Unnatural

CHAPTER 3

  He had brought a couple Homunculi down with him to soften the blow, but the debris came crashing down upon him all the same. Sharp pains attacked his torso and right leg. What kinda firecrackers is this madman using? At least his infinitely curious mind knew now why the lock was so vulnerable. Regardless of where the bomb had been planted, he would be a sitting duck in that trap.

  For all his life, Uriah had scoffed at the melodrama of those who suffered physical pain. Such sensations last for a few fleeting moments and can be soon forgotten, but emotional suffering lasts forever. It has power over people’s relationships and their very character with which no bodily scars can be compared. Indeed, death itself seemed not so frightening to him when he thought about it. At least he would never be bored or hurt in a state of nonexistence, whatever that was supposed to mean.

  That was then.

  This was now, when pain was exacting its revenge upon the man who had insulted it as much as he had all its other victims. Yes, it really was extremely uncomfortable to have your legs fractured and your chest pummeled. It really was downright terrifying to see the prospect of death staring you down when you were a helpless mess. And it really was more important to him then that he was trapped under a six-story building’s worth of rubble, than that his conscience would have to deal with the tormented cries of starving dogs and thirsty cats for the rest of his life.

  Uriah felt like crying.

  He’d never been much of a weeper even at his father’s funeral. He knew he would hate himself later for having such egocentric tear ducts, but his immediate concern was, How do I make it out of this deathtrap alive, dammit?

  When the agony became the norm of his existence, he turned his head. A Homunculus was there, glory be. He shouted in intermittent bursts, “Homunculus, I need you to get into the open air if possible. Universal minus SU-76 and seventy-nine. Confirm?”

  “Confirmed, sir,” said an android a few feet away from Uriah and the two on top of him, whose following suit would bury him. He heard some shifting and the displacement of construction material, though he couldn’t see it. Sounds of futile resistance to a pile of matter simply too compact followed. This pattern recurred in two other directions. Either the remaining robot wasn’t functional or Uriah’s command was inaudible through a dense wall of department store.

  He breathed a quiet sigh. So this was it. Screwed over by a sociopath’s brain trapped in a Libertas body, which would have saved his life if folks like this sociopath hadn’t replaced him with robots in the first place. Don’t think things like that.

  That image of Perry laughing, amid the auditory backdrop of Andy’s shrill whines, flashed into the forefront of his mind without warning. All the wasted time and effort, which had landed him here, didn’t help matters.

  Was there something about the natural human body that made the mind more than the sum of its parts, some “soul” that one had to sell in order to transition to the painless life of an Unnatural? If there was, now Uriah was not so sure he’d refuse to sell it. Maybe a synthetic body couldn’t protect a person from the Housekeeping, but one could hardly deny that it made the finite life more livable, after having confronted the humbling potency of profound discomfort.

  Perhaps spiritual suicide wasn’t, in fact, necessary to be free from the mind-torturing power of the human body itself. Perhaps it was possible to afford respect to sufferers of psychological discontent without denying it to the physically afflicted. Regardless, Uriah would be both for the last of his days, hours, minutes alive if he resigned to his fate there.

  “Try harder!” he cried. The robots moved in vain. Christ. “Okay, new plan. Homunculus, are you connected to a network of Metrauto androids, beyond the ones from Aberdeen High?”

  “Positive, sir.”

  “Is there a way you could send an SOS to the nearest Homunculus?”

  “Certainly, sir. I will send it immediately.”

  And now we wait. For three hours. He prayed the Mystery Bomber hadn’t planted any more surprises on the way from Aberdeen to Sloan.

  At least, to occupy him, Uriah had the puzzle of how the bomber survived when no other Unnatural did. But then, you might as well ask how he himself had pulled the same Apocalypse Houdini for the Organic race.