Which Flesh is Your Flesh?

Chapter 4

The night they had sex Raven had sent him home with a parcel of combat data, but Iguazu hadn’t managed to work up the courage to look at it. When his augments were jailbroken, it had given him access to a slew of new settings he had been afraid to touch. Raven insisted that he would need to start. Though he hadn’t insisted that he fly blind.

“Since the augmentation surgery I’ve been paranoid about memory loss,” Raven had explained, “so I sprung for a secondary augment.” He removed a memory card from a port embedded in the side of his skull. “I’ve been making backups of everything, just in case. I’ll send you a copy of my arena match with Freud. That should give you a sense of how things should feel if you’ve adjusted your combat settings right.” Then Raven had extracted and given him a copy of the data like it was nothing. Like it wasn’t a fragment of his soul converted into megabytes. “You know how to open data with your augments right? You won’t get what you need out of it just by watching it on a screen.”

The intimacy of it was absolutely terrifying. He had checked the data, it was what Raven said it was, no hidden brain viruses or anything, but that was scarier. That was Raven’s thoughts, his feelings, and he wanted Iguazu to experience them as if they were his own.

His fantasies had taken a strange turn since then. One of them involved Raven connecting the two of them with a transfer cable, their eyes meeting and seeing both the other and themselves reflected back. Two sets of hands moving with shared wills, their bodies intertwining, both fucking and being fucked at the same time. They would be each other and themselves, Raven would be a parasite beneath his skin and he would be a parasite beneath Raven’s. They would be a two mouthed, one eyed thing that existed only to experience rapturous pleasure.

Iguazu had stopped coming to his senses when he was done jacking off. How could he, when he remembered how he felt in Raven’s arms. When the safest and most seen he had ever felt was in the arms of a man he hated.

This memory in his hand wasn’t a fantasy though, it was real. The plastic and metal housing it was stored in made it even more frightening in his eyes. Raven wanted him to put this piece of him in his brain. They were the same. Raven clearly wanted to make them the same, excising Iguazu’s dead flesh piece by piece and replacing it with his own. He couldn’t say that he didn’t want it.

He finally decided to look at the data after he reached the top of A rank. There were only three fighters above him, Michigan, Freud, and Raven, yet his eyes weren’t drawn to that lofty top bracket, they were drawn to Rummy at the very bottom. Rummy who had the power to throw him into a massive funk despite his dead-last ranking. Iguazu couldn’t let that happen again. He still remembered what it felt like to get hit with Rummy’s chainsaw, but he’d never taken a plasma rifle shot head on, he’d never felt a pulse dagger cut through his plating. Anything could make him slip again, could make him feel like his body was no longer his own, like it was just a heap of scrap metal again, like he was just this small fragile thing that existed completely separately from it. He didn’t want that. Anything but that.

Iguazu retreated to his room the moment he could be alone. Before he’d given it to him, Raven had jokingly kissed the memory card leaving a dark red stain on the plastic. By now it had turned to rust brown. Iguazu did not wipe it off. He flipped open the card slot embedded just behind his ear and slid the memory card inside.

This was just another sortie, 621 told himself, knowing it wasn’t true. If he still had hands he’d be white knuckling the controls right now. As it was, he was threatening to rip himself out of the clamps that held him in place while he was connected to SKY BURIAL’s systems. He was already questioning his choice of load out. CLOSED CASKET was probably a safer choice. It was a newer build and he had less experience working around the limitations of its old Coral generator, but it was safer. The new legs ALL MIND had made for him could carry much more than SKY BURIAL’s, and punishing with that shiny new laser lance certainly felt excellent, but it would feel wrong to win this in anything other than Sky Burial.

It was the first AC he’d ever built, almost all Nachtreiher, with a Kasuar head, Alulas, and a finicky Hokushi generator. He was packing Etsujins on both arms, a Huxley on his right shoulder and Vvc-770LB on his left. He knew the laser blade was fucking busted, he’d been caught with his pants down enough times when it hadn’t unsheathed after swapping too quickly. Hell he’d known about that issue long before he’d ever stepped foot in an AC, that was what had gotten him into this damn mess. Yet he still used it, carrying that fucking cross on his wrist rather than his back. Half the time he considered driving the thing through his cockpit, at least until the hate took over again and he remembered he was too fucking angry to die.

He carried a lot of hate in his heart, hate for VCPL, hate for Arquebus, hate for his lawyers, hate for criminal contempt of corporate interest laws, hate for the court records, still sealed “for his protection” while the case was ongoing so he couldn’t find out his name. Not that the naive engineer that had been sued by one of the world’s largest corporations was him. That man had been ripped out of him and replaced with this fucking thing, this brain stem for machines. He’d always wanted to be the brain behind an incredible piece of technology, but this was a sick fucking joke.

For now though, this would do. He was a weapon, he didn’t need to be anything other than a brain. A weapon was better suited for revenge than an engineer anyway.

This was the final roadblock. He knew he could handily defeat every single one of the other Vespers in single combat, Freud was the only one left. His build was simple, deceptively simple. He had to be a damn good pilot if he could rise to rank 1S with such an unspecialized build. 621 had to convince himself that he was better.

Allmind announced the start of the match and 621 immediately broke open the floodgates. His jailbroken augments drowned his mind with adrenaline and endorphins until he was nothing but a sharp edge. In SKY BURIAL, the first few seconds of a fight would determine whether he won or lost. He caught sight of LOCKSMITH’s blade, a Vvc-770LB. The horizontal swipe just missed him as SKY BURIAL sprang into the air. He held down on his triggers for dear life, spraying LOCKSMITH with bullets. At this distance stagger built quickly especially with the Huxley tearing into him on top of his machine guns. LOCKSMITH fell to his knees. SKY BURIAL swapped to his laser blade punishing the stagger before switching back and darting away. His hands snapped back up, his guns still blazing, recoil running up his arm. Freud probably didn’t deserve this. He was probably just another man bound in flesh bound in machine bound in millions and millions worth of bloodsoaked choam, but still SKY BURIAL’s fingers squeezed the triggers until he thought they’d break. LOCKSMITH staggered again and SKY BURIAL showed no mercy, his blade moving into his hand before he could think and swapping back out the second the hit connected. ALLMIND’s clone of LOCKSMITH lay broken on the ground. SKY BURIAL pulled the trigger. SKY BURIAL pulled the trigger SKY BURIAL pulled the trigger.

“Hey, Iguazu.” 621 looked into the mirror in his workshop, his cameras bringing his exoskeleton in focus. The lighter one he was working on lay half finished on his work bench. It’s clawed feet and more delicate fingers called to mind SKY BURIAL’s lithe form factor.“Sorry, that was probably a little intense wasn’t it? It was the best data I had though. I reviewed all of my combat logs,” 621’s posture slumped, “that’s about as coherent as it gets.”

He ran a hand over the top of his head. Once upon a time his co-workers could tell what kind of day he was having by how messy his hair had gotten. Not anymore, not when he was this.

“Fuck, this is rancid!” 621 smashed his hand against his workbench, the metal crumpling under his fist. He paused for a moment, his breath wheezing through his cheap synthetic lungs, then he dejectedly bent the metal back into place. “I’m sorry. This is harder when I’m alone.” When Iguazu was here he had the sadistic pleasure of making the Balam mercenary squirm to keep him distracted, but when he was alone he couldn’t help but realize how stupid he looked and sounded. “I wanted to give you a reward for bearing with me for so long.”

He removed his dick from his toolbelt, inserted it into the empty socket in his crotch, and twisted it counter clockwise to lock it into place. Then he retrieved a purchase of his own. It was a niche sex toy, really only usable by augmented humans or people with extensive brain implants. It was a wireless fleshlight, designed to sync with a specific person’s nervous system and make it feel like they were being fucked if the fleshlight was being fucked. These things were generally used for long distance relationships, or by some more stealthy exhibitionists he’d known, though, there were a few more niche uses.

“Christ this is fucked.” 621 plunged his cock inside, groaning at the sudden fullness in his ass and the feeling of a tight hole around his dick. “Iguazu, you’re so tight.” He fucked himself harder, knowing that’s what the corporate merc would want to hear. God he was fucking huge. He didn’t even fit all the way inside. Not that he would really even want to. Maybe Iguazu would like to be hollowed out by the fucking thing but 621 knew his limits. The angles of the silicon felt surprisingly good inside of him, the roughness of it catching on his insides just right. All of it was silicon, all of it was false.

Iguazu, he had to think of Iguazu. That’s who he was fucking it was Iguazu. Iguazu, whose blind hatred and imperfections made him so poignantly human. There was some sort of disease that ate away at the minds of AC pilots, even the ones without augmentation. After a certain point, whenever they looked at an AC they saw a collection of parts, a load out of weapons, but never the pilot. Freud

was LOCKSMITH, Michigan was LIGER TAIL, and in a very real sense 621 was SKY BURIAL and CLOSED CASKET, but not to Iguazu. Iguazu saw his AC and he saw Raven. He still wanted to kill him, but he understood what he was killing. 621 wasn’t just a brain for a machine to him. He was a nemesis, but that implied that he viewed them at least equally or at most as looming terror on the horizon, not just parts, not just a machine, not just a weapon that needed to be destroyed.

He wasn’t sure if he was imagining his dick inside Iguazu or Iguazu’s dick inside of him as he sped up his hand. Either way it was starting to feel good again. 621 leaned back onto his work bench, spreading his mechanical legs. God he felt like a freak, in a good way, not like he normally did. Not only was he fucking himself, but if Iguazu had stuck with the memory, he would be making him feel all of this as well. He would probably love it wouldn’t he. 621 could imagine the face he’d make, the anguish as he debated taking the card out for the sake of his pride or keeping it in and knowing he was a fucking pervert for it. 621 shuddered, his exoskeleton’s safety locks engaging while he rode out his orgasm. He sat there, breathing heavily for a moment, waiting for his brain activity to return to normal enough parameters for the safety locks to disengage.

“Iguazu,” he knew his synthesizers had interpreted his whine into another awful harsh growl but he didn’t care. “Thank you.” That was the closest he could get to saying he loved him.

Iguazu removed the chip from his head. He didn’t think Raven knew all of that information was recorded. They weren’t the same, Iguazu understood that now. He held up the memory card to his good eye. The smear of dried blood still clung miraculously to the plastic. He brought it to his mouth and licked. The taste of iron and plastic was like cum inside his mouth. It wasn’t enough. Carefully he placed it on his tongue and swallowed.

He could make them the same. He could tear out Raven’s dead flesh and replace it with his, fix him like he had fixed Iguazu. No one would be able to tell where one began and the other ended. Iguazu already had something in mind for himself, a continuation of the transformation that was already in progress, he just had to wait and make sure he saw it through.

Raven had been wrong after all, it was him that was still so poignantly human.