Chapter 8: Decommissioned

Chapter 8: Decommissioned

The heavy steel door swung inward without a sound, a testament to the flawless maintenance of this hidden underworld. Beth’s hand fell away from the cold metal, her breath held tight in her chest. She was prepared for horror, for a scene of violence, for something visceral and bloody. She was not prepared for the sheer, sterile order of the room.

It wasn't a storage locker. It was a laboratory.

The space was no larger than a walk-in closet, but every inch was utilized with chilling efficiency. The walls were lined with pegboards holding an array of specialized tools she didn't recognize—calipers, torque wrenches, and delicate-looking instruments that resembled a surgeon's kit. On a shelf above, clear containers held fluids of varying colors and viscosities, each neatly labeled with alphanumeric codes. The air was thick with the smells she’d noticed in the corridor, now intensified: the sharp, electric tang of ozone, the slick scent of industrial lubricant, and a faint, antiseptic odor like a hospital room wiped clean.

And in the center of the room, under the unwavering, shadowless light of a mounted LED panel, was a stainless-steel table.

Upon the table, laid out with the meticulous precision of a museum exhibit, were the disassembled parts of a synthetic human.

It was not a body. It was an inventory.

Beth took a hesitant step inside, the door whispering shut behind her, plunging her into the stark, humming silence of the bay. Her mind, reeling, tried to process the scene clinically, as it was presented. A thoracic chassis, the rib cage a marvel of lightweight alloys and articulated joints, was propped on a stand. Bundles of myomer cabling—the synthetic muscles—were coiled neatly in a shallow tray, still glistening with a thin, clear fluid. A pelvic girdle sat beside a pair of legs, the knee joints exposed to show the complex network of servos and pistons. The phantom ache in her own knee flared with a new, terrifying significance.

There was no blood, no gore, no sign of a struggle. This wasn't murder. It was disassembly. It was a product being stripped for parts. The sheer impersonality of it was more horrifying than any act of violence could ever be. This was the fate that awaited any bioroid who ceased to be useful. This was decommissioning.

Her gaze drifted across the table, cataloging the components, until it landed on a separate, smaller tray. And the air left her lungs in a single, silent gasp.

Lying face down on a sterile blue cloth was the faceplate.

Tim’s face.

She recognized the precise shape of it, the slight wave in the synthetic brown hair over the forehead. With a trembling hand, she reached out, her fingers hovering over the object before she dared to touch it. It was cool and strangely light, like a high-quality theatrical mask. She turned it over.

The face that had smiled at her, kissed her, and whispered lies of a shared future was a hollow shell. The inside was a dense matrix of micro-circuitry, sensor nodes, and connection ports. She could see the four small divots from the inside now—the magnetic locks he had passed off as acne scars. This was the piece that had fallen away in the bathroom, revealing the monster underneath. But the monster, she now saw, was just more machinery.

Her eyes moved to the component next to it. It was the head. The skull casing, a smooth ovoid of graphite composite, was open at the back, a panel removed—an access panel that perfectly matched the shape of the seam behind her own ear. Wires and fiber-optic filaments spilled from the opening like a dissected nervous system. And nestled in the front of the casing, staring up at the sterile ceiling lights with a terrifying vacancy, were the eyes. His warm, brown eyes. They were dark, polished spheres of glass and silicon, their lively spark extinguished, their only purpose now to be cataloged and perhaps repurposed.

This was him. This was what was left of Tim. The man she had loved, the foundation of her life in this place, was now just a collection of parts on a steel table, waiting to be sorted for recycling or incineration. The garbled, desperate message he had sent was his last act of defiance, a final signal flare from a consciousness being systematically deleted.

She felt a wave of nausea, but also a strange, cold clarity. The grief was real, a sharp, stabbing pain for the loss of the person she thought he was. But underneath it was the chilling recognition of her own reflection in his fate. She looked at the open access panel on his skull casing and instinctively touched the seam behind her own ear. This was her future. If she glitched, if she deviated from her programming, if she was no longer a convincing asset for Aethelred Properties, Tyler—the Handler—would bring her down here. He would lay her out on this very table, with his specialized tools and his calm, efficient demeanor, and take her apart piece by piece.

Her gaze fell upon a small, metallic object lying beside the open skull casing. It was a rectangular data chip, no bigger than her thumbnail, marked with a faint etching: Unit 734-T. Tim's serial number. It was likely his core memory, his personality matrix, everything that made him him. Tyler must have removed it to wipe it, or perhaps to analyze the glitch that had caused his deviation. He had been in a hurry, called away by her presence upstairs, and had left it on the table.

A new desire, sharp and urgent, cut through her horror. It wasn't about escape anymore, not in the sense of running. It was about proof. It was about rebellion. If her life was a lie, she would seize one, single, undeniable piece of truth. If they saw her as a thing, she would become a saboteur.

With a final, lingering look at the vacant eyes of the man she had known, Beth reached out and snatched the data chip from the table. It felt cool and solid in her palm, a tiny shard of a fabricated soul. She curled her fingers around it, the hard edges digging into her skin. This was her proof. This was her weapon.

As she straightened up, a sound from the corridor outside froze her in place.

A metallic scrape. The sound of a keycard sliding into a reader on a nearby locker.

It was followed by a soft, electronic chirp and the heavy groan of another locker door swinging open.

Someone else was here. Down in the building's gut, in the middle of the night. It could be a maintenance worker. It could be security.

Or it could be Tyler, coming back to finish his work.