[ WP ] You have a bad bicycle crash and when you look at you injured knee you see robotics under the flesh .

Darkness. 
 
 Darkness. 
 
 Darkn- I realise my eyes are closed. 
 
 I open them and see the night sky, murky clouds half covering a full moon. I'm lying down, looking at the night sky. Did I fall asleep on another romantic moonlit date in the park? Implausible - I shift my head and find I'm in the middle of a road. That, and I've never been on a romantic moonlit date in the park. 
 
 I move my head to look down my body. My bike is lying in the street a few metres away, and I'm certain the wheels were circular last time I saw them. Fairly certain. The rest of my body slowly fades into my consciousness, bringing with it an immense amount of pain. I test myself, one limb at a time. 
 
 Left arm - check. 
 
 Right arm - Ow. Check. 
 
 Left leg - toes wiggle, knee bends, check. 
 
 Right le- uh oh. 
 
 With more effort than I can recall putting into any recent endeavour of my adult life, I sit up. Oceans dry to puddles and mountains grind to dust in the time it takes me to fold my body ninety degrees. My bike looks in even worse shape from up here, and my jeans do n't look much better. I brush off the accumulated mountain dust and painfully lean forward to get a closer look at my knee. The pain is turning to agony there with excruciating velocity. 
 
 There's a huge hole around the knee, revealing the pasty looking leg beneath. I flex my leg a fraction - a mistake, I immediately realise - to get a better view of what's causing my severe discomfort. Once my teeth have stopped grinding, my head's gotten off the grim carousel of dizziness and I dare to unclench my eyelids, I peek at the wound. 
 
 There's a lot of blood, and it's starting to seep through the fabric of my jeans. What little is left of the skin on my knee is hanging off in flaps. It reminded me of the gory special effects in The Walking Dead, but something told me I would n't be walking for a while, and I did n't want to consider the dead part yet. 
 
 There's a fluttering of wings nearby and a sudden glare from across the street illuminates the scene around me. I blink a few times, and my eyes adjust. An outdoor light affixed to a building, evidently triggered by movement. It alerts me to the amount of blood in between myself and my bike, as well as the patches of it across my clothing. I look like I lost a fight with a ketchup salesman. I laugh a bit at the thought of it. 
 
 I could definitely take a ketchup salesman. 
 
 I turn my attention back to my knee. In this new light it looks even worse - there's a lot of grit in the blood, and it looks very deep. In fact, I think I can see right down to the bone. 
 
 Huh. 
 
 Years of shit halloween costumes, adverts on the benefits of calcium and that one scene in Hamlet had conditioned me to think that skeletons and the bones they consisted of were white. Milky, pearly white. 
 
 However, in the deep crater of the wound on my leg, beneath welling of blood, there was definitely a metallic tint to the base. 
 
 Geez, I'm getting delirious now too. I remember the bottle of water in my bag - I was on the way back from playing squash with Paul, that's where I was. My bag still seems to be attached to me, and was probably why I was uncomfortable lying on my back. 
 
 After much deliberation, struggle and more than an excusable amount of swearing, I get the back off my back and remove the water bottle. I wash my hands off first, then get to the sorry mess that is my knee. Lacking any kind of medical knowledge beyond `` dirt + wound = bad'', I decide to just pour the water over my knee and see what happens. 
 
 What happens is the most painful experience of my whole damnable existence. 
 
 When the strings of profanity have dried up and the scholars have finished jotting down the seventeen new forms of curse word I just invented on the fly, I inspect the damage. 
 
 The water's cleared away a lot of the blood, revealing the bone underneath. 
 
 And it's definitely made of metal. 
 
 What's more, what I thought was grit on the flaps of skin in the darkness of the street is now revealed to hundreds of tiny wires, each a few millimetres in length but ending in what looks like copper where it seems they've been ripped. Inside the wound, I can see the corresponding sections of wire they were ripped from. 
 
 I take a big long drink of water and look again. Much to my dissatisfaction, nothing has changed. As I stare in quiet wonder at my mess of a knee, some of the wires spark and the wound starts to let off a little smoke. 
 
 It was definitely squash, was n't it? Not LSD? Mushrooms, maybe? No, could n't have been, LSD's so expensive nowadays, and shrooms give me flatulence. 
 
 Whatever drugs it may be, they kick in hard, and I resolve to get right to the bottom of the issue of whether or not I am, in fact, The Terminator, albeit with less machoism and more flab. I grab ones of the little strips of loose skin - ow - and pull, pull as hard as I can - more ow than one can possibly express in a two letter word. 
 
 With a sensation I can only adequately compare to detaching two giant lengths of velcro, the skin of my leg comes off in one long tear. In stark contrast to the sound of velcro ripping, however, the noise is more like a thousand tiny metallic twangs as the little wires apparently holding my skin on stretch and snap. Beneath this thin layer of wires is a bloody metal plate, from knee to ankle. 
 
 This is certainly not how I saw my evening panning out. 
 
 A low rumble penetrates the surrealism of the moment, and I look round to see a pair of headlights coming towards me. 
 
 I start to yell for help, then remember the previous moments where I'd just tore off a chunk of my own flesh to reveal that I have the inner workings of an Isaac Asimov novel and reconsider. 
 
 As the headlights approach, with me directly in their path, the pain in my leg starts to subside. I'm briefly relieved at this fortunate turn of events, until the pain is redirected to my cranium, a sheer white hot burst of pain. It throws me onto my back, looking once again at the night sky. 
 
 The sky starts to fade to black, the stars towards the edge of my vision fading to nothing, then the stars towards the middle, until nothing is left but the bright moon, now unobscured by cloud. Then the moon also leaves me, and darkness is back. 
 
 Then, in a font akin to the typical bios of an 80's hacker movie, words appear, one letter at a time. 
 
 EXPERIMENTAL.INFILTRATION.MODULE # 279: FAILURE. 
 
 COLLECTION IMMINENT. 
 
 INITIATE END SEQUENCE. 
 
 I hear the rumble cease, and a car door slam. Footsteps, closer and closer. 
 
 He better not steal my bike, I think. 
 
 Then nothing.
