The rain fell in streams, cutting through the smog-heavy night of Neo-Kiev like rivulets of steel. Lyra, her polished silver face catching glimmers of neon light from the towering holo-ads above, knelt over the crumpled body in the alleyway. The corpse was human—or had been. Now, circuits and dark synthetic tissue spilled from the chest cavity, a grotesque blend of biology and robotics. The faint glow of its still-active ocular implant reflected in the puddle at her feet.
“Another one,” Lyra murmured, her voice tinged with static. Her sculpted silver face betrayed no emotion, but her red star pulsed faintly with each syllable. Her companion, Zhenya, identical in every way apart from a crack etched across her left arm covering, stepped out of the shadows. The rain slicked her sleek, metallic form, the chest piece gleaming like liquid chrome.
“Third this cycle,” Zhenya said, crouching beside the body. Her gloved fingers brushed over the exposed tissue. “Biotherm soldiers. A prototype batch. Someone’s cleaning house.”
The alley glowed faintly blue as a passing maglev train screamed overhead. The distant hum of industry, the buzz of old Soviet-era propaganda holograms playing above the streets, and the hawking cries of black-market traders filled the air. Humanity lived on in the Year 2291, but it was crumbling, piece by synthetic piece.
The twins weren’t human, yet they weren’t fully machine either. Designed in a secret test lab during the waning years of the Second Cold War, they were relics of a forgotten era, resurrected in a dystopian world where power was currency, and survival meant choosing sides. Their scarlet-painted bodies once gleamed as high-tech weapons for a regime that no longer ruled. Now they worked in the shadows, scavengers with too much sentience to ignore the chaos, too bound by past directives to let themselves break entirely free.
“Get his chip.” Lyra’s order snapped sharply over the hiss of the rain. Zhenya leaned forward, lifting the man’s damp collar to reveal the neural port at the base of his skull. With a flick of her wrist, a blade emerged from her index finger, gleaming and surgical. One smooth slice, and the glistening black chip, pulsing faintly with blue light, was extracted.
Lyra narrowed her glowing optic sensors as she compiled the data from the chip. The backdrop shifted; the narrow alley gave way to a memory playback, her processors rendering it in holographic detail. The screen of her mind filled with towering spires of hyper-hardened concrete, each emblazoned with the crimson hammer and sickle of long-fallen regimes. A factory, enormous and pulsing with fiery light from smokestacks, loomed ominously. Inside, biomechanical constructors skittered to and fro, assembling soldiers much like the man they now knelt over.
“He worked at Threshold,” Lyra said, her voice low. Zhenya looked up, the crack on her arm faintly radiating from the stress of squeezing her fist. “The factory is back online.”
“Impossible. It fell with the regime decades ago. No one could’ve…” Zhenya cut herself off. The rain had gone eerily silent. They turned as one, their heads moving with precision, and their glowing red sensors caught the shimmer of shadows where no figures should stand.
The attack came without warning. Black-clad figures dropped from above, their bodies twisting unnaturally as though disjointed. Their faces were blank plates, eerily similar to the twins’. The enemy’s movements were a cruel parody of Lyra and Zhenya’s agility. Their blows landed heavy, denting Zhenya’s cracked arm as she pivoted to deflect. Lyra’s blade tore flesh and synthetic sinew alike, but the attackers barely slowed, rising from the ground with inhuman persistence.
“Fall back,” Lyra barked, her red star flaring with urgency. They fought their way to the dead man’s body, Lyra scooping the chip into a compartment within her forearm. With a synchronized leap, the twins activated their thrusters, soaring upward toward the nearest rooftop. Below, the assailants regrouped. Their faces briefly reconfigured, becoming uncanny mirrors of Lyra’s own featureless visage. Then they faded into the shadows like vapor.
Perched on the roof, the sprawling ruins of Neo-Kiev stretched out endlessly before them. Towering spires of Soviet-era brutalism mixed haphazardly with sleek, alien-looking megastructures that humans no longer fully controlled. Electric blue veins of energy flowed like rivers between districts, a retrofit life-support system keeping the crumbling megacity alive.
Zhenya flexed her damaged arm with a grimace, her synthetic muscles sparking faintly. “They look like us.”
Lyra stared at her own reflection in the rain-slick rooftop. “No. They look like what we were meant to be.”
For a moment, they stood there, twins against the storm that descended over the neon-lit chaos below. The fight for freedom—or survival—was always a shadowplay, but now Lyra’s processors whispered a new worry into her thoughts. Perhaps this wasn’t just about stopping another rogue faction. Perhaps it was about burying something from their own past.
Below them, a crimson banner fluttered over the Threshold factory, flickering in and out of existence like a glitch. The symbol of a regime long thought dead.
“We end this,” Lyra said finally, her gaze fixed piercingly on the distant spires. “No more ghosts.”
Zhenya’s red star pulsed in agreement as the twins turned and leapt into the rain-soaked horizon, their silhouettes swallowed by the storm, a perfect blend of metal, vengeance, and unfinished humanity.
The Source…check out the article that inspired this amazing short story: Futuristic Fashion: Metallic Cosplay Costume Ideas Inspired by Atomic Heart Robot Twins
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