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sheets and gouts of red blood and black lubricant. “I’m just disassembling you, you fucking bastard.”
    I threw the head to one side, shuffled my knees off of the ‘corpse’ and got to my feet. I almost wanted to roar with my victory. I’d never felt so...so...alive. Oh, what the hell, “Yes!” I screamed, hoarse and guttural.
    Even if I was capable of surprise, I would not have felt it about the ease of my victory. I could have put it down to how much of an unbelievable badass I was, but the more logical extrapolation was that the other cyborg actually expected me to comply and submit. I don’t think he, or they, if it had been all the Wardens listening in, realised just how rogue I – apparently – was. Not until I partially caved his face in, anyway. Well, they knew now.
     
    - WARDEN Q4 DISABLED DISPATCH EXTRA UNITS ACCORDING TO PROXIMITY-
     
    Oh yes, they definitely knew now.
    I looked over at the head on the floor. Its eyes were staring at mine, and they stayed on me as I approached the head and kicked it a few yards along the cliff.
    “Oh that’s right, rat me out to your friends just ‘cos I pulled your head off,” I yelled after it.
    Of course the other cyborg – Q4 apparently – wasn’t dead. Our, as in cyborg, bodies are just vehicles for moving our super computer brains around. The only essential parts of us are our heads, unless you counted our digestive systems, which are really, more of a ‘nice to have’. Personally I think it’s a design flaw; our systems should be distributed throughout our entire bodies, with multiple redundancies built in. But, hey, I’m not the cyborg god who created us, so it’s not really my place to criticise. Hah, funny how I’m all us, us, us, now, when I keep slipping into we with the humans. Fuck me, I’m one confused pile of blood and circuits.
    Shit, though; I wanted this head alive but, of course it would still be able to communicate with its buddies. Questioning it would get a bit dicey if I was fending off constant assaults from more of them – especially as they’d surely wise up now and tackle me with overwhelming force. Taking down this lone cyborg had been easy enough because I struck first, but I very much doubted I could handle two of them. Every one of the thousands of combat scenarios I was running in my head, every second, was coming to the same conclusion.
    Those combat scenarios were taking into account the differences between fighting humans, which was all I had done in the past, and fighting cyborgs. When I get into a fistfight with a human, I can – and do – pulp them in seconds, generally in one hit. Whatever super-hard alloys I’m made of are wonderful for pulverising soft human bones. But, on the other hand, a fight against my own kind is just like a fight between two humans. I was never expecting a titanic showdown where we belted the shit out of each other from sunup till sundown because we’re perfectly equipped with the strength and abilities to do damage to – and take it from – one another. A human can break another human’s leg with a kick, and I can do the same just as easily to another cyborg. Still, it was the first fair fight I’d ever had in my life, and boy had I enjoyed it.
    I went to grab the head. It was time to get out of there. I didn’t know if the other Wardens could track me, specifically, or if they’d just found my cave by following Doctor Melon. I’d take the chance and hope that only the doc had known how to find me, and make myself scarce. I’d go somewhere populated. Perhaps the Wardens weren’t up for a public war just yet, even if they could find me. But if they were, well, so was I.
     
    As I strolled nonchalantly towards Q4’s head, my metal detector – which I’d left running since the cyborg interrupted me – started beeping. It wasn’t alerting me to Q4’s head, no, there was something else, buried nearby. I followed the beeps to a patch of disturbed earth, where I gouged away