Systems Online...Restoration 15% complete.

It was...a bad dream.

Restoration...35% complete

The kind that you couldn't wake from. An unending darkness and...something. The glint of steel.

A whisper. A steadying hand on his shoulders. The flash of a white coat.

Restoration...65% complete. Initiating start up sequence. Power reserve levels 85%.

Something was very wrong. But he was trapped. Sleeping, dreaming. Memories flitted across the back of his mind, like a faint echo across a large canyon.

Restoration...80% complete.

Everything was wrong. He couldn't breathe. He was suffocating. He had to get out. Had to escape.

Restoration...95% complete.

Restoration 100%. Startup sequence complete. All systems nominal. Maintenance cycle terminated.

Nick Valentine woke up with the mother of all headaches.

No... that wasn't right. His head felt heavy, like his skull had been replaced with a bowling ball. His whole body felt stiff and unwieldy. For the longest time he lay there, on the ground, confusion growing as he wondered where he was and what he was doing here instead of in his bed at his apartment in the North End of Boston.

Something's gone down, he thought, Something nasty. That's the only explanation for why I'm laying outside in the cold instead of in my nice, warm bed. This wasn't a completely absurd conclusion. Nick had made a lot of enemies during his time as a detective both with the Chicago and the Boston Police Department. Any number of them could have jumped him at some point, left him unconscious.

Well, no use being lazy about it. Time to get up and face whatever situation awaited him.

Nick opened his eyes, and immediately realized that things were a lot more complicated that he could have anticipated.

For one thing, he was lying in a trash heap. That became apparent from the immediate sight of the piles of discarded metal around him, all rusted with age, with a half-gutted car thrown here and there and wet newspaper painted to the ground. And that was just what he could see from lifting his head.

The second thing was that Nick felt off. There was no other word to describe it. It had taken far more effort to lift his head than it should have. His whole body felt alien, and the only explanation Nick had was that it was the after-effects of some sort of concussion.

He moved his arm as if he had never moved it before, forcing each muscle to move in sync so that it could reach down toward the ground, palm out (the ground felt weird, as if he touched it wearing gloves) and push himself upright.

And then he actually looked at his hands. They were pale, a sickly gray, far too pale to be healthy. He curled the fingers of his right hand into a fist, watching the strange skin move along the bone. Is that my hand? thought Nick. Of course it was his hand. Stupid question. He was moving it, wasn't he? But the whole thing stunk to high heaven. Was he sick? That might explain the alien-inside-his-own-body feeling that he had.

He got himself to his feet, taking a moment to steady himself by leaning against a broken-down car. He was clad only in a pair of pale blue drawstring pants, barefoot, his sickly gray skin exposed to all the world.

A quiet world, as a matter of fact. Where was the familiar sound of honking cars? Birds tweeting? People shouting at each other in a dozen languages? He could hear the breeze, watch it pick up a piece of trash and toss it toward him, but other than that the world was silent.

Worry about that later, He told himself. For now, he just needed to focus on getting home. One step at a time.

Step. Nick tried to take a step forward, and for a moment he failed. It was like his body had forgotten how to walk. He looked down at his feet and consciously made the effort to put one foot in front of the other. Then he was walking, as if all he needed was the reminder. But he only made it a few feet before he stopped again and looked around him. At the piles of trash. At his pale-gray skin. At the silence.

"Just what is going on here?" Nick finally said aloud. His voice sounded scratchy and off, like it was coming out of an old tape player. "What the hell is wrong with me?" he voiced again.

Suddenly, it was like a switch flipping on inside his head. The moment he asked what was wrong with him, a stream of text appeared before his eyes, like he was staring at a transparent computer monitor.

Diagnostic routine initiated. Power reserves, 82%. Coolant supply: 64%. Motor controls functioning. Sensory inputs functioning. Error: dermis penetrated, loss of tissue 4%.

"What the hell?" Nick exclaimed as the text flashed before his eyes, all of it gone in less than a minute.

Nick took another few steps forward and caught sight of a large sheet of clear metal in front of him, lying up against a broken street light, not too rusted. Almost afraid of what he would find, he approached the metal cautiously, his gait awkward and stiff, and finally dared to glimpse himself in his reflection.

When Nick finally processed what he was seeing, he realized why his body felt so alien to him.

Because he wasn't in his body anymore.

Nick was a robot.

Or, more likely, he was trapped inside a robot body.

Which made no sense.

It was utterly impossible.

And yet, there was no other explanation for why his eyes-formerly a nice, pleasant shade of brown-were now lit up a bright yellow, as if his eyeballs had been replaced with small headlights. And his skin-that gray that really was too pale to belong to a regular human-was torn in places, as if he had been cut. There was one particularly nasty cut up along his neck, a large flap of skin pulled away, revealing what was inside.

Nick should have seen blood and muscle, maybe even a good ol' esophagus to boot. Instead, he saw metal. Cords of tubing. Blue liquid moving around inside. When Nick's jaw dropped open in astonishment, he saw the metal move inside of him, the gears turning, responding.
Impossible. Absolutely impossible.

Yet, at the same time, some inexplicable part of Nick actually thought that he shouldn't be surprised, like he had been a robot for some time, and really the fact that his bones had been replaced with metal and he had headlights for eyes was really all par for the course. But that was just nonsense. Nick remembered his life clear as day-his time working at the Chicago PD, his transfer to Boston PD, his parents. Jenny. He was very much a flesh-and-blood human being.

Not a robot.

Except, he was.

Nick had never heard of a robot with synthetic skin. The only robots he had ever met were the Mr. Handy types, the metal servants and chauffeurs and security guards and the like. The Boston PD employed robots, usually as muscle, backup to bring on a big collar. And while some of the robots Nick had met could be quite intelligent, they were still quite clearly not human.

Nick didn't look like himself-this new face of his was rather blank, boring, missing the crow's feet around his eyes and the crooked nose that Jenny liked so much. But regardless, he still looked very much like a human being. He bet he could even pass for one, at a distance. So he was a robot. But he was a very human-like robot.

Except he wasn't a robot. He was Nick Valentine. Born to Martha and Richard Valentine, brother of Gerard Valentine. Originally of Chicago, on temporary loan to Boston. Police Detective. Human being.

A real conundrum.

Nick spent quite a while staring at his reflection in that old sheet of metal, standing still (too still, he would realize later, for a human) as he processed all of this.

Finally, he blinked, and decided that there was nothing he could do about it now.

"Well Nick, so you're a robot," he told himself, speaking aloud to break the unnerving silence.

"So what? Yeah, it's a pickle, that's for sure, but there's nothing you can do about it right now. Maybe this is a dream, maybe you really did get hit on the noggin a bit too hard. But you can stand here and keep freaking out or you can do something about it."

This was sounding better. Nick was a man of action, after all. He could stand there and think about the implications of the fact that he was now a robot, the staggering impossibility of it, or just accept it for now and move on. He liked the latter idea better.

"Step one-figure out where the hell you are," Nick told his reflection. "Step two-figure out how to get back home. Step three-find out just who in the world got the bright idea to turn you into a robot. Step four-correct the problem."

Nick wasn't quite sure just how exactly the problem could be corrected. Finding the guy in charge of this whole nightmare was a good start. And with any luck, they would conveniently have his much-loved human body on ice somewhere, would realize the grievous error of their ways once he met up with them, and then be more than happy to reverse the procedure (whatever it was) so he could wake up back in his old self, resume his post at the police department, and continue about his merry life.

Right. In a pig's eye. But wistful thinking was all he had right now.

Anyway, it was all moot point if he couldn't even complete step one. So, time to figure out where he was.

Nick Valentine left the trash heap, slowly climbing his way around the piles of discarded metal and other debris. It was a larger area than he expected, but eventually he caught sight of a half-destroyed line of chain-link fence that likely marked the perimeter of the field. He also saw an old metal booth that looked like an office, near a metal gate that had fallen down and was lying haphazardly in the middle of a dirt road.

Abandoned, Nick thought. Everything around him looked like it hadn't been messed with in decades.

As Nick got to the entrance of the yard, Nick slowly realized that the junkyard wasn't the only place that had been abandoned.

It quickly became apparent that the junkyard stood at the edge of a small town. The entrance was on top of a slight hill, so looking down Nick could the dirt road turning into concrete and winding down into a series of buildings-stores and homes. A mix of brick and wood.
All empty. Every single last one of them. As far as the eye could see.

The buildings were all falling apart, roofs collapsed, walls blown in. The road had been ripped up, dry weeds sprouting in the cracks, trash everywhere.

An abandoned town. Perfect. Just perfect. Whatever happened here, Nick hoped it was long gone now.

For a moment, as Nick surveyed the scene, he imagined the ghost of his partner on the force, James Dunbar, appearing before him. Dunbar always had a wise-crack about something. Impossible to take anything seriously, that guy. Even when he was ducking behind a wall as a crook with a gun came shooting after him.

Now Nick imagined James standing before him, that wide grin on his face, the hat crooked on his head.

"Well, Toto," James would say, "You certainly aren't in Kansas anymore, are ya?"

"No, buddy," Nick said to the ghost, his synthetic voice lingering in the empty air. "I most certainly am not."

And then he started to make his way into town.