Rengoku: Decent Into Hell

Event 1: Selflessness

"Yes, you heard me... I don't care if you have to flub the numbers, just make it happen!... Who needs volunteers, just sneak someone out of death row!... No, you listen to me; we need a successful human subject, or those AI cells are just a dream..."

An important looking man yelled into his phone walking down Wall Street in New York City. Tour groups wandered the streets on the warm summer day. No one paid any mind to the man, even as he furthered his plans for his company's rise to power. As the man walked, a former employee, a scientist, followed him. The man hung up his phone, shoving it into his pant's pocket and swearing quietly at the employee he had been arguing with. The scientist following him took this as his chance. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a detonator, and ran towards the businessman...

At the same moment, a man and his fiance on a tour were walking passed the businessman. The man and his fiance, months away from their ceremony, would have to wait to see each other another day. As she felt his hand leave hers, the woman froze in shock as her future husband tackled the scientist. They hit the ground and the scientist accidentally queued the bombs strapped to his legs. They were home-made, and only intended to kill one man and the bomber. The woman shrieked into the deafening boom, instantly knowing what had just happened. But her husband could not hear her. His ears would never hear another sound...

"Ugh..." groaned Xavier Alighieri. His eyes fluttered open, revealing the ceiling of some hospital room. He tensed his whole body in instinct, stretching as if from a midday nap. He sat up and swept his hands over his face, which felt wrong somehow. He looked at his hands, and nearly shouted in surprise. These were not his hands! He began inspecting his hands and arms, seeing the smooth streaked metal and not believing it was his own body. He ripped off the sheet covering the rest of him, revealing his smooth legs and feet. He was stunned, but he was never the type to sit around when he saw a problem. He tested moving every part of his body, even wiggling his ears. He blinked a few times, even testing the motion of his eyes. He swung his legs out of bed when he felt comfortable moving his body. He felt like he was in a dream, and prayed it did not turn into a nightmare. He found it hard to walk, being taller than he remembered, but he found himself quickly and headed for the door. He didn't worry about clothes; this body had nothing to hide like his old one did, which made him uneasy, but not scared. He opened the door to his room, was spotted by several orderlies, and was suddenly standing in a tempest of human bodies. They were all pushing him back into the room, some running away shouting out calling "the CEO." Xavier did as he was told and went back in the room, but no one would answer his questions. He sat on the bed, and the orderlies looked him over, but no one tried taking his blood pressure or his heartbeat. No one asked how he felt. Instead, they asked his name and age and other personal information. He remembered all of that, but he wanted to know how he had gotten in the hospital. The nurses started to leave him.

"Ma'am!" he shouted, putting a demanding note in his voice. One nurse stopped.

"Uhh, yes...?" she said, looking at him almost with fear.

"Why am I here? What happened to me?" said Xavier, pleading for something to go on.

"You don't remember?" she said, genuinely surprised. "You saved Mr. Maro from a crazed former employee who tried to kill him. You jumped on a suicide bomber. You're a hero!"

If Xavier had skin, it would have flushed with goosebumps. His final moments rushed back to him and he jumped off the bed.

"Beatrice!" he yelled, remembering his fiance.

Orderlies rushed back into the room to calm him down and get him back on the bed.

"I'm not doing a single thing until someone brings my wife here!" he raged, incredible strength allowing him to resist everyone trying to restrain him. The struggle went on for a minute more until a voice rose over the commotion.

"That's quite enough, Mr. Alighieri!" said the voice of an older man.

Xavier's head snapped to the doorway where he saw the man he had saved. He stopped fighting, but didn't sit on the bed either, standing stiff and straight, as unmovable as a steel girder.

"We have called your fiance, and she will be here soon. For now, please have a seat so I can speak with you." Maro was short with Xavier, obviously irritated.

Xavier sat on the bed and the orderlies backed off. As the men and women filed out of the room, Xavier stared daggers at Maro, who pulled up a free chair and sat on the wall opposite the head of the bed.

"Obviously you will have questions, so let me do my best to answer most of them in one go. Firstly, as you seem to remember, you saved me from some idiot I fired trying to throw away his life and mine. Second, I am the CEO of a growing company that does research into advanced technology. For a while, we've been working on very small machines that function like cells; a collective intelligence. We encountered the problem of not having a willing human subject who would give up their body for science. However, as that very issue became an impassible wall, here you are destroying your body to save me. Naturally, out of the kindness of my heart, I had you, or what was left of you, hauled away from the crater in the street to be made into what you are now. Your head was intact, and we managed to salvage most of your memories and other data from your brain. I hope you understand the kind of trouble we went through to save you. Thanks to you, I am alive, my company can move forward with our work, and in the end you even gained from what you did. Just think, how you feel no pain, you will never be sick, and you should even be able to control the shape of your body at will, though I imagine that will take practice. I -"

Xavier cut him off, unable to bear any more.

"You think this is a blessing, what you've done to me? Look at me! No pain? Try no feeling at all! Do you have any idea what you've stolen from me! Yes, I threw my life away, and I knew what I was doing, but that should have been it! Beatrice would have found someone else! And you can rot for all I care, you and your mad science! Let me guess, like this I will never die, right? With this body, I can survive almost anything, can't I! What does that mean for my wife? Now I get to watch her grow old while I stay the same hunk of metal! And that's if she even stays with me! You've given me nothing but existence! This is no life! How could you!"

Xavier stopped roaring his anger just long enough to see if Maro would respond.

"Look, there's nothing that can be done about it now. The only way to kill you, or for you to die is to destroy your entire body almost at the same time. If some of your body survives long enough, you will rebuild yourself automatically or at will. And you'll keep your memories and personality as long as one full kilogram of cells stays intact. Any less than that and you will start losing memories. If just a few cells are left, you can't rebuild, and anything between that may mean becoming a mindless robot. If you want to die so badly, you had better get creative. Otherwise, quit whining and accept it. Your long life will be happier that way. The three months we've spent -"

"THREE MONTHS!" cut in Xavier, livid almost behind reason.

"Yes! That's how long it took to make sure everything would turn out as planned. In reality, you've been complete and asleep here for two months, and we've checked on you multiple times, but you took your sweet time waking up. Look, just let me finish already! We have spent the time you've been in the hospital building courses for you to test your body and get used to it. This will benefit you in the long run, and will help us better understand exactly what we've accomplished. After that, you can be with your wife, and if for some reason she's changed her mind in the past two months that you've been asleep in here, then I suppose you can join the military or go live under the sea or something legendary like that. Now, are you going to sit there all day, or are you going to sign yourself out of the hospital and wait for your wife to come and get you?"

Angry as he was, Xavier decided he should resolve the problems with Beatrice as soon as he could. The sooner he knew what she wanted, the sooner he could decide how he was supposed to live without her. Xavier put everything out of his mind for the time being. He didn't think about what kind of eternity he would live. He didn't think of why anyone would make something like him. All he wanted was to try and find a normal way to live, and failing that, find a purpose for his new unending life...