Replica (Original Work)

Chapter 18 - Combat Instinct Conditional

The mind of a genestock soldier and the mind of a normal human being don't operate in the same way. At least, that's what I had come to believe over my years of active service. Normal people, real people, as well trained and socialized as they could be, were products of nature. They were messy, incoherent, and dissonant. Naturals were tangled webs of emotions, uncertainties, convictions, loyalties, and their own wills to power. I usually was too. But, despite my human genetics I was at my core a product of deliberate biological engineering rather than one of nature, and sometimes I still found myself taken by surprise in the face of my own built in duality.

It was only minutes until midnight as Cutter and I were escorted downstairs to wait with the rest of the operational strike team when that duality manifested itself in the most pronounced way it could. I became the other. It is a hard experience to relate, because it isn't an experience that I have ever known anyone else to have. If I were to attach a word to it, I would call it depersonalization, or perhaps re-personalization. I, or at least the I that I usually referred to as I, found myself removed and relegated to the position of an observer as "I" the weapon took over. On that descent down the concrete staircase from the penthouse to the ground floor, I ceased to be the uncertain but willful woman I thought myself to be and became something nearly entirely inhuman, an indestructible, indomitable instrument of war.

The biotechnical engineers and military advisors responsible for my post activation training had a name for this psychological phenomena. They called it the 'combat instinct conditional'. As it was explained to me, it was a built in cognitive response that allowed artificials of my class and generation to operate in the face of situations that would reduce the most battle hardened naturals to quivering wrecks. It had the additional benefit of absolutely disabling a creature such as myself from experiencing the debilitating effects of post traumatic stress disorder.

Whatever the military benefit, however, the experience was existentially terrifying on the individual level. To be separated into what for all the world seemed like two persons, to lose control of your body and your mind, was not something any thinking thing should ever experience. To that day, I had only experienced the conditional on two previous occasions. Once, when it was deliberately induced during my field training, and a second time when Cutter and I found ourselves badly outnumbered in a firefight after what should have been a routine inquiry went wrong. The absolute lack of mercy and restraint I displayed in latter incident so disturbed Cutter that he was on edge around me for weeks following, and disturbing a man like Harlan Cutter on any level was no small feat.

When Lucy 636 the weapon took over from Lucy 636 the woman, reality changed into a cold, mechanical, almost mathematical tactical assessment, and I was fully in that mode by the time we reached the ad hoc south branch helipad. I don't know what brought on the switch that night, but it happened. I cracked my neck and my knuckles, the natural ones on my right hand anyway, reflexively twitched my cybernetic arm, and took in the situation.

The landing pad itself was a sad affair bulldozed out of the foundation of what must have been an adjacent skyscraper once. Two groups of people stood waiting just outside the touchdown zone. The first was my team, sans Cutter and myself. The second was comprised of O'Donnell along with his hand picked surgical strike force- five field operatives who I decided would know me soon enough. I was going to handle things here and now.

"Still treating us like second class desk jockeys," Cutter muttered as we walked toward the pickup point.

"We'll see how long that lasts. Aint no rest for the wicked, but there aint no mercy for the proud either." My reply made Cutter stop dead in his tracks. It wasn't what I said, but how I said it.

"That voice... Luce'?"

"Just don't get in my way." I walked right past Cutter, right past my team, with no exchange of comfort or assurance, not even a smile. It wasn't in me anymore. I was headed for O'Donnell. He took note of me before I was within ten paces, and turned to face me.