by Alex Leu
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SKIN 2.0
The Cyborg Sectors Book 1
by Alex Leu
Amy-341 reluctantly walked down the old metallic street as she did for the past thirty years on the way to her dead-end job. The internal GPS flawlessly guided her down the same familiar footsteps which were almost ingrained in the ground. It was still dawn outside, but the metal was already steaming under her, and were it not for her silicone covered carbon fiber body, she would have tried to avoid the heat wave, but she graciously kept walking and donned her brightly colored dress as if she were heading to a fashion show rather than to the droid repair factory.
Her carefully chosen wrist watch perfectly matched her outfit. The watch was of an expensive brand she had wanted for a long time, but could not afford, and so she wore a cheap knockoff that didn't even work. Amy would look at it when around humans, but she didn't need a watch as her bio-digital brain did all the timing and paced her walking to arrive at the factory check-in station exactly when her shift started.
Passing through the factory gate, the guard greeted Amy in its regular mechanical manner, and she almost replied in the same way, but she thought herself to be better than the guard and everyone else at the factory, and so she greeted the metal faced bulky machine as if it were a human. She tried a new waving hand gesture she saw a famous ballerina do to her fans on TV. The guard displayed no emotion in response to her greeting, but, Amy was in heaven with her spot-on performance. She kept replaying the moment in her head and comparing it with the original. It was perfect. The only thing missing was someone to return the gesture.
Amy checked in and went to hide in the basement of the factory where she changed from her dress into a factory uniform. There were no locker rooms as everyone either never took off their uniforms or had their uniform painted on their metal bodies. But Amy couldn't let herself be seen on the street in that monstrosity. She had the body of a star and that's the image she wanted to play in public. It wasn't her fault that her state-assigned service to society was a factory mistake, and she would not let that destroy her life.
Many times she felt cursed and even considered unscrewing her head or jumping into a metal compressor at the factory. The only thing that kept her going was the feeling, which in Amy’s case was an electrical impulse, the feeling of hope that one day she would somehow change her assignment, even if only for a day.
She took the dress off her body and looked at herself in the glossy reflection of a metal door. Even with the slight deforming effect of the reflection, she was still a masterpiece. The system made her gracious figure, emotive face, and agile limbs — to entertain, to be bathed in the spotlight, to feel the adoration of an audience. But the curse of the factory mistake during her manufacturing plagued Amy with an in-ear state-assigned attachment that only made her capable of simple repetitive work.
As a more advanced cyborg model, Amy got a supervising position at the droid repair factory, but she stood out like a sore thumb, working only among older generation cyborgs which did not even resemble a human form. She was in hell.
Amy walked down the factory aisles vigorously scanning the work progress of her lower-class coworkers and at the same time counting the minuscule currency credits that were being added into her bank account. It was possible for a cyborg to buy their way up into society, but on her small salary, it was a dream that would take an entire life's work to fulfill.
At the end of a long and grueling day, Amy slipped into her dress and once again admired herself in the reflection. Loud clunks startled her from behind and she turned so fast that her dress stretched beyond its limit and tore a little at the waist. Amy swiftly covered the hole with her hand to hide from her passing coworker but its brain was too primitive to even notice Amy's damaged dress.
“The bliss of ignorance,” Amy thought to herself. If only she didn’t know any better, then she would be perfectly happy going through the motions, but the thoughts she was capable of, made her menial existence unbearable. She glanced back at the reflection and zoomed in on her in-ear attachment. How could such a simple device determine her entire life?
She ripped a strip of fabric from the bottom of her dress and made herself a headband. Then she used it to cover her right ear, and with it — her curse. With the remaining fabric, she stitched a patch over the hole in her dress and ran out.
Amy stood at the factory gates and stared down the path leading to her charging station that she secretly called “home”. Her internal GPS reported no accidents on the way, and if she proceeded immediately, she would get home just in time to fully recharge her batteries for the next day.
Amy touched her right ear, it was still covered. She stepped away from her government determined path and into the world. Her GPS kept rerouting the path to her charging station until she finally turned it off.
The sound of metal soon disappeared from under her feet, and she stepped onto asphalt and into the world of Sector A. Only a few blocks away, but a world of possibilities apart. It was the world of higher class cyborgs such as herself, and the world of the gods she knew as humans.
She stepped in and out of cold shadows laid by skyscrapers whose tips faded high above the clouds. The place beamed with above street level hovering car traffic, yet there was hardly any noise except the slow and steady pedestrian traffic.
Amy slowed her pace. In Sector A everyone just strolled, there were no immediate assignments to complete or places to be at. In Sector A everyone enjoyed the pleasures of higher consciousness.
She walked confidently, and for the first time, she felt that she belonged. A man sitting on a bench put his book down and locked eyes with her. Amy could tell exactly where he was looking and scanned his pupils expecting him to focus on her patched up dress, but instead, she found that his eyes glided up and down her body. He admired her legs, chest, and finally stopped on her face. She blushed.
Two women passed her by and Amy was surprised to notice a particular expression on their faces, one she was not used to in Sector B among her non-human neighbors. Looking at her body, the women displayed jealousy, which soon turned to resentment. Amy quickened her pace.
“Mommy! Mommy!” Two children ran up to Amy and clung on to her legs.
“Mommy, it's her!”
Amy froze in the middle of the street and looked down at the two little humans pulling on her hands. They must have confused her with another model who had the same look.
The children's mother approached Amy. “Please excuse them, they are very big fans of yours.”
“Flowers and bees, tall grow the trees,” the children sang. “Please do the dance,” they shouted in unison.
“You probably get this a lot,” said the mother, “but it would make their day if you could do a pirouette for them.”
The light pull of the children suddenly seemed so heavy, and Amy felt her facade go down, pulled by their tiny hands. The commotion caused everyone in the vicinity to stop. Their eyes were fixed on Amy, starstruck, in anticipation of a great performance.
Amy took a step back from the children and their mother and suddenly everyone around clapped and cheered. She flinched and looked down at the ground to hide from their hungry eyes and realized that her feet stopped in the first position of ballet.
“Flowers and bees,” the children kept singing.
She knew the melody, the words, even the dance. She watched it so many times on TV. But could she do it herself? Amy never tried to, never dared to. Even with her
body, how could a factory worker like her aspire to such artistry without the talent, without the in-ear attachment?
Two cyborg police units stopped across the street and stared at Amy as they scanned her. There was no going back now, she had to go on with it.
Amy raised her hands high in the air and danced for the first time in her life. She flew like a butterfly, elated by the incredible way the dance made her feel. The TV performance of the ballerina played in Amy's head and she desperately tried to emulate it and follow all the moves.
The audience watched with their mouths open, all cherishing the moment when suddenly Amy tripped and fell to her knees.
Everyone around her froze, not understanding how something like this was even possible. Cyborgs didn’t make mistakes, they weren’t supposed to.
Amy slowly got up, pushing her body up from the weight of all the cold stares, and walked away.
“Flowers and bees...” the children cried looking at their mom.
“Cyborg — I command you to STOP!” yelled the furious mother as she rushed towards Amy dragging the children behind her.
Amy froze along with all the surrounding cyborgs. She wasn't programmed to feel fear, yet her brain circuits were experiencing somewhat of an irrational flow of electrical impulses. For the first time, she didn’t know what to do, and her right hand almost irrationally went up to her ear to cover her headband and the in-ear attachment under it, but she resisted.
The mother grabbed Amy's headband and threw it off her head. The striking red of Amy's attachment and the working class cyborgs it represented gave Amy no excuse to be on these streets, especially around humans. She was just a tool to them. She was replaceable. She was nothing.
“Impostor!” shrieked the mother and police sirens blasted the quiet street.
Amy frantically ran back to Sector B, to the metal streets, until two police cyborgs grabbed her from behind and an electric shock disabled her consciousness.
She collapsed at the intersection of the two worlds, half on the asphalt, half where she belonged, and her head hit the ground with a loud metallic clunk.
The next morning, Amy woke up in her apartment’s charging station to a flashing warning message blocking her vision:
[Unit Amy-341, Generation 4, violated restricted area code. 5,000 credits fine applied.]
The message disappeared and with it five years of her hard-earned salary. With only 6,403 credits left in her account, she was further away from her dream than ever before. Still, the scariest part was that they went inside her bio-digital brain. Was she still the same Amy?
She quickly scanned her consciousness and was relieved to notice they only accessed her in-ear attachment.
Amy pulled the plug out of her waist and disconnected herself from the charger. She stepped out of the closet where her charging station was installed and into the second half of her tiny apartment. Reaching above the closet, Amy brought down a box of clothes. She gently lifted her dress up over her head when the patch she sewed on earlier got stuck onto a loose screw on her waist and tore the dress in half. Amy froze with her hands up.
Through the ripped dress, she looked at the dancing ballerina in the poster on her door. Her body was so fluid, balanced, perfect. Everything Amy could have been and wanted.
Amy let go of the dress and it fell to her feet. She stepped on the discarded colorful fabric and left the apartment.
In the dark hallway of her building, Amy joined a long line of robots waiting to get on the huge elevator that would take them up to the surface. On both sides of the line were hundreds of doors, like lids on the graves that Amy and her neighbors called home.
Amy was the only cyborg in this underground apartment complex of blue-collar robots, the only one who had her internal parts covered with a skin-like elastic surface. Suddenly she felt naked among the machines and regretted not putting on a dress. She turned around and tried to get back into her apartment, but the bulky robots filled the tiny hallway from side to side, and when the elevator doors opened they walked towards it and pushed Amy inside.
Ninety-nine robots crammed around her for half an hour as they waited for the elevator doors to release them on the surface.
Once out, she couldn't get back into her apartment until nighttime, so Amy donned her skin on the metal streets, basking in the rising sun as she headed to work. She looked around, scanning every passing robot's eyes hoping that at least one would scan her body. But how could they? To them, she was just another cog in the machine. On the other side of town, in Sector A, it would have been a crime for cyborgs to get out undressed, but here in the machine city, Sector B, nobody even noticed. Her beauty was wasted among these simpletons.
The guard at the factory gate greeted Amy, and it almost made her day, but she realized that it was the same mechanical greeting he gave her every time. She rushed to her changing spot and frantically searched for her uniform.
The faded blue fabric hid Amy's skin, and she felt relieved, protected, until she saw herself in a reflection and an unbearable sense of disgust took over her. She punched her reflection in the metal door and the indentation distorted the image, even more, when suddenly she noticed something. Leaning closer to her reflection, Amy saw a dent in her forehead and a small skin cut that gave way to the black viscous liquid flowing through her body.
Amy examined her wound and could not remember when it happened. She played the previous day's events in her head and felt the electric jolt from the police cyborgs right before the metal ground rushed into her face.
She replayed the moment over and over, punishing herself with the sensory memory of the electric jolt as she watched the frantic movements of her electrocuted body in the distorted reflection.
The factory bell stopped her manic dance and signaled the start of her shift. It was the first time she wasn't on the factory floor on time. How could she show up to work like this? Amy looked around for something to cover her wound but all she could see were metal parts. She ripped one of her sleeves and tied it around her head.
Walking down the aisles, Amy wished she could take advantage of her position and get fixed there. She envied the dumb and careless metal bodies traveling on the assembly line, but the thought repulsed her, and she hated herself for even thinking of it.
At the end of another tiring workday, Amy’s account grew by a few more credits, an amount she decided not to get upset about. Considering her recent fine, she was happy with anything.
Amy got out of the factory gate and scanned the area for cyborg repair shops. Her body stood still while her mind searched for options. There were none in Sector B, and to repair her advanced cyborg body she would have to work for a few more years until she could afford it.
Amy touched the fabric covering her wound. She bled and the black liquid glued the fabric to her skin. She pulled the fabric and felt the skin cut get bigger. The liquid flowed and a black drop descended her forehead and blotted her right eye, engulfing her world in darkness and desperation.
All the robot workers walked past Amy to their charging stations and soon the factory gates closed behind her. She stood there until the street lights lit above her, until the loud horn of a street cleaning robot got her to move, until she was the only one on the streets of Sector B.
Amy wandered aimlessly down the dark and empty alleys when a flashing message filled her vision:
[Low Battery. Current Status 14%. Recharge Immediately.]
She stopped to calculate the route back to her apartment and immediately felt the electrical impulse which controlled her feet move down the spine all the way to her toes. Yet there was no movement. Amy stood there in the middle of the street watching her battery drain bit by bit.
The battery message kept invading her vision until she turned the safety system off. Her hearing got worse, and as her battery was dying, Amy soon lost the ability to speak and emote. Her systems shut down one by one and a sense of fear took over her as she was slowly losing herself. But even scarier to her w
as the realization that she didn’t feel compelled to do anything about it.
Soon her vision turned off and Amy was trapped in total darkness. She couldn't hear or see, and there was barely any energy left for her to walk.
From the deep black abyss of her consciousness, a shape emerged before her. It was the ballerina from the poster in her apartment. She graciously leaped out of the poster and pirouetted on her toe then bowed to the applause of an invisible audience. Amy redirected all the energy left in her battery, and stretching her hands, she winded herself into a pirouette, but before she could bow, she lost her balance and fell hard on the metal ground. The loud thud resonated through her body, and she felt a new dent form on her head.
Amy looked around searching for the ballerina, but all she could see was a large audience booing her epic failure.
“Why?! Why did they give me the desire and take away the possibility?”
The worst of all was the hope. In spite of everything, she still hoped that it could happen one day.
Out of the darkness, a bright red shape appeared. Against Amy's will, her built-in survival protocol turned on the infrared vision. The shape moved and based on its heat signature it was definitely a human. Amy never saw one in this part of town, but what surprised her even more, were the anomalies in the human's body structure marked by gaps in its bright red shape.
She scanned the heart area and couldn't detect a heartbeat even though there was definitely something hot pulsing through the human's veins. Was this a cyborg with human body parts or a human with cyborg augmentations? But something else was strange about it. Amy kept analyzing the body trying to pinpoint the problem until it dawned on her — it didn’t have an in-ear attachment. Only higher class humans and cyborgs were free of state service assignments, but this one was definitely a commoner. How was this possible?
Amy performed an analysis of her power resources and redirected all the energy to her motor skills. Her hands pushed against the ground, and after struggling to get up, she limped towards the shape.
