Humanity

Drake Kasen stood at the door of the Orbital Shuttle that had been commissioned for Orbital Skydiving and looked at the distant landscape of Earth.Drake sealed his protective suit and jumped out into the thin atmosphere. Drake felt gravity grip his body and pull him towards the ground as he fell. Drake closed his eyes, and a tear would have fallen from his eye if he had any tear ducts left in his mechanical body. Drake’s body accelerated through the atmosphere and as he fell, he would have felt the heat from re-entry, if he could feel anything in his robotic limbs that is. Drake had no sense of touch in his artificial body. The doctors that had rebuilt his body from his burnt and maimed corpse after the brutal hovercab explosion thought feeling to be unnecessary. Drake would often wonder if he was truly alive, for didn’t people say, “Pain is the body’s way of letting you know you are alive,” so if he felt no pain, then was he alive? Taking note that he was 50 miles from the ground, Drake tried to pull the cord for his chute. Nothing happened. Drake began to panic when he realized the chute was malfunctioning. If the chute didn’t deploy in time, he would be nothing but a pile of twisted metal and burnt grey-matter on the ground. Drake began to yank at the ripcord, but it was jammed and wouldn’t release the chute, and the ground was getting closer and closer. Finally, Drake wrenched the cord with all of his superhuman strength, and the chute deployed. Unfortunately Drake was far too close to the ground by now, and all the chute could do was lessen the impact from “pile of scrap” to “body in crater” when he hit. With a large crash, Drake hit the earth causing a cloud of dust to rise up. Pulling himself out of the small crater, he looked at his arm through his shredded flight suit. His skin had torn, but instead of muscles and blood, there were metal cables replacing cords of muscle and arteries of blood. Drake sighed; ever since the accident he never felt pain, for as a cyborg, Drake felt no pain.

“Looks like I’m alive,” said Drake before he chuckled at his slip, “what do you know, I answered my own question.”