Chapter Nine – Reflections
The digital clock in the dashboard clicked over to 22:18 when the minivan came to a stop in front of the cyborg dorm. She trudged up the stairs to her room and changed out of her combat uniform into a t-shirt and gym shorts and went to the shower room to clean-up before heading over to the hospital to try and see Michele.
When she arrived, the nurse she had chased away back when Angelica had been brought in from the car bombing was on duty and Kara found her presence still intimidated the woman enough to allow her to find out Michele's room.
As she approached, she saw Claes standing next to the window, looking out. She also had changed, though she wore a sweater, skirt and boots and Kara felt a bit self-conscious in her t-shirt, sweat pants and sneakers.
"Is he awake?" Kara asked.
"I haven't gone in yet," Claes admitted. Kara nodded and knocked once before carefully opening the door. Michele, sitting up and reading a book, turned towards them.
"I thought Visiting Hours were over," he said.
"I used my natural charms," Kara replied with a smile, earning her a grunt from Michele.
"That you two are not dressed in black must mean they expect me to live," he noted with a wry smile. Kara, however, answered with a scowl.
"That's not funny," she said. "I heard you were really injured."
"My torso looks like it's been hit with a sledgehammer. Those bullets left some magnificent bruises both on the skin and my internal organs. Bianchi said it would at least be a week before I should be out of bed, much less back on duty. I imagine he's being facetious about the former, though I think he is likely not about the latter. So I'll likely need to pawn you two off with Victor or Giuse."
"Anyone but Jean," Kara replied.
"I heard you and Kara acquitted yourselves well after I forgot to duck," Michele replied, choosing to ignore her request.
"It appears to have been a major weapons cache," Claes noted.
"You did well, Claes. You and Kara, both. I'm proud of you two. It's getting late, so you two should head to bed."
"Then move over."
"I don't think this hospital bed's not big enough for the three of us."
"Who said anything about three?" Kara replied with a grin.
"I'll be going now," Claes stated and left.
Thirty minutes later, Michele looked down on Kara as she slept in the chair, her head resting on his hospital bed and her face twitching as she dreamed. He slowly ran his hand through her hair, his mind's eye receding to his first few weeks with her. In her initial physical training, Kara learned the limits of her artificial body – and also learned that those limits were few. Running five kilometers without exhaustion. Sprinting one hundred meters in just over ten seconds. Leaping a hole nine meters in diameter. Lifting two hundred kilograms of free weights. And performing literally hundreds each of sit-ups, chin-ups and push-ups. Michele knew the cyborgs were good, but seeing first-hand just how good they were amazed him.
Over time and a number of missions, Michele came to understand that the girls employed strategies that came from a different idea of what could be considered "an acceptable loss". To Kara, the possibility of losing a limb to successfully carry out a mission didn't matter to her, since she could have a replacement fitted. Michele, on the other hand, didn't have that luxury. So while he might try and block a gunshot with his forearm out of instinct, Kara would do so as a tactic. She knew her body could tolerate damage far beyond what her original human body could, and she played that fact to her advantage. Some thought the cyborgs acted this way through a belief they did not know fear, but Michele knew better. Kara did not fear death, in part because she felt she could not be killed and in part because she would allow herself to be if that is what it took to keep him safe. Because he knew that she did fear him not being safe.
Having both Kara and Claes under his supervision offered Michele a chance to see how the two different types of conditioning regimens and decisions compared. While Series One and Series Two cyborgs underwent effectively identical forms of general conditioning, Kara retained a good portion of her memories prior to being converted while Claes retained almost none. This decision was not driven specifically by the conditioning: Angelica and Rico both retained much of their memories prior to conversion while Petrushka did not, though in her case that had been the result of an error. And yet with Triela and Henrietta, the decisions had evidently been deliberate, to spare them the remembrance of horror and trauma so gruesome that it might render them mad.
With Claes, Michele did not know if she remembered nothing of her prior life due to a conscious decision to deny her them or if it happened through an error occurring when they wiped her a second time after the death of Captain Raballo. Regardless of the reasons why, Michele sometimes wondered if the lack of a sense of "self" upon their waking up at the SWA played an impact how girls like Petrushka, Claes, Triela and Henrietta related to themselves, their co-workers and their handlers.
"So what was it like? Waking up a cyborg?" Michele had asked her one day early in their new relationship as handler and cyborg. Kara replied with a shrug.
"I just woke up, as if from a deep sleep with vibrant dreams. In those dreams I learned my name: Kara Michelle Pagani. The dreams told me you were my handler and adopted father and that I needed to obey your orders and instructions and those of the other handlers and staff members. And I knew things: how to speak Italian and other languages; how to move my limbs and use the proper amount of force to not crush things; how to fight hand-to-hand; and how to use various weapons and their statistics."
No longer a tabula rasa, in the intervening year Kara had developed her own distinct personality, drawing from what memories she had been allowed to retain from her previous life as Kumari Rosier and the experiences she'd gained in her new life as Kara Pagani. As she learned, loved, fought and lived, a new sense of "self" imprinted upon her brain, replacing the old one that the doctors buried deep.
And yet, the conditioning still wielded a subtle, but noticeable, hand over that personality. Like the two-headed Roman god Janus, Kara exhibited two faces: one a friendly, loving and gregarious teenaged girl and the other an emotionless soldier who dealt death with neither hesitation nor mercy in the blink of an eye. And she could switch between the two sides with frightening speed.
Michele knew Kara felt nothing for those she killed. They were only objects in the way, to be pushed aside with bullets, knives or bare hands so as to allow her to advance to the next one and push it aside, as well. He sometimes wondered if that was a good thing. The doctors said it protected them: that their young minds would have rebelled at the continuous taking of lives over the years, eventually turning them sociopathic or psychotic.
Michele had taken life, both before and after joining the SWA. He remembered the places, but not the faces, whether through subconscious action or the capriciousness of human memory. But he knew that he owed them the courtesy of acknowledging their existence, even if he then promptly robbed them of it. He felt obligated to at least acknowledge that they had been humans too, with loves and lives and desires and hopes. He felt neither guilt nor regret for doing so, for he knew that their deaths were necessary for the greater good.
Michele also knew that Kara's – indeed, all of the cyborg's - most powerful motivation focused on protecting their handler's from harm and that she took his present injury as a personal failure on her part to do so, despite his protestations to the contrary. Michele also detected a mild undercurrent of anger on Kara's part towards Claes for apparently not sharing her level of concern, even though Claes had pulled Michele out of the line of fire. He'd heard Giuse's tale of how Henrietta moved to kill a waiter early in her training when she mistakenly believed him a threat along with the rumors of Elsa de Sica almost breaking a waitresses' arm after she spilled a glass of water on her handler, Lauro.
Michele wondered if Kara ever looked at him with pity due to his slowness and his fragility. Without the vest, he'd now be dead – five high-velocity rifle rounds having torn his insides into something resembling what one would get from a tin of meat. Even with the vest, the bullets' impact energy inflicted mild myocardial contusion resulting in cardiac arrhythmia, which had lowered his blood pressure to the point of inducing unconsciousness in addition to rupturing a lung and cracking his ribcage.
Kara twitched again and slowly came awake.
"Mmmm. That feels good," she purred. She moved farther forward so Michele could reach her upper back.
"Time for bed," he said ten minutes later.
"Uh-huh," she drawled, slowly moving into a sitting position and cutting loose with a large yawn and stretch. She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. "Love you," she said.
"Love you too. Sleep well."
As she walked back to her dorm, Kara's thoughts also focused on her life at the SWA. She knew that in a way she was an orphan. Her biological parents were dead (she did not know of the uncle on her mother's side who'd refused to accept her into his care after the bombing) which made her the last of her family line at the moment. She experienced a menstrual cycle, though she did not know if she could reproduce. Considering all the changes wreaked upon her body, remaining fertile struck her as something unnecessary and even unwelcome in a cyborg. However, it remained something she currently felt uncomfortable discussing with either Michele or the doctors, though she also accepted she likely should know sooner rather then later.
For whatever reason, a handler and cyborg were known as a "brother" (fratello) as opposed to "siblings" (fratelli). To her knowledge, all such pairings were a male handler with a female cyborg and the standard cover stories for them were a brother-sister relationship, so she assumed standard male chauvinism drove the naming convention. She sometimes wondered if another section contained female handlers and male cyborgs and they were called "sister" (sorella).
To Michele, however, Kara was his "daughter" (figlia), not his sister. Kara knew that in order to be able to bring her to Italy for the advanced medical treatment necessary to save her life, Michele needed to become her legal guardian and the easiest way to do that had been through adoption. Converted to a cyborg just after her seventeenth birthday, Michele also stated that a sister two decades his junior would strike most people as something very unusual and could raise more questions then it answered so they would instead use as covers relationships like father-daughter and senior-junior. Even boyfriend and girlfriend, though she knew that such a role troubled Michele because of that age difference and the social implications it brought, even if there were no legal ones.
And yet, from the day she first opened her eyes until the day she last closed them, her body would defy both growth and decay. Ageless, yet not eternal. Chronologically eighteen, but physically forever seventeen, though clothing, makeup, cosmetic prosthetics and her Asian features could add close to a decade to her appearance. What Ponce de Leon could not do, SWA medical had – discover a "fountain of youth" and from it administered upon her an elixir that would keep her forever youthful in appearance.
So in another way, she was not an orphan, for she had an adopted father in Michele who cherished and loved her no less then what she expected her biological parents had. And she felt connected to not just Michele, but also to his family and her fellow cyborgs here at the Social Welfare Agency. And yet, for all that connection she felt, there were times when she felt alone and unconnected. When it came to her parents, she retained mostly impressions and feelings more then actual memories and images. The sound of their voices. The feel of the hands and arms as they held and hugged her. The warmth of their bodies as they lay together in bed as a family.
And she'd woken up with no memories of friends, neighbors, acquaintances or schoolmates. She did not know if the face in the mirror staring back at her now was the same face she'd had before her conversion. With no memory of them and they with possibly no idea of her present features, effectively all of the people she'd ever known were gone forever. She could pass her closest friend on the street – might have already done so – and neither would recognize the other.
Even if her facial features remained unchanged, she knew the chances of actually meeting someone she'd known in her prior life were remote. Her current life remained centered on the SWA compound. She studied and trained at the compound. Took her meals at the compound. Recreated at the compound. Slept at the compound. Her only friends now were her fellow cyborgs at the compound and the only adults in her life the handlers and staff at the compound. And she normally only left the compound when on a mission with Michele or another fratello.
Such thoughts, while rare, always made her feel moody and melancholy. Ilaria, having been on the receiving end of a few nasty tirades, learned to recognize when Kara felt this way and find somewhere else on the compound to be needed, though it only put Kara in a deeper funk because she then didn't have anyone to talk to about it. And she didn't wish to burden Michele with those feelings, she believing his life already complicated enough by her presence since his adoption of her.
What she didn't know (nor did most of the handlers and staff) was that Michele had in fact adopted her twice – once as Kumari Rosier and again as Kara Pagani. In order to bring her new existence into being, it proved necessary to end her old one and therefore Kumari "died" in a staged traffic accident on the way to the public SWA Medical Center from Ciampino Airport. In a small cemetery in a quiet suburb of Rome stood a marker over an empty grave, signifying the final resting place of one Kumari Deleroux Rosier-Pagani, aged 16.
Michele, supposedly wracked with grief with saving the girl from a terrorist bombing to only lose her in a traffic accident, then adopted Kara from the SWA hospital to honor Kumari's memory. When she'd awoken in his Rome apartment, Claes had noticed on the dresser a picture of a smiling Japanese girl in a black sweater, pink skirt, tan jacket and black boots on a pier in Yokohama, Japan - Kumari Deleroux Rosier, aged 15, recovered from the purse of her mother, Emiko Fushida, at Atocha train station in Madrid, Spain.