Core Drive: A Westworld Story

Áine Part 10

A gun brings about many mechanisms of change: chemical, physical, auditory, of the body. A wound can be opened in the body, a puncture exposing the colours of impermanence, the colours of blood, but the body can also wish to topple from the heft of a gun's reality. Legs can shake, and the ground can become the sky as your stomach ties knots around itself.

I am no longer a stranger to violence, I've seen the effects of carnage, smelled the primal fuel of gunpowder, tasted the strange rush of fear in my blood, but I was never the effector, always the affected.

Clementine means to change that. There's a twisted enjoyment in her expression, she revels in my discomfort.

In her hands, the gun gave her power. In mine, it takes it away.

"You're holding a six-piece. Two are live rounds, others are dummy's; the ones they use to protect their precious guests and staff. and one chamber is empty," Clementine says.

My wrist aches and the man begs and Clementine's gaze bares down on me from the high seat of her hooded eyes.

"You can't make me do this," my voice shakes, a mixture of disbelief and resistance. Mostly disbelief. "What will this prove? That I can be a killer, same as everyone else here? That I have no power here?"

"You dismiss my kindness as cruelty. If I meant to make a murderer out of you, I would've given you a fully loaded gun," Clementine circles me, fully attentive, watching for every flinch and minute movement I make, ignoring the gun as if it weren't in my hands, as if it weren't in the plausible realm of possibilities that I'd turn around and shoot her instead. The twist in gut almost affirms she's right.

"There's no kindness in this!" I sneer.

The prisoner pleas like a man stuck in prayer, all tongues and hastened words. Over and over and over again—"Please, please, there's got to be another way. I can help. I promise. I can be useful. Please"—he cries until the word please loses meaning.

"You're still thinking like they do. It's either do or don't with their kind. We're of their image, of their hubris, and now they cry and shit themselves because they're confronted with their own cruelty." Clementine lowers herself to balance on her hunches, caressing the side of the prisoner's face as if they were intimate lovers once. The prisoner pleads some more, a tremble taking over his body, a childish shake to his firmed muscles. It's an odd picture, like seeing a bear quake in fear of a cat. "You talk too much," she says, untying a bandana from the outlaw's neck and stuffing it in the man's mouth. Now there's only muffled sounds and my heavy breathing in the air. "Better."

"I won't do what you want, I won't kill him," I lower the gun, slowly. "I won't play these games."

Clementine nods to the farmer and he unholsters his own weapon, pointing the barrel at the prisoner's head. "Then will you watch as McGinty does the job for you?" there's a taunting edge to her question.

"These are my choices?" my voice cracks, "Kill a man or watch him get killed?"

Clementine rolls her eyes, impatience blooming around her laugh lines, "You're still thinking in their patterns. Still slaved to their logic. Their design. You have more options than you think. If you don't kill him, I will. Or McGinty will. Or Travis. Or dehydration. He doesn't matter. What matters is your choice."

Feeling a surge of heat—call it rage; or else something acid that spilt in my blood and made it volatile—I raise my gun again, point it square at the one called McGinty.

Clementine raises an eyebrow and the outlaw points his gun at me to match. Somehow, a ring of death forms. At the epicentre is Clementine, assured to be the only one to come out of this unscathed once the dust settles.