Little Lost Robot, A piece a fiction, about Ally Spirits and dead people. Options

[hyzmarca]

Little Lost Robot

It feels strange, being dead. You get used to it, eventually, but you never forget those first few days.

Back then, I'd spend hours just staring at my hand, the flesh one, flexing it, examining its movements, counting the lines, and pontificating the nature of existence. Was I me? Was I it? Was I flesh and blood, neurons and synapses, animated by an amnesiac demon as Simon described it? Or was I spirit and soul, an amnesiac demon wearing a suit of flesh and thought. I didn't know. I still don't know. But back then I actually cared.

Death isn't a painful thing. Before I died, I was no stranger to pain. I had half my body cut off and replaced with metal so that I could dish out more of it, and every surgery hurt worst than the last. The parts of me that were still flesh were riddled with scars, from bullets, knives, and burns. But death was just a single punch. My skull hurt his hand more than it his hand hurt my head; it was barely uncomfortable. And yet that punch set off a chain reaction of swelling and bleeding that left my higher functions intact, along with my memories, but destroyed those portions of my brain that hold my heart to beat and my diaphragm to draw air into my lungs. I didn't even notice it.

Simon tried to keep the medical records from me; he was always controlling and manipulative like that. But I found them, he wasn't very good at hiding things; he was too book smart and not enough street smart. The doctors were able to get my heart and lungs going again, but by then it was too late. "Spirit Death" they called it. I was physically all there, but some metaphysical component that let all of my parts work together, to move around and walk and talk, to think toughts and feel emotions, that was gone. Their only solution was to remove life support. Simon, however, was more radical in his approach to things, and a very skilled magician in his own right. A few bribes kept them from issuing a death certificate and allowed him to take my corpse home with rented life-support equipment.

And so I just sat there, staring at my hand, for hours at a time.

I knew that I was different, but I didn't understand how different I was. Some of it was obvious; I saw everything differently, there was a whole new beautiful frightening world overlaid onto that I knew all my life. Others, were less so; Simon had given me skills and knowledge that he felt would be useful, but I really didn't know what I could do or what I knew until I tried. The first time I identified a 2,000 nuyen bottle of wine by taste was far more frightening than the first time I saw a ghost zipping through my bedroom.

I had powers, too, and those came in handy on my runs. I was stronger, faster, and smarter than ever before. I knew how to cast spells, even one that would make me fly. And I could do other things, too. One time I just walked around this laboratory waving at everyone I saw and telling everyone that "these aren't the droids you are looking for". I must have had at least fifty people wondering around looking for droids without knowing why.

But I really didn't understand how different I was until Simon made me mad one day and I was about to smack him upside the head. But I didn't. It wasn't that I stopped myself. My brain was telling my fist to plant itself behind his face. It's just that my fist wasn't moving. I could do anything else, I could smash anything else. I just couldn't hit him.

Simon laughed and explained it to me. A side effect of the procedure that he used to revive me. I was his Ally, and as such I couldn't do anything to harm him, no matter how much I wanted to. He explained something else to me too, that I couldn't disobey him, no matter how much I wanted to. But he didn't take advantage of that, not immediately.

I knew one thing, though; I didn't like being what I was. I didn't have the guts to kill myself, but I wasn't going to let Simon bring me back a second time if another run went bad, not like this. So I called a called my street doc and asked him if he had any cranial bombs, area effect; if some bastard killed me again I wanted it be be the last thing he did. The surgery was quick and easy, the doc connected the bomb to my biomonitor and set it to go off if I died. It would obliterate my brain leaving nothing for Simon to salvage, and it would kill anyone nearby. That was the plan, anyway, but while I was on the table, I though about Simon, about what he told me, and I had the doc add a second setting, just in case.

The inevitable happened after a run. When we got back to the hideout Simon ordered me to strip. I look at him like he was I mad man, but my body moved on it's own accord, deftly removing my clothes. I screamed at him, but I couldn't stop myself. I yelled and I spat as his hands roamed over my body. I told him that he'd die if he did that to me. He just told me to shut up; and I did. And I did everything else he told me to do.

The funny thing about being an Ally Spirit is that weapons don't have much effect on you unless they're magical. I was surprised to learn that this is true even when they're implanted in your skull. It took months of recuperation and dozens of surgeries to rebuild my face, but I survived. Simon did not fair so well. And now I have a little joke about how I have explosive orgasms.