The numbers on the screen swam mockingly in front of his eyes as he bent over his desk. He studied them harder, squinting with all his might, sure he had made a mistake.

95% Rendering.

He braced himself for the explosion, for the inevitable failure that most of his other experiments had led to. He wondered how much of his lab he’d have to rebuild this time.

96% Rendering.

The anticipation was killing him. One would think that without a living heart he would be incapable of feeling such a thing, and yet here he was. He’d learned the hard way that even with a metal heart it is impossible to forget to feel, not without a metal brain. Not even he was willing to go that far. As much as he hated to feel, he still wanted to remember.

Hongbin straightened and walked to the metallic mannequin. She stood between the metal braces keeping her upright, eyes closed. Her hair was stick straight, without the natural wave she’d once had, but he hadn’t been able to render it any other way, no matter how hard he tried. Every inch of her polymer skin was flawless, from her pale cheeks to the sliver of stomach between her skirt and top all the way down to the toes hidden inside soft slippers. He wanted her to be as comfortable as possible when she opened her eyes for the first time.

She was perfect. If the world had been too cruel for Youngji, he’d take this imitation of her any day. He’d take it especially over his own failed experiment beating traitorously in his chest. He placed his hand over it, as if to try and calm its frenzy.

Setting the computers for the procedure had been the hard part. Taking off his shirt had been easy. Lying on the cold metal surface of the table beneath the machine he had invented for this purpose had been easy. Feeling the silver probes carefully strip the living flesh of his heart into cold metal had been easy.

Sitting up afterwards and realizing he could still feel his loss was devastating. Even more so that he could even feel devastation.

97% Rendering.

The computer beeped.

She used to bother him while he was working.  She would rifle through his notebook to annoy him. He could still remember the headline on the newspaper she’d stolen from him one morning. New Governmental Law 11539 to Forbid Use of Ghost Machines.

He’d brushed her away that morning. After all, this was a revolutionary law no one predicted would pass. While still only a theory at the time, placing human memories into a cyborg wouldn’t hurt anyone.

He would brush her away often. Why did he do that? Was his work so important that he couldn’t spare a moment to sit with her, run a hand through her hair, brush her face with his lips?

Tell her he loved her.

He did do that, though. He wasn’t one to get annoyed. When she tried, he would wrap her snug little body tight in his arms and wish to never let go. He would sit with her, run his hand through her hair, tell her he loved her.

He should have done it more often. When she got sick, everything went gray. Nothing felt right. He held her hand right up until the moment her eyes closed for the last time.

They remained closed now. But she would open them again in a few short moments.

99% Rendering.

He wondered what she would think when she saw him. If she could think at all. His other failures only looked blank and cold, and attempting to teach them memory led only to disaster. Cyborgs weren’t meant to feel, certainly not to remember, and their tangled limbs were piled unceremoniously in the corner. Hongbin looked at them now, high-grade imitations of true human flesh, but so much less than the real thing. The Youngji in front of him was his latest experiment with polymer skin and comprehensive motor commands that would connect directly to the brain. She would be as close to human as a cyborg could possibly get.

Render complete.

Hongbin looked back at his Youngji. Her eyes snapped open and glowed blue for a moment as her artificial brain fired to life. She stared forward for a moment as though blind, before the sensors in her eyes focused on Hongbin’s face. He held his breath as she looked at him inquisitively.

“You are beautiful,” were the first words Hongbin spoke. The girl between the metal braces only stared. He rested a hand on her cheek. She didn’t seem to mind, but also didn’t seem to care. She blinked at him.

The computer beeped again and Hongbin wanted to ignore it. It was incessant. She glanced down at her right arm, which was hanging in place, and looked back at him. The fact that she seemed unable to move it didn’t appear to perturb her, and she only looked expectant, as though already harboring trust in her creator.

Hongbin glanced at the computer.

Error.

The metal in his chest pulsed as he disconnected the cyborg’s right arm below the elbow. She watched him impassively, sitting on the examination table as though a patient awaiting exam. He concentrated on the malfunctioning joint, but looked her way every minute or so through the cloud of metal dust from his tools. She was truly exquisite.

When Hongbin went to reconnect the limb to its owner, he looked up into her face. She looked back at him and Hongbin hoped. Hongbin hoped that some circuitry in her brain would fire to life when she looked into his eyes and she would remember all on her own without any more effort from him. As he did the cyborg stared.

He hung his head. Of course it was impossible. Cyborgs cannot remember. Cyborgs cannot feel. Without memory, cyborgs were only hunks of metallic pieces fitted together to resemble the human form. His pile of junk in the corner only proved that.

The cyborg did not look at him when he went to fetch the helmet. Two heartbeats after his living Youngji ceased to breathe and the monitor went flat, Hongbin was working on her brain, carefully extracting the section containing memory with all the precision of a surgeon. He had practiced on countless others in anticipation of this one crucial extraction. He loaded her memories, his own memories from a drive pulled from his extinct living heart, and collected videos and pictures, into a precious MemoHelm. It could only be acquired on the black market.

Luckily he had connections. In more ways than one.

Hongbin held his breath as he lowered the MemoHelm over the cyborg’s head. He glanced at the connected computer.

Insert Memory.

Time ceased to tick; he could no longer hear the clock on the wall. He stared at her head, bowed slightly under the weight of the MemoHelm. He wished he could see what she saw. But then again, he had it all in his own mind, if not his heart.

The numbers on the percentage continued to rise. 55%. 67%. 89%. 100% complete.

Hongbin lifted the MemoHelm and watched the confusion in his Youngji's face. She bit her lip, eyes roaming around before finding his face. She studied him for a long minute, as if memorizing every inch of skin, every wrinkle around his mouth, every fleck of color in his eyes. Her hand moved. She looked like she wanted to his cheek, but instead did something much more meaningful.

As she leapt to her feet to embrace him, tight as a straightjacket, Hongbin felt joy, love, and life surge back into his limbs as though they’d never left. His metal heart pounded with happiness and his eyes stung when she looked at him with shining eyes and his cheek with a soft finger.

"It’s you.”

"It’s me.”

“I left you.”

"You’re here now.”

"Yes, I am,” she whispered. “I won’t leave you again.”      

They stood embracing like that for several minutes. Hongbin was unwilling to ever let her go again, and the feel of her artificial skin was almost real against his own.

"Come sit, Youngji.” He reveled in saying her name and seeing her eyes shine in recognition that it was hers. They sat on the cot tucked in the corner, and she laid her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. He entwined their fingers together, locking hers within his.

"I love you,” she murmured, and he felt tears stinging his eyes again. His metal heart felt as if it would burst out of his chest. It seemed replacing his living heart hadn’t changed much about him at all. He was glad.

Before he could reciprocate her words, someone knocked at the door. Hongbin felt his smile fade when the person doing the knocking didn’t wait even a second for him to open it. Four men in suits and earwigs came striding into the lab. Kara’s face went from content to frightened.

"Hongbin...”

He tried to lift her hand to hold it against his cheek, but two of the men wrenched her from his arms and the other two dragged him across the room, one man to each arm. He fought them, but they were stronger than he.

"Hongbin!”

"Youngji!”

The men didn’t say a word. One took a probe and a small screen from his pocket, and Hongbin went cold. It was a legality test, those bastards. The MemoHelm sat innocently on the table by the computers and he wondered if they had a way of tracking even the black market models.

"Stop! You’ll hurt her!”

“She has no pain sensors, you would know that well enough, Mr. Lee.”

Hongbin redoubled his efforts to break free, but they only held him tighter. The men holding Youngji held her still and plunged the sharp needle into her power module under her skin. Hongbin closed his eyes briefly. He knew she would shut down temporarily, eyes glowing an eerie blue, while they tested her for memories. He suspected they already knew what they would find.

Their screen flashed red. Illegal.

“Hongbin!” They were dragging her away.

"Youngji!” With a burst of energy, Hongbin wrenched his arms free of the men and grabbed her arm, leading her down the maze that led to the computer that had replaced his heart and most of the rest of him into metal. The men wouldn’t find their way for at least a few minutes.

They finally stopped running and faced the computers that had turned him cyborg. She looked at him, but this was not the blank stare of before. She had memories now, and no one was going to take her away from him, not if he could help it.

“It’ll be all right,” he murmured in her ear. She looked up at him with such trust in her eyes that it broke the metal in his chest into a thousand circuit pieces.

“I know,” she breathed. He kissed her forehead and led her to the table. He could hear the men blundering around in his maze of a lab, trying to find them; he knew he had to be quick.

He quickly entered the necessary code into his computers, the one he had programmed months ago as he worked on inputting memories into the MemoHelm. He always did have a worst-case scenario escape plan. Just in case.

"Hongbin,” Youngji whispered as he lay beside her. A tear fell from her eye, and Hongbin knew that she was more than a cyborg. A matching tear slipped from behind his own eye as the machines began their work, slicing into their arms, legs, torsos, chests, until only one, single beating metal heart remained of them. It pulsed red for a moment, before its glow darkened and stilled.