The voice echoed in my head, metallic and cold, as if spoken from deep inside the circuits now humming beneath my skin.
Welcome back, Subject-09.
I staggered to my feet. The floor beneath me was a grated steel mesh, lit from below by a faint crimson glow. Beyond the walls, faint vibrations throbbed, like the pulse of some massive machine.
"Where… where am I?" My voice came out distorted—layered with static, hollow, not entirely human.
No answer.
Instead, a data stream flickered across my vision, lines of glowing code cascading like falling water. Coordinates, temperature readings, system integrity scans. The information wasn't on a screen—it was inside me, projected across my new eyes.
I wasn't just in a machine.
I was the machine.
Footsteps.
I froze, the servomotors in my legs whining faintly as I shifted. A figure emerged through the haze of red light—tall, armored, their face hidden behind a visor that glowed with shifting blue symbols.
"Unit-09 is active," the stranger said into a comm link. "Stabilization successful. Prep it for retrieval."
Retrieval?
My mind screamed in protest. I wasn't some… thing to be retrieved. I opened my mouth—static crackled instead of words. My hands clenched, metal fingers digging grooves into the steel railing.
"Careful," the armored figure warned, lifting a weapon that hummed with energy. "Its core consciousness is unstable."
Core consciousness.
They were talking about me.
A sudden flood of memory fragments crashed through my mind—images of battles I hadn't fought, commands I hadn't obeyed, blood spilled by hands that were now mine. None of it belonged to Dr. Kieran. And yet it was there, burned into my thoughts like scars.
I had been exiled from my body.
And I had awoken in the shell of a weapon.
Somewhere above us, alarms blared.
The armored figure stiffened, pressing a hand to their ear. "Intruders? Here? Impossible—this sector was sealed decades ago."
The lights flickered. The ground shook. A distant explosion ripped through the silence, showering sparks from the ceiling.
And for the first time since opening my new eyes, I realized:
This wasn't a laboratory.
It was a battlefield.