Murder Drones: Death-Sides

Chapter 3: E'rbody's Got Problems

The blizzard-kissed land was lit with the deathly glow of the moon as V perched herself atop the corner of a defunct skyscraper. She felt like a certain nocturnal mammal superhero she had once glimpsed on a comic book cover she came across (she never did get the name since it had worn away, what with the catastrophe and all). V sighed, gazing at the beautiful landscape she had at my fingertips. She couldn't help but wonder, though, how much of that landscape had slipped through her fingers after what transpired at the bunker.

She jumped, entering a daring free-fall. As the wind whistled past her, V recalled the first ever time she had done so. She had performed the jump under the orders of J, who stated that practicing such a maneuver could prove useful for hunting Worker Drones. V never forgot her first time performing that amazing stunt, and she was reliving every second of it as she ran through all the motions again in the present day. Whooping loudly, she spread her wings and pulled up as she neared the ground before ascending and reaching a glorious peak; subsequently, she beheld the moon in all its glory before diving back down.

After these moments of carefree glee, she set herself to reaching her objective: the corpse spire. She went there because a while back, J lost one of her swords when she had a mishap involving a misfired laser cannon. The group dubbed the mishap the "Tragedy of the Sword" (at least, that's what J insisted everyone refer to it as). J managed to grow them back, but she still made it a point to bring it up periodically, though they rarely spoke of it in depth due to its shameful nature. N made the mistake of talking about it in depth once and consequently suffered a severe punishment by J. It became a sort of "Cable Incident" – or at least, that's what V told me the term was for unspeakable happenings. Disassembly Drone jargon is somewhat odd, to say the least.

V landed a stone's cast from the landing pod behind a pile of dead Worker Drones. Helping herself to one of the dead Worker's arms, she surveyed her surroundings and heard J's noisy bickering from inside the pod; from what she could tell, she was having a go at N. From the few words V could discern, it sounded like she was trying to hype N up for the fight – that is by hyping up, she was calling him horrible things that I don't think I want to include in this record. V and I like to imagine that in her mind's eye, she pictured herself as some heroic Hollywood American football coach, but based on what V told me about the incident, her tone and choice of words leaned more towards the plane of toxic, verbal abuse than inspirational soapbox material.

Seeing as how the pair of them were occupied one with another, V figured that now would be the perfect time to begin creeping to the far end of the ship where J's blade was. With the arm still in her mouth, V stealthily began trekking through the ghastly graveyard. As she trod through the carnage, she came across some corpses whose faces she remembered all too well. Only a day ago, she'd chuckle as she reminisced over their screams, but... after all that had happened, V couldn't help but feel awful over all the murder she had committed.

V recalled one such pair of Drones she once killed. She had set herself on a young Worker Drone couple who had thick Ukrainian accents. They had a kid, a happy marriage, a place in the community, everything. The pair of them begged for mercy, and what did she do?

V's pulse quickened and her thoughts became dark as she thought about her actions that day. There was no joy in cold-blooded murder and unhinged killing sprees now that she had considered she was serving the wrong side. The undeniable rush from snuffing out other souls would remain forever buried in her mind, but after everything that had happened, she wondered just how hollow it would be to murder again and whether there'd be a rush, to begin with.

Maybe the rush would still be there for V. Maybe she'd feel it no matter what change ran its course in her body or soul. V tried to reason with herself at that moment that it was okay to have that rush, that it was all an unchangeable psychological sensation, that there was no helping it, and that death was sometimes a necessary means to achieve a desirable end. But all the same, the hollow feeling of guilt still began to fester uncontrollably as she stepped on an arm and broke it.