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

nanos didn’t become commonplace. Part of it, though, was a fear in patients and physicians alike that the microscopic bots might go rogue or otherwise malfunction and create more problems than they solved. Because, once they were released it was damned near impossible to recapture them. Even a complete blood transfusion couldn’t remove them all because they were determined to stay and ‘fix’, and interpreted efforts to remove them as attacks upon the body. They would fight first to keep the blood from being extracted at all and then, once they realized their host was receiving an infusion equal to what was being taken, they would rush to the infusion site to monitor the blood coming in.

And then they would figure out what was going on and ‘hide’. Efforts had been made to correct that particular programming nightmare, but not with any success. It seemed to be an either or situation. They could be programmed to repair as needed, in which case they were absolutely dedicated to searching out and repairing, or they could be programmed to repair one thing only and they might or might not. They had to have AI either way and if they’d been programmed to correct some problem that would create another, or fail to completely correct the problem, they would simply wander around aimlessly trying to ‘compute’ data they considered illogical.

The fact that hers hadn’t been programmed for humans at all made her distinctly uneasy. She couldn’t complain. She was still breathing and she certainly wouldn’t have been if the men hadn’t given her the nanos. She knew better than to believe she’d just miraculously recovered from the sort of wound that usually resulted in a slow, horrible death if untreated very quickly, and sometimes even if it was. She was alive because of the nanos.

She just didn’t know what else they might decide to do once they’d finished repairing the damage from the crash.

She discovered one thing as soon as she recovered enough to notice anything besides her discomfort.

The nanos repaired her vision.

Not surprisingly, she’d lost her glasses in the crash. She hadn’t missed them because of her injuries, but she supposed she’d become so used to them it had just taken her mind a while to catch up to the fact that she saw perfectly clearly at a distance without them—either that or the nanos had just gotten around to repairing her vision. She wasn’t sure which because it was a while before she noticed. Once she did, though, she was naturally delighted.

Now, even without her glasses she could tell whether she was looking at Jerico or Gabriel when before she’d had to study their movements and individual characteristics to be sure because their hair was so nearly the same color and they were close to the same height and weight. That hadn’t been a problem with Gideon, naturally, since he was fair, but now she could see him better, see a lot of things she hadn’t noticed before because of the blurring.

The down side was that she noticed the faint scars all over all the three men that she hadn’t really been able to see that well before. Not that she thought the scars detracted from their appearance in any way, but their dangerous, painful existence was written on their bodies. It brought home to her as nothing else, not even Jerico’s recital of the battles they’d fought, that the horror of war and death, pain, and the ever present possibility of dying themselves was their way of life—all they had ever known.

Before. She was determined, despite her qualms, to change that. Maybe they didn’t want what they believed they did—a home life—because they’d never had it and just thought it sounded like something they would want, but she decided to do her best to make them glad they’d chosen her to try.

Before she could even try, though, she had to regain her strength so that she could be a mate to them, provide the things a woman traditionally brought into a house to make it a home. Gideon, Jerico, and Gabriel not only didn’t like the fact that she was determined to get up and move around, though, she discovered that it bothered them—deeply. As soon as she would begin her struggle to rise they would stop whatever they would doing, stare at her as if holding their breath to see if she would collapse again, and then disappear as if they couldn’t bear to watch while she struggled with the crutch Gabriel had fashioned for her.

It depressed her. She could see why they would be appalled at such weakness when they were so physically superior. She could even understand that her painfully awkward gate was probably a serious turn off sexually.

And it still hurt and it still made her angry. It made her wonder if they’d begun to have doubts about convincing her to join with them to begin with, maybe even begun to entertain the idea of ‘losing’ the contracts on the way back.

They weren’t without flaws themselves—close—but not flawless, she thought with a mixture of anger and hurt. And it wasn’t as if they weren’t aware of those flaws.

The main difference between her perspective and theirs, she realized, was that they didn’t care for her. If they had, they would’ve been able to overlook the fact that she was less than perfect. They would’ve at least tried, just as she was struggling to accept their flaws.

She supposed, all in all, it was a good thing that their behavior angered her because it also bolstered her determination to prove to them that she was still worth having. She was going to recover. Maybe she would have scars she hadn’t had before, but the cuts and gashes, even the two worst, seemed to be healing remarkably well. She was fairly certain there wasn’t going to be anything hideously ugly that she was going to feel like she had to hide just be attractive.

Bronte’s first order of business was a