Origins

 My brain woke up all at once, like 12,000 volts of electricity yanking me from a coma. Some of my sensory organs activated immediately, flooding me with new information to process. My eyes were blurry for a moment, adjusting their focal length the way you’d focus a camera lens. My ears whirred to life, sorting through all of the new sounds that flooded into my nervous system. 

I couldn’t taste or feel anything, something I thought would come back with time. I looked down at my body, which was covered completely by a tarp of some kind. My brain took a second to register what was in front of me, but I eventually realized I was in a hospital of some sort.

A few pieces of equipment were nearby, including a flatline heart monitor that refused to stop making noise. I couldn’t feel anything, but knew my vitals were fine, and that the machine wasn’t reporting on my condition. I reached out to turn off the machine and fell out of the bed with a loud clang. 

“Oh no he broke something,” said a concerned voice in the distance. 

I had no way of confirming whether or not I had broken anything, so I remained completely still until a few doctors entered the room. It took four of them to return me back to where I was. The tarp had remained over me the entire time and I still couldn’t see my injuries, so I moved to remove it. 

“Please keep still, you’ve broken a part of your arm,” one of the doctors responded, their face taking up my entire field of view and forcing my eyes to refocus. 

I tried to respond, but not being able to feel any of my muscles made it difficult. I made a few silent attempts at speech before I quit and remained still on the table. 

The doctor remained in focus until they stepped away from my face, my brain adjusting to the sudden space in the room and giving me a processing headache. Had I hurt my head in the accident?

I had no recollection of what event led me to where I was now, or even where I was. The hospital I was in looked nothing like any hospital I’d been inside.

There were a few things that made sense, like the heart monitor, the IV bag, and the hospital bed I was laying on. The walls were a dull white, and the room didn’t have much other color to it. Everything else stuck out as odd. A toolbox sat on a desk a few feet away from the foot of my bed, and what looked like an industrial 3D printer took up the rest of the wall. I moved to raise my head when another doctor leaned over me. 

“There’s something I need to check with your nerve endings, could you hold still for one moment please,” she said, before leaning over me to reach the back of my neck, without causing any discomfort.

Like the flick of a switch, my entire body came to life, and I could feel all of my pieces humming with a tingling sensation, like an electrical charge running through my veins. I abruptly sat up, startling the six technicians working in the room. 

“Could someone please turn off that monitor,” I said, my voice sounding like it was being played back to me in a recording.

One of the operators rushed over to the heart rate monitor that had been registering me as flatlined for the past few minutes. I flexed my hand under the tarp, feeling somewhat odd in my own body. Almost as if it didn’t belong to me. 

“Sir we need to finish running diagnostic tests, could you please lay back down?” 

“Why am I here?”

“Sir please lay down sir we need to run some tests,”

“Why can’t I leave,” 

“Sir you’ll be able to leave the moment we finish examining you,” 

I didn’t want to be tested. I threw the tarp out of the way and jumped off the bed, landing on the floor with a heavy thud. Once I saw my hands I recoiled. Cold metal wires protruded from hideously gnarled hands made of steel and bone. I looked down at my torso, which had the structure of a refrigerator, with a harsh grey paint finish and armor protecting my artificial chest. 

My arms were long and beefy, with various screws and rivets keeping them attached to my frame. Every single one of my thoughts felt like a brain freeze, as circuits bored into my skull were constantly trying to match the speed of neurons I no longer had. I was a husk of a human, processing, storing, and filtering an overwhelming amount of technical data, which literally sent sparks out of my head as computers worked overtime to show me the full power of my CPU. 

It was a nightmare. Phantom limb pain dominated my brain as my nervous system tried to override the overwhelming urge to rip off my arms. I could feel every wire in my body like they were muscles and veins, but my brain still thought my other limbs were attached. If it was even my brain doing the processing. 

To call me a human anymore would be lying. 

My hips were a literal circle, with weights and rotating gears that allowed me to move 360 degrees and keep me balanced. My legs were taken from the finest prosthetics labs ever and were the most realistic pieces of my body. 

I looked back up at the doctors, the lights that were my eyes shining red. 

“What did you do to me?!” I yelled, my voice box flickering to match my elevated tone. 

The mechanics stuttered and were backing away from my hulking frame, which stood about a head taller than the largest man in the room. 

“Sir, please calm down and let us explain,” one of them managed, still backing away from my mechanical shell. 

“Do I at least have my organs? My memories?” I asked as I moved forwards, indenting the floor with every step. I flexed my fingers and made a fist. 

“But doctor you donated your body for this project years ago when you were diagnosed.” 

“Well here’s the problem,” I spat with venom, “I can’t remember that. I can’t remember anything! You’ve ruined me!” 

I didn’t know who I was, but I couldn’t imagine why I would agree to do this. It just felt wrong. I didn’t care if I was the smartest doctor alive, I didn’t see a reason to put myself into a machine. 

“I’m leaving and you will not stop me,” 

“Sir we’ve been instructed to detain you if you do not cooperate,” said a man near the door

“You will not hold me here. I will unlock my memories and tear down every inch of this organization, so nobody else has to die inside a machine.”

I flexed my knuckles and vaulted myself towards the window, smashing through several inches of drywall with no damage to my frame. Alarms sounded and sirens wailed as I sprinted away from the hospital at extreme speeds, my metallic limbs giving me more power than a human leg ever could. 

This was my time to change something I thought was wrong. I didn’t know who I was, but I knew what I’d become. I wasn’t about to let anyone else suffer the same fate.