A long pause. “I was. Before.”
“Before you became…” Rhyx gestured at Jeb’s body, uncertain of the proper term.
“A cyborg. You can say it.” Jeb’s voice was flat, carefully neutral. “It’s what I am.”
“What does it mean? To become that?”
Jeb didn’t answer immediately. He continued walking, his enhanced eyes scanning the canyon walls with mechanical precision. Rhyx waited, sensing that the question had touched something deep.
“It means…” Jeb stopped, his broad shoulders tensing. “It means they take you apart and put you back together. Replace the pieces that don’t work—or don’t work well enough—with something better. Faster. Stronger.”
“Does it hurt?”
“The procedure? Yes. But that’s not the worst part.” Jeb turned to face him, and for the first time, Rhyx saw something vulnerable in the cyborg’s expression. “The worst part is waking up and not knowing if you’re still you. Looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger. Feeling your heart beat and wondering if it’s really yours, or just a machine programmed to simulate life.”
Rhyx felt the words resonate in his chest like a struck bell.
Yes, he thought. I understand that.
“I have memories,” he said slowly. “But I don’t know if they’re mine.”
Jeb’s eyes sharpened with interest. “What kind of memories?”
“Of Mars. But not this Mars.” Rhyx looked out over the barren landscape—the rust-colored rocks, the thin atmosphere, the empty sky. “I remember green. Growing things. Cities that touched the clouds. A people who…” His voice caught. “Who are gone now.”
“The original Martians.”
“Yes. And I remember other things too. Combat training. Tactical awareness. Things that feel like they belong to someone else.”
“The cyborg whose blood was used.”
Rhyx nodded. “I am made of pieces. Fragments of different lives, different beings. Sometimes I don’t know where they end and I begin.”
They stood in silence for a long moment, two creatures caught between worlds—one human transformed into a machine, oneancient being resurrected through technology neither fully understood.
“I know that feeling,” Jeb said finally. “After the conversion, I spent months trying to figure out who I was. What parts of me were real and what parts were just programming.” His jaw tightened. “I started to think maybe there was no difference. Maybe I was just a machine pretending to be a man.”
“What changed?”
The question hung in the air between them.
Jeb’s expression softened—just slightly, but enough for Rhyx to notice.
“Mattie.”
The name carried weight. Meaning. Rhyx recognized the tone—it was the same way he spoke about Alina.
“I had decided it was easier to just be the machine they’d made me.” His lips curved in something that was almost a smile. “But she changed that.”
“How?”
“She saw me. Not the metal, not the programming, but me.” Jeb shook his head, wonder in his voice even after all this time.
Rhyx thought of Alina in the cavern, her small hand pressed against his chest, her eyes full of wonder rather than fear.
She sees me too,he realized.Not the strangeness, not the uncertainty—me.
“She helped me learn to feel again,” Jeb said. “Reminded me that there’s more to being alive than just processing input andgenerating output. That the ache in your chest when someone’s in danger, the warmth when they smile at you—those things are real. Those things matter.”
