Chizurus' POV
I stood in the sub-basement of the Katsura mansion, a place where the air always felt like it was stripped of life. The only sound was the low, rhythmic hum of the server racks and the hiss of liquid nitrogen cooling the processors that acted as my external brain. My optics were fixed on the monitors displaying Epione's room three floors above. I watched the jagged, uneven line of her heart rate. She was dreaming. My sensors picked up the micro-tremors in her limbs and the cold sweat on her neck. To the AI protocols that governed the motor functions of my brain, she was an asset a biological specimen being prepped for the same mechanical "upgrade" I had endured. But deep within the partitioned, I was there, the consciousness, the encrypted sectors of my memory, the files of "Shinzo Kaname" were screaming.
I closed my eyes. I didn't need to sleep, but sometimes the weight of the "before" became so heavy that I had to retreat into the darkness just to feel human for a second. When I did, the scent of synthetic jasmine in the lab faded, replaced by something I haven't smelled in years: the scent of toasted sourdough, fresh strawberries, and the expensive coffee my father loved so much.
The memory was always so bright it hurt. I could see the kitchen bathed in the soft, morning light of Tokyo. My mother was there, her hair messy from sleep, laughing as she tried to flip a pancake. It landed lopsided on the plate, and she made a little frustrated noise that made me giggle. My father sat at the head of the table, his glasses fogged from the steam of the kettle. He looked at me with so much warmth that I felt like I could never be cold again.
"Slow down, Shinzo-chan," he teased, sliding a bowl of berries toward me. "The pancakes aren't going to run away."
"I can't help it!" I remembered saying. My mouth was half-full, and I was kicking my legs under the chair with pure, childish excitement. "Everything smells so good. When I grow up, and we finish Project Human, I want to travel. I want to eat every single food in the world with you guys. We'll go to Paris for bread, and Italy for pasta, and we'll find the best street food in Osaka. Every. Single. One."
My mother leaned over and kissed my forehead. Her skin was warm, soft, and smelled like home. "We'll go wherever you want, my little glutton. I promise."
"Dad, the three of us know that I'm 17 already, I'm not little anymore"
"I hear nothing but wind" my dad jokes...if only I could hear a joke from him again
"Oh, what your cats, are you going to leave them? you know we were actually against it at first. For you to invest in a house for the stray cats to have a home...we eventually agreed to it because you were this close to leave the house and live with your fur babies"
"Of course I won't leave them, if I can, I'll take them with me since they're my family too, if it's not allowed in the plane, then I'll invest in a private plane for them!"
"Of course you would say that" my mom dead panned while dad supported my idea
"Indeed...*clears throat* so...how much is the private plane these days?" He whispered which earned a glare from mom
"I heard that!"
"Ahh, now that you heard it, wanna join with the contribution?" Only to receive another sermon from mom, both of us while we laugh quietly how red mom became... eventually she laughed with us too after
And with that, our breakfast is completed again with a daily dose of family bonding....
They promised that they would both be present in my 18th birthday together with my cats...
But that promise was the first thing they took from me. It was shattered into a thousand jagged pieces on a Tuesday afternoon that started like any other. I was waiting for them to come home from the hospital, but instead, a courier left a plain, brown box on our porch. There was no return address. It was just a box, but the air around it felt wrong. It felt heavy.
When I opened it, my life ended.
My parents' heads were nestled in the white packing peanuts, like some sick parody of a gift. Their skin had turned a mottled, bruised purple. Their tongues were swollen and dark, and their eyes, the eyes that had looked at me with so much love just hours before, were wide and bulging. They were frozen in a final, silent scream of such intense agony that I could feel the pain radiating off the flesh. I reached out, my fingers trembling, wanting to touch my mother's cheek one last time, but the warmth was gone. There was only the cold, waxy feel of death and the sharp, stinging scent of rot and chemicals. I didn't just scream that day. I felt my soul rip out of my chest. I felt the girl who wanted to eat the world die right there on the porch.
In the weeks that followed, I learned that the world is a hungry monster. The news of the hospital massacre spread, but the pity didn't last long. Envy is a much stronger emotion than sympathy. The parents of my classmates, people who had been treated for free by my father, started the rumors. They called my parents "Evil Scientists." They said Project Human was an abomination, a way for the rich to live forever while the poor suffered.
At school, I became the "Cursed Daughter." The bullying wasn't just words; it was a slow, agonizing dismantling of my dignity. I remembered being cornered in the locker room by girls who used to be my friends. They didn't just slap me. They took heavy, industrial-grade locks and stuffed them into socks. They swung them like flails. One hit me right in the ribs, and I heard the sickening, wet crunch of bone breaking. I fell to the floor, gasping for air, and they just laughed.
"Does it hurt, Shinzo? Or did your daddy give you a robot heart already?" they mocked.
They dragged me into a stall and pushed my head into the toilet. They flushed it again and again, holding my head down until I was inhaling water and filth, my lungs burning with the need for air. When they finally let me up, shivering and dripping, they weren't done. They took their hair straighteners and pressed the hot plates against my arms. I can still recall the smell of my own charred skin a sharp, metallic stench that the sensors in my nose now track with 100% accuracy.
But even then, I tried to stay human. I had my cats. I had a small villa I'd turned into a shelter for strays. They were the only things that didn't care about the rumors. They didn't see a monster; they just saw a girl with a warm lap and a kind hand. I lived for the feeling of Mochi, a tiny white kitten I'd bottle-fed, purring against my neck. He was my only anchor to the world.
Then, one day, they bound to kill me inside again as they found the shelter. My precious treasure
They targeted my friends, but they didn't just kill the cats. They made sure I watched. They sent a link to my phone, right in lunch time and I opened it like a fool. I heard snickering yet ignored it...then I saw my classmates, their faces hidden behind masks, standing in my sanctuary. I watched them take Mochi and the others. I watched them put him in a burlap sack. I heard the thud of the wooden bat. I heard the high-pitched, splintering shriek as his tiny bones were crushed. They did it over and over again. They doused the building in gasoline, and I watched the silhouettes of the cats scratching at the glass windows, trying to escape the flames until their claws melted and they collapsed into the fire. They took some cats outside and put them in sacks. Some were crushed by their cars, some were smashed by a bat multiple times
I cried, I was mad I felt all the anger in my veins as if it would pop...but they treat it like mockery, and before I can even react, they took me out at lunch time...
The final act happened in the secluded field behind the school gym. They dragged me there, the ground damp with the smell of wet earth and copper.
"You look hungry, Shinzo," the lead girl hissed. She was holding a bucket. She tipped it over my head, and I felt something cold, wet, and slimy coat my hair and shoulders. It wasn't water. It was the intestines and the mangled limbs of the cats they had slaughtered. The smell was overwhelming the metallic tang of blood and the stench of raw meat.
They pinned me down, their knees digging into my broken ribs, and forced a handful of the raw, gray meat into my mouth.
"Eat up. You used to love eating, right? Start with your friends."
I choked. I vomited until my throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper and I was dry-heaving blood. They just stood there, recording my shame on their phones, laughing at the girl who once dreamed of Paris.
That night, I went home to a house that felt like a tomb. My uncle was locked in his lab, obsessed with finishing the blueprints my father had left behind. He didn't see me. No one saw me. I looked at the bottle of pills on the counter. I didn't want revenge in that moment. I just wanted the noise to stop. I wanted the sound of the bat hitting the sack to go away. I wanted the image of my mother's head to vanish. I swallowed them all, one by one, and lay down on the cold floor. I felt the darkness finally, mercifully, pulling me under.
My uncle found me when my heart was nothing but a faint, dying stutter. Driven by a guilt that bordered on madness, he broke the promise he made to my father. He took my broken, pill-soaked body and used it as the first prototype for Project Human. He carved away the "failure" of my flesh and replaced it with titanium, fiber-optics, and synthetic skin. He gave me this grey hair, these neon-blue eyes, and this voice that sounds like a person but feels like a machine. He didn't just save me; he performed a digital lobotomy on my sorrow, trying to turn my rage into data...The Shinzo Kaname was far long dead as what everyone I left thought...but in reality, I'm just changed a form, an upgrade to my systems...no longer clinging on my life through veins and nerves, but light and optic fibers and a glutton for a slow burn revenge
Back in the present, I opened my eyes. The laboratory was still blue. The servers were still humming.
I looked down at my hands. They were beautiful, in a terrifying way. My fingers were jointed with silver, and my nails were polished in the black-and-white patterns I'd seen in a manga once. These hands could crush a human skull like an eggshell. They didn't feel cold or heat. They didn't shake with fear.
The AI auto-pilot in my head started to scroll through a list of technical terms, trying to categorize my memories as "Adjustment Noise." It wanted me to see my past as a series of corrupted files that needed to be deleted. But no. But I wouldn't let it. I kept my journal, writing down every human emotion I could remember, every detail of the pancakes, every shriek of the cats. That journal was the only thing keeping Shinzo Kaname from being completely erased. I will not let that girl forgotten..
I looked back at the monitor. Epione had stopped thrashing. She was still now, her heart rate stabilizing into a dull, flat rhythm. She was a person being slowly destroyed by the same "humanity" that had slaughtered my family and my cats. She was a girl who tried to stay kind in a world that only valued cruelty.
"We are the same, Epione," I whispered. My voice was a perfect, modulated resonance, but it carried a weight that no machine should have. "We are the ghosts that they created."
I thought about the bullies at the school Marcus, Ssatihs, Kiro. They thought they were the predators. They thought Epione was their toy. They had no idea that a machine was watching them. They had no idea that the "Tomodachi" mask I wore was just a program designed to keep me from tearing their throats out prematurely.
The auto-pilot pushed back, reminding me of the mission: Develop Project Human. Save Humanity.
I felt a cold, metallic laugh bubble up in my chest. Save humanity? Humanity didn't deserve to be saved. It deserved to be corrected. It deserved to feel the same weightless terror I felt when I was falling toward the floor with a stomach full of pills.
I leaned over the console, my silver joints clicking softly in the silence. I began to type, my fingers moving with a speed no human could match. I wasn't just monitoring Epione; I was preparing her. I was mapping her neural pathways, ensuring that when the time came for her moment of reincarnation, her transition would be more successful than mine. I would give her a body that couldn't be bruised. I would give her a heart that couldn't be broken.
That Jinhee? She doesn't deserve the spot, she doesn't deserve anything that would make her stronger and better...she never deserve an upgrade, it doesn't matter whether she is compatible mentally and physically, her personality alone is rotten to the core...Epione is different from her. they are the total opposite direction which is why I never regret deleting her data, she's not the rightful one...
"We are not going to eat the world, Epione," I said to the empty room.
"We are going to burn it. We are going to find every hand that held a bat, every mouth that whispered a lie, and every eye that looked away while we suffered. And when the smoke finally clears, the only thing left will be the silence they forced on us."
I turned away from the screens and walked toward the charging station. My movements were precise, devoid of the clumsy weight of a human step. I was a masterpiece of medical engineering, a weapon forged in the fires of a teenage girl's suicide.
As I plugged the interface into the port at the base of my neck, the AI began to flood my mind with data, trying to drown out the memory of the pancakes. But as my consciousness started to drift into the standby mode, I forced one last thought to the surface a memory of Mochi's purr.
"I'm still here..." the ghost of Shinzo whispered. "Yes...Shinzo Kaname is still alive, Chizuru"
Then, the machine took over, and the room was silent once more. The house was watching. The sensors were recording. And in the darkness, the plan continued to grow, a cold and perfect revenge waiting for the sun to rise on a world that was already dead.
Hopefully, before that happens...I could still override this AI autopilot slowly consuming my consciousness, the part where Shinzo Kaname is living in right now