By NathalieHJane 

I'm a navigator. Or I should say Navigator, capital N.

Yeah, you read that right. I'm a cyborg.

Before you turn away from me in disgust, know this: I was born 26 years ago just as human as you are. No metal and plastic exoskeleton fused onto my skin and organs, no neural netting injected into my brain. Just a bawling mass of baby.

Except, unlike you, I was more mass, less baby. Thanks to a combination of bad genes and environmental contamination in utero, I barely resembled anything human, baby or otherwise. Aside from my brain and my heart, both of which developed normally, the rest of me that did manage to form was ready to go kaput within minutes of being sliced from my mother's womb.

Normally I would have been aborted, but you might remember that around the time I was born there was a sudden uptick in interest and advancement in the technology of cybernetics and bio-mechatronics.

Well, I wasn't technically "born" since I wouldn't have been viable even if I hadn't been a malformed aberration of nature. I was all of 22 weeks when they took me from my mother's body.

No matter, they had something better to cook and hatch me in, and there I finished what would have been my third trimester, encased in a warm, pulsing fluid that mimicked my mother's womb; they even recorded my mother's voice, crooning lullabies and reading Dr. Seuss books to me. Like I said, there was nothing wrong with my brain, and they wanted it to be as ship-shape as possible, and research has long shown the cognitive advantages of reading to your baby in utero.

So that was part of the deal they cut with my mother: Along with this thing you were probably going to flush down the toilet anyway, give us your voice. In return she received an undisclosed sum of money.

No one volunteered that information to me, of course; that was all because of Gregor and his single-minded obsession with uncovering the truth. My truth.

Actually, Gregor kept trying to find out how much money they paid my mother, until I finally had to tell him I didn't want to know, not really.

That man. He is like a dog with a bone when he gets it into his head that something needs to be done. Something fixed. Something uncovered and held up to the bright light of day.

Sometimes I wonder if any part of me, the original wetware part I mean, has ever felt the warmth of sunlight. My stunted, malformed body has been encased within various iterations of an exoskeleton since I was old enough to toddle but lacked the legs to do so. But I like to think that before they finished making me, the new and improved cyborg me, one of the attendants who helped raised me eschewed the Sun Room and snuck me outside so I could wiggle and mewl beneath the rays of the real deal.

***

Don't get me wrong, I don't feel sorry for myself or anything.

Like I said, I'm a Navigator, a great honor in and of itself, never mind the fact I am considered one of the very best. Some might even say the best. Sure, my exoskeleton doesn't look like much, especially if you compare it to the ones encasing Class A Infantry Cyborgs, all shiny titanium and deadly, humanoid design. No one ever wants to photograph me for glossy magazine spreads about the future of warfare or space exploration (or both), or trot me out for meet and greets with the occasional journalist or politician who feels a twinge of concern about our treatment, or the ethics of our existence. Better an army grunt flexing her bionic muscles and thanking God, the military, and whatever corporation that subsidized her birth, survival, and "enhanced lifecycle."

Me on the other hand? To the uninformed observer I am nothing more than a metal cocoon connected to a lower limb exoskeleton so I can do my daily movements and keep what few muscles and joints I do possess from atrophying. I certainly don't appear human from the outside. And some are arguing that I am less than human on the inside, but Gregor tells me to ignore that kind of thing, that "haters are always gonna hate." He says I am so smart that even if I had been "normal" people would have still felt threatened by me.

They should show me off, though. The fact is I love my job, always have. What the casual observer won't see is the millions of artificial neural connections that allow my brain to interface with and control a trans-global air traffic control system based on an intricate system of satellites, mathematical modeling, and good ol' human instinct.

I'm the one who is probably calculating how, when, and where your flight is going to take off or land without slamming into another air transport and killing everyone on board. Though mostly I do this for flights carrying your precious consumer products, or the raw materials needed to make them. Thanks to the invention of superconductor-powered electric airplanes, transporting people and goods became cheap and easy. Which is great for everyone, except for the part where, practically overnight, the world experienced a 1,000 percent daily increase in air traffic.

After a series of deadly collisions and, more importantly, a substantial loss in profits, several corporations and governments saw fit to expand their nascent military cyborg programs to include "enhanced human navigation systems."

There's more to that story, way more than I ever realized. But first, I want to tell you about how I met Gregor Tarkovsky, the man who made it possible for me to truly know myself.

***

I remember the first message. It was a Friday afternoon, at least in the part of the world Gregor was landing his air transporter, and he admitted to me later that he may have been high on the amphetamines his company regularly dished out to their pilots for long hauls.

What's your name?

Normally the pilots interface with me as though I am a navigational computer assistant, because that is either what they think I am, or feel most comfortable assuming. Sometimes they get bored, and if they're a guy they ask me stuff like "What do you look like?" and "What are you wearing?" I normally head them off by mimicking the tenor of what I guessed an actual robot would sound like.

I am a Navigator, I replied, keeping the tone of my neural transmission even and neutral.

Yeah, but you have a name don't you?

Helena.

Hello Helena, nice to meet you. I'm Gregor.

Are my instructions for landing adequate Captain Tarkovsky? Please note we are experiencing particularly high levels of air travel for this sector at the moment.

They are more than adequate. So you're a woman?

I was born female, yes.

Tell me something, what do you like to do for fun Helena?

Oh boy, I thought, here it comes. Time to take the wind out of his sails before his imagination runs wild and I have to report him for inappropriate communication.

I play chess.

Oh yeah? Me too. You any good?

I actually snorted at that. I mean, not only through my neural connection to the network, but physically, in the confines of my exoskeleton.

What's so funny?

Nothing. And yes, I am good.

How good? I'm looking for a challenge. All I have to play with these days are some of the other pilots, and it's boring. I always beat them.

I could have put him off by telling him I had other flights to land and launch, but in truth I could easily carry on a conversation with a human while simultaneously interfacing with the pilots and navigation systems of a dozen air transports.

So I offered to play him, right then and there, tickled by the idea of a non-enhanced human challenging me, a Navigator, to a game of chess. Normally I square off with other Navigators, or else with the mainframe I am plugged into.

He beat me.

Check mate.

I couldn't tell if he was gloating or not.

How did you do that? I asked, before I could stop myself.

You shouldn't have let me sacrifice my knight. I told you I'm good. Now I knew he was gloating.

I want a rematch, I demanded. It had been a fluke, surely.

So we played again, and again he beat me.

Another game, I said. I rejected a navigation request. I needed to free up some of my brain space for this. The human part of my brain, I mean. I wasn't willing to go computer to beat some random guy at chess.

Sorry Helena, I can't. I gotta sign off for the night and disembark. My Friday night awaits.

And he was gone.

I had volunteered to work through Saturday so it wasn't until Sunday that I had a chance to fully review the two games I had lost. The first game I saw my error almost immediately, and it was true, I never should have let my opponent sacrifice his knight.

The second game, however, didn't make sense to me. He had played erratically, and early on had made a really stupid error that had, truth be told, rattled me. It was a beginner's error, the kind I hadn't made since I was a little kid learning the fundamentals of chess. The computers I played against back then used to eat me alive, and it was only by challenging the older cyborg kids that I managed to build my confidence and skill. Gregor, however, had obviously been playing chess for awhile, and had been schooled in it by some master or another; how could someone who had managed to rout me make such a rookie mistake, and then beat me again anyway?

All weekend I eagerly searched the network for his sign-on code, but nothing. Finally, early Monday morning, he showed up in the system, and I pushed aside another Navigator who was in line to answer his launch request.

This is Captain Tarkovsky requesting guidance for lift off.

Why did you do play that third move?

Good morning Helena. Are you my Navigator for this flight?

Was it a mistake, or was it strategy?

I think this is the first time I've ever had the same Navigator two times in a row. What a lucky coincidence.

So you're not going to tell me? A part of me knew I was being rude, but it drove me nuts that he had beaten me, and I needed to know how he had done it.

Perhaps after you send me my coordinates and give me clearance?

I already sent them.

I was peeved by his suggestion that I couldn't conduct a conversation with a human and do my job at the same time. Didn't he know who I was? What I was capable of? Whether you considered Navigators man or machine, everyone knew we were the smartest and most efficient of our kind. At any given moment a Navigator on the job was responsible for thousands of human lives along with trade cargo worth tens of millions of Ameri-Coin. Those at my level—and there aren't many of us—are able to manage up to two dozen flights at any one time, and in sectors that are often known for dramatically different patterns of weather and geography. I might be managing a landing during a tropical cyclone at the same time I am coordinating a launch in the upper reaches of the Himalayas.

Meanwhile, not only had this human beat me at chess, he was insinuating I couldn't do my job.

Who was this guy?

You're right, you did send them. Very nice by the way. You have a very unique way of doing things.

Oh my God, I thought. Now he's patronizing me. I decided not to dignify his comment with a response. Instead I fumed in silence and denied three navigation requests in a row. I was too irritated to give them the focus they deserved. Plus it felt good to quip "Denied," a nice reminder for myself and these human pilots that I was in high demand.

Once I hit altitude I'll be ready for a rematch if you like.

I pretended to be busy and said nothing. I refused two more navigation requests.

How about if you beat me I'll answer any questions you have for me about how I play chess.

Okay, I agreed. A little too quickly for my taste, but like I said, I was chomping at the bit to find out how he had done it.

Except I lost the damn match.

***

Normally I like to work late on Mondays, to make up for the mandatory rest periods I must endure most weekends. But after my humiliating defeat at the hands of Captain Gregor Tarkovsky I decided to sign-off early and pour myself into two parallel but ultimately, I hoped, overlapping lines of inquiry into the pilot's background and the series of moves that had enabled him to win three chess matches in a row against one of the world's most elite Navigators.

Unfortunately, someone had scrubbed away his LifePrint on nearly every network I could access, including a few I wasn't technically supposed to access. All I could pull was his date of birth (he was 28 and an Aries), two of his nationalities (Bela-Russian and Canadian), and a screenshot of his checking account (he was broke).

As for the way he played chess? No matter how many chess games I analyzed through the centuries, nothing explained his playing style.

Oh, I did locate a corporate staff photo of him and yes, to answer your question, he was handsome. Black hair, dark eyes, a confident smile, and devastating Slavic cheekbones.

I signed on Tuesday morning and pinged him almost immediately.

Would you like to play another match Captain Tarkovsky?

Call me Gregor, okay Helena?

As you wish Gregor. But answer the damn question, I wanted to add.

Helena, can I ask you something personal?

I paused, suddenly on guard. But I really wanted him to play another game with me. And, to be fair, I had spent the last 12 hours trying, if failing, to invade his privacy.

Shoot.

The voice I hear when your messages are relayed. Is that your real voice?

Yes. I have elected for my neural transmissions to be translated into what would be the equivalent sound of my organic voice.

It's my understanding that most Navigators choose not to do this. That the voice we hear isn't their own.

Many Navigators are unable to produce speech because of congenital deformities. The rest mostly choose not to, you are right. I paused, then added: Some consider the sound of their real voice an intimacy that is not appropriate for the workplace.

I can understand that. You can tell a lot about a person from their voice. What about you? You don't think it's too intimate?

I had to stop and think before I could answer. No one had ever asked me that before.

I feel I am better able to communicate through my human voice. I think it ... builds trust. Sometimes I ask my pilots to execute flight patterns that can seem strange or even risky at first.

I heard him laugh and I bristled.

That's an understatement Helena. I'd know it was you even without your beautiful voice. You always come up with the craziest instructions. But you're always right.

Beautiful. He'd said my voice was beautiful. I was struck dumb for real this time, mostly from confusion, but also from pleasure. I was only human after all.

What about my voice Helena?

What about it?

How does it sound to you?

It sounds male.

But do you like it?

Another question no one had ever asked me before.

I like it. It's deep ... and resonant. Like an announcer's voice. But also kind.

By the way, did you know cyborgs can blush?

***

Over the course of the next week we played game after game of chess, stopping only when Gregor needed help landing or taking off. I was still on the job, though only nominally, listlessly taking on a few other flights at a time, resenting even those small distractions from my ongoing interface with Gregor.

I even won a few matches, though Gregor claims it was because he was feeling so discombobulated by me. In between he asked me question after question about myself, my life, my childhood, everything. And slowly, very slowly, I began to open up to him and tell him my story. Something I had never done for anyone.

Finally, after about a week of long meandering conversations and sleepless nights filled with chess and confidences, he admitted he had become aware of me about a year ago, the first time I navigated a landing for him. He said he had been impressed by my cleverness and my voice, and had finally screwed up the courage to ask me my name after months of dithering.

He said I have a reputation amongst the pilots, for my "sexy smooth voice," and the outrageousness of my flight commands.

You're right about using your real voice with us Helena, he said. We'll do whatever maneuver you ask of us, no matter how crazy.

We? I said. I wasn't sure why, but I didn't like that he had said "we."

Me, he said. And I felt a twinge that somehow traveled from my heart, down my spine, and into a part of me I didn't even know existed.

Then Gregor did three things that changed my life forever:

He told me he was in love with me.

He told me his own story.

And he began to tell me the rest of mine.