Effectively Pulling Off A Tomato In The Mirror

Basic Idea: A man with numerous cybernetic enhancements is actually a machine wearing a man's skin. More or less.

The premise of the story is that this cyborg, Malcolm Harkness, learns of a project that creates and rents out perfect war machines. These "death engines" are human constructs, bodies grown in a lab and outfitted with numerous enhancements and an artificially constructed consciousness.

He spends most of the story systematically eliminating them in either one on one combat using his own extensive enhancements or through more complicated assassination attempts. He extracts data from each one he kills until he finds the group responsible for the project and catches up with him. When they finally meet, he reveals to him that he is also one of these constructs.

I want to know if this is a good idea or if it will come off as cliche and cheesy.

edited 28th Dec '10 5:10:57 PM by KSPAM

It's definitely something I'd like to read. Even extremely clichéd or cheesy stories can be pulled off if the writer has the skill. How about making him snarky and Genre Savvy?

That actually doesn't sound like a half-bad idea.

You know, I had an idea like this once. There would be a robot double, that was trying to fuck up her life, only it turned out she was ALSO a robot clone thing, and of course, she gets mistaken for the evil one while the evil one is taken to be the good one.

Yeah...

Wow, sorry, random tangent. I like it. Just make sure the series makes it a possibility. I have read far too many series that start off with one random plot line, and bring something similar out of nowhere. Like, a story about barcodes being grafted onto skin ended up involving psychic powers and clones. No. Just... No.

edited 28th Dec '10 6:17:26 PM by MrAHR

This story is set 20 Minutes into the Future where the transhumanism debate was settled and cybernetic enhancements are varied and commonplace. The main character is a special construct equipped with numerous enhancements (more than is usually safe for humans) and a nanomachine breeder, which isn't widely available to the public. Most of this nonstandard equipment is easily dismissed by thorough self-modification, so nobody bothers to question it that much.

I'm not hearing anything that makes me think it wouldn't work.

When you say he defeats the others using his own enhancements, I don't think it would come off as a giant surprise that he's a full-blown android. You'd have to throw some curveballs at the audience, like have him bleeding after a fight.

He still bleeds because his body is partially human. He's basically a mechanical nervous system in a cybernetically enhanced body. His consciousness is artificial but the body is human.

He presumably knows that he's enhanced. The tricky part is making him convincingly unaware of how much of him the "enhancements" make up.

When he escaped his creators, he paid for a memory rewrite and plastic surgery. Unfortunately, his rewrite was interrupted and he had to flee before they could finish. He realizes he is enhanced, but his memory is fried, leaving him to think he had it done to himself willingly.

It's a little Blade Runner but it's sounds good. As said it all boils down to your skills as a writer. Go For It.

edited 29th Dec '10 9:46:26 AM by joeyjojo

^^ That works then, as an idea. The rest of it is going to all be in how well it's written.

Go for it.