Warden

WARDEN
CHRONICLES OF A CYBORG BOOK 1
Isaac Hooke


Want a Free Book?
For a limited time, Isaac Hooke is giving away Salvage, the prequel novella, here:
https://BookHip.com/DPGVBL


1
She opened her eyes to a world of broken steel and shattered glass.
The stripped husks of skyscrapers towered over her, most of them half-collapsed and little more than skeletons of corroded rebar. One such building, tilted at an odd angle, crossed the sky above her; it had fresh rinds of metallic skin peeling from the surface, curling upward like clawed fingers reaching for a rusty sky that could offer no deliverance.
A metal fence of short, flat slats surrounded her. No, not a fence, but the walls of some sort of container. It seemed to house her.
She tried to sit up, but her arms and legs seemed to be paralyzed. She tried again, taking several frantic gasps, her chest rising and falling as she struggled to move.
Finally, she lifted her head to look down at her body.
Her limbs weren’t paralyzed: her arms and legs were missing entirely. All she had was a torso. And a battered one at that: she had no hips or abdomen, and the right side was almost completely torn away. The skin had crimped all along the edges of these injuries, her epidermis peeling back to reveal a shell whose metal sheen told her she wasn’t human. There was no blood, either, only the subtle stains of hydraulic fluid that had spilled onto the floor of the container.
Her breathing became even more frantic.
What am I?
Translucent digital characters and diagrams overlaid her vision suddenly and formed a HUD of sorts. It showed a rotating humanoid body composed of vectors—a wireframe outline of the female form. The head was colored blue, along with some of the torso: entire sections of the latter were red, seeming to coincide with the damaged regions of her upper body. The arms and legs were also red. Within the head region resided the hemispheres of a human brain, shown in green.
Still gasping for air that she couldn’t seem to get enough of, she dropped her head. It hit the floor of the container that held her with a loud thud. A jab of pain shot through her, and she grimaced.
She dismissed the diagrams in that moment, not really knowing how she did so. Only a date and time remained in the lower right of her vision.
May 20th, 2619. 05:45:25.
She gazed past those translucent characters, to the reddish sky above, and watched the brown clouds wend their way over the twisted wreckages of the skyscrapers. It was somewhat peaceful. She concentrated on her breathing, along with the rise and fall of her chest, and managed to get her frantic wheezing under control.
If I’m a machine, why do I need to breathe?
She thought of the human brain she had seen in that diagram on her HUD. And then she knew what she was. A full body replacement cyborg.
Perhaps that thought should have panicked her further, but it only seemed to bring her further peace. It was as if she had accepted what she was long ago.
Her eyes focused on the time once more, and she stared at the seconds. Ticking, ever ticking.
05:45:29.
05:45:30.
05:45:31.
She had no way of getting out of that container, not without arms. She was going to die here, beneath these clouds.
Again, she felt neither panic nor fear. Only acceptance. Almost indifference, really.
No. I won’t give up. Not so easily.
She glanced around to survey the extents of the container that held her. The smooth, enclosing walls formed an ellipse around her, with enough room to hold two humans. It looked to be a pod of sorts: some kind of transportation device. There were clamps partially protruding from the floor near her torso; she guessed they had once held her cyborg body in place but had retracted at some point.
She turned her head to the side and attempted to bite at the metal floor, if only to find some sort of grip. But the surface below her was mostly smooth and flat, with nothing to latch her teeth around save for the retracted clamps. She stretched her neck, flexed her shoulders, and curved her torso, sliding her head across the floor toward the clamp on her right. She wrapped her teeth around it.
The clamp tasted metallic. Almost like blood. She ignored the flavor and bit down, using it to flop her body over to the other side, like a flailing fish. She released it and turned to face the wall once more. She’d gotten closer…
She searched the floor for anything else she could latch onto, but there was nothing. She rocked her body to and fro, and quickly realized that by wriggling her neck and torso at the same time, she could slowly worm her way toward the edges of the container. How she planned to surmount those enclosing walls once she arrived was a different story.
Bit by bit she approached the wall, curling and twisting the remnants of her body until finally she was right up against the surface. The metal couldn’t be more than half a meter tall, but for her it might as well have been a skyscraper. There was no way she’d be able to flop her body over it.
She tried to flex her neck and torso, curling her upper body as far up as she could reach, but it was no use. The upper rim of the container was beyond reach.
She lay back, panting, and stared at that wall for several moments.
There had to be a way…
She was a cyborg. Why not try biting into the metal directly? Surely her jaws possessed more compressive force than that of an ordinary human being.
So, she lifted her torso as far as she was able, then pressed the side of her face against the metal. She opened her mouth, turned her teeth toward the wall, and tried to bite down. But because the surface was so flat, like the