Core Drive: A Westworld Story

Áine Part 17

I scavenge from the corpses like a vulture. Picking at buckles and loosening ties so I can fasten them to my own body; armour that didn't stop the Deputy's knife from opening mouths of blood in human skin.

I try to clean the sticky, sap-like consistency of blood from a tactical vest with the rag I fashioned out of a guest's dress.

A twig snaps and I turn in the direction of the sound. The Deputy doesn't react, she stares at the moonlight bouncing off the water. Chewing on tobacco and drinking from a cantina. I hear the same noise again, this time further into the unknowable darkness, past a row of trees.

Wings flap above me, stark and white. The dove—my dove—perches on a branch turned towards the noise.

My ghost reappears, and oddly enough, there's reassurance in the fact this is all in my head. My insanity has structure. There is order to my chaos. I laugh unexpectedly. I hear the Deputy hum in question behind me, but she doesn't inquire further.

"You always despised me, didn't you?" my ghost asks the air. There's an odd glow around his figure, bioluminescent almost. Like the light refracted through glass onto skin. My ghost disappears and then abruptly reappears on the ground, leaning against a tree, a phone in his hand. "Because I have so much of her. Not Juliet. The daughter who took on your image. But me, the son you couldn't tame with a rod. I remind you of how your cruelty broke her. How she refused to remain under your thumb despite all your power. She made you less than powerless. She made you worthless. Worth less than me. That's why you hate me. Isn't it? I'm your monster and that means I'm the reason everyone leaves."

The ghost goes quiet. Eyes wet and glassy. He holds back a whimper and turns to face me. His face runs through a myriad of emotions. Confusion. Sadness. Relief. Softness. Fragility. He seems on the brink of breaking.

I feel the urge to go towards him. The steps I take are like possession. Each is the movement of another, and yet it is my body that complies. There's no one else around but me and the Deputy and her horse and my dove and my ghost.

I bend down near the man, take the phone from his hand and something in me shakes to the very core. I can feel him. Feel heat from his skin. Feel the texture. The softness. Smell the lingering scent of alcohol and sweat and the salt in tears. I smell stagnant water too. The wax on floors. The strange tang close to blood when metal oxidises. I smell the area. Taste it. Hear the ragged breaths he takes. Feel the hopelessness in his gaze.

I press the red icon on his phone and delete the voice message.

"I'm right here," the emphasis in the words implies more than I can comprehend. Even my voice quivers. There's a sharpness to whatever emotion I'm feeling. It overwhelms me, threatens to wrack my body and leave me immobile. Frozen in the confusion of feeling. Is this what it is to be like them? Like God. Like Man. Overbearing and raw and so powerful it paralyses the body? I want to shake my head, but I'm stuck in the moment. The words aren't finished yet. There's more to be said. "And I am—"

I'm wrenched away by a forceful pull to my feet.

I gasp at the sudden loss, but I don't know why it is a loss.

"Wha—" I protest.

The Deputy shushes me, pointing towards the encircling trees around us. Slowly I see as she does. Bodies. Painted bodies that almost melt into the landscape. At least six pairs of eyes are open and gawking. Not squinted in a predatory manner, but not open in welcome either.

I realise what we are to them before the Deputy says it. We're trespassers.

"Are they a threat?" I whisper.

Her jaw flexes before she answers, "I don't know. The last time I dealt with their kind... we weren't friendly. Neither of us." The Deputy wrings me back by the arm and I realise she's frightened of a face in the trees. She recognises one.

I'm still raw from seeing the ghost. My mind is still reeling from being disconnected and with the Deputy's state being so raw and open, and my need to connect, to find the end of the story that was unfinished, I unintentionally steal hers.

The Deputy grunts, flung back as if by some invisible hand. At first, I think she's been hit by a weapon, but I heard no gunshot, saw no knife and heard no arrow whistle.

"I ain't no lawman no more. I'm a family man. I leave that business to the likes of you fine folk," the Deputy says with a thick drawl. "No price is gon' change that."

I rush to her side and fall to my knees, I hear a chorus of something falling around us, but I pay no heed. I grasp the Deputy's face and her eyes barely register me.

Skin to skin, there's a cushion of electricity growing between us and then my eyes suddenly roll to the back of my head.

A new rush hits me. I see flashes of a narrative. A gold rush. A wife and a child in a homestead. A man on the foot of porch steps. Sometimes a woman. Sometimes a band of strangers. Each stranger tosses a deputy's star towards a man. Then it's a flurry of heat and metal and the smell of gunpowder. Sound of guns. Violence on violence. Killing in the canyons. Scalping. Endless deaths. Endless life anew. Then, an explosion rips a body apart. And suddenly there's a man in a woman's body in a whore house. Then the man is erased and just the woman in a woman's body in a whore house remains. Then more violence. More gunpowder. The instinct to pull the trigger never abates. The instinct to protect perseveres. This undeniable urge to seek what is longed for casts an impossible shadow over each new day. To long for a family. To hold a wife close by the fire and tuck in a baby boy in a house by a homestead. But the homestead burns and the face of the wife doesn't remember the man behind the face of a whore. So, she murder's the new deputy, the new man playing the deputy with a wife and a son and a home on the homestead. She steals his badge and gives herself a new name, a new title. The Deputy.