They dragged me to a room. No windows. Just mirrors. A table lay before me. A single lightbulb hung overhead. I heard the creak of floorboards underneath my feet. And the invisible drips of faucet echoes somewhere behind the white brick walls.

They left me there for a long time. Wearing only a patient's robe, my hands cuffed behind the chair, the draft chilled over my skin, head to toes. The floor was a bed of ice.

Eventually the heavy door pushed open behind me. The sound of high heels and heavy boots entered. I looked up from my daze, two frowning guards came in. If looks could kill.

"Jon Clow," said the man. He remained standing. The woman sat. She wore a crew cut suit that hid her skin all the way up to her neck. Professional. Wore glasses. She looked smarter than both the man and I combined. Could probably kick our asses, too. I spotted the curvature of her calves and thighs as she had walked in. No wonder the guy was reluctant to take his seat beside her.

"We have a few questions for you, Mr. Clow," said the woman.

(I'm sure you do.)

She pulled out a bag and a manila envelope. She pulled out two photos but laid them on the table facedown before I could spot them. She leaned forward and tilted her head down so that when she raised her eyes sternly up at me she came off like the most forceful no-bullshit-tolerated interrogator you'd never seen on TV. She pointed a heavy finger at the photos. She bit her nails. The outline was white where the nail was torn and one edge still had a stick of dry blood. "Now you're going to see these two photos and you're going to tell me if you've ever seen these people before. You lie and we chop a finger off. If I have to ask you again and you lie a second time, we take one of your balls, Mr. Clow."

How does it get any worse than that? I thought.

"And if we have to ask you a third time," she continued, her tone forceful the entire way through, "then we're just gonna cut your tongue off and ask you only yes or no questions from there. Peachy?"

I nodded. Might as well practice my nods now.

When she was sure I was on board she flipped the first photo over. It was a man I'd never seen before.

"Have you ever seen this man?" Her eyes and the eyes of partner were locked and loaded on my expression.

Goddammit, I thought. There goes my finger.

I looked at them with disbelief. I shook my head, pleading to the Universe to cut me a break.

But the woman frowned at me.

"I think you have," she said.

I shook my head again. Unable to utter a word.

"I'm going to give you another chance, Mr. Clow. You have my respect now but you can lose it in a second along with one of those ten fingers of yours. Now cooperate with us before we end up having to give the janitor extra work to clean your blood off the table."

Holy fuck. This woman was insane.

"I swear, ma'am, I've never seen that man in my life."

This answer was less than acceptable. "Alright then," she said, motioning to her partner. The man pulled out a hatchet from his belt. He came over to me and pulled my left wrist toward him.

"Which finger?" he said. His eyes turned up. He was asking me, of all people?

I looked to him in utter horror. "I much prefer none of the above?"

The man simply looked to the woman who nodded to him with her eyes, two beady black needle points in her face. "Freestyle," she said.

He sighed. He really wasn't looking forward to this. His face was dangerously close to my hand as he rose the hatchet over his shoulder and swung it down like a farmer decapitates a chicken.

To my horror, the most unexplainable pain pierced my neural networks as the hatchet split through my flesh, my bone and, worst of all, my nerve. The hatchet struck a dip through the metallic table and I screamed in pain when the blood burst from my finger and sprayed the man in the face.

All of a sudden, the man's eyes lit up as if he were surprised blood had come out of my finger at all.

My vision blurred and went red as I shook and looked over to the woman who screeched and jumped to her feet in fright. Her whole face had gone white. "Jesus!" she shouted. "He's a man!"

"What!" I shouted. "Of course I'm a man!" I thought I'd faint until I saw the woman toss the hatchet man a moist towelette to wipe his face before she ran to me and caught my head before it dropped smack dab on the table.

"What were you doing in an enemy pod!" She shouted. "We thought you were a cyborg. We thought you were with the company!"

All I could determine from her shouts was the part about the company. My head rolled back while she tied my finger with rubber bands and applied pressure. "I am from the company!" I said. "They left me on Mars for years and I never heard from them until they sent some robot girl so I could take a shuttle back to Earth!"

The woman pulled back when I said this. Both she and the man turned to me with serious attention. "A robot girl?" echoed the man. "A humanoid?" He and the woman locked eyes. There was something serious about the word. I had no clue what a humanoid even was.

"No," I said, "not a humanoid. A robot!"

"Did she look human?" asked the woman; fear struck her face like a bat.

"Yes, she looked human but--"

"Then she's a humanoid," she said. "A humanoid is a human replica."

"Whatever," I said. "Look at my fucking finger! Grab it before it falls off the table!"

"It's still on your hand," said the man. "I only clipped it."

"You struck a nerve!"

"Yeah, well, the hospital's downstairs." The man seemed more pissed that my blood got in his eye than the fact that I could have lost all movement in my pinkie finger. Imagine how pinkie rings could have become a real difficulty if that had happened!

The woman turned and said to the man, "This is serious. We need to tell the judge and inform the army there's a humanoid on Mars."

Fear washed over the man while he finished wiping his cheek clean of my blood.

She turned to me now. "Do you know the coordinates of where the humanoid is now?"

I didn't think she deserved any help from me. Plus, I thought the girl they were calling a humanoid was far more harmless than these whack-jobs. "I'm not telling you shit 'til you get me out of these handcuffs and send me back to Earth."

The woman looked at me like I was crazy. "Why would you want to go back to Earth?"

I shot her an equally bizarre stare. Are you deranged? "Why would you want to stay on Mars?"

"Because," she said. "Humans are safe here."

It took a minute for that bizarre phrase to sink in.

She continued, seeing that I was confused, "How long were you stuck on Mars?"

"Years," was all I would admit. I didn't want to remind even myself how long I'd been stranded alone.

The woman nodded at me slowly as though she were beginning to understand just what I was missing. Her eyes flickered in a changing thought. "A lot has changed on Earth," she said. "A lot has changed everywhere."

I cringed at her frightful gaze. She looked sad and scared for once. When I looked to the man behind her, he was looking off, thinking in a trance as well. He appeared sad and afraid, too.

The woman left my handcuffs on, still apparently not trusting me. But she passed me a pen, knowing I had much to tell her. "Where's the girl?" she asked.

I looked at her and wrote the coordinates on the back of the photo she hadn't flipped yet. When I was done, she read it and passed it to the man. "Give this to the general," she ordered.

He nodded and began to walk away, when I suddenly saw the front side of the photo, and a terrible fear rose over me. "Wait!" I shouted.

He turned and both of them stared at me. On that photo, was the portrait of a business man, a dazzling but sinister smile. His hair gelled back. Pointed eyebrows.

The woman took notice. She pointed at the photo, alarmed. "Do you know this man?"

I nodded. I knew that man better than anyone. Except my mother.

My chest frozen in mid breath, I said, "That's my father." Both the woman and her partner's eyebrows jumped and their eyes grew wide, with fear, before I finished. "That's my father, Al Zander."

It was an entire minute of forehead rubbing and pacing around the room before one of them came out and took notice of the contradiction. Al Zander was CEO of the company, responsible for pioneering the revolution of human surgeries that led to many addictions and self-propelling desires to integrate technology into one's own flesh, to become a cyborg, more perfect with every new technological update one invested into their own body. Despite this legacy however, Jon Clow was the CEO's son, stranded on Mars to never receive a single surgical upgrade whatsoever?

"So, you are even more of a body tech 'virgin' than any of us humans on Mars are," the woman said, arms crossed, fascinated. Other humans who were against sugically implanting technology into their bodies had at least integrated those primal identity sensing chips into their hands for convenient purchases at the super market and for using to unlock their cars and homes. But those were just coded, pin-sized chips.

They wondered, how did the CEO and his son fall so far apart?

I told them my dad was not the CEO of anything nor was he working for the company at all by the time I'd been sent to Mars on mission and was left stranded with the rest of my crew dead. I'd took to digging graves for eccentric Hollywood actors and sports athletes, as well as other famous or rich individuals who wanted to have their death be laced with the future of mankind in some way. But I was unaware that advances in Martian inhabitance had continued on other parts of Mars and never thought it'd come so rapid.

But the exponential speed of technology advancement led to people's addiction to updating themselves to cyborgs; just the same, while the biotech, AI, nanotech and sustainable energy revolutions all made possible the creation of human replicas, this spurred AI robot's biological replication of the human body and mind, thus leading to the creation of the humanoid, a humanoid which deeply desires to become the real human counterpart it is mimicking. When the two paths of human and robot suddenly overlapped on their pursuit of mimicking the other, cyborgs found themselves more superior to the humanoids because of cyborg's human origin, but also sprung a kind of ethnic cleansing where those humans who chose not to update to the status of cyborg were looked at as the type of backward hillbillies that only brought about irrational problems and created conflict. The cyborg elite neglected to give humanoids any rights and to this day humanoids are enslaved by their creators. As for humans, a massive sort of crusade followed where those who were willing to give in to the technologizing of mankind's biology were saved and those who weren't either were crucified or escaped. Only a few humans successfully feigned death and left to Mars.

"The girl, I mean humanoid, on Mars you saw," said the woman, a serious dread in her eyes, "has come to kill you." That was her conclusion. And her partner nodded. "I don't know if your father had any part in sending her to do so, but someone did. Humanoids are still under the mandate of their creators, cyborgs, and humanoids have always admired and sought to be human themselves. Thus, if she has come to kill you, which I see no reason for a humanoid to leave Earth to come to Mars other than to fulfill the murder mandate of her cyborg counterpart, then she may have also come to kill all of us." This was the first time I saw her close those beady black eyes and open them again. "And for that reason, I confess I am fatally afraid. We are all in danger."

I went white at the thought. However, a part of me was thinking, why don't we just convert to cyborg then? Anything to be on Earth, right? Humans suck anyway.

Of course, I knew by their faces, if I had uttered any such thoughts... they'd do worse with that hatchet; they'd chop off my head.