A Quick Death in Texas - Sample: The Sheer Violence of a Paradigm Shift

Ever been punched so hard, you realize you're a sub?

His senses had failed from the blow, but at the last possibility, he’d caught himself from tripping the trigger of his secret sure-killer, his beloved Gator Jaw. This had saved him from what his former comrades in section 99 had warned him about, before they threw him off the team for their perception of his ‘antisocial behaviors:’ Namely, that he’d blow his own head off accidentally, from inside of his own head. Even still, the force of the blow split open his already wrecked face and peeled a chunk of it away, struck through the plating beneath and rattled his insulated internal architecture. He shouldn’t have been able to do that with a closed fist, because he shouldn’t have been able to do that with a sledgehammer. How?

As soon as Gator’s sight returned, he drew a targeting bound around the man, and swung an arm like an iron girder at his neck. The man turned to air, save for twin trails of streaming green light from his eyes that traced the path of his supernaturally fast slip. Then he turned solid again, and lanced a jab-straight-spinning back elbow into his bent jaw and cocked optics. Each one landed like the submunition explosion of a cluster grenade.

<WRN// Di-Perc Sensors disrupted>

<AUTO// Reboot sensory suite, attempt 1 of 10, in 3, 2, 1…>

He hated this. This was incredible. This was amazing. Not one, but two. They were going to kill him. They were going to kill him. THIS WAS AMAZING.

His senses returned again, and he realized he’d taken several backsteps. The man had pounded him every step of the way, hooking an endless series of flowing strikes into his core and joints. It made no sense, as fists that should have broken like flesh and bone against his armour instead rang through and registered internal impacts, as though he was being repeatedly bodyshot with soft-tipped shotgun slugs. The man wasn’t a man any more to Gator’s sensors, not a terran, not a cogitoi, just simply an inanimate shape that was nonetheless moving. He had no thermal signature now, no electro-muscular impulses to read when he was about to act, nor breath to read when he was readying to exert himself, nor pulse to measure his exhaustion. The man was simply mass to his sensors, a golem, relentlessly beating him from behind a face that was nothing but contempt and green-glowing killer’s eyes.

Gator tried an uppercut, and felt as though he was a crane that had lost its ballast. The man sidestepped it, rolled under, and hooked a right hand through his face’s exposed substructure. A distorted squawk escaped him, from the sheer crushing battery of the strike. As his optics frazzled again, and his brain washed with a red tide of damage reports, it dawned on Gator: he’d never actually learned how to fight, as machine logic and a proper targeting system can deal with any weak biological’s pathetic ‘martial arts.’ So he thought.

On the inside, he laughed. On the outside, he screamed. He was going to die. It was incredible. The man in the black jacket was right there, close enough to reach out and touch, grasp by the neck and break with one hand. But not with all his speed could he actually lay hands on him. Every time Gator struck back at him, he’d blur away as light and colour, become solid again, and hit him so very hard in reply. That, or the blow would glance against some unexpected parry form and be swept aside as though his limb were a feather duster, only to have his blocking form explode outward at him, hitting him as though it was reflecting all the force he’d put into it. Gator could not discern the man’s method of defense, he could see the shape and form of his stances, but as soon as he’d seem comfortable in one, he’d discard it, for another. Then he’d discard it for another, then another. Then when least expected, he’d draw it out out of his discard pile and take it up again, as prelude to a blindingly painful elbow slash across the face.

Anchor screeched with rage, spun so as to gain momentum, planted his hands and clawed them into the floor. On an arc, he swung a kick with both legs that could have broken one of the terminal’s load-bearing supports like a straw. The man in the black jacket somehow backstepped it and slipped, bending just clear of its reach. He vanished, then streaked back into his range like green lighting, catching Gator as he righted himself with an uppercut that scraped the floor and reached for the ceiling, nearly shedding a vapor trail along its arc. As he took three clumsy, hobbling steps backwards, Gator couldn’t control the scream he let out, his ear-mics momentarily clipped to static by the blow’s sheer power.

He’d never considered ever confronting the definition of madness with a perfectly logical machine mind, yet here he was, trying the same thing over and over, and taking the same painful result each time. What were you, meat? Why were you? How?

His world was crumbling, and its ruins were so beautiful.