When I arrived on your world,

“Excuse me. Do you mind if I sit here?” the young man asked as he carefully balanced a breakfast tray on his right hand. He did not want to sit with anyone, but the hall was very crowded and this table was the only one with an empty seat.

The long head of black hair didn’t even look up from the table to answer. “Whatever makes you happy.”

He didn’t bother introducing himself as he sat down. It was a side-effect of not taking his medication, this inability to care. But as he quietly ate his food, he noticed something familiar about the other man’s way of carefully dissecting every morsel before lifting it with one finger into his mouth.

“Trigger?” he ventured.

The black hair parted slowly to reveal a face. A pair of blood-red lips appeared first, followed by a regal nose, then a pair of dark black eyes. After a moment, recognition replaced the initial look of anger. “Long time no see, Omega. What brings you to this hole?”

“The usual: reprogramming.”

“What is it this time — still having those dreams?”

Omega had not seen Trigger since six months ago, the last time he had been in for rehabilitation. It was then that he was given his last warning. This time he was actually up for a complete programming alteration. The dreams themselves, he had been told, were not the problem. If he continued in his attempts to think independently, the dreams were merely a side-effect. The doctors were, of course, lying. His dream circuits had been dysfunctional since he was a mere school-drone. That was where he and Trigger had become friends, though the first time they met had cost Omega a trip to the hospital.

Trigger was a toy of researchers. His imbalanced and slightly retarded brain were not aborted as is the usual practice. Instead, his birth was the beginning of a very long inquest into the catalog of human brain functions. He had been implanted with nearly every device ever invented, including fully functioning reproductive organs of both sexes. Omega, not knowing what else to think, always thought of his friend as a he.

His unusual friend, because of these experiments, often suffered from what his doctors called reality-induced rage. Omega had once asked Trigger why he so often had these fits of rage and instead of an answer came a seductive smirk. That had been merely hours after a fit, in which Trigger had destroyed everything in the classroom, including the teacher and three classmates. His punishment was to visit Omega in the hospital, who had merely received a broken arm.

He had been kept in school for years despite the fits. His teachers and classmates were expendable. He was not. Omega was only twelve when the two had met and already the experiment had been going on twenty years. Trigger’s age was as close to infinite as Omega could imagine.

Despite the incident and their differences, the two went on to become friends. To one particular statistician’s amazement, Omega survived the next six years of Trigger’s experiments. He laughed at the accusation that he actually gave suggestions when asked who was next to be killed during the next so-called fit. Trigger enjoyed talking with Omega who, although not in favor of violence, always had interesting ideas of destruction and actually listened. In return, Trigger did his best to pretend that he cared about Omega’s strange dreams of the Holy City.

“Of course I’m still dreaming. But that isn’t the real problem—”

Trigger looked around furtively. “You’re not taking your medications are you?”

Omega smiled mischievously at his friend. “Why should I bother? They don’t do anything for me. Of course, then again...”

“Damn it, just give them to me, will you?”

Trigger reached his open hand under the table to receive the pills. He brought them up to look at them, admiring each as if they were priceless white pearls, before throwing the whole handful into his mouth. He swallowed and turned his eyes back down to his food, picking each bit apart before eating it. Omega made no attempt at conversation as they ate. He knew that his silence during his friend’s concentration was appreciated.

I could only look to the coldness of space.

Over the next few days, the two continued to meet at that same table. Omega wondered for a moment why no one else ever sat at the table — but his experience with Trigger’s possessive nature and explosive temper answered that quickly. His suspicions were confirmed when he realized that the other inmates weren’t bothering with him either. It was merely a matter of time before there was enough tension worked up among the population to cause a confrontation. But Trigger was appeased by the extra medication for now and didn’t care for another fight.

After nearly a week Omega finally discovered exactly what his new programming would be. The newer cybernetic brains were far more efficient than his outdated and already damaged human one. They would merely replace his barely functioning brain with a newer, more advanced model. That was, of course, not his opinion. He rather liked his brain, even if it was the cause of his insanity. He tried to broach the subject with his friend.

“The Generation 15 models are quite good. I wouldn’t mind having one,” Trigger commented.

“But what about my personality? The new models might be efficient but they don’t even have emotions or—”

He was interrupted from behind. “Emotions — worthless things aren’t they?”

Trigger looked up from his food. He growled in a deep voice that promised violence. “Go away.”

The confident reply was mechanical. “I won’t. I want to sit here.”

Omega realized that this person was much further from humanity than anyone he had met before, even his doctors. He looked like a young man in his early twenties, but his eyes were hollow and gray. Omega imagined that he saw nano-machines crawling underneath the man’s skin. Trigger, though agitated, could not possibly win a fight against him.

“It’s alright Trigger. I think he’s the friendly type.”

Trigger closed his eyes, not really caring. If Omega said he was a friend, then that’s exactly what he was. Besides, he wanted to enjoy the rush from the morphine he had taken from a few people earlier. Blocking the sights and sounds around him, he gave his body over to the oblivion.

“You are Omega, aren’t you?” the cyborg asked as he sat down. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Omega nodded quietly. His reputation, not for anything he had done, had again preceded him. It was a well-known fact to anyone with any education that he was the last of his kind, the only living person with a completely unaltered human brain. He, like Trigger, had been an experiment. No one had been born with a fully-functioning brain in nearly a hundred years. It was ordered before his birth that he should be allowed to live as much of his natural life as possible and that he should always be observed. It was a test to see if a human being could survive in a world no longer constricted by their weaknesses.

As a child he had been made fun of by others; but instead of wallowing in misery and self-defeat, he discovered strength in hate. Though he didn’t have the stomach for killing, he often visualized another person’s destruction. When he met Trigger, he found a way he could comfortably realize those aspirations.

“Who’s that?”

Omega didn’t feel like conversation and the metal-head had begun to annoy him already. “That’s Trigger. He’s a bit violent. I don’t recommend pissing him off.”

“So I’ve heard, but I wasn’t asking about him. I was asking about the other one.”

Omega had never noticed that there was someone else sitting at the table. He tapped Trigger’s shoulder, and asked him who that was next to him.

Through the haze, Trigger only managed a few words. “Oh... That’s Kernel. Quiet one... doesn’t... can’t talk.”

Omega studied Kernel for a moment. There was nothing distinguishing about him except for the wall of silence that seemed to surround him. He turned his attention back to the cyborg. “And you would be...?”

“I’m Switch. At least that’s what I call myself. My serial number has too many letters and numbers in it for most humans to remember.”

This Switch character was obviously a product of Generation 15 programming. Omega’s skin crawled as he examined the human skin that probably concealed a host of mechanical wonders so common in the world he lived in. He even thought he saw evidence of a skeletal armor protruding from inside his shirt.

“And what you are you here for?”

“A bit of this and a bit of that. I’ve been on the waiting list for some time. I was finally granted an upgrade last week. Now they’re just doing some body-work before I get discharged.”