I had a strange feeling like I was being watched but I must have lost them in the crowd because it went away once I was clear of the apartment building. About halfway to the tram I started to get dizzy and had to steady myself against a wall as I walked. The pressure was building inside my head like someone had injected carbonated water directly into my skull. I could feel it bubbling up in my sinuses and forcing its way out through my eye sockets.

"Oh Bath." I swore as my knees buckled. My fine motor skills were degrading rapidly and soon I would be puking my guts out. That explosion had rung my bell hard and if I hadn't been suffering from a traumatic brain injury I would have recognized the effects sooner.

It didn't hurt, it was beyond pain at this point. It was pure damage. Lethal damage. Something was broken inside of my head. I could feel it swelling and the pressure was building until I wanted to scream. My legs kicked involuntarily like I was drowning and I emptied my stomach into the pavement.

There was something important that I needed to do but I was too far gone to remember what it was. I felt small strong hands rolling me over onto my side so I wouldn't choke to death on my own vomit. They were asking me something but I couldn't understand the words.

"Oye, Pendejo! Dónde está tu maldito control?" A female voice said in Katzen before switching to thickly accented Döbian. "Hey, asshole! Where is your fucking control interface? You're a warhund right? Where is your fucking control interface? The voice in my head says I need to help you! It says I'll die if I don't!"

Yes! That was the thing! That was the thing I needed. "Tags…" I rasped, patting my chest. Then everything went black and I found myself falling. Neurons firing in the darkness brought flashes of forgotten memories as crisp as the day they were made, but only moments, only glimpses. And I was still falling.

It was like I had been dropped from a great height and I was crashing through the walls of reality. One second I was watching my sister salute me in her new uniform and the next I was jumping out of an airplane for the first time.

I could hear my instructor's voice echoing in my ears as the wind whipped by. What was his name? Why couldn't I remember his name?

"Deploy your chute, Braverhund. Deploy your fucking parachute!" He screamed over the radio.

What parachute? I wasn't a commando anymore. I didn't have a parachute. "Pull the fucking cord!" The instructor's words echoed in my mind. "Deploy your fucking parachute right now or you're going to die!"

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But I couldn't. Someone had sabotaged my gear. I remembered now. I had pulled at the ripcord as hard as I could but nothing had happened. So how had I survived? How had I survived a fall from that high up with no parachute? What had I done to save myself?

Then I was in blackness again and I felt a crazy moment of calm as I reached my hand behind my head and pressed my fingers against the soft spot where skull met spine. I wasn't supposed to know it was there but my father had told me all about it.

"This will make you strong. Stronger than you already are. This will make you invincible." Gershwin Braverhund said, appearing to me in the darkness like a phantom. "All you have to do is say the words. You won't remember this, but you will remember the words."

Then he was gone and I was falling towards the ground. It was close enough now that I could make out trees and buildings. What were the words? What were the words I was supposed to know?

"Ich bin der blitz. Ich bin krieg. Ich bin eisen." My father whispered to me as I fell. His voice somehow louder than the screaming wind. Yes, those were the words.

I repeated it back to him, knowing full well what I was about to unleash. But it was better than dying. I didn't want to die. Not yet. Not like this. If I let it out only a part of me had to die. Losing a part of me was better than losing everything, wasn't it?

I felt myself split into a dozen pieces as the wetware in my head searched for a compatible host. Time slowed as it offloaded subprocesses and cognition to the other commando. I watched myself hit the ground through an unfamiliar pair of eyes. Braverhund was dead. His parachute didn't open and he impacted at terminal velocity.

I woke up to see the black furred Katzen prostitute from earlier looking down at me with concern. I saw the tattoos underneath her wide eyes and suddenly I felt a connection form. Those eyes were familiar. I recognized them by the way they looked at me. But they did not belong to her or any other katzen.

My wetware reached out, verifying her identity. I hoped to God I wasn't right but I had to know. I had to know if my father had found a way to cheat death, just as I had. My wetware confirmed it. The ID codes matched. Gershwin Braverhund was looking back at me through the eyes of his victim. My father smiled as he saw the recognition in my face.

She was young, my father had liked the young ones for his experiments because they were soft and malleable. How young had she been when he put that wetware into her head? Had she known it was laying dormant inside of her just waiting for an opportunity to awaken? Had she understood what monsters she carried?

Obviously not, because she would have thrown herself off of a bridge rather than let it take her. But it was too late for that now. How many of these poor survivors were walking around with a ticking time bomb in their skulls? Hundreds? Thousands?

Gershwin would watch from behind their eyes, pulling strings like a puppet. He would guide them to me, waiting for the words that were his signal to come out on stage and take a bow.

"I was worried I was going to lose you." The katzen said in perfect Döbian. All trace of their accent had disappeared as Gershwin took hold. "But my heart beats strongly in you and your sister. And we Braverhund are hard to kill, aren't we?"

"Yes father." I said as I got to my feet. The long dormant nanomachines in my blood had woken up and were wasting no time repairing the damage the explosion had caused. "We are."