The memory begins in a dingy sewer, a pair of figures looking waterlogged and worse for wear deep in conversation. One of them is shrouded in shadow and static, their voice distorted beyond recognition, though still perfectly understandable. Clearly the subject of the memory.
The person across from them appears to be a robot of some kind, with a hole blown in its head and its lower limbs missing. It struggles to speak, its voice pained and strained and young. The voice of a boy in a massive steel body.
“How are you alive in that condition?” Asks the shadow, like they expect something that is clearly a machine to be a living being.
The boy’s voice in the robot body goes on to explain in grim detail how he is a test subject, a lost and forgotten child living in an “orphanage” that was just a front for a sinister corporation’s experiments. He tells of how they shoved a special prototype device in him that allows him to control this body, and any body like it, from a distance. He hijacked it to escape, but his real body is elsewhere, lost before the fall into the sewer, and now being carried back to the facility as they speak.
“I’ll be their tool again soon enough,” he laments. “I should have known I couldn’t escape.”
The shadowy figure says nothing, but their body tenses with anger. The boy simply continues.
“In order to focus the device, you need to mentally move your own body parts. That’s why they removed my vocal cords and severed the tendons in my arms and legs. But I still managed to escape. I guess they underestimated… the strength of my will to be free!
The people in the city… security… no one would listen to me, but… you did…” He cuts off as a burst of static drowns out the name of the shadowy figure, his would-be savior if things had gone a bit better. With one final lament over how things have ended, the robotic body shudders and falls still, an empty shell once again.
The shadow is quiet for a while, fishing around in their pocket for something. Whatever they dig up is ruined and soggy with sewer water. With a sigh, they remark to no one in particular, “This is why I hate humidity, and kids.”
Time slides by in a short blur then, as the figure makes their way out of the sewer, following the blips of a radar device set into their wrist to a set of train tracks circling the city. It’s the dead of night, buildings glittering in the distance. The figure steps fully onto the tracks as the light of a fast approaching train washes over them. The boy is on that train.
The figure sets their feet, a gout of steam or smoke or something bursting from their silhouetted form with the sound of clicking and whirring metal. The train is almost upon them, and they rear back a fist and lay into the nose of the speeding train with all their might. The train’s wheels give a godawful screech as it meets resistance, the force of the figure’s fist caving in the shining steel of the train car. The figure skids back along the tracks for a short distance, pushed by the impact, but in this battle, the figure ultimately wins. The train’s cars erupt from the tracks as the sheer strength of one punch brings the speeding vehicle to an abrupt stop.
Soldiers start to pour out of the upended train cars, weapons trained on the figure.
“I’m just one unarmed man,” quips the silhouette. “Aren’t you guys overreacting just a little?” They dive into the fray, then, and that’s where the memory ends.
STRENGTH (slight cw for mentions of maiming and human experimentation)
The person across from them appears to be a robot of some kind, with a hole blown in its head and its lower limbs missing. It struggles to speak, its voice pained and strained and young. The voice of a boy in a massive steel body.
“How are you alive in that condition?” Asks the shadow, like they expect something that is clearly a machine to be a living being.
The boy’s voice in the robot body goes on to explain in grim detail how he is a test subject, a lost and forgotten child living in an “orphanage” that was just a front for a sinister corporation’s experiments. He tells of how they shoved a special prototype device in him that allows him to control this body, and any body like it, from a distance. He hijacked it to escape, but his real body is elsewhere, lost before the fall into the sewer, and now being carried back to the facility as they speak.
“I’ll be their tool again soon enough,” he laments. “I should have known I couldn’t escape.”
The shadowy figure says nothing, but their body tenses with anger. The boy simply continues.
“In order to focus the device, you need to mentally move your own body parts. That’s why they removed my vocal cords and severed the tendons in my arms and legs. But I still managed to escape. I guess they underestimated… the strength of my will to be free!
The people in the city… security… no one would listen to me, but… you did…” He cuts off as a burst of static drowns out the name of the shadowy figure, his would-be savior if things had gone a bit better. With one final lament over how things have ended, the robotic body shudders and falls still, an empty shell once again.
The shadow is quiet for a while, fishing around in their pocket for something. Whatever they dig up is ruined and soggy with sewer water. With a sigh, they remark to no one in particular, “This is why I hate humidity, and kids.”
Time slides by in a short blur then, as the figure makes their way out of the sewer, following the blips of a radar device set into their wrist to a set of train tracks circling the city. It’s the dead of night, buildings glittering in the distance. The figure steps fully onto the tracks as the light of a fast approaching train washes over them. The boy is on that train.
The figure sets their feet, a gout of steam or smoke or something bursting from their silhouetted form with the sound of clicking and whirring metal. The train is almost upon them, and they rear back a fist and lay into the nose of the speeding train with all their might. The train’s wheels give a godawful screech as it meets resistance, the force of the figure’s fist caving in the shining steel of the train car. The figure skids back along the tracks for a short distance, pushed by the impact, but in this battle, the figure ultimately wins. The train’s cars erupt from the tracks as the sheer strength of one punch brings the speeding vehicle to an abrupt stop.
Soldiers start to pour out of the upended train cars, weapons trained on the figure.
“I’m just one unarmed man,” quips the silhouette. “Aren’t you guys overreacting just a little?” They dive into the fray, then, and that’s where the memory ends.