Upcoming stuff.

Here's a little spoiler for my next story, which was inspired by this image.

I think I was human once.

That's what the memories say. These memories were mine, I think. Little more than emotions now, faded by time. A thousand fractured images swirl in what I assume is my mind. Faces, places, people and things.

All gone.

That world is gone. Rubble. Mud. Steel. Rust. Flame. That's all that's left now. If that world ever existed at all.

Was there a bright flash? A searing heat? Perhaps I remember that too.

I am awake now, awake. Soon I may sleep. I cannot remember awakening. I cannot remember falling asleep. I am a switch, on and off, on and off. There is no middle ground. And yet, I do not dream.

I am free and a prisoner. I see, but not with my eyes. I live and I am dead.

I am flesh bound to machine. Without the man, the machine is nothing. Without the machine, the man is nothing. In this machine, I am the machine. We are one and the same, two halves of a whole.

To them I am a god. For them I fight and I kill. Down from the mountains we come like a tide. They are my children. They are weak and I am strong. Who better to save them but me?

The others are not my children. They are the enemy, the enemy. They are fragile, just as my children are. They are soft bags filled with flesh and blood and bone and my word how they scream. They feel. They fight. They die. I do none of these things.

I kill the enemy with the gun. To the flesh part of me, it is only a gun, the gun. The machine part of me knows what kind of gun it is, when it is empty and when it is not. The machine knows how to shoot the enemy, and I know how to make them die. We work together to silence the enemy. Each shot kills another.

Sometimes they wear armor, so you have to hit them again, and again, until they stop moving and breathing and living. Then we take what is ours and my children and I go back to the mountains. They need the petty trinkets and the things they call food to live, but I do not.

I feel jealousy. Or at least, I think I do. They know so many things. What the wind feels like on your face. What the rain feels like on your skin. To be hot. To be cold. To be wet. To be dry. To live and to die.

I think I would like to die. To lie down in the dirt and never awaken again, never ever ever again.

But still I go on, with no means to die. The machine won't let me die. Or perhaps it is I who won't let the machine die.

I am Sequester.

We are Sequester.

Sequester is me.

You can see more of the magnificent Keith Thompson's work at his site, where you can also read the awesome back-story that accompanies the above image.

I will warn you, however, that some of his work is certainly not for the faint of heart!