My hands gripped the steering wheel as I rolled to a stop at the red light. Out here in the countryside, we lived away from the city rats and refugee sprawl. After the sea swallowed the coastal cities, we sold what land we had and moved to the western edge of North Carolina. Thank God we did. The plagues came next. Then the riots. After that, the cities became every man for himself.

  Further west, there was still some order. A little piece of the world my old man used to talk about. Peaceful, he’d say. No chrome. No corps running every aspect of your life. His father before him? He remembered a world without cyberware and soul-splitting tech. Just dirt, sweat, and whatever faith you could carry.

  I hated the corps. Or as my kid sister and her friends call them—corpos. Every new generation trims the fat off words like they're optimizing speech patterns. I swear she called me something the other day I still don’t understand.

  “Choom! Hey, choom!” Her voice shot from the backseat like a laser blast.

  “Azzy… you know I hate when you call me that.” I glanced at her through the mirror. “I'm your big brother. The one graciously hauling your butt to school so you can get a proper education.”

  Schooling was still a thing out west—barely. I had to drive her 25 miles into town so she could get her daily dose of ‘damn learning.’

  “Why don’t you have to go to school, Alex?” she chirped, way too casual for such a loaded question.

  I bit down on the urge to snap. The truth still stung. I dropped out to help the family farm survive. No other choice.

  “We’ve talked about this a thousand times,” I sighed. “I had to help Ma and Pa keep things running. And Pa? Man can’t even open a terminal without calling it a ‘space toaster.’”

  I checked the mirror again—Azzy was trying not to crack a grin.

  “I know. Still not fair…” she muttered.

  She wasn’t talking about me, not really. Ever since they installed that ‘learning enhancement’ chip in her, she’d been maturing faster. Talking more like an adult. Sometimes I wondered if I was just dumb—or if the tech was moving too fast to keep up with.

  I barely noticed we’d crossed into town until the buildings started crowding the horizon. We passed a construction site—a skeletal husk of steel and prefab walls. A sign promised a Megacomplex capable of housing 128,000 people. I didn’t like it. More coastal refugees flooding in everyday meant more concrete boxes, more tech, more everything.

  Good thing I’d be forty by the time this thing opened up. Maybe I’d be long gone. I never liked the cities anyway.

  We pulled up outside the school. Kids everywhere—laughing, pushing, yelling. I envied them. They were born into a world full of shiny tech and second chances. I’d been denied both. The docs said I couldn’t get cyberware because I hadn’t had a neural prep implant as a kid. Which was funny, since that tech didn’t even exist when I was a kid.

  Azzy’s eyes dropped to the floorboard. “I don’t wanna go,” she mumbled.

  “Come on,” I said, stepping out and opening her door. She glared at me like I’d insulted her cereal brand.

  “Spooky,” she hissed, curling away from the door.

  “I know the kids are mean,” I said, crouching down, “but you gotta be tougher. Be kind, but don’t let them step on you. If they give you trouble, just tell them your crazy brother’ll knock their teeth in.”

  I pulled a face like I’d gone full cyberpsycho. She cracked up.

  “You’re such a gonk,” she snorted, launching herself into a hug.

  “Come on. I’ll walk you to the door.”

  We crossed the street, hand in hand. I spotted some punks tagging a wall nearby—gangs, more and more of ’em lately. Like roaches after a flood. They preyed on the working folk. Leeching life from people just trying to keep the lights on.

  At the school door, I knelt and hugged her again. For some reason, I didn’t want to let go.

  Before she stepped inside, I pulled one last trick from my sleeve. “Hey Azzy—why don’t stars ever do their homework?”

  She tilted her head. “I dunno. Why?”

  “Because they’re too busy shining in class.”

  I pulled out a cheap magnetic star I’d found in a bin at some rundown outlet and stuck it on her lunchbox. She lit up like it was made of gold.

  “Love you, Bigby,” she said, squeezing tight.

  “Love ya, Az. I’ll grab you something good on the way back, alright?”

  I watched her disappear into the crowd. My smile faded the second she was gone.

  I got back in the car and pulled away from the school. The road home stretched quiet and cracked. I wondered what snack she’d want. Something sweet, probably. She always picked sweet stuff.

  The soft hum of the road fades into static. My hands, once gripping the wheel of a beat-up truck, twitch slightly in the dirt. Asphalt gives way to grit and rubble. The memory fizzles out like an old holotape on rewind.

  Then—darkness.

  No light. No noise. Just the thrum of foreign machinery pulsing through my spine. I felt like a ghost caught between two frequencies.

  I remember the heat. Sparks. Voices, speaking in slurred, half-drunk slang I couldn’t decode. Hands grabbing me, dragging me like a busted fridge down metal steps. Then? Nothing. Static again.

  I didn’t dream—if I did, I don't remember it. Just a hollow feeling in my chest and the sound of someone cheering in the dark.My eyes flickered back to life. HUD scrambled like bad TV reception. Internal diagnostics tried and failed to reboot my vitals. No pulse. No heartbeat. Just… system errors.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  I was lying on cold sheet metal. Grease pooled beneath my arm. My limbs felt like they were dipped in concrete.

  I wasn’t alone. A silhouette hunched over me, fiddling with something near my neck port. The glow of a cracked tablet reflected off his implants.

  He was hunched like a question mark, skin the color of old grease and stretched thin over his wiry frame. His torso looked like it had lost a fight with a welding torch—burn scars lacing over what used to be tattoos, now melted into abstract blobs. His jacket, some repurposed corpo lab coat dyed in motor oil, hung loose over his skeletal shoulders. It was torn at the sleeves, the edges singed and stained with blood that probably wasn’t all his.

  One eye was real. The other was a mess of bolted chrome plates and mismatched lenses, swiveling erratically as he adjusted some coil on Alex's neck port. The cybernetic half of his face twitches every few seconds, probably a bad connection in the neural wiring. Each twitch made a metal jaw plate grind against his teeth with a soft chkk sound, like a knife being sharpened.

  A rebreather mask hung crooked under his chin, more decorative than functional, rigged with colorful tubes that pulsed with glowing coolant or maybe just radioactive piss. His fingers were dirty and surgical—he moved like someone who took apart children’s toys for fun and never put them back together. His nails were chipped and black, some replaced entirely with tiny tools—one was a soldering iron, another a neural jack, and a third looked suspiciously like a drug injector.

  He muttered to himself with a voice like static through a busted speaker—raspy and stuttered. The words were half-drowned in glitchy laughter, like he wasn’t sure if this was work or a game.

  “Looks like this one’s finally juicin’ up…” he chuckled, tapping the side of Alex’s temple like knocking on a vending machine. “Hope ya got a fight-or-flight protocol, tin-man. You're up next.”

  Then he leaned in, and you could see the rows of micro-scars lining his cheeks—implants removed, rewired, and jammed back in, all done by his own shaky hands.

  He reeked of ozone, copper, and something chemical—probably home-brew stims—and his breath hit your face like a kicked car battery.

  Why do I know all of that, I have my memories and I should be freaking the fuck out, but I am not. I tried to speak at least trying to imagine my own voice coming through my OWN vocal cords.

  “Whe- whe- where am- am I?” I sounded in defeat with my metallic voice that sounded more like a mono-tone hum that spoke with each syllable I mustered.

  “Holy shit, droid, you got a matrix in there?” He squinted, staring at me with a twisted grin, his breath rank as he leaned closer, eyes scanning every inch of my chassis. I couldn’t move—like my body had frozen, every part of me locked in place. When I tried to speak, he jabbed something into my neck. It wasn’t just that my urge to speak died—it felt like I couldn’t even disobey him if I wanted to.

  What the fuck was happening?

  He was still poking around inside me—casually, carelessly—as if I were just another broken bot on a slab. But I felt it. Not just the cold touch of tools on metal—pain. Sharp. Invasive. Wrong.

  How was I feeling about this? I wasn’t flesh anymore. I was steel, circuits, wires—my blood probably coolant and lithium. And yet, every prod felt like knives under skin I didn’t even have.

  This body—mine or not—belonged to me. Bone or carbon, flesh or steel, it was still mine. And he was violating it.

  Something snapped. Not just inside me—in the system.

  A surge stormed through my chest, and suddenly—crack—a bolt of electric light erupted from my chassis and slammed him in the head. He staggered, eyes wide with pain and disbelief. I didn’t think so. I lunged.

  I grabbed something—tool, scrap, it didn’t matter—and tackled him. Rage, raw and primal, boiled over. I brought the object down. Again. And again. He raised his arms to shield himself. Useless. I didn’t stop. Couldn’t. I didn’t want to.

  All the experiments. The prodding. The watching. The owning.

  I kept going until his breath was gone and his arms stopped moving.

  Then—silence.

  I froze.

  “Sir…?” The word slipped out, like a default setting I couldn’t turn off. No response. Blood poured from his skull like paint pooling on cold tile. I looked at my hands, ready to drop the weapon—only to realize there was nothing to drop. Just blood. My hands, empty, soaked in him.

  I stepped back, heart pounding. Wait—heart? Am I breathing?

  I panicked, dropped to my knees, checked his pulse. Nothing. Still warm. Too warm.

  I staggered away, breath quickening like a runaway engine. I ran.

  Didn’t think so. Didn’t look. Just ran. Anywhere was better than there.

  I killed him. I killed him.

  He was the first. Would he be the last?

  The corridor blurred around me until—light. Noise. Not alarms. Not footsteps. Chanting.

  I ran. I didn’t care where—I just needed away. Away from the body, away from the blood, away from what I’d done. The corridor narrowed and twisted, the steel walls closing in like a maze built to trap rats.

  Then—light.

  And noise. Chanting.

  I didn’t slow down until I nearly barreled into a massive metal gate, patchworked from rusted scrap and armored plating. The sound was louder now, voices chanting in a rhythmic pulse like drums in a warzone. I pressed a hand to the gate and scanned it—looking for a handle, a latch, something I could use.

  But instead of a lock—light.

  A blinding beam shot down from the ceiling and vanished just as fast.

  [UNAUTHORIZED SCANNING DETECTED]

  “What the hell?” I spun around. No one. The voice was deep, metallic, almost growled through static. It wasn’t coming from a person—it was coming from somewhere. Maybe even that light.

  Before I could gather my thoughts, the gate groaned and started to rise with a mechanical screech that rattled my new bones. My eyes adjusted to what lay beyond—and my gut dropped.

  A pit. Not just any pit—an arena.

  Makeshift bleachers lined the walls, crowded with screaming weird looking people. Grease-slick hair, chrome implants, bloodshot eyes. They howled like hyenas over a battlefield of broken tech. Down in the pit, humanoid machines—mangled droids, cybernetic beasts—tore each other apart in brutal, gladiatorial combat. Sparks flew. Metal crunched. Oil sprayed like arterial blood.

  And before I could even think of running, a voice boomed over ancient loudspeakers.

  “LOOKS LIKE WE HAVE A NEW CHALLENGER!”

  The crowd exploded.

  Another gate slammed down behind me with a thunderous clang, sealing off my escape and shoving me forward. My feet stumbled into the dust-streaked floor of the arena as every eye in the coliseum zeroed in on me—just another toy thrown into the grinder.

  I wasn’t ready.

  But it didn’t matter.

  The fight had already begun.