"She's exquisite," said the Commandant of the Marine Corps as the turntable spun, displaying Test Subject-01 from all angles.

The golden light of the hall glimmered off her polished, pink carapace and six segmented legs. The military brass sipped their champagne, some staggering tipsily onto the rotating display to inspect her closer. Their sweaty fingers left smudges wherever they touched.

The torso of the man welded inside the prosthetic body shuddered with every touch of skin against his shell. The human central nervous system wasn't built for this - it lacked the sensory bandwidth required to monitor and control so many limbs at once and so the engineers, in rebuilding him, had chemically tweaked his spinal cord to allow the nerves to carry the excess of sensory data. The sensation of multiple hands caressing every inch of him was almost more than he could handle.

"She's the star of the show," the ExoDyne salesman declared. "A perfect predator, four hundred million years in the making - updated for the 21st century. She can traverse any terrain a warzone throws at her, even scale vertical surfaces to reach the perfect sniper’s nest. Once prototyping is complete-" He slapped the wide, flat abdomen with a hollow thunk. "-she’ll be able to mount a 60mm mortar, turning her into a high-speed artillery platform. Shock absorbers in the chest help mitigate recoil."

"Shock absorbers?" echoed the Commandant dubiously, eyeing the rubbery tits with a raised brow.

The company salesman grinned sleazily. "Beautiful and practical. Your marines will love 'em."

Test Subject-01 barely heard the exchange. Through the overload of sensory noise and tactile pleasure, he sensed a change in the room. Something was wrong, though he couldn't say what. Then, from the kitchens, a scream. The hubbub of chatter faltered. One of the ExoSuits burst into the room, moving on all fours like a hunting wolf, a bloody kitchen knife in one hand. It lept, the precision of the movements and the inertia of its heavy, steel body cleaving the knife cleanly through the neck of the head of the Air Force. The aforementioned head sailed past the chandelier. The doglike Subject-11 landed with its knife through another man's chest, not even slowing down.

For the first time since they'd put him in this body, Subject-01 didn't feel a stranger in it. Combat training and programming merged in the heat of the moment. As the mad dog pounced, one of 01's front legs struck it from the air with a clang. Three of his legs formed a stable tripod, while the remaining two lifted the panicking Commandant onto his back. 01 struck another blow against 11 and then, in the moment that bought him, scuttled. His titanium limbs crunched through the dry plaster wall until he hung from the roof like a vast arachnid.

"Hell of a tech demo," the Commandant said numbly, his arms clung tightly around his waist, looking down at the carnage unfolded beneath them. Military heads and ExoDyne representatives ran in terror, slipping over puddles of blood. "Hell of a tech demo..."