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A moment of inaction, of carelessness, is all it takes. A pair of tongs, stained dark red from hours of work, slip out of his clammy grip and clatter to the floor with a sound that might as well have been deafening for how it echoes between the tiled walls. He, who doesn't yet know a name nor title, watches helplessly as the tongs still in front of him and the clanging gradually subsides. It is too late. He should pick them up. His teeth sink into his lower lip – pungent copper fills his mouth.
A hand falls heavy on his shoulder, daring him to crumble beneath its weight. Every fibre of his being screams against it, urges him to move forward or out or away or somewhere, anywhere but here and now. Yet he remains, for he knows that there is no somewhere, no place to run. He keeps his spine straight and his breathing shallow, trying to appear perfectly still as he steels himself for what is to come.
“It seems I have once again misjudged the depths of your incompetency.” With curling fingers the hand presses him down, cold points digging into his shoulder with more force than any normal hand could ever exert. He tries to ignore it, to remain. Something cracks in his shoulder and then, with a single loud snap, breaks. It’s a sharp sting of pain that blossoms out like a devouring flame, as if a serrated knife sinks into his flesh, every edge goring the wound ever wider. He yelps, the sound wordlessly forcing apart his lips before he has the good sense to remember to keep them shut.
“More whining,” his father snarls. “You forget yourself, child. I don’t care for your failures, nor your whimpering, yet you continuously whimper and whine instead of doing the one job you were created to do.” His father shoves him to the floor and he hits the cold tile face first, his nose breaking with an audible crack and searing pain, rattling his teeth and flooding his mouth with another wave of acrid copper. This time he manages to resist the urge to vocalise, once again pressing his teeth into his tattered, stinging bottom lip. A single muddy thought thanks the stars that at least his teeth have been spared this time. They haven’t been regrowing right recently.
“It would be a mercy to end your neophytic existence. Any of the other subjects could replace you and be of more use than you have ever been.” As his father speaks he crawls onto his side and curls in on himself, his shoulder screaming in red hot protest with every movement. His body grows stiffer by the moment, every movement more of an effort than the last. The sting of copper overwhelms his caved in sinuses, burning like he’s drowning, and there’s a darkness crowding the edge of his blurry vision that threatens to swallow him whole with each new, laboured breath. “Are you paying attention?” It’s only with great effort that he manages to whine in response.
“I should not have permitted you to awaken, much less to live long enough to prove your incompetency to such an undeniable extent.” He dares a glance up at the towering shape of his father, looking much the same as it did that day he took his first breaths. Tall, imposing, leering down at him with empty eyes. His eyes were organic then – many parts of him were – but other than that he’s indeed much the same. They both are. “Many before you have lost their lives for much less. Perhaps it’s time you finally joined them.”
He wants to kill him. Rend what little flesh he has left clean from his bones with his own hands until every surface in the very room they stand in is drenched dark green, his own skin slick and warm and reeking of that horrible copper stench. If only he could force his heavy, aching body to stand, to let him sink his teeth into warm flesh, to claw at the skin and let chipped nails catch on it until it splits open beneath them like an overripe fruit that's been left out in the sun. To rip and tear and hear him wail in agony and to see all those who came before in the mirror images of his wide-open, dying eyes.
The Tyrants would execute him.
They’d win.
And they’d recreate his father, use his own discoveries to create something new. Something worse, undoubtedly. Bones of steels and tendons of thick wires. Dark, viscous liquid in plastic veins and a brain that is little more than a link in a million tethered network. Reconfigure him in their own image.
He cannot kill him. Not yet, he thinks, hopes, as his body succumbs to the numbing dark.