All the King’s Horses
A Conversion Bureau story.

What is there left to save, when you are more machine then human?

Medulla Suspension – True
Sub-Cortex link – True
Frontal Cortex isolation – True

Muffled sounds, artillery in the distance, gunfire and unearthly screams echoing.

Tightness, armor chafing against hard skin, chest weighed down, pressed into dirt but unyielding.

No panic, no need for air. Ground shakes at nearby impact. Hands explore their close surroundings, tracing the sharp edges of fallen rubble.

Freedom through force, pushing the debris aside and emerging into the broken world.

Mist creeping in through fresh gaps in the concrete structure hides the outside from view. Blind.

Check armor; chest section damaged, significant gap over upper left abdomen. Blood loss? Negligible.

Rubble is unstable underfoot, something else trapped beneath, long tendril protruding. Unmoving. Target was neutralized.

HUD reestablishes contact with sat-com, roof of this building missing. AR map flashes up and matches the contours of the unseen street. Green silhouettes move through the virtual plane shadowed by their call signs.

Street is deserted, visibility eight feet in dense fog. Theta-Four struggling across pavement, damage to right leg critical, left leg unaccounted for, left arm unaccounted for. Chances of field repair; nil.

Establish recovery beacon. Await regroup… Eleven Units accounted for. Continue sweep.

Howl permeates the mist. New contacts moving closer, flashes of artillery illuminate their shape through the sheet white aura, huge and lumbering. Four at least.

Startling green eyes flicked open, the only indication that the reclined figure was once again among the waking world. Instinctually they assessed the dank apartment, taking stock of the boarded glassless window, broken remnants of furniture and the sound of dripping water from the tiny flooded bathroom. Reality reasserting dominance over dream like simulation, the jade orbs relaxed and swiveled to look at the skinny girl from whom the interruption had originated.

Lying curled up upon a filthy mattress, the tawny youngster fumbled with a lock of her haphazard black hair as she mumbled.

There was much that could be said about the adolescent. Life in the underbelly of the world had taken its toll on her lithe body, old scars and bandaged wounds acted as a temporal map of past encounters. Poverty had stripped her of all but the barest essentials of humility, rags that had been scavenged or stolen and sown together by hand. Despite her dreadful appearance, her relatively unmarked face bore the worst indications of suffering. Beneath dull lifeless eyes hung the perpetual nervous grin that earmarked her as a hyena of the slums. This was a child whose boat had tipped over the edge of sanity and now could not stop laughing at the crumbling world. It was either that or scream.

Painfully pulling herself into a sitting position, the girl turned to look at her as yet silent observer. Apparently, humans make eleven critical assumptions within in the first seven seconds meeting one another.
What was suggested in the first seven seconds of meeting this quasi-human form? Bald and androgynous, the thing sat stiffly in a coverless armchair. Little of its actual body could be seen, covered as it was by grubby mismatched denim, stitched together between patches of chitin armormesh. A heavy barber coat and leather scarf completed the impression off a student’s laundry basket having been dumped on an old biology skeleton. That which was exposed to the air appeared female only in the pejorative sense and was an unpleasant window into the uncanny valley. Everything about the face was subtly wrong. Devoid of hair and coated with smooth bleach white skin, the earless head seemed slightly too small for the eyes that stared unblinkingly from cavernous sockets. Nothing moved save those piercing jade orbs, completing the appearance of an emaciated doll on chemotherapy.

Familiarity saved the girls stomach from turning out the pilfered rations as she patiently waited for the expected protest, meeting the unbroken gaze with a twitching smile. When it finally did speak, the voice arrived as a kind of metallic resonation, like a child shouting down a long metal tube.

Shrugging dismissively, Katrina Weatherly dragged herself upright and walked unsteadily to the boarded window. Yellowing smog curled through the world outside, rapping around the tops of lampposts like a sticky foam and hiding the street from view. There were few buildings like this one left in the world, many of the mega-corps opting for modular plasti-create units that were cheap to mentain and replace. Out here in the sticks though, where gangs and mobs lorded over the corpse of society, some old masonry buildings still remained. Never having been cleared or reclaimed. Left for dead because it was considered ‘unprofitable’. So very human.

“Gona’ have to eventually.” She stammered weekly, staring unblinking through thin gaps between planks. Gunfire and shouting in the distance hinted at the confutations taking place all over the broken suburb. Now, by the sound of things, a fight had broken out in the unseen street below their ramshackle hovel “Now seems as good a time as any to get the fuck out of dodge”

Once again the hushed raspy voice issued from the depths of the barber clad ‘female’, her jaw unmoving as mechanical words strung themselves into unpunctuated verse.

“You are traumatized Migration to Equestria is unacceptable Risk too great and process is permanent.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Barked the girl, suddenly shaking with uncontainable panic, “It’s on the hollocrons every day, ‘Leave everything behind and come to Equestria’! I know it sounds too good to be true, but fuck Sarah! I’m sick of this fucking world. I don’t want to live anymore. I just can’t take another day of-”

Gunfire rang out across the street. Katrina blinked, wind knocked from her and ears ringing from the deafening interruption. She was on the floor, covered protectively by the being she had referred to as ‘Sarah’. Plaster dust floated down through new shafts of pale daylight, echoing the spray of molten rounds that had embedded themselves in the far wall.

Curling inwards, Kat whimpered as angered shouts and the sound of heavy footsteps closed the distance to the font of the building.

“They have found us Now we leave.” Spoke the ‘Sarah’ plainly, moving swiftly to its feet and urging the teen to move.

Resisting the urge to curl up into a fetal ball, Kat crawled hastily to the mattress and swept up the tattered bag that lay to one side. With barely a moment to breathe, a vice like grip wrapped around her stick thin arm, guiding her towards the unhinged bathroom door.

“Wait.” The doll instructed, releasing its hold and stepping into the small room.

Long since abandoned, there had been no reason for World-Corp to maintain the city’s basic amenities. Waste from the nearby super city had been pumped straight into over taxed sewers. Some structures had sealed off their drains, but here the lavatory was flooded with regurgitated rot. Fortunately, this was exactly what Sarah was looking for.

From the floor below came the crash of frail doors being kicked aside, coupled with whoops of murderous intent. Sinking down against the pealed wall, Katrina covered her ears hoping the block out the terrible advance of their pursuers. As the pounding footfalls ascended the unstable staircase, the rending of rotten wood was lost among the racket of the elated gang.

Another crash issued barely meters from their own feeble hiding place, followed closely by another spray of laughter and gunfire.

Suddenly the apartment was filled with the splintering of chipboard, the firm hand across her mouth the only thing preventing the youngster from screaming as the foot appeared through the door. Curses foul enough to curdle milk rebounded as the owner of the appendage struggled to detach himself from the doorway, returning a solid blow that knocked the offending obstacle clean off its runners.

Through the terminally opened door, a snarling red face appeared, the livid scared smile across its cheeks casting no reflection on the fury of the humiliated ganglander.

Hungry eyes swept the empty room, finding nothing to sate an appetite for violence but an old mattress and crumbled furniture. Unstated, the feral man turned and ran screaming into the next available target, the sound of tortured metal braking free from ancient plaster following the two retreating figures through the yellowing smog of Salem.

When it comes to unfinished projects, you can call me Mistress Artha-Job. One of the main reasons why I never complete stories is my constant desire to return to previous chapters and rework them. Before forging ahead with a venture dear to my heart, I’ve first got to brake this cycle and prove to myself that I CAN see a story through to its conclusion.

Thus this story is a personal challenge to myself and comes with some self imposed rules;

1: Once a chapter is published, I cannot return and edit it into oblivion. Changing spelling is okay but no major alterations. I’ll just have to live with the stigma of poor characterization and horrendous sentence structure.
2; I will endeavor to develop the story in both readability and appeal with each successive chapter, applying any constructive criticism I’ve received and generally trying to improve my writing skills on the whole.
3: At least one chapter (1000 words or more) must be posted every week, forcing me to keep pace. Given that Thursday is my last proper day off in each working week, we’ll use that as the deadline.

If I stray from any of these self imposed restrictions, especially the one on timing, feel free to badger the heck out of me (Please find your badger enclosed in the standard Fimfic commenter’s package).

First Draft

by Cherry Rie

Toy Soldier