He wasn't under arrest. He didn't have the luxury of having a trial done by jury. His lawyer advised him this was for the best. That people were sacred of him. People would look down upon him and if he was judged by his peers, he would surly lose.
Murphy did not see it that way. That black and white. He knew most people were good at heart. Probably someone on that jury, would understand his plight. Would look past the metal and chrome and see him. If one person did that, then he had a good chance for a mistrial.
Judge Snyder was a tall, ugly old man. Set in his ways, the bastard was constantly under investigation for racism and sexism. There was never enough evidence to support these claims. Judges were supposed to be picked at random. Murphy suspected somebody had handpicked Snyder.
He took less than an hour to decide on his fate.
"I've come to the conclusion," Snyder had refused to look at Murphy during the whole proceedings. "That Alex Murphy was killed in the line of duty five years ago. This…machine has helped the police force greatly during these past few years, but the many consequences of his actions have over shadowed that."
It started to rain. From the window, Murphy watched as Robin left the library and ran down the street. A few moments later, the sky gave a deafening CRACK, and the heavens opened up and the ocean fell in.
The rain reflected his mood. Dark, grey and a little more than pissed. He felt useless.
Murphy clunked his head against the window glass, his mood darkening along with the sky. There were so many gaps in his memory. He tried again and again to resurface the past. Why is it, he could remember the outcome of his trial, but not the actual proceedings? Why could he remember the judge's name, but not the lawyers? And what the hell happened after the trial? Who turned off his power core? When did they turn him off? And why did they choose to delete certain parts of his memory?
Murphy knew all this information seemed to point at a conspiracy. It didn't make any sense, though. They deleted his memory so fifty years down the lane, he wouldn't have evidence? It didn't make any damn sense.
A small pop caught his attention. Red had made some sort of nest like shape out of her blankets. The loss of a left arm didn't seem to faze her as she expertly opened a small bottle with her right hand.
"Let me see that bottle," Murphy held out his hand. He wanted to make sure these were not sleeping pills.
"Why?"
"To make sure they're safe."
Red hesitated for a moment before handing them over. Murphy saw she kept one fat little pill in her hand, though she didn't put it in her mouth.
Pain pills.
"What other bottles do you have?"
At Murphy's request, Red pulled out a small leather pouch and handed it over to him.
There were seventeen pill bottles in all. Pills from pain killers to sleep aids, to vitamin pills of all kinds. All the vitamin bottles had a little red mark on them, while the pain bottle had blue and the sleep aid had green. "Who gave you these?"
"Robin's grandfather," Red told him. "He told me to eat the pills from the red bottles everyday. He told me only to eat the blue or green ones when I needed to."
Of course. Food was probably scarce here. Even in a city as large as this one, nobody would dare break into a convenient store in fear of the androids. Even then, with all these pills, malnutrition is still a heavy possibility. The body needed more than just vitamins, it needed calories, fats, and sugar. Was Red naturally skinny or was she malnourished?
Murphy indicated the little white pill in Red's hand. "Are you in pain?"
"I will be." She said. She didn't swallow the pill just yet. She placed the little medication on a chair, well within her reach. From there, she proceeded to take off her shirt.
She didn't bother to ask Murphy to leave the room or even turn around. Either the idea of modesty was loss on her or she didn't care. She expertly slipped her right arm into her sleeve, pulled the shirt over her head and pulled it off from her half left arm.
The girl was more than malnourished, she was starving. Her skin, naturally pale from lack of sunlight, helped illuminate each rib bone. Murphy was reminded of the starving children from Africa often shown on the Christian channel. He could also see one rib, from the looks of it, broke and then healed improperly. It stuck out like a sore thumb. A doctor was going to have to break the bone again or else she was going to have many problems. She had no breasts, only two small pink nipples, almost as pale as her skin.
Murphy's eyes were automatically drawn to her shoulder. To her false arm. As always, as technology took a step forward, somebody took a step back. Red's arm was indeed the wave of the future. But the person who had done her procedure had done it poorly. Very poorly.
She wasn't just missing her arm. Practically her whole shoulder was gone, replaced with steel and tubing. Where flesh finally met metal, the two clashed together as if one couldn't decide which should remain dominant. The two criss-crossed each other, much like a zipper. Skin above metal, metal above skin. Scar tissue ensnared around the steel, suggesting that she had this done a long time ago.
Red placed her hand over the white foam she had placed on the day before. She added a little pressure and the foam broke easily and fell off. The once ruptured hose spewed no more of the copper fluid. Red's fingers played around underneath her pit, apparently looking for something. She found it, pressed it, and the metal around her shoulder sprang open.
Murphy almost jumped at the sudden movement. Red's arm now no longer held onto her fleshy shoulder as it sort of slumped a few inches downward. Three fat tubes kept the arm connected to her shoulder. The first tube she disconnected gave an evil hiss as it parted. Red flinched. The second tube gave a weaker hiss as it fell. Red flinched again. It can't be because of the sound…
The third refused to disconnect.
"Shit," Red murmured, unable to twist the tube off. "Murphy, can you get this? I think it's broken."
Instead of squatting in front of her, he chose to walk behind her back. Red didn't seem to notice his embarrassment.
Murphy saw that the tube's slot been broken. Smashed in. He told Red this. "I can still pull it out with a little force. Is that all right?"
She nodded. She was shaking a little bit, her hand braced on the chair.
He thought about questioning her. He grabbed the tube's end with two fingers, tugged on it to test its' strength. Then in a split second, he yanked it off without effort.
Red gave a gasp of audible pain. The arm came off, falling to the floor. "What's wrong?" Murphy said worriedly. "Did I do something wrong?"
"No," Red said shuddering. She reached to the table, grabbed the pain pill and popped it in her mouth. "Once the arm disconnects from my nervous system, for a moment I know what it feels like to have it ripped off."
Murphy didn't have pain receptors in his limbs. OCP thought such a thing was useless. Pain from a broken finger or leg would seriously handicap a officer. If he lost an arm in the line of duty, his brain would register his arm was gone, but he would feel nothing.
"Are you in pain now?"
Red shook her head. "It only lasts for a second. The headaches that come afterward are horrible."
Murphy refused to let Red take another pain pill. He didn't know if she understood him when he talked about "over dosing" and "addiction." She agreed not to take the pill after some persuasion.
Taking off her arm clearly exhausted her. Perhaps it was much more painful than she let on. "Here," Murphy draped a blanket over her. "Sleep off the pain."
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A/N: Nothing much in this chapter. Bigger and better and badder things will happen in the next chapter.
Yes, I understand that this plot sounds very Terminator-ish (what futuristic-apoloclyptic-taken-over-by-robots doesn't sound like Terminator?) but trust me when I say there is a bigger, horrifying plot involved. It's also kinda stupid, depending which angle you look at it from.
Anyhoo, R/R!