## Volume 1: The Scrapyard
### Chapter 1: Power Critical
He didn't remember pain.
Pain was a biological feedback loop, a frantic signal fired along wet nerve endings screaming about damaged tissue. That organic circuitry no longer existed.
The final file stored in his corrupted human archive was stained with primal fear: the screech of a high-tension cable snapping like a whip in Shop #7, a blinding white spark erupting overhead, and a short, cold thought that cut through the panic: "Too late." He hadn't even had time to raise his hands to shield his head.
Then came the darkness. It might have lasted an eternity. Or perhaps just a nanosecond. Time had lost its meaning in the void.
Then... the boot sequence began.
Consciousness didn't return like a dreamer waking softly from a deep slumber. It was a violent, forced initialization—a hard launch of a complex operating system on critically damaged hardware. Lines of code cascaded through the void before his internal gaze. Strange, glowing symbols... yet somehow, he understood their syntax perfectly.
> [SYSTEM INIT] CORE KERNEL: [CONSTRUCTOR]... LOADED.
> [MEMORY CHECK]... [ERROR SECTOR 4-9: PERSONALITY DATA CORRUPTED]
> [CALIBRATING SENSORS]...
He tried to inhale. It was a reflex, a phantom instinct of a drowning man. His chest should have expanded; his lungs should have drawn in the cold, biting air.
Nothing happened.
There was no breath. No heartbeat—that familiar, rhythmic metronome of life that used to pound in his ears during moments of fear. The silence inside him was deafening. There was only the faint, monotonous whir of cooling fans spinning somewhere deep within his torso.
He opened his eyes.
This was not human vision. There was no soft focus, no peripheral blur. Optical sensors clicked sharply as diaphragms contracted, adjusting the aperture. The world exploded in a stream of raw visual data. The image was grainy, rendered in high-contrast amber and grey tones, artificially sharpened by algorithms.
Semi-transparent interface windows floated over reality, boxing objects with thin digital frames: [Scrap Metal], [Unknown Alloy], [Biomass: None].
He was lying on his back. Above him hung a low, oppressive sky the color of dirty cotton, scarred by the jagged veins of green lightning.
He tried to sit up. His brain sent a signal to muscles that weren't there. Instead, hydraulic pistons responded with a strained whine.
Whirrr-clank.
Marcus (the name floated up from a cache file, tagged to an image of an old, plastic ID badge) slowly raised his hand to his face. He expected to see skin—grimy, calloused, stained with grease and oil.
He saw a skeleton.
His hand was a collection of dark, pitted metal segments. The knuckles were open ball-joints, exposed to the elements. Instead of veins and tendons, bundles of multi-colored wires encased in translucent insulation ran along the "bones."
He clenched his fist. Metal chimed against metal. No tactile sensation of skin on skin. No warmth. He felt only the resistance of materials and the pressure on the servos.
Horror, cold and rational, washed over him. He wanted to scream, to purge this nightmare from his mind, but his attempt to speak produced only a distorted burst of static from a damaged vocal emitter.
"Kkkhhh-zzzt..."
An alarming crimson symbol flashed in his field of vision, obscuring his sight:
> ⚠ SYSTEM WARNING ⚠
> * STATUS: CRITICAL FAILURE
> * POWER: 8% (Estimated Runtime: 42 minutes)
> * NETWORK: Offline. GPS module not found.
> * DIAGNOSIS: Severe Chassis Degradation.
He was a machine. And not a sleek, new model—he was old, broken, discarded junk left to rust.
He remembered who he used to be. The factory floor. Hands coated in engine oil. He hadn't been a soldier; he hadn't been a hero. He was a technician. He knew how to listen to machinery. He knew the specific grinding sound of a dying bearing and the acrid smell of burning insulation.
Now, he was the set of bearings and insulation. And his internal diagnostic tools were screaming a single imperative: "Find energy. Shutdown imminent. This is the end."
His gaze fell to his own legs. Thin, spindly struts covered in patches of oxidation. He was standing atop a mountain of refuse.
He looked up. Around him, stretching as far as his enhanced optics could see, lay an endless ocean of metallic corpses.