Steve and Christine landed in the space under the platform and skid to a successful stop. Normally, an effort like that would break any human’s legs like twigs, but thanks to the enhanced spacesuits, the landing felt like little more than a hard stop. Steve turned to see the aliens scaling down the cave walls, their eyes trained on the humans, then looked back to find Christine examining an opening to one of the lava tubes lining the atrium.

“Not good,” she said. “These tubes could connect behind us.”

“Okay, we have maybe 30 seconds to do this,” he nodded.

He switched modes on his rifle and fired two large, special rounds into two lava tubes one after the other. The rounds detonated deep within the passages, caving them in. Christine followed his cue, firing off charge after charge. As the hexapods appeared halfway down the walls, she fired off her last round.

“I’m out!” she warned.

“Me too!” acknowledged Steve. “We’ll have to hold them off with conventional kinetics.”

“Roger that,” said Dot’s voice over the intercom. “Hurry, we don’t have much time left.”

The hexapods were now on the floor of the atrium.

Steve and Christine took positions behind large boulders in a lava tube, taking a quick breath to check their ammunition. As the clicking of hexapods limbs approached them, they turned and started firing short bursts of suppressive fire.

Alien bodies quickly began to pile up, but the hexapods just became more aggressive and determined. Laser bursts aimed at the humans flashed into existence at increasing intervals as the humans continued to fire in steady, rapid bursts. Enraged shrieks and hisses filled the chamber.

“Hold on!” yelled Steve. “We’re almost there!”

Christine simply nodded while firing. A few moments later, a deafening thunderclap rang out, rocking the tunnel, sending pebbles on the ground shaking, and generating a dust cloud from the ceiling. Another just like it followed rattling the tube even harder.

In the narrow opening between the aliens and the tube entrance, streaks of red and purple light sent hexapods limbs and rocks flying as the cave filled with screams, whirring sounds, and explosions.

An infuriated hexapod managed to fight through and charged for the humans. Steve and Christine focused their fire, tearing its head and thorax to shreds as it collapsed and slid right between them.

Another alien jumped right behind it, charging the humans at top speed. Steve aimed as Christine reloaded and pointed her gun at the intruder in one swift motion. But before they could fire, a violet electrical bolt from a flash of light overhead momentarily threw the alien off course.

As it jumped towards Steve and Christine once again, Dot came down from the ceiling and whipped an armed tentacle surging with violet plasma and electricity to slice the hexapod in half mid-flight. The hexapod-shaped robot shorted out as its body hit the ground, its motors convulsing before giving out.

Behind Dot, an eruption of red and orange plasma and energy cleared out the last of the hexapod machines. With a cascade of flickering lights, the entire cave was suddenly brightly illuminated, momentarily freezing the humans and the cyborgs with the beams’ intensity.

“And done!” Rang out Alice’s voice. “With 47 seconds to spare too. A personal best for the team!”

Dot dropped to her knees and held herself up with her arms and tentacles, steam emanating from the back of her extra limbs.

“You sure as hell didn’t make it easy,” she groaned.

“Holy shit, I thought I was gonna die at least twice!” panted Christine.

In a spacious room with a massive floor-to-ceiling monitor covered with camera views of the cave system, Leo and Alice sat at a desk filled with screens and controls. Leo nodded with approval while Alice smirked fiendishly.

“It’s our job to keep pushing you,” said Alice. “Remember, deliberate practice is the key to success.”

“And using Steve and Christine as bait was just plain evil!” Leo shook his head disapprovingly.

“They volunteered,” said Alex, his voice implying a shrug.

“And racked up 63 kills,” announced Alice, raising her brow. “Nothing to sneeze at.”

...

The heavy door of the airlock shut and sealed behind Alex and Christine as they entered a large room lined with spacesuits and mechanical arms arranged in circles. Alex stood in one of the circles. A small group of robotic arms quickly came down to split and unlock his armor.

The back of his boots peeled away and the protective footwear was slid off by two robotic arms. His tactical pants split as four arms kept the nanotech fabric taut and peeled it away. His hoodie underwent the same process.

With the outer layers peeled off, the inner protective layers were exposed: a flexible, ceramic carapace covering his chest, shoulders, and spine while exposing his tentacle ports. His ankles were encased in braces with extra reinforcement over his tarsals, and composite guards locked over his shins, outer thighs, and forearms.

Christine silently took note of all the gear as another set of robotic arms unlocked and removed the second layer, leaving Alex in just his boxer briefs. He stepped off the circle, stretching and rubbing his eyes as Christine stepped into a circle herself so the robot arms can unlock her spacesuit. His body, just like Dot’s, was also anatomically correct, she noted to herself.

As her helmet and life support pack were removed, Christine saw a long QR code and “_v 0.0.1” next to it under Alex’s top right tentacle port, as well as a large scar of crystalized carbon gel on his lower back. As the rest of her suit unlocked in the back and was carefully pulled off her, Alex turned around. She noticed another scar on his stomach, obviously from the same incident that left the scar on his lower back.

“Where’d you get that?” she asked.

Alex looked befuddled for a moment before glancing down at his stomach.

“Ah, that,” he sighed. “It’s a... souvenir of sorts from a mission.”

Christine stepped out of the circle or robotic arms in minimal underclothing. As she reached for her uniform, she spotted yet another surprise, a minimalistic gray design of a wolf on the cyborg’s left shoulder.

“Neat wolf,” she noted. “Is that a play on your name?”

“What do you mean?” he replied, genuinely confused.

“You know, Volkov? The root word for that surname in an ancient Earth language is ‘wolf’ so...”

“Couldn’t tell you. Someone had the idea to give prototypes code names and was really committed to it, so Mai became the Red Dragon and I was the Gray Wolf. I pointed out that both of us had red, 3,000 Kelvin spectral emissions and they dropped it for a bit. The names and designs still stuck around because once in a while, they’d keep trying to make those code names a thing again.”

He chuckled and shook his head. Christine found herself closely studying his face. One of the things she quickly learned from Dot was that the cyborgs did indeed have lips, not just thin slits for their mouths. Their full shapes were just obscured by the dark, uniform gel. Looking at Alex in more detail, she saw traces of other individualized features hiding in the synthetic skin.

It was as if whoever designed their template wanted to give them the same individuality and personality as the people they were, or at least would be according to their genes, but either couldn’t bring themselves to commit to the task or just weren’t allowed, leaving hints and shapes to make out with attentive eyes willing to study the features of these minimalistic living mannequins.

“Maybe you’re right,” Alex suddenly said. “Maybe the humans who came up with the names had something like that in mind. But my name doesn’t actually mean anything, even though it’s kind of you to think it does. It was randomly assigned to me because code numbers would get too messy and convoluted. That’s all.”

“They just picked a random name?” she furrowed her brow.

“Exactly. They clicked a button and out popped Alex Volkov. Or Mai Ito. Or Dot Nelson. As third gens, Dot and I were hatched in a factory and were supposed to be raised by volunteers across the solar system until we were old enough to enroll in the academy. We don’t have the family history for meaningful surnames.”

“Even if you were hatched, someone had to contribute the DNA for it. Do you know anything about your parents?”

“Not a thing. I’ll never know who my biological parents were and they’ll never know their genetic material was used to create a child. Same goes for me. If my gametes were used in a hatchery, no one will ever inform me. That’s just the way it was designed. On top of that, my genes are too scrambled by engineered viruses to ever figure out what ancestry my human parts have.”

“Was that difficult? To accept that you’ll never know your parents?”

Alex finished changing back into his civilian clothes. She was worried he’d leave and his body seemed to lean towards the exit, but to her pleasant surprise, he stayed put.

“It really wasn’t,” he replied. “It’s not like I had another choice. You grew up with your family though, right?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “I mean, it’s a closed environment on a planet where the only place humans can live was the city. You basically have no choice but to be close to family, get along, and have strong ties with just about everyone you meet. It’s not just a matter of family, it’s a matter of survival.”

“I see. Earthlings have been romanticizing that kind of life for 10,000 years at this point. You’d make them jealous if you ever make it back there.”

He checked his phone.

“Well, catch you later,” he said. “Got a few things to wrap up in the lab.”

Christine waited until he was out of earshot, or at least as far out as she thought he could be before sighing with deep frustration and disappointment.

...

Christine plopped down at a bar in the mess hall next to Steve with a cup of coffee, sipping while deep in thought.

“So how’s your little project with Alex going?” asked Steve.

“Not great,” she shook her head. “I learned some things about what the prototypes are and the Explorer Program but it’s like pulling teeth. And about Alex, I just know some trivia and that the guy seems to run on nothing but coffee, noodles, and antimatter.”

“At least you had much more success with Dot.”

Christine almost spat out her coffee, blushing and coughing as she swallowed some of it wrong.

“What the hell Steve?” she asked while still coughing.

“From what I gather, Alex has been poked, probed, and prodded all his life, so if you want to understand him, or even know a little more about him, you have to do it on his terms,” offered Steve. “He might be a grump, but there’s definitely flashes of normality there. He could just take a long time to warm up to new people. I have an idea to run by the Principals Committee to help with that. You know, for the sake of improving team cohesion.”

“Huh. The Principals Committee? Since when are you hanging out with that sort of crowd?”

“Really? From the woman who has one of them answer her booty calls?”

Christine growled a little in response.

“I’m not judging, I swear,” he laughed. “I’ve just never seen you so into someone before, but at least now I know your type. Carbon gel, huge glowing eyes, and a set of big ol’ mechanical tentacles.”

Christine very lightly, almost lovingly elbowed his ribs.

“You butthead,” she affectionally chuckled.

...

Alex was looking through windows of code and reports on his massive monitor. A vibrating voice wave symbol suddenly appeared in the lower left corner. His eyes pulsed, prompting the call to pick up.

“Hey, Alex!” greeted a Researcher on the other line. “Sorry that it took me so long to get back to you.”

“Not a problem,” he replied. “I was just out for some training anyway. Just started reading over your report. So those things are cyborgs like we thought, but not Earthlings?”

“Right. We ran the test ten times and the STRs show pretty clear signs of drift. Our best guess is maybe 2,000 generations but that’s just us trying to put a number on it while working through all the anti-retroviral code we didn’t expect to see.”

“Hmm. So, bottom line, there’s no chance that its genetic progenitor was an Earthling?”

“Nope. And the genetic engineering done to them follows the same idea as yours but there are a lot of odd variations we’re still trying to map out.”

“You don’t have a lot of tissue to work with for that...”

“Yeah, they’re down to the brain and nervous system, and the brain is... well, in rough shape.”

“Sorry about that. In my defense, they were trying to kill us.”

“No, no, it wasn’t you. That’s not damage, it was done deliberately.”

“You’re joking...” Alex felt his jaw go slack from shock.

“Dead serious,” said the Researcher. “Those missing parts were filled in with neural meshes and nanobots.”

Alex’s eyes danced across the glyphs on his screen, widening more and more as the contents started to fully sink in.

“So the attacker that shot itself did it because it was so heavily lobotomized that its brain was effectively hijacked, and a hard enough hit messed up the meshes and it decided to self-destruct,” he summarized. “Why... Why would anyone do that to a living thing?”

“That’s a question closer to your area of expertise than mine,” replied the Researcher.

Alex rubbed his forehead with a deep sigh.

“All right,” he exhaled. “Now, I want you to think very, very carefully before you answer the next question. Did you find any evidence of surgical intervention? Anything at all?”

There was a pregnant silence on the other end of the line. A few images showing closeups of nerves and brain cortices wrapped in dark nano-fibers popped up on Alex’s screen.

“Look... uh... It’s really hard to say anything definitive because it was all done with nanites, which already integrate with tissues pretty smoothly, and it’s even more difficult in a body that radically altered.”

She paused again for a few moments.

“I think both of us know this was done by Patchwork. That QR code and version number are pretty much their calling card. Does it really matter if all we’re doing is just confirming the obvious?”

“I guess not,” Alex said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his chin in thought. “I’m just... I’m just trying to understand what they’re after and why they did what they did. None of my ideas feel right and my gut is telling me it’s something pretty goddamn awful.”

“I’d listen to your gut if I were you. I really would.”

“Thanks for all your work.”

“Anytime.”

The call dialog disappeared.

With a heavy sigh, Alex opened an application on his computer and typed in a few commands into a terminal. A hologram of a human brain with large parts replaced by webs of machinery and encased in a mesh appeared on his desk.

“If you think this is going to get me to back down, you’re out of what’s left of your fucking mind, you old bastard,” he said to the hologram, put on a pair of wireless headphones, and began writing code in the terminal window.