Short Stories

I was given a second chance at life

As humans we believe in many things after death, spend time with loved ones, and start over in life. The list continues but for me well i am one of the very few exceptions. A year after I died I was brought back to life in a highly controversial project that sent the world into a blood rage to wipe me off the planet and all of those that turned me into the thing I am now.

First I like to start with the life I had before I died. At birth my father died on duty, he was a very good father to my older brother but I would never have that chance. I was brought into a life of drugs and property. My mother had to work dead end jobs and sell herself just so we would have food on the table. I didn't know any better but my big brother was the one that protected me from the world. Except this was his downfall as the stress was too much being the man of the house and raising me as mother was normally away. What threw him over the edge is when our mother was found dead after a rich guy was too rough with her and didn't bring her to the hospital. Instead drop her off in the pouring rain when she died of her injuries. My brother was forced to drop out of school and get a job while making sure I was taken care of. Between his shift at work and taking care of me he would start to go to drugs as a relief as the stress was too much. A bit after he was addicted to drugs and started to leave me at school where I had to get rides from others. When he stopped showing up to work the Bill's started to pile up and the house started to look like a homeless camp with trash scattered everywhere, bugs and rats littered the floor with the piles of dirty clothes and trash my brother just threw into the floor. After the lights and water were turned off it was my brother's breaking point. I was 17 at the time and had a small job so I could try to bring food in the house. After a long day at school and a late shift at work I returned home to find it was burning down with massive flames in the sky. Fire trucks and cops tried to put out the fires. I stood there watching my family home burn to the ground. Inside the front door was the charred husk of my brother on his knees looking up at the roof as if he was asking God why he did this. One of the cops saw me and tried to grab me. I saw him and quickly ran away. I didn't stop imagining my family falling apart one by one dying after trying their hardest to help me. It was all my fault was the last thought as I turned my head to see bright lights inches from me. 

I was hit by a blue Ford, he was speeding going 68 out of 50 speed limit. He was too busy drumming his string wheel to highway to hell to notice me that had just ran into the front of his truck. I was thrown 30 feet and tumbled multiple times on the hard asphalt till I came to a stop hitting the back of a parked car. My body was sickening, nearly all my bones broken and jetting out my body. My clothes being blood rags, the cop that chased after me caught up in time to witness the entire thing and was the one that called the ambulance that kept me alive long enough to get to the nearest hospital. Once there I was through into emergency surgery only to die under the knife of the surgeon. It was not his fault the odds were stacked against him from the overwork and stress of his job. The sight of me made him think of his daughter, at least that's what he wrote in his suicide note. Even in death I caused the very person attempting to save my life to end theirs. 

My body was discarded like many others that had no family to mourn over it. Except this wouldn't be the end of my story yet just the very beginning. In the morgue the mortician was stopped and my brain was taken and placed into a cooler and flown in a private plane to a team made of robotic experts, and a few neurosurgeon. Which would be the oddest combination unless you were using a human brain to run  the most advanced system of metal and circuitry, or in other words an android exoskeleton. It looks entirely human except for the cracks in the plates of skin. Then again I can activate this system that costs my entire exoskeleton with silicone rubber that fills in the gaps and gives my body a human feel. It's easily removable by a blade or heat like normal silicone. There are a lot of features of my new body and honestly sometimes I do miss some of the feelings I felt as a human. I can still achieve them by releasing chemicals in my brain. Each part of my exoskeleton can be turned into a weapon with many gadgets available, which is what brings me to the next thing to talk about. Being hooked up to all private and classified files I found out my brain was taken by mistake and this mistake was not found out till it was too late and going back would jeopardize the whole project. So it was overlooked by the team assigned to the project. They figured it wouldn't matter if you take an undeveloped brain from a traumatized 16 year old, vs a brain from a well trained and specialized soldier that was prepared for such a situation and event was on standby when they needed the brain. Instead the one scientist in charge of retrieving said brain made the mistake of two girls dying in the same time frame down to the second. Furthermore having the exact same name. An easy to avoid situation if the one individual was not recovering from a heavy late night of partying the night before.