Post-Human Trilogy

Finally, the super soldier made it to Sanha, his boot stepping into Sanha’s field of vision, wiping away the painting like a sandcastle in the waves. Sanha gulped hard before lifting his head up, squinting as the overhead lights hurt his eyes.

Aldous watched through Sanha’s eyes as the super soldier looked down at his next victim. He looked like the worst perversion of the man-machine civilization. Straight out of Milton, stood a real life Beelzebub, complete with wings that spread out into a six-foot span. He wore a helmet that covered most of the top part of his face, and he flexed skeletal-looking prosthetic fingers on the trigger of his extraordinarily heavy and powerful rifle, carried by his carbon fiber cybernetic arm.

Worst of all were the eyes—or lack there of. The super soldiers all had their biological eyes scooped out in favor of mechanical ones that were jammed unnaturally into their eye cavities, causing bluish stretch marks to snake outward into ugly, web-like patterns in every direction. The mechanical orbs were too large to simply replace the biological eyes, so the entire extent of skin surrounding the eyes, including their eyelids and the muscles around them, had to be removed. This gave the super soldiers an uncanny lack of facial expression, their eyes appearing almost as black voids. At their center, however, were golden irises that swiveled to and fro.

The irises rotated perceptibly as Sanha looked into them, apparently facilitating some sort of visual process. The super soldier’s eyes remained locked on Sanha for an unusually long period of time, the rifle not firing as expected.

Aldous felt as though he were in a Planck ripple—the time seemingly drawn out inexplicably as he waited for his friend’s life to end. The other executions had, at the very least, been quick. This time, it appeared the super soldier was savoring this one for some reason. Does he know Sanha has a rider? Aldous’s connection was aural only, so the white glow that crossed over the eyes of post-humans while their minds’ eyes were flashing images shouldn’t have been present. Could the super soldier possibly detect Aldous’s presence anyway?

Then, suddenly, the rifle barrel was lifted. “Professor Sanha Cho,” the super soldier announced, almost cheerfully, “today’s your lucky day. You’ve been classified as a VIP.”

“Oh, thank God. Thank God,” Sanha whispered to himself.

“Excuse me for a moment, will you?” the super soldier said as he turned to the post-human kneeling to Sanha’s right and unceremoniously shot him in the temple. Blood sprayed hot on Sanha’s right cheek, before quickly cooling and becoming a cold shock, running down his neck as the super soldier’s execution spree continued.

Suddenly, a harrier transport emerged from above the tree line, headed in Aldous’s direction. It yanked him out of his stunned immobilization and sent his legs springing into action. He turned and ran for the nearest tree, reaching down with his hand to grab a few branches as he thrust himself down into the snow, pulling the branches up over himself like a blanket of camouflage as he did so.

He knew the transport would certainly be equipped with sensors that could detect and recognize a human pattern amongst the trees, but Aldous hoped the snow and branches would be enough to keep the intelligent algorithms from recognizing his pattern.

The transport whizzed overhead, its red laser sensors visible underneath its belly as it passed by, but it didn’t stop.

When a minute had passed, Aldous got up, brushing the snow off of his clothes and exposed skin, and tuned back into Sanha’s mind’s eye.

The last post-human had been executed, and the super soldier was now standing in front of Sanha once again, gazing down at his prey. “Those implants of yours are mighty powerful,” he began as he returned his rifle to his backpack and retrieved the smaller, sleeker disruptor device. “We can’t just keep shooting the damned thing over and over,” he said as he shot Sanha in the lower abdomen, the energy dissipating in his body.

Sanha grunted slightly, but the disruptor wasn’t painful as much as it was uncomfortable, causing the MTF implant to shimmer slightly, resulting in a numbing of the legs, not unlike the experience of people with sciatica. “I mean, I could just assign a guy to follow you around and shoot you every two minutes, but that hardly seems practical. Lucky for you,” he said, grinning as he replaced his disruptor, “there’s an alternative.”

The super soldier held up his clawed, mechanical hand, and the contraption suddenly made an electric whir as it began to spin like a drill, the fingers merging together to form a fine tip. With his free hand, the super soldier grasped Sanha by the back of the neck and forced him down onto his stomach. He clamped down on him with his right leg, placing it on the back of Sanha’s thigh, locking Sanha into position as the drill hovered above Sanha’s lower back.

Aldous had never heard such screaming in his life. It was a shrill pitch that could only be called forth by the worst agony—unimaginable agony.

“No! No,” Aldous whispered.

After a torturously long minute, the screaming stopped, followed only by the sound of Sanha’s wheezing. He shut his eyes several times, preventing Aldous from seeing what was happening. It wasn’t hard to guess, however.

“It’s really quite a beautiful thing,” the super soldier commented in the blackness.

Sanha’s eyes suddenly flashed open, the super soldier having grabbed him by the scruff of the neck once again and pulled him up with one arm, holding the blood-covered MTF generator in the other, displaying it for him.

“Who would’ve thought something so small would cause so much trouble?” He released Sanha and let him fall back to the concrete.

Sanha closed his eyes again, opening them intermittently for brief flashes before they rolled back into his head.

“Stop your whining,” the super soldier demanded. “Those little nanobots of yours will fix any incidental spinal damage I might have caused. You’ll be right as rain in an hour—and a lot closer to being human again.” His lip curled into a sneer. “You’re welcome.”

With his lips quivering from the horror, Aldous held his head in his hands as he considered his options. The logical thing to do was to keep running, but he hadn’t anticipated how difficult it would be to leave his companions. He hadn’t accounted for the emotional element once again—he hadn’t accounted for the horror.

After a few moments, he managed to force his cement legs to resume moving—a slow trot at first, but as he considered the consequences of failure, he began to run hard, nearly sprinting away through the snow.

Suddenly, the super soldier cocked his head to the side, apparently listening to a communique. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Holy…they are tough buggers, aren’t they? What’s the name of the VIP?”

Aldous suddenly froze once again. No. It can’t be.

“Professor Samantha Gibson,” Colonel Paine reacted, repeating the name that had been related to him, his smile suddenly brimming widely. “Well, I’ll be damned. Small world, ain’t it?”

16

“Heaven bless you, Father, I can’t protect you!” the master-at-arms shouted. “Bullets have no effect.”

The priest nodded, understanding the gravity of the evil he faced. He had pocketed a small bottle of holy water when he’d clumsily exited his room, pulled along by the steward that the master-at-arms had sent to fetch him. As he gazed up at the limp body that floated only inches above the ground in the center of the smoking room, he wished he’d brought more—a lot more.

“Glorious Prince of Heaven’s armies, Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle against the principalities and powers, against the rulers of darkness, against the wicked spirits in the high places.” He tossed the first salvo of holy water at the floating apparition.

It seemed to have no effect.