Arc 2, Chapter 1: Reddest River
- Pronouns
- She/Her
In this update, we meet a real sick fuck.
Also, Arc 3, Chapter 1: Green Zone Abomination is now on the website!
I noticed that the red trail on the walls wasn't wallpaper. It was blood, smudged across the surface of the white room like an ancient Hollywood joke about color theory. You could see little bits of meat and matter. Alison, skinny in only the way that someone with countable calories and an obsessive cardio regimen could be, stared at me with a dozy grin. "Oh, you're noticing that? It's one of my earlier art projects," she said to me. "I think there's so much beauty to be made with a good corpse, don't you think? Sure, it's so wonderful to keep things alive, to make them pretty and new, but sometimes you just get some materials worth recycling."
I spoke in my squeaky voice. " I love you!" I didn't want to say that, and I did not mean to say it. Jane bent over, giggling.
Alison took my hand and squeezed it. "I love you too," she said. Compared to Jane's rich curves and Starry's digital avatar's increasing muscle — they were all digital avatars, in the end — my toned fitness had been reduced to soft chub. I wanted my new gut and flabby hips to crawl off of my body like centipedes. Alison traced fingers down my sides, groping. "Oh, Eliza sure won't understand you, and Leah's going to ask me to cut off those pretty little police-regrown fingers of yours for appetizers." She laughed lightly. "I might just let her do it, I'd love an excuse to give you some new ones."
Jane stopped giggling. "She really is crazy, isn't she?" she barely strung together. "No, I'm not a hypocrite. Let me talk to her."
"I forbid you from doing so," Starry said.
Jane did it anyway, and I wasn't sure how she managed. She spoke, in her voice. "Listen, uh, Dr. Montaigne, you're not gonna believe this, but you're in possession of a killing machine. We're also cannibals, and it's our job to make sure that Portland wins the Second American Civil War, you know, the 2ACW. What you've got is a military super-soldier you're planning to use as some kind of doll. My name's Jane Montrose, I'm a soldier in the Portland USA Army who she ate and absorbed into her brain, somehow, and I'd love to offer how to teach you to use your investment to the fullest."
Alison smiled and patted my breast. "Oh, Janey. You don't have to worry about that, now." She traced a finger underneath my breast. "I'm just going to make a nice little incision here, to start. I'm…I'm just an admirer of the female form, you understand. Nothing against lesbians, but I'm not one. All I want here is a companion. I don't need a war machine. There's no one I want to kill who I won't kill myself, with my tools." She said it sweetly, even more than a Double Chocolate Marshmallow Krinker.
"What about your boss?" Jane said. "I bet if Luna Moss learned you had a murder-borg in your possession, she'd love to use it?" Jane checked to see if she could get into Alison's internet. She could. "And I will tell her."
Alison groped my tit, hard, as tight as she probably could. I yelped in pain, constriction. "She won't know." She waved a bio-modded finger, and she made me punch myself in my gut. I coughed, agony down there stealing my air. "You tell her and I will make you fuck yourself to death. If I can't have you, well, you know the rest. By the way, just for making that threat, Janey, I hope all the other people in your brain can hear this too: I'm going to drug you." Alison stood up and turned on her heel. "Have we established a beautiful, singular order based in unity?" she said, switching back to her friendly demeanor.
"Yes, ma'am," I said, nodding.
"Now, you're going to stay there, like a good girl, and then I'm going to lop you and give you a big, pretty chest. That way, just like you said, you won't be a useful war machine. You'll be a useless object for good." Alison left the room.
"Jane!" I said, in our shared brainspace. "What the hell?"
Starry spoke. "No, that threat was a 95% certainty. My estimates are failing, but this guess wasn't one. It was simply that Alison acted in a way outside of our expectations. We must surmise that Moss gives her a freer hand than we initially intended."
"Well, you fused us!" I said to Jane.
Alison returned, pushing in a table on rollers, loaded with surgical equipment from foam to scalpel and from needle to devices I couldn't even name. I couldn't refer to her in my monologue as Montaigne. I would have said Dr. Montaigne, but if this freak was ever a doctor she would have lost her license a long time ago.
She took a long syringe from the table, loaded with some kind of glowing gold liquid. "Starry," I said in my mind, gasping. "You'd better undo these enhancements' programming to let me get the fuck out!" I said.
Starry frowned, like a barricade for me to run into. "This is advanced stuff. I'm not a cosmic AI. I can't just dismantle a structure like this. I'll have to look for weak points, entry hazards, anti-intrusion measures…"
"Just do it, please!" I said, and Alison Montaigne raised her syringe, needle-point up. She took my stomach, which was mostly organic, and she rubbed at it. She found a spot, and she began the subcutaneous injection. My world became gold, rapture, flooding like a hurricane, like a thunderstorm, like a moment in the middle of Noah's flood, at the base of the sea, breathing air, the ocean spiraling around you a billion miles down as the anglerfish and the sea monsters were thrown in every direction, in an undertow that would end up up top, over, flying, and I was down here, at the base, surrounded by water and rocky monsters exposed to air-drowning.
I felt as though the universe was imploding, suspended, surrounding me, a rush of ecstacy, of energy moving through my veins, and I saw Jesus Christ return to me in a white coat and stethoscope, and he embraced me, my eyes ranting, my eyes talking like eyelid-mouths, then wide open. Everything was wide open. Joseph Smith touched my head, and he told me to lie fallow during these lazy days, while my body was made into a perfect lantern.
Maybe I was a bomb.
I felt my body implode, explode, replode and unplode. I was drowning, I was screaming, I was living in golden everything injected into my lungs like the mother I had who I wished could have known me as a goddess or maybe as a dancer or maybe as a freak, my awkward two-step and alternate historical affectations shooting through me and around me. They bound me, they stormed me, they drowned me, they were water.
I love Jesus, I thought, as he kissed me on the lips. It tasted like rotting fish, and it smelled like a festering wound. I let him corrode my skin in my corkscrewing imagination, as Joseph Smith took my cheek and told me I was a sister, and they kissed upon me. I thought I was going to the Outer Darkness, which was why there was a swirling portal like something out of World of Warcraft (2085) in my vision, my hallucination, my breaking and my memory fused together. I love you, Jesus, I really do, I trailed off in my head, as religious kisses of pure Outer Darkness cut through my left arm. There was red liquid shooting off of it, but that red liquid rapidly became a kind of pixellated amber.
My eyes were talking, but now they were open-mouthed, my lashes my teeth and my teeth just lashes. I felt as though I had a great big eyeball in my mouth, and I was too high to wonder if it was a gag. I wasn't sure what was in this substance that had been forced into my body, but my body was an angel and I was a part of Jesus Christ, now.
In 2084, scientist A.J. Merriweather was inaugurated, and he swore to dismantle the US's nuclear weapons systems. He succeeded. In 2056, Daybreak Candace Holyfield was voted as President of the United States, and she put through surprisingly comprehensive LGBTQ+ protections as a member of the Religious Left.
In 1974, President Francis Parker Yockey was elected to office. He sicced the Third Klan on his enemies and began to work to exterminate the "Jewish race". In 1956, President George Lincoln Rockwell was elected. In 1932, George Van Horn Moseley came to power in the United States. As the face of a military coup, he abolished democracy in America forever. In 1923, Adolf Hitler became Fuehrer of Germany.
The words ran through my mind, cutting and grinding into it like the amber was doing to my meat. They weren't facts. They were possibilities. They were could-have-beens, never-hads. None of them had gotten into office, except for Hitler, and it had taken him a decade after 1923.
But time bent in my mind, and my tangents were binding me like full circles.
My tangent saved me, reminding me that someone was cutting into my new patchwork arm. It didn't hurt. Nothing hurt. It was beautiful, and sad, to watch my arm leave me. It wasn't cut through. Halfway, nearly, maybe a third, or maybe it was hard to see under all of the redness that became amber.
I heard the trombone noise of Starry trying to say something to me. It was a blorp of sound, too distorted for me to really hear her, but I took it as a sign. I forced myself, with my untouched arm, to launch myself forward, my teeth heading straight for Alison's stupid face.
Jesus watched. So did Joseph Smith. So did the storm, and the ocean, and Hitler and Yockey and Merriweather and Daybreak Holyfield with her perfectly apt surname. We began to eat the air close to her, even if I wasn't sure why I'd want her in my head to begin with, but Starry and the killer's instinct took over.
She decked me in the nose, breaking it and stopping my launch. I reeled back and hit the operating table again, feeling a bump in my head where my standard-issue skull plating was. I still saw amber flood, running down the white table in a pure spiral. It was a gout of flame. I saw Joseph Smith reaching into her heart, plucking it from her chest, but she did not falter. "Stop hurting me!" I yelled, through what felt like an ocean of water.
She punched me in the head again, this time between the eyes. Dazed, she produced a roll of duct tape from somewhere I was having trouble perceiving, and she tried to slap my bleeding arm against the table, tying it to the edge. I grabbed her head with my good arm, and she headbutted me before I could eat her. "Oh, you nasty little bitch," she said to me. She picked up her device — a circular saw, I could now see in a blurred kind of way — and tried to bring it back onto my arm. I swung my injured arm like a flail, trying to box one of her ears. She grabbed my wounded arm and twisted it backwards.
Jesus wept, I could see him doing it.
She drew a second syringe, one filled with a milky white fluid. The point arced down at my leg.
Reagan in the robot body stopped her, grabbing her wrist. "Alison, please. These people are…"
"They're at least two cannibals and terrorists," Alison said, still brandishing the needle. "You can't seriously be saying I should let them keep killing innocent people."
"You must be one of the Sick Fuck Doctors, right?" Reagan said, still holding Alison's wrist. "I don't think you can judge people for killing."
"I only kill people who deserve it," Alison muttered. "Please, just get out of my way so I can fix this little bastard."
I used my good arm. I punched Alison in the face, as hard as anyone could in my position. She fell back. Reagan moved to stand between us. "I know Cerberus are bad people, but they don't deserve torture. No one does." She motioned with her robotic knuckles as if to crack them. "If you actually respect me, you'll listen to me."
Alison stood up, clutching her face. "I respect you. I think you did a good job. I think you risked everything for the common good. Trust me, you'll like them fixed. They'll be a lot less bloody. It's not torture, it's a gift. They'll get to be art supplies."
"I don't like it," Reagan said, which I sort of assumed we all knew about her already. Jesus faded away, and Joseph Smith was standing alongside Alison. Fixed. I'd rather be fixed by her than fixed by my church. There had been instances of families pressuring their queer and trans members to get their orientations and gender identities changed through their neural translators. It was illegal without the subject being an adult able to give informed consent and a thorough psychiatric profile in Portland, but it was tolerated in Deseret, even for minors. My parents weren't that bad, but Joseph Smith was glaring at me. I told myself it wasn't really him. My world was gold.
"What do you want, Rae? What can I give you to make you step aside?" Alison said, to Reagan.
"I'm sorry. I can't think of anything." Reagan grabbed Alison by the arms and pushed her against the wall.
I reached for the duct tape Alison had used, and found it on the floor. I started to tape up my wound on my arm, until I could find some foam or something to help it heal.
"We should go to a hospital," Jane tried to say, and I barely made her out through the gold world.
"No," I said. "They'd just send us back, probably lop us for her." I wasn't sure if that was the case, but my head's throbbing and my previous experiences made me think Portland wasn't a seven-star place to live. "Besides, to quote a great philosopher, I'm tripping balls." I didn't think that Jane understood me, and I wondered if the drug was affecting her or not.
"Sorry, I'm straight," Alison said, with a lopsided smirk at Reagan.
"I wouldn't have pegged it," Reagan said, and I thought she was unimpressed by Alison's confidence.
"Can I tell you a story, Reagan? I think we really can become gal pals," Alison said, still smirking.
"Don't," Reagan said, Alison's body pressed now against a floor-to-ceiling window.
"There was a younger woman I used to know named Alexandra. She was a theo-Nazi, and she had a history working with the infamous David Montrose as a concubine, propagandist, and killer. She livestreamed hangings of racial minorities and created VR games out of criminal footage: games where you could play perpetrator for every crime you can imagine, using real simulations of real mass killings. So I kidnapped her, and brainwashed her through her neutral transmitter. I lopped her, too. Mercenaries broke her out. Montrose managed to fix her brain and put her body into a new robot one. They, unfortunately, managed undo the damage I did to her, and now she's still preaching her cult of death. I could have made her benign, useful, artistic, and beautiful. I was stopped from it. Now she's calling for people like you to be tortured to death on international VRTV. If she had stayed in my company, countless atrocities would have been avoided."
Reagan considered this. "This isn't okay. This thing you're doing, it's not okay." She still held Alison there, while I wound tape around my wound. I could sterilize it later.
"She didn't tell you that she killed a bunch of rear-echelon soldiers too, right? Or that killing and eating all of those cops wasn't in self-defense? What's her body count, something like forty people? I've barely even started brainwashing her, I just began the surfacemost elements of it. I don't know just how many people she's murdered, but what I do can't be worse than that, and if it stops her from eventually just butchering civilians like her aggressive personality so clearly wants…" Alison's smirk became a genuine smile. At least, I was convinced without a shadow of a doubt that it was genuine.
Reagan let Alison go. "Just give me this body, and let me walk away," she said. "I don't want to be part of either of your 'teams', here."
"Sure, it wasn't a pricey 'bot," Alison said, sliding down and walking back to me. "An honor to meet you, Ms. Bradley, like I said." She tilted her head to her and saluted in a relaxed fashion, and Reagan did not mirror the gesture back.
Reagan walked to the door, and I saw her exit.
Alison picked up her circular saw. "Oh, Teddy, where were we? Maybe I'll just start with your forearms and forelegs."
Also, Arc 3, Chapter 1: Green Zone Abomination is now on the website!
I noticed that the red trail on the walls wasn't wallpaper. It was blood, smudged across the surface of the white room like an ancient Hollywood joke about color theory. You could see little bits of meat and matter. Alison, skinny in only the way that someone with countable calories and an obsessive cardio regimen could be, stared at me with a dozy grin. "Oh, you're noticing that? It's one of my earlier art projects," she said to me. "I think there's so much beauty to be made with a good corpse, don't you think? Sure, it's so wonderful to keep things alive, to make them pretty and new, but sometimes you just get some materials worth recycling."
I spoke in my squeaky voice. " I love you!" I didn't want to say that, and I did not mean to say it. Jane bent over, giggling.
Alison took my hand and squeezed it. "I love you too," she said. Compared to Jane's rich curves and Starry's digital avatar's increasing muscle — they were all digital avatars, in the end — my toned fitness had been reduced to soft chub. I wanted my new gut and flabby hips to crawl off of my body like centipedes. Alison traced fingers down my sides, groping. "Oh, Eliza sure won't understand you, and Leah's going to ask me to cut off those pretty little police-regrown fingers of yours for appetizers." She laughed lightly. "I might just let her do it, I'd love an excuse to give you some new ones."
Jane stopped giggling. "She really is crazy, isn't she?" she barely strung together. "No, I'm not a hypocrite. Let me talk to her."
"I forbid you from doing so," Starry said.
Jane did it anyway, and I wasn't sure how she managed. She spoke, in her voice. "Listen, uh, Dr. Montaigne, you're not gonna believe this, but you're in possession of a killing machine. We're also cannibals, and it's our job to make sure that Portland wins the Second American Civil War, you know, the 2ACW. What you've got is a military super-soldier you're planning to use as some kind of doll. My name's Jane Montrose, I'm a soldier in the Portland USA Army who she ate and absorbed into her brain, somehow, and I'd love to offer how to teach you to use your investment to the fullest."
Alison smiled and patted my breast. "Oh, Janey. You don't have to worry about that, now." She traced a finger underneath my breast. "I'm just going to make a nice little incision here, to start. I'm…I'm just an admirer of the female form, you understand. Nothing against lesbians, but I'm not one. All I want here is a companion. I don't need a war machine. There's no one I want to kill who I won't kill myself, with my tools." She said it sweetly, even more than a Double Chocolate Marshmallow Krinker.
"What about your boss?" Jane said. "I bet if Luna Moss learned you had a murder-borg in your possession, she'd love to use it?" Jane checked to see if she could get into Alison's internet. She could. "And I will tell her."
Alison groped my tit, hard, as tight as she probably could. I yelped in pain, constriction. "She won't know." She waved a bio-modded finger, and she made me punch myself in my gut. I coughed, agony down there stealing my air. "You tell her and I will make you fuck yourself to death. If I can't have you, well, you know the rest. By the way, just for making that threat, Janey, I hope all the other people in your brain can hear this too: I'm going to drug you." Alison stood up and turned on her heel. "Have we established a beautiful, singular order based in unity?" she said, switching back to her friendly demeanor.
"Yes, ma'am," I said, nodding.
"Now, you're going to stay there, like a good girl, and then I'm going to lop you and give you a big, pretty chest. That way, just like you said, you won't be a useful war machine. You'll be a useless object for good." Alison left the room.
"Jane!" I said, in our shared brainspace. "What the hell?"
Starry spoke. "No, that threat was a 95% certainty. My estimates are failing, but this guess wasn't one. It was simply that Alison acted in a way outside of our expectations. We must surmise that Moss gives her a freer hand than we initially intended."
"Well, you fused us!" I said to Jane.
Alison returned, pushing in a table on rollers, loaded with surgical equipment from foam to scalpel and from needle to devices I couldn't even name. I couldn't refer to her in my monologue as Montaigne. I would have said Dr. Montaigne, but if this freak was ever a doctor she would have lost her license a long time ago.
She took a long syringe from the table, loaded with some kind of glowing gold liquid. "Starry," I said in my mind, gasping. "You'd better undo these enhancements' programming to let me get the fuck out!" I said.
Starry frowned, like a barricade for me to run into. "This is advanced stuff. I'm not a cosmic AI. I can't just dismantle a structure like this. I'll have to look for weak points, entry hazards, anti-intrusion measures…"
"Just do it, please!" I said, and Alison Montaigne raised her syringe, needle-point up. She took my stomach, which was mostly organic, and she rubbed at it. She found a spot, and she began the subcutaneous injection. My world became gold, rapture, flooding like a hurricane, like a thunderstorm, like a moment in the middle of Noah's flood, at the base of the sea, breathing air, the ocean spiraling around you a billion miles down as the anglerfish and the sea monsters were thrown in every direction, in an undertow that would end up up top, over, flying, and I was down here, at the base, surrounded by water and rocky monsters exposed to air-drowning.
I felt as though the universe was imploding, suspended, surrounding me, a rush of ecstacy, of energy moving through my veins, and I saw Jesus Christ return to me in a white coat and stethoscope, and he embraced me, my eyes ranting, my eyes talking like eyelid-mouths, then wide open. Everything was wide open. Joseph Smith touched my head, and he told me to lie fallow during these lazy days, while my body was made into a perfect lantern.
Maybe I was a bomb.
I felt my body implode, explode, replode and unplode. I was drowning, I was screaming, I was living in golden everything injected into my lungs like the mother I had who I wished could have known me as a goddess or maybe as a dancer or maybe as a freak, my awkward two-step and alternate historical affectations shooting through me and around me. They bound me, they stormed me, they drowned me, they were water.
I love Jesus, I thought, as he kissed me on the lips. It tasted like rotting fish, and it smelled like a festering wound. I let him corrode my skin in my corkscrewing imagination, as Joseph Smith took my cheek and told me I was a sister, and they kissed upon me. I thought I was going to the Outer Darkness, which was why there was a swirling portal like something out of World of Warcraft (2085) in my vision, my hallucination, my breaking and my memory fused together. I love you, Jesus, I really do, I trailed off in my head, as religious kisses of pure Outer Darkness cut through my left arm. There was red liquid shooting off of it, but that red liquid rapidly became a kind of pixellated amber.
My eyes were talking, but now they were open-mouthed, my lashes my teeth and my teeth just lashes. I felt as though I had a great big eyeball in my mouth, and I was too high to wonder if it was a gag. I wasn't sure what was in this substance that had been forced into my body, but my body was an angel and I was a part of Jesus Christ, now.
In 2084, scientist A.J. Merriweather was inaugurated, and he swore to dismantle the US's nuclear weapons systems. He succeeded. In 2056, Daybreak Candace Holyfield was voted as President of the United States, and she put through surprisingly comprehensive LGBTQ+ protections as a member of the Religious Left.
In 1974, President Francis Parker Yockey was elected to office. He sicced the Third Klan on his enemies and began to work to exterminate the "Jewish race". In 1956, President George Lincoln Rockwell was elected. In 1932, George Van Horn Moseley came to power in the United States. As the face of a military coup, he abolished democracy in America forever. In 1923, Adolf Hitler became Fuehrer of Germany.
The words ran through my mind, cutting and grinding into it like the amber was doing to my meat. They weren't facts. They were possibilities. They were could-have-beens, never-hads. None of them had gotten into office, except for Hitler, and it had taken him a decade after 1923.
But time bent in my mind, and my tangents were binding me like full circles.
My tangent saved me, reminding me that someone was cutting into my new patchwork arm. It didn't hurt. Nothing hurt. It was beautiful, and sad, to watch my arm leave me. It wasn't cut through. Halfway, nearly, maybe a third, or maybe it was hard to see under all of the redness that became amber.
I heard the trombone noise of Starry trying to say something to me. It was a blorp of sound, too distorted for me to really hear her, but I took it as a sign. I forced myself, with my untouched arm, to launch myself forward, my teeth heading straight for Alison's stupid face.
Jesus watched. So did Joseph Smith. So did the storm, and the ocean, and Hitler and Yockey and Merriweather and Daybreak Holyfield with her perfectly apt surname. We began to eat the air close to her, even if I wasn't sure why I'd want her in my head to begin with, but Starry and the killer's instinct took over.
She decked me in the nose, breaking it and stopping my launch. I reeled back and hit the operating table again, feeling a bump in my head where my standard-issue skull plating was. I still saw amber flood, running down the white table in a pure spiral. It was a gout of flame. I saw Joseph Smith reaching into her heart, plucking it from her chest, but she did not falter. "Stop hurting me!" I yelled, through what felt like an ocean of water.
She punched me in the head again, this time between the eyes. Dazed, she produced a roll of duct tape from somewhere I was having trouble perceiving, and she tried to slap my bleeding arm against the table, tying it to the edge. I grabbed her head with my good arm, and she headbutted me before I could eat her. "Oh, you nasty little bitch," she said to me. She picked up her device — a circular saw, I could now see in a blurred kind of way — and tried to bring it back onto my arm. I swung my injured arm like a flail, trying to box one of her ears. She grabbed my wounded arm and twisted it backwards.
Jesus wept, I could see him doing it.
She drew a second syringe, one filled with a milky white fluid. The point arced down at my leg.
Reagan in the robot body stopped her, grabbing her wrist. "Alison, please. These people are…"
"They're at least two cannibals and terrorists," Alison said, still brandishing the needle. "You can't seriously be saying I should let them keep killing innocent people."
"You must be one of the Sick Fuck Doctors, right?" Reagan said, still holding Alison's wrist. "I don't think you can judge people for killing."
"I only kill people who deserve it," Alison muttered. "Please, just get out of my way so I can fix this little bastard."
I used my good arm. I punched Alison in the face, as hard as anyone could in my position. She fell back. Reagan moved to stand between us. "I know Cerberus are bad people, but they don't deserve torture. No one does." She motioned with her robotic knuckles as if to crack them. "If you actually respect me, you'll listen to me."
Alison stood up, clutching her face. "I respect you. I think you did a good job. I think you risked everything for the common good. Trust me, you'll like them fixed. They'll be a lot less bloody. It's not torture, it's a gift. They'll get to be art supplies."
"I don't like it," Reagan said, which I sort of assumed we all knew about her already. Jesus faded away, and Joseph Smith was standing alongside Alison. Fixed. I'd rather be fixed by her than fixed by my church. There had been instances of families pressuring their queer and trans members to get their orientations and gender identities changed through their neural translators. It was illegal without the subject being an adult able to give informed consent and a thorough psychiatric profile in Portland, but it was tolerated in Deseret, even for minors. My parents weren't that bad, but Joseph Smith was glaring at me. I told myself it wasn't really him. My world was gold.
"What do you want, Rae? What can I give you to make you step aside?" Alison said, to Reagan.
"I'm sorry. I can't think of anything." Reagan grabbed Alison by the arms and pushed her against the wall.
I reached for the duct tape Alison had used, and found it on the floor. I started to tape up my wound on my arm, until I could find some foam or something to help it heal.
"We should go to a hospital," Jane tried to say, and I barely made her out through the gold world.
"No," I said. "They'd just send us back, probably lop us for her." I wasn't sure if that was the case, but my head's throbbing and my previous experiences made me think Portland wasn't a seven-star place to live. "Besides, to quote a great philosopher, I'm tripping balls." I didn't think that Jane understood me, and I wondered if the drug was affecting her or not.
"Sorry, I'm straight," Alison said, with a lopsided smirk at Reagan.
"I wouldn't have pegged it," Reagan said, and I thought she was unimpressed by Alison's confidence.
"Can I tell you a story, Reagan? I think we really can become gal pals," Alison said, still smirking.
"Don't," Reagan said, Alison's body pressed now against a floor-to-ceiling window.
"There was a younger woman I used to know named Alexandra. She was a theo-Nazi, and she had a history working with the infamous David Montrose as a concubine, propagandist, and killer. She livestreamed hangings of racial minorities and created VR games out of criminal footage: games where you could play perpetrator for every crime you can imagine, using real simulations of real mass killings. So I kidnapped her, and brainwashed her through her neutral transmitter. I lopped her, too. Mercenaries broke her out. Montrose managed to fix her brain and put her body into a new robot one. They, unfortunately, managed undo the damage I did to her, and now she's still preaching her cult of death. I could have made her benign, useful, artistic, and beautiful. I was stopped from it. Now she's calling for people like you to be tortured to death on international VRTV. If she had stayed in my company, countless atrocities would have been avoided."
Reagan considered this. "This isn't okay. This thing you're doing, it's not okay." She still held Alison there, while I wound tape around my wound. I could sterilize it later.
"She didn't tell you that she killed a bunch of rear-echelon soldiers too, right? Or that killing and eating all of those cops wasn't in self-defense? What's her body count, something like forty people? I've barely even started brainwashing her, I just began the surfacemost elements of it. I don't know just how many people she's murdered, but what I do can't be worse than that, and if it stops her from eventually just butchering civilians like her aggressive personality so clearly wants…" Alison's smirk became a genuine smile. At least, I was convinced without a shadow of a doubt that it was genuine.
Reagan let Alison go. "Just give me this body, and let me walk away," she said. "I don't want to be part of either of your 'teams', here."
"Sure, it wasn't a pricey 'bot," Alison said, sliding down and walking back to me. "An honor to meet you, Ms. Bradley, like I said." She tilted her head to her and saluted in a relaxed fashion, and Reagan did not mirror the gesture back.
Reagan walked to the door, and I saw her exit.
Alison picked up her circular saw. "Oh, Teddy, where were we? Maybe I'll just start with your forearms and forelegs."
Last edited: