000:00:08:23

The screech of metal. A jerk, a click, and falling in the dark awoke him. He gasped and opened his eyes in time to have his senses jarred by the impact of his body against the cold floor. It was dark, but dim green overhead lights cast heavy shadows. The silhouettes of hanging bodies surrounded him. Rows and rows of countless bodies, deathly still. He looked up and saw his own former position among them, a small blinking display that read:

set: GEN-7-90 INITIATION UNAUTHORIZED Enter: override

No, these weren't corpses, he realized, nor comatose victims. The bodies were metal. Wires and adapters plugged into their spines. Heads of smooth, blank screens that mimicked helmets. Androids.

His breathing came out in gasps, dread making his limbs prickle. He reached out a hand to pick himself up and found that it was synthetic. His skin, rubber and fiberglass, his veins copper.

"No, no, God, no…" The uneven, tinny voice that came from his throat made him shiver.

He grasped at his chest, his neck, his face. His face was gone, he had no heartbeat. What…? Where were his memories? He was human, he knew he was human. His joints clicked as he shook. Panic threw him to his unsteady feet. Limbs that didn't belong to him. What had been done to him? Where was he? He needed to get out. He needed someone to tell him what he was. He needed to remember something.

The green lights shut down and switched to red. An alarm blared in the android's ears and he felt like screaming. Blinding fluorescent lights illuminated the giant room. A voice in the pit of his chest told him to run.

He bolted down the walkway surrounded by empty shells, turned a corner, and saw hundreds more all hanging and numbered. He heard heavy footsteps beyond the alarms, some stop and go, some steady then silent. Rows and rows of inanimate bodies stared back at him as he tried to stay hidden. There, an Exit sign lit up, its own light flashing off a spinning reflector.

A red dot on the ground blocked his path there. It shook and glided around the ground in front of him, then was joined by another and another as footsteps came closer.

"Who goes there! Come out with your hands above your head!" Demands rang out unkindly.

He felt so calm despite his thoughts racing. Was he feeling fear? No heartbeat or adrenaline could confirm that to him. He had to be, or he wouldn't be shaking so much.

"You are trespassing on private property! Come out now, or we will shoot to kill!"

He bolted for the exit amidst the flashing lights and could hear the hesitation in the footsteps that followed him. The guards shouted commands. He zigzagged and turned to escape their laser sights.

"This is your final warning!" The cry hardly ended before the shooting began.

Ricochets against the ground and sparks. The android tripped in a split second where panic overtook his thoughts and a bullet grazed past his hand that went out to break his fall. No thinking now, only escape.

He regained his momentum. Around the corner to avoid a staccato of bullets. Path blocked, turn again. Gunfire there, turn back. An opening quickly filled by guards. Shouting drowned out by the shots. Avoid the androids, was this an android or a person? Where was the human trespasser?

They blocked off the exit, so he turned back. Where the guards had entered was clear. Hallway after hallway of hazard lights and crisp corners. Assembly lines, conveyor belts, heavy machinery. Running for his life in a factory he'd only seen from a distance before today. Gunfire at his feet, debris past his head. The slam of his heavy heels on metal, tile, and concrete.

A wider alarm blasted over the intercom like a war cry. A demand for blood answered by bullets that avoided every piece of machinery but him. A bullet cracking through the fiberglass in his upper arm. Feeling the absence of the pieces that shattered and were kicked underneath workbenches and containers. Fighting the thoughts that flashed through his brain like white noise.

Override. Override. Someone had woken him up. The guards were looking for him, and someone else. Made of flesh and bone, not steel and rubber as he was. Someone who knew something about him. Perhaps what had happened to him. He ducked under more gunfire and into the deeper maze. He'd left them behind. Were they already dead? Screaming rang inside his head, like a siren cutting through the dense fog of morning. Thick dust clogging his lungs. Distant memories.

He turned another corner and tripped on his feet as they tried to backtrack before his brain did. A lone guard on silent feet trained a rifle on his head as he dropped.

"Wait! Please!" The android threw his hands up in defense.

The guard froze. Just a heartbeat. Just long enough.

"I don't know you, but please, I can't remember who I am, I don't know how I got here." He saw a name sewn onto the guard's chest just visible past the Kevlar. "Mr. Byrne, please, please, help me. Please don't kill me."

The gun's barrel wavered. Heavy boots came storming down the hallway. The guard looked up and lowered his rifle. Just a heartbeat.

"Shit," Byrne muttered.

"Lower your weapon!" The others shouted and opened fire.

Byrne grabbed GEN-7-90's arm and ran. The force of a landed gunshot shoved the android after him as he regained his footing. They turned a corner and burst through a door to what looked like offices. Byrne pulled him behind a wall and gestured to be silent.

"Hold your fire, damn it!" he shouted. "I'm on your side!"

They could hear the confused mutters as the other guards let up.

"Drop your weapons and turn over the bot, sir."

"I have nothing to do with this you idiots," he spat. "I'm putting my gun down."

He put his rifle on the ground and pushed it around the corner with his foot. He glared back at the android, whose chest was heaving as if he had lungs to gasp with. A vague anxious face glimmered in the bot's visor like an illusion as he shook his head. Don't do it.

He put both hands out unarmed and slowly stepped out into view. Countless red dots trained on his chest and face, though he did not flinch.

"Put those away before you blind me, the android is right here."

"Byrne." A harsh voice spat the name as more wary boots arrived at the scene.

GEN-7-90 watched Byrne clench his jaw, his brow furrow. A bead of sweat rolled down his temple. He heard a sharp rustling and dove in front of Byrne just in time to catch a bullet for him. The guards didn't seem to care what Byrne had to say.

"Oh fuck!"

The android yanked a distraught Byrne back into cover and ran as fast as he could. Gunfire peppered the desks and walls behind them. He slowed just enough to push Byrne in front of him and felt another bullet connect with his own shoulder.

"This way!" Byrne finally offered, making a sharp turn and ramming through a glass door.

He slipped and crashed to the ground amidst the glittering glass, but GEN-7-90 lifted him back up and shielded him once more as they dashed out of crossfire. Other guards flanked them but an emergency exit was finally clear. They burst through the heavy door, setting off further alarms.

The android spun around to jam the door closed, praying the layered steel would hold back the angry gunfire from inside.

"Mr. Byrne! Where-"

A pair of gunshots from behind cut him off and his head snapped around to look for his savior. Byrne stood with a pistol in his hands, deathly still. White knuckles. Two guards in front of him collapsed, a red pool quickly forming on the concrete. One was dead before he landed. The other writhed in pain. An awful wet gargle was the only other sound from the crashing at the door.

The android looked around and saw the parking lot of company trucks. A fence surrounded the factory but much of this back area seemed accessible for emergency vehicles.

"Byrne, the cars! We can't stay here! They'll kill us!"

He seemed to come back to life, a shudder and wild eyes as he spun around and bolted for the parking lot. He had keys to one of them if he could remember which one.

The truck kicked up dust and spun around the corner followed by the sound of more shouting and guns. Byrne threw the passenger door open and the android hopped in, ducking into cover as guards tried to give chase on foot. They had to get lost in the city somehow. The fields just outside town helped them lose the trucks that followed, but they ditched theirs in the corn and circled around city limits on foot.

They stopped when Byrne collapsed, exhausted and dizzy. The android carried him to a dry spot beneath a bridge and found that not every bullet had been dodged.

The two sat in silence as the android wrapped gauze around Byrne's cuts and the flesh wound that had soaked his whole sleeve red. His hands were cold and clammy. Night had fallen ages ago, and police sirens at least hadn't arrived on this side of town yet. Best to stop and rest here until morning.

"Why did you save me?" The question was an urgent whisper on the man's lips.

The android looked at him, and the face projected in his visor seemed more clear than before. Sad eyes and freckles beneath the scuff marks.

"Because they would have killed you. And I thought… maybe you knew something about what happened to me. At least, I couldn't watch you die."

"You're a robot with AI you're not supposed to have, and I'm an unlucky idiot."

The android looked at his hands that didn't belong to him, now smeared with drying blood. He thought he could remember a woman's screams. Screams that broke his heart. Long brown hair. She called out to him.

"No, I remember…" he struggled for words. "I remember people… I remember pain."

The man watched him shiver. Bullet dents and exposed inner workings secreting oil the robot seemed to suddenly notice. His fingers clutched the damage like it pained him. No AI came off the rack behaving like this. Had he been run through some sick simulation?

"Do you remember a name?"

GEN-7-90 nodded slowly. "Em… Emrys, I think. I'm Emrys…"

The man watched Emrys's face glitch slightly, then solidify. A blue-eyed redhead, with small scars on his lip and forehead. Stranger and stranger…

"Emrys, huh?" He sighed. "I'm Zoran. Thanks… for saving my life."

Emrys nodded. "Thanks for saving mine."