My world was pain and shifting shadows. A kaleidoscope of memories, my own and not, blended together and then poured down my throat.

  An eye snapped open in the void and looked wildly in every direction. Tears flooded from it, slapping down onto the ground far below to form large pits of tar that stirred and reached for the heavens. A scream echoed in the air, torn from the throats of shadows.

  My scream joined them.

  Mela’s face, stuck in a rictus of agony and horror as she reached out for me, and then…

  My heart was still beating. I could feel it trying to tear its way out of my chest.

  My lungs slowly inflated before emptying of air, struggling to keep me alive.

  My blood streamed through my veins, painful in my hyperawareness of it.

  My nerves fired up, lending me the sensation of metal beneath my fingertips.

  Other basic bodily functions and senses followed, yet in spite of that, I was stuck. I couldn’t even twitch, let alone properly move, like my own body was the burial casket for my consciousness.

  “You better keep your fucking promise.” The voice was male, aggressive, with an undercurrent of tightly coiled tension.

  “Threats do not suit you.” The second voice was cold and droll. “Remember exactly what I’ve done for you and your sister already.”

  “And I’ve paid back my debts to you! Twice over, with this fucking mess!”

  “Hmm… Perhaps. Very well, we will consider your debts settled. I will contact you in the future with offers of employment, and you will be suitably compensated if you accept.”

  “Don’t fucking bother. Not after… I need to go fix this. All of it. Before I —”

  “Yes, yes, you can take your drama elsewhere. You are dismissed. You will be hearing from me.”

  I heard the sound of teeth grinding together, followed shortly by loud, angry footsteps.

  “Amelia, come here,” the cold voice snapped. “Really, have I not taught you to be more attentive? We need to start working on him now. I don’t want him to expire completely, or worse, for his corruption to erupt and ruin all my hard work. I am not starting from scratch yet again. What do the scans say?”

  “Well…” A hesitant, quieter voice. Female this time. “He’s actually stable, Doctor. I don’t think we need to worry about the corruption.”

  “Stable? He’s bleeding that blasted crap all over my floors!”

  “Yes, but the scans haven’t picked up any signs of uncontrolled mutation or obvious mental corruption. There’s some damage there, but I think it’s mostly from the containment protocols, not from the eyes themselves.”

  “Hm… then, perhaps, we don’t need to extract them immediately. There are some tests I’ve been wanting to run for some time now… Very well. No need to rush, anyway. He’ll be under for a while yet. The tranquilizer I had that incompetent buffoon give him is of my own make.”

  “Would you like me to run some more scans to test for his compatibility with the eyes? Frankly… from what I can tell so far, his compatibility should be high. You might even want to consider authorizing a full unlock of the Shadow Runner Package.”

  “The full unlock? Install the package, and waste those eyes on this piece of slum garbage?”

  There was real anger in the voice now. Pain exploded in my side. I was dimly aware of being pushed, of the sound of wheels skidding over tiles, and then an impact that jostled my whole body.

  “He’s wasted far too much of my time already! No, we’ll use him to test the bleedover if his compatibility is really that high. That should let us set a better baseline for future experiments.”

  “Of course, Doctor. What would you have me do with him then?”

  “Prepare him for the initial testing of block B. C and higher would be too challenging for his ilk, but we might still get some good data in B… If he doesn’t go insane, we can introduce him to block A as well. It would be a fitting way for him to meet his end, after all he’s put me through! We’ll just need to tighten the containment on the eyes before we send him in.”

  “There is still a degree of risk that we could lose them if we do that, Doctor, and he might be a highly valuable —”

  A slap rang out, followed by one of the quietest whimpers of pain I’d ever heard. It was barely there at all.

  “The next time you decide you know better than me, we can perform the tests on you. I’ve kept you out of the kindness of my heart, and this is how you replay me?! No better than your mother. I should have disposed of you along with her, but you still have some use. At least the training I’ve put you through makes you mildly useful. You have your orders. Follow them.”

  Footsteps again, growing fainter. The swish of a door sliding open and closing. Then nothing, for several long seconds.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  A deep exhale followed almost a whole minute later, as if the woman was waiting to be sure the coast was clear.

  “Well fuck you too, asshole.” Her words came out as a vindictive hiss, then shifted to a low grumble. “And what do you want to bet that if something goes wrong, he’ll blame me? Speaking of, how the fuck did you do it, hm? I mean, the package is already installed. That means the eyes are shot either way. You even managed to level up, what was it… Clairvoyance? Really? Not Programming or Quickhacks or something? I mean, I see you’re close, but still…”

  She was, I realized with a start, talking to me. Did she know I was awake? That I was aware?

  “What am I supposed to do with you? Can’t keep lying to that asshole. It’s a good thing checking diagnostics is so far beneath the illustrious shit stain and that he’s too paranoid to hire anyone else, or we’d be toast. Still… I kind of wish you had slightly higher skill levels, you know? He wasn’t wrong. C would eat you alive, and even B might be… tricky.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Not at all. Then again, why had the ‘doctor’ made it sound like A was the deadliest?

  “Wish I could at least warn you and explain what’s going on before I have to hook you up into that contraption of his. That way we’d have a chance to… never mind. If he really gave that dick muffin some of his good stuff to give to you, you’re not gonna wake up for another couple weeks, so…”

  A deep sigh, and the sound of flesh hitting a hard surface. Her voice came out slightly muffled this time. “What I wouldn’t give for a chance to shoot him in the face.”

  My heart was already beating a thousand miles per minute, which is probably the only reason my blood pressure didn’t spike even higher.

  She didn’t know I was awake. And since I still couldn’t move, or speak…

  A groan, and then her voice was clear again.

  “Alright. Forging data, here we come! I mean I say ‘forging’, but I’m just gonna direct the actual scans to my feed, and then… There we go. I’ll just need to switch some numbers around, see? He might get a little suspicious if you do too well in B, but… I think I covered my ass with the whole compatibility thing. Which wasn’t actually a lie. What the hell’s up with you anyway?”

  I really wanted to speak up, ask a few clarifying questions, and maybe beg for my life a little. Possibly cry. You know, the usual. Unfortunately, I was a useless, stiff board of a body.

  At least it seemed like they wouldn’t be ripping my stolen eyes out of my skull any time soon.

  “Really, how did you even steal the cybernetics? Those… Reapers, was it? They were supposed to get them. We even sent a security guard with the courier. The dickwad spent a ton of money to secure the entire block around the Reapers’ homebase, so we’d be ready for containment once they installed the cybernetics. Just a second…”

  Mechanical tapping followed. It sounded like an old-timey keyboard, which was a bit ridiculous, considering my incredibly advanced eyes had come from these people.

  “Ugh, ‘advanced security’ my ass. I can’t believe he went for the whole ‘single input terminal’ thing… Anyway, yeah, those eyes of yours? The only thing we’ve found so far. And let me tell you, tracking them down was a pain. I know we installed a bunch of stealth tech on them, just in case we actually get a field-ready operative, but come on! We couldn’t even ping the city scanners for cybernetic registration codes.”

  Those were a thing? Since when?! How much were manufacturers slipping into their products without letting people know?!

  “I mean, sure, we caught a couple suspicious pings here and there. Either you or the eyes visited the middle districts once. That place has better scanners, obviously. But other than that? Zilch. It was only recently the asshat decided to burn the whole slums down to find his shit.”

  Burn down the slums?

  Surely not literally. At least, I hoped not…

  Worry and terror gnawed at me in equal measure. The number of lives lost over what I’d done… and the Kittens…

  I tore my mind away from the subject. Violently. I couldn’t even think about it, or I would go insane.

  “I wonder if you somehow bought those eyes from the thief? I mean, you didn’t have any of the other pieces… Also, if he ever figures us out and presses me on the whole ‘installed package’ thing, I’m so gonna rub his nose in it. I told him we should put in alarms to alert us of the package getting installed. We could have found you a while back if we did, from what the eye logs are telling me.”

  I would have shuddered if I could have. That didn’t even occur to me as a possibility, and it should have. I was an idiot.

  And now I was, for all intents and purposes, a dead idiot.

  Yay.

  “But noooo… He wanted his perfect ‘stealth operator’, so why would we have pings for when the eyes connect to the net? And obviously no one would ever steal them, so why would we need an alert for the package installation, Amelia you idiot, here let me slap you a few times and tell you how stupid you are, ugh…”

  The woman devolved into more grumbling, and more typing sounds followed. Meanwhile, I was stuck in abject disbelief. If she’d had her way, I would have been brought to them on day one of owning my new eyes, hogtied and ready to be sliced open.

  Scratch that. Day one? I wouldn’t have lasted an hour.

  “Never mind that you’re sending the bloody cybernetics out to a bunch of gangers for testing. Never mind that you expect them to go insane and get corrupted within an hour of installing them. Oh no, he had his precious ‘containment’ and his fucking ‘perimeter control.’ Like that shit would stop some of the crap we, I, was forced to program for these packages! Sure, regular old security guards could stop a mini Behemoth looking to tear their heads off, or the Stalker looking to escape, or the Runner with access to a net node. Sure, that’s bloody fucking likely.”

  The sheer anger radiating off of the woman was so tangible, I swear I could feel it pressing against me.

  “I should really find and thank whatever poor shmuck stole all those from us, if they’re still alive. It could have been bad… then again, I suppose I have my father’s stupidity to thank for being able to talk shit about him like this? I mean, if he did the smart thing and installed cameras and listening devices in here… But no, can’t take any risks when it comes to his ultra special secret lab. Fuck him, right?”

  The typing stopped. I heard quiet footsteps, then fingers lightly brush against my forehead. “You look so young. I mean, you’re just a year younger than me, so looks are deceiving I guess, but still… I’m sorry. Really, I’m so, so sorry. I don’t want to do this to you, but I can’t — I’m not — Ugh!”

  I felt warm drops landing on my face.

  Tears.

  “I hate this so much… I’m going to — He won’t get to —!”

  A deep, shuddering exhale, followed by sniffles.

  “I’m sure he won’t keep getting away with it forever. He’s going to get stupid and greedy enough to fuck up one day, and then they’ll tear him apart. Not ‘cause he’s a monster or anything, just ‘cause he dared to steal money from them, you know?”

  Unfortunately, I did. Cause why else would corpos ever care? And I had to assume these were corpos I was dealing with.

  “Well… I guess I’ll start hooking you up now. He’s going to be back soon, so… Can’t keep dragging this out forever. I’m just… Yeah, as I said before. I’m sorry. And… good luck.”