She stared at her Cyber Husband's handsome profile and waited another full minute before finally shaking off her indecision. Motivated at last, she strapped the chair restraints into place around his ankles and wrists. She had to expand the one for his chest to the maximum width her confiscated operating chair allowed. That's when another truth about the situation hit her full force, and worse than it had with the first two cyborgs she had tried to restore.
"Add a personal note to Peyton 313's file. Start recording. There is no universe in which it is fair that such a strong, good man's free will should be thwarted by a few simple spoken words in his ear. Further apologies for my part in this would only be redundant. However, I remain incredibly ashamed of myself for not acting sooner to rescue all cyborgs from this unnatural fate. End note. Pause recording."
Tears-hot regretful tears about her part in the Marine Captain's circumstances-fell on the metal bands holding him in the chair. They fell faster than she could blink them away. An occasional swipe with the sleeve of her lab coat was necessary to keep working.
"I'm truly sorry I didn't do this a long time ago, Captain Elliott. I hope it really is a case of better late than never. Restoration will work this time-I swear it," Kyra whispered.
After she had secured him as best she could, Kyra walked to a nearby sink and washed her face. Nervous nausea threatened to eject the measly breakfast she had consumed earlier. This time when she had killed the primary processor, she hadn't left any of the government's latest updated programming behind. Instead of trying to amend existing code as she had twice before, she had totally erased all former initialization routines from Peyton 313.
The problem was she had no idea how much of the real man she'd erased in the process. Captain Elliot might be an empty shell when he came around. Or he might be anything from a very confused to mentally unstable cyborg.
As well as knowing what to turn off in the reboot, from her failures she had also learned that the risks were not all on the side of the cyborg. Without the primary processor's safety protocols, nothing prevented a still very dangerous man from misusing the greater physical assets his cybernetics provided. When he woke, Captain Elliot would be quite capable of killing her or anyone else he chose.
His military training happened prior to his cybernetic enhancements. That earlier, fully human programming was encoded in cellular memory, which cyber scientists had discovered could never be erased from any soldier. Kyra counted that fact in the positive column for the restoration process. Captain Elliot would need the memories of his military training for what he had to do. A full scale revolution needed a real leader with his kind of background. His service was a large part of why she had specifically chosen him.
Kyra turned from the sink and her remorseful musings to stare at her captive. The tears had stopped, but her gut still clenched in rebellion of what she had to do. The possibility of failing a third time loomed like a dark cloud and threatened to disintegrate her resolve.
"Damn you, Jackson. I should never have gone along with you. I wouldn't be in this mess."
Her bastard ex-husband had come up with the Cyber Husband program, which the relieved chancellors of the UCN had rushed to support. Fueled by monies received for renting out the soldiers, Jackson had convinced them to try a Cyber Wife version. When no volunteers stepped forward, they had coerced women prisoners into it. She had been happy when Jackson and his sadistic followers had found women much, much harder to control. Chaotic hormone surges influenced cyborg females as much as any set of processor commands ever could. Hormonal disruptions happened in over ninety percent of the cases, and they happened regardless of what the best and smartest of cyber scientists did to prevent them from occurring.
Through her continued work at Norton, Kyra had heard the whispers that Jackson had killed one of the Cyber Wives during experiments to tweak her sexual leanings. Whatever the truth was behind the rumors, one of his tortured victims had finally managed to kill him back. Having gone from loving Jackson to loathing she had ever met him, she had been nothing but happily relieved with that fatal consequence of his work.
Yet Jackson's tweaking of the Cyber Wives had not been the trigger for the extreme actions she was currently taking with Peyton Elliot. No. The women had not been the thing that tipped her over the edge.
One year before Jackson had been killed, the sick-minded bastard had found a way to insert a smaller controller device into children. Behavior issues were a thing of the past now for parents wealthy enough to afford the million dollar implant. If a controlled child rebelled, a parent could just zap them a couple times. It had proven to be one hundred percent effective in wiping out rebellious behavior. Future generations among the wealthy would be automatons afraid to take any normal human risks.