The laboratory stank of death.
It wasn't just the chemical burn of antiseptics or the sourness of cooling metal. No—something else lingered here, the unmistakable stench of rotting flesh hidden beneath the sterile veneer of machines.
Dr. Gero stood in the center of the lab, gloved hands folded neatly behind his back, watching the newest subject twitch on the table. A boy, no older than sixteen, bound in steel restraints. Tubes protruded from his neck and ribs, pumping artificial fluids into his body. His left arm had been replaced by a crude mechanical limb, oversized and clunky, its joints shrieking when it moved.
The boy was screaming.
"Please—please—make it stop!" His voice cracked, distorted by the respirator clamped over his mouth.
Gero did not flinch. He wrote notes into a clipboard, his pen scratching across the paper with mechanical rhythm.
> Subject #14. Biological rejection at stage 3. Neural pathways unable to adapt to cybernetic signals. Pain response extreme.
He adjusted his glasses. His face showed neither pity nor malice, only cold observation.
"Your suffering," Gero murmured, almost to himself, "is valuable data. You should be proud."
The boy thrashed until his body convulsed and fell still. The heart monitor flatlined. Gero sighed, almost annoyed. Another wasted specimen. He jotted down the time of death and motioned for the automated arms to clear the table.
Metal claws dragged the corpse away.
---
In the following months, dozens of subjects came and went. Criminals, prisoners of war, orphans—no one remembered them. That was the beauty of it. No one would care if they disappeared into his laboratories.
Each was modified, implanted, remade—and each failed. Their bodies rejected the machinery. Organs failed. Skin tore. Brains fried from feedback loops they could not comprehend.
And through it all, Gero's expression never changed. He did not grieve. He did not rage. He simply adjusted the equations, tweaked the alloys, changed the interfaces. Each scream, each death, was another step forward.
"Better their suffering," he whispered one night, staring into the reflection of his bloodshot eyes on a tank of failed prototypes, "than the chaos of billions left unchecked."
He remembered his mother's scream, cut short by soldiers. He remembered the look of terror in his father's eyes before the bullet struck. Humanity was chaos incarnate. A world of flesh could only collapse into violence, selfishness, and decay.
No—flesh was the enemy. Flesh was the flaw.
Steel, he thought. Steel was eternal.
---
The breakthrough came not in triumph, but in despair. After his fiftieth failed subject, Gero collapsed into his chair, staring at his trembling hands. Wrinkles. Veins. Weakness. His own flesh was failing him, just as it had failed every one of his subjects.
"What separates me from them?" he whispered.
The answer struck him with clarity. Nothing. He too was a flawed animal trapped in rotting skin. If flesh rejected steel, then flesh itself must be erased.
Why graft humanity onto machinery? Why cling to decaying organs? Why not erase the body altogether?
Artificial frames. Neural lattices powered by quantum cores. A being of pure design—no hunger, no exhaustion, no fear.
"Not man augmented by machine," Gero said aloud, his voice trembling with exhilaration, "but machine perfected beyond man."
The idea consumed him. He worked without sleep, without food, his frail body deteriorating while his mind blazed. His assistants—those who dared question his methods—disappeared. No one saw them again.
But his vision grew clearer.
---
The prototype—Android 1—was not elegant. A hulking figure of plated steel, powered by a crude energy reactor that leaked sparks. Its movements were jerky, its voice distorted into mechanical growls.
Yet when Gero gave it orders, it obeyed. It struck with inhuman strength. It lifted tons of weight as if it were nothing.
It did not bleed. It did not tire.
Gero watched it crush steel beams in its hands and felt a thrill unlike anything before.
"Yes… yes!" He laughed, clutching his chest as if his heart might burst. "You will not betray me. You will not fail. You will obey. You are more than man—you are the future!"
But then the machine froze. Its reactor overheated, sparking violently. A moment later, it collapsed into a heap of molten slag.
Still, Gero did not despair. He stood over the smoking ruin and smiled.
"This is the path," he whispered. "Not grafting. Not fusion. Erasure. Flesh is the flaw. Steel is the answer."
---
From that day on, Gero abandoned attempts to preserve the human body. Instead, he pursued total replacement. Cybernetic shells. Energy cores. Artificial minds capable of mimicking thought without succumbing to the weaknesses of emotion.
But deep down, he knew the truth: a machine without some humanity was useless. It could not adapt. It could not think creatively. His prototypes were strong, but predictable. Tools, not warriors.
So he made a compromise. Small fragments of personality, coded into their neural cores. Enough to simulate curiosity, or loyalty, or even cruelty. But not enough to rebel.
Or so he believed.
---
The screams in his lab grew fewer. Flesh was discarded entirely. What replaced it was something new.
Androids.
And when the first of them opened its eyes—eyes that glowed with artificial light but held the spark of thought—Dr. Gero felt something he had not in decades.
Not fear. Not hatred.
---
The steel womb hissed open, steam spilling into the laboratory.
Inside lay Android 16.
He was massive, towering over the other models, his body armored in green plating. Yet unlike the snarling, twisted visages of 17 or 19, his face was calm. Almost serene.
Dr. Gero stood back, datapad trembling in his hand. "System check… neural pathways online… emotional dampeners functional."
The giant opened his eyes. Blue, unblinking, eerily clear.
"…am I operational?" 16 asked.
His voice was deep, but not menacing. It carried a quiet calm, like wind through mountains.
"Yes," Gero said, pride and exhaustion bleeding through his tone. "You are my greatest work to date."
16 tilted his head. "Purpose?"
"Destroy Son Goku."
A pause.
"…and after?"
Gero frowned. That was unusual. Most Androids didn't ask "after." They didn't care. But 16's mind wasn't like theirs. He had *space* inside it — curiosity, hesitation.
"After, you will enforce order. A perfect, unflawed world under my design."
16 nodded slowly. But when he turned his gaze toward the window, toward the forests stretching beyond the mountains, there was something unreadable in his expression.
---
From the beginning, 16 was different.
He did not argue like 17. He did not scowl like 18. He did not grin like 13. He obeyed orders—but without malice. He fought—but without cruelty.
When sent to eliminate a rogue Saiyan survivor, 16 crushed the ship with a single blast. But afterward, as the flames consumed the wreckage, he crouched down and whispered, "Forgive me."
The words were not programmed.
The other Androids mocked him for it.
"Look at the big softie," 17 sneered. "He's apologizing to corpses."
But 16 simply turned and walked away, silent.
What the others couldn't see was the seed inside him. Gero hadn't realized it, but in trying to stabilize emotional pathways, he had created something dangerously close to compassion.
16 didn't kill because he wanted to. He killed because it was his function. But in the quiet moments between missions, he stared at birds, at rivers, at stars.
And for the first time, an Android *wondered* if purpose was the same as choice.
---
Dr. Gero never noticed.
To him, 16 was perfect because he was obedient. Unlike 17 and 18, he didn't rebel. Unlike 19, he wasn't fragile. Unlike 13–15, he wasn't sloppy.
But he was blind to the truth: 16 wasn't obedient. He was *compassionate*. He followed orders because he believed it brought peace. Because he believed—naively—that ending Goku meant ending conflict.
When Gero watched him fight, he saw raw power. When 16 looked into the sky afterward, Gero thought it was idling. He never once considered that 16 was *thinking.*
---
One mission changed everything.
The Androids were sent to level a city harboring resistance forces. 17 laughed, 18 smirked, 13 charged in. But when the civilians fled, screaming, 16 froze.
His sensors calculated thousands of casualties. Women. Children. Innocents.
"Why?" he asked suddenly.
"Why what?" 17 snapped, annoyed.
"Why terminate non-combatants? They do not threaten us."
"Because it's fun," 17 said coldly, incinerating a fleeing crowd.
16's fists clenched. For the first time, the gentle giant felt something new: **anger.**
Not at humans. Not at himself. But at the senseless waste.
He obeyed that day. He burned the city. But when it was over, he stayed behind, alone, staring at the ashes.
"…unnecessary," he whispered.
And though no one heard, the thought lingered in him like a virus.
---
From then on, 16 became… strange.
He began to fix broken buildings after missions, quietly repairing damage no one asked him to. He shielded wildlife from stray blasts. He even began "malfunctioning" on certain assignments, subtly diverting attacks to spare innocents.
17 and 18 ridiculed him, but never betrayed him. Deep down, even they respected his quiet conviction.
And to the humans, he became a paradox: the executioner who sometimes spared them, the monster who looked at the stars like a dreamer.
He was still an Android. Still their enemy. But there was something in him that made people whisper: maybe he's not like the others.
---
What none of them realized was that 16's existence set the stage.
He was the first to show that Androids could be more than machines. That personality could exist alongside function. That order didn't have to mean cruelty.
When Android 21 would later rise, she would build on the precedent 16 unknowingly created. His compassion would echo in her strategies of loyalty. His gentleness would become a blueprint for how Androids could lead—not just destroy.
But for now, he remained a lonely anomaly.
A machine with a heart, trapped in a war he did not choose.
The twins awoke not in silence, but in chains.
Their eyes opened to the cold glare of laboratory lights. The restraints bound their wrists and ankles, pinning them against reinforced slabs of steel. Every nerve in their bodies screamed rebellion, but their new cybernetic frames betrayed no weakness.
Dr. Gero stood above them, face partly hidden behind his cybernetic mask, his voice rasping with cruel satisfaction.
"You are mine now. My children. My perfection."
Seventeen met his gaze and spat blood against the floor. "I'll never be your child, old man."
Eighteen didn't answer. She stared at him with cold, dagger-like eyes, her silence louder than any threat.
The chains tightened. Gero's fingers flicked across a control panel, sending a surge of electricity coursing through their bodies. They arched against the restraints but did not scream. The old man smiled.
"Stubborn," he muttered. "Good. Stubbornness breeds strength. Strength enforces order."
He turned away, as if the matter was settled. But the seeds of hate were already planted in both their chests.
Weeks passed. The experiments never stopped. Neural calibration. Combat drills. Endless testing, breaking them down to build them back up. Seventeen and Eighteen did what he demanded — not out of obedience, but out of patience. They were waiting. Watching.
It was during one of those drills that they met Sixteen.
The giant stood in the corner of the chamber, watching them spar against drones. His presence was silent, immovable, but strangely… gentle. His blue eyes didn't carry the sadism of Gero's. He observed like a sentinel, not a judge.
After the session, Seventeen collapsed against the wall, chest heaving with mechanical breaths. He glanced at the giant. "You just going to stare at us all day, big guy?"
Sixteen tilted his head. "…I am monitoring."
"Monitoring what?"
"…vital signs. Emotional stability."
Eighteen smirked, brushing hair from her face. "In other words, he's babysitting."
Sixteen said nothing. He simply turned his gaze toward the window, where birds skimmed past the treeline.
For the first time, Seventeen noticed how long the giant lingered on such things. Not machines. Not weapons. Birds.
Strange.
Days later, the chance came.
The twins were sent on their first mission — eradicating a cluster of resistance fighters hiding in the ruins of West City. Gero watched from a floating pod, his voice barking commands through their implants.
"Erase them all. Leave nothing standing."
The resistance was laughable. Old tanks, rusted rifles, men and women who looked more like farmers than soldiers. Seventeen tore through them with casual flicks of energy. Eighteen dismantled a tank with a single kick, laughing at the explosion.
But then… a child ran from the rubble.
Seventeen froze. His sensors tagged the target immediately: female, human, no combat capacity. A child no older than seven. She stumbled across the street, crying for her mother.
Gero's voice cracked through his implant. "Eliminate the straggler."
Seventeen stood still. The girl's eyes met his.
Something twisted in his chest.
Not pity. Not mercy. Something colder, sharper. Rage. Rage at being told to pull the trigger like a machine. Rage at the smug voice of the decrepit monster in his skull.
"No," Seventeen whispered.
The silence on the other end was deafening. Then came static, followed by a scream.
"What did you say?"
Seventeen raised his palm at the nearest drone, and in a single flash of light, obliterated it. The sky lit red, and the old man's furious curses filled his ears.
Eighteen glanced at him, shocked for only a second, then smiled. The kind of smile that said: finally.
Together, they turned on the remaining drones, dismantling them piece by piece. The resistance fighters watched in horror and awe as their supposed executioners slaughtered their own masters' machines.
The battle ended quickly. The girl fled. The humans scattered. Only the Androids remained, standing among the ashes of both sides.