Hi, this is a new story about our favorite Almost Human heroes. Comments, reviews and pm-s are more than welcome, and the very thing that keeps me writing.

Pt 1

With a little click and a soft buzz Dorian's system rebooted itself and as soon as the energy revived him, he opened his eyes and sat up straight, only to smack his head hard against an overhanging, thick tree branch.

Not equipped with pain nerves, Dorian just checked the top of his head for damage. No holes, no cracks, no tears. Good. All of sudden reality hit him and the time frame before the safety shutdown kicked in, was loaded into his memory banks.

'John?' He pushed himself up on his hands and immediately toppled over. What the…

His electronic brain told him he was functioning properly, with only little damage to some chips and an in- and outport. But for the rest, Dorian appeared to pretty complete.

Appeared indeed. The synthetic man held out his arms in surprise.

His right hand was gone, severed at the joint. Bits and pieces hung from the stump where only minutes ago his hand had been. Thick, purple lubricant dripped slowly from the inside of the digital arm onto the leaves he sat on. At regular intervals blue and bright white flashes of light lit up the ends of the wires.

Fascinated, Dorian looked at his left hand and the space where his right hand should be, with a strange, detached feeling. His eyes told him clearly his hand had been ripped off and was gone, but his brain unit hadn't processed that information yet and kept sending signals to move his fingers. In fact, he answered to that urge with his left hand, and was certain he did the same with the other.

Was this what humans called phantom pain? Was this what John experienced? Did he feel warmth, cold, pain, an itch, fatigue in a limb that didn't exist because his brain couldn't process the new status? Was it a physical defect rather than mental resistance? Did John…

John!

Distracted by this new situation, he had almost forgotten about John, but now it fully hit him.

'John? Where are you? John? Are you alright?' He raised his voice, got to his feet and began to shove aside branches, undergrowth and wildly growing shrubbery. 'John? Talk to me man! Where are you? Can you hear me? John?'

An eerie, cracking sound overhead made Dorian look up. Above him, wedged between branches of an enormous, old tree, sat the remains of the helicopter, which rocked slowly in the wind. A broken rotor hung in another tree, plexiglass, metal, foam and straps of the leather seats and fragments of the interior where scattered all over the forest. The mossy ground was littered with debris.

'John! Are you up there?' He called out. There was no answer. He looked at the broken screen of the cockpit. Smears of blood stuck to the inside of the plexiglass. He could not see John still in the helicopter, so he must assume that his partner had been thrown out - just like he was. Dorian had landed almost directly under the wreckage.

The helicopter could come down and crash into the ground any moment. It wasn't stuck very tightly and the tree branches weren't all that sturdy, plus a number of them had already broken by the crash. The sooner Dorian found John or the prisoner, the better. Even he, an android, would not survive standing under that when it came down.

'John! John! JOHN!'

to be continued...