Kingston 691: A Cyborg Adventure

Chapter 1

1King grinned as he watched the couple making excuses to the tough, no-nonsense maître d’ he had hired for his restaurant. Regardless of what they said to Franco, he could tell the real reason they were twenty-five minutes late from the way Peyton couldn’t keep his hands off the woman. While a smiling Dr. Kyra Winters was charming his employee, his former captain and most of the time friend, was steadily drawing slow circles on her back with the fingertips of his human hand.

King shook his head as he contemplated their passionate relationship, barely holding in his sigh of envy. He didn’t blame Peyton for publicly staking his claim tonight. Doc was quite the picture in her lacy black dress and sharp, pointy heels. Best of all, underneath those alluring feminine clothes was a real woman that both he and his friend admired.

Because Doc had the guts to try and right the mistakes of her past, evicting soldiers from Cyber Husband hell was her full time job now. She went to Norton and faced angry converted men every day, yet kept going back the next to restore yet another one. He’d seen the stress of her heroics cut her down more than once, but so far she hadn’t let her personal meltdowns stop her. At least Peyton’s fawning attention to her every sexy body movement kept a smile blooming on her face.

King didn’t know whether to laugh or swear at what happened next. “Peyton, you lucky bastard,” he whispered under his breath. Having finally gotten her way with Franco, Doc turned a shy but victorious smile in her husband’s direction. Peyton’s wink of approval made her smile even wider. It was the only time in the history of their friendship where King knew for certain he didn’t stand a chance in hell of luring the good-looking woman away from his friend’s side.

Damn it. He needed to start dating and find a woman or two of his own, but the restaurant opening had taken all his time and energy. Or at least that’s how he’d rationalized his celibate lifestyle so far. The price of the space in this commercial use building had been too good to pass up, even if fixing the aftermath of the previous owner’s parting temper tantrum hadn’t been fun or easy. He sighed, feeling confused as usual about his personal motivations. It was a common occurence since his restoration.

Shaking his head to rid himself of his serious thoughts, he went to meet the couple. For the present, he would just take his pleasure where he could, which tonight meant yanking Peyton’s chain as hard as possible. His long legs ate up the floor space as he hurried across the polished gleam of its recovered stone surface.

“I’ll seat them, Franco. Thank you. Every spot is booked tonight and you’re incredibly late, Peyton. Don’t you ever let this woman out of bed when she’s not working?” King asked, his words and tone infused with as much sympathy as he could manufacture. Ignoring Peyton’s eye roll, he looked down at the beauty beaming up at him and smiled. “I have to say Doc, you’re looking especially gorgeous tonight. Why don’t you dump this guy and let a real man show you a good time?”

King grinned as she laughed at his teasing. Before Kyra could answer him, the man beside her interrupted their conversation.

“You’re wasting your breath, Kingston. Why would my wife trade in her custom made husband for an oversized rogue put together with mix and match parts?”

King grinned at the insult, happy to have provoked Peyton’s possessiveness so easily. “Because I could give this woman a graceful life. You wouldn’t know refinement if it bit you on your tightly toned ass.”

King enjoyed Peyton’s glare as he picked up Doc’s hand. He pretended he was going to kiss her fingers, but instead used it to pull her to him so he could soundly kiss both cheeks. Doc’s giggle of surprise—and gasping pleasure at being hugged—earned him a middle finger salute behind her back, something he hoped the rest of his wealthy patrons didn’t see.

“If you don’t get your clever hands off my woman, you’re going to need them replaced tomorrow.”

King belly laughed at the nearly genuine threat, bringing all eyes in the place to the three of them. “Doc would just see I received better ones. Wouldn’t you, gorgeous?”

Kyra shook her head. “Oh, no you don’t, King. Leave me out of your man-up debate with my husband. I just came to eat. What’s good tonight?”

King tucked her hand in the crook of his massive arm as he walked them to their table.

“Honey, you have definitely come to the right place if you’re hungry. Tonight we have Louisiana fare: Shrimp and Grits or Crawfish étouffée. If seafood doesn’t sound good, try the simulated filet mignon. Chef Tony perfected it this week. It’s got just the right balance of nutrients and tastes way better than most simulated twenty-first century beef.”

“Please don’t be disappointed, but I don’t eat meat or even seafood anymore,” Kyra said softly, working to look apologetic. “I gave up that kind of protein when I was in my forties. My body just doesn’t process it correctly.”

King turned loose of her at their table. He put his hands on his hips and sighed as dramatically as he could. “Well, my crush on you is over then, sugar. Now I know it will never work out between us. I can’t be fooling around with such a strict vegetarian. Do you at least eat vegetable protein?”

“If you can hide it in a lot of real vegetables. I eat a lot of salads.”

At Kyra’s guilty head shake, King laughed and looked at Peyton. “You can keep her, Peyton. I’m looking for a meat eater.”

Peyton punched King’s arm hard, but barely got a snort from his massive friend. “Don’t be insulting. If my wife leaves your new restaurant hungry, I’ll light up your media presence with your culinary failure. My processor is lightning fast compared to your archaic one. I can hit a thousand sites in about ten seconds.”

“Fine. I’ll put in an order for a Kingston House Salad with plant protein as well as some real tomatoes,” King said, looking as dejected as he could fake doing. “What about you, Peyton? You want a salad too?”

“Me eat salad? Hell no. I’ll take the largest serving of protein on your menu. And if it even vaguely resembles a twenty-first century steak, I’ll kiss your ass.”

King snorted, mostly because he knew the protein was a near perfect facisimile. “Really? What would you do for the real thing?”

“Don’t make me debase myself for something I know will never be on your menu. I’ll only hate you for it later,” Peyton declared.

King grinned widely. “I’ll get the order in and have Greg bring over a couple glasses of wine. He recorded your preferences from the interview we collected with your reservation—unless you want something different than what was on it.”

When they shook their heads no, King turned toward the bar, but instead ended up looking straight into the face of a woman he never thought he’d see again.

“Hello, Kingston.”

Having been trained to be unfailingly polite since childhood, King wasn’t surprised when Annalise Harrington turned and smiled in apology at the couple he’d been talking to. He put his full attention on her so he could use his cybernetics to study her body signals and analyze her level of stress. As he expected, her readings were extremely high.

“Hello, Annalise. How wonderful it is to see you.”

King lied as casually as possible, holding out his hand as his mind pulled up her contract file contents from storage. Doc had pulled the Cyber Husband chip, but since his long term storage had the space, he’d kept a copy of all the data on it. The well-preserved gray-haired beauty now smiling at him had been his last contract wife in the program. Heiress to several fortunes, she had been widowed twice from human males before she’d ever bought him. Annalise was the mother of three and grandmother of two. She liked to have tea at precisely four in the afternoon. She was also a master gardener. Her tomatoes won awards every year.

“So how did the tomatoes turn out when they ripened? I’m sorry I never got to see them,” King said, nearly meaning it. Annalise had been kind to him…and not asked him for anything physical…which is why he felt compelled to be kind in return tonight.

Since his restoration, he had developed his own system of rating the past events. His memories of Annalise were blessedly neutral. Did she answer about the tomatoes? Like all the many other times he recalled doing it for his contract wives, as well every other woman he’d known, he lifted Annalise’s fingers and placed a chaste kiss across her knuckles.

“I’m sorry if you were inconvenienced by my departure, but I must confess that I am happy to be free of the program. I hope my honesty about the matter doesn’t offend you.”

Annalise pulled her hand gently from his as she shook her head. His cybernetic readings of her indicated she was telling the truth with her negative head movement.

“It doesn’t offend me at all. As odd as it might seem based on what you know about me buying you, I am happy for your freedom, Kingston. May I talk to you privately for just a minute? I promise I didn’t come to make a scene in your new restaurant. In fact, I’m very happy to see you adjusting to your circumstances so gracefully. It doesn’t surprise me at all. You’re one of the most adaptable men I’ve ever met.”

Shocked out of his typical unflappability by her words of praise, King did what he vowed he would never do again. He referenced the Cyber Husband help files for a polite and proper response to his former wife. He feared trying to come up with something original when his surprise was so great. “It would be my pleasure to talk with you, Annalise. Excuse me while I turn an order in to the kitchen. I’ll be right back.”

Annalise nodded and immediately headed back to her table.

Peyton gave him a questioning look as he turned back to them, but King shook his head before walking toward the kitchen. Ignoring the smiling faces of his other customers bent over their food, King moved at a fast clip, not wanting to stop progress. Task done, he headed back to Annalise’s table more slowly, unsure of what he would say to her once he got there. He consulted his files once more and stopped to ask Greg to send over a glass of Annalise’s favorite wine.

At the table, Annalise smiled at him and held out a hand indicating he should sit in one of the remaining empty seats.

“King—thank you for your time. I’ll rush through this explanation so you can get back to taking care of your business. Now that you’re a free man I think it’s time you learned how you came to be with me. You see…I…oh dear, this is not at all easy to admit. Before you were my Cyber Husband, you belonged to my daughter. Seetha gave you up because…well because she…”

“Seetha?” King automatically searched his files. The data was barely there. Seetha Harrington. Calibration Engineer. All other data erased.

He shook his head at the strange dead end to his curiosity. He quickly scanned back to his first two husband contracts. The information was still completely there for those women, and in a similar quantity to Annalise’s. Why was only one wife’s file erased? And who erased it?

“I found your daughter’s name in my storage, but that’s all I could find. Do you know why all the information about her was erased?” King demanded.

“Yes. It was probably because she…because she…” Annalise released a sigh of anguish at having to be the one to tell him. She crumpled the cloth napkin in her nervous hands.

King automatically put his hand over Annalise’s to still her movements. “It’s okay. Just tell me.”

“After she bought you, Seetha fell in love with you and believed you loved her back. She fought a long and expensive legal battle for nearly the entire seven years she kept you with her. In that whole time, she refused to let you get your yearly maintenance or be upgraded. The more memories you made with her…well, the more normal you seemed to be. Then in the seventh year of her contract, Seetha lost her right to decide what was best for you cybernetically.”

King snorted. “Upgrades—otherwise known as cyborg oblivion.” He saw Annalise nodding her head at his comment. Her sympathethic response confused him further.

“Having declared you malfunctioning because of your many unprogrammed responses to Seetha, Norton Industries took you back to investigate the reasons when they won. They kept you for over a week. While we don’t know everything they did during that time, we know for sure they upgraded your processor. Somehow, in changing the core of what you were, they erased all seven years of your time with Seetha. That’s why you don’t remember her now.”

King shook his head. “This is hard to believe, Annalise. I remember you, but I have no recall of what you’re telling me about your daughter. It was not returned during my restoration.”

Annalise nodded and sighed. “Because Seetha still technically owned your contract, Norton eventually returned you to her in your newly rebooted condition. You looked at her like she was a stranger and went back to accessing the original data file on her. Seetha mentally unraveled when she realized the changes were permanent. To her, it was like the real you—the version of you she loved—had died.”

King shook his head again. It was like hearing a sad story about someone other than himself. Annalise pulled a photo from her handbag and slid it across the table. When he picked it up, he saw himself standing next to a beaming, light chocolate-skinned woman. She was exotically beautiful. He glanced up at Annalise’s hopeful gaze on him before directing his attention back to the photo.

He had zero recollection of the moment, and no recognition of the woman, but in the picture he was smiling widely and looking happy with life. His expression of pleasure didn’t seem fake at all to him. The happiness he saw on his own face mirrored the contented expression he had gotten to see on Peyton’s face a lot lately. Too bad he didn’t remember what made him smile so wickedly in the photo. The woman must have said something to make him laugh. It tugged at something inside him. His voice when he spoke was gentle.

“So the woman standing next to me is your daughter?”

“Yes, and I know you’re probably thinking Seetha doesn’t look a thing like me. It’s because she was adopted,” Annalise said quietly. “She is not my birth child, but make no mistake, she is very much my daughter. My other two children are biological, but Seetha is the child of my heart.”

“I’m sorry, Annalise. I sincerely don’t remember her, but there’s nothing wrong with my eyes. Your daughter is a very beautiful woman…just like her mother.”

King watched Annalise nod at his compliment, but stress lines wrinkled her forehead. According to the notes in his records, she had always responded well to personal compliments about her appearance. At the moment, her gaze registered only concern for her child.

“Yes, Seetha is very beautiful…on the inside as well as the outside. She said the upgraded you was worse than starting over with a complete stranger. You no longer reacted to her jokes, her teasing, or her loving overtures. She said she could not go back to being nothing more to you than your latest bed partner. At her angriest, Seetha declared Norton had killed the version of you that had been hers.”

King shook his head. “I’m sorry for what she suffered, but I don’t remember anything about what you’re describing.”

Annalise nodded. “Yes. That’s very clear to me now. But I need to finish my story. After she returned you to Norton for good, depression took Seetha down hard. She withdrew from the family…and me…for the first time ever. Seetha doesn’t even know I bought you, but I simply couldn’t let you end up being used poorly by some callous, rich woman. Kingston, you were part of my family when you were with Seetha. I still consider you part of it…even if you don’t remember us.”

King laid the photo down on the table again. He blinked, consulted her file, but found nothing helpful for this situation—even though he didn’t doubt Annalise’s truthfulness. His senses read her body signs very clearly and her vitals were now steady as a rock.

“I don’t know what to say, Annalise. What do you expect from me? No, that’s not what I meant to ask. Damn it—I think I’m in shock—and please excuse my language. My body temperature and respiration are suddenly erratic. Since my restoration, my cybernetics tend to have blips when I get this emotional.”

“It’s okay to express yourself around me anyway you want,” Annalise said firmly. “I choose to believe your strong reaction is because we still matter to you on some level…at least a little. It also tells me I was right to trust you with the truth.”

King rubbed a hand over his face, something he’d seen Peyton do when frustrated. He wanted to tell Annalise he couldn’t help her or her family…and part of him didn’t want to help. But some other part caused a nauseous feeling in his gut when he thought about refusing.

Doc said he deserved to seek as much closure as he needed about any part of his life. Right now he certainly needed to know Annalise’s daughter hadn’t gone off the deep end too far because of what Norton had done to them both. He had started over just like Seetha Harrington had intended him to do when she sent him back to Norton. Now she needed to start over too.

King quietly studied Annalise’s concerned gaze holding his. Did Annalise even ask him to see the daughter? Or was that debate just going on inside his head? The startling information had given him so much to think about he’d lost track of their conversation.

“Don’t you think seeing me again might be forcing a cruelty on your daughter, Annalise? It would be bad if she got her hopes up about my relationship to her since I’m never likely to recall the missing information. Even if I did magically get the erased info back, Dr. Winters has confirmed the Cyber Husband files don’t have any human emotion attached to any of them. For a restored cyborg, it’s like reading research information. When I was with your daughter, I promise you I was nothing more than just a series of AI programs running. Every answer I have ever made to any wife was pulled from a help file with thousands of politely phrased choices meticulously coded by some sensitive cyber geek at Norton. As I learned a wife’s preferences, I coded the ones that netted the most positive results. That’s all my responses could have ever been with Seetha.”

“I hear what you’re saying, Kingston. I’ve read all about Cyber Husband programming. Like you say, your relationship with Seetha started out quite logical and formal…and just as impersonal as you describe. It started out just like ours did when you came to me. But I’m telling you, as surely as I am sitting here across the table from you now, following codes was not the full reality for you. After six or seven months with Seetha, you started to change. While I don’t have any proof outside of a few pictures I rescued from the trash, I would bet my entire fortune you had genuine human feelings for my daughter. No one will ever convince me differently. With Seetha, you were always more than just a cyborg programmed to please her.”

King’s mind whirled. Despite Peyton’s brags about his processor being superior, his own sifted through all his Cyber Husband files with lightning speed. Since he had only been contracted four times, it was not very difficult. He ran through them repeatedly, changing just one variable each time.

On one pass, he decided to stop at each wife’s file and just catalog his body’s reactions to acknowledging its existence. Ironically, that’s how he found the blip on Seetha Harrington’s. Sweaty palms. Nervous stomach. Anger. The last reaction checked him up because it was illogical even though it felt very real. The data about Seetha had been erased. How could his human side be angry over what he didn’t remember? Why would any part of him care? Not even her photo jogged his recollection.

He ran the same check again on all four files and got the same result…with one exception. Each time he ran the check, the sensation of being angry when he got to Seetha’s became a little sharper. Of course it could be just trepidation over the lack of data and not knowing why it was gone. His cyborg side could never condone something just being missing—it would search for a reason. But as he and Peyton had discussed many times, anger was a portal emotion for cyborgs. Behind it lurked a reality which was nearly always shocking.

So many good things had happened to him in the weeks since he’d been restored—like the restaurant, just to cite one big one. That didn’t mean he had no awareness of the bad following him around, like the ongoing distrust most people in the world carried for his kind.

He knew he wasn’t an emotional coward. Regardless of the outcome, he wanted to know all of his reality, no matter how much potential it carried for causing him more pain. Right now, he wanted to know with his mind what caused his body to get upset over nothing more than a placeholder file and an erasure notification.

“No matter how many times I have watched you freeze up to think, I still find the process alarming. Perhaps I’m just nervous because last time you did it, you left for good. You can’t know how relieved I was to see your name listed as one of the restored cyborgs. I was even more thrilled when you created social media to talk about the restaurant. I knew then I would one day find a way to talk to you about what happened.”

King looked hard at Annalise. Her genuine concern for him as well as her daughter was in her kind expression. How could he be unkind back? The bottom line was that he couldn’t.

Knowing he’d done the right thing by both Harrington women was going to be worth a little drama and a lost afternoon of his time. So he’d talk to the daughter—figure out the anger thing—then they could both go on with their lives.

“Okay. You’ve convinced me. I guess I’m at least willing to talk to her. Where is Seetha now?”

Annalise swallowed hard, frowning as she held his curious gaze. “I don’t know. I was hoping you’d help me find her.”