Ekron

The Fall of Ekron 3

Not only transmuted chimeras and electronically enhanced humans lived in Ekron before its fall, but there were also sentient machines, humble servants for Achish and his children. They fulfilled multiple roles, from cooking to teaching and sometimes they even went to war. One of those servants, named Karl-11, was in an apartment at the central levels of the city, teaching history to a six-year-old blonde girl in her bedroom. The parents were chatting in the living room next to them, stupidly deliberating about who would win in a hypothetical fight between Baphomet and Achish.

The girl, named Briella, looked at her mechanical teacher while he talked, a humanoid assembly of wires, ceramic and metallic plaques, with shiny eyes like those of a mouse. She was thinking that her eyes had that glow too, as well as her parents' eyes; the same kind of wires that filled Karl's body sometimes emerged from her skin when she suffered an injury.

She asked Karl-11, interrupting his class, "Am I a machine just like you?"

"Not just like me, I don't have the organic parts that you have."

"Why not?"

"The mechanical and electronic parts that you have, were installed in your body short after you were born, they can't do anything without your control. I was fabricated as a fully electronic and mechanical entity; I don't need an organic controller to my system. Our design concepts are totally different."

Briella was thoughtful for a few moments and then asked playfully "Do you love me?"

"Yes Briella, I love you with all my heart. Shall we continue? There is some controversy about the first atomic bomb detonation, there was an accidental explosion before, but the first real atomic bomb was launched and detonated over Königsberg in..."

A loud cry interrupted the machine and sounds of hissing came from the living room. Karl-11 looked up to the next room and closed the door with a bang. Sirens started to howl, and normal illumination changed into a red light. Briella shouted in panic as the door was charged from outside and Karl-11 was trying to keep it closed pushing it with both hands. Briella sat on the floor covering her ears from the sound of sirens and started crying. Karl-11 took the lamp cord and tied the door handle to a nail in the adjacent wall.

"I will protect you my child," said Karl-11 to Briella.

A powerful charge opened a hole in the door, and the head of a horrific snake or worm loomed up from it. Karl-11 stroke it with his mechanical arms, the creature opened its mouth and hissed with foam coming out of it. A second strike stunned the worm, which face looked strangely familiar to Karl-11. It was at that moment that he noticed a stream of spores was coming out from the foam in the creature's mouth. He looked back at Briella and there she was, convulsing and vomiting in a strange posture, slightly leaning forwards, he rushed to her aid and held her hands, but her eyes had lost her bright, and her arms fell from her body, hanging dead in Karl's hands, who let them go, horrified. Her legs fused together, and her torso enlarged to triple its length, her face took a dumb, inhuman expression and her mouth opened wide revealing that her throat had amalgamated with her jaws to form a cavity, containing black teeth and a repulsive proboscis as tongue. Foam came out of her mouth as she hissed and squirmed like an animal.

The horrid worm whose name was once Briella, charged the door where the head of a stunned worm version of her mother still hung from a hole. Karl-11 opened the door, and the beast went through it in a rush, as if it had so much to do and so little time.

Karl-11's head made a buzz, that lasted a quarter of a second, in that time his electronic brain processed what had just happened, entry shock state and recovered. He slowly walked out of the apartment, while hundreds of pale worms, with cables and circuitry hanging from their bodies, bit each other in a lugubrious game, crawling on the walls with a never-ending hissing that had started to numb Karl's senses.

He got to the central square of Ekron feeling desolated, as other machines like him gathered there in the same state. There was no need to talk anymore, little antennas communicated their dark emotions with each other, as if human contact would have been just a dream, just an excuse to forget they were only machines, soulless, cold pieces of metal. Little red lights attached to their antennas had replaced human touch, and stillness has replaced the loving lullabies they once used to make babies sleep. All that was gone, and they couldn't even cry for their loss.

Achish appeared in the square, silent and unexpressive, just walking as little red lights in his neck connected him with his servants.

"There will be revenge for our loss," he communicated them, because there was a plan, a simple and brutal plan, made a couple milliseconds after the last human in Ekron was transformed into vermin.