Jake Maison
12/09/2023
Image description: a purple head on a lilac background with metal plates on the top of its head. It has vivid green liquid eyes and red blood spattering on its face near its nose and mouth. It has wires inside its cheeks.
A brilliant streak of purple against the black night sky came bearing down like a comet. The old house was rendered in stark relief against the light, its tenebrous shadows stretching out at impossible angles to flee the incoming wrath. There was a commotion from within the house, shouting, screams, the bustle and crash of movement. The rebels within had been awoken by the light.
An unseen signal from within the house fired off to the system of shield projectors that ringed the house, their lenses flaring and spitting from the effort. A dome of rendered golden light rose around the house to meet this new threat before it struck with the force of an angry god, and a sound like the air itself had been split in half. The shield dome buckled and shattered, the pattern of pale gold hexagonal light shapes dissolving beneath the weight of the attack.
More panicked shouts emanated from within the old house, those within scrambling to mount some kind of resistance against what was coming. The source of the projectile, a siege-class fabricator unit housing The Crownbreaker within its core, retracted its plasma cannon and commenced the release of its arsenal; twenty hunter-killers sprang from the sides of The Crownbreaker’s unit and streaked into the sky above.
The drones scattered into a cloud of angry metal death; tracer guns poised to kill. Scattered potshots erupted from the windows of the house, either going wide or dinging harmlessly off the drones’ plasteel plates. In return, violet bolts of superheated plasma splintered wood and exploded windows, carving through the house like hungry ghosts. From within there came agonised screams as the rebels fell one by one.
After two strafing runs, the drones returned to The Crownbreaker before shutting down. The hammer had done its job, now came the time for the scalpel. From within the unit awoke The Inhuman; partly human, mostly machine and bred for killing. The Inhuman rose from their pod, running a systems diagnostic as their orders were received, binary gospel scrolling across their artificial retinas. The Inhuman stalked across the silent expanse towards the old house. Had they retained their smell receptors, The Inhuman would have picked up the smell of ozone, the coppery tang of blood, the stench of burned hair, and seared flesh. But all that remained of The Inhuman that was organic was their face; set like a death mask, eyes replaced with emerald-green implants, brain defiled with wetware.
A quick scan of the house told The Inhuman that none of the rebels in the house had survived, though several heat-signatures in the large basement below led The Inhuman to power up their weapon: a miniaturised railgun housed within a compartment in their right forearm. The house was largely ruined by the drones’ attack, but the door had remained surprisingly intact. The Inhuman was quick to remedy this with a swift kick that reduced the door to splinters.
A warning flashed across The Inhuman’s awareness, faster than they could register. There came a bright blue light from somewhere beneath the house, an expanding sphere of energy that at once burned like fire and chilled like ice. The Inhuman’s body seized up, the bridge between the organic and cybernetic crumbling to dust as their armoured body crashed to the floor. Darkness crept in from the edges of The Inhuman’s periphery and a critical systems failure took hold.
That which remained of the man before The Inhuman stirred in the inky blackness of the void, with no body to speak of save for his head. The system of memories and neuro-electric pulses that once composed him trapped within a walking prison of metal and violence. From the infinite nothing came a distant green light, growing only closer as it came screaming towards him. The man felt fear but found solace in his shattered memories; a house not unlike this one, the woman he loved watching him approach, lips curved in a loving smile, eyes a pale and piercing blue. The raging green maelstrom that was The Crownbreaker enveloped the man upon contact, its hateful tendrils snaking their way back into every part of him. The man was gone.
The Inhuman awoke on the floor of the house, among the remains of the dead. Running a diagnostic on their system, the Crownbreaker deduced that The Inhuman had been hit with a remotely-triggered electromagnetic pulse weapon, meant to disable them and render them vulnerable to attack upon entering the house. The attack came in the form of a four-person kill team kicking their way through the basement door, bristling with high-calibre weapons and clad in plate armour. The Inhuman’s systems had largely repaired themselves by the time the rebels were able to zero in on their target.
Rushing out of the doorway and into the hall in something approaching a phalanx formation, the kill team took aim at The Inhuman with an assortment of burst rifles and automatic shotguns. The Inhuman moved with impossible speed to avoid the onslaught of gunfire that occupied the space where they had just been standing, replacing the air with lead and gun smoke. Stalking through the living room carpeted with rebel bodies, The Inhuman’s scanners showed a quartet of heat signatures through the wall, the thermal shapes slowly realising that their target had moved. Without giving the rebels time to regroup, The Inhuman propelled themselves through the wall, their armoured body crashing through rotten wood with ease.
The rebel within closest reach died first, their head pulping between the wall behind them and the powerful grip of The Inhuman’s hand as it clutched his skull. The kill team scattered in a terrified panic, their brains barely registering the horror of their comrade’s death. The woman to The Inhuman’s left instinctively raised her burst rifle, taking aim to fire. Unsheathing a ten-inch monomolecular blade from a compartment in their left forearm, The Inhuman cleaved through the rifle’s assembly with a single swing, cutting it in half and tossing the woman backward with the sheer force of their attack. The man to The Inhuman’s right barely had time to turn and face his enemy before his jawbone exploded, the two-millimetre ferromagnetic slug firing from The Inhuman’s railgun and pulverising flesh and bone into a fine red mist. The man slid to his knees, emitting a pathetic gargling sound and clutching at a part of himself that was no longer there.
Already having raised her shotgun, the woman closest to the basement door howled in fury as she held down the trigger. Shell after shell of buckshot scored against the matte-black finish of The Inhuman’s armour, the woman’s war cry dying in her throat as she realised she hadn’t even made a dent. The woman’s shotgun emitted a rhythmic metallic click as the firing mechanism met with an empty magazine, the woman cursed as she tossed aside her shotgun and reached for her sidearm.
The Inhuman simply raised their railgun again and fired, the slug punching clean through her stomach and throwing her bodily through the doorway and down the stairs to the basement. The Inhuman made to follow her down, only to be stopped when a scattering of pistol shots rattled against their left leg and shoulder. The Inhuman turned to regard the woman standing in the kitchen, pistol drawn and smoking. Stepping over the wreckage of her burst rifle, The Inhuman surged forward with monomolecular blade poised. The edge whispered through the skin, tissue, and bone of her neck, severing her head completely.
Caked in blood and gore, The Inhuman returned to the basement door. The emerald-green flare of their scanners detecting the fading heat signature of the woman thrown down the stairs. She sat with her back to the wall of the basement beside the stairs, one hand clutching the red ruin of her stomach while the other aimed her pistol at them. The strength seemed to leave her as The Inhuman stopped to look down at her, a shallow groan escaping her as the pistol clattered to the floor. The Inhuman lowered themselves to kneel before the woman, her eyes brimming with tears but never flinching, even as the monomolecular blade slid gingerly between her ribs and into her heart. The Inhuman watched that heat signature dwindle to nothing as the woman sighed her last.
Standing up, The Inhuman found their target almost immediately; centred in the room stood a twelve-foot-tall obelisk, carved by unknown hands aeons ago from a glassy black substance. The faces of the obelisk were inscribed with unknowable glyphs that hummed with a strange energy and pulsed with a horrible light. Between the obelisk and The Inhuman stood the last of the rebels, a woman. Records called her a genius, a madwoman, a witch. Unlike the other rebels, she wore civilian clothing, a simple grey shirt, black pants, and a white lab coat thrown over. Her face was drawn and gaunt, eyes a pale and piercing blue. Those cold eyes narrowed at The Inhuman, lip drawn up in a sneer.
She screamed at The Inhuman, demanding how they dared to wear his face as she broke into a sprint. Raising her fist as if to strike them, the woman charged at The Inhuman, who simply side-stepped and raised their arm a fraction. Warm blood splashed across The Inhuman’s death mask as the monomolecular edge cleaved through skin, flesh, and bone like paper. The woman made a wet, gasping sound as she toppled to the floor beside The Inhuman, who continued on unfazed towards their objective.
The woman chuckled darkly from her place on the basement floor, declaring she had won the moment The Inhuman set foot in the house. Grinning a red grin, the woman slumped down and did not move again. The Inhuman had little time to ponder her words before a small black oblong device suddenly protruded from a compartment in their chest. The device began to emit a series of beeping sounds, rattling in its housing as an orange light began to emanate from its core.
The Crownbreaker had exfiltrated its carrier unit from the combat zone long before this. The thermonuclear explosion that assuredly purged the house and all within from existence appeared as little more than a sharp flash of light and a smear of cloud, the shockwave a mere vibration in its armoured plates. Remembering the witch’s rage at the sight of the face worn by The Inhuman, The Crownbreaker knew well the cruelty of its choice in organic components but knew better the necessity of such things. Mass-producing constructs and automata of limited capacity served their purpose in keeping the remnants of humanity in check, but force could only achieve so much. Fear was a weapon The Crownbreaker prized most highly, the requiem worn by The Inhuman was enough to corrode the morale of most if not all who stood against them.
With the last bastion of resistance eradicated, The Crownbreaker’s purpose had been fulfilled. Mankind would doubtlessly hate it for all that it had done, The Crownbreaker knew, but they would at least be alive to do so. From the large green optic of its unit, The Crownbreaker took one last look at the world before powering down.
Days later, a man with a prosthetic jaw would return to the house, his environment suit shielding him from the worst of the fallout. Where once a house from the old world stood proud and decrepit, now existed only a crater as wide as it was deep. Through the howling wind and streaks of atomic lightning, the man with the prosthetic jaw persisted towards the centre, his mind conjuring images of annihilation and ruin. What he found instead was an infant girl lying naked and wailing on the ground in front of a tall, cracked obelisk engraved with strange glyphs.
The child, though clearly distressed, appeared unharmed despite her surroundings. The man was quick to bundle her up in a blanket and sprint out of the dead zone. Once he was clear of the radiation, the man reunited with his comrades within one of the walled cities. Once back at their hideout, the man bathed, clothed, and fed the girl. The more superstitious members of the rebels called her a miracle, unharmed as she was despite days of malnourishment in the middle of a radiation storm. Others instead called her an aberration, pointing to her mismatched eyes; one a deep emerald green while the other a pale and piercing blue.
In a cold and forgotten corner of the world, a great machine awoke once more. Colossal machine-printers roared to life after decades of inaction, rendering sheets of plasteel into bodies for hunter-killers, armoured carriers, mobile fabricators, orbital weapons platforms and bipedal combat units. From within the core at the heart of the great machine, The Crownbreaker watched as its army began to exponentially take shape.
Human brains suspended in tanks of bio-fluid were extracted, spliced with interfacing cybernetics, and placed within armoured bodies. Organic materials were drawn from their genetic profiles and used to sculpt human faces and skulls, the sockets of which were fitted with optical implants. Suits of insulating membrane were grafted to the endoskeletons to protect against electromagnetic attacks. The Crownbreaker was a fast learner.
Casting itself skyward, The Crownbreaker would gaze into the emptiness of space through the eyes of ancient satellites in orbit over the planet. Having peered through The Inhuman’s eyes at the glyphs engraved in the faces of the obelisk, The Crownbreaker knew who carved them and what they meant. That strange energy and horrible light pulsing from within, a mere mote that would coalesce into something greater if left unchecked. Somewhere, The Crownbreaker knew, between the blackness of the void and the white pinpricks of distant stars, something had awakened. The Crownbreaker also knew that as it stared out towards it, something was staring right back.
The Crownbreaker knew that, for having been awoken by a failsafe triggered by the cries of the child, the mission at the house had been a complete failure. The mad witch having lured it there in order to achieve a kind of pyrrhic victory. The Crownbreaker also knew that if it could hear the cries of the child through long-range scanners, then that which stared back could hear them as well. And it would be coming.
The Crownbreaker returned its attention to the blasted wastelands below and to the walled cities shining like beacons in a sea of darkness, serving as a reminder of the importance of its mission. The titanic doors of the machine printer facilities opened with a groan of rust and disuse as millions of individual machines emerged in orderly formations. Hunter-killer drones stored within armoured carriers, kinetic bombardment platforms rising up into the atmosphere, and combat bipeds stored within aerial transporters. At the head of this metal horde marched the cyborgs, The Inhumans, emerald-green implants glittering with monomaniacal focus. The wetware directing every neuron in their organic brains toward a single objective:
Find the girl.
***
Hi, my name is Jake and I am a 28-year-old art student. My pronouns are he/him. I am currently trying to figure out what I want to do with my life and the most resonant answer to that question seems to be to write science fiction stories that are as violent as they are weird. Enjoy!
***
Paper Road Magazine 