Further North

Epilogue

"Julian...?"

"Cleo? Is that you? Do you still love me?"

"Fool! Don't you see now that I could have poisoned you a hundred times had I been able to live without you?"

Cowards die many times before their deaths, yet the valiant never taste of death but once.

I'm sorry, my love...I'm sorry...

——

The sound of machinery buzzed around the young man who walked besides black body bags filled with humanoid robots on flat tables with wheels, checking and scribing each and every one of them on his clear tablet, yet, despite how many times he had done such a task, today he finally felt his curiosity take the best of him.

It hadn't been twenty minutes into this next batch of bags when he noticed a foul smelling liquid seep from one bag. Tentatively, he unzipped the bag to see a perfect, calm composed face of Julius Cesar, but out of his back panel, the liquid seemed to leak out through a crack in his head. The boy reached out and opened the panel with slight difficulty, but what presented itself to him shocked him senseless. At first, the young man stood still at the unbelievable state of the brain throbbing in the container, then he went to the next body bag, unzipped it and opened the back panel of a young woman to yet again find a human brain. And the next and the next, then—the young boy ran to his supervisor twenty aisles next to him, dropping and inevitably breaking his glass tablet. He ran besides dead human brains harvested from who knows where and who knows from—running and running until the supervisor—a silver fox—turned to the shaken boy and comforted him.

"Sir!" The boy heaved a much needed breath, "they're—I'm mean—alive—it's just—"

The older man hushed the boy. "Now, sonny, what's wrong?"

"They're human!" The boy finally mustered.

It took both the boy and the supervisor to uncover the brains fully; the older man standing still while the boy fidgeted with fear.

"What're we going to do, boss? Who do we speak to about this? No, this can't be happening!"

"Shhh," the older man quietly started, "we'll act like we never found out about this and continue with the dismantle procedures."

"But they're alive still!" The boy tried to reason with himself that he was committing murder.

The supervisor turned to the boy, "oh suck it up, murder isn't that bad, we're not going to jail for this. If anyone asks, we'll just plead innocent and remain oblivious to the situation!" He bent down and picked up a wrench which he gave to the boy, "here, I want you to break open the glass covering and dump the brains into the black rubbish bag there." With his deft movements, the old man continued down the aisle a ways before he began checking inside the skulls of the 'androids' again.

The young man turned back to the emperor of Rome and his brain with huge thick dark red blood vessels that convulsed with every heartbeat. It was a weird, bright pink color and the blood vessels varied in size. The young man found the tube where the blood was pumped through, resting on his spine, and with scissors, the boy clipped and made a small incision in the thick tube.

Red blood gushed from the slit, spilling into the black trash bag. With the scissors again, the boy smashed the thick glass and wiggled the brain from the gaping hole in the metal skull; Red blood clots stuck to the silver inside.

In the young mans hand, quite large for his body size due to his up and coming sudden growth spurt, the brain was quite small for an adults...

Letting his hands curve forward, the brain tumbled from his slimy hands and into the black bag where other brains of varying sizes would soon join it.