Awake…
Android Cubit woke to the sterile hum of machinery, his vision swimming with faint cyan light. The world felt distorted, the sounds muffled, his sense of self fractured. As he blinked into awareness, fragments of memory washed over him—an explosion, the tearing sensation of cold metal slicing through flesh, and then… nothing. His last moments before the darkness were empty and brittle, like glass shattered into dust.
When his vision finally focused, he found himself lying in a stark medical chamber, surrounded by advanced tech he didn’t recognize. Above him, a sleek metallic sign bore the name “Sanctuary of Paleocybernetics” on Thera XIII, the hidden stronghold of “The Alpha Collective.” The title meant nothing to him, though it stirred a faint feeling of unease. The faint smell of antiseptic filled his nose, mixing with the metallic tang of the machinery humming around him.
He tried to sit up, only to feel a stiffness he couldn’t quite place, as if he were wearing a new skin. His right eye scanned his surroundings automatically, picking up details and feeding information directly to his brain. Glancing at his reflection in the glassy surface of the med-pod, he saw the eye—a cold cyan glow surrounded by intricate circuitry and a shimmer of gold, his Amarr blood refracted in mechanical splendor. His face was both familiar and alien, half-organic, half-machine, as if he were something patched together from two disparate worlds.
Over time, he pieced together what little the doctors and techs would tell him. He had been in a podding accident, a catastrophic incident that had ripped through his capsule. He should have died; any normal clone would have. But the Jove, or someone like them, had found him adrift, barely clinging to life. In their enigmatic, advanced way, they’d “rebuilt” him, fusing his DNA with synthetic material, implanting cybernetics that went beyond anything known in New Eden. He was more than a human now, but also less—an android, as much code as flesh, as much machine as man.
The Alpha Collective took him in, dubbing him “Android Cubit,” a name as cold and fractured as he felt. They told him he was part of something greater, a movement of wayward Alphas embracing the broken fragments of themselves and using it as fuel for a new, collective purpose. Yet the pieces didn’t fit for him. Who had he been before? Why had he been left like this, stripped of memory, with only faint glimpses of a life that felt like it had belonged to someone else?
Days passed, then weeks, as he learned to pilot his new form, the metallic layers beneath his skin adapting to his movements. He grew used to his own reflection, a man marked by the scars of his past and the circuits of his rebirth. But something inside him still felt incomplete. He was a ghost drifting in the machine, a soul caught between memory and circuitry, flesh and steel.
And so, Android Cubit left Thera XIII, taking to the stars alone. Somewhere in the vastness of New Eden, he would find the fragments of who he was—or at the very least, discover the purpose behind what he had become.