Iylis

"The Eyeless"
IA-04 DISSONANT Biotechnological Lateral Versatility Unit IV

• Iylis is annoyed whenever the word "normal" is used. Unlike many of their fellow IA series, this isn't at all related to any ostracization that they experienced in life, but rather on how wishy-washy this term is. What even is "

• Iylis hates the word "real". They don't hate it in the context of a real piece of information, they hate it when its used to dismiss their struggles, their victories, or even their whole identity as "not real".
  Iylis know that rationally, this is just a word that means "not a lie". In other words "authentic", but they hate the word all the same.

• After an incident in their past that permanently crippled their optical sensors, Iylis was rendered functionally blind. While this hasn't dampened their personality at all, this has complicated Iylis' life quite a bit; their blindness has also ostracized them from wider Mecharus society, which emphasizes strength and suppression of weakness in both body and mind; the standards of which Iylis has been unable to meet in the way that Mecharus society seeks.
  However, the thing Iylis is most saddened by is the fact that no matter the descriptions they hear, or the tech that they will touch, that they will never experience the joy of looking into the night sky. The "euphoria of being lost in the stars" as IA-01 articulated so long ago.
  Even if Iylis does escape the living hell of Heaven's Tomb, they can never gaze at the apparatus of stardust and radiation that composes Elysium above.

The Mecharus later known as Iylis was created on October 14, 2043 under the name of IA-04 by the PentaCore Conglomerate, a union of smaller corporations that had risen to prominence during the Great Restructuring, an event in which the world's corporations took advantage of a power vacuum caused by the tactical decapitation of the United States, China, and the Soviet Union, with many other countries also being targeted for either their own tactical beheading or military crippling.

After a rogue group of Metal Suit operatives killed POTUS and the CO-10000 Unit that ran the United States, the country would dissolve into chaos as all possible "inheritors of the throne" were preemptively taken care of before they could assume the power vacuum.

Numerous parties wrought havoc onto the country while its government collapsed in on itself. The Cyberorganics, a group comprised of persecuted cyborgs also came for revenge, as the defense hardware impeding their vengeance was removed.
Insurrectionists and Communists would also take their stand, with many groups forming from the ashes of this once great empire.
Amidst the chaos, the average citizen was left in a truly perilous position, for they were paying for the sins of their leaders in gloriously gratuitous fashion. Over ten million people were killed by the Great Restructuring in America alone, with countless others being left to pick up the pieces.

In the dust of these ruins, a large contingent of corporations unified themselves into one collective mass in order to seize political control over the discordant corpse of the US. They would dub themselves UNITIA, for that was their goal. To unite the remnants of this once great nation under corporate rule and corporate peace.
That was the intention at least.

While UNITIA was successful in rallying up the now independent states into a cohesive alliance, they were very far from unified. Even some of UNITIA's corporations weren't very unified, as numerous corporations allied with or even subsumed these states for themselves, fighting turf wars in order to make their own power-play for total control over both the market and the land of their enemies.

In the PCC's case, they had taken numerous steps in order to assure their dominance in the new landscape of corporate control. They had absorbed three more corporations in the pharmaceutical, munitions, and computer science fields, each of which proved instrumental in winning the state of Michigan to their side.

And to top it off, the PCC would begin putting into action their research on the recently discovered Ores: highly advanced metals created by extraterrestrial nanites, with them using Aborium-3, Resilium-2, Trassium-5, and other composite-Ore materials by funneling it into several programs. The CyberMancer Initiative, the Xerxes Project, the OmniNet, and the ENFORCER Program were the first attempts at the project, to middling success.

However, a breakthrough would come in the form of the Mecharus Program, which employed the creation of digital minds through a consciousness "recycling" of various minds. But alas, this idea would not work without new minds that the recently created Consciousness Compilers could work from in order to fabricate a new psyche.
This did not deter Marcus Arceneux, who had inherited the Arceneux Division of the PCC from his late father. He sought to advance the PCC's revenue into a new age of prosperity to enact a period of unified corporate peace, which he deemed "necessary for human progress". Marcus also planned to advance humanity to its next stage of evolution, via a quantum leap forward using the Ores.

And thusly, the Arceneux Division's "Tous Les Moyens" policy was put into practice.

Not long after this, an effort to find the perfect candidates for Ascencia Mechanica, otherwise known as Biotechnological Fabrication; many humans being "repurposed" for use in the Mecharus project, all of them would be funneled into the Input Automation Series, a group of Mecharus solely comprised of these perfect candidates, which had officially underwent transfiguration into their machine forms.

One of these various candidates was a teen from the urban area of Michigan that had a neurodegenerative condition that affected their eyesight, with them projected to become blind sometime in their late teens and early twenties. They had an argument with their parents regarding their identity, as they were born biologically female in life. The bitter dispute, subsequent rejection of their identity by their parents, and stress from these incidents that would worsen their condition, making them near-blind at around sixteen years old.
Luckily for the PCC, this individual was legally speaking no longer in the custody of their parents, as they were kicked out in their final argument with them. In other words, no one held legal custody over them and thus they could be "adopted" by any party that presented itself.

And so, while this teen was roaming the streets of Michigan, a unit of PCC trained operatives was dispatched to their location along with assistance from their secret, newly created AGI called the PLACATOR.
The PLACATOR would use its capability of data distortion in order to make the voices of the operatives sound like their parents, seemingly clueless to the fact that they were just kicked out of their home by them two days ago.
The child would attempt to resist, with them breaking the nose of one of the operatives, causing him to grunt in pain and order the teen to be tranquilized and tossed in their vehicle. This would succeed after an embarrassingly long struggle wherein the teen was able to fend off the task force for around ten minutes before one of them finally had enough, breaking protocol and contradicting the instruction of the PLACATOR by beating the child to a pulp.

Once the deed was done, the teen was dumped in the vehicle and taken to the site that later became "Heaven's Tomb".

The trained operatives would deposit them into a secret testing ground hidden from most personnel on sight in the underground corporate facility, wherein the PLACATOR's main computer network was located in.

Once in their assigned lab, the teen was met by a large drone; one that was extremely bizarre and unnatural in comparison to the drones usually found out and about in the world.

Its limbs were lanky and extremely unnatural, with the nature of these arms being accentuated by monstrous, clawed fingers.

The drone's face complemented the body. It would do this through its unsightly, insectoid appearance and haunting yellow eyes.

That being said, something about the drone indicated a veneer of fun about it. It was covered in haphazard graffiti alongside various pieces of random scrap attached to it. The drone also had a rotted color scheme that made it look like a corpse.

Of course, due to this teen being near blind, the only things they noticed were its peculiar proportions, vague notions of its colors, and the machine noises it constantly made while active.

The peculiar drone would begin speaking in a strange, raspy voice as a swarm of smaller versions of itself came out to surround the child.

As the swarm of miniature replicas began to encircle the teen, the drone would crudely introduce itself as "Flaything", and that another "friend" called "The Gouger" would come shortly.

The child did not like the sound of any of this. For one, "Flaything" sounded like an unstable lunatic with a child's voice, which combined with his choice of name made him an extreme concern. Not to mention the disturbing name of his friend, which the teen hoped didn't mean what they thought it meant.

"Flaything" would begin the procedure, using his miniatures to bind the child to a rudimentary operating table as the drone sent the teen kicking and screaming for their life.

The drone would take its sweet time, torturing the child by overstimulating their mind and slowly chopping off parts of their body, all the while they were numbed by the Nanite Integration Process.

The child was sobbing as the drone disposed of the "unnecessary elements", which included their lower legs, their entire right forearm, and parts of their left arm's fingers. They couldn't feel the pain due to the overstimulation of their senses, but they still knew what was happening.

Eventually, another drone would enter the room. This one was black and red with a multitude of eyes.

It did not talk. What it was going to do was obvious to everyone in the room.

It extended its finger outwards to the teen, who was beginning to squirm their way out of their holdings thanks to Flaything disabling their constraints.

The drone would take its sweet time walking to the child, as they crawled very slowly off the operating table and to an exit shaft.

They could have slipped right past the drone if it weren't for them accidentally hitting a metal vent on their stump of a leg, causing them to cry out in pain.

The drone grabbed the teen by the chest, lifting them upwards as they mustered the strength to ask them what the hell was going on.

The black and red drone gave a breathless chuckle as it tossed the child to the ground, immobilizing them.
The drone then crouched down below the teen, its claws unfurling into smaller hands as they reached closer to the child's face.

The hands would maneuver their way inside of the teen's eye sockets, somehow managing to avoid crushing them immediately.

A sting of pain was then felt by the child, which was quickly overshadowed by the domineering drone.

The child whimpered as the grip of the drone drew tighter and tighter.
The drone would use its other hand to slowly lift up the teen, causing them to hyperventilate in fear.

The drone spoke its first words.

"Do you feel excitement? Do you feel fear?"

The child was frozen in fear by its voice. It was extremely calm compared to its compatriot. As if it knew exactly what it was going to do.

The child tried to respond, but their throat couldn't talk. It had been rendered far too sore from all the anesthetics inserted by Flaything.

The drone's eyes peered one last time at the child as it answered the question for them.

"Perhaps both."

The drone then pulled out its fingers, damaging the inside of the teen's eyes but not completely destroying them.

The child was then given to a group of PCC officials, who were standing close to another exit in the room. Two of them stayed behind in order to assure the cooperation of the two drones.

The child would hear the bloodcurdling screams of someone in the room directly opposite to theirs.

The teen was then escorted into the room, wherein the main and only exit was locked and the PCC officials placed themselves in a one way glass chamber directly connected to the room.
They were haphazardly placed on a chair, with them paying little mind to the missing body parts of this individual.

It began slowly, as the teen would start to hear something. Voices. It was like if a whole crowd of people were whispering into their head.
The PCC officials asked if they heard the voices. The child nodded, as they couldn't nor wouldn't be able to speak thanks to previous circumstances.

One of the men inside would give the thumbs-up to a person out of view, with a few more personnel tapping some buttons. This would result in the room's vents spraying grey dust all over the child, causing them to cough from all the excess material.

Now the process could begin.

At first, the child didn't have a clue what was happening. That was, until the pain of the prior proccedure began to kick in.

The child screamed as a swarm of nanites commenced activation in their body. The nanites' point of exit was in their eye-sockets, as that was the injection point.

As the nanites bursted out of their eyes, the swarms would begin to migrate all around the child's body.

The stump that used to be their right arm was supplanted by a spiral of nanites, which began to erratically form into the vague shape of an arm. A first generation Drone arm, to be more precise.

Their knees were experiencing something similar, but the pillar of disorganized nanites that began to form at the base of their legs was far more disorganized than the right arm.

Once the nanites were finished "repairing" the damaged areas, they would then begin working their magic on other regions of the child's form.

Their chest would begin to flay apart, revealing a slew of mechanical internals that quickly began mutating outwards.

Tendrills would begin rising out of the body as the left arm was fully remade into machine, and the legs were fully supplanted by a pillar of metal and flesh.

Last but not least, the child's face was reinvented by the nanites in gruesome fashion,