requiem

Hello lovely bloggers 🙂

I am so pleased to finally be able to say that I finished my short story to submit to the epic Dagda Publishing. They have a new anthology, much like the wonderful Tuned To A Dead Channel, coming out with the theme of technology gone mad and I found an idea flowing straight out of me. Hopefully it will be good enough to make the book; I truly enjoyed writing it. This is an excerpt from the beginning. I hope you enjoy 🙂

Requiem

They say pride cometh before a fall. They weren’t wrong, Ana grimaced.

Why was she thinking of scripture now? She had a lot better things to do than think of mythology. She wobbled slightly on the support beam and had to refocus to centre herself. She had a job to do and she couldn’t afford to screw it up. This hinged on her actions.

She waited and she watched, checking her dual pistols as she went. They’d seen better days and were now the older model of the MK34’s but Ana loved them. They’d never let her down. Her longsword, made of hypersilver, shimmered at her back. Hypersilver was incredibly hard to get hold of on the Earthen black market but Ana had her ways; not to mention so many Eupounds it made them drool with delight.

She sighed. Where was the target? She knew she was no saint when it came to punctuality but tardiness in a Bot was beyond a joke. They were supposed to be the be all and end all of Humanity weren’t they? She sighed again as her patience wore even thinner.

Eventually there was movement below her and the target came into sight. She had chosen a deserted corridor of the station as she needed no questions. Yes her actions were sanctified, but not to the uninformed.

She dropped silently behind him and waited for the usual revulsion to surface. How could someone, anyone, willingly submit themselves to the Cleansing? They were taken up to the Bot home and never seen again. Soon the remnants of their previous lives would appear among the stagnant buildings left on the surface and each time Ana felt sick. She shook herself. This was no time to think of that. She drew her pistols and pointed them at his back.

“Nice to see you again Chancellor.” She watched as he slowly turned round and had to smile at the dispassionate shine on his robotic face. He too had once been human and submitted to the Cleansing. Not one shred of humanity seemed to be left.

“Be gone, pest” he replied in his metallic voice. It would have shredded the hearing of normal humans. Luckily Ana wasn’t normal.

“Now Chancellor, you know that’s not going to happen,” Ana began, resting one pistol on her shoulder. “The Order has sent me to collect payment and that’s what they’ll get.”

“You will get no currency from me,” he replied, and his monotone mechanical voice grated on her already stretched nerves.

“Ah Chancellor, the time has passed that you could buy us off. Payment is now in what’s left of your life.” She could tell the Chancellor wasn’t impressed with her threat. She wasn’t sure Bots were even left with any sort of emotion. Next time she would ask.

Slowly she cocked her pistols and allowed the threat of them to hang between them. He seemed as unimpressed as he had always been and moved to charge her. Ana quickly rolled backwards, shooting as she went, allowing her momentum to increase the lethality of the lasers. Unfortunately they merely bounced off the shining metal that passed as his skin. Evidently the Chancellor could afford a better Cleansing than most. She sighed as she landed back on her feet and drew her sword. At this point she didn’t even bother to move but allowed the Chancellors momentum to carry him forward. She watched in only minor satisfaction as what was his neck connected firmly with her blade, followed by the thud of his head unit hitting the cold floor. No true emotion surfaced at the act, but then it never did.

She sighed as she turned to survey her work. The Chancellor lay in two neat pieces with not a single drop of blood flowing. She hadn’t expected any really. Everything organic was discarded in the Cleansing. Still, she moved to crush the head. If left to it another Bot could come along and reassemble the pieces making the Chancellor whole once again.

It was a strange sort of immortality that Ana loathed. For some reason, the central personality core was stored in the head unit, so the best way to ultimately kill them was to crush the head.

Job done, she turned to leave. The constant death and conflict seemed to be weighing on her more of late. She sighed and made her way back to her entry point. She was used to jump ships, transportation, hell – even an old fashioned aeroplane drop off. This time was different.

This time she had been bundled into a cargo box with one air hole and had ended up on this Bot Hell. She was then told that after she was successful; she almost liked her superiors confidence; then she would have to jump from the platform, blessedly still in Earth’s atmosphere, with only a parachute as support. Suffice to say she wasn’t optimistic about her chances of surviving. Then again, she never was…