POV: Leon (Lee) Saint

  Time: The Present (Internal Chronometer: Year 219 of Service)

  Location: Stealth Shuttle, Approach Vector to Mechanicus Station

  They say memory is the gift of God for humanity. A chance to relive the best moments of your life, to look back and reflect, to enjoy every moment, to make it all an experience. Whoever said that was full of shit. Memory is a curse when you cannot forget.

  Biological brains are designed to fade, neurons are meant to die, synapses are supposed to weaken, and trauma is meant to be buried under the soft silt of time. It is a survival mechanism, one of the very things that has driven humanity to its current standing in the food chain. If a human remembered every second of pain with the clarity of the moment it happened, they would go mad.

  Well, I believe that it is needless to say that I do not have that luxury.

  My memory is crystal storage, a perfect and indelible living fucking hell of an existence. I can very easily recall the smell of the rain on Volatis two centuries ago just as vividly as I can process the tactical readout of the shuttle I am currently sitting in. And if you wouldn't fucking believe my luck, I can still feel the phantom itch of an arm I lost in 2761.

  Sometimes it's good that I can remember. Being activated, and the first thing I see and hear is a memory of my wife as she told me she loved me. But why is it so fucking perfect? I want to forget it all, because I'm also haunted by them.

  These are not memories. No. These are files, files I don't have the fucking access clearance to delete. Files that torment me the more I try to forget.

  Flashback

  October 14, 2761

  Location: Planet Volatis, VIC Territory

  The rain on Volatis was never clean. It fell through layers of industrial smog and neon light, hitting the pavement as a greasy, acidic drizzle that soaked into your bones and stayed there.

  I was sitting on a crate in the alleyway behind a noodle shop in Sector 4. My name was Lee Saint. I was thirty-four years old, and I was a decorated Lieutenant in the Volnar Intergalactic Coalition Special Operations Command. I had once been awarded a Silver Star for the defense of the Outer Rim. I had once received a commendation for the extraction of the Diplomat on Aris Prime. I had once walked without a limp and with two arms.

  The stump didn't hurt anymore, not really. But my fucking hip, on the other hand, well, that shit killed me. I had caught the brunt of a plasma grenade that had detonated two meters away from me during the botched raid on the Citadel. It had shattered my pelvis, fused three vertebrae, and taken my arm.

  The med-evac had saved my life, but I wish they had just left me there. Left me to die... Because saving my life only served to destroy me...

  I took a swig from the bottle. It wasn't real liquor. It was some synthetic ethanol blend brewed in a bathtub in Sector 9, usually used to strip paint off industrial haulers. It tasted like battery acid and burning rubber, but it did the one thing I needed it to do: it made the world a little bit softer. It blurred the edges of the neon signs reflecting in the puddles of piss and rainwater. It dulled the screaming nerve endings in the wreck of my hip.

  "Spare a credit?" I rasped out to a suit walking by, a Corpo type, probably mid-management at some logistics firm. But the bastard didn't even look down. He just stepped over my outstretched, trembling hand like I was a bag of shit.

  I looked at my hand. The grime was embedded so deeply in my fingerprints that it looked like a tattoo. I looked at the empty space where my left arm used to be, the fabric of my jacket pinned up with a rusted safety pin. I let out a laugh that turned into a hacking cough, bringing up phlegm that tasted like the smog hanging over Volatis.

  "Lieutenant Lee Saint," I muttered to the damp cardboard box I was leaning against. "Hero of the Outer Rim. Savior of the Diplomat. Look at you now, you magnificent son of a bitch."

  Five years. It had only been five years since the operation on Kara-4. I was told it would be a simple extraction. Get in, grab the intel, get the fuck out. But those fuckers were wrong. Intel is always fucking wrong. We dropped right into a kill box, and I lost twelve men in thirty seconds. Shit happened so fast that all I remember is the painful three-mile crawl I performed through mud mixed with the blood of my squad mates to get to the extraction point.

  And what did I get? A shiny medal, a bitchy handshake, and a fuck you for a medical discharge that barely covered the cost of the painkillers.

  The VIC didn't want broken toys. They wanted shiny new soldiers. I was a reminder of a failure they wanted to bury. So they buried me in paperwork, delayed my pension, and denied my appeals for cybernetic reconstruction.

  Then Emily left.

  That was the kicker, wasn't it? The love of my life. She looked at the broken, screaming thing in her bed, the man who woke up thrashing from nightmares of burning flesh, and she decided she'd had enough. But the bitch didn't just leave. No, that would have been alright, had she not liquidated our joint accounts and milked me for every credit I had saved for twenty years. She took it all and vanished to some resort world in the Core Systems.

  That night, I screamed until my throat bled. I had punched a wall until my knuckles shattered. And then, I just fucking spiraled. I went further down, and eventually I found myself in the undercity. Down knee-deep in the filth.

  "Lee?" A painfully familiar voice cut through the rain and the fog of cheap booze.

  I squinted up through the drizzle and saw a man just standing there. He was tall, wearing a long coat made of real wool, not some synthetic weave. His shoes were also polished, reflecting the neon pink of the 'Girls, Girls, Girls' sign flickering above the noodle shop.

  I looked at the man's face and immediately recognized him. He was my childhood friend. We grew up in the same hab-block. We enlisted together. He went into Intelligence, I went into Spec-Ops. He went up... and I went down.

  "James," I slurred, a lopsided grin breaking across my bearded, filthy face. "Look at you, man... looking flier than a motherfucker, huh?"

  James looked at me, and his eyes didn't hold disgust. That would have been easier to deal with, instead of the fucking pity they held. A deep, sorrowful pity that made me want to vomit. The fucker was looking down on me, wasn't he? Just like every fucking body that walked across this fucking street.

  He crouched down, disregarding the filth on the ground, so he could look me in the eye. "I've been looking for you for 15 months, Lee," James said softly. "The VA said you dropped off the grid. Nobody knew where you were."

  "Well, here I fucking am, Jimmy," I gritted through my teeth, lifting the bottle in a mock toast. "Right where I fucking belong. I am the king of the gutter. The phantom of the alley."

  "Don't be like that, man," James said, standing up and offering me a hand. "Come on, let's take a walk."

  I stared at his hand for a while, my own mind warning me against touching his soft, unscarred, smooth skin. Then I looked at my own hand. My ego wouldn't let me take this fucker's hand. So I used the wall to leverage myself up, gritting my teeth as my hip joint ground bone-on-bone, sending a spike of white-hot agony up my spine. I stifled a scream and turned it into a grunt.

  I took a deep breath, and we started walking. Or rather, James walked, and I limped beside him, dragging my left leg like a dead weight. We moved through the crowded markets of Sector 4. The smell of frying synth-meat and ozone hung heavy in the air.

  "You need help, Lee," James said, keeping his voice low. "I can see your hip is... it's bad. And the arm... we can get you a prosthetic. I have connections now."

  "I've been like this for five fucking years," I spat, stopping to lean against a flickering holographic vending machine. "I don't need your charity, I don't need anything."

  "Lee..." James said in a downcast tone. "You're dying, Lee."

  "We're all fucking dying, James! That's the whole fucking point of life. From the moment we suck in that first breath, we're fucking dying!" I shouted, startling a passing woman. I spun around, gesturing wildly with my one good arm. "Look at them! Look at all of them! running to jobs they hate, to buy shit they don't need, to impress people they don't fucking like. They are the slaves, James, they are fucking slaves... but not me... not me."

  I stumbled closer to him, smelling the expensive cologne on his coat. It smelled like sandalwood and money.

  "I'm fucking free," I whispered with a crooked smile, my eyes wide and bloodshot. "I built this life. Me. Brick by brick. I survived the war. I survived the peace. I survived her. The VIC chewed me up and spat me out, and you know what? I'm still fucking here. I am the master of my own fate. So fucking what if I'm dying?"

  "You're drunk, Lee," James said, shaking his head. "And I can tell you're starving."

  "Starving? I am enlightened!" I roared, laughing manically. "I see the strings, Jimmy. I see the fucking puppet strings. You think you're safe in your high tower? You think the VIC gives a shit about you? They'll use you until you break, and then they'll give a handshake and a pat on the back for 'job well done,' and toss your ass in the trash just like they did to me."

  James stared at me, his jaw tight. He reached into his pocket, and I flinched, instinct taking over, thinking he was reaching for a gun. But he pulled out a credit chit. A gold one. High value.

  "Here," he said, pressing it into my hand. "Take this."

  I looked at the chit. It was more money than I had seen in three years. I could buy... I could buy so much booze. I could buy a room for a month.

  "Why?" I asked, looking up at him. "Why are you giving me this?"

  "Because you were my best friend," James said, his voice cracking slightly. "Because you were the best of us, Lee. And watching you like this... it kills me."

  I clutched the chit tight. "You're a good man, James. A real one. Maybe the last real one left."

  I turned and limped toward a liquor store across the street. I bought three bottles of the top-shelf whiskey. Real whiskey. Not the synthetic swill. I cracked one open right there on the street and took a long pull. It burned, but it was a smooth burn. A rich burn.

  James was still watching me when I came back out.

  "Lee," he said, stepping closer. He pulled a small, sleek black card from his inner pocket. It had a simple silver logo on it: SIGS. Starship and Inter-Galactic Solutions. I knew them. Everyone knew them. A massive conglomerate that had its fingers in everything from terraforming to weapons manufacturing.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  "If you ever get tired of being 'free,'" James said, his voice heavy with meaning. "If you ever want to stand up straight again. If you want the pain to stop. Call this number, and ask for Dr. Aris."

  "SIGS?" I scoffed, tucking the card into my dirty pocket next to the credit chit. "The IUC's corporate overlords? You work for them now?"

  "I work for a division that fixes things," James said. "That works on fixing people. We're doing groundbreaking work, Lee. And we could fix you. Give you a new arm, reconstruct your hip, and even give you neural therapy for the... for the trauma."

  "I don't need that shit, I'm fine," I lied, taking another drink. "But thanks for the booze money, Jimmy."

  "Fuck Lee..." James looked at me for a long moment, shaking his head slowly with pity. "Just take a look at yourself, Lee. Really look at yourself."

  He turned and walked away, disappearing into the neon mist. I watched him go, and I felt a pang of something in my chest. Was it shame? Regret? I didn't fucking know, and I didn't fucking care. I drowned it with another swallow of whiskey.

  "Fuck him," I whispered to the rain. "I'm free."

  But, freedom, as it turns out, has a price. And that price was agony. It had only been three weeks since I had seen James, and the money he had given me was gone. I had drunk it, smoked it, and snorted it away in a haze of self-destruction that even I was impressed by. And now, I was crashing. Hard.

  I was curled up in a corner of a derelict subway station in Sector 7. I could feel my body vibrating, and my skin felt like it was covered in ants. The withdrawal seizures were starting, and they made my hip feel like someone was hammering a rusty nail into the bone with every heartbeat. I was shivering so hard my teeth clacked together.

  "Please," I whimpered into the darkness. "Please, God. Just make it stop."

  But there was no answer. There never was.

  I rolled over, my hand brushing against something stiff in my pocket. I pulled it out with shaking fingers and stared at the card James had given me. The silver logo caught the dim light of the emergency strobe overhead. SIGS.

  "If you want the pain to stop."

  That was all I wanted. I didn't even want my arm back. I didn't want my wife back either. That traitorous bitch. I just wanted the noise in my head to shut up and the fire in my body to go out.

  I clawed my way to my feet. It took me ten minutes just to stand. I dragged myself up the stairs, out into the relentless rain. I found a public terminal, a battered, graffiti-covered booth that smelled of piss, and jammed my thumb against the screen, bypassing the payment request with a hack I had learned in the service. The screen flickered to life. I stared at the card, my vision blurring. I punched in the number.

  It only rang once before someone answered.

  "This is Dr. Aris's office," a smooth, synthetic voice answered.

  "I..." My voice was a croak. I coughed, tasting blood. "James... James Carter gave me this number. My name... my name is Lee Saint."

  There was a heavy, silent pause.

  "Mr. Saint," the voice returned, sounding warmer now. "We have been expecting your call. Stay exactly where you are. A transport is being dispatched to your location."

  I slid down the wall of the booth, clutching the receiver to my chest. "Just make it stop," I whispered. "Please."

  The transport was a black, unmarked aerial vehicle with tinted windows. Two men in tactical gear lifted me inside like I weighed nothing. They injected me with something, and I felt the pain that had tormented me for five years vanish in a flash, replaced by a warm, floating darkness as I slipped into unconsciousness.

  When I woke up, I was clean and lying on a bed in a room that was blindingly white. The air smelled like it had just been scrubbed, devoid of the ozone and rot of the city. I groggily looked down and noticed that I was now wearing a white gown. My skin had been scrubbed raw, washing away the grime of five years.

  "Welcome back to the land of the living, Lee," I heard a voice call, and shifted my sight up a little. I don't know how I didn't notice him when I looked down, but James was standing at the foot of the bed. He was wearing a lab coat over his suit now, and next to him was a beautiful woman with olive-like skin and grey hair pulled back in a tight bun, holding a datapad. I assume that would be Dr. Aris.

  "James," I croaked. My throat felt dry. "Where..."

  "We're at SIGS' Biomedical Research Division," James said, smiling. "There's no need to worry, you're safe here."

  "We have reviewed your medical history, Lieutenant Saint," Dr. Aris said, her voice clinical and cold. "It is... extensive. Complete disintegration of the left hip joint, amputation of the left humerus, severe liver damage, neurological degradation due to substance abuse, and PTSD, amongst other things."

  She looked up from the pad. "You are quite the broken man, Lieutenant."

  "Yeah, tell me something I don't know," I muttered, trying to sit up. I felt weak, but the pain was gone.

  "We can fix you," James said eagerly. "All of you. We have a program, Lee. Project Revenant. It's... it's radical. But it's designed for men like you, men the galaxy has chewed up. We want to give you a second chance and make you better than you were. You'll be stronger, faster, and best of all, you'll never experience pain again."

  He slid a glass pane toward me that held a digital contract within it. There were pages and pages of dense legal text that I would never understand even if I tried to.

  "All you need to do is sign here," James said. "We'll handle the rest. You'll never have to sleep in a gutter again, and you'll have a purpose again."

  I looked at the contract. The words swam before my eyes.

  "Biomechanical reconstruction... Neural integration... Asset designation..."

  "I just want the pain to stop," I whispered.

  "It will," James promised. "Trust me, Lee. Remember, we're boys for life."

  I looked at him. He truly might be the only friend I had left. The man who had pulled me out of the rain and was now giving me a second shot at life, a chance to regain what I had lost. I didn't contemplate it much and pressed my thumb to the pad.

  The glass flashed green, and the word "ACCEPTED" appeared in white letters.

  "Excellent," Dr. Aris said. She then tapped something on her pad, and I felt some restraints clamp down instantly. They were thick metal bands that had shot out from the bed, locking my ankles, my chest, and my single arm.

  "What?" I slurred while attempting to wriggle free from the restraints. "James... Wha- what the fuck is this, man?"

  "It's nothing to worry about, and it's more for your own safety," James said, but he stepped back, looking past me, as if refusing to meet my eyes. "The procedure... it's invasive. We can't have you moving."

  "Procedure?" I weakly pulled at the restraints. "I changed my mind! Let me go! James! James! God damn it, look at me!"

  The ceiling opened up, and a massive robotic array descended, bristling with needles, lasers, and saws.

  "Sedative," Dr. Aris ordered.

  "No!" I screamed, my drowsiness suddenly leaving me. "James! You son of a bitch! You set me up!"

  "I'm saving you!" James shouted back, his composure cracking. He looked desperate, almost manic. "You were rotting, Lee! You were dead already! I'm giving you a shot at immortality! And if this procedure works, then you're going to be the first! The first one who survives!"

  "Survives what?" I roared.

  "The transfer," Dr. Aris said calmly as she tapped her data pad, and a mask descended over my face, sending a gas hissing into my lungs.

  "James!" I screamed, my voice muffled. "Don't do this! Please! I don't want to die!"

  "You're not going to die," James whispered, his face hovering over me as the darkness clawed at my vision. "Lee Saint is dying. But Asset 0-53... he's going to live forever."

  The last thing I saw was the laser cutter spinning up, whining like a banshee, descending toward my chest. I tried to scream, but my body refused to answer to my mind, and darkness swallowed me whole.

  Contrary to what I expected, you know, to see some pearly gates, well, who am I kidding? I know damn well I was expecting the fire and brimstone of hell, but there wasn't that either. It was dark. I felt alone, so alone, like I was the last living being in the universe. I don't know how long I spent like this, but it felt like an eternity, until a boot sequence filled my... eyes? No, it's more like I was the booting sequence.

  SYSTEM INITIALIZATION...

  CORE PROCESSING: ONLINE.

  OPTICAL SENSORS: ONLINE.

  AUDIO RECEPTORS: CALIBRATING.

  MOTOR FUNCTIONS: STANDBY.

  NEURAL SYNC: 98%... 99%... 100% - SYNC COMPLETE.

  I gasped. Or I tried to. But I didn't feel my chest move. I couldn't feel the air rushing into my lungs. It was like there was no air, no, more like I had no lungs.

  I opened my eyes, and it all hit me like a wave. It was like I was viewing the world through a video game with everything being in ultra-high definition. But everything was too sharp. I could see the microscopic scratches on the metal ceiling tiles. I could see the thermal signature of the air vents.

  Text scrolled across my vision in a transparent red overlay.

  DIAGNOSTICS: GREEN. POWER LEVELS: 100%.

  "He's online," a voice said. It sounded distant and processed, like it was being fed directly into my brain.

  I tried to sit up and heard servos whirring. A sound of heavy hydraulics filled the room, and my curiosity forced me to look down.

  I tried to scream, but no sound came out of my throat. Just a burst of static from a vocal synthesizer.

  My body was gone. My scarred, dirty, broken body was gone. And in its place was a chassis of matte black combat alloy. My arms were pistons and cables, encased in armor plating. My legs were reverse-jointed, reinforced for heavy impact. My chest was a reactor core, glowing with a faint, sickly blue light.

  I was a machine. A robot. A thing.

  "I need a mirror," I transmitted. It wasn't something that I had spoken. I had only thought about it, and the speakers in my neck produced the word in a voice that wasn't mine. It was a deep, metallic growl.

  Someone rolled a reflective surface in front of me, and I looked at the face. It was a smooth, sensor-studded faceplate. No eyes. Just a single, vertical red optical strip glowing in the center.

  "No," I said. "No, no, no!"

  I lunged, moving with unfamiliar yet terrifying speed. I tore through the restraints like they were made of paper and grabbed the technician standing nearest to me, a man in a hazmat suit, and lifted him into the air by his throat. I felt his windpipe crunch under my metal fingers. I didn't mean to kill the guy. I just wanted out and didn't know my own strength.

  "Shut him down!" Dr. Aris screamed from behind a blast shield.

  "Lee! Stop!" James's voice.

  I turned my head. James was there, behind the glass. He looked terrified.

  "You did this to me!" I roared, the audio gain on my synthesizer maxing out, shaking the walls. "You killed me!"

  I threw the technician aside, which resulted in him being launched 5 meters into a wall with a wet thud and the crack of bones. If he wasn't dead before, he was now. I charged at the glass. I was going to kill him. I was going to tear the wall down and rip James apart limb by limb. I raised my fist, the pneumatic drivers hissing when-

  COMMAND OVERRIDE: AUTHORIZATION SIGS-ALPHA-ONE.

  PROTOCOL: SUBMISSION.

  I felt my body locked. Mid-stride, mid-swing, I froze. I tried to move my arm, but it didn't obey me. I tried to step forward, but my legs refused to abide. It was like I had become a statue.

  "Motor functions suspended," Dr. Aris said, her voice trembling slightly over the intercom. "Neural inhibitor active."

  I stood there, trapped in my own personal coffin, staring at James through the glass. My mind was screaming, thrashing, begging to move, but the machine wouldn't obey.

  "It works," James whispered, staring at me with a mix of horror and awe. "It actually works. The consciousness is stable."

  "Asset 0-53," Dr. Aris said. "Welcome to your new life. You are now the property of Starship and Inter-Galactic Solutions. You represent an investment of four billion credits. You are the perfect soldier. You do not eat, sleep, or feel pain. And most importantly... You do not disobey."

  "Let me die," I transmitted. "Please... Just fucking kill me..."

  "We can't do that, Asset," James said, stepping up to the glass. He placed his hand against it, right where my optical strip was focused. "We have so much work to do."

  He let out a weak and pathetic smile. I've never wanted to crush someone's skull more than now. But I couldn't fucking move.

  "I told you, Lee," he said in a bitter tone. "You're going to live forever."

  Then the world went black as I had been turned off.

  ---

  The memory faded slowly, shoving itself back into the quarantined sector of my hard drive.

  Internal Chronometer: Year 219.

  It had been two hundred and nineteen years since I had become this thing. I looked down at my hands. They are the same hands from that day in the lab. Scratched, dented, repainted a hundred times, but the same. I have died a thousand deaths in this body. I have been blown apart, melted, crushed, and dropped from orbit.

  And every time, SIGS puts me back together. They download my backup consciousness into a repaired shell or patch up the old one. But no matter what, they won't let me go. I, just like the others, am too valuable. I am one of their Boogeymen. A fucking ghost in the machine.

  But at least they've used me less and less in the past hundred years. They started using psychos that would kill anyone, old, young, women, kids, whoever stood in their way was gone. It was fucked up, but at least I wasn't forced to kill as much.

  Kill count: 239,574

  Yeah, as if that's really going to make a difference. They made me a killing machine, and whether I like it or not is not part of the contract my dumbass signed 219 years, 7 months, 12 days, 18 hours, 37 minutes, and 14 seconds ago.

  My objective flashed on my HUD.

  TARGET: ALIASTAR THORNE.

  STATUS: TERMINATE WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE.

  I feel the familiar phantom itch of a nose I haven't had in two centuries. I feel the ache in a hip that is now made of titanium composite. The ghost of the man I was haunts the machine I am.

  "Asset 0-53, radio check," the handler's voice crackled in my audio receptors. It was a new handler. Some kid who wasn't even an itch in his great grandaddy's balls by the time I had served a whole lifespan.

  "Read you, Command," I replied. My voice was void of emotion. I learned long ago that screaming doesn't help, and begging only makes shit worse for you.

  I check my weapon. A heavy rail-cannon magnetically locked to my thigh.

  I am a slave. A prisoner in a walking tank. I hate them. I hate SIGS. I hate James Carter, whose grave turned to dust a hundred and fifty years ago, while I kept marching on from conflict to conflict.

  But mostly, I hate myself. Because I made the call. I signed the line. I traded the pain of living for the hell of existing.

  I looked around me at the other 3 simulacrums that were under my command, Carl, Tomas, Jalon, or rather, Asset 0-96, Asset 1-97, Asset 3-41. They, just like me, were military men who had signed their souls away almost 200 years ago. We were probably the last relics of the first simulacrums who got shit done without creating a mess.

  The shuttle ramp hissed open.

  "Deployment in three... two... one..."

  We stepped off the ramp, our metal feet clanking heavily on the deck.

  "Alright, lads," I said to my men, "Time to go to work."

  "God help you, Aliastar Thorne," I mutter to myself, my optical sensor flaring a deep, blood red. "Because He sure as fuck didn't help me."

  Book 2 has wrapped up with a short 13,400 words, and Book 3 has begun with 3 new chapters! That means that you can read up to 27 Advanced Chapters on my Patreon at

  But listen closely now. I'm currently editing Chapter 4 of Book 3, so that number will become 28 sometime today.

  Crimson_Reapr is the name, and writing Sci-fi is the way.