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The android's body crumpled forward in its seat, half of the machine's head missing. Around the wound, snapping and sizzling electronics crackled, metal seared to a white-hot temperature by the plasma gun's burst.

Luke barely took a moment's hesitation before he was upon the assailant. His hand rushed to the large, hefty mechanical spanner that sat at the side of his seat. The trooper was still training his firearm on the fox, the clone's reaction time suffering from the momentary delay as its controller's mind co-ordinated its movement. The delay was enough for Luke to strike, knocking the gun out of the way.

A soft, chirpy voice filled the air. From the corner of Luke's eye, a small holographic figure appeared above the dashboard of the truck. "Good morning" chirped the hologram, a tiny six-foot tall turtle. "I'm Terry the truck-driving terrapin, your helpful on-board AI."

The fox ignored it, and dove angrily for the soldier. Graves was already in motion, though, bringing the barrel of the gun up once more. The burst of plasma showered through the air, searing barely a fraction of an inch from the fox's head. The shot crashed through the windscreen, forming a molten hole in its wake.

"It appears that I have lost contact with the driver" chirped the hologram, the little blue light construct flickering slightly. "Unfortunately without a direct link to the driver, you will be unable to control the direction and speed of this vehicle."

Graves gritted his teeth behind the reflexive shield of his helmet. The spanner collided with the side of his head, ringing sharply. The fox was angry - furious, it seemed. Luke struck again and again, hammering violently against the trooper's armour, forcing the horse to stumble back a few inches.

"But don't worry" continued the little terrapin, "simply state your destination clearly and I can plot an automated course for you."

"Shut up!" snapped Luke, angrily.

The momentary distraction was all that Graves needed. He caught the fox with a swift, hard uppercut, the thick glove slamming into the boy's chin. He expected that the youngster would crumple, but he continued. Clasping against the vehicle's chair, Luke gave one shot at the android's sizzling remains. He clenched his teeth tightly, hands forming into fists.

"Just go down" snarled the stallion. "I'm not getting paid to deal with you."

"Screw you" retorted the fox, clutching the spanner as though it were a lifeline. He hoped that the android could be repaired, rebuilt. If he wasn't - if that was the last he was going to see of Cybe... He didn't even want to think about that.

"I'm sorry" chirped the vehicle's AI, "but that is not a recognisable destination. Please enter a destination and I can take you there."

The vehicle jerked, bumping abruptly on the road.

"Rowan" he snapped, "get me to Rowan!"

The AI fell silent for a second, before stating "I am sorry, I do not believe that we are programmed with that location. Please enter a destination and I can take you there."

"Kid" said the soldier, his voice deep and reverberating, "listen to me. My job's just to recover the android. I'm not being paid any extra to put you down. Just drop this fight, get out the vehicle and forget about the whole thing, and I'll let you live."

Tears brimmed in Luke's eyes. Anger - abject, seething anger. Anger at the soldier in front of him, hidden behind his mask, that had taken Cybe away from him. "Fuck you" he hissed.

A soft ping filled the air, and the little holographic terrapin jumped. "The Faquao Opera House. Got it! Changing direction!"

With that, the vehicle turned, sharply. The trooper's feet moved, adjusting for the shift in the cabin. Luke, however, wasted no time. He rushed at Graves, the moment that the movement in the horse's boots left him off-balance. Striking hard against the soldier's helmet, he grabbed for the gun.

At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to rip the pistol from the soldier's arms and turn it on him. Tears broke from his eyes, brimming and misting the fox's eyes. He kicked at the man's legs, screaming at him, wanting to do nothing more than hurt the man - the man that had taken the mechanical wolf away from him.

A little ping sounded, far off in the distance from the fox's focus. "For your ease and convenience" chirped the vehicle's AI, "I will deploy your on-board manual steering wheel."

The soldier brought his booted foot up and ploughed it into the fox's chest. Luke stumbled back, his back crashing agonisingly into the dashboard. A heavy shock of pain flooded through the boy, and he felt his teeth tremble.

Staggering to his feet, Graves plucked his dented, cracked helmet from his head and let it fall to the cabin's floor with an echoing thud. His chest heaved as he struggled to catch his breath. "You damn kids" he snarled, bringing the plasma pistol to bear, "if you would just learn your damn place..."

Luke reached up, grabbing ahold of the newly deployed steering wheel. He had never learned to drive - most people didn't, not since vehicles required that a driver connect to the on-board software via a datajack. But he wasn't aiming to drive. He gave the wheel a sharp, brutally hard yank.

A huge, heavy twist of metal, and a whine of many tires as they skidded on the road. Skidded and whined, and jumped. From far below, a crashing sound reverberated, along with the crunching of broken masonry as the vehicle tumbled into the roadside buildings, crushing them beneath its mammoth bulk. The truck gave a terrible roar, heaving along with only its rightmost set of wheels on the ground, skidding further and further to the left, before it eventually fell and ploughed into a freefall skid.

The world turned, and both Luke and the stallion tumbled up, off the floor of the cabin, and into nothingness.

* * *

"- spokesperson for the republic has gone on record as stating that bombing is scheduled to continue until the oppositional forces are eradicated, while social media website Facetime continues to work with the republic's government to assist in the operation..."

"- will lead us to redemption. Let us bow our heads for a moment in prayer. Lord, let your children of The 900 remain loyal through these trying times, let our souls resist the temptations of the digital, the cybernetic, let our bodies remain sanctified in your mercy..."

"-clockwork mechanical man. Does everything but live. For thinking, wind number one under left arm. For speaking, wind number two under right arm. For walking and action, wind number three, middle of back. Guaranteed to work perfectly for a thousand years..."

"- left much of the online hacker community in disarray since his mysterious disappearance some three weeks ago. Despite several claiming to take the place as his or her successor, we still know as little about the fate of the hacker Samedi as we did when..."

"- left the road and collided with several city blocks of housing. Emergency services are currently on the scene following the crash, which has caused a considerable pile-up. So far there has been no words from municipal cleaning, who own the vehicle at the center of..."

The man arched an eyebrow. The dim light in the office was especially dull, tinted with a hint of an orange hue as the sunlight filtered through the window shielding. Even so, the blinds were drawn, sharply cutting hard shadows across the elk's equally sharp suit.

He sighed. Slowly, he reached out a finger and pressed a button on his desk. "Ashley" he said, his voice as dull as the light.

Roughly an inch above the mahogany desk, a crackling image snapped into life. Ashley barely gave a second glance, mid-way through undressing. She paused only once she had shrugged off her shirt and checked both data cables that connected into her biceps and lead up, off-image, into an unseen bio-receptacle.

"Ashley" exhaled the elk once more, less patiently this time.

She glanced up, finally. "Sir?" she asked.

"Channel thirty-six" he stated, coldly.

"Yes" she said, trying her best to hide a small sliver of nervousness. "Yes, I'm aware of..."

"Your apprehension of the android," he said, "which was to be a covert operation, appears to have found its way onto the national news. Care to explain?"

The hologram of the woman flickered a little. She reached back, checking the cables connected to the base of her neck, her legs, her shoulders and thighs. "A minor setback" she explained. "Our mercenary seems to have got a little over-excited and blown off the android's head."

"What?" snapped the elk. "And the data?"

Ashley inhaled. "It should be recoverable from the memory card. I have reviewed the footage, the gunshot was high - it shouldn't have damaged the card slot at the base of the neck. We can recover the information we need from the android's body, even without the head."

"Unless" said the man, coldly, "the android thought to stash that card elsewhere. Right?"

Grimly, Ashley nodded. "In either case, I am taking full control of the mission personally."

"I see."

The air felt cold for a moment, heavy with threat.

"Ashley" said the elk again. His fingers tapped, impatiently, against his dark tabletop. "You do realise that you will be relinquishing all of your health benefits."

"I don't believe I ever had any in the first place" she said, with more than a hint of impetuousness in her voice. She lifted her foot, arched forward slightly, and lowered it with the static-like sound of water. "I'm just getting into the transference pod now" she explained, "and I'll be control of one of the Bioroid's commando units."

"The cost of rebuilding that city block" explained the CEO, "will come out of your Christmas bonus."

Ashley turned away, sinking down into a seated position. The pod itself was outside of the hologram's point of view, leaving her image half-formed and appearing to break off at her mid-section. "It's curious" she pointed out. "The fox. Despite the memory rewrite, he seems to retain some of the training that the android gave him. Perhaps..."

"Ashley" said the CEO.

"Yes sir?"

"I'm going to keep a running cost of the financial losses that your failure has incurred. If it exceeds your salary for the next year..." he began.

She turned her head slightly, seeming to look directly at him. "That won't take long, with how little you pay me already" she interrupted. "It's in hand. Mission continues."

The elk snorted, and deactivated the hologram.

With Ashley's image gone from above his desk, he exhaled heavily. Propping his elbow onto his desk, the CEO of CyberaTech rubbed the space between his eyes, easing some of the tension that had settled there.

Why, he wondered, did the damn robot have to give him so much difficulty? For what possible reason was this damned prototype so insistent on vexing him, and why was it so ungrateful for the gift of life that he had given to it?

Seating back upright once more, he dismissed the annoyance. With a flick of his wrist, he beckoned the newsfeed to commence once more. "Continue" he said. "From fifteen seconds ago."

"- is complete fake news. We have the reports. They are accurate. Nobody died during the collapse of that space station. There was no ecological impact at the crash site. These lies are simply attempting to harm my presidency and..."

"- in a surprising twist, birth rates have risen across the country for the third consecutive year. This has been Natasha Mokolov, CBN news. In the weather today, ash storms have enveloped much of Northern Africa following the impact from former space..."

"- don't know if anyone out there can hear me, but if you can, please. He's standing in the corner of my room right now. Just standing there and watching me. Oh god, I'm too afraid to move. I don't know how to describe him. I don't think he's even human - his eyes, god I..."

"- has won several awards and took the video game world by storm. However the game was not without controversy, due to the company's reputably shocking working conditions which has left several key developers dead from ill health due to..."

"- fled the scene of the crash. Witnesses at the scene reported one of them as a fox, carrying what appeared to be a broken android. Paramedics have also recovered one other victim from the crash, a clone who was found dead at the scene. Suspicion of terrorist..."

* * *

Snowfall.

It took her a few moments to realise that the lightly floating, tumbling specks were not snow, but glass. Tiny, inperspeceptable shards of glass, each barely more than a glistening mote in the darkness.

She turned, looking around her. The land was dark, under a sky that was too high for her to truly be able to see. All that existed around her was the glass snowfall, and her own sense of perspective.

It was then that she began to realise that she had no physical form - that she existed as a single mind, floating in awareness within the wilderness. She tried to examine herself, but there was nothing - no body, no form.

As the thought settled on her, she felt herself lifted upwards. Slipping inexorably upwards, skywards, into the never-ending night.

Gradually above her, an image took form. At first it twinkled lightly like a star, but as she grew closer and closer the object began to take a single and more defined form. A humanoid form, looking down at her - or at whatever space her mind seemed to currently occupy. She drew closer and closer, tumbling upwards in a smooth ascent, floating on an invisible breeze.

She could see the figure's face now, reflected as if it were in a rippling mirror. Her mind's consciousness reached out, wanting to embrace the figure.

It occurred to her that she often dreamed of the figure before her. As her mind's fingers touched against the figure, the touch seemed to shatter the air between the two. It cracked, the image shattering silently, without a sound. Pieces began to fall.

With a dim recognition, she was certain that it was the world that surrounded her awareness - her mind - that tumbled away in pieces, leaving the floating figure untouched and undamaged.

Somewhere above, she heard a voice, distant. Echoing. The figure opened her eyes, and the mind stepped finally into her. Together they looked up, upwards towards the voice. And, gradually, she began to remember.

She remembered that she often dreamed of her first strong memories - the seconds before she opened her eyes for the first time, responding to the voice that called to her. The voice spoke the same each time, "Prototype model online, initialization successful." She did not remember the moments of her body's construction, of her limbs being secured and her synthetic skin sliding easily along her cybernetic limbs. Those moments were forever lost to her.

But instead, as she opened her eyes, a word hung on her tongue. A flicker of a memory, an echo of a thought. "Alice", she wanted to say. But then it was gone. And, awakening from the last remnants of the dream, she awoke. Cybe, she thought to herself. My name is Cybe.

Her eyes circled, taking in her dark surroundings. A think line of light penetrated the shadows that surrounded her, at ground level. Closet, she thought. I'm in the closet.

She thought back to her last existing memory before coming online. She recalled a young fox - Luke, she remembered. She had given him her memory card, the little piece of plastic and circuitry that contained every experience of her life. She remembered asking Luke to load it into her, to keep it safe just in case anything should happen to the male android body that she had inhabited at that point in time. Yes, she thought, she had been riding her male chassis at the time. And in the event of catastrophic system failure or irreparable damage, the backup made from that memory card would automatically come online.

Perhaps, she thought, that was why she had dreamed of her own mind moving through space, entering her own body and... she paused. And let out a sigh. This meant that something bad had happened to her. Her male chassis was probably destroyed.

Pulling her leg back to her chest, she heaved her heel against the door of the closet, breaking her way out. Rising, she felt a sudden shift in the air around her. She had been used to moving in the old body, used to its heft and weight. It would take a few days to get used to her female one.

She wondered how long it had been since the backup. Days, possibly. Or months. Perhaps even longer.

Stepping out into the light, she looked around the apartment. Everything seemed to be in order, matching just how she remembered it. Walking on bare feet, she made her way into the bedroom. Her first objective, she decided, should be to find something to wear, as it would be significantly less safe for her to leave the home without clothing. As she opened her old wardrobe, it occurred to her that she didn't remember that particular requirement when she was in the male body. Perhaps it was a specific requirement built into the female chassis, she considered, or maybe the requirement to take specific precautions against sexual assault from men was simply something expected of women in this society. She snorted. Seemed more like a problem with the society.

Tugging free a small leather jacket, she slid her arms into it and tried to fasten up the front. The zipper moved a few inches, before it began to struggle as the fabric tightened around her chest. WIth a sigh, she left it unfastened and instead slid her legs into a pair of denim shorts. "Newsfeed on" she said loudly.

The television in the corner snapped brightly to life. "- tailbacks in three miles in all directions around the crash site whilst emergency services are struggling to clear debris from the roads. Police cordons are still in place around the area and searches are underway for the survivors that fled the scene, leaving one confirmed dead."

She slumped on the bed and finished fastening on a pair of sturdy, calf-high leather boots. It would do, she decided - she barely cared. She turned, glancing at the television. What on earth had she missed?

"This news clarifies earlier aerial satellite footage" continued the voice-over "showing the survivors to be one fox, male, in his early twenties, accompanied by what appears to be a heavily damaged CyberaTech android. A representative from CyberaTech has made a statement..."

She stood up from the bed. "Oh shit" she muttered. "Oh shit, Luke, what have you done?"