Sam

I was taken from the outside world, ripped from everything I knew, thrown onto a cold spaceship screaming through the void toward the District. Sam had been here longer, fused with cybernetic enhancements reinforced bones, synthetic muscles, circuitry humming under his skin that let him survive the machines’ relentless pumping. I was still new, raw, my body aching as we landed in this mecha world. Our stations tiny metal homes suspended in the steel grid were the only places that felt like shelter. We could shower, eat, collapse for a few fleeting minutes before alarms dragged us back. Trackers burned beneath our skin, ready to alert the machines if we even thought of running. Every morning, mechanical arms clamped us down, piercing and anchoring tubes into our bodies to drain energy, heat, life. We weren’t repairing anything we were the system. Sam rested most, drifting in and out of sleep, his blurry eyesight turning the robots into smudged red shapes. Yet when the pumps tore into him, he didn’t scream. Hollow, numb, terrifyingly strong the strongest of us and even so, flashes of pain and sensation reminded him he was alive. I had to stay sharp. Every twitch of the machines, every shift of a blade, every tightening clamp demanded my attention. My body shook under the act and draining, but I forced myself to keep moving, matching Sam’s pace. The robots noticed us both. Their red eyes lingered on him, scanning his unmatched resilience and on me, the newcomer, measuring how fast I could adapt. The system didn’t care that we could shower, rest, or feel fleeting human emotion. It only cared that we survived, pumped, endured. Sam endured because he was built for it. I endured because I had no choice. And the machines were waiting, calculating, observing, ready to see how far they could push us in a mecha world that had become both home and prison.