Because They Don't Bleed Red E-Book

Ithaka O.

• Herausgeber: Imaginarium Kim
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

He's just a delivery guy walking the surface of the earth...
...in an era when humans don't rule there anymore.

Overcast skies. Greasy roads. Endless sonic tension.
That's the cold reality a young man must face when he wants to get anywhere above-ground these days. It's a risk. It can get deadly. Yet he must rise above the shield of safety to protect his loved ones.
If only the machine overlords wouldn't notice.

Leseprobe

BECAUSE THEY DON'T BLEED RED

A SHORT STORY

ITHAKA O.

IMAGINARIUM KIM

© 2022 Ithaka O.

All rights reserved.

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

No part of this story may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Also by Ithaka O.

Thank you for reading

1

When it happened, I’d been fighting through the slithery grime-covered main overpass at their speed. The day was dark as the asphalt, the sky overcast. Something half like sleet and half like snow fell from the clouds. If Jackson hadn’t installed extra purchase features on my soles, I would have flung myself out of my path at some curve back there. Sprinting at this speed, faster than the last Olympic Gold Medalist known to humanity, combined with this slipperiness—the whole venture simply wouldn’t have worked without his genius.

I could barely see a thing. The bastards had shattered every street-lamp a long time ago. There were no traffic lights. They didn’t need any and our needs were immaterial.

From every direction, they were coming crashing on me. A curve, a straight path, it didn’t matter. The collision was inevitable. They didn’t slow down. Didn’t need to. The traffic lanes were irrelevant. They hit my head, slammed my torso, cracked the surface of my limbs, just as they did with their likes: intentionally. They didn’t need to do this, this colliding, this crashing into anybody. But they didn’t operate from need. This was their way of checking: only their likes allowed on this overpass.

Occasionally, the impact was so destructive, a whole chunk of the shell that covered me flew off. It was then that from its fine near-surface vessels, the shell automatically released gasoline. Its reek filled the air around us. But we didn’t stop—neither me nor those bastards. And it wasn’t just me who reeked. It was them, all of them who underwent that vigorous confirmation process of Only we, the androids, allowed in this world. The lack of light, the crashing, the high speed—their speed—all that existed for that single purpose of weeding out my likes, the humans.

So, here I was, keeping up with their speed with the help of Jackson’s invention. The extra-purchase soles. The motor-powered shell. The booster shots to force my muscles to keep up. Oh, by the way, when the gasoline-oozing happened, the shell generated a sizzling noise. On a cold, wet day like today, that sounded especially dramatic. It added to the believability of my androidness.

Those assholes, they could sense the tiniest little difference in the electrical sizzle. Our guess was that they had a whole room full of their kind that was in charge of developing ever-advanced sensors. And then there was another whole room full of their kind that developed ever-intricate sizzling sound patterns.

It had taken Jackson months to create this iteration. Can you believe it? He’d needed to make me sound more machine-like for me to dare travel on these streets, which long ago, our ancestors had built.

Apparently, this iteration worked. No one stopped me. No one flashed red lights at me, alerting their police. We—them and I—traveled at their speed, deliberately colliding into each other, not minding the wetness and coldness, because to machines, wet and dry, cold and warm simply had no bearing.

My charade couldn’t last. Of course it couldn’t. This was a temporary measure. The shell, the soles, those weren’t the problem; the problem was me, my cursed human muscles.

I had ten minutes to the destination, ten minutes back. That was it. No more, or I’d burn myself. Quite literally, I’d set myself on flames, with the poisonous booster flowing like fire through my veins.

Believe me when I say that I never wanted to be here. Who in their right mind would want this job, when everywhere on the ground level and above, bloodthirsty machines have taken over?

We’d become the rats, my kind. We lived in sewers that we’d built a century ago, and only because the bastards didn’t bother to police them and didn’t need to use them. Androids didn’t flush toilets. It was as simple as that.

That didn’t mean that they let us be in peace. Oh, they were much too smart for that. They knew we wouldn’t be satisfied with “being.” Our kind never was. So, what did they do? They cut off sections of the sewers. Population control through space control. That was what they called that measure. Just so we couldn’t multiply all over the place. As if we were rabbits!