Cold.
It can be a deadly element.
Or an element of the dead.
Cold.
An element of change.
Slowing everything down, coming to a crawl. A turning of seasons.
Cold.
An element of power. Moving like a glacier. Carving rock as it moves it's weight across entire landscapes, where nothing stands in its way.
Cold.
An element of immortality as Humanity learned to harness it for Cryogenic suspension, to aid them in travelling away from the planet known as Earth. A planet now devoid of any life. A planet left to the mercy of the cosmic winds as it's magnetic field failed and its star stripped away its atmosphere.
To perceive this element, one must be among the living.
"Stop squirming!" Her cybernetic hands were always cold. Every time they touched him in an effort to clothe him they brushed his skin sending a shiver throughout his entire body.
"There, now go put your shoes on or we'll be late!" Heading the demands of his step mother he runs down the hall into the living room. He is caught mid stride, another cybernetic hand reaches out and catches him by the collar. His father pulls his collar bringing him face to face.
"Don't be late boy. You don't want to end up like your old man, living in a dump like this. It's important. O.k?"
"Yeah ok." He goes to grab his shoes but is pulled back again.
"This wasn't how it it was supposed to be. I wanted... We wanted... Aww get your shoes on." His father tosses him towards his shoes. What was left of his father.
Cybernetic modifications were trending on Gineeren. A surplus of Protor parts had become available since the uprising. As prices dropped and they became more accessible, a great many Gineeren found a sort of novelty in them, some becoming quite addicted to having them done. His father and step mother among them.Everything from serious medical conditions to cosmetics and extensions.
Growing up, and watching his fathers addiction slowly evolve like a dripping icicle in winter was difficult. He had watched the transition of a loving caring father becoming a cold and calculated machine, who's only interest was modifications, and making sure his new young bride had everything she needed.
Among a never ending series of reasons to come, this was among the first he would encounter that would fill him with an unwaivering dedication to avoid any such modifications throughout his life. For the last thing he wanted to become was like his father.
And so, he remained with great pride, unaltered, unmodified, original as the day he was born, when Protor-Sercons took his mother's life. Cold and ruthless, emotionless weapons of destruction. Heartless and unforgiving. Much like his stepmother. Much like every replacement part in his fathers body. Much like every machine Gloriano would come to encounter in his small, insignificant existence on Gineeren.
"You ready yet?!" She playfully slaps him upside the head with her newly calibrated cybernetic hand. He looks to his father who springs to his feet, he falls to the ground, staring at metal legs that slow his fathers pace.
His father is too slow to catch him. His arms are limp, and nothing but a cold metal floor awaits his fall as his face and head slams into it. Everything goes dark.
Cold. While on the outside it can depict an abscence of life, to feel it on the inside reminds us we are alive.
It enters his perception.
It begins at his feet. He begins to shuffle them. He looks around. His tunnel vision barely makes out his shoe in front of him.
He lunges forward as the hook in his shoulder tightens the jarring, clanging chain it's attached to.
He screams. He screams louder, until his voice fades into a cold, menacing, string of glitches and artifacts.
Out from his mouth tentacles of wires come spewing out in a pool of pent up fluid. His eyes fill with panic as they slowly inch and crawl their way back into his throat. Frightened he looks away, to all around him. A nightmare.
The bundles of wires retract. He screams. He looks down at his shoe. His feet. Still cold.
This is no nightmare. This is hell. He screams, his head hangs down, his body hangs forward on the hook and chain. He stares at the shoe, his vision still blurred.
Footsteps approach. Long and wide, heavy footsteps. His eyes gaze up to see the devil has entered the room. Fiery eyes, huge horns, covered in jagged hard spiky edges.
Sobbing, he pleads "Noooohohohh," he convulses trying to escape.
"Calm yourself!" From the booming voice a giant hand lunges forth and takes him by the neck. "Calm. Yourself."
Shivering, he focuses. This is no devil, this is a Protor. "Am I, am I in... Hell?"
The hand releases from his neck gently, as Inswarm senses him calming. "No this is not the mythological afterlife the Humans brought with them. It's much worse. You, are still on Gineeren. Stop squirming, your mods still need a moment to calibrate."
"Mo...Mods? Mods! What have you done to me--ehhhh" The coils of wires begin a projectile path from his throat once again, but Inswarms quick reflexes shoot straight to his mouth closing it before they can escape, and he holds the mouth closed until they recede. "Stay. Calm."
He let's go. Gloriano falls back into his slump of defeat and begins sobbing once again. Inswarm reaches down and picks up his shoe. "Come now, this is no way for a man to face his fate. You reached the brink of lifelessness and I saved you because I heard you were the toughest, most resilient, and most stubborn Gineeren in the city. Not this week and welting flash flap. Where is this Gloriano! The original! No, this is emotional, sobbing, and sensitive... Maybe a more feminine name would suit you, Glorian---"
"What! What do you want, What! What have you done to me?! Tell me or I'll get up outta this-- whatever and I'll rip your circuits out!"
"That's more like it." Inswarm comes face to face with Gloriano, his mandibles click and snap. "As we begin a new, know this: I saved your life." Inswarm crouches down and begins roughly putting on the shoe. "There wasn't much left of you, I had to make some - modifications."
"You did not. Noo." Gloriano smirks in his classic phase of utter denial. "Cyber? Cybernetic?" His smirk turns to a face of pure anger as his voice deepens and crescendos into a high pitch, "Modifications?!" He begins to squirm, trying to escape again.
Inswarm throws his foot with newly fitted shoe to the ground and springs up. "Yes, cybernetic modifications, now stop... Stop! Squirming." Inswarm picks up the chain and holds Gloriano in the air by the hook. "It was the only way. Now as my algorithms suggest, you owe me for saving you. Had I not picked you up, your blood would have completely drained from your body, your brain would have suffocated and stopped sending messages between synapses. This was necessary, otherwise you would have been a waste of my time." Inswarm throws him back into the chair. "Now. Your selection includes two options. One, you keep squirming while exibiting the vocal characteristics of a young female, or two, you listen to what I have to offer and we come to terms."
Inswarm walks to a counter and grabs a rather large syringe. Defeated Gloriano stares at the ground and grumbles. "What makes you think, for a second I wanna make a deal, with a Protor." He spits on the floor.
Inswarm walks back. "I know a great many things that you do not. Things that I believe you want to know. I have my eyes and ears spread all around this city." He flicks the syringe.
Gloriano gives a low grumbly laugh, "Yeah yeah don't we all, I doubt there's anything in that tin can that I would care about"
Inswarm darts the syringe straight into Glorianos thigh. Gloriano can't feel it at first but as his thought begins to quiver he feels the cold moving up his leg, and then throughout his entire body. He begins shivering and shaking all over.
"Let's be clear. I, and only I know how to maintain that gear filled meat suit that now makes up your entire failing Human Body of yours. Something they failed to tell me about the tough guy. Something I had to adapt my work to so that what was left didn't reject the modifications like a foreign intruder."
"You should have let me die!" Gloriano struggles to blurt out his frustration.
"Perhaps. But what use is death to you when you have so much potential. So much unfinished business. Perhaps you would like to know who stole your ideas?"
Glorianos shaking and shivering comes to a slow halt.
His voice begins to move like a glacier.
"You.... Know...."
Carving through stone.
"Who.... Took...."
Powerful.
"My ideas?" As these last two words leave his lips, his vision turns red, illuminating the lab. "Ahrhhgh. Ah!"
"Yes, yes. Yes. Don't mind the glow, I've provided some experimental alterations to your modifications." Inswarm grabs Glorianos cheeks between his massive hand and turns his head back and forth, analyzing the craftsmanship. "Full of Power. Full of Purpose. I've weaponized you. Think of it like that car you used to sell, with the onboard computer..."
Gloriano shakes his head free, his eyelids expand along with his perphial as he begins scanning the room with his infrared AR optic echo illuminators. "Plus! Plus one."
"Correct. Gloriano. Plus One."
Gloriano darts his gaze back at Inswarm and begins scanning for weakness. "What do you want from me?"
"Ah there he is. Gloriano Plus One!" Inswarm lunges over and grabs the chain then abruptly removes the hook in GP1s shoulder. The weight of Glorianos new arm and full cybernetic chest bring him face first into the cold floor as he glares at Inswarm who doesn't catch him. "Your loyalty. For saving your life. For enhancing your existence. For making you more than yourself. For filling you with the best technology gineeren has to offer. An extra heart, double capacity quad-lungs, enough power to run your new arm, your new leg, and those beautiful protor red eyes of yours."
Gloriano struggles to work his arm enough to regain some resemblance of a posture. "Fine. You'll have it. Now tell me...."
"Oh there's more! But we will get to that in due time." Inswarm walks over and picks up Gloriano Plus One's other shoe. "We may both benefit from your situation." Inswarm begins walking away, and pauses next to the table. "I, am in need of some recruits, some men. More men... To be more...Take your revenge, but bring me back what's left. Leave their minds in tact, we will wipe-" Inswarms mandibles click "the memory, but use the minds in my experiments. Your mole is amongst none other than your trusted employees over at your shop. It seems they may have sold you out to the Toraudites."
Gloriano Plus One begins screaming, not with fear, but with sheer anger.
Inswarm places the shoe on the table, and coldy walks away as only an advanced cybernetic AI could.
The screams of GP1 echo down the halls of the cybernetics labs, as he struggles painfully to recalibrate, and recover, so that he may simply place his shoe upon what may be the only surviving part of the original, Human he once was.
Screams that are chilling and haunting. A once dead man come back to exact his revenge on those who betrayed him. A once protor free original, now filled with as much Protor parts as the list of people he screams to now, who will look into his beautiful red protor eyes, and will soon feel as the vengence in his cold heart. Plus one.