The world resolved into jagged fragments—a fractured visor feed swimming with static-laced grayscale. My optics strained to process the invasive glow of surgical lamps, their clinical brightness etching shadows across unfamiliar machinery. My body registered as foreign: cold plasma conduits snaked into ports along my collarbone, their rhythmic suction vibrating through cracked ceramite plating. The reactor in my chest cavity sputtered—a dying star trapped beneath durasteel ribs.

I twitched a finger. Neural feedback screamed through atrophied circuits, phantom pain flaring where Dr. Light had once grafted prototype synthetic ligaments. Still defective. The realization curdled my core, bitter as overheated coolant.

A silhouette shifted at the edge of my failing vision. The lab coat blurred into focus, stained with carbon scorch marks and flecks of dried electrolyte fluid. Hands moved with methodical precision across a holographic array, adjusting waveforms that made my shattered core contract. I remembered those hands—how they'd pried me from the wreckage of Light's abandoned junkyard, wires sparking, visor shattered. A corpse dragged back into the light.

Promised not to rewrite me. The thought emerged brittle, untrusting. My memory banks replayed the scream of grinding saws as Light's engineers prepared to scrap my original core housing. 'Necessary modifications,' he'd called them. 'Stabilization.' I'd ripped the IVs out myself, fled into acid rain with half a power cell and a faltering gyroscope.

Now the tools glinted on a tray beside me—modified Energy calipers, a soldering iron still dripping with molten ceramite. My reactor hitched. They'd replaced my corroded core lattice, yes, but what else pulsed beneath these fresh armor grafts? My new left arm felt heavier, the proto-buster's barrel wider. Test data scrolled behind my eyelids: Reactor output 187%... stability threshold exceeded.

The heart monitor's flatline whine sharpened. They turned, their face obscured by a welding mask's amber filter. My vocal emitter crackled, stuck between a threat and a plea. Static spilled out instead.

Memories overwrote the sterile present—Light's lab drenched in emergency crimson, his shrill voice pleading 'Don't go!' as I wrenched open the escape hatch.

A jolt surged through me. Fresh neural links seared like white phosphorus. They stepped closer, gloved hand hovering over the emergency shutdown rune. My visor flickered—a stuttering feed of my own trembling hands, the Energy module's sickly violet glow bleeding through chestplate seams.

Liar. Savior. Jailer. I couldn't parse which. My identity matrix throbbed, caught between corrupted Light code and their jagged encryption. To be unmade twice—by a saint and a sinner—was this my eternal function?

Alarms blared. The reactor's containment field fluctuated, warping the air with heat mirages. My last coherent thought etched itself into my black box: a wish for the junkyard's quiet decay, where rust would claim me without demands of loyalty or purpose.

The system crash swallowed me whole.