The snippet may well be as it is as I was using a large sander this morning. Power tools have all sorts of unintended consequences. Anyhow, part 2. I am wondering about a name for this. Suggestions are welcome.
Rumors swirled about the angels. Some said they were all machine with the consciousness of the culprit trapped inside the circuits. Othes said they had enhanced human bodies; that they were cyborgs. No one believed they were people any longer, for they had no free will. A black cloud of fear swirled around her, eating at her mind, for one thing all people agreed upon was that angels lived forever. How much of her personality would be left? Memories of family wouldn’t exist, but what of the rest? She hoped all would be gone for then she wouldn’t know any different.
The door whispered open to admit a guard in a black Banker uniform and carrying a force whip, they type used on harja beasts to make them do tricks for people. Freya tried to swallow in a suddenly dry throat. She wasn’t people; she was a beast.
“Designation number 666, remove all apparel and jewelry, put them in the waste bucket in the corner and then follow me.”
Stars have mercy on her, it had started. Not Freya Blackhome anymore. The name didn’t exist and soon she wouldn’t remember, either. She jumped up to comply when he cracked the force whip, aware the next time wouldn’t be a warning. Her smart clothes for her court appearance were now dirty and smelled of a mixture of sweat and fear. She peeled them off, along with the rings from her pierced ears, dying a little more inside, ashamed of her older body with its sagging breasts and stretch marks. Now she wished she’d let her graying hair grow longer to give her some cover, but no, she’d cropped it in a shoulder bob before the trial, if that travesty could be called a trial.
Head down, not meeting the guard’s eyes, she followed him along a corridor, up a stairwell and onto a roof, where she was crated in a cage for an airlift by a drone, a marked difference from her arrival in the detention center ground runner. Freya didn’t need to search for her location on the skyline. The obsidian Banker’s building towered above all the rest. While not politicians, elected for a set number of years, a Banker held his place in society for life. They held most of the real power, but not all. Now she belonged to them. Sure enough, the drone aimed for the landing pad on top of the ominous building.
Guards in black uniform waited, their force whips ready. Freya didn’t resist, for what was the point? The only place she could have run was off the edge of the building, but they would never let her near there. Her fate wasn’t to die. Her fate was to be a possession.
She walked between them, matching directions until they stopped in a room with a large, metallic bed in the center with a hooded arrangement poised over where a person’s head would rest. Trembling started then; she couldn’t stop it, nor could she make her limbs move when they ordered her onto that bed. Hands grabbed at her, throwing her into place, strapping down her arms and legs. A sharp pain seared the back of her neck and then all feeling died from her shoulders down. A scream began to build when she figured they had cut her spinal cord, but another savage pain in the front of her neck stopped the intention from becoming reality when they put a tracheotomy in her windpipe. She wasn’t going to make another sound, not now. The carapace joined together over her head and then the cutting started.
