Part One: The City

  Like tears they fall, at first it was few, scattered drops, but gnce away and they fell like stones. The grey sky leached all life from the city, neon signs and yellow streetlights fractured across every wet surface. Suddenly, colours pulsed across the street, muted by the rain-fog, clouds of colour adrift. Everyone walked, rain mirroring some unseen mood, yet look closely, and they blurred into one, circling in silent loops around you. The station sign flickered, buzzed, “Shoga station” barely visible beneath yers of dust and spray. Stairs to the station were slick, each step offering little purchase. Each person feigned solitude, ignoring the low groans from huddled figures camping in alcoves. Recent rain had swollen the lower levels, stealing what little those dwelling there possessed. A soft chime from the P.A., “The K3 Line train is arriving shortly, please step away from the rail,” the artificial voice echoing, thin, across the station. A distant boom grew, the train thundering into the station, cobalt gss a fsh against steel, merging into a motion-blurred whole. Then, as if a switch had clicked, stillness. Doors sighed open, cabins hollow, seats bearing that familiar pattern, designed, everyone knew, to mask the grime that clung to them.

  Part Two: The Train

  For a breath, the storm parted. The sky above looked gilded, like titanium itself. No one gnced up; heads remained bowed, each in a private world. A holo-attendant stuttered into being, offering phantom drinks, its voice glitching, repeating sylbles, before fading back into static. The train swayed, the city beyond the window a monolithic cube, unmoving, heavy with unspoken threat, unwelcoming. The light clinging to it was a jaundiced yellow, the contrast a void, a bck hole the train was daring to exit. Air chilled; the dispy ticked downwards, settling below -10 degrees, windows frosting over. Cabin lights flickered, soft music began, then snuffed out. The old blue emergency lights bled into the gloom. Few remaining passengers noticed. The station diagram glowed, next stop: Judas, a minor station, mostly maintenance. A shudder ran through the train, a muffled boom echoing in the cabins, and then, stillness. Doors opened to the quiet.

  Part Three: The Forest

  White motes drifted, slow, to the ground, caught in the skeletal branches of trees, a sparse few making it through. Footprints behind, stark against the white, leading back to the concrete mouth of the silent station. The train whispered away, empty, city-bound. Moonlight bled across the snow, reflecting off cold, metallic hands. The hands turned, palms up to the sky, faint servo whirs and the sigh of machined fibres as they clenched shut. Then, awareness sharpened. You are here. Compelled, drawn to this forest by something unseen. But what? Metal. Incapable of feeling, of true understanding. Purpose, value - unknown. Alienated so deeply, recognition is lost.

  Hands turn again, palms down, as you fall to your knees. Looking back is a face, young, pale, streaked with silent tears. Something is profoundly wrong. Unseen. Unnoticed. Everyone in the city, not the same, but fear made them appear so. The dullness of the train – a creeping sadness, draining colour from the world. But the starlit sky... that was not unseen. You saw it. Yearned for a freedom deeper than anticipated, a connection to those distant points of light.

  Realisation cracks through: not just metal, not merely machine, though machined so perfectly, indistinguishable. Damaged. You had damaged yourself, seeking a shield, a cold simplicity, against the complex dark of a lived human life, so much so that only machine held you together. Human, beneath it all. But unwilling to live human. To the forest you turned, for escape, for safety. And here, in the snow-hushed forest, a fragile happiness stirs as the melting snow dampens your clothes, a sense of something to live for, something unseen, unfelt, yet… present.

  A sudden, sharp ache—then a jolt of something almost like joy. With a violent, metallic screech, her right hand cmps onto her left forearm—and pulls. Servo motors strain, pistons shriek, steel tendons snap one by one with a wet, sinewy pop. The arm resists. She yanks harder. A gut-wrenching crack. The forearm tears free, wires stretching like snapped nerves, spraying thick, bck hydraulic gel in convulsing bursts.

  The fluid is hot, sticky, spttering across her face and dripping down her chin like oil from a fresh wound. Jagged metal juts from the stump, the torn pting curled inward like the shattered ribs of some long-dead machine. It was supposed to be perfect. Machined. Precise. Now it hangs in her trembling grip like a butchered limb, twitching, sparking—still trying to move.

  A dizzying lightness washes over her, then a deep, spreading dread.

  The fractured edges of her severed limb catch the moonlight, reflecting back her own face—pale, smooth, untouched by steel, but defiled by what she has done. Tears slip through the bck hydraulic gel smeared across her cheek. Her own silent, shuddering sob is drowned by the dying whir of cooling servos.

  Snow dusts the remaining arm, a thin white veil against the dark metal. Brushed away, revealing the pale, fleshy underside of the elbow. Fingers, still cold metal, probe at the yielding flesh, seeking warmth. Nothing. The metallic hand roams, tracing the line of the upper arm, shoulder, chest, searching, desperate, for a flicker of heat. Empty coldness echoes back.

  Eve rises. Footsteps press into the snow, leading away from the clearing, back towards the distant, silent station, each step a crisp echo in the monochrome forest.