Which Flesh is Your Flesh?

Chapter 5

To put his plan into motion Iguazu had to wait until open enrollment for his company benefits. Balam mercenaries got decent insurance, though the nature of their work made the premiums fairly high even with the corporate discount. He had made sure to complain loudly about his low pay for a few days before making his elections, so that it would be slightly less suspicious when he took a few plans much cheaper than his usual. He was probably being paranoid, but he wanted to make sure no one figured out what he was trying to do and stopped him.

Next was the sabotage. He made sure to publicly act like a raging dick to the engineering team, ensuring both that they would stop inspecting and performing maintenance on him and that if Michigan found out Iguazu’s emergency hatches had been welded shut, he’d assume it was one of them. Who would expect Iguazu to do something so heinous to himself anyway? Nobody wanted to think about burning to death in their cockpit. After he’d finished that he’d bent and rewired his boosters. He was able to account for the drift when quick boosting, but he knew entering an assault boost would make him lose control completely and cause a crash.

Finally for his own comfort, he started messing with the settings on his pain receptors. Not directly, the nerves themselves he couldn’t do anything about, but with his jailbroken augments he could decrease their ability to transmit information to his brain. It made it hard for the flesh to move, but that was fine for his purposes.

When he was finally done he talked to a few contacts, made a few preparations, and waited for just the right moment to strike. Luckily with the amount of strikes Arquebus was making, he had plenty of opportunities.

He got the chance to enact his plan when Michigan sent him out on a solo mission to eliminate V IV Rusty. Out of all of the Vespers, he minded losing to him the least. Sure, going down locking his sword with Snail would look better on his resume, but he didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. Rusty would probably enjoy killing him, but he wouldn’t monologue insufferably about it over coms like Snail would.

He didn’t bother taking the fight seriously. After the first time he staggered Rusty dashed backwards and Iguazu took his chance. He turned down his nerve connections all the way and assault boosted as if he was going for a kick. He went wide, his boosters spinning him upside down. The friction knocked his head off first, then he crashed through a building and into the nearby cliffside. Iguazu was glad he didn’t wait to turn his nerves off.

“That’s a shame,” came Rusty’s voice. “I’d heard you’d finally become a real pilot.” Iguazu choked trying not to laugh. If only he knew.

He could tell that the flesh in his cockpit was injured, but he could also tell that it was still mostly recoverable. He needed the center mass to be inoperable. The limbs, those he could let be, but the central portion of it needed to be destroyed. His booster systems were still online.

He made sure to engage his emergency life support systems first. He still needed to keep part of the flesh from being destroyed. Then, he boosted into the cliff face again at full power, crushing his core. His emergency systems started to take over cycling his blood and supplying him with oxygen, since his crushed dashboard had been shoved through his flesh’s chest, turning his heart and lungs into paste. He could feel the pain distantly now, the intensity pushing past his blocks, but he ignored it. Instead he took stock of the flesh in his cockpit.

Hips were pulverized by another shard of the dashboard, spine was broken in several places and severed where the dash had forced its way into the chest cavity. Several ribs were broken, and his bad eye had been torn out, the ruins of his eyelids like a gaping maw. He was well within “more expensive to fix than replace” range. Perfect. He sent out a distress signal and let the emergency life support systems sedate him.

He didn’t remember much from when he got back to base, just flashes of things. Red throwing up, Wu Huahai helping the med team scrape out what was recoverable, Michigan and Nile talking to each other in hushed whispers,

“You mean you think this was…”

“…acting out of character…welded shut…pulled his web traffic and…”

He woke up screaming and thrashing when the med team reconnected his nerves. He didn’t recognize the noise that came from his own throat.

“Put him back under!” Someone shouted. “He’ll tear out the connections.” He felt something jabbed into the back of his neck and he was out again.

When he finally woke up for good, he wasn’t in anymore pain. His systems alerted him that he was re-entering standard mode and he turned his nerve connections back up, still nothing. His fingers steadily reached up to his face and met smooth glass. He retracted his face shield and his hard metal fingers met metal.

“You’re paying for your repairs.” Iguazu hadn’t noticed Michigan sitting there. He looked like he hadn’t moved or slept in days, his gray hair greasy and heavy bags under his eyes.

“You look like shit. Sir.” He added hastily. The voice bank he’d recorded before his “accident” sounded better than he’d thought it would. His synthesizers were probably much higher end than Raven’s, so his voice sounded a little bit more natural. There was still plenty of distortion, but that had been an intentional choice. He wanted to sound like his voice was drowning in a chorus of machines. “It’s just the head and core right? I can cover it. Though, I thought AC repairs were included in my contract.”

“Twelve seconds.”

“Twelve seconds?”

Michigan lifted his leg, pulling out the Manila folder he’d been sitting on. He pulled his reading glasses from the breast pocket of his flight suit and started reading.

“Pilot engages life support systems. Secondary assault boost manually initiated twelve seconds after initial crash. Core compresses until shrapnel breaches cockpit. Assault boost manually disengaged. Boost systems recovered from wreck undamaged. No system defects noted.” He angrily removed his glasses and shoved them back into his pocket. Ah the crash report. Iguazu had forgotten the crash report. “I’d think you were trying to kill yourself if you hadn’t engaged life support. You sure as hell weren’t trying to get discharged either, you know it’s cheaper to just fix expensive assets like you than it is to make new ones, even if we have to scrape you out of the damn cockpit and put your brain in a god damn Tickle Me Elmo.” Michigan stared at him like he expected some sort of reaction from him.

“What?”

“You’ve got nothing to say? It took us hours to get you out of that wreck! You were fuzed to the fucking console! We had to cut you out! I think I deserve a fucking explanation as to why you decided to make our jobs so much harder by WELDING THE GOD DAMN DOORS SHUT!” Iguazu’s external mics peaked and he turned his audio input down.

“What can I say that would make what I did make sense to you?” Michigan started to say something but Iguazu interrupted him. “Besides saying that I regret it, because I don’t. Sir.”

“Iguazu.” Michigan grit his teeth. “We’re over budget as it is and you wrecked a piece of equipment worth about 400,000 Choam. I already warned you, mad dogs get put down. If you can’t give me a reason at least give me an excuse. I do- Balam doesn’t need to lose anyone else right now, no matter how much corporate bitches about wasted funds. Just give me something to throw them off the scent.”

“I activated the boosters to prevent the enemy from recovering Balam’s proprietary technology. Crushing the core destroyed the drives that held the data for Balam’s bespoke OS. It was a selfless sacrifice for the sake of the company,” He didn’t bother disguising the venom in his voice. Michigan would be making the report, not him.

“That should hold them for now, but nobody who actually knows you will believe it.”

“You told me you didn’t care what I did to myself as long as it made me a better soldier.” He shifted the blankets covering his legs. “My skin is military grade ballistics ceramic, I have a top speed of 65 kilometers per hour, which I can sustain for hours without getting tired, I can survive off a combination of charge from my solar cells and biomass making me much cheaper to maintain than a human soldier, and I have a crash test rating comparable to an AC.

“Are you using standardized parts?”

“Yes Sir.”

“Do you need to get a repair license to get under the hood?”

“No Sir, it’s illegal to require a company license to work on cybernetics on most planets, including Rubicon 3.”

Michigan paused for a moment.

“Whenever the corporate reps come by, your every moment is spent in unbearable agony, you got that? We don’t need them getting any ideas. I don’t know whether I should commit you or put you in the running for the Nobel fucking prize, but until I figure it out, never pull some shit like that without my go ahead, are we clear?”

“Crystal, Sir.” Iguazu let his riot visor slide back down. What could Michigan even do if he did? Short of stepping on him in LIGER TAIL there wasn’t much he could do to hurt him. Once he was discharged from the med bay he was going to start going through his code to see if Michigan had slipped in a kill switch. The second he found it, it was getting turned off.

“We managed to recover a few pieces of you intact. You can figure out what you’re doing with them.”

Iguazu was tempted to have them cremated and shot into space, but depending on what was left of him, he had an idea for something far more interesting.

621 had found another package at his door. He didn’t like the look of this one. It was a pretty big package for one, and it was insulated to keep whatever was inside cold. Worst though, was the smell. That was one of the few senses that was still his own. There wasn’t really the same kind of demand for noses as there was for eyes and ears. 621 had gotten fairly used to the smell of his own blood, enough that he could tell when the blood he was smelling wasn’t his. There was a note taped to the top.

“Let me be your strength -616”

Michigan had let him know that Iguazu had been in an accident. Based on what he said, Iguazu wasn’t in a state to be his own strength let alone anybody else’s. 621 was even considering walking into their base to try and visit him. Walter was friends with Michigan, he might be alright as long as he didn’t try to push his luck.

He probably needed to at least take a look at whatever fucked up thing Iguazu had sent him first. 621 cautiously slid off the lid of the container. Inside was a set of wiry human arms, a set of rail thin human legs, and a single brown eye. The left arm had a tattoo on its upper bicep, a group of ants carrying away the head of a stag beetle. 621 slammed the container shut.

“What the hell did I do to him?”

“Raven. Stay absolutely calm and don’t react to what I’m about to say.” Ayre warned. “Im picking up someone behind you. About 10 meters back and 15 up.”

“I’m going to guess he isn’t in an AC.” That would put him somewhere on the walls of the old Furlong base.

“I’m reading an augmented human, older generation. I’m not detecting enough energy output to suggest an AC but I’m not detecting vitals either.”

He’d been stationary for too long, Iguazu was going to start getting suspicious if he didn’t start moving. 621 picked up the container as calmly as possible.

“How much energy output are you detecting?”

“About 395.” That was too much to be an exoskeleton like his, even one of the military grade ones closer to an MT. A reading like that was closer to an autonomous drone or a military riot suppression bot. He’d done some research early on into prosthetics options, and among more extreme body modders just doing a full conversion into something with standardized, modular parts that could easily be swapped out and modded was a popular choice. Generally decommissioned police bots were the most accessible, and they could be easily modified to take nerve inputs. Military riot bots were designed for it though, so that they could be used as extra bodies in an emergency, after which the injured person could be reimplanted into a bought or lab grown spare. He would’ve considered it but the surgical outcomes post reimplantation tended to be pretty grim.

“That sounds about right.”

621 walked the package inside his hangar. He walked to the door controls at a quick but even pace.

“They’ve followed you inside.” Ayre warned as he pressed the button to close the door.

“Shit!” He picked up the box again, trying very hard to forget what was inside of it. “Ayre, can you start getting NICHE ready? This thing isn’t designed for combat.”

“Have you fixed the nerve overload issue?”

621 heard something above him clatter and snapped on his rear cameras to look. He caught a flash of dark turquoise, but pretended he hadn’t seen anything and kept moving. It was going to be fine, he was going to be fine, he just needed to get to NICHE. Hell maybe Iguazu hadn’t turned into a crazed lunatic, maybe he legitimately thought he was doing something nice for him, but then why was he hiding? To see 621’s reaction, to hide his own? It was certainly tipping the scales towards fucking lunatic.

“No, but it will have to do.”

“But you could die!”

“Okay, but what are my options here, Ayre! Either my own exo kills me or Iguazu does!”

“You think that’s Iguazu? And he’s here to kill you? Why would he do that?”

“Like you said, humans aren’t great at discerning particularly strong positive and negative emotions.”

He slightly more hurriedly cranked open the door to his workshop, then cranked the door closed and put the box down. Ayre had already started up NICHE. It also wasn’t designed for combat, but it was a lighter exoskeleton than the industrial one he’d been using. He’d been building it so that he could get around a little more easily, with fingers thin enough that he could hold a gun if he ever needed to defend himself, though he hadn’t been able to resist sticking a set of boosters on it, which was what was causing the nerve overload issue. He still needed to figure out how to get his brain to recognize “booster systems” as a part of the exoskeleton’s nervous system instead of turning off random systems whenever he tried to use it. He was lucky he had been able to initiate that soft reset on his heart in time. Something to ask Carla about once he stopped Iguazu from doing… whatever it was he was trying to do.

Ayre helped him transfer into NICHE and he shut the clamps that held him in place. It was going to be fine. It was going to be fine.

“Did you like it?”

621 jumped back knocking a wrench off of his workbench. He was absolutely sure he’d closed the door- the vent. The vent was open. Though looking at him it was difficult to tell how Iguazu had squeezed himself in there.

He was in a military riot bot alright. Over 2 meters and several hundred kilograms of metal and ceramic with a bullet proof glass face shield. These things were designed to be intimidating above all else, not practical like NICHE. At least that was what 621 told himself. His armor plates reflected that intimidation centered design ethos, using hard boxy shapes in lieu of more organic curves, though their placement still suggested the forms of human musculature. It seemed he’d already had himself painted in his customary ugly teal though, which did sort of undercut the effect. Capping it off was the smooth, tinted-glass shield designed to hide his face. Iguazu let it slide back so that 621 could see him, his face was fairly human-like at a glance, but when he spoke his lower jaw spread itself to either side like mandibles. He repeated the question.

“Did you like it?”

“Shouldn’t you still be in the hospital? I heard you had a bad crash.”

“I’m fine now, more than fine.” Iguazu still sounded mostly like himself, but he sounded off. The distortion in his voice seemed unnatural, like it was intentionally tuned that way rather than the product of bad synthesizers.

“You might still have brain damage. You shouldn’t be traveling long distances or operating heavy machinery.”

“I’m entirely heavy machinery.” He leaned against the workbench with one hand, blocking 621 on one side. 621 moved his hand, not sure if NICHE was as strong as he’d hoped or if Iguazu was letting him.

“Exactly. Go home and stay in bed until you’re thinking sense again.”

“I am thinking sense. Those spare parts would’ve rotted if I didn’t get them to you as soon as I could. I would’ve gone through all that trouble for nothing.”

621’s blood froze.

“You didn’t do this on purpose did you?”

“What part?” There was something else about Iguazu’s voice that was bothering him, but 621 couldn’t put his finger on it. All he knew was that it was making him on edge.

“You didn't get into that crash to become an organ donor right?”

“No, it was just a happy accident that some parts of it were usable.”

“But you still crashed your AC on purpose.” He had picked up on the part Iguazu hadn’t admitted.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think I care that I don’t remember my name. That was the name of a weak, petty, little man who destroyed his life and blamed everyone but himself for it. You showed me I didn’t have to feel like him anymore, I can be someone stronger, better, I just had to carve the rest of him out of me.”

Raven figured out what was bothering him about Iguazu’s voice. He didn’t sound angry or resentful anymore. His tone was no longer dripping with poison. He just sounded calm, maybe even confident.

“You were right, I am a weapon. I’m a weapon and it feels good.” The last word came out like a distorted pur from his mandibles. “But, I know that isn’t what you want. You wanted to be like the flesh that I destroyed, so I’m giving it to you. I have no use for it.”

“We don’t even know if you’d be a compatible donor.”

“All Mind gave me your medical records. They test all of our HLAs in case anyone ever needs an urgent transplant. We’re a six point match. You know how rare that is Raven? Not even fraternal twins are always that close”

“Yeah? What’s your blood type?”

“O negative. Not that it matters since you’re AB positive. I’m starting to wonder if you just think you’re too good for my spares.”

“You have to understand how fucked this is.”

“Yeah, and who gives a shit. You can have my humanity, I don’t need it anymore. I just want to be part of you.” He tilted 621’s head up with one of his metal hands. “Just let me Raven, you don’t have to be just a weapon anymore.”

“And be what, your accessory?” He smacked Iguazu’s hand away.

“My other half, let me make you whole again.”

“I’m already whole. You’ve made the mistake of assuming I need you as much as you need me.”

“If you’re already whole, why do you call yourself 621?”

“You don’t get to call me that.” 621 didn’t raise his voice, but he did jab a finger into Iguazu’s chest hard enough to make him step back.

“I call you Raven, but that isn’t what you call yourself. You let me see inside your head, I know what you think of yourself. I can make you Raven, you just have to let me.”

“And that would involve you grafting pieces of you onto me.” Raven’s hand brushed up against a power drill. He very slowly wrapped his hand around the grip.

“Not just pieces of me. There’s a few other good candidates for tissue donation in All Mind’s records. I can get the parts from them. I think Rusty has the same eye color as me.”

“You’re out of your mind! You can’t just go around stripping people for parts like they’re machines!”

“Why not? They treat themselves like machines anyway. I bet if I flayed Snail he’d have a new synthetic skin in a week.”

“If he didn’t die!”

“What do you care if he dies, Raven? You want to kill him anyway don’t you? We might as well make him useful.”

“So instead of killing him because he’s Snail and he sent hundreds of augmented humans to their deaths, you want to scrap him for parts? You understand how those two things are different right?”

“To humans.”

“If you’ve been in my head you know that’s enough for me.”

“Well that’s the beauty of it! You don’t have to kill anyone! Just let me be your weapon, I can take care of everything, if you let me.”

621 clocked him with the power drill. Iguazu stumbled backwards with a grunt, momentarily destabilized. One of his mandibles was bent out of place, far enough that he couldn’t close his visor.

“Shit! That hurt!” He seemed more surprised than angry. “I didn’t know I could still feel pain.”

621 wound back and hit him again, and then again and again until the plastic casing cracked and the heavy battery fell onto the floor. Iguazu shuddered to his feet, the side of his head caved in.

“You know that’s pointless, my brain isn’t in there.”

“No, but your camera systems are.” 621 darted to the wrench he’d knocked to the ground. Iguazu lunged at him, trying to grab it from his hands. He extended a stun baton from his arm and winded back. 621 felt his muscle memory take over. He followed the same pattern he always did when he was about to be hit with a melee weapon. 621 boosted.

Iguazu watched as Raven went completely limp. Surprised, he re-sheathed his baton. He hadn’t even hit him yet. Iguazu did a quick scan of his vitals, heart still beating, lungs still working, brain still registering activity, though the latter was registering as abnormal. It looked like his brain was desperately trying to make his body move, but something was blocking his nerves from receiving the signal. He was helpless like this. Iguazu… Iguazu could fix him, even if Raven didn’t want to be fixed, he could force him back into shape while he was like this. There was a chance that Raven would even see that he had been right to do it. Iguazu, try as he might, still had the psychology of a compulsive gambler. He released the clamps of Raven’s exo skeleton and disconnected him from its systems. Then he had Raven in his hands.

He looked so small outside of his machines. His body bled all over Iguazu’s hands. Even this vulnerable Raven was still a divinity in Iguazu’s eyes, a martyr rather than a god, but one that had finished their death in ecstasy and now stared out from a painting holding his own eyes in his hands. A thing eternally dead, eternally dying, eternally suffering because Iguazu wasn’t strong enough to do what was needed. A thing that took his sins upon his back so that Iguazu might still be blameless. Iguazu wanted to drench himself in sin to protect him. His new body contained protocols for performing surgery, he could fix him.

The die was cast. He would accept the roll where it fell.

Iguazu cleared off Raven’s workbench, shooting out a quick blast of disinfectant before putting him down. He retrieved the box containing his spare parts. Their builds were similar enough, it should work.

“Turn down your pain sensitivity,” Iguazu instructed. Raven’s heart started to race but his brain activity didn’t suggest he was changing his settings. “I’ll have to bolt the bones together, sew the nerves to each other, and then stitch up the muscles and skin.” Again, Raven’s breathing sped up but he didn’t turn his pain sensitivity down. The working half of Iguazu’s face contorted itself into a grin. “You want to feel it then? I knew you’d agree with me eventually.”

He sawed a bit off of each of Raven’s stumps to begin, he needed open wounds to work with or the limbs wouldn’t heal into each other. Michigan had kept his spare parts fresh with a small army of medical nanobots in case Iguazu changed his mind about having them replanted. While of course that was never going to happen, he appreciated the foresight. He wouldn’t have been able to make himself part of Raven if he hadn't kept them in good condition. He very carefully peeled back the muscle of Raven’s new arm to expose the edges of his bone. Then he lined it up with the stump of Raven’s arm and trimmed the bone so that the edges would match as closely as possible. A small arm extended from beneath the plates of his stomach, a plate and screws already in its hand. He didn’t hesitate.

Raven’s heart rate skyrocketed, but he still couldn’t move. It felt almost like doing maintenance on a machine, ensuring he was tightening but not over tightening the screws, making sure his hands stayed relatively dry so that his fingers would slip as he turned. Human bodies were not so dissimilar from machines after all. They both ultimately ran on electrical impulses, the push and pull of mechanical parts, and the energy gained from chemical reactions. When man created machine, he did so in his own image, it was only right that Iguazu could see itself reflected in the shards of Raven’s broken mirror.

When he’d finished bolting each of Raven’s new limbs to his body, he attempted to switch to a magnification lens, but he found he couldn’t. Raven must’ve damaged his camera systems after all. He popped a quick repair kit and nanobots crawled beneath his skin to fix his circuits. There was a buzz in his head, but he ignored it, waiting patiently for his systems to come back online.

His cameras finally accepted his input, switching to a micro lense, and he got to work stitching Raven’s old nerves to his new ones. At this point his heart rate and brain activity plummeted. Iguazu was still registering activity, but it had fallen. He must’ve finally passed out from the pain. Ah well. He’d have to see what he thought once he was recovered. It was probably better that way, it would give him more time to realize Iguazu was right.

The muscles were far easier to join together than the nerves, it required far less delicacy. However he was at a loss in terms of Raven’s skin. There was nothing he could connect the skin of his arms to. This close to his body he could see that patches of skin had begun to grow back over his flayed body, but none close enough to the replantation site. He just settled on stitching it back down for the moment. Hopefully it would all grow back alright.

Finally he was down to the eye. This would be the tricky part. The ports wired into his optic nerve would be difficult to remove by hand. It was a good thing he had the small army of medical nanobots Michigan had tasked with preserving his pieces. Iguazu had a few of them carefully begin breaking down the wires and the metal housing, carrying them away piece by piece until the socket was clean. Then, Iguazu began to carefully sew together the optic nerves, popping the eyeball into the empty socket when he was finished. He left while Raven was still out cold, but directed the nanobots to get to work on stabilizing him. Raven would thank him, he was sure of it.