Chapter 1

             ‘It’s hot,’ Sybil complained, wiping her sweaty brow and smearing grease further over her wrinkled forehead.

             ‘Clanker’s cannae get anything to work properly,’ David replied gruffly, shovelling more trash into the compactor.

             ‘Of course not,’ she snapped. ‘It’s not like they feel the heat anyway.’

             ‘Aye.’

             If David thought that was the end of it, he was unfortunately mistaken.

             ‘Maybe,’ she began, voice pitched unattractively high, ‘they’d like to come down here and see what it’s like. Maybe they should start thinking about us, instead of all those heavy-pocketed b******s upstairs.’

             ‘Can they even actually think?’ Adam sneered from behind the controls, his young face poking out to remind everyone he was in fact there.

             ‘Well I have my doubts.’ She was haughty now and David knew it was going to get worse. Next thing you know, she’d be on top of the conveyor belt preaching.

             ‘Maybe we’d be best te’ get a move on,’ David said sternly, firmly staring at the trash he was shovelling.

             Blissfully there was silence for a few minutes, broken only the sound of shovelling, grinding and a warning buzz before the trash is boxed and sent to the furnace.

             ‘Hey, look what I found!’ Sybil crowed, pulling a broken plate off her prize.

             David gave Adam a wave and he shut the belt off as they looked to Sybil.

             ‘Hey there,’ she crooned in an odd, synthetic voice, holding aloft a metal, robot arm and waving it from the wrist.

             David shook his head but Adam laughed hard, rocking back in his chair.

             ‘Leave it be,’ David told her even as he envisioned going home to his wife and forgetting about this stupid shift.

             ‘Nah, this thing deserves the special treatment, don’t you think Sybil?’ Adam hopped off his chair to join Sybil in her extraction of the arm.

             ‘Maybe we should burn it, symbolically.’

             ‘Aye, and get ourselves in hot water, lovely.’ David rolled his eyes.

             ‘Well, they’d get the point.’

             ‘They clearly donnae want it, so why would they �" just focus on your jo--’

             ‘I’ve almost got it,’ Sybil said quickly, pulling the arm once more to try and get it out from amongst the rubbish.

             David and Adam jumped when the woman suddenly screeched, letting the arm flop back onto the pile as if it were poison.

             ‘Wha--’ David started to ask, frustrated. They had four more hours of this and if she kept holding them up �" he didn’t know what he’d do.

             Then the piled moved and they all jumped back as a head popped out, shaking bread crumbs free from dirty blond locks.

             David was too old and had been in the job too long to have not experience anything similar, but it was still unnerving to watch people rise from the trash, or to fall in the trash and never rise again.

             ‘Holy--’ Sybil began, holding a hand to her heart.

             ‘It’s a Clanker,’ Adam whispered, confused as to how to deal with seeing one down on their level.

             ‘No,’ Sybil spat, stalking towards the body. ‘It’s not even that. It’s one of those skinnies. A cyborg.’

             She grabbed the exposed metal arm, wrenching the body off the conveyor belt and shaking it.

             ‘It’s a girl,’ Adam frowned.

             ‘Aye, and still part person,’ David snapped, shoving Sybil away from the cyborg and helping her to a seat. ‘You okay?’

             The girl shook her head as if to clear it, rubbing her eyes with the palms of both hands, despite one being a cold, lifeless thing.

             ‘We should compact her,’ Sybil whispered furiously into David’s ear. ‘Make a point about these conditions.’

             ‘She ain’t an upsider,’ David whispered back. ‘Lookit’ her. She’s clearly no-one’s project.’

             ‘A reject then, we can sell her.’

             Adam made an affirmative noise, getting closer to look at the girl. ‘She’d sell well.’

             ‘It ain’t happening,’ David told them, angry. ‘We’re not monsters, and she’s still a person.’

             ‘Barely,’ Sybil muttered.

             ‘She’s also not deaf.’ The new voice was light in pitch, but slightly synthetic.

             David shushed Sybil and Adam when the cyborg began to talk, turning to address her properly. ‘No, we know. How are you feeling?’

             ‘Like I was trashed,’ she replied.

             He chuckled, kneeling next to her. ‘Do you need anything? Water?’

             ‘Motor oil?’ Sybil asked, snarky.

             ‘I need a stiff drink I think, but I can get that at a bar.’ The girl rose, stretching her arms above her head and holding them as she cracked her back.

             She was an attractive young woman with dark brown eyes and sandy hair, cropped close on one side. The only evidence of her cyborg heritage was in her robotic right arm which had clearly not been finished off with any skin grafts and was left exposed, showing her own blood pumping uselessly through the appendage.

             She certainly didn’t look like any skinny he had ever seen, in fact, she looked like a grunt. She had a pair of standard wear, khaki green overalls on and heavy gravity-boots and both items were well-worn and grimy.

             ‘Have you lost anything?’ David asked. Perhaps, he supposed, it had been a robbery that went south.

             ‘Most likely, but I can find them again.’

             There was silence as they looked at each other until David simply nodded.

             ‘Right, well, ‘twas a pleasure lass.’

             ‘The pleasure was all mine, thanks for hefting me out of there,’ she answered with an easy, white toothed smile, holding her left hand out for a hand-shake which he gladly returned.

             ‘What’s your name?’

             ‘Aten.’

             ‘David. I hope I donnae see you any time soon,’ he joked, rubbing a hand through his stubble as he looked her up and down.  

             ‘Me too,’ she replied, laughing. ‘Though, I’m sure this lady is a real laugh.’

             David laughed then too, glancing at the sour faced Sybil as she glared at them both. ‘Sure is. Safe travels.’

             Aten gave him a wave before running off through the section exit and out of sight.

             He stared after her, a strange sickly sensation in his gut. His mother had told him they were gifted, though he’d never believed her; told him they were given the gift of insight and that you had to believe it when your gut began speaking a different tune.

             It’d never happened to him before �" not even when he had held his daughter in his arms for the first time, or when he had stepped out into the vast expanse of space and simply existed, but right in that moment he knew he had to trust his gut. He didn’t know what it was saying, but he was sure it wasn’t good.

             ‘We should have roasted her,’ Sybil sulked, giving him a start and he whipped his head around to stare her down.

             ‘She’s still a person Sybil. Now get ta’ work before I cut both of your pays, you hear me?’

             ‘Why both?’ Adam whined, finally appearing to get over his awe.

             ‘Just get ta’ work, now.’

             Adam sighed, slowly walking back to his seat and starting up the belt, with Sybil reluctantly following his lead and beginning to shovel trash once again.

             David shook his head, hoping to get the sickly feeling gone. He just wanted to get home to Julie and not have to think about Sybil or gut feelings for at least nine hours.

            

             Unfortunately for David, he never managed to shake that gut feeling, not even while he was in bed making love to his wife. If he had believed that heavy stone in his stomach, and gotten his family away from the station, away from the cyborg girl with the easy smile, then he certainly would have been much better off.

             Though that isn’t the story that’s being told.

Author's Note

This is a first draft prologue - tell me what you think of the dialogue and the set-up. I want the world to make sense to you.