The Legend of A Half-Human

When @neoxian announced the contest I totally had a male centric action-packed cyberpunk theme in my mind. In the end I chose to do some thematic reversals and ended up doing the opposite of the original plan. So, let me introduce you to the characters:

Soltrana – The most talented Binary manipulator in the history of Human kind. She is a living legend and probably one of the most powerful women in the world. As a Binary Manipulator she can control certain aspects of all cybernetic life forms. More powerful a Binary manipulator is, more control he/she has on the cybernetics. She is a scientist, through and through and will pay any cost to see her experiments succeed.

She is a NN percenter (99.99%), humans with the least amount of cybernetic enhancements in their bodies. In the modern age, an average enhancement in a human being is about 10 percent. Any less and it becomes useless and any more it becomes unstable.

She is the wife of Adam. Her love for Adam is something that she has never been able to reconcile with. It puts her at odds with everything she believes in. She doesn’t believe in spirituality, religion or marriage and yet she is married herself.
- Soltrana in her Lab (Photo by Tiko Giorgadze on Unsplash)

Nina – Nina is a half-human. Half humans are extremely rare and artificially created from human and cybernetical parts. Their consciousness is shared between a human brain (left lobe) and a cybernetical brain (right lobe). Rest of their bodies might be fully human or fully machine or a combination of both. They are called half-humans because of their cybernetically shared mind.

Nina is one of a kind because she was born naturally to half human parents. A natural half human birth is unheard of and almost impossible to actually happen and in the end considered a taboo. She was raised in a private facility where she met Soltrana as a teenager and started her human conditioning under her.

-Nina after she gave herself lifeware update (Photo by Comfreak at Pixabay)

Adam – The guy (I am sorry guys I am not able to define his character in my mind. Don’t be disappointed though because this yet unknown character is very special)

-Adam sitting by a flame (Photo by Vinicius Amano on Unsplash)

Hellcrad – A modern day city with a population of roughly 80 million beings. Like most places, Hellcrad is basically a hellhole where life is worth less than the space it occupies and thus in constant danger of being taken. This is where our story take place

-An affluent neighborhood in Hellcrad (Photo by Florian Wehde on Unsplash)

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BEGINNING

Nina moved away from the door and tried to hide herself from the view. She would have made it if her opponent wasn’t using an ultra-vision scope designed to track living cybernetic organisms. Although to be fair calling the woman an opponent wasn’t technically true because here in the Hellcrad city, opponents usually dueled to death. Suddenly her ‘opponents’ hand came literally out of nowhere and settled on her nape. Nina felt the cold chill of terror followed by a complete paralysis as her bionics started to shut down. The woman after her was Soltrana, the most powerful binary manipulator in the world.

Usually Binary manipulators didn’t go after the common people. They were too high up in the hierarchy of this world to be bothered by common people. There was just this little problem that Nina was the mistress of Soltrana’s husband. Nina had known this fact from day one that no woman can tolerate another woman with her husband. Never mind the fact that the mistress in question was only a half human.

As Nina felt the cold chill of silence descend on her senses, her last thought was the face of the man she loved with all her half-human heart and the cold hand of his wife, on her nape.

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Soltrana looked at the girl as she stood rigid and frozen in a parody of motion like a mannequin. She removed her hand from the nape of the girl’s neck and turned around to see if the door to the chamber was closed. After locking the door, she quickly removed the girl’s clothes and checked her bionics for any permanent damage, repeating the procedure with the cybernetics as well. She did it out of habit, more than anything else. Soltrana was the most skilled Binary Manipulator to have ever lived and she never made mistakes when dealing with cybernetic life. Still, this girl was different – unique in ways that was almost impossible to comprehend. She found the girls vitals functioning and stable. Although the bionics in the girl’s body had shut down but her humanly vitals were all up to speed.

She took a step back from the girl and took another look at her physical form. Her physical beauty was nothing short of perfection and a stab blinding jealousy stole Soltrana’s breath away. After a decade of this mess she was seriously starting to doubt her own judgement. Had she made a mistake? After all, what woman requested the man she loved to take a mistress. When the said man was her husband no less. What had she been thinking? There were other ways she could have handled this but no. In the name of science and experimentation she had gone ahead and made herself complicit to the taboo-est act known to human kind. She had asked him to make a half-human fall in love.

Given his nature, he had simply grunted a ‘no’ in reply but eventually Soltrana had worn him down. It had taken her almost a decade to convince him and finally he had relented. There were almost thirty-five million men living in Hellcrad and Soltrana could have manipulated anybody to be a part of her experiment. Yet she had decided that it would be her own husband who should seduce a half human. For one thing, he was one of the rarest types – A full blooded human, without an ounce of Bionics in his tissue or any cybernetic implants. He was also the most straight forward man she had ever known with a level of intelligence that far exceeded the most, man or machine. Of course, nobody could tell that when they looked at him because his looks and demeanor, both were that of a hulking brute.

But he had this presence about him. This assurance that if he was there then the world was going to be alright. She could never explain how a man made of flesh and bone could make those around him feel safe when protection machines made of titanium couldn’t. Soltrana knew in her gut that in a world that was killing itself, a world that showed no mercy to humans or machines alike, this cursed state of existence would be the most painful for a half-human. For this exceptional being wouldn’t find solace either with humans or with machines.

Her husband was what you could call an anachronistic anomaly. The very definition of the ancient man, of whom one would read only in the historical documentation at the central archive. Somehow, he still adhered to the old ways and practiced what he liked to call an ‘honorable lifestyle’.

When he decided to leave for the experiment, he had done it without telling her. He had left a note saying that he’d be back in a month. What had shaken her the most was not the fact that he had left (because he frequently did when he went on missions), it was his return that had shook her to the core. One morning she had woken up to find him sitting beside the fire in their chamber. When he noticed her awake he had casually turned back to face her and told her the most damning words possible - ‘It’s done’. His casualness hadn’t surprised her because it was just a facade. It was his way of compartmentalizing when he had too much on his plate. It was the effect, the news had on her that disturbed her the most because she didn’t think that she was capable of jealousy. How did he do it? What steps had he taken to make sure that the half human fell in love with him? Did they have sex? The last question was killing her the most.

Before she could ask anything, he had walked out of the room and then promptly left with his men for the next mission. She couldn’t blame him for not taking his time saying goodbye. She knew that because of her he had postponed his mission. Without him his men had refused to leave the city and it was causing a big problem. It was he and his men that made sure that the city was supplied with food and fuel to keep functioning. Now that the supplies were low in the city it was essential that the platoons left as early as possible and he couldn’t afford to waste any more time in the city. So, he had left and Soltrana had slowly driven herself into a mental frenzy.

Now she was here looking at the most complex cybernetical life form on earth and she was jealous of it. Jealous enough to contemplate shutting it down permanently. The thought of killing her was a fleeting one and left as soon as it had come because the scientist in her wanted to know the results of the experiment.

One hour later Soltrana had made several extremely complicated incisions to her skull and established a full cybernetical interface with her memories. Unlike fully organic life forms the memories of cybernetical beings could be visually reconstructed, just like machines. The device required to do it was small enough to carry in a purse and Soltrana carried that on her person all the time.

Establishing the connection with Nina’s brain was not the problem because she already had Nina’s cerebral map. Soltrana herself had done the mapping around 10 years ago and modified it accordingly over the years, as the girl has matured into an adult. The problem was reading through the memories because they had no order or reason to them. They were distributed all over the cerebral map and they had to be pieced together to make a sensible visual reconstruction.

The master binary manipulator that she was, Soltrana was skilled enough to piece together a memory in mere seconds. She already knew that extracting memories from Nina would be no joke because of her complicated cerebral patterns, but there was even a bigger problem at hand.

Nina’s human half that was alive was protecting those memories. It was not allowing, Soltrana the access she needed to piece together any usable information. Until this point it had never happened. She had reconstructed memories from Nina before and although it took time, but it was doable. Today Nina was not cooperating and for the first time in her life Soltrana didn’t know what cybernetical manipulations she could further do to extract the memories.

She was still struggling when the device suddenly went offline only to reboot on its own. For about five seconds Soltrana thought she had lost Nina permanently, until the screen showed affirmation of the connection with the girl’s brain. She breathed a sigh of relief. Had she worked the device to hard? But in that case, it should have given her a warning rather than reboot itself. What was happening? Just to be sure she rechecked the girl’s vital signs.

She was still checking them when suddenly the screen of the device came alive. Before she could look at the screen, she heard his voice from the devices audio output. She jerked her head towards the screen. He was sitting comfortably on chair and eating an energy bar as he spoke from the screen. With a moment of clarity Soltrana knew what was happening but he confirmed it for her

“…………. would already know by now that this conversation is happening between you and me. Although I am talking to her but Nina is asleep, and I have asked her to record this conversation in her mind. At my request she will compartmentalize it so that she doesn’t hear it until she replays it for you.

The girl is sweet and innocent. Too innocent to be caught in this mess, Soltrana. It took me two days to seduce her and now she is infatuated with me beyond all reason. This conversation we are having is a proof of it. Otherwise what person allows you access to their brain and place it at your disposal. As opposed to what this world might think, half humans are fully alive – you and I both know it. So, imagine a twenty-one-year-old girl, who is probably more intelligent than both you and I combined, agreeing so readily to be a mere courier of my message to you.

You are a good woman Soltrana. Nobody knows that but me because nobody has understood you except me.

I have made a mistake by coming to this girl. My plan was to find this girl, give her a script to follow and pay her well to deceive you into believing that I have done my part of your crazy experiment and failed and be off with my men to the next mission. Then I saw her………

I am not sure how she has survived in this dump of a world for all these years. The idea of a such a fragile flower surviving and maintaining its luster for so long is too good to be true. She reminds me of a world gone by ………. long ago. A world where life was good and pure. Until now I have only seen it in the books that I read at the archive but seeing her is like seeing that world

By now you are probably going crazy with suspense and chewing the nail of your right pinkie. Don’t worry I didn’t touch the girl. Didn’t really have to, she bought my act hook line and sinker. But there is only one problem – It wasn’t really all an act.

Despite being a 99.99 percenter, you have always failed to understand finer nuances of human emotion. I know what you are thinking. As much as I love you sweetheart but what you think you know about people is their behavioural pattern not their emotions. So, let me lay it out for you.

By know I am sure you have experienced jealousy like any other normal woman, without me having to cheat on you. So now tell me now, would you let me seduce Nina again…………. but remember this time it’ll be for real.

Take Nina to a safe house and leave her be. She needs to sort this mess out in her head. No more experimenting with her……………….”

Soltrana felt disconnected from her body as she finished listening to his message. She didn’t even realize as her own hands started to disconnect the cords from Nina’s head. She filled the incisions with artificial bio fluid and watched it set. The little bald spots will grow the hair back in no time……… her brain refused to think beyond what was in front of her. Things beyond that felt too complicated to handle.

What had she done……………what had she done……….

.....THE END (maybe)