Oktober Mermaids

Coastal Terminator

We thought we'd escape the rogue clockwork by running to the sea.

Three mechaneers, and none of us wanted to admit to the other that the tesseract-based gear was a sorry idea. We just wanted to flee the half-dozen floating red eyes that escaped from our workshop, ignoring the screams of the citizens murdered by our creation.

"Why though, Dr. Ein," Al sputtered, "did you give it three sets of eyes?"

Ein's grin was wide and toothy. "So it could see three-dimensionally, of course."

Al started, "That's not—"

But he was cut off by the lingering, beady red glow of the clockwork monster Ein aptly named the Terminator. The eyes appeared, then vanish, chilling all of us.

Since I'm Ein's assistant, I at least attempted to talk him out of that name—but I'm not persuasive enough to convince a mad scientist about many things.

As the sea sweeps the beach behind us, and the silver-gray fog blankets the city on the other side of the concrete wall, I feel suspended between the origin of life, and the last machine mankind will ever create—Life 3.0, metallic, steamy, without flesh. So I mutter, "We shouldn't have made this thing..."

"If we didn't," Ein says, "it would've come to pass eventually. Now we can say it's our creation!—you wouldn't want to leave it in the hands of all those coal-diggers, or the fools with the combustible muskets..."

"You mean gunpowder?" Al stammers. "I was just experimenting with it the other day—"

Ein grabs his shirt, sneering, "You brought the devil's ashes into our laboratory?"

"Maybe that's why the Terminator woke," I say. "Perhaps, this is our punishment for dabbling in the wrong science..."

"Science is not evil," Ein retorts. "But gunpowder is," as he narrows his eyes at his colleague.

"I may have put some in the Terminator," Al continues hastily. "The water-based device in his arm seemed better with—"

Then the six neon-red lights appear again, like floating crystals in the wash of fog. They're poignant, approaching. I shrill and run, the older gentlemen following behind me.

I know it's hard to believe I could survive that monster, when it gunned down the other two mechaneers in the deep of the night.

But I swear, as I tripped in the bone-white sands, collapsed on my hip, and curled up to die, the monster walked up to me—offered a metallic arm—and lifted me to my feet.

Then it stared at me, hard.

It howled in agony.

"Not one of us," it cackled through puppet-like jaws. "Not right. Not fair."

And it walked into the sea, never looking back.

♦️

First draft: October 18
Word count: 469
Inspired by: The Halloween Vault contest, "The Hunt," located here:
https://my.w.tt/nTLcpNaHaR