FICTION: Cyborg Sleeps part 4

Part 3

A few notes on this episode.

Asira's curvaceous 5'4" 145lb figure should be read as resembling a 145lb woman's figure. Because of her cybernetic and magical add-ons, she probably weighs something different, probably slightly more, than a woman of similar appearance would.

"Warlock": I'm well aware of the derivation meaning "deceiver" or "oathbreaker", but in Asira's universe those meanings are long-forgotten, and the word is used because of the syllable "war" to mean a magician who specialises in using magic as a weapon of war - a military magician or a magician who is in the armed forces. The insignia that Asira notices denotes that the man is a magician, and shows his military rank.

The weapons Asira uses are real weapons from this world, that I looked up on Wikipedia. As noted, the Desert Eagle, although a favourite for computer game programmers, is not really useful for humans in the real world due to a small magazine and massive recoil making it hard to fire accurately several times. The comment about wild bears was drawn from the Wikipedia page. According to Wikipedia, the smaller handgun was designed for special forces - the CT stands for "Compact Tactical", but also is sometimes taken as "counter-terrorism".

I'm trying to keep the setting slightly ambiguous for the time being, so I have avoided being specific about agencies and organisations - the National Crime Squad was a British designation in the police force, but in Asira's universe it is more likely to be a parallel with the real world's FBI.

I'm not entirely sure if I've got the nutritional reasons right for Asira's love of spag bol, but it sounded plausible when I wrote it.

Part 4

Asira suppressed a sigh as she saw the men in the conference room respond to her entrance. Her dark, Asian skin coupled with a curvaceous 5'4” 145lb figure (enhanced by the enlarged breasts that hid magical properties) had a seemingly inevitable effect on human males, even when shrouded by the loose and casual clothing she'd acquired for this meeting. Her eyes changed colour again, this time showing a very bright red, and she watched them start as she used this simple trick to remind them of what she was. She knew a few of them would still have fantasies about a woman like her, but she also knew that if she actually offered to make them come true, suddenly they would lose all interest. Besides, she was here to work, not find a fucking partner. Her attractiveness came in useful on missions sometimes, of course, but it was a nuisance when men couldn't focus on the task in hand. She brushed her short-length hair behind her ears and and clapped her hands sharply once.

“Right, guys, what do you need me for?”

The gathering included intelligence experts, a psychological profiler, equipment specialists and magic analysts (she noted that one of them bore the military insignia of a warlock). These were to be her team for introducing her to what the mission involved, and then helping her make sure she had everything she needed in terms of information, weapons and sorcery to be able to carry it through. If she needed to, she would be able to requisition the services of other experts as well, but she knew that the people who set up cyborg missions were usually pretty good at foreseeing what talents a particular assignment called for. The briefing was being run by an officer from the agency that had called for a cyborg intervention, who would explain what it was all about, and had assigned the intelligence experts to the case. Although reports would undoubtedly be made back to this man by the analysts he'd selected for the job, once this meeting was over it would be down to Asira and her team to make everything happen, and he would go back to whatever he did with his time when he wasn't here. With over 50 missions in her 5 years, Asira was adept at getting every detail she needed about the mission and its objectives from the hirer at the first briefing. It helped that most of the information that he would cover was sure to be a repetition of the added memories that Asira had received when she was wakened – one part of this process was aways to check that the memories had been transferred properly.

The first session was routine, inasmuch as any of these assignments could be considered routine given that cyborgs were only ever brought in to deal with the exceptional, or exceptionally difficult, tasks. Although in many ways the cyborgs made the perfect soldier, in practice they were much too expensive to replace, meaning that front-line duties were not a practical deployment for them. Special Forces and espionage of various sorts were the most common uses for someone like Asira, although sometimes in a particularly challenging or dangerous criminal investigation the National Crime Squad would call upon the cyborg facility as well.

After a couple of hours, Asira was confident she had everything she needed from the hirer, so she and her team for the mission got down to the business of planning how she would go about achieving their objectives. After another two hours of thrashing out their first thoughts and testing them for problems, Asira dismissed her experts for lunchtime and to spend the afternoon checking that they had the necessary resources to put together the mission outline agreed so far: “7pm back here, guys. Then we'll see what wrinkles we need to sort out. Let's go eat!”

Asira was feeling more relaxed now that she was actually getting work done, and her initial synthetic anxiety was no longer bothering her as much. Instead, she was aware of being incredibly hungry. A month or so of magically suspended animation still took some food energy to sustain the body, and it was always wisest to go to sleep with an empty digestive system – other biological processes also having a tendency to carry on working regardless of her consciousness inhabiting her body or not. Consequently, once the synthetic urges were mollified, Asira always had a ravenous appetite following an awakening.

Her favourite first meal was always spaghetti bolognese: high in complex carbohydrates and protein, it stocked up her body on the key nutrients that it craved. She would have a mountain of the stuff on a vast plate and methodically chow down on it until every last strand was gone, her belly feeling as though it was visibly distended by the quantity she had ingested. The first defecation after waking was never a pleasant experience, but Asira felt on balance that this was the most satisfying way to go.

Her team being busy for the afternoon, Asira had nothing specific to do for her mission until they reported back to her later. While she still felt an urgency to get on with it, she knew that her impatience would achieve nothing, so she set about some basic useful tasks of her own, to keep herself in top condition in her skills. Exercise after such an enormous meal would, of course, be extremely unwise, not to mention uncomfortable, so Asira made her way to the firing range instead.

Although externally, Asira's arms looked and felt identical, her left arm's skin and texture were entirely artificial, and concealed a highly powerful mechanical endoskeleton integrated with her organic nervous system. As a result, she had no problem firing the massive .50 AE Desert Eagle handgun and, when on a mission where such a bulky piece could be used, it was her favourite because nobody ever got up after being hit by one of those rounds - .50 calibre rounds more often being used to stop charging wild bears than humans. The capacity of her left arm to absorb the recoil made it possible for her to fire the enormous pistol one-handed with no loss of accuracy.

In her right hand as she entered the stall, Asira held a much smaller weapon, a HK UCP45CT. Designed to be easily concealed and highly accurate, it was a much more conventional weapon in her field of work for humans, and well-suited to her needs on more conventional missions. She liked to have two weapons, and was practised in firing the conventionally-sized handguns in tandem. Her favourite trick, though, was to carry the Desert Eagle and the UCP at the same time, and using the accuracy that he enhanced eyesight afforded her, fire five shots in rapid succession marking out a tightly-bunched cross on the target, then place a single .50 AE round from the Desert Eagle smack in the middle of the cross. There weren't many parties in the world where you got to show off that particular talent, though.

After working out with her favoured handguns, Asira moved outdoors to practice with the sub-machineguns, automatic rifles and sniper rifles that were available to her. Since military operations were rare for cyborgs, the likelihood of needing any of these was small, but it still paid to have the skills ready in case they were needed. Asira believed she owed her life to her practice in the use of shoulder weapons after an espionage mission had gone bad and she had been forced to escape by any means available. She had stolen an automatic rifle from the enemy facility she had infiltrated and, using accurate fire to pick off pursuers and discourage others from following, managed to find her way back to friendly territory. Ever since, she had been adamant that a cyborg should know all forms of fighting and all forms of weaponry. Since their missions were always exceptional and difficult, the chances that a change of plans would be needed were that much higher.

Also, being adept with a sniper rifle gave her an extra dimension whenever a mission called for assassination.

Having given herself time to digest the food she'd eaten earlier, Asira finally hit the gym with about two hours before her team were due to report back. Although her left arm was entirely mechanical, the enhancements in her other limbs were much more subtle, and she still depended a great deal on basic biological muscle power to succeed. She needed plenty of both aerobic and anaerobic exercise to keep herself primed for service, and she always made sure she found time to get sessions in when she was awake. It was likely she would be back in the gym later that night when all the humans were sleeping.

At 7pm precisely, back in her sweatshirt and jogging pants, Asira arrived at conference room D towelling her hair after a shower to wash the sweat from her revitalised limbs.