The lights were on.<br/><br/>He took a deep breath of crisp afternoon air and gently allowed his eyes to flutter closed. He took in the sounds. The soft breeze from the west bringing with it a warmth the likes of which heated the very soul of his being. He was standing at the far East entrance to the park, leaving it for the day. His right sleeve dangling loosely while the other was rolled up on his arm, a simple old watch adorning his wrist. He'd spent the past few hours goofing around at the pond, messing with the ducks there and skipping small rocks he'd found around the water to pass the time. Letting the world pass by while he took life easy.<br/><br/>But after so much time had passed and the alarm ticked over on his watch, he remembered he needed to head to his mechanic for a quick tune up. It wasn't anything big in his mind. Losing the arm.<br/><br/>It had happened when he was little. A tree had fallen over and crushed the limb. Didn't even get to feel the pain of it was how sudden things had happened. He just blacked out and when he woke up he was in the hospital, options being explained to his pops about what could be done for his future. It didn't bother him that his arm was gone today, but back then he'd been a real mess. Started screaming. Freaked out. It seemed. So far away now six years later. But he supposed that was what happened when you had something like that occur at sixteen.<br/><br/>But through science, he was better now. He felt at the metal disk that composed his shoulder, twisting a small switch on the underside of the plating and then pushing back until heard a clicking sound. And then his arm flashed to life.<br/><br/>Atoms slowed in the air, photons gathering along them and then becoming denser, shaping themselves into a limb. Five fingers, elbow. All in a neon blue glow. Hard light projection. A somewhat cheaper alternative to the normal cybernetics. It functioned for all that he needed it to, and he didn't ever really need to get it examined for anything besides calibrating the "nerves" that ran to the generator. Still, that didn't exactly come for free and doing it by oneself without the proper knowledge could be dangerous.<br/><br/>Not to mention it was frowned upon due to hard light limbs being a very easy thing to weaponize. He hadn't done it himself, but there we're stories about folks who had altered their own to produce bladed weapons and even one who had managed to create some sort of luminescent firearm. Truly, the things science had given them.<br/><br/>But as he walked down the street to the clinic, he knew that without such advances he may well have not gotten to the hospital at all. After all, was a hard light field that had stopped him from bleeding out on the way there.