The Birth of Revenant-47
Mikhail opened his eyes to a blinding white room. Every surface hummed with an eerie, sterile energy. He struggled to remember how he’d gotten there—images of battlefields and marching orders swirled in his head, but slipped away the harder he tried to focus. A hiss of escaping gas echoed through the chamber, and he realized he was encased in a cylindrical pod, arms pinned by metal restraints.
Overhead, a row of shadowy figures observed from behind reinforced glass. Their muffled voices crackled through a speaker: “Begin Phase Two. Adjust the neural interface.”
A searing jolt tore through Mikhail’s spine, and his vision fragmented. Memories flared—of a sunlit garrison yard, teasing banter with fellow soldiers, the smell of dust kicked up from training drills. Then everything receded, devoured by a wall of agonizing static. Panic surged in his chest as those faces, once so familiar, faded from reach. He tried to call out a comrade’s name, but it slipped from his tongue faster than he could form the word.
Metal arms emerged from the cylinder’s sides, each fitted with syringes and surgical lasers. They poked and prodded, dismantling his limbs, layering them with exo-plates and synthetic muscle fibers. Mikhail wanted to scream, but his throat wouldn’t respond. Instead, every shard of pain sent him drifting further into a numb haze. One by one, the name tags of people he’d known faded like half-remembered dreams.
At some point, they lowered a visor onto his face, wires burrowing into his temples. He felt a frigid burst inside his skull as his mind was rewritten line by line. Mikhail glimpsed flashes of illusions—scenes that didn’t belong to him: cityscapes darkened by impossible storms, battles across uncertain timelines. Were they new memories, or false implants? He couldn’t tell. Reality became a flickering kaleidoscope of howling wind and malfunctioning machinery.
A numb eternity later, the overhead glass parted with a hiss, and a figure in a lab coat stepped forward to inspect the results. Words echoed through the speaker, mechanical and final: “Subject Mikhail is gone. You are now Revenant-47.”
He recognized the phrase only as a directive, an identity to obey. Still, somewhere deep, a voice inside him resisted, whispering that he was once a loyal soldier, a man with pride and a future. The voice grew quieter with each breath, overshadowed by the chill coursing through his freshly augmented limbs.
When the process ended, they unlatched the restraints, letting his new metal body stand on uncertain footing. He surveyed the reflection in the polished steel floors: glossy exo-armor, a partial helmet revealing only a thin slice of pale skin below a visor. Gone was the man who once dreamed of reuniting with distant family or winning honorable battles. In his place stood Revenant-47, an echo dragged from the edges of time and refitted for a life of unwavering servitude.
He bowed his head, the movement stiff with unfamiliar mechanical precision. As the lab’s white lights glinted off his plating, the last of Mikhail’s memories dissolved, leaving only the faintest ache of yearning—and even that soon slipped into silence. The transformation was complete. Revenant-47 would serve until there was nothing left to serve for, until the flicker of that old self vanished entirely. And somewhere, behind the neon hum of the lab’s instruments, the Coalition’s watchers offered satisfied nods—knowing they’d gained their perfect, unfeeling weapon.
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