The boy's body took seventy-eight hours of incessant flesh working to manufacture completely. The girl's took only seventeen.
The process of creating any unregistered body was a profoundly heretical operation. It would mean execution without trial, and few under the Archwarden's purview would dare attempt such a thing.
But the Flesh Artisan's current clients were peculiar ones indeed. They were insurgents, it seemed, at least in the Flesh Artisan's eyes. He hadn't realized there were any insurgents in the Archwarden's empire. The indoctrination measures were so extreme, so convincing. Two times now the Flesh Artisan had read through a copy of their holy book. He had found the religion and its tenets intriguing beyond all expectation.
Never once had he thought a servant of the Archwarden would come to him for a request.
The Flesh Artisan had agreed to their request, of course. How could he not? The concept was so compelling.
The clients had made it clear they wanted the Amorphic channeling cords to be run through the boy's skeleton, rather than adjacent to it like was common practice in the Archwarden's models. And they had wanted the skeleton itself to be laced with tungsten, too. They had suggested nanobots in his bloodstream, boosting his immune system and repairing internal bleeding, and asked for his biosynthetic muscle to be reinforced with graphene microfibers.
The girl had been manufactured with only a standard humanoid body, but it was the girl that the Flesh Artisan found most difficult to create. The body was no problem, but the mind?
The consciousness file his clients had given him was the most complex set of cognitive code the Flesh Artisan had ever seen. He had worked on thousands of bodies and never been tasked with something like this. It was exhilarating.
Five hundred seventy-three hours for the complete synthesis of the girl's mind. It had been exhausting work, and the boy's was easy by comparison. The Flesh Artisan contacted his clients immediately upon finishing. They would arrive the following day.
*****
It began with only a glimmer of conscious thought adrift in the void of an empty mind. The boy stared out from his thin shard of existence, unable to recall what he was, what he had been before.
Before what? Where was he? Where was his mind, his memories, his self?
After laying the groundwork of the boy's consciousness, the Flesh Artisan began to download his consciousness file into the comatose shell of his body.
At first, fragmented memories were all there were, shoved into his mind without context or emotion attached. Inconsistencies abounded, chasms in the boy's being that felt wrong not to be filled. Slowly, the memories trickled in. The boy watched as pieces of its mind coalesced like a shattered mirror reforming itself.
His first memory was of a girl, smiling at him. She tapped her forehead and told him the truth of all existence.
"The mind shatters like glass."
More memories, fragments of a life that the boy had yet to understand was his own.
Blood soaking into a wool carpet.
A child collapsed in the dirt, a soldier running, an explosion.
A classroom, an equation, the whiteboard at the front filled with mathematical calculations.
Admiration. Love. Not an emotion yet, but an idea, an abstraction – unexplainable but magnificent. Her, a girl. What was her name?
She was tapping her forehead still.
"The mind shatters like–"
Glass Theory. What was Glass Theory?
But the boy was ripped away from his thoughts as emotions poured into him in waves, meticulously assigned to the memories that had piled up in his mind. The Flesh Artisan had moved onto the next stage of the download.
Devotion: it was his existence to serve. Serve the Directive. Serve Heaven.
What Directive? What was Heaven?
But tied to that devotion there was something more. Dread. He dreaded death, more than anything else. Six figures standing with him on a ridgeline. The boy and his friends, alone, the last line of defense against a horde of things, approaching across a desolate battlefield.
Next came pain: the agonizing cries of those friends as they died around him. His own desperate cries for survival, screams of defiance, of fear. Murmuring a name over and over as he stared at the mutilated steel of his armor, his mangled limbs, the blood pooling below him. Katsumi. Katsumi. I'm going to die, Katsumi.
Death was to fail, and to fail meant he would never be reunited with her. Her, Katsumi.
The boy's eyes shot open. He tried to suck in a breath and gagged – something was jammed in his throat, covering his mouth and nose. His muscles spasmed, the artificial body receiving input from his mind for the very first time. For a moment his arms only twitched. Fear again. He couldn't breath, choking on the thing in his throat.
Then he felt his body tense, sensation finally finding its way into his fingers. His arms shot upward, scrabbling wildly at his face, clutching at the mask and ripping it away. He coughed as the mask and the tube that had been forced down his throat retracted into the ceiling.
For a moment, it was only his heavy breathing that filled the chamber.
A convulsion in his chest – the boy let out a pitiful cry and vomited upward.
"Oh my, oh my," a scratchy, mechanical voice called, accompanied by the sound of approaching footsteps. Cold hands fell on the boy's shoulder and back as he rolled over, still coughing up fluids. The hands eased him into a sitting position.
"You're quite alright. It's a natural reaction to the new body, my child. Here, I have a rag to clean yourself with."
The boy felt a rough dampness wipe away the puke on his face and neck. But . . . something was still wrong. "I . . . I can't see."
"Again, quite alright. Think on the bright side, child – your vocal chords are working fine."
". . . Water."
"Yes, of course. Here you go."
A metallic shuffling, and the boy felt the cool touch of a bottle to his lips. He grabbed it blindly, sucking down the water.
"I estimate your vision will fully return within ten minutes," the scratchy voice was saying, "If not, I might have to reinstall your retinas, but I doubt we'll have that problem."
The boy downed his last gulp of water. With the bottle emptied, he sighed. "What . . . what is going on? Where is this? What am I doing here?"
The voice was silent for a moment. "Unfortunately," it began, "I have been told to refrain from telling you anything of importance. Just know that here in this chamber, you are safe. Know that soon all of your bodily functions will be restored. You have nothing to worry about."
The boy realized he could see the faint outline of a figure now. Blurry, as if through a murky pond, but there was someone there.
"Now, I'm going to need you to do something for me, child. Nod if you understand."
The boy nodded.
"I am called the Flesh Artisan. Do you remember what you are called?"
The boy sat still, pondering this. When the answer didn't come immediately, angst made his heart quicken. He should have a name . . . and he did. What was it?
"Enmei. Akasaki Enmei."
"Good. Do you remember where you are from?"
"Japan."
"Alright. How old are you?"
"Seventeen . . . but no, I've been alive for centuries . . . centuries of–"
"You are seventeen, Enmei. At least, your body has been crafted to be such. What year do you believe it is?"
Enmei was about to answer, but the words caught in his throat. "I don't understand. I . . . there seems to be multiple answers. Conflicting answers."
"Give me one of them."
"What first came to mind was the year 2103. But that's not right. It can't be."
"Good enough. You will be confused about the state of your mind for some time. That is alright. Just know that whatever memories you have, they are largely irrelevant now. Your mind has been taken from an age long past. Nothing is the same as you remember."
Enmei realized that he could see the figure much better now. Details began to sharpen on the figure's face – its face.
"You're not human."
"That's right. I am what is called a biological mechanoid. Those of your era would probably call me an android. Terminology matters little."
The mechanoid knelt before Enmei, draped in a thick rubbery cloak from which several gunmetal limbs poked out of the sides. One of those arms rested a cold hand on Enmei, steadying him. Enmei couldn't tell how many limbs there were, exactly. Definitely two that functioned as legs, several arms planted asymmetrically across the creature's body, and another tool-like limb that sprouted from its shoulder. Pinpricks of light like the eyes of an arachnid shone from within its drooping hood.
The Flesh Artisan.
Despite the creature's grotesque, robotic nature, Enmei found he wasn't scared. He turned to survey the chamber. A laboratory of some kind – cluttered, mounds of metallic instruments pushed against the walls. Robotic torsos, limbs, and heads hung from the ceiling around the stone operating table on which Enmei sat.
Stone, huh. It seemed more of a ceremonial altar than a surgical platform.
Directly above him, a giant claw-like machine stared down from the ceiling – a circular mouth of a thousand different tools. That was where Enmei's respirator mask had retracted upwards into.
Enmei turned, and found the girl lying naked beside him, the altar just wide enough for them both. Something in Enmei's heart broke at the sight of her. A thought that didn't feel like his own.
Katsumi. At last . . . how many centuries have we been apart?
Enmei felt his eyes well with tears. He hadn't thought those words. He was still confused – he hardly knew who this girl was. It seemed as if there was someone else in his mind, another consciousness still locked away from his own. Enmei set a hand to his head as pain blossomed behind his eyes.
"Do not fret, child. The girl will wake soon. In the meantime, let me get you some clothes. Your chaperones will be arriving shortly."
"Chaperones?"
The Flesh Artisan opened a cupboard, producing a set of gray military fatigues and boots. "The ones who commissioned your creation. I didn't spend the last month making you for free, you know."
"You're . . . selling us?"
"In a way, yes. Think of yourselves as art pieces that several high-paying customers wanted for their collection. I do wish the best for you, child, but I really have no clue what my clients have planned for you."
The Flesh Artisan came over with the fatigues, handing them to Enmei. "Get dressed now. And don't worry. You're not being sold as slaves or anything. You're much too valuable for that. I trust my clients have a more intriguing fate in store for you."