Everything felt cold and empty to Silash, as if he were nothing but pure awareness floating in an endless void.

[System processing]

[...]

[Processing complete]

Silash suddenly opened his eyes, but he was seeing everythig differently now. He was... in a dark room. It looked like a office building. And he was sitting in a chair, a cold chair. Why was everything so cold?

[Silash]

[Level: 7]

Silash could barely believe it. Did he have a system all of a sudden?

[Skills: Meta Analyze]

He had a [skill]? Silash didn't know how to feel about any of these. He was just... Hell, he was just a nerdy water elemental, and he even had low elementality at that. Now he had a system? What was his [skill] exactly? [Meta Analyze]? What did that mean?

[Meta Analysis]

[As a skilled observer you have an uncanny ability to break apart the inner workings of things with your creativity and intellect. Using this skill allows you to do so on-demand and is specifically tailored to things you already know nothing about. Essentially, you can spot objects, elements, whatever you may see that you have absolutely no idea what it is - well, use this skill, and you will know what it is, infallibly so. In fact, if anything, this skill turns on its head the normal methodology of scientific examination, as things that you think you know may keep you from properly observing and utilizing this skill on them. Still, this skill has ramifications that not all can sense in this mopment, and may be wildly difficult for you to grasp right now, but it will indeed allow you to craft from items in your world in ways you would never normally imagine.]

There was only one thing that was a little offputting about it - well, one thing other than the fact that he seemed to have suddenly acquired a system with no reasonable explanation as to why. Everything Silash saw seemed to be tinted a deep blue, and it was a little distracting - though he did notice his ability to distinguish between colors while his sight was imbued with the particular abormality was improving by the moment.

Still, what had happened to him, and why did his body feel so dreadfully cold? Silash looked down at his hand, and was immediately stricken with fear.

What was there was not a hand in a tauman sense. It was not a hand at all - it looked more akin to a mechanized claw.

"What the fuck?" Silash suddely felt his heart leap. His voice was... not his own. Sure, it was close - but it sounded tinny, like it was coming out of old speakers instead of, well, instead of from a taumna mouth. Silash looked down further, looking to his torso and his legs, and saw with horror that he was no longer himself - at least, not physically.

Silash didn't know what to do, but he had to find out what the hell was going on and make whoever was responsible for this nonsese pay for how they'd transformed him. He looked to the door, the door that had been staring him in the face since he'd waken up and seen messages from his system. And then, he charged at it with all his mechanical might.

[You're taking damage]

Silash recoiled in pain as electric currents surrounded the door and then, on impact, coursed through his chilly body. A voice crackled over an unseen loudspeaker.

"Well, it's great to see that you're awake, Silash!" said a familiar voice over a tinny speaker that sounded ready to rattle itself to death.

"Tim? Are you fucking kidding me? What the hell have you done to me?"

"What have we done to you, Silash," replied Tim's voice.

"Yea, Silash," replied the breathy voice of Hilu. It sounded like this whole situation was, to her, a bit of an aphrodisiac.

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"Fuck off! This is... This is terrible! How could you just turn me into this..." Silash looked at his metal claws in horror. "How could you turn me into this thing? And completely without my consent or prior knowledge! Sure, as a scientist I have of course considered the possibility of implanting the tauman mind into a well crafted piece of machinery - an automaton if you will - and I do indeed think that it's swell enough that you've seen fit to grant me a system. I had no idea any of this was possible, and it really is amazing. Still, I think if I had ever had the choice, I would've never come to see you, Tim. Because this, this is awful. If I were a less mentally stable individual, hell, if I were a tad more in touch with my emotions and not conditioned to repress the everloving shit out of them and bottle them up whenever possible, I'd be crying right now. Fuck, I'd be bawling. But here I am, in this cold, harsh, unfeeling piece of machinery. Can I tell you that it feels like every part of my body exists, but at the same time that it's all but gone numb? It's fucked up and disturbing. You did this to me. Why, Tim? Fucking why?"

"Why does an artist do anything, Silash, dear friend?" Tim said with a nasal laugh.

"You are not my fucking friend, and if I ever fucking see you again I'm going to smash your head like a firemelon!"

"Yes, of course. Um, good luck with that." Tim cleared his throat. "I guess I ought to give you a bit of a heads up on this bit, then - you actually, by design, will never be able to do that. See, as one of the great minds behind the design of your impeccable automaton body, I've programmed within it a bit of a failsafe, a killswitch that when activated will make it impossible for you to harm either myself or Hilu. It's tied to our biomarkers, and in all effects it makes you as harmful to us as a fly to an electric fence. So, go ahead, heap on the empty threats. Get all your anger out. Because when you do see us, and you will see us, it's going to crush you to be unable to do anything if you don't deal with these emotions now."

"You're not my fucking therapist, Tim!" Silash was pacing around the room in a counterclockwise circle. He hated to watch as every pace he made was perfectly measured and calculated by his new body. Everything felt so empty and sterile now. He hated it. "You're just a freak show, a terribly wealthy man who's mind is so warped that he thinks implanting the consciousness of the man who, by all admissions, saved his life into some disturbing, mechanized form is the right idea of a good time. In short, you're fucking demented!" For emphasis, Silash grabbed the office chair and ripped it in half with a few choice clicks of his hydraulic arms.

"Oh, but look how strong you are, now, Silash!" cooed Hilu's voice. "Plus, think about it this way - your new body is a lot stronger than your old one. There's no biological clock tick, tick, ticking your life away. You just need to be maintained mechanically, and you can soldier on ad nauseam. That's a feature we look for in people who are useful to us."

Silash felt a phantom chill run up his already cold back. "Are you saying that there are others you've done this to?" Of course, the more Silash thought about it, the less he needed them to answer to know the truth. Hilu had, essentially, already admitted it - people that were useful to her and Tim were more useful as lifeless robots. That wasn't necessarily something someone said if they'd only ever turned one person into an automaton by way of some strange swap of consciousness. "Fuck. How many people have you two done this to?"

Silash waited far too long for an answer. And, when he did get one, it was more of a grumble and a non-answer, where instead Tim started asking Silash if he liked his system and if he was impressed by how strong his hydraulic arms were.

"Yes, they are strong, Tim, thank you." Silash would've rolled his eyes, but he probably didn't even have eyes at this point. He imagined some bizarre array of camera lenses molded into an unbecoming, mechanical countenance. Then, he realized something. "Hey, Tim, is everything I see supposed to be blue as a berry? Because everything is blue as hell, and if you're the one controlling this body of mine, for better or worse, I'd like to be able to see easily."

"Ah, shit, sorry," Tim grumbled. "I forgot to include the color correction settings in your main branch. One second, I'll push an update. You don't have to do anything, all your body software is tied in to your system, it's a specific creation that I manage while tapping into the universal backend with a couple custom kernels. One moment."

Silash didn't like the sound of this. So not only was he trapped in this mechanical form and unable to retaliate against Tim or Hilu for it, but they could also push updates to him from undisclosed locations? So it didn't matter where Silash was - he couldn't fight them, and he couldn't run from them? He couldn't even choose not to be a robot?

How could he win?

[System downloading patch]

[...]

[Patch downloaded]

[Applying patch]

[...]

[System patched]

Silash noticed with relief that the world around him suddenly looked a whole lot closer to what he saw when he was a tauman, though he also realized that his vision was in fact better than it had been before. He looked down at his body and noticed that it was built mainly out of blue tinted steel - still, it was better that Silash be blue than the whole world.

"Thank you," Silash said cooly. "Now what?"

"Now you begin training," replied Tim, an evil edge echoing in his voice.

The electrified door to the office suddenly shot down into the floor and revealed a row of automated sentry rifles. Five red dots were hovering around Silash's torso.

Shit, Silash thought as the rifles open fired, blasting glowing rays of energy towards him with an empty malice.