My first armor was steel. The robotic arms and legs that replaced my damaged biological ones were controlled by servos, pistons, hydraulics, and other common mechanisms. It was crude, clunky, heavy, and cumbersome, but it worked.

After I established myself a bit and my robotics business had started to grow, I took the opportunity to upgrade myself and my armor. The steel was replaced by titanium, expensive yes, but much more durable and a lot lighter. Thanks to the much reduced weight I was able to replace a lot of the mechanical equipment with digital versions. This also reduced the overall weight, and was less bulky, so the armor and limbs were more streamlined and easier to maneuver.

Then my robotics industry expanded exponentially as I was able to move it into different sectors. Power production, security and defense, upgrades and innovations, and my newest brain-child, advanced prosthetics; in both shape and function they would look and act more like natural limbs than anything previously offered. With the nano-processors and regenerative culmination power sources I developed and using near cellular level surgery procedures I helped to establish, it was now possible to make a prosthetic limb that looked and felt natural, and was powered and controlled by the bodies’ own circulatory and nervous system. I replaced my own armored robotic limbs with these advanced prosthetics and then modified them to produce force energy barriers. So, for a while my armor wasn’t armor at all, but a series of energy “shields” covering my entire body that I dubbed the barrier array. The full freedom of movement and almost no additional weight were wonderful and worked well for a while, although there were a couple of down-sides. The energy requirements for the barrier array far exceeded what the human body could produce, so I had to wear a supplementary regenerating power pack which I cleverly disguised as a vest. The other problem was that it wasn’t as durable as physical armor and a sustained or excessively strong attack could temporarily overload it, at which point I would have to jump out of battle and let them reestablish. Yeah, it only took seconds, but in battle seconds can matter. Then the breach happened, and it was no longer feasible. These new enemies from an alternate reality was just too powerful.

So, my new armor took the components of my last two; the light-weight, streamlined titanium armor with the energy projecting barrier array incorporated into it. Mobility and weight increased, and since I now had the advanced prosthetics, I now had to include arm and leg armor, but my resilience to damage nearly doubled. However, to defeat your enemy you must know your enemy. I started collecting armor from the invaders and the destroyed husks of their robot soldiers. Their technological advances had taken a different route than ours, and what I found was unlike anything I had ever seen. They had filament sized fibers woven and stacked on top of each other, creating armor that was stronger than and more resilient than titanium and only a third of the weight. Even more impressive, the fibers were self-healing. If you did damage the armor, a specific voltage of electrical current passed through the fibers would cause them to weave back together. Then there was the technology built into the robots. The micro-servos they used required less power and gave nearly double the output of even what I had accomplished. (No wonder the things hit so hard).

It took a while, but I was able to reverse engineer and then replicate their technology. So, my final armor was nano-weave, self-repairing fiber overlaid with my own barrier array technology, and using free-friction, quantianized micro-servo that doubled my strength and speed. In a word, I was invulnerable.

Things were good for a while. No matter whom or what I was fighting, I could take the damage and stand against it. Battle became a choice rather than a struggle. A decision as to whether to stand there and slug it out with them or get them to attack me so that another hero could take them down.

Then there was darkness. A dark dome enshrouded the city and the nearby chain of islands one night. We had no way out. We tried to fly over it, drill under it, bash or blast our way through it; but nothing worked. It formed a solid sphere around us, no matter what we hit it with we couldn’t damage it, and anyone that touched it simply vanished. Things were bad, and they only got worse; the dome was flattening. Slowly, inexorably, the darkened disc that had become our sky was falling.

Every hero, every villain, and everyone in between dropped their rivalries; we had a common enemy. The greatest minds in the city and on the islands came together to study the darkness. It had to have a weakness, some way to dispel or destroy it, to establish some hole or crack that would allow people to escape. Scientists, Magi, and Engineers working around the clock, looking for some chance, some shred of hope, and the sky got closer.

The rate it was falling was so consistent that we knew to the day and the hour when it would hit; a true deadline. We tried everything. Plan after plan was proposed and tried; we stopped caring about the probabilities, it didn’t matter how much of a long shot it was, if it worked. But the final sunset, as we had taken to calling it, was still coming.

In the final week it was decided, we would not surrender, we would not go quietly into the night! On the final day we gather. All of us; hero, villain, vigilante, and rogue; standing side-by-side, shoulder to shoulder, focusing all our power and anger into the sky that had betrayed us. No one backed down, no one turned away, and at the end we exploded in a roar of ultimate defiance!

Then, there was darkness, the world and reality disconnected. Time and space merged, melted, and lost all meaning.Whether I floated in that darkness for moments or years, I couldn’t have told you. Then, I landed. Cold, drained beyond belief, my head swam and my stomach lurched. I removed my helmet, retched into the brilliantly green grass, and staggered over to a nearby tree. Something seemed wrong about this, but my mind was a whirlwind and focus was impossible. I crumpled under the tree, place my back against it, and let the peaceful darkness of unconsciousness take me.

When I woke up the sky was darkening, but my mind was clear. In a rush, it came to me what was wrong with the trees and grass; they shouldn’t be there. Before the darkness hit I had been standing on the marble steps in front of City Hall, in the middle of a metropolis. Now, I was standing in a valley cloaked in bright green grass, and dotted with tall, full, dark wooded trees. Either the valley or I was out of place. I put my helmet back on, the electric blue display screen snapping back into focus as it sealed. Casually I looked at the 57% glowing from the power indicator. Lower than I expected it to be, but nothing critical, the power supply was extremely efficient and the suit was designed to power systems only when they were needed. In a pinch I could even regenerate the power cell by opening the solar absorption panels, but that was extremely slow.

I looked around once more, “Okay, let’s do this by the numbers. S.P.E.C.S connect to the GPS network. Let’s find out where we are.” A blue wire-frame globe flared to life in my display, a visual pulse indicating that it was trying to identify my position. After a few seconds the globe turned red, and a small, slightly apologetic voice in my ear, “Sorry, I’m not getting any responses.” “Re-tune the antenna to pick up local broadcasts. Maybe we can find out where we are that way”.

The globe turned into an antenna, and the broadcast waves spun for a few seconds, until it to turned red. S.P.E.C.S spoke again into my ear, “I don’t understand this boss. I’m getting nothing. No signals at all. Television, radio, radar; nothing on any frequency at all”. Okay, maybe I landed in a dead zone. I happens right. Certain spots on the planet where electromagnetic signals just can’t penetrate. “Switch to visual scans, maximum range. Deploy the wings. Let’s get some altitude and see if we can find something”. Darkness was coming on quick. I wouldn’t have long. The octagonal plates slid from the back panels and arranged themselves, magnetically locking into place as they reach their prearranged position.

My forearms and lower legs glowed as the gravity suppressors came on line. I launched into the air, in seconds I was cruising at 300ft above the ground. I switched to  hover and slowly panned around. My visor’s rangefinder zoomed out as far as it could, blue sketch lines trying to identify anything unnatural. A single, sharp corner stood out on the horizon. “Mark that target”. We’ll head out at first light and see what’s there”.