I am man, p.1
I AM MAN, page 1
The Rebel Christian Publishing
Copyright © 2021 Valicity Elaine
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
ISBN: 9781736415818 (eBook) Print: 9781736415825
Amazon Kindle Vella ASIN: B094QC8KXM
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination. Inclusion of or reference to any Christian elements or themes are used in a fictitious manner and are not meant to be perceived or interpreted as an act of disrespect against such a wonderful and beautiful belief system.
Cover designed by Valicity Elaine
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Content
Series Order:
I AM MAN
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Continue the series…
The Christian Message
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Rebel Christian Publishing
Original Author’s Notes
This novella was originally published as an episodic story on the Kindle Vella platform. It has been modified and formatted for your enjoyment. Original author’s notes can be found at the very end of the book. Please enjoy I AM MAN and take the time to leave your thoughts and opinion in a review on Amazon, iBooks, Goodreads, and Bookbub. Thank you!
Series Order:
I AM MAN
I AM LOST
I AM BROKEN
I AM FREE
I AM COMPLETE
Other Books by Valicity Elaine
Cross Academy
Withered Rose
To the Lord Jesus who is my loving Father
To my sweet little sister who is my number one fan
To my older sister who cheers for the older sister, haha
To my parents who have taught me that anything is possible
I AM MAN
Book I in the I AM MAN Series
By Valicity Elaine
A Rebel Christian Publishing Book
Chapter One
She had a nightmare last night. He’d tried to ignore her whimpering, but his hearing was too good for that. She’d been having the dreams all week. They come and go on rotation, like a boomerang. Or whatever it’s called.
Last night was the worst of it, so bad she woke up screaming. He’d rushed in to help, weapons drawn, and then she’d screamed at him. He’d only been doing his job, trying to protect her. But it was hard to fight the monsters when they were inside your head. He’d left her room without a word when she’d gone into a rage. It’d been the most emotion he’d ever seen from her so he couldn’t complain. Playing bodyguard all day got boring, he needed some entertainment—even if it meant getting screamed at.
Today he decided he’d leave her be, no matter how bad it got. Just let her cry it out, like she was doing now. He could hear voice; muffled, as if sobbing into a pillow. This would be a good time to go into autopilot and let his Core take over. But that’s the whole point of his Core being a central module; it did what it wanted. Sent him into autopilot when it felt like it. Not a moment sooner. So, he stood there outside her room at 7:17 in the morning, waiting for her to finish crying and come out for breakfast.
Bored, he checked his weapon. Locked and loaded, always loaded.
Code-X5 had been assigned this job three months ago. If it’d been up to him, he never would’ve taken it. But it wasn’t up to him because he was on probation and when you’re a Guardian on probation, babysitting is all you ever really get to do. It was better than being stuck on a shelf in his old factory somewhere but, gosh, he missed doing things. He kept that thought to himself, though. In all his boredom, he got to be this close to a Pureblood every day. For an old Skel fresh after reset, that was a blessing.
Code checked the time and then his weapon. Two more hours passed before Clora-Vean finally wiped her snotty nose and started her morning routine. He could hear her soft footsteps even from his position behind her heavy metal door. Her routine was always the same; wind her alarm clock, throw out all the tissues she’d used, stretch, and then open the door.
There was always a pause between her opening the door and actually stepping out. The metal lock disengaged, and she cranked it open slowly, but not because it was heavy. Timidly, like a child in trouble, she peered out and gentle green orbs met with fluorescent blue marbles glowing in place of eyes.
A heartbeat of silence ticked by.
Code looked away before Clora-Vean could speak—not that he guessed she would. She still seemed uncomfortable around him. Three months here and he couldn’t tell whether she wasn’t used to his presence as her Guardian or him … a Skel.
In a perfect world, it wouldn’t matter that Code-X5 was a Skel. But then, in a perfect world, Skel wouldn’t exist. It all happened too long ago, when the sky turned off and Earth was lost. Thankfully, humans had been planning to colonize other planets for two centuries by then. A mass exodus had already been in the works, the sky blinking out was the extra boost they’d needed to get the heck out of dodge.
Only thing about leaving Earth altogether like that—it left too many people vulnerable. Not everyone is meant for space travel, not everyone is meant to live on Mars or Venus or whatever other planet they’d discovered. Humanity lost a third of its population in the initial Shut Off and another third during travel. Less than two billion people successfully relocated to the planet they called New Earth. Half of them didn’t make it through the next six months, wiped out by hunger, sickness, and even suicide. With humanity’s population below one billion—and depleting—it became painfully clear: Humans were going extinct.
Enter the Age of Augmentation. As an attempt to help offset extinction, humans found a way to extend their lives and augment their bodies to better suit their living conditions. It started with better eyesight, lungs with micro-filters built into them to survive the sandstorms and chaotic weather of New Earth. Augmented sensors in the nose, enhanced legs and muscles and immune systems. They had become super humans. And then they got bored. Which led to war. Which circled right back around to that whole brink of extinction thing again. And that’s where Skel came in.
A mix of organic parts and too many enhancements to name, these humanoid beings were mass produced in factories. They were frames—mere skeletons of humans designed with one purpose or the other. Attack or defend.
Code-X5 was a Guardian. His purpose was to defend an assigned client until death or the termination of his contract. He had lived long enough to remember when augments were cool, and Skel were highly sought after. The X5 in his name represented how many times he’d been reset; 15 times? Or maybe 50 times? He wasn’t sure.
A Skel could be reset and left in a factory for decades, or broken down and sold for parts, their organic pieces harvested for sick Augments or desperate Purebloods. But Code remembered enough about his early life cycles to know that things had changed. Skel were no longer considered prizes to win a war or defend high ranking military officials. They were slaves now, with Augments and Alien races a step above, and Purebloods at the top of the pyramid.
Clora-Vean was a Pureblood. One-hundred percent human—not a single drop of Alien blood in her lineage or a single augment in her family line. It was said she could trace her ancestry back to Louisiana on planet Earth, before it died. This honor, this privilege, of calling herself human and nothing else—a Child of God, as the old humans would say—is what has kept her family on the throne of the Vale Republic. She was the youngest of the Valetian royal family and apparently the most difficult as she’d been sent to live in this palace completely alone. Code didn’t question it. His assignment was to protect her, the reason she’d been put here was—according to his higher ups—none of his concern.
So, he minded his business and put the politics aside. This wasn’t the first time he’d had to babysit a royal brat anyway. In his last life cycle, he spent nine years guarding a Kishran prince—then the prince was assassinated which made his ranking drop, so he was reset, reworked, and then he woke up here. Blinking back the sun with his metallic lids as his new boss uploaded his next assignment to his Core. Guarding a Valetian princess. Why his boss felt he could keep this one alive was beyond him, but he took the job and got to work. It was simple with hardly any real work involved but Code was happy to be on his feet again instead of floating in that empty void between sleep and consciousness, waiting for someone to power him up.
Code stayed put while Clora-Vean brushed past and slipped down the hall toward the bathroom. She always showered first, exactly half an hour. He wasn’t supposed to be more than a few mete
The shower water stopped, Code’s signal to move to the kitchen. Breakfast was never much for Clora, but it’s been especially small this past week which made him worry—he always worried when it came to her. She was his client, his sole reason for being activated. And she was human. Humans in general were weak little things but Clora was a Pureblood, free of enhancements of any sort; that made her weaker. And she was small—like, really small. Code would have put her at 14 but her file listed her as “early 20’s.” Maybe it was her oversized clothes or the fact that her mane of curls probably weighed more than she did. She just looked so fragile, and it made him wonder if he would’ve looked that weak had he been born instead of farmed.
Today’s breakfast was toast and a bit of jam smeared in the middle. Red jam. Code wondered if it was strawberry, cherry, or raspberry. The scent detectors in place of his nose filtered through the 62.7 trillion different smells stashed in his memory and relayed the information before he could even blink his metallic lids. Strawberry, it was strawberry jam.
God, he would never get used to this body. Though this was the only body he had ever known, it always seemed new to him. Every reset he was forced to endure felt like being born all over again. The organic parts of him cried out in rebellion, refusing to accept the fact that he never hungered, felt thirsty, or even needed sleep. Some would go as far as calling him immortal, though he had weaknesses. He didn’t age the same as Clora-Vean but rust was definitely an issue, he never felt tired but his energy system needed a recharge once every ten days, and he didn’t have a beating heart but he could definitely die—in ways more painful than a Pureblood could imagine. And he felt things, too. Probably tens of times more sharply than a Pureblood ever could. Sensors and detectors were a heck of a lot more sensitive than feelings. Clora-Vean thought she’d been hiding her discomfort toward him, but he knew. He caught the slightest purse of her lips, the tiniest wrinkle of her brow, he could even hear her inhale sharply every morning right before she opened her door to see him standing at his post, gun in hand.
He knew and it made him just as uncomfortable as her. Because his system didn’t just magnify his senses, they increased his own emotions right with them. Maybe keeping those organic parts of his brain mixed in with heightened monitors was some attempt to make him more human, or maybe it was a clever way of punishing him. Code-X5 couldn’t say for sure.
He checked his weapon. Loaded, always loaded.
After breakfast, Clora took an hour to change from her bathrobe to her royal attire. She always dressed up even though she never left her quarters. It was like she was preparing for something or someone, a just-in-case outfit. But no one ever came to see her except her tutors and her seamstress once a month—she hadn’t grown at all so her clothes never needed to be taken up or patched. And she never left. Ever. Not even to walk through the gardens that’d been flown in and planted just for her or to stroll through the vast halls of her stone castle. She never even stepped foot onto the balcony attached to her bedroom.
Code wanted to ask her why, but he didn’t think it appropriate. He barely spoke to her and it’s not like small talk was part of their contract. He was supposed to keep her alive, not be her best friend. And besides, he was sure Clora wanted him gone more than anything. He was a Skel, and she was a Pureblood princess. Even if he did feel like talking, he didn’t know where to begin. He could remember her favorite meal, even the exact temperature she enjoyed it most at. He knew her height, weight, and the length of her hair down to the longest coil. And he knew, for whatever reason, she didn’t simply enjoy reading, she liked memorizing things. Everything.
He’d seen her read the same book ten times, mumbling the words out loud just to keep them there in her head. Code had learned all of that about her but after three months here, day after day, he still couldn’t look her in the eye. Especially not when she emerged from her bedroom wearing a beige, floor-sweeping dress. It clung to her small body until reaching her hips, becoming a stream of material pouring down to the floor. A dark purple cloak covered her bare shoulders and her hair had been piled on top of her head; there was so much of it, Code wondered how her neck hadn’t snapped from the weight. He liked the purple cloak, though. It was different.
Everything in the Vale Republic was some shade of brown; the hot sand outside, the food, the people—Purebloods, Augments, even the Skel, made of metal from head to toe, had a dark tone to their plating. Clora was no different with her nut-brown skin, matching perfectly with her kinky chocolate hair. The only thing that set her apart from the rest of the people Code had seen in the Vale was her eyes. Gentle green eyes the color of seafoam, at least Code was told they were the color of seafoam. He’d seen the sea but not this foam stuff, and he couldn’t find any information on seafoam in his archives. Sometimes more than classified information gets erased during a reset. That’s what happens when you’re produced at a cheap factory.
“Um…” Clora’s soft voice cut into his thoughts, jolting him to attention.
Code’s visual sensors locked onto her face. She was looking directly at him, right into his blue, glowing eyes. If he had a heart, it would have fluttered; instead, he felt a hollowness in his chest. The springs in his neck area coiled.
“Princess,” he said, gripping the gun in his hands.
“A package arrived for me. I’d like to go get it. Alone.”
He wasn’t supposed to leave her side. But this was the first time she wanted to leave her chambers in three months; he couldn’t tell her no. His Core would report this to his boss, of course, and he might get marks off his ranking for it. Skel with low ranks got crappy assignments or sat on factory shelves for years. The worst of the bunch were destroyed. Code-X5 had a nice rank, one nice enough to put him beside a Valetian princess despite getting a Kishran prince killed in his last cycle. He didn’t want to mess this up. But he didn’t want Clora to hate him more than she already did.
She cleared her throat, still staring up at him, waiting for an answer. “Will you stay here?” she asked.
“Of course.”
She flinched and took a cautious step back. Darn, that came out too harshly. Without normal lungs it was hard to tell how forcefully he spoke at times. Got to work on that.
“I’m sorry,” he quickly apologized.
She gave him half a smile and then made her way to the front door. She glanced back over her shoulder before she walked out. There was that hollow feeling again. He wanted to vomit. What kind of Skel got all weak in the knees over a little human?
With Clora gone, he suddenly realized he had nothing to do. That worried him. Though he’d been bored out of his mind, he’d gotten used to babysitting her all day long. Now, with just a few moments of freedom, he found himself staring aimlessly at the wall. For hours a day he would stand around while Clora went about her lessons with her tutors, enjoyed her meals, and wrote letters to unknown individuals—he could have zoomed in on the letters with his visual monitors or tapped into the camera feeds in the palace to watch from a bird’s eye view. That would have allowed him to read over her shoulder through the lens of one of the 72 different cameras set up in her home. But he never snooped; he was a gentlemanly Skel, okay?
Most times, Code refreshed his archives to keep busy. He re-watched old memories from past life cycles—what pieces had been left to him—studied another Alien language, or he watched the news on his Core’s feed. Most often, he checked his weapon, even taking it apart and counting the rounds while Clora went to the bathroom or took naps. During dinner, he liked to check the pistol at his hip, never surprised that it was fully loaded, much like the auto-rifle he normally carried.
He decided to check his weapons now, all five of them. Sitting on the floor with his legs crossed and all the pieces taken apart and laying before him. He closed his eyes and turned down his sensors so he was virtually blind and deaf—or as blind and deaf as his Core would allow him to be while on a job. Then he started putting the weapons back together, piece by piece. He knew his guns back and front, knew the feel of cold metal against the touch sensors on the tips of his fingers. This was the part of his job he loved, besides the few times where he actually used his weapons, of course.
