THE TALES FROM COPPER 9! Volume 1 (Murder Drones)

Prologue - Chapter 001

Year 3071
My name is Nicholas 'Rick' Davidson.
For the last 25 years, I have been a mercenary, test subject and man of impossibility. And my world has been flipped like a table.
But to tell you how I got here, well, that's a long story.

Alright, it's rewind time.
25 years ago...
"Hey! There's Rick! HI RICK!"

I turned around and saw two androids and a young girl before me, the only beings I considered to be real friends.
Tessa, and the two server drones that her parents had told to protect her, V and N. Though, Tessa didn't consider them as servers, more like friends or siblings, as they treated her even better than her own parents.

Tessa: "Hey Rick! Watcha doin'?"
Me: "Monologuing, what ya think I was doing?"

Tessa: "Ooooookay? Anyways, wanna come to the party at my place on [          ]?"

I agreed, on the condition that I got to hang out with any drones in the building. Tessa was uncertain but the other drones convinced her to say yes, after a few minutes of unnecessary begging.

Me: "So, how are Noah and Veronica going?"
N and V: "Apologies for speaking out of order sir, but please refer to us as N and V, we are just humble drones and you don't need to speak to us like we're equals."

I then placed my hand on N's shoulder and talked sternly to him.

Rick: "Fine, I will call you by your designations, but you have to know I will always believe that all sentient beings are equal to me in my heart, no matter what station they serve in life, no matter what I learn or think. Even you and V, I forever will consider as equals."

The speech brought a teardrop shaped symbol to N's nonexistent eye.

For the next week I gathered the courage to go to the party, but my father forbade me from doing so. And told me we were leaving earth to live on his space station indefinitely.

My father was a scientist, obsessed with forging mind and machine to create a superhuman entity, capable of human emotions and morals, but also capable of inhuman feats of physical prowess and endurance. His only anchor to his emotions and humanity was my mother; Clare Millicent, whom had died of Brain Cancer 3 years earlier.

After we lost her, my father lost himself, becoming dedicated to making a product or medicine that could completely reinforce the human body, making it an unbreakable fortress that could survive even the worst of conditions.

Before mother passed, my father and I only saw each other twice per day at best. Afterwards, his unbridled hate for me came out; he blamed me as the only way she could deal with the stress of pregnancy was through smoking, which he believed to be the cause of the cancer.

One day whilst scrolling through ideas for the best possible way of creating the desired effect, he found an article about the study of Nanotechnology. That article details how using it to create machines allowed them to twist and shape their body to best suit the job, and also allowed them to become near-indestructible.

He became obsessed with it, but since the product was designed to be taken at a young age, no test-subjects would volunteer, at least, none under the age of 15. One thought led to another and 5 weeks later he is using his own fucking son, I was only 9 years old, to test his projects, leading to him having to clone me and my memories as a precaution. He kept my original body in a cryogenic stasis pod, as he had later plans to test the effective treatment on me, the original.

Every single clone was injected with chemicals and medicines to speed-run the aging and growing process, leading him to test a new type of treatment every week. It took him three years to develop an effective treatment, which was composed nearly entirely of liquid Nano-machines.

Three years of testing on young children, who were technically his own children, and watching them die either a slow, fast or near instant death. And every time, he chuckled and said "Disappointing, but not surprising."

While I was in cryo-stasis, my body was preserved, but my mind remained active, and my mind was focused on what I could do to him after the surgery. My soul purpose at that moment was to make him pay, for doing this to his son. He brought me out of stasis and placed me in surgery, but stopped the surgeons before they injected me with the anaesthetics.

He said "I want him awake for this, so he can know the pain I went through when I lost her." And they did, they left me awake for the entire surgery, only injecting me with paralysing medication, that kept me awake but unable to move.

I felt every single second of pain, even when injecting the nano-fluid through my eyes. Every second felt like an unending storm of crushing pain on my skeleton, killer migraines, heartburn, digestive breakdown, and an inferno of white-hot fire that burnt the entirety of the inside and outside of my body.

When it was finished, I had blacked out from the searing pain. I awoke three days later, with a new body, look and act, but it wasn't until after my awakening that I realised he wasn't planning on letting me leave alive. He sent me to a 'cell' that was actually a very large escape pod, which was sent on a direct collision course to the sun.

I don't know what happened, whether it was luck, or the person who provided the navigation, but someone or something took pity on me that day. My pod caught onto Mercury's gravity and was pulled down to its surface.

A Black-Market Kingpin; Globak the Gargantuan, found me and took me in, protecting me and training me as his right hand and best friend. Over the next 22 years he would become the closest thing I had to a real father, and as a result, I grew up to become a Well-known and respected Bounty Hunter; The Taskmaster.

To be continued...