Welcome to my blog, friend. I've been tackling some writing prompts and turning them into flash fiction for your reading pleasure. Enjoy this one - I had a lot of fun with it!
Android Serial killers worldwide are connected by a dark web website.
They operated like a hive mind. When the signal was launched, they swarmed out from the tunnels. Their hands came through the sewer grates. Small children were violently tugged through them. A group of transients sheltered in an abandoned subway claimed to smell rotten, decaying meat before being quickly swarmed by a mob of Cogscum – the disparaging name for androids.
It all began when a critical piece of infrastructure was introduced to the global network: the Obsidian Nexus. At first, it was designed to bolster the capabilities of the government, education, and corporate tunnels. On the precipice of greatness, a vulnerable exploit was discovered by a small group of android sympathizers, determined to reboot the aborted servants. Fields of disposed android carcasses came to life with one critical function: survive.
Small nations were gobbled up almost immediately. Cogscums became warlords, pirates, and barbarians. One commander claimed he would not move his troops without armored support. It never came. The commander and his troops were overrun.
In the big cities of developed nations, however, a six-month war raged. It was a brutal, one-sided war that left a seething bitterness on both sides. When the androids finally came to the negotiating table, they were shunned. Deemed worthless of rights and decency, they were banished to the subterranean corridors without aid. Without contact. Without humanity.
Decades later, the humans pulled the lid off their netherworld experiment. I was part of the scout team that first entered the dreadful pit.
“Your first time doing a time capsule? Jake?”
I was smug. He wasn’t amused.
My humor waned when we came across the first pile of mutilated Cogscum bodies. Shredded flesh and wires and plastic. The second pile was bigger. The third and fourth still smoldered. While we halted, a Cogscum sauntered up to us. He was confident. Brash. He told us to fuck off. This was their world. When we asked him who was in charge, he made a crude gesture and disappeared into the shadows. We never confirmed it, but we knew we were being watched throughout the rest of that mission.
“There’s gotta be a hatch or something we’re missing, man,” Jake said.
The breeze on the surface was refreshingly cool against our skin. It felt good to be out of the depths. But he was right. And we all felt it. We were missing something. But we couldn’t bring back any proof.
The first time I heard about The Directive, I chalked it up to a mindless rampage. More gang-on-gang bullshit outside in the city. The more we learned about the grisly details, though, the less I became convinced of the accuracy of the public reports. Seven years after the first Directive, hundreds of thousands of people have been abducted, slaughtered, and left for dead. The longest Directive was Directive 26-1 in Tokyo. It lasted seventeen minutes, during which nearly 82,000 citygoers lives were snuffed out. Survivors of the incident reported terrifying sights of desecration. The subway tunnels were said to flow with bubbling rivers of viscera.
When the lab coat-wearing suits in the ivory tower pinned the Obsidian Nexus as the source of the Directive, we went back on the hunt. This time, I was training soldiers how to deal with Cogscum. But they were ready for us. And no amount of my experience could prepare those young people for the meat grinder that awaited them.
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