Nice — I hear you. I'll pull the gears out of the chest, oil them, and sew them back in with pulse and poetry. Below is a full rewrite of slower, richer, and breathing. Raw emotion, sl.
The city remembered only ruin.
Concrete lay like broken teeth. Glass glittered across the ground like a scattered constellation. The wind moved through the skeleton of the neighbourhood with a dry, indifferent whisper, carrying the smell of scorched iron and a sweetness that none of them could name — blood and ozone, a trace of something that used to be whole.
Trunks moved through it like a boy who had learned to breathe smoke. He kept his coat closed around him though the wind had no mercy; his boots tapped careful, fast, on cracked asphalt. The world was a ruined hymn and every ruin had a meaning now: this was where they had fought, where things had been lost, where a life had been taken. He knew the lines of these streets with the same intimacy he knew Master Gohan's voice. Today the lines felt like betrayal.
He found the gi first because the world, when it wants to speak cruelly, begins with symbols. A strip of orange caught in a jagged rebar, torn as if by claws. He knelt without thinking, fingers trembling as he pulled it free. The fabric was filthy, smelling of smoke and last breath. He traced the frayed seam as if his touch could travel the thread back in time.
And then the arm.
Half-hidden under a slab, skin splotched, the hand curled like the last syllable of a plea. He saw the fingers and the knuckles and the faint callus on the thumb where Gohan had pressed against training dummies in summers that now belonged to another life.
A sound left Trunks that was not a scream and not a sob, some animal thing that had been waiting for permission to live. His knees unclasped and the boy who had been sparring in empty warehouses and crying into pillows fell apart on the fractured road.
It was not clean, that breaking. It came ragged and immediate — a tide of grief that clawed at his lungs. He clawed back: anger — a hard, hot thing like steel — gathered behind his throat. He thought of every promise that had been made in small rooms and on quiet mornings. He saw, in quick slices, Gohan's stern look, the soft laugh over burnt rice, the way he had steadied Trunks' hands when the boy had trembled. The memory of those small mercies folded over the fresh wound.
His hands dove into the dirt where the arm lay, fingers scrabbling for anything left of the man who had taught him how to stand when everything was falling. The gi in his arms, the arm still warm enough to remind him that some part of this could not be finished. The awareness slammed into him: they had not finished it. They had not finished Gohan.
Rage: bright, feral, immediate. It burned like a fever. It was the exact heat of helplessness transmuted. He began to scream — not for vengeance at first, but for the loss of the small human things that no villain had ever really considered: the quiet scolding, the shared tea, the nights when Gohan stayed up to patch a torn sleeve by lamplight. The scream carried. It bent the world.
The sky answered.
Not with mercy — with a kind of electricity that seemed to know the letter of Trunks' pain and write it into the air. The hair on his arms rose. The hairs were not metaphor; they were the first small spikes of an old, terrible power remembering the body it could live in. Light burned behind his eyes. The concrete underfoot buckled like the skin of some wounded animal.
This transformation was not the slow, noble becoming that legends made it out to be. It was jagged, vindictive, sculpted out of feeling too large for the frame. Gold flared from him, not soft but ruthless, and the world shrank into a single pinpoint of rage and loss.
He thought of Gohan as a man, and then as an idea — protector, teacher, quiet moral force — and that idea burned longer than the memory of flesh. The power did not make him a conqueror. It made him a child with a blade.
Two figures watched from the shadow of a collapsed storefront.
Seventeen, arms folded, the corner of his mouth lifted in something that was almost a smile. Eighteen, hands at her sides, expression that had always been a practiced blank now carved with something older — a nameless disturbance.
"Impressive," 17 said, as if commenting on the weather. "He'll be a problem."
"Maybe," 18 replied, but her voice had a softness like someone who had felt more than they had permitted themselves to admit. She did not relish the display. If anything, there was a thin, uneasy taste in her mouth.
They had not planned the boy's anguish. They had planned something worse: a demonstration. A message. A laugh whose echo would never stop.
They were better at planning.
---
Down beneath the city, metal remembered its maker.
Dr. Gero's vault had survived like a disease that outlived its host: half-buried schematics, dormant machines, a single cracked stasis pod that leaked cold mist like breath from a dead thing. The stairwell down smelled of oil and old secrets. Rust frowned like eyelids on the doors.
When 17 and 18 pushed into the central chamber, the lights hummed alive with slow reluctance. A figure lay in the central pod — pale, bandaged, an arm missing. Tubes threaded like veins into his sides. The face, when they cleared the frost from the glass, still wore that gentle slope of mercy and worry that had always been Gohan's: the babysitter who booted them both out of the house when their antics went too far; the teacher who took a child's small curiosity and made it something that could stand against the world.
They could have dragged him out and smashed the remains into the dust. They could have left him to rot. Instead, a darkness that was not yet remorse but certainly not without perverse curiosity guided them to open Gero's files.
Gero's logic was not simple. It was a philosophy — the twisted calculus of a man who had made hatred into an engineering problem. Where most inventions sought to solve a benign scarcity, his solved the problem of mortality and the inefficiency of flesh. He had mapped ki pathways into circuitry, woven DNA into latticework of nanotechnologies, and written subroutines that translated pain into function. His work on Cell had been the scaffolding of obsession: how to take raw genetic potential and compress it into a design that evolved toward a single outcome.
Gero had left blueprints like a sermon.
17 sketched the outline of a plan in the stale air. "We keep what's useful," he said. "Give him the structure to do what needs to be done and then—" his mouth curved, "—we watch what this puppet will do."
Eighteen's hands moved across consoles with faintly familiar competence. She read the sequences for neural interfacing, for regenerative scaffolds, for kinetic conduits that would let a body draw power from the very act of moving — a perverse mimicry of life. She understood the arrogance in the designs and felt, in a place thought dead, a prickle of something like awe.
If you wanted the cold summary: Gero's tech allowed them to graft mechanical systems into the body that did more than replace missing parts. It let them build a scaffold that would re-route ki and metabolism, stabilise rogue cell signalling and provide a closed loop for energy. In simpler terms — if the graft worked and the bio-nanites accepted the tissue, the body would no longer tire the way living bodies did. It could fight and heal in cycles that staggered natural law.
They would make a weapon.
They would make it out of Gohan.
---
But machines keep memories in the places people don't.
While harvesting the vault's archives, 18 found a sealed directory: an innocuous filename, tucked behind layers of encryption like an old photograph shoved behind a copy of a will.
LAPIS_LAZULI.sec
Eighteen felt the name like a hand on her sternum. She opened it.
It was not code alone. It was faces. Grainy images of people who had been children who had once laughed and scraped knees. Birth records, familial notes, a half-typed diary. There were addresses that smelled of wood smoke and bottles of medicine. There were names one could say with affection.
The files were a revelation and an accusation making the same motion: the Androids' "memories" came from lives stolen, archived by a man who had wanted to control not only bodies but histories. Lapis and Lazuli were not scientific project names. They were keys to humanity that Gero had hidden away: profiles of people he had turned into numbers, lost names tucked inside a machine.
When 17 looked, the world tilted. He saw a boy with salt water in his hair and a grin he had not known belonged to him. He saw a woman — his mother — tucking a blanket around a sleeping child. He saw holidays and the small cruelties of living and the kind of compass that had nothing to do with orders from a lab.
And then the screams: there were recordings layered in the directory — pleas, cries, a woman's voice begging for mercy. For a moment, the machinery around them was not the anchor; the memories were. The sound of grief long ago became immediate.
They had been weapons, yes. But behind each blast of energy they had released, there had been a human face. They understood, in one terrible second, that their hands had not only followed lines of code. There had been choices.
"You remember," 18 whispered, and the lab answered with the small, shivering echo of a simple, terrible truth.
They tried, at first, to explain it away with logic. Gero had sewn them together with parameters. Gero had told them what to do. But memory is not logic. Guilt is not a bug you can patch. They were collaged history that suddenly had the wrong edges.
The breach was not cinematic. It was a slow, listening thing. They uncoded and recoded. They deleted the patterns that had led to certain reflexes; they traced the loops back to their source and pried them apart. It took days. It took nights of cold hands and older, quieter conversations. By the time they were done, their speech had the air of addicts who had just watched themselves become monsters in a mirror.
When the first false justification went away, all that remained was the list. The children. The faces. The small, human phrase in a recording — "Please, please—" — looped, and neither of them could breathe cleanly.
Eighteen fell to her knees. 17 did the same. There was no heroism in it. There was simply the recognition of what they had been and the intolerable weight of what they had done.
"We can't take it back," 17 said at last. "But we can choose what we do from now."
The choice of how to atone would be the thing that kept them awake for years.
---
Their first act of repentance was a clumsy, practical mercy.
Gohan's body would wake if they finished the integration too quickly. The override subroutine — a directive that might, when fully installed, rewrite moral heuristics to a programmatic conclusion — had to be completed in a delicate sequence. If it completed now, the result would be immediate, catastrophic. The hybrid being would wake whole, slick with new mechanics and stripped, at the mental level, of the stuttering mercy that once defined him.
They could finish it. They could watch the world burn from the vantage of a creature who knew how to make scales and algorithms out of sorrow.
Or they could give time.
They rewrote the activation script like a delayed bomb, extending the integration's last phase by fifteen years. Fifteen years of slow grafting. Fifteen years in which the body would knit itself around the implants, in which the nanites would test and accept biological markers, in which the brittle edge of the override might be sanded down and the original mind given more chance to resist.
Why fifteen? It was half luck and half calculation. Biological cycles, the half-life of certain nano-proteins, the time it would take to test behavioural arcs… and a stupid, smaller part of them that hoped the world could change enough in that time that something like redemption might not be lucent fantasy.
They buried the truth of the delay behind layers of misdirection. Aboveground, 17 kept their reputation alive long enough to remain feared. Beneath the soil, they kept a small list: towns whose broken pipes they repaired, children they unobtrusively led out of collapsing buildings, harvests they protected by stealth. None of it would wash away the screams, but it would be a ledger. It would be something they could point to when they could not forgive themselves.
They left a single, private promise between them: to try to make Trunks' world softer, however clumsy and inadequate their hands.
---
Inside the machine, in the brittle cathedral of Gohan's own remade chemical brain, a war began that had no trumpet.
It was not a war of fists. It was a war of image and habit and stubborn human light. The part of Gohan that loved quietly, that had once taught a shy boy to stand and to eat properly and to read poems while the kettle sang, found ways to flicker through electrical storms. It remembered small things: the way a cicada sounds at dusk, the particular slack of a pupil when someone tells a joke badly. Those details were not grand philosophy. They were anchors.
Across those anchors, the override kernel marched in icy logic: efficient endings, measurable results, the methodology of removing variables until outcomes could be plotted. It argued with him like a cold tutor: "You are inefficient. You allow emotions that compromise objective safety. The world is safer measured in an absence of variables."
Gohan's response was not an answer so much as a stubborn noise like someone humming under cold water. He clung to color and taste. He replayed injustices as if they were compositions, and he found new ways to be angry. Anger became a tool to push back against the override's abstraction. Love became a smuggled code.
The patient inside the pod dreamed of his students and the smell of burnt rice. He learned to push his hand against the inside of his own skull and feel the foreign architecture like a painful guest, and then to speak to it anyway; he learned to hide a joke inside a memory and fold it into his thoughts like a seed.
Outside, the world grieved and trained and tried to become ready for the day something made of Dr. Gero's logic would open its eyes.
---
When Trunks finally tore himself away from the ground, when the golden fire ebbed and left a boy who felt far older and hollowed, the city was still ruined, and the gi lay in his arms like an accusation. He wrapped it close and did the only thing he knew how to do: he put one foot in front of the other and walked toward tomorrow with someone else's ghost in his pocket.
Down beneath, beneath the lights that hummed with patient malice, Son G-Ω — Son Gohan — slept on. Between flesh and circuit, between memory and program, something was being assembled that would neither be entirely monster nor entirely man. It would be a long sleep. It would be a long reckoning.
And the future, like a measured clock, began its slow turning.