Just Another Casualty 2 Months.
That's how long it would have been before she was going back to Polska where her parents were living. It was her choice to study in America and make full use of her dual citizenship, and she racked her brain for why she couldn't have left earlier as she takes shelter in the technical room in the 2nd floor basement of her dormitory. Her father's side was the Polish side, and she spent her younger years there while her teenage years were spent in the USA. Her name was Maria Grala, not pronounced like it looked but she didn't really care if people butchered her fathers tongue like he did.

The news had long stopped broadcasting, the streets ran red with blood from people trying to escape whatever was actually happening. She'd not even left her dorm building, hiding in the basement since she knew their were roving gangs killing or kidnapping on a whim. Maria had been subsisting off the water in the pipes and the contents of a vending machine for the maintenance workers. There was no radio down here, no hidden passage out unless she wanted to chance that the sewers were safe, and unless the army actually stepped in there was no hope.

Maria huddled in a corner with her a suitcase of her belongings and a blanket her mother knitted slung over shoulders. She shivered in the cold tomb of pipes. Despite having nothing to do, it was hard to sleep.

She heard the noisemaker she put on the stairs door ring out, and 4 pairs of footsteps. She grabed her suitcase and ran for the sewer grate she'd been avoiding without thinking. She wasn't ready to die and any group of people coming down here were not the type to be offering aid. She pushed her noodle arms as far as they could go to force the grate open, thinking all too late to use a crowbar. On her way to retrieve one, she was met with masked rioters in looted body armor and weapons yelling incoherently at her. Her hesitation was all they needed to know they found easy prey, as she was pacified with a blow to the side of her head.


"Wakey Wakey..."

"Told you she was still alive"

"Finished dealing with other ones, this the last one for our weekly quota, right?"

"Yeah. Just torture the shit out of her. If she gets glowy or start acting freaking we'll calm her down" one of the rioters says as her vision comes to. She's in a bloody operating room, strapped to it with tape over her mouth to keep her from speaking or screaming too loudly. Their are tables of power tools and cutlery alongside a car battery. She didn't even bother screaming as tears formed in her eyes as one of the masked men stand up while the other leans on the wall with a needle in hand.

The first to go was her legs, a meat tenderizer bringing her femur's closer to shattering and shredding muscle with every hefty blow. The masked man hitting her over and over again just stared with a look of power in his eyes, as if he enjoyed all of this.
"Could be tears of joy, we've gotten a couple masochists already! Lets try something more potent then," he says as he grabs a hose and starts forcing it into her mouth after violently ripping off the tape gag to attempt a waterboarding. When she looked close to dying, he would take it out and make her cough up all the water she could. The water splashed all over Maria, not that she felt the cold over the myriad other sources of pain.

"Third times the charm, then I'm done playing with you. Got a schedule to keep, you know?" he said as she tried to clear the water out of windpipe. Her attempts to cling to life were interrupted by feeling the clip of a car battery cable squeeze on finger. She tries to brace herself for the shock but its futile, the pain runs through her arms to her whole sodden body. The pain was what she imagined being on fire felt like, without the warmth to give some kind of consolation to the massively painful experience. The masked man did the same to her toes with the same effect, and as a final act at his wits end to force some kind of reaction out of her, clipping the cables to her lips. Her brain didn't perceive the feeling of being shocked for long, shutting down like a computer in a power surge.


Get up, trash. I need to see if you're worth allowing to live any longer.
The voice in Maria's head wasn't her own. It was machine-like, angry, and demanding. Opening her eyes didn't make a difference in what she saw: complete darkness. Her breath felt shallow, the stench was terrible, and her legs wouldn't move.

If you can get out of this corpse pile and fix yourself with the knowledge I've given you, then you might be worth giving a second a chance. And don't bother asking about a name, I know yours and its trash until you prove your worth more than nothing.

The voice disappeared, Maria's brain still blocking out the overwhelming pain of her broken legs and fried nerves. She tried to focus on any way out, on any sound of movement as she sat in the middle of the pile of corpses. She reached her hand out to try and climb as the air started to grow thin. Maria's arms climbed and pushed the bodies of others aside, looking for any gap big enough for her short body to fit through. Pushing the arm of a woman aside, she saw moonlight and rain. The fresh air from the tiny hole hit her like water being splashed in the face of a desert wanderer as she put her head above the pile of corpses. She was in a trash dump at night, with rain pouring over the city. A few fires still endured in the distance but the silence and stillness was almost divine. The voice didn't come back, even as Maria forced the rest of her body out of the pile and rolled down it to the ground, hurting her shoulder in the process. She could only crawl with her arms, digging her fingers tightly into the piles of stinking waste and pushing herself along.

Maria knew she was dying, and while in the past she may have just tried to find a dry, warm place to expire in, she saw a way out of this. All the junk here could be used to augment her body. The tools needed had to be in the garage on the other side of the junkyard. The young woman started the slow process of pulling herself over, thankful the rain could at least parch her thirst during the third physical ordeal of the day. By the time it got close, her arms were ragged and filthy, pricked with broken glass and bleeding. It was a godsend that the door was left unlocked and a car was in the garage.

As she dragged herself up to chair, the part of her that knew how cybernetics worked told her that most of her body was beyond repair. Her legs were festering and broken, and if she could walk, she could acquire tools and materials to fix the other parts of herself. A more reasonable part of herself reminded of the unavoidable reality: cutting off her limbs was going to hurt very much. She positioned herself by a table where an engine was being scrapped, grabbed the hacksaw and bit down on a rage while she she started cutting through the dead flesh on right leg, the pain only truly starting when she hit bone. Every stroke sent another code red message to her brain to stop which got vetoed by the less sane part which knew it was going to be replaced with metal. When her right leg was finally severed, there was a briefly satisfying crunch, and a plop to the ground. The bleeding was slower than expected.

More time to work at least.


The sun was shining as Marie dragged herself out of the garage on cybernetic legs, and arms which gleamed of the same metal that was one a car door. Her torso was patched over with pieces from the car's hood, having replaced almost everything but her heart and spine. She set to gathering more metal, wires, batteries from junked cars, and more sleek materials like carbon fiber to layer over her newly made body parts. She survived off of the offices refrigerator's contents and the remaining water in the sink and toilet while working on cybernetics day in and day out. It was much easier to fix and mold herself when she could tell a wire acting as a nerve to stop feeling pain, easier to shape herself with a bansaw and welding torch over exercising.

The Maria that wanted to go home was gone: her parents would never recognize her since she replaced her head with steel and her face with pale hardened plastic. A week of this lifestyle had passed, surprising her that nobody came back with more corpses to dump. She took the lack of food as a sign that she couldn't stay here forever. Even an artificial stomach needs food after all, and the fires in the distance had died down.

You're still alive. I acknowledge you have more will to live than the trash you were first killed with.
What are you?
Something beyond your understanding. It would be pointless to explain it.
Who caused all of this?
Why don't we find out? You didn't put yourself back together with steel and circuits to waste away in a junkyard, did you?

Maria found a mirror and looked at herself: She was shorter, sleeker, and had plated cybernetics from neck down. Her head was like a depressed dolls, with big downcast eyes. Her approximation of hair was white nylon fixed to a steel scalp. This all happened because someone wanted to search for a reaction of some kind on her as a test subject, and a feeling of vengeful justice built up despite her detached demeanor as of late. She grabs a black coat several sizes too big for her and focuses her mind on making a "save point". This might be the last bit of peace she gets for a long time, but she'd rather end it on her own terms this time.

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Pub: 11 Jun 2025 02:12 UTC

Edit: 11 Jun 2025 02:37 UTC

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