Captive: A Dark Cyborg Romance Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

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  Captive

  By

  Loki Renard

  Copyright © 2018 by Stormy Night Publications and Loki Renard

  Copyright © 2018 by Stormy Night Publications and Loki Renard

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Stormy Night Publications and Design, LLC.

  www.StormyNightPublications.com

  Renard, Loki

  Captive

  Cover Design by Korey Mae Johnson

  Images by Dreamstime/Viktor Gladkov, Dreamstime/Chaoss, and Dreamstime/Evgeny Illarionov

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults.

  Chapter One

  Lilly

  Huddled in the corner of the room, I hear him coming. He knows precisely where I am. There are plates of steel between him and me, and concrete thick enough to shield me from a nuclear blast—but none of it will protect me from him.

  I’m tired. I’m thirsty. My mouth is dry and my heart is pounding.

  I’ve been running for two weeks. It feels like forever. It was long enough to give me the idea that I could possibly escape. I got cocky. I decided to have breakfast at a hotel bar. I didn’t hide my face and someone’s camera must have caught me. That image, zipped through a thousand wires, uploaded to a dozen databases, searched by a handful of very advanced bots put me on the radar of several groups of people I needed to stay away from.

  Now he is here, outside the bunker I hired with the last of my money. It’s really a vault designed to protect the valuables of the rich and famous, and it’s supposed to be impregnable. Something tells me that it isn’t. Not against him. He is going to carve through every single layer between us and pull me out like a sardine.

  There’s nowhere left to run. I’ve enlisted the help of everyone I know, everyone who still cared or who was in a position to do something. But nothing has made any difference. Nobody can save me.

  He’s coming for me. He’s coming and nobody can stop him.

  I hear dull thuds as he starts to work at the wall. If this was a mere man coming to get me, he’d have to use a hammer or a battering ram. I know he won’t be using either of those things. His fists are more than capable of turning concrete into crumbling dust. His fingers will pluck at the steel mesh and peel it away like a foil wrapper.

  Sure enough, after almost an hour of cowering and waiting for the inevitable, the wall crumbles. An eye peers through and locks with mine. He has incredible eyes. Pale gray, tinted bright blue at the very center of the pupil. Like a star about to go supernova.

  They were black, in the beginning. No iris. I gave him those eyes. Now they burn with life, and rage, and the desire for vengeance.

  That gaze meets mine and I’m thrown back in time to the precise moment this day became inevitable. I was there when he first saw the world. I was one of the first people he ever laid eyes on, and I knew the moment our gazes locked that we’d made something special. Something unique in all the world. The first of his kind. The only of his kind.

  I knew too, when I was forced out of the company, made to leave him behind, that I wasn’t really leaving. Oppenheimer couldn’t abandon the bomb. Edison couldn’t escape the light he shed on the world. And I couldn’t run from my creation either.

  Adam.

  What else could he be named? What other moniker would adequately represent our hubris, the God complex that every single scientist in the facility embodied. We were so proud of what we’d done. We’d made a man.

  The day his heart began to beat was the day we cheered and congratulated ourselves. We had created life. We had unlocked the deepest mysteries of being. We had made a new form of being, and he lay in the womb of our facility, perfect in every single way.

  I was so proud of him. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  He wasn’t born. He was printed. We designed him and then we built him in cellular layers of metal, silicone, and flesh all knitted together so precisely, all capable of interacting and flourishing within the form we created.

  The early trials were on rabbits. We created bunny after bunny, watched them live their lives, mate with other rabbits, and some of them even produced offspring. Our cyborgs had the capacity to be fertile. This was technology that had the potential to change the very fabric of the organic world. We hadn’t just made a new form of life. We’d given it the ability to propagate itself using the same channels life has been using since the dawn of time.

  Adam was the first and only human version. He was our masterwork. There was not a part of him we did not know, and that was not specifically and carefully designed.

  When he was complete, he was beautiful. His shoulders were broad, his hips narrow in perfect male ratio. His musculature was advanced, even though he’d never so much as twitched a finger before. We made him tall too. Six foot eight, not quite freakish, but well above the average. We set his default code at ten percent body fat. Enough to make him look like a ‘normal’ human, but not so normal that it obscured the incredible architecture of his form. Michelangelo couldn’t have created a more perfect man, and to say that we were proud of him is to say nothing at all. The designers’ attention to detail extended to his face, of course. They made him beyond handsome. He had near perfect symmetry, a hard powerful jaw, straight nose, lips that were full without being feminine, two hard black slashes of brow, and dark hair that curled just a fraction when it was wet.

  On the day he began, we gathered around his insensate form and congratulated ourselves. He was alive, but not yet conscious. He had been given a pair of white underwear, but nothing else to obscure the perfection we had wrought. He was an incredible work of art and science. He was our greatest triumph.

  The anesthetist lifted the sedation. We waited. He opened his eyes. He looked at us. And he spoke four words that made some of us titter nervously, and others of us stare in horror. One of the team had those words tattooed over his heart:

  This was a mistake.

  More frightening than the words was the fact that he had the ability to form them so swiftly. He should have been more or less blank. He was yet to be programmed. We had terabytes of data ready to upload to his neural circuits, multiple languages, the wealth of knowledge of centuries. We had a personality ready to impart. But from that very first moment, Adam was his own being.

  Staring at him now, through the remnants of the wall that he is quickly peeling away, I am thrown back in time to the moment this all became inevitable.

  Chapter Two

  Three years ago

  Adam has been online for several weeks. He’s still learning a lot of things, but the development team has mostly peeled off to work on new projects. I’m not ready to leave him yet, even though he was technically transferred to the Ascent training team a week or so ago.

/>   I’ve stayed on board because he needs someone who understands the technology to make sure that they don’t exceed his stress specifications. He’s being primed for work, a fact I don’t like, but knew was inevitable. I haven’t been told what work he’ll be doing, but it’s likely that they’ll be preparing him for some kind of military or police application.

  Since he woke, I’ve had limited contact with him. Ascent is very careful about who gets to be in his presence. They’re guarding him closely to say the least. I’ve been allowed in to run a few basic tests related to cognition, because it was my neural network technology they integrated into his brain.

  It’s been fourteen days since I last had contact, and I’m really looking forward to seeing him again. Adam is more to me than a subject. I saw him laid down in the early stages in row after row, flesh printed in three dimensions. I’m not privy as to how the entire process works. The technology is top secret and wholly owned by Ascent Laboratories, and I only understand a part of it. Nobody is allowed to know all of it.

  For the first two weeks of his life, he was kept in stasis of sorts, data uploaded day and night through the probes in his temples.

  His brain isn’t like ours, and it’s not like a computer. It’s neither and it’s both. He has a lot more storage capacity than the average wet meat processor, but he needs time to build connections between the blocks of information. As time goes by, I expect his cognitive abilities to far exceed that of a normal human.

  He was made by men, but he is not a man. He was knitted together, piece by piece, by machines, but he’s not a machine either.

  He’s something between the two. The consciousness of man and machine.

  For someone in my field of work and study, he’s the Holy Grail. A potential answer to the question of consciousness and personhood. It’s a problem that has been mystifying philosophers for thousands of years, and Adam could be the key.

  Developing a meat robot is easy. Developing one with consciousness is something else. It’s my theory that consciousness isn’t inherent in the meat of a man. It’s a matter of reception. I helped develop a chip, a neural lattice that allows the brain to develop in near organic ways. He won’t be separate from the human world. He will potentially be part of it.

  Of course, for the rest of the team his consciousness isn’t the focus. As a group we have created an impressive intellect and a physical body so powerful, and so capable of both inflicting and enduring damage that he puts even the most incredible human warriors to shame. He can withstand explosive blasts, take bullets. I know that aside from a precious few spots, he can be stabbed over and over again, taken apart and put back together. We can generate new organs and limbs for him. He can potentially be modular. And with that same technology, we can give people new organs and limbs. There’s the capacity to change the lives of millions of people for the better if we can fine tune the technology even more.

  I have everything ready to give him a new round of testing. I can’t wait to see how his language skills have advanced, how he is coming to terms with the fact of his existence. Adam has had no infancy, no childhood. He has been spawned fully adult, and I expect that to have some kind of flow on effect.

  The doors in front of me lead to the chamber where they are training him. I’ve only got fifteen minutes to do my assessment, but I’ve come a little early in the hopes of being able to see him for longer.

  I swipe my card and they open. The silence of the hall is broken by a rage-filled scream of anger and pain. At first I can’t comprehend what I am seeing. It’s literally unthinkable. The man we made with so much care is writhing in agony.

  They have chained Adam to a plinth, and they are torturing him. I can’t say it any other way. They have electric probes and they are zapping him on the tender parts of his body. He is growling and snarling like a tethered animal, foaming at the mouth as they laugh and strike at him again and again.

  His powerful body is contorting at the stimulus, unable to resist the electrical impulses. They have deliberately chosen the most disruptive form of pain they could use. His nerve network is new and raw. This is cruelty of a kind that churns my stomach.

  I drop everything I’m holding and run to him, cursing them all at the top of my lungs, and myself too, though more internally. I could have prevented this.

  When he was still in development, there was an argument over whether or not he should be sensitive to pain of any kind. We didn’t have to give him pain receptors, but we did. Without pain, he wouldn’t know when he was hurt, and without knowing when he was hurt, he wouldn’t be able to adapt to damage. Now that capacity to feel is being used against him in a stupid and thoroughly cruel way.

  I push my way through them and throw myself on his body. One of the assholes strikes with the shock rod again and I feel the agony of the strike zip through my body, my muscles contorting in referred pain.

  “Stop!” the overseer shouts, angry not at the men who are torturing Adam, but at me for my interference. He grabs me roughly by the arm and hauls me away from Adam. My strength is no match for his, and as much as I try to stay with Adam, I can’t help but be pulled away.

  The overseer drags me off the plinth where they have Adam bound on his back like a sacrifice. I am glowered at, not just by him, but by every single soul in the room besides Adam. They’re all so utterly sure of themselves. They believe they have the right to hurt him. He’s not a person in their eyes. He’s just a thing to use and to hurt.

  “What do you think you’re doing!” I confront him before they can confront me.

  “He disobeys orders. We need his submission.”

  “What?” I stare at him. “We made him to be independent.”

  “He still has to follow orders.”

  They start to torment him again, right in front of me. As if my presence doesn’t matter. As if they have some right to destroy what so many of us worked so hard to create.

  “Stop!”

  I run forward and push their probes away. They don’t know what to do with that. They don’t see Adam as a person, but they know I’m a human, with rights. They know if they use those electric prods on me, they’ll kill me. So they step back.

  He’s singed and burned where the points have met his skin. They’ll heal swiftly, but that’s not the point. We didn’t design his regeneration capabilities so he could be used as a test dummy for torture.

  “Leave him alone,” I growl. “Don’t you dare hurt him again.”

  “Step aside, Lilly.” The lead tech comes forward to try to defuse the situation.

  “No.” I stay where I am. I’m trembling with rage. How dare they do this? He has been alive for no more than a month and they have made his world painful. They are punishing him for being what we made him to be, and I can’t stand it.

  He’s being held down with so many bindings and straps he can’t protect himself. He can’t even curl up against the pain. He has to lie there and take it.

  What they don’t understand is that they can’t break him. We made him unbreakable. Every bit of pain makes him more resistant, stronger, angrier.

  “You can’t do this to him. It won’t work. He’s not made to respond to this.”

  “Everything responds to pain. Now move. Your job is over. Let us do ours.”

  “I didn’t make him so you could hurt him!”

  “What did you think was going to happen to him? You think you made the perfect soldier so he could spend the rest of his life crocheting and reading you articles from women’s websites?”

  The asshole snorts at me. He’s military and he’s a fucking asshole. He doesn’t understand the technology that went into making Adam. He doesn’t understand what Adam is at his core. He’s a brutal sadist and he’s going to destroy what I’ve created.

  “Leave, Doctor Mallory. Now. Or face the consequences.”

  I stare at him with all the fury I have. “The consequences are going to be yours if you don’t stop this. I promise you, you will regret what yo
u have already done, and if you keep doing it, you’ll regret it even more. He’s not an animal to be beaten down. You’ll never break him. Not ever.”

  He jerks his head toward his men. “Get her out of here.”

  They grab me by the arms. I lose my temper. More than that, I lose my mind. I lash out with all the anger Adam can’t express. I kick. I hit. I bite down on the hands that grip me.

  In the end it takes four of them to pull me out of the room. My clothing is yanked and wrenched, my head is locked beneath someone’s arm.

  The last thing I see as they haul me out are Adam’s eyes locked on mine. There’s no expression on his face. It’s a mask of cold fury. I can feel his anger, his pain. I can imagine the betrayal he must feel. He came into coherent existence mere weeks ago and now all he knows is pain. This is my fault. I could have made him a dumb machine like the rest of them. I could have saved him from this. That neural network is the only reason this pain matters. It’s the only reason he has any comprehension, any sense of himself as a being that can suffer. This is my fault. And I can’t undo any of it.

  * * *

  “Doctor Mallory, you’re an exceptionally competent worker, but you must be aware we cannot tolerate the kind of interference you displayed today.”

  I’m being fired. After being thrown out of the torture chamber, I’ve been sent to HR like a naughty schoolgirl. The representative’s face is such a stern mask I could almost expect a spanking, except they don’t beat the employees here, only the subjects.

  “And you must be aware that what you’re doing is wrong,” I argue back. “Dead wrong. He’s fully self-aware. What’s being done to him is torture.”

  “He’s a prototype, Doctor Mallory. I know it’s tempting to anthropomorphize the projects, but…”

  “This isn’t anthropomorphizing anything,” I interrupt. “He’s more human than you and I. He just happens to also be more than human. He’s our greatest achievement, and he deserves more than to be tied down and shocked just because he won’t do as he’s told.”