Darkness wasn't empty, it was heavy.
Shane floated in it, weightless, like a body suspended between worlds. No ground to stand on, no sky to reach for. Just the slow beat of a distant heart and the cold, clinical echo of machines breathing for him.
Am I still alive?
The question surfaced slowly, like a whisper through oil. Then, pain. Searing. Dull. Everywhere. A symphony of broken nerves and fractured will. The void trembled.
Beeping. Distant at first, then closer, sharper. Rhythmic.
"Vitals stabilizing. Neural pathways active but scattered," came a voice, metallic and sterile.
Shane tried to move, to scream, to ask, but his lips wouldn't obey. His eyelids were bricks. The world outside his body remained unreachable, like a reflection behind unbreakable glass.
Then, warmth. Not physical, but familiar.
Dr. Elias Rhane.
The man's voice was steady, low, like a deep note held through chaos. "You're in the ArcLab, Shane. You're safe. You're alive."
Alive? The word twisted in Shane's gut. No part of him felt alive.
---
The Recovery Chamber – ArcLab Delta
ArcLab Delta was hidden beneath the sprawl of Central Hyperion, its existence known only to the highest levels of the Parallax scientific elite. But this room, this chamber, was Rhane's secret. A personal sanctum cloaked in shadows and bioluminescent panels, surrounded by monitoring columns pulsing in gentle hues of cerulean and violet. The walls hummed softly, like the inside of a sleeping beast.
Suspended in a transparent gel-bed, Shane's body lay disassembled and reborn. Wires like veins threaded into what was left of his chest. Parts of his limbs had been replaced with skeletal alloys and neural mesh. Tubes breathed for his lungs. His heart, or whatever remained of it, beat with synthetic precision.
Dr. Rhane leaned over him, scanning his cranial interface. His face was lined with fatigue, the glint behind his glasses dulled by fear he refused to voice.
"You shouldn't have survived the implosion," he murmured. "But you did. Somehow, you did."
---
Inside the Silence
Shane's mind drifted in and out of consciousness.
In one lucid moment, he opened his eyes.
White-blue ceiling. Rhane's silhouette. Machines chirping like metallic birds.
Then nausea. Terror. He remembered the chamber collapsing. The sound of his bones snapping. The last glimpse of the world before the surge engulfed him.
And... Liora.
His sister's name cracked through the fog like thunder.
Did she know? Did she see what happened to me?
Tears welled in his remaining human eye but didn't fall. He wasn't sure he still had the capacity. His throat was too raw to scream, so he just stared upward, silent as a ghost, while Rhane adjusted the readouts.
"You'll start regaining motor function soon," Rhane said, noticing the tension in his face. "But I need you to be ready for what comes next."
---
Dreams of the Past, Echoes of the Now
Time was a blur. Days passed, maybe weeks. Dreams swam with images of the past: his mother's laughter, the sunlit roads of Orinthas District, Liora's paint-stained hands.
Then they twisted. Those memories gave way to nightmares, of himself as a metal husk, of synthetic limbs clawing at glass, of voices that weren't his whispering through broken comms.
Each time he awoke, something had changed. More control. More sensation. More pain.
And each time, Dr. Rhane was there, the eternal sentinel.
"You're becoming something more," he whispered once, gripping Shane's trembling hand. "But I won't let them take your soul in the process."
Shane turned to him then, his voice a scrape of ash and fire. "Am I still me?"
Rhane didn't answer. He only looked away.
---
One Step Forward
Weeks later, Shane stood barely on cybernetic legs. Support frames held his weight as he gripped the metal rail of the therapy corridor.
His reflection haunted him: pale skin patched with bio-synthetic grafts, veins glowing faintly beneath the surface, one eye still human, the other a dull, unblinking lens. His left arm ended in sleek composite steel, marked by etched sigils meant to stabilize feedback loops.
But the worst part wasn't what he saw, it was what he didn't feel.
He didn't feel whole. He didn't feel real.
"I should've died," he said one night, standing beneath the arc-lights in the private medbay.
Dr. Rhane approached him slowly. "But you didn't. And now you carry more than your own fate, Shane."
He handed Shane a small datachip. On it was the preliminary blueprint for the neural mesh interface Rhane had built from scratch, a new kind of prototype, one never tested, one never sanctioned.
A ghost of a grin formed on Shane's lips. It felt like the first genuine emotion he'd had in weeks.
"If I'm going to be a weapon," he said, "then I'll choose what I fight for."
---