On a sunny day, beneath the blazing sun shining down on the streets of a busy, unknown city, a boy could be seen walking distractedly, completely absorbed by the glowing screen of his phone.
In his hands, the device that so completely consumed his attention displayed something shocking.
Something surreal.
Something that made his breath catch and his thoughts spiral out of control.
"THE FIRST ARTIFICIAL HUMAN HEART CREATED."
A mechanical heart.
Not just any mechanical heart, but one capable of replacing a real, beating human heart.
A heart made of steel, wires, and circuits. A heart that made it possible for a human being to continue living, walking, breathing, thinking, even without a single beat of organic tissue.
The boy's real heart, the one of fragile flesh and blood that he despised, began to race.
"Could this be it? Could this be the first true step humanity had taken toward replacing its weak, flawed, dying flesh?!" He exclamed loking at his phone.
His mind flooded with thoughts that refused to stop. What if one day he could replace his skin? His flesh? His muscles, his bones, his blood... all of it.
What if it could all be exchanged for something greater? Something stronger.
Something tha could be eternal, not flawed by a biological factor.
He dreamed with his eyes wide open. Flesh, skin, blood, bones.
All of it gone. Replaced with something more. Something better. Something that wouldn't decay. That wouldn't bleed. That wouldn't die.
He saw it clearly. A body that was no longer bound by weakness.
A human form that didn't age, didn't tire, didn't break. A body that could take humanity to the stars without fear of radiation, without fear of cancer, without fear of death, the next path of evolution!.
Could this be it? Could this be the beginning of something far greater? Could this simple headline be the spark that would ignite the flames of a new era?
The boy, lost in thoughts and dreams far removed from the world around him, continued walking. His feet moved forward, but his mind was elsewhere. Floating. Soaring. Dreaming.
And so he didn't see it.
He didn't see that he had stepped into a busy street filled with cars speeding past without pause all honking, screeching a racing as their life depended on it.
Somehow, miraculously, he almost crossed to the other side of the road.
Travelling a huge path without being hit by a simgle car.
But his recklessness came with a cost.
"Fuck what that crazy kid is doin!?" The driver of a truck saw him and tried to stop.
The trucker barreled toward him.
The driver screamed, hitting the brakes in a hurry.
The tires shrieked. Metal groaned. Rubber burned against the pavement.
The boy finally looked up, startled by the sudden noise. He turned his head, still gripping his phone, and saw it.
The truck barely missed him.
But it didn't stop.
It crashed violently into another car.
The impact sent the car flying.
The car that was hit by the truck, and was now out of control, was now coming straight toward him.
Before the boy could even understand what was happening, before he could move or scream or think, the car struck him.
Pain surged through his body, sharp and immediate.
And yet, what filled his heart wasn't fear.
It wasn't regret.
It wasn't even shock.
It was sadness.
Deep, crushing sadness.
Sadness that this was the end.
Sadness that he would never witness the dawn of the new era. That he would never see the age of flesh becoming g to metal.
His fragile, pitiful flesh couldn't even survive the impact of a car.
What a pitty.
These were his last thoughts before everything went black.
His vision vanished first and then his thoughts finally ceased .
It should have ended there.
That should have been the end.
But fate — or perhaps some unknown force, some incomprehensible will — had other plans.
Because instead of vanishing forever, instead of being reduced to nothing, the boy opened his eyes.
His eyelids fluttered. His vision was blurred.
The room he found himself in looked like it had been pulled straight from the pages of a science fiction novel. Metallic walls. Monitors. Wires. Blinking lights. Machines. Tools. The air was cold and dense, filled with the scent of something sharp and industrial.
And something else.
Something strong.
Grease.
The thick, sharp smell of grease filled his nostrils, invading his senses.
But it wasn't coming from the room.
It was coming from him.
More specifically, from just below his neck.
He turned his head slowly. Nervously. Carefully.
To his right.
And what he saw froze him in place.
His arm.
His arm — once flesh — was now metal.
A mechanical arm dark and cold.Shaped and jointed like a human limb, but entirely artificial. Wires peeked through its plating. Joints moved with quiet precision.
It was real.
It was part of him.
This wasn't a dream.
He stared at it.
He couldn't look away.
"This... can't be happening. This... can't be real…"
But there was no fear in his tone.
There was something else.
Excitement.
His breathing grew faster. Uneven.
Then, louder now almost laughing he said something.
"The flesh… the flesh… my weak, useless flesh… it's gone! It's finally gone!"
A wild grin spread across his face.
His eyes shimmered with something bright and unstable.
With trembling fingers — one made of warm, flawed flesh, and the other now cold, gleaming metal — he touched his new arm.
The sensation was cold, smooth and solid.
It was perfect.
Exactly as it should be.
A wild grin spread across his face.
And then out of nowhere it hit him.
Memories.
Images.
Not his own.
They came crashing into his mind like a storm, flooding his consciousness with knowledge he had never lived, with experiences he had never seen.
And one name stood above them all.
Lucas.
That was the name. The boy who had lived in this body. The owner of the body he now possessed.
Lucas had been born in a world not so different, yet vastly more advanced. A future where humanity had expanded beyond Earth.
A world where humans lived in colonies among the stars.
Where technology advanced, yes… but not down the path of steel and circuitry.
Instead of embracing the path of steel, instead of evolving through metal, they chose another path.
The path of flesh.
"Morons... They have eyes but can't see the glorious path!" He murmured to himself while going through the memories.
Genetic enhancement.
Evolution through DNA.
Lucas had been a student at one of the most prestigious military academies of Blue Star — a united Earth colony dedicated to creating genetic warriors.
Soldiers bred not just to fight, but to evolve.
To become monsters in their own right — to match and surpass the real monsters they faced.
A species of alien insectoids, that looked exactly like zergs that he had only seen on videogames before dying.
They were fast vicious and endless in number.
Creatures that evolved constantly, adapting faster than humans could prepare.
Insect-like monsters, creatures with endless hunger and capable of evolution, that was just a nightmare that had come out of the deepest abyss of the wildest dreams.
To fight these creatures, humanity created soldiers who could do the same — mutate, evolve, push their genetic limits.
Lucas had been one of them.
Not just any one — a genius.
Lucas was one of the best, one of the hopes of humanity that would conquer it's victory against those ugly insects!
He evolved faster than anyone else. Grew stronger, smarter, sharper. The academy saw his potential.
They pushed him, supported him without holding back, they raised him with all their forces.
Until the day it all ended.
One mistake was all it took.
When he was on a battlefield, one of the military school's training grounds he was ambushed.
It looked like a mantis, but moved like lightning. Its bladed arms severed Lucas's right arm in a flash.
It was rapidly killed by the professors who were holding the class.
Luckly he didn't die, even though he had lost to much blood he survived.
But that was the beginning of the end.
No more elite attention.
No more favor.
No more praise.
Just silence, isolament he was abbondoned.
The academy didn't expel him — but they might as well have.
They stopped caring.
They stopped helping.
Even the regeneration serum, the one thing that could've brought his arm back and preserved his genetic potential, was denied.
Too expensive. Not worth wasting on a poor student from a poor family.
No one helped him regrow his lost arm.
Not only because he was from poor family, but because he now got no use for them.
He was now just a waste of their resources, a failed investment, that was it, he was not the first and will not be the last.
But he didn't give up.
With scraps, with some parts found in forgotten warehouses.
He installed the cheapest, most basic prosthetic the academy had.
The very one now attached to this body.
Even tough he was abbandoned, his ambitions, his hatred towards the insects didn't fade.
Even as others looked down on him.
Even as his dream of reaching a Level 10 Genetic Warrior faded into smoke.
He endured.
And he kept going.
He kept training.
He kept fighting.
He refused to give up.
Not because he still hoped to reach greatness, but because he had no other choice.
After finishing his training on the Blue Star's military school he barely reached a level 2 gene warrior rank, barely qualifying himself to go to the front lines.
After he arrived at an outpost created in one the battlefield fronts, Lucas fought with everything he got.
Killing one zerg after another, with the dreams that one day he could gather enough to buy a regeneration serum, it didn't even needed to be one that could mantain his potential.
All he wanted was to regain his own arm, but even one of the cheapest regenerative serums weren't something that was close to his reach.
Until the day in a field mission, while he was protecting an important resource point, he took a claw to the chest. A direct hit to the heart.
Somehow, he was pulled out of battle and dragged to a field base full of wounded soldiers.
He was tossed onto a cold metal bed.
And there… he died.
Never getting that serum.
Never regaining his missed body part.
Never fulfilling his dream.
All of that — every thought, every moment, every memory — now lived inside the new owner of his body.
And yet…
The boy — the one who now lived inside Lucas — felt no sadness.
No pity.
Only amusement.
A faint, mocking smile crossed his lips.
"Flesh... huh."
He raised his metal arm again, admiring the dull gleam beneath the artificial light.
"Who the hell would want that back?"
A fatal wound.
He was dragged back to a field hospital, where the wounded piled up like discarded trash.
Placed on a cold bed, left to his death.
He died.
His dreams didn't matter anymore, his desire, hatred towards the zergs, they were all gone.
And now, someone else lived in his body.
Someone who didn't share his sorrow.
Someone who didn't weep for his loss.
The boy smirked, lifting his metal arm and admiring its simple form.
"Flesh… who needs it."
"Who would ever want it back?"
"Why cling to something so weak… when you can have this?"
"All I can do for you is to mantain your name my friend, it's not an important thing for me anyways as I never cared to remember even mine before waking in your body."
"Maybe I could take care of your family as payment for taking your body, that's if you even have one left."
He couldn't understand Lucas's desperation at all.
To him, the arm wasn't a burden. It wasn't a reminder of failure.
It was a gift.
It was perfection.
He admired the prosthetic, even though it was outdated. Even though it wasn't advanced.
To him, it was the beginning of something far greater.
Then a memory resurfaced.
Something about the heart.
Didn't Lucas die from a wound to the chest?
He frowned.
Slowly, his metal fingers moved toward his heart, toward where the injury had been.
He touched the spot.
And then—