SmackDown: MadMike's Revenge!

Round 7: Lightning Bug - @bloodsword

Chapter 22: Lightning Bug

by bloodsword

Corbin looked at their hands, battered and torn. They looked like they should belong to a human. They bled and they hurt like a human's. They felt, they touched, they made things happen, just like a human's. So how could they belong to something that wasn't?

"If you're done feeling sorry for yourself, I've got that mod you were looking for."

Corbin turned towards the voice, which belonged to a rather bedraggled-looking droid. Looking more like a human skeleton than anything else, the droid moved behind a counter stacked high with jars of body parts.

"I ... I'm not feeling sorry for myself," Corbin retorted, letting its hands drop to its side. It leveled a hard look at the droid. "Just caught by surprise, is all."

"By what?" The droid ducked behind the counter to grab something. "You can't tell me you didn't know you were a mech outta the box. It's kinda obvious."

"For you, maybe," Corbin fired back. "You're a mess of tubes and wires." It barely resisted the impulse to look at its hands again. "I was made to look like one of them."

The droid popped its head up for a second to peer at it with its glittering optical sensors before disappearing again.

"Not really," it said from somewhere behind that counter. "Wrong skin tone, weird eyes, and, in case you missed it, you ain't anatomically correct."

As Corbin frowned in confusion, the droid went on.

"Besides, why the hell would you want to look like them? They don't even want to look like them, modding away their appearance, builds and structure to the point there are days I can't even tell what the hell I'm lookin' at."

The droid paused to set a small cylinder on the countertop.

"Your stealth mod. Not sure what you're going to do with it, though. Being a mech, you can't hack your own DNA to insert the mod," the droid pointed out, folding its arms and using them to lean on the countertop. "You don't have any to hack."

"Maybe not," Corbin replied, lifting the cylinder to peer at it. "But I know someone who does. Someone who owes me a favor."

That made the droid's optical sensors flicker.

"I wouldn't have thought you had been around long enough for that," it bluntly noted.

Corbin opened its mouth to reply. Only to close it again.

Truth be told, it had no actual idea how long it had existed. All it knew was that, since waking up in that alley with a dead bio-modded human at its feet and a DNA saw in its hand, Time had flown by as it went from crisis to crisis, trying to figure out what the hell was going on before someone, or something took it offline permanently.

It waved its hand dismissively.

"I've been around long enough," Corbin said somewhat evasively after a reflective pause, pushing its musings into the back of its mind. "I just need to get this ..."

An abrupt bang from the mod dealer's front door interrupted what the grim mech was about to say. Feeling a thrill rush through it at the unexpected sound, Corbin turned toward the sound. And found itself looking at no less than half a dozen powerfully-built humans in black combat armor, their pulse rifles up and ready.