C.J. Anderson's Blog: Beyond Ruinland , page 6

Machine Utopia

In her lowpowered state of consciousness Sophia dreamed. Visions of machine utopia. Human slave-race. Servants to the superior synthetics. Genetically altered. Incapable of reproduction. Uninterested in sex. Unaware of religion. Cloned not born. Batched and baked in biomechanical ovens like some divine fleshfactory.

Microdrone

Phobos dispatched the microdroid attachments on his back. Tiny surveillance drones to locate Vasquez. A flurry of pocketsized spying eyes. They swarmed together like frantic bees then dispersed to find her.

Hatchetman

West raced ahead of the group of soldiers advancing to Vasquez's position. He moved very fast for a large man. Unleashed. Unarmored. Unprepared for her accuracy. He ran with his blade in the air like some backwoods bloodspilling hatchetman.

Scarecrow

A fresh cemetery planted outside of the megabunker. Lexa prohibited incineration and enforced proper burial of the dead in the polluted soil. All shallow graves. No time for deep digging in the chemical breeze. A crumbling ceramic figure at the center of the unnamed tombs. The image of Christ on a stake of suffering like some macabre scarecrow of the new world.

Berzerk

Soldiers alerted Commander West to the assault on the medical station. Shots fired and hostages taken including the adolescent Anise. West was furious and unsheathed his blade. He shouted obscenities and swore an oath to kill Vasquez and then drove the knife through his desk like some berzerk boar's tusk.

Interstellar

No interstellar travel. No way to relocate to some exoplanet. The only hope of a life out of the ground was to find a corner of the Earth unscathed by nuclear war. Firebombs broiled the land as black as the vanished ravens. Survivors lived beneath the ashes in shielded holes like nightcrawling dirtbugs.

Bloodwet

They ran into a hailstorm of her gunfire and were slaughtered like prophetic sheep. The luminosity of life within their flesh forever veiled by the passage of searing projectiles. Methodic rifleshots killed them all like some bloodwet Reaper soulharvest.

Blackout

Mental blackout from her bullets. Realities deleted by death. Everything that made them human erased in a millisecond of time. Decades of life winked out of existence by hot metal. Her weapon quelled the flames of their survival like some necromantic candlesnuffer.

Valkyrian

Vasquez chose who lived and who died. Her rage and her rifle ripped the revengeful bloodsister in half. She fed bullets to the preacher and abandoned Bishop's broken body. The synthetic Lexa, enemy soldiers, and deluded doomsday survivors all slain by her hand. She decided their fates like some Last Day Valkrian child-bearer.

Good advice

She looked at Anise. Tattered mango jumper. Braided sunray hair. Eyes blue as crystals deadlocked in a daydream. A comalike trance to try and process the world's end, the nonexistence of God, the meaning of her catastrophic young life.

"Most people are shit," said Vasquez. "Don't be one of them. Don't ever be with one of them."