by M. D. Cooper
Rika attempted to speak, but found that she couldn’t part her lips, or move her tongue—or her jaw. She had another minor freakout, and the man placed a hand on her stomach. The sensation of human contact was calming and welcome, though it felt oddly muted through the matte grey material that covered her.
“Easy now, you can’t talk anymore. I’ll get your Link back up in a bit. You’re probably hungry, too; let me give you something—not too much, mind you, I don’t want you to get queasy.”
He grabbed a tube from beyond her field of vision, and attached it to the port on her stomach. A strange sensation of her stomach filling came over her, though she had not swallowed anything.
“I’m really excited,” the man carried on as he detached the tube. “You’re the first of the SMI-2 scout models I’ve had the opportunity to build. They’re new and super-advanced. You’re going to love it, I bet.”
Rika desperately wished that she could tell this ‘assembler’ that she would love to have her limbs back, but that wasn’t possible. She made hmmmming noises out of her nose as loud as she could—which also felt weird, for reasons she couldn’t identify—but the man just patted her on the stomach again.
“Don’t worry, you’re in good hands. I’ve put a thousand of you guys into mechs. You’ll be up and ready to fight in no time. I have to admit,” he said with a hungry smile as his gaze swept up and down her body. “It’s gonna be handy to have you conscious, being my first scout mech and all. We can make sure the fit is good.”
The assembler touched her stomach again, running his hand across it. “This new carbon-polymer is really great, too. No more of you mech-meats having stinking skin that needs to be cleaned all the time. Pretty sexy, if you ask me. Too bad they sealed up all your useful bits down here.”
As he spoke, the man reached down and patted her crotch.
She jerked away, recoiling from his touch, though she could instantly feel that there was nothing there; she was smooth as a child’s doll between her legs. Rika lifted her pelvis up, trying to get a better look at this new indignity that had been bestowed upon her, while the man walked toward a rack and lifted up a long item, carefully unwrapping its plas covering.
Rage and shame mingled together. She was just a thing to him; an object that deserved neither respect, nor remorse.
If I had my limbs, I would—
“Oh,” he said while looking over his shoulder. “Once you’re built, don’t even think about hitting me or anything. You’ll regret it if you do.”
Rika couldn’t help it; she was already thinking of beating him senseless. Searing pain tore through her mind. She would have screamed if it had been possible, but she only managed to make loud, breathy grunts as her chest heaved from the shock.
The assembler chuckled. “Gets ‘em every time. You have a compliance chip in your head now, Mech A71F. You’ll never have an unsavory thought about anyone in charge of you again.”
He held up the object he had unwrapped. It was a leg, a long one. It looked strange, and Rika realized that was because it was shaped like a horse’s hind leg: double-kneed, with the first one bending backwards. The foot, if it could be called that, was more like a three-taloned claw, with two on the front, and one at the back for the heel. The limb appeared to be made of some sort of dark carbon-fiber material, and had overlapping ridges where the joints were located.
“Lay still,” the man said, and Rika felt her muscles stiffen and was suddenly unable to move. The assembler lifted the limb in the air and spoke again. “Raise your right leg.”
Rika found that she could move her leg now, and lifted it into the air.
“Think like you’re pointing your toes,” her assembler said, and then nodded with satisfaction when the cylindrical nub on the end of her thigh pointed straight out. He then slid her new leg into place. It covered her whole thigh and seated into the cylindrical protuberance with a satisfying ssshhhhuck sound.
“Looks pretty good,” the man said with a nod, and he lined up a pair of rods, each with two holes, across the thigh-section of the attachment. He shoved them into the holes, and Rika felt them slide through her leg. They must have passed right through her femur and out the other side. She realized that’s what the ports she had seen were for. He ran another pair of rods through the back of her leg using a set of ports she hadn’t spotted, and then turned toward a console.
“OK, I’m going to connect the leg to your nervous system, then we’re going to put it through some tests.”
The next hour was filled with Jack—which was the assembler’s name, as she finally learned—slowly adding limbs, and testing out every possible piece of functionality.
When he was done, she stood on the floor in front of the table, flexing the joints on the double-kneed legs that were attached to her thighs—which still felt awkward to walk on, but Jack said she’d get used to them before long.
Her left arm, thank the stars, was relatively normal, with a three-fingered hand at the end of a nondescript limb. Jack had explained that it was useful for a mech to have a hand so that it could do things like operate doors, or manage its own feed and waste tubes.
During the fitting, he had continually referred to her in the third person as ‘the mech’, and she slowly had begun to think of herself as nothing more than a piece of hardware. A part of her mind screamed that this was mental conditioning—likely enhanced by the compliance chip in her brain—but there was really nothing she could do about it.
Her right arm ended in what Jack referred to as a ‘multi-function weapons mount’. Currently a long sniper rifle was attached to it, and she practiced aiming while Jack lifted another object off the rack and set it on the table.
“This is a bit different. Since you don’t have skin to clean anymore, it’s going to fit a lot tighter—but it’s more flexible, too.”
He lifted up two pieces of a shell that would wrap around her torso and between her legs. It had an almost chitinous look to it, with the overlapping plating. Jack pressed the front piece against her torso, and studs protruding from the armor—for that’s what it was—sunk into the ports there. He repeated the process with the back, and then fiddled with an overlapping plate between her legs, finally driving a long shaft into her pelvic bone to pin the armor in place.
Next he placed chest armor over her upper torso, front and back, and anchored it into place as well. The chest armor was less flexible; only a small bulge revealed that under all the steel and carbon fiber, she was still a woman made of flesh and blood.
“Can the mech bend over?” Jack asked. “I want to test full range of motion. Touch your toes…or your claw-feet things…”
Rika did as instructed and bent over, touching the front claw on her right foot with her right hand, and then tapping the muzzle of the rifle against the other.
“OK, good,” Jack said. “Now twist side-to-side…OK…then arch your back.”
Rika followed the directions without pause. She had received two additional mental shocks from the compliance chip for responding too slowly, and she wasn’t about to let that happen again.
“Hmmm,” Jack muttered. “A bit of slippage when you arch backwards; but I suppose you won’t do that much, and your skin underneath can still stop a bullet.”
He turned to grab one more thing from the rack.
“And now for the mech’s grand finale!” He turned and showed Rika a featureless black oval, which he deftly split in two. “Your helmet.”
Rika twitched backward. The helmet looked like it belonged on a robot. It would take away the last appearance of her humanity, and make her nothing more than a machine.
“Don’t move,” Jack said sternly, and Rika found herself paralyzed once more. She blinked rapidly, the only movement she could make, as Jack placed the back and then the front of the oval around her head. It was dark inside, and her breathing was loud in her ears—until something snaked into her ear canals and all sound ceased. She felt something wrap around her neck, and knew she was
now completely entombed in her matte grey shell.
Rika realized that with the Link, she had access to basic information like the date and time. She saw that her sentence had only been commuted three days prior.
Three days…
It felt like a lifetime had passed; like the Rika then was another person.
All that remained now was Mech A71F.
The black interior of the helmet was replaced with a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the room. If Mech A71F hadn’t been locked stock-still by Jack’s order, she would have fallen to the ground as waves of dizziness came over her.
She watched with startling clarity in the dimly lit room as Jack disconnected the power cables that had been attached to her limbs, and placed a small, oval battery pack on her back. A readout appeared on her HUD showing that the external battery was 98% charged, and would last fourteen days at its current drain. Estimates appeared beneath that data showing that under strenuous activity, the battery would only last five days.
There was a brief snapping sound in her ears, and Mech A71F realized she could hear sounds in the room again, but not with her ears. The sounds were fed directly from the helmet’s sensor array into her brain.
“Can you hear me?” Jack asked.
“Good,” Jack replied. “Run full diagnostics.”
She wasn’t sure how to, at first; then suddenly she knew exactly what to do, and she ran the diagnostic routine on her armor. It showed green across the board, and she reported that to Jack.
“Good. Mech A71F, you are ready for combat. You will receive final subliminal training en route to the front. Exit this room and follow the route highlighted on your HUD. It will take you to your transport.”
DEKAR’S DREGS
STELLAR DATE: 07.02.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Dekar Station, Merchant Docking Ring
REGION: Outer Rim of Parsons System, Nietzschean Empire
Nine years later…
“Hey, Rika, you have a ship to load! Get your tinhead out of the stars and get that shit loaded, or I’ll dock your pay!” Bay Chief Hal yelled at Rika from two berths over.
“Not a tinhead anymore,” she muttered in response.
“You’ll always be a tinhead to me,” he called back.
“Damn, Chief Hal has good hearing,” Chase said from across the stack of pallets. “Guy can hear a mouse across the bay.”
Rika let out a long, silent breath, resisting the urge to walk over to Chief Hal and slap him clear across the bay.
Rika stepped up to the cargo stack and slid the rods protruding from her forearms into the slots on the top of the crate, hefting its three hundred kilos with ease.
She noted that the crate was stamped with a Nietzschean logo, indicating that it was confiscated material, seized as the spoils of war.
The war her people had lost.
‘My people’.
Rika no longer considered the Genevians ‘her people’ any more than she did their Nietzschean conquerors. The Genevians had taken her body from her, thrown her into desperate battle after desperate battle, and made her kill thousands of enemy troops.
All for an unwinnable war, where the high command squandered the lives of the mechs—and the soldiers fighting alongside them—until there was nothing left.
When the Genevians finally surrendered, the peace turned out to be no better than the fighting.
That the Nietzscheans despised the Genevians was no secret; their actions during the war did not belie their hatred in any way. Rika had believed that the only thing they hated more than Genevians were their mechanized warriors. As one such warrior, Rika had expected to be executed when the change of masters had occurred.
Some of the mechs had been killed, but only the ones who had gone insane with rage and hatred and could never be integrated into any society again.
The rest—Rika included—had spent some time in internment camps, but eventually had their compliance chips and military hardware removed, and were set free.
‘Free’.
Whatever freedom was, Rika was certain it was not present where she had ended up.
What Rika had learned in the five years since the end of the war was that, though the Nietzscheans hated the Genevian mechs because of the destruction they wreaked during the war, they respected them as warriors for rising above their circumstances. That respect had translated into their release back into society.
However, the Genevians felt great shame for what they had done to their own citizens. Unfortunately, that shame did not include any form of respect, acceptance, or financial aid to help rebuild the mechanized warriors’ organic bodies.
Those conditions made for scarce work. Rika had moved from one manual labor job to another, until she finally ended up at Dekar station on the outskirts of the Parsons System.
It was surreal to be here, slinging cargo in a system where she had fought so many battles—many of them victorious.
But every hard-won ground battle was balanced by a loss in space; Rika still remembered boarding one of the last ships that had evacuated the Parsons System, when the Genevian fleet retreated and abandoned it altogether.
An abandonment that had not hurt Dekar Station in any way.
Though the Genevians had lost the fight in the Parsons System, Dekar had prospered. The station was on the fringes of the system, and when the Nietzscheans had attacked seven years ago—just over two years before the end of the war—Dekar had surrendered without a fight.
There was no profit in fighting against a superior enemy—especially when your own space force ran from almost any conflict—and the owners of the station were far more interested in profiting from war than actually fighting a war.
Fleecing refugees had also become a substantial business on Dekar as the years passed.
It sickened Rika to be here in their company. But where the denizens of Dekar were cowardly, they were also pragmatic. It hadn’t taken long for Bay Chief Hal to realize that, with her mechanized body, Rika was stronger than ten fully organic humans and far more versatile than a bot.
The icing on the cake was that, unlike with a bot, he didn’t have to pay for repairs when her robotic components suffered damage. She was responsible for that.
Which was the reason Rika was so deep in debt.
Well, part of the reason.
Rika had spent most of her initial earnings on getting her face reconstructed after what the Genevians had done to it. It was no small expense, but well worth it.
From the neck down she was still covered in her matte-grey skin—no longer sheathed in armor—but her head looked as it had before that fateful night when she’d been sentenced and ended up in the Genevian military’s human chop shop
.
She allowed her thoughts to continue to wander, and it helped pass the time as she and Chase loaded the freighter. He worked the loader, pulling the crates off the bay’s grav conveyers, and Rika carried them into the ship’s main cargo bay, stacking them according to the Supercargo’s directions.
Even with her slow start, Rika finished the job just under the ten-minute deadline set by Bay Chief Hal. Without a word of thanks, he assigned her three more ships to load; when that work was complete, another two.
The workload wasn’t unexpected; they didn’t call Bay 1217 ‘Hal’s Hell’ for nothing. He ran it with a ruthless efficiency, and many discerning captains requested berths in Bay 1217, keeping it busy at all hours—much to the dismay of his dockworkers.
Chase wrapped up his shift seven hours later and passed Rika a message as he left,
They both knew she wouldn’t show up.
Chase had always been kind to her, but he had grown even friendlier since her facial reconstruction surgery, asking her to join him for drinks nearly every night.
Rika didn’t fault him for not finding her attractive when her head was just a faceless orb with two eyes and not even a nose; but the fact that he had only asked her out after her surgery hurt more than she cared to admit.
“Pining after a real boy?” Hal’s voice sounded nearby, and Rika looked back, staring down at him from her 2.3-meter height—towering over him.
“Haven’t seen one,” Rika replied. “Just talking assholes around here.”
Hal snorted. “Have it your way, Rika. Another ship just came in. Needs to be cleared out and loaded back up in two hours. You just bought yourself that job.”
Rika bit her tongue and nodded as she walked to the ship that Hal pointed at, examining the work order he passed her over the Link.
Getting it done in two hours by herself was going to take a miracle.