VOLUME 1: THE SCRAPYARD

  CHAPTER 1: INSUFFICIENT POWER

  He didn’t remember pain. Pain is a reaction of nerve endings, a signal of damage to protein-based matter. And that matter was gone.

  The last thing his human memory archive retained was colored by fear: the sharp metallic shriek of a snapped cable in Workshop No. 7, a blinding spark overhead, and a brief, cold thought: "Too late." He didn’t even have time to cover his head with his hands.

  The darkness lasted an eternity. Or perhaps a second. Time had lost its meaning.

  Then it began... the boot sequence.

  Consciousness did not return as a soft awakening from sleep, but as a hard, forced launch of a complex operating system on damaged hardware. Lines of code scrolled before his inner sight, in the void. Strangely, he understood their essence.

  > CORE INITIALIZATION [CONSTRUCTOR]... SUCCESS> MEMORY BANK CHECK... [SECTOR 4-9 ERROR: PERSONALITY DATA CORRUPTED]> SENSOR CALIBRATION...

  He tried to inhale. Reflexively, in a panic. His chest should have expanded, his lungs should have drawn in cold air. But nothing happened.

  There was no breathing. No heartbeat, that familiar metronome of life that thumped in his ears during moments of fear. The silence inside was deafening. Only the barely audible, monotonous hum of cooling fans deep within his torso.

  He opened his eyes.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  It was not like human vision. There was no soft focus. Optical sensor lenses clicked sharply, adjusting the aperture. The world exploded with a stream of visual data. The image was grainy, in gray-orange tones, oversaturated with sharpness.

  Semi-transparent interface windows floated over reality, framing objects: [Scrap Metal], [Unknown Alloy], [Biomass: None].

  He was lying on his back. The sky hung low over him—the color of dirty cotton wool, torn by scars of green lightning.

  He tried to get up. The brain sent a signal to muscles, but hydraulic pistons responded instead.Whirrr-clack.

  Marcus (the name surfaced in the memory cache, tied to an image of an old plastic badge) slowly raised his hand to his face. He expected to see skin, dirt, calluses, traces of grease.

  He saw a skeleton.

  His hand consisted of dark, scratched metal segments. The joints were exposed ball hinges. Instead of veins and tendons, bundles of multi-colored wires in transparent insulation stretched along the "bones."

  He clenched his fist. Metal clinked against metal. No tactile sensations. No warmth. He felt only the resistance of materials.

  Horror, cold and rational, washed over him. He wanted to scream, to vent this terror, but the attempt to speak produced only distorted static noise from a damaged vocal emitter:"— Kkhh-zzz..."

  A flashing red symbol flickered before his eyes, obstructing his view:

  > ? SYSTEM WARNING> * STATUS: Emergency> * POWER: 8% (Estimated runtime: 42 minutes)> * INTERFACE: Network Offline. GPS Unavailable.> * DIAGNOSIS: Critical chassis wear.

  He was a machine. And an old, broken machine at that, thrown out to die.

  He remembered who he used to be. The factory. Hands covered in grease. He hadn't been a soldier, hadn't been a hero. He was a technician. He knew how to listen to equipment. He knew how a dying bearing sounded and how burnt insulation smelled.

  Now he himself was a set of bearings and insulation. And his internal diagnostic screamed: "Find energy. You are shutting down. This is the end."

  His gaze fell on his own legs. Thin, walking actuators covered in rust. He stood atop a massive pile of garbage, and all around, as far as the eye could see, stretched an ocean of metal corpses.