The Tomorrow Solution

The Tomorrow Solution_Part 7

Nira was silent, her lover wrapped around her, and the bed sheets tangled around their limbs; the air damp and hot, sweat slick on their skin, Iris laboured breath shifted her body against Nira's, and as the night stretched thin, an aura of pale blue and gold appeared on the skyscraper-studded horizon. Nira twisted a finger in Iris's hair, letting her hand drift to stroke the side of her lover's breast, delighted by the pink this brought to Iris's cheeks. Happier than she thought she deserved, Nira's remorse intruded on her euphoria, memories stained the colour of blood and echoing with terrible screams. Her will, she feared, was not her own, in which case love and joy that blazed was a product of someone else's design, all she felt a hoax played on her by her programming.

Silence between lovers swells and drifts with a satisfying bliss but may become still and tight in recognition of some intrusion. Nira paused in her affectionate caressing of Iris's autumnal skin, sticky with half-dried sweat; taking her eyes from a cluster of freckles spread like a constellation across her lover's stomach, Nira sat up, allowing the sheet to slip from her body and the warmth of Iris's body to seep from her skin as the cool air drew it away.

Leather boots creaked on the opposite side of her bedroom, betraying the steps that footfalls did not.

"I'm sorry for what's about to happen," Nira said into Iris's ear. She slid off the bed. There wasn't time to hesitate, let alone to dress. From the front pocket of her luggage, she pulled the black handgun with which she killed Isaiah. She cocked the gun, pulling the slide back, careful not to make any unnecessary noise. "Don't move," she whispered to Iris as she took aim at the door, her finger ready on the trigger, waiting for the inevitable moment the door would open and she would be forced to kill again.

Iris didn't dare move. She pulled the sheets up over her with her body pinned to the bed's backboard. The once comfortable quiet in which they basked became tense and confining, anticipatory, trapping them within it. Nira remained still, arm outstretched, gun in hand, her face resolute as she stared down the sight towards the door. Waiting. Seconds passed like tiny infinities. Passing only under protest to the next second, each a struggle, leaving no room between them to draw a breath.

The door burst open, and Nira squeezed the trigger, firing the first shot as a black-uniformed soldier came into the bedroom, his submachine gun raised. Nira's eyes followed the bullet's trajectory as a crown of red spray exploded from the soldier's head. Nira prepared to fire again, and Iris screamed behind her. But no one else came. There was the awful silence once more. And then there was nothing.

Nira collapsed to her bedroom floor, and three soldiers rushed into the room, their leader, a tall man in a balaclava slipped a small electronic device into his pocket, pleased with its effect on the robotic woman, having forced her to completely power down. Iris screamed for help, and one of the soldier's shot her.

A small dart penetrated her skin, and sleep came with great haste as a powerful sedative surged through her bloodstream. A haze eclipsed her vision, and in her final conscious seconds, the leader opened a small compartment on Nira's neck and pressed a button there, a patch of computer components visible beneath her skin, blinking with blue-white lights. Iris thought she was hallucinating, incapable of telling reality from fantasy now. Before she slipped into a deep dark and dreamless sleep, the image of the soldiers' insignia on their shoulders imprinted on her memory. She recognized it, had seen it often. Nietzsche Mechanical's logo was ubiquitous.