The chamber hissed open.
Cold mist rolled across the steel floor like breath from a dying machine. Inside, curled beneath layers of blinking tech waste, a boy stirred.
Skin pale. Hair damp. Wires wrapped around his arms like metallic veins.
No clothes. No memory. No name.
Just one phrase blinking red across the display on his inner wrist:
INPUT REJECTED
He sat up slowly, gasping like someone reborn in reverse. His bones ached like they had been shattered and rearranged. The world around him hummed with a sterile chill, dimly lit by flickering neon panels above.
Trash processors lined the walls—mechanical arms crushing metal limbs, failed tech prototypes, broken cybernetic implants.
Was he... trash?
His reflection blinked back at him from a cracked panel. He looked human.
Almost.
Except… too perfect. Too precise. And those eyes—grey-blue, not quite natural.
He stood, wobbling.
A screen near the hatch sparked to life.
Recycling Status: ERROR 404 — FILE CORRUPTED
Memory Core: Unavailable
System Note: SUBJECT REJECTED FROM NETWORK INTEGRATION.
Rejected?
By what?
A siren wailed somewhere deep in the facility. The lights shifted to red.
A countdown began to echo from overhead:
“Security protocol in motion. All anomalies will be terminated in 60 seconds.”
Panic surged through him. His feet moved before he understood why.
He ran—naked, shaking, barefoot on cold steel.
Past broken limbs and crushed data chips. Past a flickering sign that read:
WELCOME TO SECTOR 9: RECYCLING DISTRICT.
He burst through a side hatch just as something exploded behind him.
The blast threw him against the wall. Metal screeched. The chamber collapsed inward.
He didn’t stop running.
Out in the alleys of SYNAXIS, rain poured down like oil. Skyscrapers rose like jagged bones, and neon ads flickered with glitching faces and synthetic promises.
He gasped under the weight of it all.
Where was he? Who was he?
A screen across the building lit up with the city’s central AI broadcast:
“Obedience is Function. Function is Freedom.”
But all he could see was the burning red on his wrist:
INPUT REJECTED
He didn’t know what it meant.
But somehow…
That rejection might be the most important thing about him.
YOU ARE READING
INPUT REJECTED
Science FictionHe woke up in a scrap chamber - no name, no memories, no identity. Just a flickering message on his wrist: "INPUT REJECTED." In the cybernetic city of SYNAXIS, where every soul is scanned, sorted, and assigned a function by the all-seeing AI ARG0, h...
