The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Fifty-Two

For some people, Memory was a stealthy and relentless assassin of character, a quiet and intimate killer with a garrote wrapped around one's throat. Try as they might, as defiant as they could be, a person could not escape the insidious tightening of the noose as Memory strangled them, revealing them to be as they truly were during the most desperate of times: anxious, anguished, wretched and afraid. The brutality of Memory could drain a person's courage and make even the strongest of men and women fall weak to their knees, little more than breathless craven animals fighting to retain that one last moment of self-respect and honor. It was a murderer of Ego, a mirror revealing the appalling and ruinous stains marking a person's fragile soul.

So it was with Draekasen Se'nurqille Predayas frae'Bluhd, the Knight more recently known by the name "D'Spayr".

Upon staring into the face of Emaris Staurqe, D'Spayr was assaulted by a veritable torrent of harsh recollection going back several orbital solar heliars...

*** There, in the gloom and darkness of the underground laboratory's vast oval-shaped specimen operating-arena, they'd lined up the few survivors against the ceramic-tiled, blood-spattered walls, making doubly sure to keep their long-barreled particle beam weapons at the ready in anticipation of further hostility and continued resistance. The place reeked with the harsh aromas from spilled chemicals, burnt wire insulation, slagged metal and the stench of burnt flesh. The arena floor was littered with splintered and collapsed debris, the remnants bio-lab telemetry consoles, computer workstation terminals, attenuated robotic appendages and overturned tables of chemical beakers of different shapes and sizes --- and bodies, lots of unmoving, mortally injured bodies.

The Key-Matrix had been destroyed. The multi-channeled, hydroponic Rudimatron-Incubatarium, which was by definition a clinically antiseptic, biologically-cloistered secure environ, had been savagely breached, then partially immolated and pulverized by coherent-weaponry blaster fire. The fragile ecology of the massive amniotic artificial womb had been violated beyond salvation and its extraction-gates had been forcibly disassembled... Even the Monsignor-Attendates, that unflappable team of tireless, single-minded android midwives, had not been spared the extreme violence unleashed inside the facility. Death was everywhere.

How the hell had it come to THIS? He could not understand how things had unraveled so badly and so quickly.

It was not one of his prouder moments.

Of the original force of seventeen members of the Emperium's Armed Extra-Territorial Crisis Protectorate, the action-arm of the Hegemonic Bio-Ethics Judiciary Council's "Ministry of Racial Alignment", there were only the himself and four others of his regimental brethren who yet remained standing. Of the seventy or so synthetic, biological gene robots, or "gene'bots", who had been gathered within the confines of the specimen-operating arena in the bowels of Teshiwahur's Forge-Enclave Prime Center, only eleven remained alert and active.

Nearly three heliars ago, they, the rebels, had demanded the Forge-Enclave's Rudimatron-Incubatarium be shut down and its latest crop of Kodespawn be destroyed before they could be implanted with service-engrams. The rebels had not wanted their newborn brethren brought into the world imprinted with the ID-centric bio-coding that programmed them to be little more than robotic slaves of the Emperium. The rebels, who brazenly had called themselves 'The Prometheuns', had collectively turned their backs on their creators, deciding for themselves that as bio-synthetic mutant human-variants, they had the right to choose their own personalities and establish their own personal and cultural destinies. They did not see themselves as true citizens of the Emperium, but instead as a separate species and culture abused, exploited and tyrannized by the World-Father and his minions. So they had collectively refused to do as they had been commanded, they had refused to follow the rules laid out for them, they had refused to accept being considered as nothing more than soulless clockwork machine people. So they had chosen to fight back.