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In the Atlas military’s official files, that day in the training arena was classified as an accident.
One hundred and sixty-eight separate previous simulations had never accounted for the evolution of a new subroutine, combined with the simple and inescapable force of gravity. A single twist in the last blade of Penny’s set had made the filament snap, the broken tension reverberating back through her entire body. Electricity and Aura worked in sync to soak up the impact, drawing the other swords back together to keep them from suffering the same fate, and that singular blade landed halfway across the arena, sinking six inches deep into reinforced steel.
Then the flying spare impaled Ironwood’s arm.
Penny drew in a breath, recycled through false lungs, the gasp part soul and part subsystem. His other arm, holding a pistol full of practice rounds, dropped like a stone, and Ironwood’s eyes went wide, more white than blue. The forcefield around the arena dropped in an instant, a pair of observing soldiers leaping over the wall to attend to him, but Penny couldn’t move. She was frozen, limbs unresponsive, blinking repeatedly as the moment processed and replayed; analyzing, analyzing, panicking.
“Mr. Ironwood!” Penny shouted, and dashed forward.
Both soldiers put their hands up to stop her, but Ironwood’s head snapped up. “It’s fine. She can see.”
There was no blood. Where fabric split under the blade, there were circuits instead of flesh, sparking and exposed to the air. Embedded lines of white Dust glowed bright, threatening to surge and explode before the energy was snuffed out, and Ironwood sagged to that side, gloved fingers going limp.
“I’m not hurt, Penny.” His smile only showed a fraction of white teeth, but it read as genuine. “It’s just a simple repair.”
Every alert thrumming through her body started to quiet. “How?”
“I’ll show you in a moment.” As Ironwood straightened up, the soldiers took a step back, and he pulled the sword out in one slow draw. “But you should sheathe all of these.”
All ten fingers worked in a blur, filaments attaching to both hilts once more and yanking them back together, a magnetic snap opening her backpack before the weapon folded into place. Ironwood refused assistance from several passing officers as they walked, and Penny tried to make herself small, hands and shoulders pressed tightly together as they bypassed the infirmary and went behind a set of closed doors that required his personal scroll code and an optical scan. A woman in a white lab coat was working at a repair bench inside, putting together the joints around an artificial knee before testing its flexibility.
“General, are you–” A reflexive salute was stopped halfway, and she ran over to a large white table, prepped for what appeared to be complicated surgery. “Did the Aura connection short out?”
“Yes, but only to the arm.” Ironwood knocked his bare hand against his chest, and the ring of metal made Penny jump. “Nothing else seems to have shut down.”
“Well, we decided on using closed systems for each limb for a reason.” She pushed his hand out of the way to start undoing the buttons of his vest, and Ironwood’s jacket was tossed over her chair at the repair bench without a care for the ironed fabric. “Do you care about the shirt?”
Ironwood chuckled softly. “No.”
His dress shirt came apart in white strips, catching on jagged bits of metal, and Penny couldn’t stop herself from staring. That his other arm was made of flesh and blood, she knew, but the right half of Ironwood’s body was molded metal and Dust-bound circuits, chest split down the middle by a sprawl of pale scar tissue that continued all the way down to the buckle of his belt. Using a tool Penny had never seen before, the technician started to pry off the top panel surrounding the deepest part of the gouge in Ironwood’s arm to get to the thick cords underneath, built to act like tendons and muscle.
She was programmed to adapt, to understand, but the tug in the center of Penny’s chest could only be called awe, tempered with curiosity. “Are you…like me?”
“No, I–” Ironwood blinked, then looked her right in the eye and smiled. “I take that back, Penny. In many ways, I am probably more like you than I think most days. But I was born with my body intact, with a soul. This injury happened in the war.”
Penny nodded, still watching in fascination as the technician unscrewed the connections between Ironwood’s elbow and forearm, removing the latter piece so she could pry out shorted-out transmitters and a Dust crystal that had a crack right through the center. He appeared to take the entire thing in stride, pulse slow and even according to all of Penny’s external sensors, but it felt like something was swimming in the pit of her stomach, even if there was nothing set there but a simple processing mechanism.
“What if I had hit your other arm?” She asked, barely loud enough to modulate from her throat.
Ironwood snapped out of his idle focus, meeting her eyes again. “Penny, part of being a person is making mistakes. You have to learn from them, grow from them.”
“But–”
“It would have been fine.” He winced as the central Dust crystal was replaced, Aura leaping to encircle it and power the upper half of his arm again. “After all, then I’d be more like you.”
Penny looked down at her feet, and against all protocol, a smile started to tug at the edge of her mouth.