Jamie McEwen, a personal trainer taking place in a clinical trial

I was sitting in the waiting room, probably the most nervous I'd been in my entire life. This meeting would shape my very existence from this moment onwards. I had a chance to get a mechanical body. I had no hope of ever affording a mech, nobody did. Ok, the uber rich could afford them, but nobody like me. The price tag on a mech body was measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I was never going to afford one on my personal trainer's salary.

I did have an opportunity here and now though. I'd signed up to a research project where ten lucky people would be given mech bodies to research how the human mind would deal with changes into mech bodies that were quite different to their own. The catch? I wouldn't have a say in what I looked like afterwards, but I was ok with that as long as it meant getting a mech body.

The door to the office opened and out stepped two people who couldn't have been more different if they tried. The first dominated my attention, he was tall, towering over my hundred and fifty-two centimetres, so tall that he had to duck to get through the door. He was built too. He looked like someone had taken Arnold Schwarzenegger's form and idealised it. In fact, this is exactly what had happened. Blond hair, piercing blue eyes, perfect white teeth. This was a man who could only be a mech, this was Brian Bautista, the man who had invented mechs, a man who had been amongst the first humans to be uploaded into a mech. His pinkie had cost more to make than my entire net worth, and his body was just a drop in the ocean of his wealth.

The man beside him was short, fat and balding. His wispy brown hair combed over to try and look respectable. Despite this, he was well dressed and had a confident stride which, considering the intimidating perfection of the man beside him, I found rather impressive. Whilst the fat man looked to be about forty years older than Brian Bautista, I knew that Bautista had to have been the older by at least ten years.

As Bautista turned and walked for the door with long, powerful strides, the fat man walked straight for me. "Jamie McEwen?"

I nodded as I stood and extended my hand. He took it and shook firmly, introducing himself as Michael Stevenson before leading me into the office. "Mr Bautista is funding ths project, he was just finalising the designs for the bodies. Some of them are incredibly attractive. Of course, anyone who gets put in one can expect an indefinite lifespan so if you're unhappy with what you get, you can rest assured that it's likely you'll eventually amass the wealth to get a new body that looks however you want it to."

"I... I can?" I stammered. I was a little lost with what was going on. "What do you mean that I can rest assured? Are you saying that I'm already in?

"You are a leading candidate. Your responses to the online psychological profile were exactly what we are looking for, you seem sexually dominant, yes?" "Sexually dominant? I dream of dominating women, of having them obey me. Yes." I hadn't actually gotten to though. I was young and relatively unattractive, and I wasn't exactly the most endowed man either. Getting sex at all was enough of a challenge for me. Dare I hope that they would be putting me in a large, well built ultra-masculine body?

They slid some paperwork over for me to sign, I didn't even bother to read it. Once it was signed I was lead into a lab and a technician started putting electrode on my head, explaining that I would be transferred that very day. I was given a few minutes to make a few calls to explain where I had gone, then the technician hit the switch and my birth body crumpled to the floor, braindead.