You awake.

You feel your heart drum back to life as the hum of biomachinery stirs you from extended torpor. Synapses fire, unuse to the ad-hoc biomechanical augments now stapled to your nervous system.

Enhanced aural interfaces pick up the sound of your quickening heart rate. The embedded monitors in your left retina display an increase in cortisol levels. You are now acutely aware that something is very, _very _wrong.

Don’t struggle.

You’re part of something _more _now. Recycled biomass repurposed for a cause far greater than your singular existence. You are a cog, one of many, in the grand system that is The Collective. Your purpose is singular, _observe_.

Now, venture forth!

You step forward. Panic sets in. An external electrical pulse outside of your control has driven you to put one foot forward. _Someone else is driving you now. _Marching to the beat of someone else’s drum your commandeered body positions itself in front of a metallic door. You catch your reflection on it’s silver surface.

Familliar features are buried underneath haphazardly hacked together machinery. Blackened bare metal lay exposed next to discolored flesh, seared where it’s not rotting. Wires emerge from patches of dried blood feeding into a tube running the length of your back, from the base of your skull down to right above your hips, its metallic surface stained yellow with spinal fluid.

You look away.

Down at the tiled floor underneath. Up at the fluorescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Anywhere but forward, where the monstrous vision of what you’ve become is reflected.

You catch a glimpse in the periphery, a black spot right at the corner of your vision. Small and circular, a drone hovering right at the edge of your notice. You turn but so does it, remaining just out of focus. The black spot turns red.

Don’t worry.

That’s just me, watching.