Writing Snippet #3
A YOUNG, STUNTED CLONE MURDERS AN ADULT HUMAN BEING AND CRIES HERSELF TO SLEEP.
They used to call these things by fanciful names - my model in particular used to be called a 'Nuclear Cavalier' at some point, but it is hard to imagine such dignity being extended to it now:
It looks fat and sluggish in its ablative plate.
The reactor that used to be its namesake has been replaced by far more efficient mechanisms over time. Cast, stamped, and filed-down like an action figure — she's got the shape of a hero, but she's kitsch if you look close.
We're not unalike. I've got a batch-number, too.
Cloned wrong and bad from public stock - dark hair, dark eyes.
I could be anyone. I am anyone.
When batch cloning first came into vogue, the Industrialist dreamed of subhuman labor that unpopular tasks could be offloaded upon - no more did those concepts have to be cleverly constructed through social mechanisms. But the Economist had a grander vision - subhuman labor you could tax.
Realistically, I'm a gun.
Wealthy people aim me at eachother, and I only cost a third of a paycheck.
I climb into the suit.
I load the utility hatchet into my forearm.
They call it a hatchet, but it's more of a broad, flat knife.
It ends in a crowbar head, in the event that I need to pry my way in.
I contemplate the handgun or a rifle.
The handgun has a higher caliber; it accompanies me.
—
The room is marble, or granite, I'm not sure, it's a glossy rock with lots of veins, or at least it's trying to be. The way it cracks under my feet makes me think it's fake.
I've been expected, though:
I'm not the most subtle creature.
Her machine is very human. She is very human.
I can tell by its sleek, angular contours, and how quiet she shoots.
I'm in over my head. The glow of her ocular sensor sweeps a haughty glare over me as I kite myself backwards, into the narrow corridors of the civic center. In the halls there's no real room for error: my circular error probable doesn't matter.
When she clears the door way, I pop three rounds down range, and watch her mechanized thigh explode, but not before she quietly empties a full magazine into me.
She pounces like a cat and eclipses my entire worldview as she does.
The pneumatic hiss of her dampeners distributing her crushing weight over me is terrifying. She pins my gun-hand, and I hear the servos whine in protest as she breaks my fingers to take the pistol from them.
She'll finish me with my own gun, if I let her.
She looks so expensive. She looks like jewelry.
I try to cover my face with my free hand to protect it, when I lock eyes with my salvation.
When I invert the mag-lock on the utility hatchet, it shoots forward with an authoritative clap. The pointed end busts across her ocular sensors, and I watch the smooth glass shatter like a jewelry case before i begin looting in earnest, pulling necklaces of cabling out of her face.
The haptic feedback in my destroyed hand feels good and vengeful as I push her face away from mine.
I split her at the shoulder with the hatchet.
And then down the middle, where the blood comes out.
Her pilot is as beautiful as her machine - a human being, though she looks more like a clam, right now - meat nestled in a shell.
I feel a cold sort of intrusion as I look at her nude breasts - hacked diagonally out from her clothing and underscored by brackets of fat and rib.
A twinge of envy - my body will never grow like that. This is as good as I get.
When I get to the hangar bay, they deduct my damages.
They deduct the three rounds I'd fired, too, and I feel grateful I'd finished in a melee.
I want to hate that other pilot for having things I don't, but as I look at the cloned flesh ejecting my plates and putting new ones in, I wonder just how miserable a life that human being must have had to be doing the same work as me.
The halogen bulb in my sleeping compartment clicks as I turn it off, and begin to dream.
I dream of a world where this isn't a way to eat, and we look the same, and there's no map or logo or number that separates us.
And I cry.