Another Part of Me is Missing

(Read the previous story in this two-part series here.)

Fallow-coloured brick steps, the creaking wooden planks of the balustered scaffold, the block – huge & out of place, like a shameful memory intruding on pleasant conversation – being carried over the space between all of these in a dozen laborious seconds. Half of my life, it seems – half of my world & more.

The man (or is it a woman?) wearing the hood stands neither too tall nor too straight: Brethren justice does not boast, it does not make a show of punishment. The witnesses, I know, are only there to represent the Senate’s support of the procedure – there are but very few, all of them old.

. . .

I was a cog in the machine, but saying so does not do justice to the Plethora. She does not think, it is true, & this is our weakness & our strength: our technoetic space does not so easily overflow into the world as those of our enemies. The Plethora needs her Mechanists’ prods, but always she exercises a certain pressure & so: I was a cog, turning under her weight, a fleshy cog carrying out the motions of a clockwork titaness.

Mechanists can’t easily explain to laypeople– nor even to Dancers & Gamers – what it is to be part mind, part software. We have binary intuitions, cravings for functions which have nothing to do with any known organ. We speak & dream gnosis; we surprise ourselves when, unplugged for repose, we think broken thoughts: part of ourselves does not translate outside of the silicon brain.

. . .

It is not that part which is ever at fault; mistakes are all flesh, betrayed by increasing heart rates & shallow breaths while, having been summoned to far-off places, our minds need don bodies of fluid steel & carbon mesh. This we must do always for sabotage, for murder; for war, for the survival of the Operator calling the process. We are cogs in the machine & the machine is a weapon; we obey.

Except sometimes we do not. There was Sylk, there was her prize, & there was the crowd – a crowd, I surmised, of breathing, talking, thinking beings like myself. I did not have the context: I could not know if her orders were justified. But could they ever be? Can it ever be worth it to rain ion-charged shrapnel onto a market square, on the unwitting Subjects standing between the Operator & the needed tech?

Therefore I thought – & there was my mistake. There were Servicemen beyond the square who had no such regard for life. Sylk is dead; I am considered her murderer, though I was a cog all the while.

A cog who is now being replaced. It is a woman in the black hood – I can see it now. Why does she look so much like her?

A sound -- nothing like what I expected.

Another part of me is missing; I feel I must be logging out.