I looked up at the sun, burning white-yellow in the desert afternoon. I mentally clicked the switch in my mind. The sun turned to blue-green-purple, like a bruise in the sky, blazing in ultraviolet hues. Another switch and the sun was an angry red-orange wound and the sky was dark while the desert sands burned. Another switch and the sun was yellow again in a blue sky and I stood on yellow-orange sands.
I left it there, unwilling to waste another fifteen minutes - of which I was kindly informed by the numbers which flickered in the depths of my consciousness - staring into the sun and trying to avoid the problem. Facts had to be faced.
I turned, looking back at the reddish-grey crag jutting out of the sands, at the canopy of cloth stretched over wooden poles that sheltered the entrance to the silver catacomb he had just emerged from and at the three small bodies which lay on the sand beneath it. I had to face what I had done, the lives I had ended.
One was already dead, his head removed with a clinical sweep of my blade. The other, taller and with a shorter beard, had grabbed the nearest implement - a heavy pick - and swung it at my sword-hand with a wordless cry of rage. The pick caught the hand and pulled the blade from my grip. Unconcerned, I raised my other arm and instinctually fed energy to the gem in my palm. The temperature of the surrounding air dropped as a nucleus of heat gathered inside her skull. She screamed, once, and then fell silent, dropping bonelessly to the sands. I turned to the last one, fleeing towards the rise.
I banished the memories back into the depths of my mind, trying not to remember how right it had felt, the feeling that obeying whatever imperative called me to destroy the intruders in the ship was my highest purpose. I couldn't deny that I had changed physically, to the point that I wasn't even human, but I wouldn't - couldn't - accept that who I was could be stripped away from me like that.
I wasn't a killer. I was a writer, an aspiring author, the kind of person who spends far too long on their computer each day coming up with characters, plots and settings. I wasn't a killer.
Even if my body told otherwise.
Firstly, I was at least seven feet tall, if you don't count the ears. Now, I had never been especially short - I had to duck through doorways on a regular basis - but suddenly gaining that kind of height would be a surprise to anyone. I was still humanoid, two arms, two legs, one head, and so on, but that was about where the similarity ended. For a start, I was made of metal (and a metal-like substance that, according to my database, was apparently some kind of metal-ceramic blend with some reinforcing magic thrown in for good measure, but that's beside the point). I was, to all intents and purposes, a robot, a ghost in the machine
Except it wasn't a machine, not exactly.
For a start, there was the fact that the role of servo-motors to move the limbs was taken by a set of gems (cut into exactingly precise numerologically-significant shapes) which projected a kind of animating magic - magic! - to let me actually do anything. Then there was the fact that my right hand had a similar gem containing a magic sequence for use in fabrication and building, allowing me to break down and recombine the compounds of a material into new forms, while the left bore one which allowed limited control over heat in my vicinity. And finally, there was the not-insignificant point that I, as in my mind, was contained in a diamond the size of a golf ball set within my torso, along with a few precious scraps of data on what exactly I had become, what I was and what I could do, as well as a truly vast amount of corrupted and unusable data that I would have to get rid of at the first possible opportunity.
In short, I was a seven-ish foot tall black-metal-and-white-ceramium colossus with the head of a jackal, ridiculously long and pointy ears sticking up from my head like a pair of antennae and glowing blue eyes. It was not a pleasant transition, even with the benefits of effortless strength and the fact that sleep would be obsolete for me.
What scared me more, though, was the way that I myself had changed. I was aware of every one of my thoughts and emotions. I could silence memories and call them up in crystal clarity with a thought, even if some facets of my old life still escaped me - a relic of having an organic mind, I suppose, with all its faults and frailties.
I felt self-possessed in a way I never had before, and at the same time I more mentally vulnerable than I had ever been, because there, in the back of my mind, I could feel something which i couldn't control, which was of me, and yet was not, the same thing that had made me feel so incredibly, ecstatically, horrifically justified and righteous while I was slaughtering the dwarves. It was quiescent now, its cold grip retracted. I could tell that it wasn't dead though. It was waiting, waiting for another situation that fit the parameters it was set. Then it would stretch forth again and grip my mind with its rightness and certainty, and I would be lost again.
It was like having a time-bomb strapped to your head. I decided to call it the Executive. I'm not entirely sure why I named it. I think it's a human thing, to name things, so as to give us a handle on the world. But I digress.
I was resolved to destroy it, excise it, burn it from my mind as soon as I possibly could. I had managed to reclaim control, reclaim myself, only when the Executive's control relaxed after all of the 'threats' were pacified, four dead and the last already unconscious. I didn't think I could keep it under control if another 'threat' turned up, not unless I could make some headway with getting it out before then.
When I had first 'awoken' from its control, I had been horrified at what I had done. The last of the dwarves, a red-haired male, had only just fallen silent. I collapsed beside him, trying to feel something, anything, from him. The sense-magic in my fingers felt no pulse in the neck beneath his expansive, crimson-stained beard. The horror had been replaced by a cold, horrible certainty. He was dead. I had killed him, thrust a sword through his chest. And it had felt right, oh so fucking right. There was no blood on me or my hands - it had evaporated into the air, courtesy of some kind of self-cleaning function of my new body - but I had been the one to end those lives.
I had gathered the bodies - the three above ground, at least - and placed them under the canopy, almost in a trance. Then I had turned away and walked out into the sand. Not too far, only a hundred yards or so. That was as far as I got before the emotions inside of me overwhelmed me and I exploded.
I roared to the sky, the sound echoing out into nothing over the featureless plane of the desert. The sun's heat gathered and seared the sands around me, melting them to glass in some places and freezing them till they cracked in others. I screamed and screamed and screamed, and I had no throat which could turn hoarse. I fell to my knees and beat at the sands, but there was no pain. I could feel the impact, but there was nothing to distract me from the cold, horrific certainty of what i had done. Eventually, I fell silent and climbed to my feet and stared at the sun, wildly hoping that perhaps that could blind me, that I could feel something as punishment for what I had done.
There was no difference. There was nothing. I was metal and gemstone and glass. There were no tears.
Eventually, when I had got to the point that I just felt empty, I had found that mental 'switch' which changed my vision - distantly, some part of me noted that it was probably filters for different wavelengths of light, ultraviolet, infrared and so on - and I had just… stared. Stared up at the sun as it changed from a green-blue bruise to an angry red wound to the yellow-white that I had always known.
Now, though, there was still the last of the dwarves to deal with. I wouldn't kill him, but I couldn't really let him just wander around either. For one, I like living and it's possible that he would find some way to off me in revenge for his dead companions. For another, as far as I could see around, there was desert, desert and some more desert, with the occasional crag or mesa breaking the sandy monotony. If he was free, there was a reasonable chance that he might steal one or more of the ponies that were sheltered in the shadow of the rocky outcropping and try and make it back to wherever he came from. And as much as I would be happy for him, I doubted that it would end so well for me.
All of which led to the conclusion that probably the best I could do was to find a way to confine him in a place where he wouldn't cook at midday or freeze at night, a problem handily solved by the fact that I had access to an underground catacomb.
Reaching the canopy - and carefully not thinking about the three three corpses laid out there - I lowered myself down the hole that the dwarves had made. It was close, but I could fit.
It was dark, and to human eyes it would likely have been near-impenetrable, but to me the lines of the passageway were as clear as day, as was the crumpled body of the first dwarf I had killed, his blood sluggishly spilling out onto the silvery-grey floor. Another death on my conscience. Another body to bury.
Driving those thoughts away, I strode down the passage to the door to what some vestige of the uncorrupted databanks in my head told me was the Automaton Command and Control Centre, and more importantly where the last dwarf had been passed out, the last I had seen of him.
The door mechanism was stuck, the meagre amount of energy in the system insufficient to get it fully functional, not after waking me up, and so I was forced to simply pull it open. Bracing one hand against the frame and the other on the edge of the door itself, I pushed apart. There was a faint hum as my animator-cores increased the energy that they fed to my arms, and then a squeal of metal on metal as the door slid sharply back.
I could make out the prostrate form of the fifth dwarf - and they were dwarves, right out of a fantasy novel and complete with the most impressive beards I'd ever seen - lying next to one of the five control pedestals that supported the interface. They hummed softly and glowed with blue light, streams of turquoise energy washing up and down their sides. I would have to come back later and see what remained of the cogitator's memory.
Ignoring that for the time being, though, I leant down and scooped up the unconscious dwarf. The weight was felt, but it was more like I was picking up a half-full shopping bag than an entire person; albeit a four-and-a-half foot person. Holding him in my arms bridal-style, I carried him out of the room and down the corridor, towards where my internal map suggested that there would be a storage room.
When I got there, the door was just as inoperable as the one to the control centre. Thankfully, it too was a little ajar and, after rearranging the dwarf so that I was holding him over one shoulder in a manner similar to the fireman's carry that my PE teacher had demonstrated, once upon a time, I was able to pry it open with only one hand.
The site that greeted me was much as I had expected: a empty room, the supplies that would once have filled it long since removed, either by robbers - which I doubted, given how intact the rest of the complex was - or by the original occupants, when they left. Perfect for what I wanted.
And just in time, too, as just as I was removing the dwarf from my shoulder, a low groan sounded beside my ear. He was waking up.
I set him on the ground and stepped back, placing myself between him and the door. As he brought a hand up to his head, still groaning and muttering in a language that I didn't understand, but which sounded vaguely Swedish from the accent and stresses, I channelled a mote of energy into a small glass globe set into the wall. It ignited with a blueish light, illuminating the room.
He opened his eyes and looked at me, then scrambled to his feet and jumped back.
Maybe I should have left the light off.
