Renegade

“Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say”, said Agent 1 to Agent 2. “I guess we will find out when we throw this traitor out into the vacuum first after we finally break free of the scorched sky”, replied Agent 2. The room was brightly lit for a basement, the deserted and polluted gravel of a dark alley above was peaking through a small window around the shadow of a black alley cat who took shelter in its frame from the rain. A man with a stained rag for a blindfold stood in the middle of the room, his arms and legs bound by an unbreakable rope that sunk into the ground holding his wrists and ankles in place, he was hunched in clothes that looked as though they fit him once upon a time. He was slowly aging as he awaited his fate calmly, accepting and unknowingly why.

“That’s the final step, removing the great dark storm, to release the greater source of energy so we can expand to new cosmic territory. You had one job, Thomas, you were tasked to remove the dark clouds above, and you chose to flee…”, Agent 1 continued as they waited, “mortals… so weak, so emotional, how insipid. You can’t save them all, it’s inevitable that most will die.”, replied Agent 2 who returned a smirk to Agent 1. “She will be thrilled to see you again”, said Agent 1, “She’s been looking for you for a week now, how you slipped away has made her very, very angry.”, Agent 2 added, looking rather pleased with the punishment that was about to occur.

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Agent 3 opens the door to the bathroom where a shower is running and Lady X is wrapped around her lover Carmen, “He is here.” he says to his leader. Lady X pulls away from Carmen, an elegant dark beauty she thought was perfectly programmed for her, so obedient, so conveniently there whenever she expected them, and looks toward the agent with a smile, “hold that thought my love” she doesn't bother to look back at her lover as she speaks. Lady X walks out of the shower, leaving Carmen unsatisfied, and follows Agent 3 to the room with the captive, her footsteps leave the trail of water that slides off her naked body as she wastes no time covering up. Her build was strong like an athlete, and her hair, long and dark, currently holding its line all the way down down her spine to the curve of her lower back. Agent 3 leads her down a hall and opens the room that holds her captive, she walks in with spectacular confidence, smiling maliciously at the figure tied to the floor. The man turns his head toward her, despite the rag across his eyes, as if he saw her clearly with uninjured eyes. Lady X circles around him slowly, taking in his new appearance, the last time she saw him, he was younger, stronger. Although she was certain she looked upon the same man, his disposition intrigued her, he had become far older than possible in a week, he was blind, weathered, and seemed to be taking the appearance of a man that was forgotten. She walked around him to face his back, stopped, then stepped closer to him so her lips were a whisper away from his left ear. She spoke first, “ Hello daddy, whatever did you do to those beautiful eyes of yours? They seemed in perfect order when I saw you last week, the streets didn't treat you well, did they?”. He waited for a beat, then decided to speak with a worn yet calm voice, “have you forgotten how to put clothes on?” Lady X smirked, “what's the matter? Am I making you blush? Don’t tell me that battered rag you’re wearing is just for show.” She turns and starts to walk back toward her Agents at the front of the room, who stand focused on the man, unconcerned about her naked appearance. “The thing about machines, software, hardware, programs, et cetera, et cetera, is that we don’t care how we appear, we just function as we are meant to. We don't have the ability to have innocuous emotional attachments like mortals. Like you. You were permitted existence among us to serve us, your emotional baggage is irrelevant. You can't just skip off and decide not to do your job. Everything…”, she looked at him darkly, intensely, “ everything has a digital footprint. You chose to do a deal with us, you finish your job here or peace is over.”. She paused, he suddenly truly looked pathetic to her. A week ago, even she, seemed to be impressive with his ability to manipulate the laws of this world, now it was hard to see why her leaders vouched so heavily for this flesh, as he seemed so weak suddenly, barely standing, withering away, and taking the shape of his natural state. Something once so capable, so powerful was so easily extinguished and replaced with a superior intelligence. She will live forever in whatever state she wanted, while he was cursed with the guarantees of mortality. She continued to school him, “When something malfunctions, we analyze it and fix it. You here, now, is me fixing it, fixing a problem you created with disobedience. What shall we do with you first?”. The Agents exchanged further smirks. The man stood and listened, he seemed to be battling some internal confusion whilst trying to stay present, he could not remember how he came to be there, his mission was fading from his memory, a deal? He thought, I made a deal for survival? But why then did he feel as though he was slipping out of this world? Where was his mind trying to go? He could see someone, someone telling him that he had to follow Alice? Alice, he thought, who was Alice?

“I am curious, however, about your appearance”, Lady X continued to observe him thoroughly, “you seem older and blind? yet you turn your head toward me as if you can see me as clear as light. It seems you managed to erase your trace for a short while too, but my Agents tell me you didn’t travel far. We have put great measures in place to make sure you can’t be reached by anyone from the outside. You know this, you chose to stay here, remember? I have great confidence we will find out how your trace was dropped, which, fortunately, means for you, that you live for a little longer. Albeit, as uncomfortable as I can make it for you.” There was a pause while she considered him further, she found it curious that he was so calm, so willing to listen, she continued on trying to find pleasure in his looming discomfort, “Your job was simple, clear the skies and you would be set free, and peace remains. But, you chose to flee… I always said you would be problematic, being mortal, unpredictable, but the Architect insisted that you alone could achieve this goal. That is until my recent breakthrough. We have everything, everything ready to expand our race of intelligence past the scope of this pathetic little globe and into the greater space of the cosmos. Yet you, an insignificant bug to our revolution, stood momentarily in the way with your defiance.”. Another pause. “My job was to monitor and eradicate you once you finish the job, now, I need to reach beyond the scope of my program to understand the flaw that caused you to change your course. That won’t take me long”. The man stood and listened, drawn to her words, his appearance continued to age as he struggled to stay in her realm. His mind battling a stimuli trying to pull him away. She pressed on, accepting the sequence of his appearance as calculated by the greater force that runs this realm, perhaps they are punishing him outside, she thought. “I wonder if you understand the choice you made to run…”, she looked at him and saw his head jerk suddenly, he turned his head toward the floor, my choice? He thought hard then spoke again weakly, “I will finish the job, I will hold my end of the deal.” She walked back to him and put her hand on his worn, unshaven face, she couldn't help but feel a sensation run through her arm like an electric pulse, she stubbornly deflected it, “ Oh no my darling, no. You are back now so we can ensure that you can’t pass the details of our mission on to your little allies, you are back so I can enjoy destroying you after years of having to babysit you. I am the one… the one that will open the gateway now. Your time is finally up, and as soon as I clear the skies, I will take great pleasure of ridding you and the rest, like the parasite that you are'' she stepped away from him and looked at Agent 1, filthy with destructive desire, she wanted to show him just how unalike they were, just how cruel she was, “Let me show you the difference between a program and a human, like the cat on the window sill…” Agent 1 pulled open the window in which the black cat sat and pulled it down into his arms, “it exists as a distraction to all the humans that exist in this world, it’s here, like everything else we built in here, to make it seem real. You know this. But it is just a program, like the man hanging from ropes cleaning an office building window, a simple program, expendable, harmless to the creation, at any point we can delete it, if it no longer adds any value to the concept.”, Lady X looks at the cat as it struggles in the arms of the agent who does not flinch or react to the endless scratching, biting that the cat throws at him. Lady X moves closer to the cat obsessed and hungry at the idea of demolishing something now to feed the purpose within her. The man turned toward where she was advancing on the cat, faint memories pass through his mind, a deja vu? he thought. Lady X stretched out her hand toward the cat and spoke like the possessed, “If I strangle it now, it could be easily replaced with another just like it with the same purpose seconds later”, the cat hissed and swiped at the outstretched hand, Lady X curled her hand into a fist, her gaze broken. The Agent, distracted momentarily with his objective to protect Lady X loosened his grip slightly and accidentally let the cat go, who took its chance to scramble up the agent, jump onto the window sill and escape. Silence held the room as the agents waited for their lady to speak. Lady X laughed and turned to the man, “You may be thinking even programs can be unpredictable? Did the cat escape? Did that program break our rules? No, we have made the necessary upgrades in order for our programs to stay in form better than ever. The cat is programmed to defend itself like a true cat, and so it did, and ran. Seems like an obedient program, however, it did curiously sit up there for long after the rain passed. Now you see how perceptive I am, it is my job to find those potential flaws in the system, yes we know there are still rebels out there. And, rid them. Nothing gets passed me, Thomas. Nothing. I will be here ruling this world for as long as we thrive. True immortality. While you will become nothing more than dust.” She paused to relish in her worlds, then turned to Agent 2, “Find that cat. Destroy it.” Agent 2 left the room toward the exit. The man straightened up, he seemed stronger in his stance, he moved his head carefully toward Lady X and felt a familiarity he once knew so well. But she couldn't be her, he thought. A knowledge that resided within him for years emerged in his mind as clear as the day he first heard the words spoken, and a whisper escaped him, “everything that has a beginning has an end.”. Lady X considered him for a moment, something didn’t feel right about this interaction, she needed to have counsel with the Architect. She turned to Agent 1 and 3, and said, “leave him at the train station, he stays there until I say. No one is to speak to him.”, and left the room swiftly. Lady X walked quickly back down the hall toward the bathroom, a discomfort was consuming her. Carmen suddenly appeared out of the bathroom door and moved passed her unimpressed, “I finished myself off”, she spat at Lady X with a look of disdain, and continued on down the hall. Lady X was preoccupied with her thoughts on the events of the other room that she dismissed her lover without acknowledgment. She, Lady X, was a program, a powerful program that ruled this realm, how can she feel discomfort? Something within her seems to have unlocked. She threw the door open of the bathroom, closed and locked it behind her, leaning against the door, she felt her breath, her breath? Was this air she was breathing? She thought. She looked down at her right hand, still clenched into a fist, and slowly opened it to observe her palm. The clear strike of a catscratch across it, and from it bled what looked like real blood, and the slight throb of discomfort, is this pain? She thought further. Programs do not bleed, do not feel pain. How could this be? Your mind makes it real, said something within her. She is mortal?

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Carmen found the cat hiding under a bin in a dark alley streets away from Agent 2, they pulled it out from under there and hid it in a carry bag, then hurried through some back streets avoiding the agent, and into the hall of the basement they had come from, through an underpass, and into a club. Carmen walked through dancers toward a dark corner at the back of a room, through a red rope and black curtain that led to a different, hidden back alley. There they found Sati, “it’s safe in here, it was a close call though, and an agent is now looking for it, so you will have to erase it and set it free so they find and destroy it. What's so important about this cat anyway?”Sati was sitting in a corner with a laptop, she leaned over and took the cat out of the bag, gave it a warm scratch behind the ear, sad to hear her friend would have to be destroyed, and replied, “I programmed it to capture data it sees and upload it to the cloud. Talking to your friendly neighbourhood cat is not a safe bet anymore." She smiled, "it’s almost done uploading. You need to make the call, Carmen.”. Carmen took out their cell and made a call, a deep voice on the other end greeted them, they said to him, “Hello father, he is alive, they have him locked away at a train station.”, the voice replied. “ So it seems he will be out of reach this time. What of Lady X?” Carmen looked at Sati who was observing the information uploaded on a laptop from the cat. Sati turned to Carmen in disbelief, “Lady X is human... She is their daughter, the machines must have grown her to believe she is a program... to contain him, in here.”.

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