A Lenda do Herói Cibernético

The boy Yuki ran happily down the street, a whole heap of scrap metal rattling behind him. To everyone he met, he cried, "I have a father now! I have a father now!"

Most of the people in Scrapheap Town watched with amused smiles, though it should be noted that the amusement was mockery. Yuki's biological father had been killed years ago when a lithium bacterium invaded his bio-brain, leaving behind a woman and seven children.

To feed those seven children, the woman had no choice but to sell off her spine, cerebellum, and pons in exchange for an engineering machine. Scrapheap Town was called Scrapheap Town precisely because a garbage dump from the Age of the Sublimation had been unearthed here, and the whole town survived by living off its resources. Certain alloys and other materials from that same age had to be transported into the cities, and the demand for hauling them was enormous.

Once the woman had become an engineering machine, she no longer had the means to care for her children. Of the seven, four gradually fell ill and died; one was taken by the tax collector as a genetic levy to preserve the diversity of the human gene pool. The eldest son left for the city at an early age to make his own way, leaving only the youngest boy behind. He had been bullied since childhood.

Most of the residents had little interest in Yuki's "new father." Only a few children, with rough and careless hands, shoved Yuki hard. His body fell to the ground with a thunderous clang—that was a hallmark of cheap prosthetics.

"Ha