Pixel Ghetto

..::: M o r t a l i t y :::..

By ^0^After Midnight^0^




Threadding through the dark underworlds was always risky, the cool steel and veins of ciructry under his hand, his phaser ready to shoot was a cold comfort at times. If he were found with it buy police or anti-cyborg radicals who think they're police, Paige would be scrap metal in seconds. Witnessing it first hand only opens old wounds of his own "mortality".

Paige in comparison to Ryan, was the first created, what you would call an "older model" but was in much better condition than Ryan who was created roughly a year after him. He knew that they were thrown out because there was something 'wrong' with them, they were both broken.

For about 8 or so months after Paige was thrown into the Ghetto, memory sensors still switched on, something hit him through the other hunks of forgettable and mangled metal and hit his motion sensors back into operation.

With a tormented scream that had been smothered for seemingly endless months he crawled out of his squalid grave. Clawing through the garbage he heard a small metallic squeek.

His rage grew at what he saw.

Hastely built and just as quickly desposed of, like cheap toys when children get bored of them. Torn up in places, his face half ripped off reveiling the steel skull and wires underneath, his left arm broken and parts of him burnt. Paige had just been switched off and burried, this one had been tortured with the pain sensors on sensitive and then haphazardly thrown into the garbage so that the parts' scavengers could pick him apart alive.

Looking up at the 'sky' he was like a needle trying to claw out of the immense haystack that was the underworld he'd been cast into, it was impossible to try hunt down the beast who did this to him. He could only let his heart bleed and try to collect every part of this castaway and hide it from the scavengers, after all.

This was another like him.

Working on him night and day, ignoring his own sleep sensor he had him operational and learnt that he was created by the same hand and abandoned by the same hands. His name was Ryan and his story was a bitter tale of hatred to his maker, his torture created an unwavering hate towards his maker were as Paige still deeply in his core, loved him. Despite their diffrences they built a small life in the Ghetto amongst the defunct CR's and other forgettable mechanical forms always relying on each other for company or health, sex and confiding but they were still drones to their originator. In hate or love for him.

After a year or so Paige repaired him to the best of his ability and Ryan was fully functional except for some more expensive parts that Paige had to venture up to the mid levels to deal for parts. They traded in illegal parts for wepondry stolen off the bodies of the teenage gangs that terrorised the Ghetto, Ryan was the one who would shoot them down with such accuricy, killing or maming them but making sure their weapons stayed in a usable state. Paige would run to Bar Kay San in the mid lower middle level and trade their wares with Dale, who had a thing for collecting what he called "Fossil Guns" and had his mits deep in the 'hard to find' spare parts trade.

Ryan's apperance was not 'human friendly' to say the least, if there were one part that Paige had not been able to fix through scraps in the Ghetto was the delicate facial pieces that had been torn away. It was superficial but important, what he needed was something called "Hyper Skin" and through sources Paige had found that Dale had the amount of the nanobot self building skin that he needed to repare the bigger parts of Ryan's face.

The problem was, the substance was illegal and hard to find even in the underworld, that's were dealers like Dale come to play. Paige loved Ryan a lot, though his devotion to his maker was stronger but he would never give up on his care and matenenice for his counter part. They needed each other to somehow scrape together an existance even if it is in the sqawlor or the Slums and Ghettos, to find some kind of purpose, meaning. Even if they were just robots and their externals are fauxly familiar, somehow they've evolved a human sense, what makes us special and real.

Love and Hate.

Paige walked through the heavy steel curtains of the lift doors and pressed the pannel to go to the lowest section it ran to, the rest of the way he'd have to walk and clamber through the mangeled mess of the underworld. He held the small bottle to his chest and smiled to himself for a moment, the elevator effect excellerated his heartbeat program. It beated irregulary but it was a beat non-the less, a soft rythmic comfort, Corazon I was only a half salvaged recording of the program playing in a loop but it was special to him.

(@)-------_____[CorazonI} [...Beat, Beat-Beat-Beat, Beat...]
(@)-------_____/repeat/corazon/
(@)-------_____[CorazonI} [...Beat, Beat-Beat-Beat, Beat...]
(@)-------_____/repeat/corazon/



..::: B a c k :::..