Over the last few weeks, Deckard had learned a lot about the world and how people lived. There had been so much that he had never known about before. Everything from how people earned their money to the way they spent their time. He had watched people play, walk, work, and even on one occasion make love. That had stirred up some serious phantom emotion surges inside him.

He had seen how people struggled with their cybernetic prosthetics on occasion. Many of them were refusing to accept the new hardware as a true replacement for their missing limb.

He had already known that was an issue and had even incorporated a fix into the project. Watching as people dissociated from their limbs, and even in some cases actively abused them, was eye-opening for him.

Thankfully, not everything was like that. Most of the people he watched appeared to truly be happy for the most part. What he had believed to be true before was, in fact, the truth. The general populace all seemed to be content for the most part. There was a small subset that was unhappy for one reason or another, but even those people had plenty of food and clean clothes.

The world was in a good state, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be better.

During his time studying the people, the world, and various games, Deckard continued to change parts of the project. Sections were added for areas that he hadn’t considered before. He knew he couldn’t solve everything with what they were doing, but it could show everyone what was possible.

Finally, he reached a point where everything was working in one form or another. Only a few systems had been fully tested by that point.

It was just a matter of time before he had all the categories in the same top form and was fully tested and working.

Unfortunately, it was time he was destined to never have.

The outcry against Koarden enterprises had been growing worse during the time he was absorbed in learning about the world. And it had finally reached a tipping point. An armed company of trained personnel was in the process of breaching the front gates of the campus at that very moment.

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Alarms were going off everywhere and people were scrambling to make their way to safe rooms.

In response to their actions, Meredith had begun activating her own plans. Teams that she had placed around the globe at different corporation headquarters began their own breaching actions. At the same time, she began live streaming the attack on their campus with the headline ‘You Caused This!’

She wanted everyone to know that everything that came next was their own fault.

There was just one little detail she forgot. Deckard was still on the campus, and he was very much in a vulnerable position.

The world could only watch in growing horror as the armed squad swept through the Koarden Enterprises campus executing everyone. That wasn’t what they had been protesting for, none of them had thought that something like this would be the result of their actions.

Scientists, doctors, students, interns, and entire families all lived on the campus, and none of them were safe from the massacre. There were defenses that had been put in place, and they did an admirable job of protecting everyone. However, they had never been designed to keep out an insurgent group with this sort of training and tactical gear.

It didn’t help that the government wasn’t even coming to help. They were turning a blind eye to everything that was going on. It was something that Meredith would never forget.

Deckard had just uploaded all the latest updated files to the secure server he was sharing with his mother when the alarms began blaring.

Unfortunately, he had never been trained in self-defense, there had never been a need. The closest he had ever come to it was the exercises he used to get used to his new bodies and limbs.

The only thing he could do once the alarm started blaring was head for the closest safe location. It wasn’t actually a bunker, but it was close. However, the closest one was several floors below him, and already full and sealed by the time he reached it.

It was the same for the second and third safe rooms that he tried as well. He never got to try for a fourth one.

The armed company of soldiers found him as he was running through the corridor and opened fire without even saying anything.

Deckard felt the bullets cutting through his metallic body, severing all the sensory connections that they had worked so long to get right. In seconds he was nothing more than a twitching mess on the floor while the damaged and mostly destroyed body sparked and jerked with each spastic spark.

“Is this the son?” One of the soldiers asked.

“Who can say? Supposedly, he goes through bodies, like you go through underwear. Shoot it in the head a few times and then we’ll take it as a trophy just in case.” Another said just outside of Deckard’s failing vision.

There was a loud crack of noise and then everything went dark.