapped from Earth and taken to this Iceholme were the same generation?”

  “Indeed,” said Melon. “Although they only ever woke up twenty of the forty million people they transplanted. They spun us a line about saving us from a comet collision, how they were so sorry they could only save so few, and that they were only capable of sustaining those twenty million of us that they had revived. Years later and they were apologising again that a power failure had cut life support to those still in stasis. They even showed us footage of Earth being destroyed by a comet. Which some of us now know was fake.

  “But, over time – generations, that is – little cracks showed, and human curiosity was piqued. The Kon Ramar’s arrogance is one of their weaknesses. They had no idea that some humans had found a way to learn from their technology, to learn their written language – they taught some of us to speak a basic version – to read their history, and, to discover their future plans. The culmination of us learning what we did, was that we realised Deliverance was next and then Iceholme, if they failed at Deliverance.

  “We had a chance, we realised, to get to Deliverance first and have the Kon Ramar’s pre-planted cyborg servitors prepare a welcoming party that they’d never forget.”

  “Why can’t you use your own cyborgs, on Iceholme?” I said.

  “There aren’t any. None that we can find information about, anyway. I think the aliens’ arrogance literally leaves them with zero fear of any trouble from the Iceholme humans. They don’t think like we do. They’re not paranoid. They’ve seeded some planets with Wardens because the actual expected results of their experiments there are that trouble will occur. It’s the same on planets where they’ve allowed for conditions in which human technological progress is expected to increase. The Wardens will step in and end any threat before it begins, if it emerges before the Kon Ramar are ready to turn up, gas that planet and start stitching brains together.”

  “But isn’t uncertainty the reason for experimentation in the first place?” I said.

  “To humans, yes. To arrogant, unhinged, powerful space-zealots who’ve had hundreds of thousands of years of things going their way, no. They’re alien, Zed.”

  Melon’s tale certainly came with more back-story than Chester Boram’s did, but I recalled the Grand Overlord saying that if you’re going to spin a yarn, spin it big. “So, you shared everything you knew with Chester Boram when you got here, but the two of you couldn’t unite to face the threat of these Kon Ramar?” I said.

  “I didn’t realise that Boram knew about the Deliverance fleet flagship, let alone that he had access to it,” said Melon. “He told me not to worry; not to worry because he’d made a deal with the Kon Ramar. They’d repatriate him and his chosen few to a paradise planet and he’d deal with any trouble stirred up ahead of their arrival.”

  “Hence the plasma weapons?” said Lothar, astutely.

  “Indeed,” said Melon. “He didn’t tell them that – back then – one cyborg was already active on the planet, so they don’t know that he knows about their slumbering, hidden anti-insurrection force. Boram subsequently told me that he was going to use the cyborgs not only to defeat the Kon Ramar, but to create a human empire.”

  “A Boram Bay Overlords Galactic Empire?” said Kam. “Fuck that, I’m with you Melon, even you can’t be worse than that.”

  “Exactly,” said Melon. “We don’t want that. We just want the Kon Ramar to leave us alone. Maybe in time we can truly become friends with them.”

  “Fuck that,” said Lothar, Kam, Oxley and myself almost in unison.

  “One step at a time then, eh?” said Melon with a grin.

  I re-targeted the laser rifle on the middle of Melon’s forehead and activated its beam once more.

  “What, what the fuck are you doing?” Melon cried.

  “Nice story, Doc,” I said. “Nighty night now.”

  “No! I’m telling the truth. I swear,” said Melon as his melting forehead flesh dribbled into his ocular array and over his one good eye.

  I said nothing.

  “Zee?” said Lothar.

  “Zed, please,” said Melon.

  “I just have to be sure, Doc,” I said. I wasn’t going to go through with it. I’m not that bad. I just felt this was the only way to squeeze the last drop of blood from this reticent stone. “You’ve got about ten seconds left, I’d say.”

  “You bastard,” said Melon. “I can’t fight the Kon Ramar with the likes of you!”

  “I’m all you’ve got, and besides, yes, you can. Better still, I can fight them without you.”

  “Wait!”

  I allowed an eyebrow to raise.

  “You had a son!”

  Amidst blaring alarms in my mind, once more demanding that I reboot due to an apparent emotional overload, I calmly clicked the firing stud, shutting off the burning beam. I then dropped the laser rifle to the floor, called up an image of that tatty old stuffed toy I had in my bag, and then, even as I felt my knees buckle, everything inside me switched off.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  My internal clock said that three minutes had passed since Melon dropped his little bombshell. My reboot sequence takes less than a second, so I was a little concerned about having had a blackout. It’s not like I can get shit-faced on a pub crawl and wake up the next day with gaps in my memory – sounds fun though. I had shards of rock embedded in all of my knuckles and in my forehead. Also, most of my hair was singed and there was a large patch of melted flesh clinging to my neck. Must’ve been quite a ‘night out’.

  “I’m proud of you,” came Melon’s voice.

  “Yeah, Zed,” said Kam. “Even in the midst of a complete mental, or, ah, I don’t know, logical breakdown, you still held back from completely killing Oxley.”

  Oxley was on the ground, groaning and hugging his torso.

  “Zee, buddy, we thought we were losing you there,” said Lothar. “You blacked out, came to, started ranting and raving about Wardens, Melons, brains and lizards and then started trying to mine the rock with your face.”

  “And, even when Oxley and I started lasering the back of your skull,” said Kam, matter of fact. “You were still ‘Zed’ enough to pull your punch and only break, what, half of Oxley’s ribs?”

  “You’ve fought the Warden off again, Zed,” said Melon. “Another step in mastering yourself.”

  “Tell me about my son,” I said. And then, “Oh, and how is Oxley?”

  “He’ll live, it’s probably just bruising. You hardly touched the pussy,” said Lothar.

  “Good. Sorry Ox,” I said. “Melon, if this story ends in you telling me you’re my son, I’ll kill you for being so fucking obvious, okay?”

  “That would be more than fair,” said Melon. Kam and Lothar nodded as they hauled Oxley up to his feet. He was groggy but it didn’t seem I’d done enough damage to inhibit his operational capabilities.

  “Zed,” continued the doctor. “I deleted your memories, because I couldn’t trust you with them, but, I had a backup plan that maybe, just maybe I could turn you against the Kon Ramar in blind rage. I…I have one last memory to restore to you. I attached it to my personality files when I enco
ded my own brain. Just in case it might serve to motivate you.”

  “Hand it over then,” I said.

  “We will need to network together to file-share. I seriously suggest you take steps before we do this, to lock down emotion-based processes to minimal priority.”

  Either we were over the trust thing now, or we never would be. I made sure my emotions were held in check – although it felt as though they were merely in a glass case.

  “Go for it,” I said. “Lothar, if I do anything odd, melt me and then him.” Okay, so I have trust issues, clearly.

  “Happy to, buddy,” said Lothar with an eye-crinkle. Come on, crack a smile Lo, it won’t kill you.

  A private networking request pinged in my head. It felt similar, in an almost alien way to being on the Warden network so briefly. I metaphorically held my breath and acknowledged the request. It was done in a human heartbeat, and, as before, I had a new memory, flagged as requiring urgent review. So I reviewed it.

  *

  I was in a terminal of some kind. Some sort of travel-based terminal, only too modern, too clean, too quiet. I felt betrayed. Four incredibly strong hands grabbed me by the shoulders, squeezing hard, bruising my soft flesh. They pulled at me as I stared down into the face of my young son, his red-rimmed eyes streaming tears. My cheeks, too, were wet; though I had tried for so long to stay strong for him.

  The gripping hands pulled harder. I was being taken. Taken for their experiments. Because of their lies. Taken because of his.

  Between us, my son and I each clutched an end of his snuggly toy cheetah – I’d won it for him at that grabby-claw game on the pier, on his third birthday just last year. As they dragged me away from him and he sobbed “Daddy,” the toy and then our arms were pulled taught, stretching, straining until the cheap stitching of the toy gave way and the cheetah was torn in two. And we were torn apart.

  “No, Daddy, come back!” cried my son, as they bundled me out of the door. It banged shut behind me with awful finality. I stared at my half of the ruined toy and sobbed like a baby.

  *

  Cheetah? Leopard? Close enough.

  “Ouch,” I said. “That’d be a kick in the teeth if I still had any.”

  Melon simulated a sigh of relief. “You controlled your emotions then.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “It was...I mean...I’m sorry, Zed.”

  “Looks like ancient history to me Doc,” I said, lying to everyone. And then, ”What was his name?”

  “Peter,” said the doctor.

  “What happened to him? How much do you know? How the fuck do you know it?”

  “From reading your memories. I’m sorry. But I only read enough to be able to use you as a last resort. Humanity is at stake here, so a little snooping into your priva – ”

  “What happened to my son, you fucking bastard?”

  “That memory was from Earth. You and your son had been selected to go into stasis, you’d been chosen to be ‘saved’ and taken to what would become Iceholme. But, well, you know where you ended up. The Kon Ramar envoy who had originally made contact with you went back on his word. Your son, though? Well, he made it to Iceholme.”

  “Who was he with? Did I have a wife?”

  “Strangely, I have no idea,” said Melon apologetically.

  “Did he get by okay on Iceholme?” I said. But I already had an idea of what Melon would say next. He failed to prove me wrong.

  “I’m sorry, Zed,” he said slowly. “He was one of the twenty million who was never revived.”

  “One of the twenty million who’s life support failed?”

  “I want to nod sadly,” said Melon. “I’m so sorry, Zed.”

  “I’m a machine, Melon. What do I care?”

  “Is that how you’re going to deal with it?”

  “Seems logical.”

  “Perhaps, but – ”

  “Shut. The. Fuck. Up.”

  Lothar, Kam and Oxley had all been standing with their stupid fleshy gobs wide open. As silence fell, they suddenly found things to do elsewhere. Kam and Oxley started treating each other’s minor wounds from the recent fighting, Lothar began packing up the Kambulance and the bikes – they’d not found the grey-skins’ transportation anywhere nearby, so it was pedal power again once we decided what to do next. I did notice that they were all keeping well within easy earshot, though.

  “The leopard,” I said. “If you deleted my memories, how have I ‘known’ these past years that those toys have significance to me?”

  Melon was quiet for a while, looking thoughtful. “I’m not really sure. I thought I had been quite thorough with my deletions.”

  I growled.

  “Yes, I think perhaps now that was a mistake. But, all may not be lost. They may be stored somewhere else, backed up somewhere. After all, there were copies of everything stored on the colony bridge shuttle – which I also deleted. As I say, I do like to be thorough.”

  “So, where then? Where else might they be backed up? Somewhere on Deliverance?” I said.

  “Unlikely,” said Melon. “They may have been archived back when your brain was scanned and encoded. So they may be stored on Earth, possibly even archived on Iceholme, which seems to be some sort of hub planet for this sub-section of the galaxy.”

  When Melon mentioned my own brain-encoding, a logical question arose, but one that borrowed a mixture of exhilaration, hope and anxiety from the human side. “When they took my brain pattern, encoded my personality, downloaded my fucking essence, or whatever the hell you want to call it; when they did that, did I survive? Did the ‘real’ me survive?”

  “Heavens, no,” said Melon as though the thought was preposterous. “This happened long before the Kon Ramar bothered to make the encoding technology non-lethal.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Indeed,” said Melon. “The original Zach Estramen died to create you.”

  “Zach?” I said. “I hate that name.”

  “Hey, my ma was called Zach,” said Oxley. “You take that back.”

  “She was?” I said.

  “Just don’t ask,” said Kam.

  “So, that explains the Zed, or is that a coincidence?” I said.

  “That explains it indeed,” said Melon. “And once they encoded your brain pattern, they went through fourteen different configurations of mapping it to the fully simulated brain software that runs alongside the core Warden program. They then installed all of that into a cyborg body that used your D.N.A. for its outer skin, and lo; Zed Fourteen was born.”

  “If they used my D.N.A. then do I look like, well, me?”

  “You do,” said Melon.

  “Poor Zed,” said Kam with a cheeky grin. “Everything upgraded apart from his big ugly face.”

  “Don’t forget the cock-suckers took his dick, too,” said Oxley.

  “Wait a minute, Melon,” I said. “I just want to check. Do you know me?”

  “Not at all, no. You died and were re-born hundreds and hundreds of years before I was born. No, my dear cyborg, I learned all I did of you from watching your memories like a series of home movies.”

  “I see,” I said. “So, why do I ‘know’ about the leopard? Or at least collect cuddly toys like some kleptomaniac toddler?”

  “Well,” said Melon. “And this is just an educated guess – but, ah, it’s a very well educated one, so it’s probably correct… Every memory file is interlinked in almost innumerable ways, so fragments of information could perhaps be left behind in remaining memories. Little nuggets so unimportant that the deletion algorithms I wrote may have ignored them.

  “I don’t have any other little hints of memory like this, though,” I said.

  “No, there’s that trademark Doctor Melon thoroughness that I mentioned, I’m afraid. It just seems that you regarded this event with your son as more important than my deletion software realised.”

  “You didn’t think the traumatic separation of father and son would be an important
event in my memory?”

  Melon might have shrugged if he were able. Perhaps if I had been traumatically separated from a scientific research journal he would understand.

  “It’s very interesting, now that I think about it, though,” Melon said. “The fact that you moderate your assassinations, to only go after those you deem worthy. That’s a smattering of your true personality coming through as well.”

  “Zach was a killer?”

  “No, not at all, no, but because he was a good person, what minuscule part of him remains in your human coding has – along with my re-coding – allowed you to rein in what would otherwise be the confused excesses of your rudderless warden program.”

  I shook my head. “Between the Kon Ramar and yourself, it sounds like nobody had a clue what they were doing with me.”

  “Well,” said Melon. “You were the first cyborg they created – from human stock, but that’s another story – and, I think they must have misjudged the human to Warden co-dependence ratio initially, before finally ‘perfecting’ it with iteration fourteen.

  “Oh, suddenly I’m perfect, now?”

  Melon ignored the jibe. “That said, though, they must not have been completely happy with the amount of influence your human personality was having in general, because cycle fourteen, the final one, turned you into the same sort of mindless chump that the rest of the Wardens now are.”

  “Low blow,” I said. “Mindless chump? Until you re-programmed me.”

  “Until I set parts of you free,” said Melon.

  “But when did all of this happen?” I said. “You told me the aliens just turned up and knocked the Earth out with giant stink bombs.”

  “They did. Then they loaded up the people they were sending to the experiment and ‘backup’ planets, but there was one particular group of scientists that they approached and revealed themselves to – coming as friends, warning of the Earth’s impending death-by-comet.

  “These scientists, of which you were one, were engaged in very early, theoretical cyber-organism research, on Earth. The aliens said that they wanted to help with the research, as it might be beneficial to the survival of mankind after the cataclysm. They wanted to fast-track you and your families to Iceholme, to their cyborg creation laboratories there.”