"I haven't experienced rain in a while." A man clad in a black suit said.
"It takes a while to remember the feeling." Came the reply, this one though, from a fierce-looking woman. Her nickname, Tigress, matched her persona completely. Both were seated in the back of a memorial service.
The duke and a few of his men were gathered to send off one of his guards. Despite him being just a guard and a mercenary, the duke felt he owed him something. After all the crazy risks the man had taken for him, it felt as though he was part of the family. This untimely death, coupled with the fact that he had just lost his daughter too, seemed a bit too much.
"Do you think he is dead?"
"Even the mighty do fall."
"Think about it, can someone like that die out of something as commonplace as a car accident?"
"Whatever the case, we are here to find out." The tigress was curt. She too had her suspicions, but death does occur, so it wasn't entirely out of the question."
"Do you think the duke is in any way involved in this?"
"We don't even know if there is a 'this' to begin with."
As the 2 talked, they did not know that a 3rd person was listening in on their conversation.
It had been a murky night when a silhouette walked out of the doctor's building. Blending with the shadows, the man walked around until he was sure that there was no tail. This was the start of a new life, and he wanted no association with the past. Despite all the safety measures he had put in place, he knew he could never be truly safe, but this was how he would find his way to safety, hence it didn't hurt to check over his shoulders one more time.
Walking into a motel, the man checked in using his specially prepared documents.
"Barda King, what sort of name is that." The old motel's proprietor, who was also doubled-up as the receptionist, wondered out loud as she read the name submitted. After she verified that it was legit, she offered him a room for the night.
That night, Barda didn't sleep, nor would he ever again. Sleep as he had come to know it was a thing of the past. Nevertheless, he was not going to shed any tears over it, if he had any. Rather, he had something he had been putting off for so long.
Firstly, Barda understood that he needed to familiarize himself with his own body. These androids had been built for disabled people, as a way of facilitating the transition to normalcy. Using all the state of the art technologies available, the androids had very sophisticated bodies.
For the most part, they had functional internal organs which meant they could eat and use the bathrooms just like ordinary folk. The difference came in during digestion. While ordinary meat flesh digested, as usual, the android had special psionic reactors that could convert anything, whether edible or not, into energy.
Similarly, the androids could absorb ambient energy from the surrounding. This meant that he had an unlimited supply of energy, and being a machine, he was tireless. He could keep going as long as there was enough energy to do so.
Additionally, they had nanobots. These were state of the art constructions embedded in many smart devices. The bots assisted in maintenance and self-improvement. They facilitated the self-healing ability of contemporary androids.
An Android body was built with the latest polymer alloys, making it extremely hardy and resistant to corrosion while being very light. The artificially constructed muscle fibers packed more power than the strength of 5 adult men. The reaction speed and combat mods made Barda invincible while fighting normal people, but that was not all.
When it came to senses, the android's eyesight was not only extremely detailed and fine-tuned, but it also acted as the HUD, providing information as if on screen. With high definition camera lenses that could magnify up to 300 times, they made binoculars a joke.
The eyes also came with different modes. There was the light mode(normal vision), the Starsight mode (night vision), x-ray vision(penetrative), and the Ultraviolet mode(heat vision), and these are the ones that Barda understood. There were others he couldn't make heads or tails, but he had an entire lifetime to get that.
The android's skin was extremely sensitive to even the most minor movements and feelings, and the eyes could pick up a much wider range of decibels. More importantly, the ears had a much further range. Barda was able to eavesdrop on the Tigress and her companion's conversation from over a mile away, but by that time, he had already gotten plenty of practice.
The most amazing feature Barda found was the embedded network chip. Most human-operated android devices only had basic ones. On average, they could link to the information grid and be used by the user to access the information.
However, the moment humans began to take on the android form, there were a lot of controversies surrounding this capability. A normal human body couldn't automatically link with the information grid, and despite so many continued testing, it had been proven to be a lost art.
The reason being, the human brain just couldn't link with the machine language at such a low level. There were no interpreters, and many who participated in the tests ended up dying. Politically, many purists were outraged. Some even cried that it was the end of the world, but these had been crying wolf for so long that few paid them any heed.
That being said, there was a new breed of people who chose to abandon their humanity and favor the life of a machine. To do so, one needed to transfer their consciousness to become digital. In essence, this meant linking their brains to the machine but leaving the brain plugged in. Most chose partial transfer, where they would retain their body but could also take on the android body, such as the doctor that treated Barda.
However, our boy needed something more drastic. Gone were the days when one when to get facial surgery. If you wanted to truly move on, just change the body for an android one. This was commonplace, but anyone found to be truly android was looked down on, like some freak.
Barda had made a request. He needed his network chip and driver to be phantom, untraceable. To do that, he had paid the doc with everything he had. Since he was moving on to a different life, he set up schemes for the doc to be able to pick up the man's wealth. For that, he demanded only the best, and that was what he received.
Every part that had been added in him was state-of-the-art. Every mod in his body was top-notch. Many he had seen or heard of before, and some he did not. His doctor was the best. Now all that was left of him was to give this awesome body a fitting life.
Barda's first order of business was to get himself out of the country, and the planet he was in, but he knew he couldn't do that just yet. He needed to cover his tracks, see if someone had managed to follow any breadcrumb he had left behind. That was why he was sticking around.
As agreed, the doctor had orchestrated the car accident, where his body was found driving. This was not the kind of ending his allies, and even his enemies expected. Some people are just meant to die better. A car accident was so uneventful that it seemed strange. Death is death, and despite it being suspicious, there was always the possibility that he was indeed dead. In that case, all they could do was move on.
This was what Barda was banking on, and this was how he would get away from the pain of the former life. For all intents and purposes, Barda had started a new life. The old was gone, and the new had come. It felt like a reincarnation, only this time he was way more overpowered than he had been previously.
As he watched his own body be put to rest, complicated emotions clouded his heart. If he had his way, he wouldn't give up who he was to become someone else. If he really did have his way, then he could go on a killing spree, ending all his enemies and going back to his life.
That was the fantasy, the reality was very different. He was just one normal human going against some of the grandest organizations and civilizations in the universe. There was little he could do.
What Barda didn't know was the journey he was about to embark on would be so treacherous that he would end up right where he started, hunting the monsters he thought were too big for him. I digress, for now, all Barda had planned was a fresh start.