Scars (3)
She once had a family.
Contrary to what someone had assumed, she was never a bioroid. She had a real, biological family—parents of her own flesh and blood—the kind of family no bioroid could ever possess.
She once had a name.
Contrary to what someone had guessed, she possessed a name bestowed upon her by those parents. Unlike bioroids, designated first and foremost by model codes, she had been called by a proper name from the very moment she drew her first breath.
Yet that was all she could remember now: the distant, faded knowledge that she had once had a family, and that she had once had a name.
By now, she had forgotten her parents' names. She had even forgotten her own.
All that remained in her memory was a number.
Uttered in cold, emotionless voices, Subject 108 was the only name she remembered.
The place she grew up was inside a colossal cylinder. A gigantic, endlessly spinning metal barrel that humanity called a colony.
Her earliest memory was of an enclosed sky. Up and down, left and right, cold metal bulkheads boxed in every vantage point. Everywhere she looked, there were only towers of steel and dense crowds scuttling between them like worker ants.
Her parents often told her stories about the past. Strictly speaking, they were not ancient tales, having unfolded mere years before she was born.
"The year you were born was the year we were forced to settle out here in space," they would tell her.
"We used to live on a world called Earth."
"Back there, the sky was blue. There were open fields stretching past the horizon, and vast bodies of water called oceans."
To her young mind, these stories were impossibly difficult to grasp. She had no concept of what an ocean looked like, nor what words like sky or horizon truly meant.
Seeing her confusion, her parents showed her photographs and video recordings preserved from their youth. Soon, they began showing her countless digital archives: breathtaking landscapes of untamed nature, sprawling continents, a lush and bountiful planet, a paradise lost.
Those images formed her indelible impression of Earth—becoming the words and visions that would sustain her spirit throughout her life.
Her parents were well aware of how deeply she idealized that lost world. And so, when they felt the time was right, they revealed the bitter truth.
"We were driven from Earth."
"There are many reasons we must live trapped inside this suffocating colony, but the decisive one is simple."
"It was because of ungrateful superhumans, and one man who betrayed all of mankind."
"As long as that traitor draws breath, we will never set foot on Earth again."
Though exceptionally bright, she was still a child filled with innocence and dreams, and hearing those words made her weep for days on end.
Back then, she could not understand why her parents had spoken with such harshness. Only much later, in the twilight moments when she combed through the remnants of her memories for the last time, did she finally comprehend.
Her parents had been utterly convinced that she was destined for greatness. Watching their daughter display extraordinary brilliance from the tender age of five or six, they believed she would rise to the very pinnacle of society.
And within the Jovian Humanity Coalition, there was one prerequisite that every aspiring elite had to possess:
An unyielding hatred for superhumans and the Traitor.
The Humanity Coalition of Jupiter did not merely dislike superhumans; they loathed their very existence.
The reason was brutally simple: slaughter.
During the World War, back when all of humanity still inhabited Earth, countless mundane humans were massacred by rampaging superhumans. The devastation reached its zenith under a single individual known as the Traitor, forcing the surviving half of mankind to flee into the void of space.
Yet the nightmare did not end with their exodus.
Having escaped into the cosmos, the remnants of humanity analyzed the causal chain of their downfall and reached a single conclusion: the catastrophe had stemmed from granting superhumans too much freedom—in other words, negligence.
Grief-stricken and consumed by loss, humanity could not rein in their fury. They imposed draconian restrictions and proposed laws bordering on persecution upon their superhuman brethren. Naturally, the superhumans rebelled.
Protests soon escalated into armed conflict, and skirmishes bled into open civil war. Within two years, humanity fractured in two:
The Superhuman Republic, claiming Mars amidst its ongoing terraforming;
And the Humanity Coalition, floating dozens of artificial colonies in the void between Mars and Jupiter.
Even after being driven into the cold expanse of space, humans continued to tear each other apart. Though the fighting eventually settled into a tense ceasefire, it did nothing to extinguish the burning hatred between both factions. In the Jovian Coalition, indoctrination against Mars and its superhuman inhabitants was integrated directly into the academic curriculum.
The greatest enemy of humanity is the superhuman; to subjugate them and force them into service for the betterment of mankind is the solemn duty of every member of the Humanity Coalition.
She, too, was subjected to this education. It was a curriculum normally reserved for advanced secondary schooling, but her extraordinary intellect had propelled her into higher education at the mere age of nine, exposing her to the dogma far earlier than her peers.
Yet she was still only a child.
She understood in theory that superhumans had to be hated and kept under strict control, but she did not truly grasp what supernatural power even was. More often than not, childish empathy and instinct overpowered cold doctrine.
And because she was so young, she made a mistake.
The single greatest mistake of her life.
It began with an accident.
A transport freighter collided while navigating the colony's central transit shaft. The crash threw tons of heavy structural steel out of the zero-gravity corridor, and once exposed to the centrifugal pull of artificial gravity, the jagged metal rain plummeted across the colony interior.
By tragic misfortune, the school she attended took a direct hit from the barrage of falling steel.
Students attending an outdoor lecture scrambled in panic toward the shelter of the building. In the chaos, someone caught her eye.
"Ahhh—!"
Though the girl was six years older than her, she was a classmate sharing the same lectures and an acquaintance she knew by sight. She could not bring herself to abandon her fellow student when deadly shrapnel was about to tear her apart.
She sprinted forward to help.
Hauling the older girl—a full head taller than herself—into the safety of the corridor, she suddenly felt eyes upon her.
"Your... your body..."
Dozens of metal fragments had shredded her arms and legs, gouging deep, bloody gashes. But the wounds did not last. Her flesh was actively rejecting the shrapnel, pushing the jagged shards out of her skin.
Watching her body knit itself back together in seconds, and looking down at her clothes drenched in her own blood, she finally understood.
The look in the other girl's eyes was not gratitude.
It was pure, unadulterated terror.
Not long after, visitors came knocking at her door.
Without understanding what was happening, she was led away by strangers, taken from her home, and escorted out of the colony altogether. Aboard the shuttle, she marvelled at her first glimpse of the vast, starry cosmos. But that wonder was short-lived. She was brought to another colony and shoved into a cramped, sterile cell.
At nine years old, she had no way of knowing this room would become a prison with no end date.
> Commencing Enhancement Experiment on Superhuman Subject.
From the moment that word—experiment—first echoed off the walls, pain became a constant companion, never leaving her flesh for a single day.
> Serum Extraction: Attempt 6.
Assuming she was too young to understand what was being said, the researchers never bothered to blindfold her or muffle her ears.
Yet she was exceptionally bright.
She understood every procedure inflicted upon her, and soon realized what she had become. She possessed superhuman regenerative capabilities, and in this facility, she was nothing more than an experimental test subject.
> Regeneration Limit Test 4: Commencing.
It did not take long to learn which procedures brought the most excruciating agony.
After two months, she could categorize every procedure into graded tiers of pain.
Two months more, and she felt herself growing numb to the routine.
Three months later, they advanced her to a new experimental phase.
For the first time, she wished to die.
A year passed, and the faces she occasionally saw in the hallways began vanishing one by one. She was not referring to the researchers—they always kept themselves draped in full hazmat suits and sterile gear. The faces she spoke of were the other test subjects, souls who shared her wretched fate.
Two years passed, and total apathy took hold. Pain, human conversation, physical contact—none of it provoked a reaction anymore. She no longer had goals, dreams, or desires.
It was around this time that her hair began turning stark white.
Three more years slipped away, and she forgot her own name. Rather than the lost name she had once carried, the designation "Subject 108" felt far more natural, far more familiar.
And just when she had abandoned all hope—when she had abandoned herself entirely—
The door to her cell swung open.
"Halt all projects immediately!"
Those were the first words she heard when the door opened.
A woman who introduced herself as Sara held her tightly in silence for a long time before gently taking her hand and leading her outside.
Following Sara, she emerged into the open air for the first time in years. Only then did she comprehend that the facility was an illicit laboratory, and that she had been subjected to inhumane superhuman modification experiments.
Leaving that facility's colony behind, she was transferred to a residential colony with ordinary streets and ordinary schools. Sara re-enrolled her in advanced secondary education, arranged a modest home, and assigned a guardian to look after her.
She could not return to her real home.
Her memories had withered, and her parents were long gone.
In the end, she had to rebuild her life from a blank slate. Not as a precocious nine-year-old child, but as a hollowed-out seventeen-year-old girl stripped of all vitality. If there was any small consolation, it was that she had finally reached the proper biological age for the classes she attended.
And so, she began living as an ordinary student, an ordinary girl.
She couldn't make friends. Sometimes she trembled uncontrollably just from catching sight of a passerby. She spoke to almost no one.
Yet, against all odds, she was living the life of a mundane human.
The very life she had longed for so desperately all those years ago.
Time passed until one day, shortly before her twentieth birthday.
Just as it had been for the past three years, her walk to school was lonely. A solitary path walked alone. She crossed paths with neither classmate nor neighbor on her morning commute.
Except on that day.
"...Who are you?"
A man stood squarely in the center of the road. Even dressed in a sharp business suit, he could not conceal the unmistakable bearing of a soldier.
"Subject 108."
That single utterance from his lips was enough to shatter her world.
The moment "Subject 108" fell from the suited man's mouth in that cold, clipped voice, all strength drained from her body. Her legs gave out, dropping her to the pavement. A violent tremor seized her limbs as an icy chill flooded her veins. Tinnitus shrieked in her ears, and phantom agonies flared across her smooth, unblemished arms.
"The Coalition requires your service. The project has begun."
She was terrified. Utterly, overwhelmingly terrified.
With every syllable that left his mouth, she could only squeeze her eyes shut against the horror.
"Let's go."
Yet what terrified her most was neither the designation "Subject" spoken aloud, nor the lingering trauma of military enforcers.
What truly terrified her to the depths of her soul... was the quiet relief blooming in her chest. The grotesque, comforting realization that she could finally stop playing the clumsy role of an ordinary girl—an outcast who belonged nowhere—and return to being a useful test subject.
She was terrified, most of all, of herself.