Cyborg Nation by Kaitlyn O'Connor (english readers TXT) 📗

Jerico had told her they didn’t hate humans, but they had given her that distinct impression before, made her feel guilty for things she had had no hand in, no control over.

Was it just her imagination? Or had they set out to use guilt to make her empathize with their cause? And, if that was the case, why had they abandoned that psychological warfare so abruptly--within the first week of her captivity? It seemed likely that it had been intentional, not just accidental in the sense that they were so angry about it that they couldn’t control or contain their feelings of misuse.

It was a very effective method of brain washing, but only if the message was pounded in repeatedly over an extended period of time. That would’ve seemed to have supported the suggestion that it had been unintentional except for the fact that it also suggested a radical change in their perception when they went from not being able to help spewing venom about their mistreatment to suddenly having no problem submerging their feelings.

If it had been intentional the motive behind it, she felt sure, would have been to ensure that she was on their side by the time they reached their destination, to make certain that they could trust her to take the place they’d set aside for her without having to worry that she would use the opportunity to strike back at them.

She would’ve liked to think that they’d abandoned the plan because, once they had begun to get to know her, they had realized that she would never, under any circumstances, harm the innocent, however she might feel about the people who’d orchestrated and implemented her captivity.

Was that it, she wondered? Had brain washing been a part of the plan, but they’d seen that it wasn’t necessary?

They had definitely been using reverse psychology on her, assuring her that they were nothing more than machines and at the same time proving they were anything but. She’d had the sense, though, that that was more of a defensive mechanism, because they had expected her to hate them. It was actually fairly typical human behavior to forestall rejection one expected by rejecting the other person first. Pride, ego, or sheer contrariness made it easier to push others away before they could do the snubbing because then one couldn’t get hurt.

Maybe that was it? Maybe there had never been a plan at all to try to brainwash her into shifting her loyalty from her fellow humans to the cyborgs? Maybe they’d just been so hounded by the company trying to wipe them out that they’d been sure all humans would hate them on sight and they’d been braced for it, already defensive before they’d even given her a chance?

She frowned at that, realizing that she’d heard enough to know that even the cyborgs had a ‘class’ system—that Gideon, Jerico, and Gabriel had even more of a reason to feel persecuted and defensive than the others. The Hunters, apparently, ranked at the very top of the pyramid because they were not just top of the line cyborgs. They had everything the very best had and much more. They had been programmed to believe they were human, right down to the tiniest detail—a past, memories that made them capable of functioning as if they’d been born, not manufactured. She suspected that it had come as a severe blow to them to discover they weren’t and they were probable wrestling with some pretty serious psychological issues of their own, but obviously the cyborgs didn’t see it that way. To their thinking, although obviously they would rather die than admit it, they were inferior. They were intelligent enough to understand that they lacked something critical, knowledge and skills that would help them to fit into the new social structure their kind had established better, but were unable to fill in the gap.

After reasoning it over for a little while, she decided that she’d probably guessed right about a lot of it. It seemed logical that whoever had sent them would consider it absolutely necessary to do whatever it took to shift her loyalties, especially since they expected her to be influential in the lives and development of their young. They not only wouldn’t want to take the chance they she would hurt them. They wouldn’t want to take the chance that she would try to manipulate her patients.

She didn’t think it would have occurred to Gideon that she might be trying to manipulate them if they hadn’t set out to manipulate her.

She still didn’t know why they’d abandoned the plan—although it was clear they had—but she was as certain as she could be that it had been part of their original orders.

She was equally certain that she wasn’t mistaken about their defensiveness and that it wasn’t just her bleeding heart that saw them as ‘wounded’. The humans who’d created them wanted to annihilate them … and they didn’t even feel the equal of their peers because they’d only been originally designed to perform a specific function. They could be soldiers, servants, or pleasure bots, but in every case they were expected to be slaves to humanity, puppets that could be used or discarded, where the others had been able to walk among humans and interact as their equals, completely undetected.

She actually felt more uneasy once she’d reasoned it out, though. It would almost have been easier to accept that she was ‘blameless’, under mind control—theirs--instead of her own. If she accepted that they hadn’t deliberately manipulated her, though, she also had to accept that her soft heart was once again working contrary to what should have been a much stronger instinct of self-preservation. She was flawed.

Of course there was no doubt that their motives for kidnapping her hadn’t been nefarious. They needed her and knew damned well no human was going to just volunteer to help them. That left them in the position of either doing without or taking what they needed.

That