by M. D. Cooper
“Strip!”
No one moved for a moment, and he eyed them with an unpleasant stare. “If you sorry assholes aren’t butt-fuck naked in one minute, I’m going to have Lars here shoot you all in the kneecaps. Fuck knows you won’t need them anyway.”
The possible meaning behind his words terrified Rika, but she followed the instructions. Something in his voice made her think he was very serious about shooting them in the knees.
She pulled off her shoes and the jumpsuit, tossing them in the tub behind her. She hesitated at removing her underwear, but despite the guard’s hungry gaze, she thought that any ogling from his eyes was better than bullets from his rifle. As she pulled off her bra, she glanced at the others, who were pulling off their undergarments as well.
Somehow, they all looked better naked than in the ill-fitting jumpsuits. Not that any of them looked great. Most bore the look of hard living on the streets, or in low-rent government housing. Rika had to admit that she looked better than most, though she was shorter and thinner than all but one other girl.
“Get under the nozzles, close your eyes, and clench your dicks, assholes, and pussies. This is gonna sting,” the not-Lars guard said with a coarse laugh.
Rika stepped gingerly across the cold tile to the center of the room. She clenched her fists and closed her eyes, prepared for the worst.
When the spray came, it was warmer than she had expected—but it hit hard, scouring every part of her body. Then it began to sting; then burn. She felt like her skin was on fire, but didn’t dare to open her eyes. Nearby, a man screamed in pain, and the guard laughed.
“I told you not to open your eyes, fucker. Don’t worry, little bitch; you’ll get rinsed off in a minute. It’ll stop burning, then—mostly.”
Rika felt something sliding down her head and shoulders, and she tentatively reached up—her hand encountering a strange, lumpy mass. She recoiled in horror before she realized it was her hair. She touched her face, and found that her eyebrows were gone; she ran her hand higher, and felt her smooth scalp.
“That’s it,” the guard advised as the warm spray continued. “Brush all that shit off yourselves. The sooner you do, the sooner we can give you the final rinse.”
A minute later, the spray changed in pressure and the burning feeling on her skin eased. The man who had opened his eyes a moment before was reduced to a mere whimper, and Rika hoped his vision hadn’t been permanently damaged.
“Open your eyes,” the guard called out, and Rika tentatively followed his instruction. All around her were the glistening forms of her fellow conscripts. Hairless, with red, irritated skin. “Look at you all,” the guard chuckled. “Like shiny little dolls.”
“A lot better than the shit-stains that came in here,” the guard with the rifle, Lars, spoke for the first time.
“OK, meat,” the first guard yelled. “Move!”
At his words, a door opened up on the far side of the room, and the naked, hairless, shivering conscripts filed out.
This time, the corridor was short and well-lit. It opened up into a large room with three long boxy structures running down its center. They looked almost like train cars, though conduits connected to them at regular intervals.
At the near side of each of the long boxes were wide, dark openings, with a pair of technicians standing before them. Rika noticed that no additional guards were present, but she doubted even the pair who followed them in were needed. Each member of the thirteen conscripts was utterly cowed, their spirits broken. They would not put up any resistance.
Rika also spotted automated turrets mounted on the ceiling, and knew that any attempts to escape would be met with more force than she cared to encounter.
The technicians on the far right called a citizen number, and one of the men walked over to them.
“Right, then,” she heard one of the technicians say to the man. “You’re a good size. We’ll fit you for the K1R; good thing, too. We have a quota to fill on those, and you lot rarely live up to the reqs.”
The other technician pulled a metal harness along an overhead rail until it slapped the man in the back. Clamps wrapped around his thighs, torso, biceps, neck, and forehead. Without further preamble, it lifted him into the air as he cried out in alarm, and then it pulled him into the dark opening of the long structure.
One by one, the other conscripts were called forward. Each was racked just like the first man, as the technicians made cryptic remarks about what they were suited for.
Eventually, it was just Rika and the other girl who was a hair shorter than her. They stood close to one another; not touching, but taking whatever comfort they could from another human’s presence in the hell they found themselves in.
“A71F,” one of the technicians at the far-left structure called out.
Rika approached, and the man sized her up. “Hey, Rick, she’ll probably work for one of the new scouts, won’t she?”
The other man eyed her up and down, likely measuring her with his augmented eyes. “Yeah, she’s great for it. Looks like a hundred sixty seven centimeters and just under fifty kilos.”
“Has good Link-tech too,” the first technician said. “Won’t have to spend too much to make her brain worth using.”
“Using for what?” Rika asked quietly. It was the first time she had spoken since the courtroom, and she surprised herself—it was almost as though she had forgotten how.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” the technician replied as she felt the rack slap her on the back.
This one was different than the others she had observed; it clamped tight around the top of her thighs, and again just above the knee. It did the same around her arms—one just above her elbow, and the other uncomfortably jammed up in her armpit. Another clamp wrapped around her head, followed by one around her neck, and two around her torso.
“No!” she cried out, struggling against the clamps. “What are you doing to me? Where am I going? Please, I have to know!”
The technician named Rick slapped her ass.
“Somewhere where that will never happen again,” he leered.
The rack lifted her up and pulled her toward the dark opening of the long structure, and Rika began to writhe with fear, bucking and straining against the bonds.
“Hey! Stop that!” the first technician called out. “You’re gonna miss the—aw, shit.”
Rika felt something hit the clamp on her neck and slip to the side. She wasn’t certain what she had just avoided, but she was glad—until she heard the technician named Rick laugh behind her.
“Well, I guess you don’t want the anesthetic, then! Don’t worry, the pain will make you pass out soon enough.”
“What?” Rika cried out, and then she felt something hot against her elbow. She strained her neck, trying to get a good view, and shrieked in terror and pain as she watched a laser slice her arm off at the elbow. The light from the opening was fading, but she could still make out her forearm, falling free from her body and landing in a pile of limbs below her.
The scream that tore from Rika’s throat was cut short by her collapse into blessed unconsciousness.
“See?” Rick told the other technician. “I told you she wouldn’t make it past the first limb.”
“Good for her; would have sucked if she was still awake when it started cutting her skin off.”
A thud came from behind the pair, and they turned to see the thirteenth conscript unconscious on the ground.
“Well,” Rick laughed. “At least we don’t have to worry about her struggling.”
MECHANIZED
STELLAR DATE: 09.23.8939 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: GAF Base 99A1, Kellas
REGION: Caulter System, Genevian Federation
Rika woke with a strangely muffled scream, and began thrashing.
It took a moment for her to realize that she could move her limbs; and then a moment more to realize that everything felt wrong. Her eyes were open, but she couldn’t make out anything around her. She
blinked rapidly, noting that even her eyes felt strange.
Around her, a room slowly resolved into view. Coupled with the sensations in her skin—which felt coarse and almost numb—she inferred she was on a table. She looked around, and the vague shapes slowly solidified into stacks of equipment. Not medical equipment; more like some sort of workshop.
She tried to sit up, and that was when she was served with the brutal reminder that she was missing her arms from the elbow down. She lifted a leg, and saw that it ended at the knee.
Rika closed her eyes tight and a whimper escaped her. She laid her head back and shook it.
No no no no!
After a minute, she opened her eyes again and looked at her arm. That was when she realized why her skin felt coarse and numb—where there should have been pink flesh, there was only a matte grey covering.
She rubbed her stubby arms against her torso as tears began to streak down her face. As she did, there was a moment of incongruous relief as she realized that her breasts were still present; though they were little more than nondescript lumps under the matte-grey covering.
The end of her arm stumps were cold against her ‘skin’, and Rika realized that her limbs were capped with steel; small, ridged cylinders, roughly four centimeters long and three across. When she attempted to bend her elbow, or gave what she assumed was the mental equivalent of moving her elbow, the small cylinder moved. She realized it must have been mounted to a round ball-joint of some sort inside her arm.
It took her a few minutes to grasp what this all meant. She must have been prepped for cybernetic limbs. She had seen soldiers in combat vids with cybernetic limbs, but never all four—and she had always assumed it had been a voluntary modification.
Apparently, she had been naïve.
Rika lifted her head as much as possible, and pushed her pelvis up. She took a moment to realize that putting pressure on the ends of her limbs didn’t cause any pain—there were some small miracles, at least.
A glint of light caught her attention, and she noticed that there was some sort of metal port in her stomach where her belly button used to be. She took more care to examine what was left of her body, and saw another pair of ports at the bottom of her rib cage, two more in her thighs, and another pair on her biceps.
Careful examination with her arm-stub led her to discover that there was one at the base of her neck, as well. Her movements on the table also revealed that there were several more ports running down her spine, and, she noted with a grimace, another between her ass cheeks.
“Oh, shit, you’re awake!” a voice nearby said, and Rika turned her head to see a man approaching. “Must have screwed up the sedation. I hate it when they do that.”
The man was young, not too much older than Rika. He held part of a sandwich, of which he took a final bite, chewing rapidly.
“I wish they’d at least tag you when that happens. Then I’d know you were gonna wake up,” he said around the mouthful of food.
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, though she had not swallowed anything, came over her.
“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 him 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.”
He 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. Rika could instantly feel that there was nothing there; she was smooth as a child’s doll between her legs.
She jerked away, recoiling from his touch, then 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 object, carefully unwrapping its plas covering.
Rage and shame mingled together. She was just a thing to this man, an object that deserved neither respect, nor remorse. If she had her limbs, she 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, and 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 man 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 man 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,” the man 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 on the thigh-section of the leg. 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 on her thighs 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 his 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 coul
d 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.”