Nate watches through the one-way glass as Adya sits on the sparring mat, chatting with Murphy about the bionics in his leg. She’s spent the last couple hours wandering across the room and taking it all in. Any loud crashes or bangs have yet to spook their new cadet, thankfully. She watches the other agents spar with a childlike curiosity, but with the age to fully appreciate all the new sights and sounds her new home has to offer.
The door to the office latches shut and Tristan leans back against it. His eyes widen in his colleague's direction as his hand rubs his cheek. “Adya fucking Prisham,” he mutters. “How long have you known?”
“A resounding thirteen hours,” Nate answers without as much as a glance.
Raising his hands in disbelief, Tristan’s laugh comes out as more of a scoff. “A text would have been nice! The poster child of cybernetics is right outside this room and we’re in charge of her. Do you understand what this means?”
While Val leafs through some of the other cadet’s files, Nate does the same with Adya’s. It’s just like any other file, filled with emergency contact information and release forms and signatures, but the fifth page takes up a whole spread. A vague diagram of her inner mechanics, from her head to her torso, on the left; on the right, names of the bionic components. Class 6.B Rotator Cuff Joints, 3-18 Gauge. Tungsten-titanium alloy skeletal structure. Interdisciplinary Neural Interface with Motor, Auditory, and Olfactory Connectivity. It feels like he’s looking right through her. He flips away from it.
The photo of her on file from when she was sixteen isn't much different from how she looks now— long, brown hair, golden skin, a slightly convex nose and broad shoulders with good posture. The more her she looks, the more her she probably feels. She’s standing with family in the photo and smiling from ear to ear. He hasn’t seen much more than a shy grin since she arrived.
Nate shuts the folder and slides it back into the filing cabinet. “Yes, Tristan, it means that there’s a few more eyes on us than usual. But she’s just like any other cadet.”
Val hums in disagreement. “She’s a cyborg, man. And she’s the first of her kind. If anything happens to her, we have to take the fall for it. That’s paperwork I am heavily disinterested in delivering to General Morales, Elora, or-- worst case scenario-- the president of the ACA.”
Nate furrows his brow as he looks between his two colleagues. The loud, aggressive shove of his chair against the desk makes Val pause her tour through the files. “I know this is a lot to take in,” he explains, “but the General put me in charge of her training and I will see her through it. In the meantime, show some respect. Do not call her a cyborg, a robot, a droid, or anything else that’s not Adya or Cadet Prisham. I already have to train her— I don’t have time to bark at you guys for being insensitive.”
He expects his colleagues to scoff at him for raising his voice and giving them orders, but they merely offer a nod of acknowledgment and head back out into the training facility. Whether or not they took it to heart is still up in the air.
Murphy has Adya in a gentle, forward chokehold when the office door shuts behind Nate. “Lift your chin, duck, and slide out to the left. Good! Faster,” he says. “The first step of combat is self-defense. Only once you can protect yourself without thinking about it can you protect others. Try going to the right this time.”
“Murphy, give her a break. She just got here,” Val says, pulling a sleeve of crackers from her backpack and tearing it open.
“It’s just basic, low-effort stuff. We’ll wrap up soon.”
Adya paces back and forth on the mat. “No, it’s okay,” she insists. “It’s kind of fun. It’s like physical therapy but cooler.”
Her chest rises and falls as if she was truly winded, and her voice has moments of greater breathiness to match. They really didn’t spare a cent with her, Nate thinks. He chuckles at her comment.
Val offers a cracker to the cadet when she steps off the mat. “Want one?” Immediately realizing her mistake, her outstretched hand tenses up and lowers. “Oh my God. I’m so--”
“No, no, it’s okay,” Adya says. “Thank you for the offer, anyway.”
A brief silence as they watch a sparring pair go at it a few feet away. Adya gasps when the shorter agent takes a blow to the hip, but swings himself around his partner and brings him to the mat.
“Do you miss it? Food and drinks?” Nate asks.
“Sometimes. Only my mom’s cooking, really. Limitations of technology at the time meant there was no way for me to retain a gustatory or digestive system. I’ve heard the ACA is working on that, though, so that’s neat. Maybe one day I’ll get the upgrade.”
“Well, let me know when that happens. I’d be glad to bring you whatever you’d like.”
I hope I’m not coming on too strong. A write-up from General Morales would feel like a splinter compared to this responsibility. He’d be speared right through the heart, should he let his new cadet down. She dropped everything she once knew to be in this room with him now. He knows how it feels to leave home, travelling thousands of miles to carve out a new space for yourself in the world. The least he can do is offer a hand.
Adya picks herself up from the floor and takes one step toward the mat before a resounding shot rings out from halfway across the room. She stumbles back, colliding with Nate’s chest. Her eyes stay wide and alert long after the sound disappears up into the air, like a creature of prey traveling home in the dark.
“I thought we weren’t doing any arms training today,” he mutters, a reassuring hand landing on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. You’ll get used to all the noise.”
Murphy groans and stomps over. “We have silencers for a fucking reason, you guys! Everything echoes in here! Jesus Christ.”
A chorus of apologies are thrown in his direction. Nate laughs to himself. “You’ll also get used to that,” he adds with a pat to Adya’s shoulder. She shakes the nerves from her body and steps back onto the mat.
“I know you guys are agents, but are you, like… a special kind of agent?” she asks after worming out of a few more of Murphy’s headlocks.
“We’re a rescue team,” Val explains through a mouthful of crackers. “We specialize in extraction of hostages, crime suspects, wounded individuals, anyone who needs a quick exit.”
“Sounds very dramatic.”
“Sometimes it is. Usually, we go on missions with the rest of the agents-- we just have the training necessary to run into a crumbling building or scale a thirty-foot wall and bring someone down.”
Murphy starts teaching Adya how to keep someone from grabbing onto her. He reminds her to be gentle, uninterested in finding out how much strength her metal body is capable of producing. She catches on after a few tries.
“There are no agents in Kolkata, just police officers,” she says. “Much of the population had always hoped that they’d make the transition. Not a lot of people trust police officers anymore. But with how densely populated some areas are, I’m not sure there would be enough agents.”
“Are bionics as big of a thing in India as they are in the United States?” Nate inquires.
Adya’s gaze goes empty for a couple seconds before her eyes light up again. “A bit less. 28 percent of all bionics-related procedures are conducted in India, and 39 percent are in America. That’s not including amputations or anything that comes before the implementation of cybernetics.”
“Did you just…?”
She nods with a bashful, awkward laugh. “I can access bits and pieces of data on private, encrypted servers around the world. No connecting to the Internet, though. Elora says it’s a security risk.”
“But you can do it?”
“Well… yes and no. Only if the safeguards are moved can I navigate public, digital space.”
Val lets out a hoot, sending cracker crumbs onto the floor. “Safeguards? Elora has you childproofed like a kitchen cabinet,” she says.
Nate snaps his head around, ready to rip her a new one; but Adya laughs. It’s the first real, broad smile they’ve seen from her all day. She accepts the observation and says that it’s for the best. Val and Tristan leave her be as she continues perfecting her technique with Murphy. Nate, however, stays to watch his cadet take her first steps toward the future.
Comments (1)
See all