The roof lights of the Edison Academy for Cybernetic Arts buzzed loudly. They sounded like angry wasps. Jagged shadows were cast across the chrome lockers. In the flickering glow, three girls—Lux, Syn, and Vex—cornered Nova against the bio-circuit wall. Their neural-jacks pulsed with malicious code, their grins sharp as razors.
“Think you’re special, freak?” Lux sneered, tapping her temple. A flicker of black-market malware danced in her ocular implants. “Just because your mom screwed some deep-space squid doesn’t make you better than us.”
Nova said nothing. Her veins hummed with something older than the city, something not entirely human.
Syn giggled, running a finger along Nova’s neural port. “Let’s see what happens when we flood your system with junk data.” She slammed a pirated virus straight into Nova’s cortex.
Big mistake.
Nova’s eyes went black. Not dark—void. The school’s lights dimmed. The air crackled with static.
Vex took a step back. “Uh… guys?”
Then the screaming started.
It wasn’t sound—it was data, a shriek of alien code tearing through their cyberbrains. Lux clawed at her skull as her implants melted. Syn’s optics burst in a shower of sparks. Vex collapsed as her nervous system was overwritten with something ancient and hungry.
When the janitor-bot found them at dawn, Lux was babbling in binary, Syn’s face was frozen in a rictus of terror, and Vex… Vex was just gone, her mind a hollow shell.
Nova sat cross-legged on the rooftop, watching the sun rise over the megacity. She licked her lips—tasted like copper and starlight.
School was going to be very different now.
My Other Car is a Robot 
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