"Get out of here, half-breed," the man shoved him out of the shop with more force than necessary. Joe Shimamura staggered to his feet, too angry to see straight.

Who did this guy think he was, looking down on him? Didn't think he was good enough to bag friggin' groceries?

The next day, the grocer arrived to find his shop vandalized.

A couple days after that, Joe began his residence at juvenile detention. Besides the vandalism charges, also had him on several robberies and a couple "assaults" - self-defense, more like.

Juvie was the pits. His inmates weren't too bad to him. Some of them looked down on him, like always, but he actually had friends now. It was the guards that made the place bad. He had a short temper. That put him on their bad side pretty quick.

That's why he broke out. There was no way he was staying there any longer, not after those guards nearly beat his friends' brains in.

The plan went wrong pretty fast. First, one of his fellow escapees hurt his leg, and they had to leave him behind. Then, well, something knocked him out. He was only vaguely aware of two men tossing him in a car trunk, shutting the lid down on him like it was his coffin.

When he came to, he thought for half a second he might be dead. There was a bright light above him after all. But no, he was in some kind of operating room. Maybe he'd been shot? No, then why was he strapped down like this? Men in surgical masks and goggles hovered over him, speaking in a language he couldn't understand. A mask reached out at him, smothering him with some kind of gas. He passed out again, yet the sense of danger grew sharper. A pain in his chest... nothing.

The newest subject was young, likely their youngest subject since 001. Dr Gilmore readied his scalpel. First to go was the heart. An artificial heart quickly followed by artificial lungs kept the brain sustained while everything was cut away and removed. 009 would not have an organic body worth mentioning.

Yet, his external appearance would be preserved, as he had insured with almost all the Zero-Zero Cyborgs thus far. He was improving humanity, not stripping it away.

Wasn't he?

As he removed organic component after organic component, shoving it aside like refuse, he remembered the reactions of the older cyborgs to the loss of their original bodies. He was taking away something precious. He would make sure it was replaced with something incredible.

It would take him years to realize that the "gifts" his creations received had been at a high price. Too high to truly be called a "gift".

They used robotic appendages to separate the nervous system, salvaging it. The work was meticulous, drawn out, and exhausting. They would up leaving the original salival glands and esophageal tissue. Sense of taste was too tedious to replicate, and the cyborgs had been engineered to digest food. Again, in the interest of improving humanity rather than destroying it. Then, there was matter of integrating the new body with the remaining tissues. Mostly the nerves. On older prototypes, this had involved grafts and implants, for the most part. Since 005, however, they had been working to perfect true cybernization. 004 was a step in that direction, of course, but his body had required too many "simple" robotic weaponry parts, besides being horrendously damaged when they received him.

He left several times over the course of the surgery, taking shifts with his fellow doctors.

The other cyborgs were currently training their abilities. He looked at them, living weapons, every last one of them, angry that they hadn't been given a choice in the matter. Some accepted the change more than others, but all resented their lack of free will.

Uh-oh, 002 and 004 were arguing again. 008 tried to halt it, only to be accosted by them in tandem. Racial, cultural, and ideological differences had been largely sorted among the 00s, but 008 was new. And the only African. But he had displayed intelligence well beyond any type of prejudicial stereotype usually associated with his ethnicity.

"That's enough," Gilmore intervened. "You are all brothers now, the first of a new race of cybernetic humans."

004 looked a bit chastised, but 002 just stuck his chin out. 008 was placid as ever.

How is progress on 009? 001 inquired.

"We're reconstructing him now," Gilmore replied.

"So once he's finished..." 003 said, purposefully vague.

The others nodded. Now that they'd discovered the truth about Black Ghost, it was all a matter of timing until they blew this joint. Until then, they were perfect cyborg weapons.

It was strange, 003 reflected, to see a single boy wreak so much destruction single-handedly, while he was decidedly confused. She still wasn't accustomed to the idea of "cyborgs". She couldn't accept that they were now ultimate weapons of destruction, even when face to face with a display like this.

They were still human! They weren't machines, they weren't!